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Title: Masquerades
Studies in the morbid
Author: Shane Leslie
Release date: February 9, 2026 [eBook #77896]
Language: English
Original publication: London: John Long, 1924
Credits: Tom Trussel, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MASQUERADES ***
MASQUERADES
THE LATEST LIBRARY NOVELS
_Seven Shillings & Sixpence Net Each_
_A WISE FOOL_ _Edward Charles Reed_
_This is the Prize-Winning Novel in the John Long (2nd) £500 Prize
Competition for the Best_ First _Novel. John Long’s previous £500 Prize
Competition for the Best_ First _Novel was won by Emmeline Morrison
with her Novel, “Good Grain,” probably one of the most popular novels
published in recent years_.
THE WOMAN TEMPTED THE COUNTESS OF CATHCART
THE FACE IN THE NIGHT EDGAR WALLACE
THE MARQUISE RING E. W. SAVI
MASQUERADES SHANE LESLIE
THE CHALLENGE NAT GOULD
DESIRE OF THE DESERT ARTHUR APPLIN
BURNT BRIDGES TEMPLE LANE
THE HIDDEN HOUR J. B. HARRIS-BURLAND
THE ROSE OF ALGIERS CECIL H. BULLIVANT
THE VENUS GIRL LESLIE BERESFORD (“PAN”)
TIGER RIVER ARTHUR O. FRIEL
THE LAIRD WINIFRED DUKE
THE DAY OF RECKONING E. ALMAZ STOUT
THE SEA DEMONS H. M. EGBERT
THE BREAD OF DEPENDENCE EDMUND B. D’AUVERGNE
THE DANCING GIRL GASTON LEROUX
THE ARREST FREDERICK BROCK
THE INVISIBLE NET J. J. BELL
STORM HALLIWELL SUTCLIFFE
THE WORLD OUTSIDE HAROLD MACGRATH
THE CRÊPE DE CHINE WIFE AMY J. BAKER
THE MYSTERY OF WO-SING A. G. HALES
THE COMPULSORY MILLIONAIRE W. HAROLD THOMSON
BARNEY S. B. H. HURST
THREE OF A KIND EMMELINE MORRISON
JOAN PETERSON--SPORT MARGARET ARMSTRONG
THE LEGACY FROM NOWHERE PETER GLADWIN
ROOM 13 EDGAR WALLACE
CHÉRI-BIBI, MYSTERY MAN GASTON LEROUX
THE END OF A CIGARETTE EDWARD GELLIBRAND
MARGOT’S PROGRESS (3s. 6d. net) DOUGLAS GOLDRING
JOHN LONG, LTD., Publishers, LONDON
And at all Libraries and Booksellers everywhere
MASQUERADES
STUDIES IN THE MORBID
BY
SHANE LESLIE
AUTHOR OF
“THE OPPIDAN,” “DOOMSLAND,” ETC.
[Illustration]
London
John Long, Limited
12, 13 & 14 Norris Street, Haymarket
[_All rights reserved_]
Made and
Printed in
Great Britain
Copyright, 1924, by
John Long, Limited
All rights reserved
_Readers are requested to note that all the characters in this book
are purely fictitious, and the names are not intended to refer to any
real persons_
“Masks, masking and unmasking of masks; all is
Masquerade.”--APOCRYPHA OF SOLOMON.
“_Seigneur, mon Dieu, vous le Créateur, vous le maître; vous qui avez
fait la Loi et la Liberté; vous le Souverain qui laissez faire, vous
le juge qui pardonnez; vous qui êtes plein de motifs et de causes
et qui avez peut-être mis dans mon esprit le goût de l’horreur pour
convertir mon cœur comme la guérison au bout d’une lame; Seigneur,
ayez pitié, ayez pitié des fous et des folles! O Créateur! peut-il
exister des monstres aux yeux de Celui-là seul qui sait pourquoi ils
existent, comment ils se sont faits et comment ils auraient pu ne pas
se faire?_”--
FROM BAUDELAIRE’S FAMILY PRAYERS.
[Illustration]
TO THE ENTERTAINING SOUL
OF THAT SUPERFINE WRITER
FREDERICK ROLFE BARON CORVO
IN PURGATORY
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE POPE’S TEMPTATION 11
CONNEMARA 24
INSPIRATION 43
BALTHASAR THE CRUEL 59
A SAVING PHANTASM 75
JEALOUSY 83
THE DRUMMER OF GORDONMUIR 96
THE SUPREME COMPLIMENT 110
A STUDY IN SMOKE 121
THE MISSIONARY 131
MIDIR AND ETAIN 169
KATHLEEN 177
JOHN SALTUS 197
LOADED DICE 214
AT THE HIGH TABLE 225
A SAINT 235
CANNES 252
THE NECROPHILE 264
THE BEAU GESTE 282
THE EVIL EYE 299
THE WEIRD GILLY 312
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
THE BIG LITERARY EVENT OF 1924
THE JOHN LONG £500 PRIZE NOVEL
A WISE FOOL
By EDWARD CHARLES REED
“A Wise Fool,” by Edward Charles Reed, the Prize-Winning Novel in
the John Long (2nd) £500 Prize Competition for the Best First Novel,
gained the distinction from among several hundred Novels sent in.
It is an exceptionally brilliant Novel, written on really original
lines. Revealing high literary quality, the story, which is modern in
atmosphere, is such as to make the widest appeal. It is a throbbing
tale in which love, adventure, romance and passion are skilfully
combined. There is no gainsaying the ineffable charm of the narrative
nor the lovableness of certain of its characters. In Edward Charles
Reed, the publishers and their advisers have the firm conviction they
have discovered an author destined to make an enduring reputation by
his Novels. It will be recalled that John Long’s previous £500 Prize
Competition for the Best First Novel was won by Emmeline Morrison
with her Novel, “Good Grain,” probably one of the most popular Novels
published in recent years.
_Ready Autumn, 1924. Crown 8vo, Cloth, 7s. 6d. net_
JOHN LONG, LTD., Publishers, LONDON
MASQUERADES
THE POPE’S TEMPTATION
Under the great Dome that floated like a golden bubble upon the red
tranquillity of the sea of sunset lay the indecipherable shadow of
a crumbling City. It was a City of secular silences, and yet it was
filled with the murmur of the prayers of those who were long dead.
It was a City of many mansions and narrow streets, of slow-filling
fountains and great dumb doorways. Upon the time-eaten walls were set
windows, whose dust-shrouded panes separated the twilight without from
the twilight within. In that City was no sign of mart nor sound of
amusement.
Under the Dome stretched the great palace. Through corridors of jacinth
and chalcedony-coloured marble stirred a quiet and unending business.
It was a business that seemed to have begun in the faraway centuries
and to move towards slow fulfilment with the ending of the world. From
time to time the noiseless shadows of men in sable-coloured dress
moved through the corridors or passed into the darkness of the rooms.
Some were slashed with sashes of scarlet as of hyssop or with purple
as of grapes, all of which had high liturgical significance, but
they made little show compared to the soldiery guarding the gates.
Behind balustrades of alabaster and upon snowy marble floors stood the
guardians of the gates. They were magnificently clothed in yellow and
black and vermilion, as though to signify very clearly that their watch
was not withdrawn in the golden morning nor in the red of noon nor yet
in the pitchy darkness of the night.
Behind the gaudy metallurgic gates and past the long corridors of the
colour of jacinth and chalcedony, fenced in an inner chamber by men,
whose swords turned every way, an old man rested in a chair of cedar
wood. The lineaments of his face and the folds of his garments were as
white as fretted ivory. A white cap circled his silver hair. His eyes
were like two wicks burning in a lamp of snowstone. His feet were shod
with shoes whiter than wool. Upon each shoe was woven a crosslet of
tinsel thread. At a little distance it gave the appearance of the print
of a nail of gold. The old man sat resting.
Arranged upon shelves of camphor wood and behind crystal panes were
a few very precious presents from contemporary but mundane rulers.
The table, upon which the old man rested his arm, was a souvenir from
the Emperor of the Sun in recognition of his recovery from water on
the knee by the timely application of a miraculous medal. It was
exquisitely inlaid with the solar radiations that Celestial Royalty
affect on their notepaper. The old man was sometimes seized with a
thought of irony. He himself was the only child of a sunburnt peasant.
Nevertheless, since he had accepted the Pontifical Maximate, his Arms
were the Keys of Heaven and of Hell, and his seal was the Seal of the
Holy Fisherman.
Other very marvellous gifts there were. Upon the pallid marbles
stretched carpets dyed azure with the blood of shell-fish found only in
the Solomon Archipelago. They had been brought by the Queen of Sheba,
a most devout soul, then living as a comfortable exile in Paris. In
the corner stood a life-size lion of gilded bronze with eyes of red
carbuncle sent from the King of the Sahara, who also was a god after
his manner. His love of studied effect was well known to explorers, and
was often mentioned in the Press. In an opposite corner was another
table of pea-green marble all blurred and blotched in a pattern of
streaks, the gift of the Lord of the Everlasting Snows in default of
his ancient allegiance. From the old man’s girdle of white camel-hair
hung a rosary of tawny beads which his devoted liegeman of the Isles
in the North had robbed from the strange Hyperboreans, who are of such
near kindred to the seals that they may be dispensed to take them in
marriage when there is a shortage of their own stock. The floor was of
worn pavement of onyx stone presented to the predecessors of the old
man upon the Throne of the Fisherman by an Oriental Sovereign so long
ago that his name had been forgotten among his own people. And his
people in turn had been forgotten by the historians, which showed that
they had deserved well of the gods.
The old man was glancing through some parchment papers, which his
scribes had written in clear script but in a character without
character. His scribes all wrote alike, and they wrote in a language
that was dead. As the old man finished reading each parchment, of
his spontaneous clemency he affixed his minuscule initials and the
year of his Pontificate. The parchments showed that his duties were
manifold, that he had the souls both of kings and of children in his
keeping, that he was the anointed Reader of Scripture to the Nations,
that the Calendar of the Saints was in his keeping and jurisdiction.
One parchment was the Ban of the greater excommunication of the
Great Mogul, who had audaciously removed the feet of the pontifical
ambassador when he omitted to remove his episcopal sandals. A lesser
excommunication there was directed unto the King of the Wends, who had
married three wives albeit in his sleep, and his court chaplain had
considerately forwarded a certificate that his Master was suffering
from sleeping sickness. Over and above the scroll and screed of
all these precious documents was inscribed in Stephens’ indelible
blue-black ink the supreme style and bearing of the old man, to wit
“THE SERVANT OF THE SERVANTS OF GOD.”
As the night drew apace, the old man felt very tired, and his hands
seemed weighed down as though with invisible chains. He had indeed
spent a very tiring day. Before dawn had broken in streams of white
fire upon the Dome, he had been roused from his slumbers to say his
prayers. Chamberlains clad in dark green velvet with gold chains
enlinking the pontifical cipher had led him to a velvet stool to
meditate awhile on the four last things, which shall come to man and
woman and priest. The ritual forbade him to eat until he had offered
sacrifice upon the High Altar where none but he was allowed. He had
been brought under the Dome on a palanquin of gilded lattice-work and
carried by carriers in the gestatorial uniform into the Basilica of the
Holy Fisherman. And at the High Altar facing the people he had sung the
Liturgy, moving now to one side and then to the other behind the six
golden candle-sticks. Like a huge-headed moth with heavy scaled wings
he had seemed in the white blaze. And all the while the Holy College
had stood and moved and prayed around him in scarlet, and the crying
of the singers had never ceased. When he sat back upon the Throne that
is above all earthly thrones he had felt faint for food. His secret
Chamberlains had upheld him while his private flabellifers had fanned
him with the great festal fans of ostrich plume. It had been the Feast
day of Him whose emerald enamelled his waxen finger and whose Keys he
carried in his consecrated girdle. The emerald had once served as an
optic glass to the Fantastic World Emperor, who had been indiscreet
enough to use the Servants of God to illuminate his gardens at night.
The hours had passed slowly for the old man watching his venerable
acolytes and eminent assistants through the clouds of incense smoke.
From time to time his closing eyes had lighted on the great Image of
the Divine Fisherman, which was enthroned opposite to him. Time had
made the Image as black as bitumen except for the feet, which the pious
lips of pilgrims had burnished till they shone like molten bronze. And
each time he had thought of the stupendous stewardship for which he
must one day give account. He remembered too the quiet days of study in
his hermitage before he was burdened with the nets of the Fisherman.
Peace and happiness he had forfeited since the dread night when the
three score and ten Princes of the Holy Blood had chosen him by secret
balloting in a golden chalice to be Lord over them. Since that night
men had come from the ends of the world to thrust their burdens upon
him, though his own burden seemed sufficient. Tears had anointed his
waxen cheeks and fallen like transparent drops upon his richly chased
chasuble, upon the stellar stole and upon the jewelled maniple which
hung from his wrist like some dead humming-bird.
But the multitude perceived not that he wept, for his eyes were
turned away from them toward the great Image, which was clothed in
the likeness of the vesture of God. Upon the head of the great Image
the Acolytes had set a treble crown signifying the Sovereignty of the
Gate that is Above and of the Gate that is Below and of the Gates of
Twilight, which lead neither to Heaven nor to Hell. In the hands of
the Image were clutched the Great Keys and, though the philosophers of
the world made light thereof and though the rulers of the world acted
as though it were otherwise, there was no doubt to the folk but that
they symboled the Keys of Heaven and of Hell. From the shoulders to the
sandals of the Image hung a cope of frosted gold, and it was fastened
with a lock of living sapphire. Dire and doomful was the face upon the
Image of the Fisherman, and the Image filled the shadow of one pillar
of the Great Basilica. Now each pillar of the Basilica was about the
thickness of a mortal man’s house.
When the Liturgy was finished, there arose a Deacon with archacolytes
at his side in scarlet vestments, and bowed to the old man, and
straightway the silver trumpets sounded through the Dome as it were
the sound of a single reed of an organ or as the note of a sea-wave
in the hollow of a sea-shell. And all the Princes of the Holy Blood
arose and processed slowly before the old man as he was carried from
the Basilica over the heads of the people. When he was lifted above
the heads of the people he raised his hand higher to bless them. His
fingers fluttered like the wing of a tired dove moving upon the face of
many waters. And all the people moaned like the thunder of the tide, “O
Priest and O King, live for ever!”
When they had brought him within the Palace, they disrobed him of his
heavy vesture and gave him a piece of broiled fish to eat, and to
quench his thirst a slice of pomegranate seethed in old wine. It was
the hour when he should receive the pilgrims, who came from all over
the World-that-is to beg his favour in the World-to-come, or to ask the
eleemosynary aid or the autoscript of the old man; others for dispense
to make forbidden espousals within the circle of blood and others to
be annulled of theirs for ever. To each and to all he spoke softly but
surely, saying, “This may I give to you, and I give it to you without
price,” or “Of this it is not permitted to give you, and I give it to
you not at all.” After the pilgrims had passed upon their way, the
old man gave audience to his own ambassadors in the presence-chamber.
They wore thin chains of gold and Symbols set with amethyst or emerald
according to their degree in the Sacred Precedence. As each went his
way, the soldiers of the guard raised and let fall their spears.
Lastly there had come to the door a Lord of the Most Holy, Indeviable
and Undeniable Inquisition. He was clad in white samite and hooded, so
that the guard looked not on his face. Him the old man bade be seated
and do swiftly whatsoever he was come to do. And the Lord Inquisitor
bowed himself to the ground and kissed the old man’s feet. Then he
arose and heard the old man’s confession such as he was bound to
confess daily, saying to him: “Let my Lord reveal whatever evil he
hath done or caused other to do, and every evil word he hath spoken or
caused other to speak and every evil thought that hath crossed the mind
of my Lord’s Holiness even unto the shadow of the shadow.”
And the old man searched into his own mind and reported gravely, “O
my Lord, thy Lord searcheth and findeth no evil done or deemed this
day save the great weariness thy Lord felt in the continual presence
of the Servants of God.” The Lord Inquisitor looked grave as in his
duty bound and answered, “This even were a sin, O my Lord, for when
the eyes of the Fisherman grow weary then are the nets broken.” And
he bade him say the Seven Penitential Psalms and to pray for the soul
of the Lord Inquisitor. And when he had received the Absolution of
the Lord Inquisitor, the old man smiled for the first time that day.
Then the Lord Inquisitor had knelt to receive the old man’s blessing
and the great green emerald moved symbolwise upon the air. Delicately
and discreetly as a dancing master, who had corrected the steps of an
innocent child, the Lord Inquisitor passed into the corridor. His head
was shrouded once more and bowed as though he had conned the pages of
some very secret and sacred book. As he passed, the soldiers saluted
him but fearfully, knowing the office which was his. It was his to
unlock and lock the soul of him who kept the Keys of Heaven and Hell.
The old man was awearied and his Chamberlain brought him a little broth
of bread and wine, saying to him as of set ceremony: “Gall He had to
eat and vinegar to drink.” When he had eaten, they led him into a small
ungarnished room to sleep. And the day was the thousandth day of his
pontificate, and the night was the thousandth and first.
With the dawn of dark unto the dark of dawn the movement of men to and
fro ceased under the Dome. The old man slept and forgot his visitors of
the day. Yet there stood a visitor at the outer gates. For less than
a moment of that which is called Time a Shadow darkened the Gateway.
Through the corridors which were of marble, the colour of jacinth and
chalcedony, passed the Shadow. And within the small ungarnished room
it sank into shape. No legate announced this visitant, no Chamberlain
ushered it past the doors, and no soldier of the many, who stood
guarding the gates moved his spear-head in salute. The old man neither
stirred nor spoke in his slumber. But on the horizons of sleep he
beheld a vast panorama as of a desert stretching around and beyond him.
Sands that glittered like yellow silk in the garish sunlight, rocks and
caves there were, sands stretching endlessly. In the dead distance a
dot of jet moved and grew larger and larger until it seemed to be like
an eagle flying across the mirage of the air. When it was quite close
it was grown to the stature of a man. And a Voice proceeded, saying to
the old man who watched aghast: “Art thou not lonely in thy weariness
and weary in thy loneliness?”--employing a remarkable zeugma of speech.
The old man answered: “Nay, for He Whose servants I serve is
continually present with me.”
And the other answered: “There is none with thee, for in the wilderness
every soul is one and alone, and here there is neither God nor Man--for
even thyself art above all mankind and but a little lower than the
gods.”
“I know not who or whence thou art,” cried the old man, “but thou
speakest false, for I am not as God and I see the footprints of a man
in the sands before me.”
And the other, laughing horribly, said: “The footprints that thou seest
were left by One That was not Man.”
Then the old man grimly remembered his office and answered with the
tongue that is indefectible from truth: “Nay, but most truly He also
was Man, and let whosoever denieth be Anathema!”
The other, finding him not unwary, spoke again: “I know thee who thou
art, thou holy one. Would’st thou not be set amongst thine own people
again and see the place of thine own home?” To the old man’s anguish
rose a vision of his father’s house and his mother’s hens feeding on
the tiny midden under the little vineyard where he played as a child.
With a parched tongue the old man would have made stress to answer him,
but the plains swayed suddenly in his sight and he perceived the sun
turn to blood and himself compassed by a cloud darker than darkness and
felt himself carried through the thin air, unable to stir or speak,
until he stood planted above the world upon a gilded pinnacle of the
Great Basilica. Below his feet in the distances crowds of people
vibrated as though the carcass of the earth had rotted and had become a
moving mass of maggots.
And the Voice whispered to him: “I have set thee, O thou holy one, upon
the pinnacle of the Temporal Power that thou mightest be a sign in the
sight of all men and strengthen their faith. Cast thyself down from
hence and the Angels of Him, Whom thou servest, shall watch over thee
and keep thy foot lest it be dashed against a stone.”
The old man answered: “With desire have I desired to go down unto the
multitudes, that I might become a servant where they have made me a
Prince, but it is not given unto me to fulfil my own will in this
generation.”
It seemed then as though seven vials of darkness had been loosed from
the sky and that a cloud of iron hemmed the temples of his brain,
and that he was being lifted whither he knew not. When his eyes were
opened, he perceived that he was upon the top of an exceedingly high
mountain and that a light shone at his feet, which was not the light of
the sun nor of the moon nor yet of the stars. He beheld and lo! it was
a great glamour from the jewelled crowns and diamond sceptres of the
Kings of this world. They were all gathered at the foot of the mountain
and their armies were ranged behind them across the plains as far as
the eye could reach. And in the estuaries of the far-away seas the
masts of their ships and galleons trembled like a forest of reeds. And
again the Voice spoke to him, saying: “All the Kingdoms and Dominions
and Principalities that you behold, these all will I give unto thee
with all that they contain and possess if thou wilt genuflect to me but
once.”
And the old man, knowing out of memory what his answer should be,
murmured: “Get thou behind me, for it is written that thou shalt not
tempt the Lord thy God nor even the Servant of the Servants of the Lord
thy God.” Then the Voice that had spoken to him out of the shadow fled
away like a shrill wind moaning to itself in the wilderness. Beyond the
plains of the earth and estuaries of the sea it passed into a wail of
despair. And the wail died away.
In the dead of the night the old man cried out aloud, and the
Chamberlains thrust their gold chains upon their necks and hurried to
his side, and the guards lit their torches and crashed their spears to
the salute. And the old man questioned his Chamberlains, saying: “Who
hath come in, and who hath come out, and who hath questioned me when
I slept?” They answered: “No one hath questioned the Holiness of our
Lord, for no one hath entered in.” And the captain of the guards swore
that not so much as a shadow had passed between the spear-points of
his men. In the morning the old man sent for the Lord Inquisitor and
revealed to him all that had happened in the night. With the answers to
the dire Voice which had proceeded from the shadow the Lord Inquisitor
was well satisfied. And he asked him how he had replied to the Voice
tempting him to see again the place of his father’s house and the
little cottage and the vineyard and the tiny midden and his mother’s
hens, and the old man trembled, saying he had not known how to give
answer, for his tongue had become parched to his mouth.
And the Lord Inquisitor, who was an apt theologian, said: “It was well
that the Voice that spoke from the shadow passed to deal thee other
temptation.”
“With desire that is greater than desire have I desired to return unto
my own home,” said the old man, “but he that tempted me did not press
me above my strength, carrying me away to the top of the Basilica when
I could not give answer.” And the Lord Inquisitor answered: “He that
tempted my Lord dared not continue lest he should remember his own
home, for he too hath been separated from the place of his desire and
of his beginning and of his love. And how shall he tempt others of
temptation that he himself is worse than tempted of? For others may
yield to temptation, but the Tempter cannot yield unto his, which is as
a terrible desire possessing him. He can only be tortured, not tempted,
for the home which he hath lost is eternal. The home which the Holiness
of my Lord hath deigned to desire but hath consented not to revisit is
but an earthly one.”
“Frankly, then,” said the Pope, “the Devil is home-sick.”
“Damned home-sick,” said the Grand Inquisitor.
CONNEMARA
I have been highly recommended in the scholastic world, though that is
not what I have set out to say. I left the London Board School with a
caseful of certificates, and later I gained the highest honours at the
Training College before entering my mission as a teacher. There was
only one phrase in my final dossier which might be read in a derogatory
sense. It was to the effect that my extreme common sense supplanted all
trace of imagination. Heaven knows that no such deficiency can be laid
to my credit now. I am even supposed to have imbibed a little madness.
But to return!
After several years passed in the normal teaching curriculum I began
to experience a desire for change, to which the steadiest and least
neurotic are liable. But I did not feel that I was indulging in
anything fantastic when I applied for the post of governess abroad.
The Agency replied that no suitable place was on their books, but that
if I cared to consider Ireland among exotics, they could offer me
occupation with an old Irish family on the Connemara borders. Though
entirely (I am not sure whether to say blissfully) ignorant of Ireland,
I felt that any change would save my mind from becoming rutted in the
monotonous. The terms were generous and the work promised to be light.
I was expected to accompany three children in their play-hours. There
was no specific mention of lessons. I forwarded my formal acceptance
with a selection of diplomas. A week passed before I received an
answer in Early Victorian copperplate with all the flourishes of our
ancestral script. It was written by some local schoolmaster presumably
in the hedge, if not the liquor-shop, and was intended to convey the
instructions of the fine old Irish family aforesaid:
“GREEK KALENDS, May, 1888,
“Gortinealy Schoolhouse.
“REVERED MADAM,
“I am instructed by my laudable and proficient patron, Mr. Sinnach,
hereditary proprietor of Gortinealy and _fundator optimus_ of the
above seminary, to write you word that your letter has been by me
examined and found syllabically correct. We have made trial of
your enclosed diplomacies and pending special consideration by Mr.
Halloran, our esteemed Curate, with whose sententious monograph
on the Irish Round Towers the London School Board is doubtless
acquainted, and by Mr. McGrath, the gombeen man down the road, we
duly pronounce them creditable to yourself and printer. These ensigns
of learning we duly return with our patron’s command to present
yourself at a near date (next fairday preferred) at Gortinealy
terminus.
“I remain your obedient and certificated _frère_,
TIMOTHEUS O’HUSSEY.
“_Postscriptum ad demonstrandum._--I may divulge that I have had Mr.
Sinnach’s children under mensal and manual instruction since last
lambing. They are already acquaint with Copying, Mathematics and
Dithyrambics.--T. O’H.”
I must say that I felt a little puzzled by this effusion and quite
failed to perceive the pedantic jealousy of the local sage jutting
between the lines. I went to our Carnegie library and read all I could
discover about Irish Round Towers, including one of Moore’s Melodies
which I learnt by heart. Mr. Halloran’s treatise was unfortunately
unknown. I suspected that the Postscript was a variation of the poor
old joke which includes Education under the three R’s, Reading,
’Riting, and ’Rithmetic. Mathematics no doubt corresponded with the
latter. Copying was writing, but Dithyrambics was Greek to me. I hunted
in a dictionary and found it really was Greek, in fact “an ancient
Greek metre peculiar to Dionysian strains.” Even so it conveyed nothing
to my mind. I afterwards discovered that it must have been meaningless
to the writer no less, whose chief object had been to overawe a rival
with his own knowledge.
Meantime I dispatched a telegram of acceptance, and shipped myself to
a southern port of Ireland. I shall always remember arriving in the
early dawn. It was a hot July, and a gossamer of greyish pink trailed
from the inland mountains into the pearly bay. Behind the yellow tidal
rocks the bright green branches of trees pierced the mist. It was like
a picture at the Kensington Art School. As soon as it became day, it
began to drizzle, and whether the sun was shining or not, it continued
to drizzle at intervals all day. I realised that I had changed climates
at least. I am prepared to admit that the Irish climate is as tropical
as its admirers claim, but I add that it always remains at the rainy
season!
On landing in the rain I discovered to my surprise that no inhabitant
carried an umbrella. My sunshade (for it was July) was the only human
contrivance besides the slates on the house-tops for baffling the
elements. I passed down the unsheltered quays to a weather-beaten,
groggy-looking building labelled TEMPERANCE HOTEL. A passing drayman
kindly picked up my luggage, which would otherwise have been abandoned.
At the hotel door I asked the host how much I should pay the driver.
“Nothing at all!” he answered; “but come in and eat for the Glory of
God, for you must be famished.” After breakfast I asked if I could be
driven to the railway station, and again what fare I was expected to
provide. “The old man will give ye a lift,” I was told, “he’s bound
that way.” And as I stared in reply, my host continued: “’Tis a lone
widdy woman he takes ye for, and he thinks it would be unlucky to take
money off ye.” I thought of London busmen!
I was indignantly asserting my real state in life, but he explained
that a fresh young woman travelling in black clothes could only be
taken for a widow woman, and maybe seeking a mate! Again I expostulated
as to my intentions, for he seemed interested in my welfare, and we
chatted until my train was due and indeed long after, for he was sure
that no train would ever be so inconvenient as to leave for Gortinealy
at the right hour. By the time I was driven to the station I had learnt
several lessons not often propounded in London Board Schools, including
that of Irish Hospitality. I spent another hour at the station talking
with the driver. I could not help asking him why we had not seen a
single umbrella that day. Did nobody possess one? “Ye lie!” he answered
kindly; “every son’s mother and mother’s daughter of them does trot out
an umbrella on fairdays.”
“Why fairdays?” I asked.
“To keep the flour and the tea dry, of course,” was the reply. And I
queried no more.
Then I boarded the train and after endless tours and detours, during
which I vaguely dreamed I had crossed the Alps and the Steppes,
I reached Gortinealy towards midnight. It was pitch dark and the
atmosphere was filled with melting clouds. It was not till I saw it in
the morning that I realised that it was not a place at all, at least
not to London eyes, for it consisted of a sprawled line of cabins,
some with thatch and some under slate, surrounded by driving mists and
stationary swamps as far as the eye cared to reach. It was loose space
rather than fixed locality.
A kind of deputation awaited me in the station. There was the Curate,
and I felt that his bulging silk hat must be lined with the famous
manuscript on the Round Towers. There were two grooms in faded hunting
coats and top-boots, and a weird personage, whom I immediately
recognised by the quill pens over each ear as my certificated _frère_,
Timotheus O’Hussey. Their attentions overwhelmed me. The Curate patted
my back, the grooms confiscated my luggage, and Timotheus burbled a
little Latin. I heard him saying: “_Salve Domina!_” How I love the
Irish, and yet I would rather teach conic sections to elfs in Hell than
return as a governess to their country! They immediately offered me
refreshment in their very refreshing way. When they discovered that I
had found food at the port of entry they were immensely surprised, it
not being a fairday. Still, they insisted on my eating home-made bread
in the signalling box and gulping some tea as black as coaldust. “Is
it far to the house?” I asked.
“Not far in daylight but a good step after midnight,” was the
mystifying reply--“maybe getting on for ten miles.” And my heart sank,
for I had been provided with the certain piece of mathematic knowledge
that seven English miles went to five Irish. I climbed with set mouth
into the high-braced trap. The Curate who had been sent to meet me made
a charming little speech of welcome into the arms of the family, who,
I was painfully aware, were still distant by fourteen miles. Then he
stepped into the night. The two grooms threw my luggage into the rear
and held it down as though it were a live thing. Timotheus sat at my
side in front handling the reins as fantastically, I guessed, as the
pen. And so we started to rock and crash through the night.
I immediately began to feel terribly silent and lonely. Thank heavens
one of the axles creaked. It seemed like my last connection with the
civilised world of streets and wheels. A trace of starlight struggled
through the dripping cloudbanks, throwing a little silver gauze upon
the country-side until I could discern a stretch of waste and wood on
either side. One remote scrub was pointed out with a whip flick as the
grandest corner in the world for finding a fox. There were no fences,
but the road was lined by huge boulders, which so far from being there
for macadamising purposes I learnt were lapidary trifles brushed out of
the roadway itself. I began to wish I had taken a course of geology,
which might have been more illuminating to me than geography at the
moment. I was dead tired, but I pricked my ears when I heard Timotheus
enlarging on the pleasures and magnificences of the Big House, to say
nothing of the royal descents of his laudable patron, and his three
children whom he alluded to as “bright-eyed Homerians.” With inspiring
gravity he gave me to understand that he had recently introduced them
to the Greek Syntax. I gathered as well that Mr. Sinnach was a mighty
hunter and spent his time driving and tearing the foxes out of the
woods and the mountains and the ditches. Timotheus assured me that he
did not so much enjoy the fox-hunting as he hated the foxes “with the
illustrious hate of a Lucifer crossed in love.”
For two hours we jogged and jolted through a stretch of that primitive
void called Irish landscape before the carriage lights suddenly haled a
whitewashed portico out of the gulf of night. “Welcome to Gortinealy,”
I heard a soft voice say a minute later. It was Mr. Sinnach, the
Master, as they called him. I shall never forget the first time I saw
him standing with his red hunting coat in the lamplight. He had been
waiting to receive me in all his war paint. He was a real gentleman,
though I used often to shudder hearing him swear. As he led me
courteously into his stronghold I looked round for my luggage. One of
the grooms was throwing it to the other in the window. I looked back
into the night. Between me and civilisation stretched a Sahara of Wet.
Warm, however, was the oak-lined hall within, adorned with innumerable
guns, skins and antlers. At the top of a rickety old stair they lit
a silver candlestick for me and motioned me down a long passage. At
the end was my room, which possessed a key that would have unlocked
the Tower of London. I felt as tired as though I had been through
examinations.
* * * * *
I was still in my travelling dress when I awoke the next morning and
looked out of the window into a courtyard. Beyond the wall lay the
end of the world. I changed and hurried downstairs, but there was no
sign of human life. A servant appeared and familiarly informed me that
my charges had celebrated my arrival by taking to the mountains on
ponies, and that the Master himself always gave the clock a good start
on mornings there was no hunt. Between his long hours in bed and his
longer hours in the hunting field or among his horses and hounds, I
used to see him very little during my stay at Gortinealy, for all his
leisure time was divided between stables and kennel.
But the children, two boys and a girl, proved more delightful company
than a whole Board School of London Cockneys. They knew more queer
things about Natural History than a double course in Biology could have
taught them. They must have been running wild for years, and certainly
they were not guilty of the least education. They may have passed very
learned hours studying Dithyrambics with Timotheus, but I had to begin
by teaching them to spell English. I don’t think the London County
Council inspector would have approved of them entirely. They seemed to
have been taught to boycott correct English. But I grew to love them
more than I can say, which is always the way in Ireland. There is very
little lost there between loving and hating. Nothing is tepid except
the soft rain, and the soft tepid rain--it raineth every day.
As soon as the children discovered that I could not ride or fish or
shoot, they took a kind of pity for me and consented to appear on
certain hours to hear what I had to say for myself. Apparently I
interested them, for they consented to appear fairly often. In the
evening I read them books of Natural History, which proved my sole
means of winning their attention. Punishments were always out of the
question, and they took no notice of my praise. I suppose I taught
them something. But they could always be trusted and did not appear to
get into trouble like most other children. They could shift amazingly
well for themselves. The mornings were at the hazard of lessons, but
every afternoon we went on the bogs or mountains. I gradually forgot
the feel of the pavement and lost my street legs. I learnt the art of
bog-trotting instead. But my real adventures were played in the minds
of the children themselves. They had been brought up without playmates
and had grown almost uncanny in their relations with animals and birds.
The elder boy seemed to be able to charm them by his eyes. As for the
girl, I used to call her Pocahontas, for she was more Indian of the
woods than girl of the schoolroom. Their minds were quite uncramped
by education, and the whispers of nature were audible to them. Their
father took very little interest in their welfare. If he wandered out
for a walk he always took one of his grooms or walked a couple of his
horrible hounds--but never a child.
I could not understand his intense feeling for his smelly hounds,
with their horrible yelping and slobbing mouths. One morning coming
along the passage, I discovered that he actually kept one in his
bedroom at night. He used to make me think that he was a lost soul for
ever in search of his lost time. I never saw so much time lost as in
that household. Mr. Sinnach had no real occupation unless you count
fox-hunting, and between the hunts he showed no sense of rest. To
me he was as gentle and harmless as a child. I sometimes thought his
life was the life of a man who was followed, except there was nothing
that would dare follow him in those woods and hill-sides, over which
he was sovereign and squire. He never made the least inquiry as to the
progress of his children’s lessons. Their sport alone interested him.
I believe that the boys had never been punished for anything except
for not riding straight or for spoiling a puppy. He must have been one
of the world’s authorities on horses. Personally I had no interest
in that direction except for a home for old bus-horses to which I
used to subscribe. I once made this deserving charity the subject of
conversation at dinner, but he only sniffed very fiercely and said
“Dogsmeat! dogsmeat!” I am afraid I could guess what he meant, and it
horrified me.
He became a different character when the fox-hunting began. His step
grew smarter and his hoarse voice could be heard roaring in the small
hours before sunrise as he shouted to the grooms and hounds out of
his window. The hunt used to arrive from all quarters and all the
early morning there was pandemonium getting them started for the
distant meet. How often I was awoken by their stamping horses! How
often I listened to the yelping hounds as the huntsmen flicked them
into seething order! At night the Master used to return wearied out
in body but a raging lion in his heart. I could always tell whether
success had attended him by the sound of his voice. After a blank day
he would curse man and hound, but if Reynard was dead he would ride
up to the house cheering like a schoolboy. His hatred for the fox
was almost inhuman. He used to brandish some blood-stained relic of
the unfortunate animal through the house. Sometimes he used its fresh
pad to stir the wine for his friends. I always stayed upstairs when
they were drinking orgies over their success. At first I was excited
enough by what our Board School Inspector would have called “giving
vent to the passions of Neolithic Man,” but it became monotonous in the
hunting season. I lived, worked and felt well, but I rather lost the
sensation of time. Time stood rather still at Gortinealy and typically
indeed there was only one motionless hand hanging on the face of the
old clock on the stairs. The only use for clockwork in that strange
old house was for timing the length of their runs after the wretched
foxes. The number of minutes in each run was carefully scribbled in
some loose sheets of paper that were generally left between the leaves
of the Family Bible. I found them there one afternoon and spent an
hour pasting them neatly into a copybook. But the Master was wild,
when he returned that night, and for the first and only time he used
bad language to me personally. He questioned me very carefully. Why
had I been opening the Family Bible? Had I read anything besides the
records of family sport? Had I read the private family entries? and so
forth, until my curiosity was thoroughly aroused. He seemed scarcely
to believe my denial. When I tried to find the Bible the next day it
had disappeared. It was not for two weeks that I found it by chance
lying at the back of a shelf of books. I opened it at the flyleaf.
There were columns of births, marriages, and deaths. The death column
was curiously divided into two sections and puzzled me. In some years
there had been as great a mortality as fifty written in numbers, but
I could not believe the clan was so considerable to include so many
deaths. The other column was clear enough, a long list of ordinary
entries. But two struck me with an odd thrill because I could not grasp
their meaning:
“Edward Sinnach--1848--killed by them.
John Edward Sinnach--1871--killed and eaten.”
This was all I had time to read before the Master came in and began
looking furtively at the shelf behind which I had replaced the Bible.
I spent the whole night lying awake and trying to think sense or read
purpose into those words. I went to sleep with a mild conviction that
my employer was the degenerate descendant of a remarkable missionary
family, one of whom had been killed by the heathen in the forties and
another a generation later had not only been killed but eaten, as the
familiar rhyme puts it;
“By a cassowary
On the plains of Timbuctoo
Prayer and Hymnbook too.”
For nights I wept silently for those two uncanonised martyrs. I used
to picture their travels and their adventures, their sermons and
their catechisms, and in more terrible moments the details of their
deaths. But in what countries were they killed? It could only have
been in the Cannibal Islands. And naturally my mind, which always
seeks facts perpetually, returned to the one awful question: “Was
Edward eaten as well as John?” It so preyed upon my mind that I used
to wake with the grim query on my lips. It was a month before I gained
additional information. I had asked the elder boy if he had ever seen
his grandfather John. He replied that he had died when he was quite a
baby and his father would never allow his name to be mentioned. I asked
why? It was because he had died a disgraceful death. In a bed upstairs
instead of in the hunting field or fighting or travelling abroad, like
every other true member of the family. Of course this revelation put an
end to my romance about a young and earnest missionary in the wilds of
Africa and I could only conclude that Family Bibles, like so much else
in Ireland, were used as vehicles for rather gruesome practical jokes.
Winter was fully and icily fledged, and snow made a welcome variation
to rain. The winds swept the last leaves off the trees and ripped
open the loaded clouds till they dropped in hail and flake out of the
firmament. But between frosts the hunting continued, for the Master
seemed unable to sleep if he had failed to have a run in the day. I
think he was only happy after he had seen a fox torn to shreds on the
fangs of his hounds. One stormy evening he returned in a terrible
humour. Though they had enjoyed a wonderful run the fox had escaped,
and the Master alone of the hunt had returned furiously dissatisfied,
railing and roaring. I heard him snarling up and down the long passage
all that evening. When I chanced to pass him he lowered his head, it
seemed to me shamefacedly. The boys crept away from him and came to
hear me read stories in my own room. They were afraid of him, though
in his way he was fond of them. The first time they had been in at
the death of the fox he had gone wild with praise and had dabbled
their faces with gore. He used to say that they had not been properly
baptised till that moment, which made them his true children. I don’t
believe he would have recognised them as legitimate if they had not
been hard riders before they were out of their teens.
On the following day there was a meet at the other end of the county,
and the Master was out and riding long before I came down to breakfast.
I remember hearing him shout to his hounds while I was still in bed,
and their deep belling note in reply. I lay in a drowsy stupor, for
sunrise was still two hours to eastward. Once again the house was full
of stamping boots and clicketing spurs. Once again the old staircase
creaked and rattled to the heavy sound of feet and I heard horses
pawing the courtyard below. Then the whole party rode away, and I fell
back into profound sleep. It was the last time that I ever slept in
that terrible house at peace.
When I came down in the morning the children were waiting for me, as
chivalrous and charming as ever. They condescended to listen to all I
had to say in defence of the awkward rules of spelling which govern
the English language. They were curious children. I could not call
them wise or foolish, backward or advanced. They had had no education
and yet they were grown up. They were little savages outwardly and yet
angels to me. My heart always reaches to them with a sudden ache. That
day I gave them the last lesson I was ever to give them.
All the morning the mist mildewed the window pane, slowly flushing the
roof and choking the gutters and creating tiny waterfalls and leakages
in every direction. I used to think that we were in that part of the
universe where the rain itself is brewed. The sound of water dripping
or running filled every corner of the old house. It was one of those
days which cause sympathy with Noah. The whole afternoon I spent
blinking over a book before a fire in the hall, while the children
sat round me in their charming, chattering way. It had been too wet
for them to hunt that day and they were soon yawning. They made no
objection when I seized a chance to send them to bed early. There was
nobody in the house except the old cook, for the whole household had
departed the previous night, including the old gardener, with spade and
terrier, to be in time at the meet. Darker and darker grew the evening
while the turf fire flickered brighter and brighter until it collapsed
into a tiny avalanche of white ash. It was late when I finally lost
the thread of my reading and was roused by suddenly hearing a long,
distinct howl outside.
I had passed so many months in the country listening to the same series
of noise, the wind, the leaves, the birds of night or day and the
rain, that I had become keenly sensitive or suspicious of the advent
of a new sound. This was a wail such as I had never heard before. I
listened again and caught the same curious shrieking. It was not, as
I thought at first, a dog’s howling. It contained too wild a note. I
could not guess what animal could have uttered it, but I sat assuring
myself that wolves had been extinct for two hundred years in Ireland.
I crept to the door, when the sound came again, and started down the
long passage of the ground floor. I had not gone half-way when I heard
a sound that thrilled the blood in my brain. It was not one howl but
many, a horrible chorus that rose and rang, which neither the wind
nor the rain could drown. As the sound sank my courage sank with it. I
began to shake like a reed and a gust of wind might have overthrown me.
But I felt that I had to look out into the night to locate the source
of the sound or I should never have slept. I entered the kitchen. The
old cook had retired to bed and I was alone with only a wooden door
between me and the outer court. I had the strength to struggle to the
window and look into the night. It was not too dark for me to see that
the place was alive with wild animals, a dozen, twenty, thirty lithe,
slender creatures running round in a quivering, coiling crowd. When
one halted all halted. When one raised his thin snout into the air and
howled, every living animal howled in echo. All the Diplomas attesting
my character for common sense could not prevent me dropping into a dead
faint.
It must have been an hour later that I was brought to my senses by a
deluge of cold water. A sound of low voices hummed round me, and I
heard an Irish voice say: “She must have taken it to heart, but there’s
no harm done.” I was led slowly into the passage and to my own room,
where I found to my surprise that the children were in an agony of
grief. I strove to comfort them as well as I could. I pleaded, and told
them stories, but it was all in vain. I had a vague feeling that they
wept for me and because I had swooned in the kitchen. I had forgotten
for the moment all that preceded the swoon. When I assured them that
all was all right, they cried; “But no, Dad is dead, dead; fell from
his horse and was found in the wood.” Then my memory began to start
from its subconscious lair and I gradually remembered everything....
After putting them to bed I crawled into mine and remained there for
that awful night. I could close my eyes but not my ears, and from time
to time I heard the howling recommence outside. And within the house
I heard the agitated steps of the servants and the men of the hunt,
who had returned, bringing the Master’s body. They heard the howling
as well as I did, for they stopped dead each time the wild sound
recommenced. I knew then that I was not mad alone but that it was a
house of the mad. Gradually the howling died down to a wail and passed
away into the thin dark of the night. But I could hear men moving all
night in the house, and when I came downstairs in the morning, lights
were still burning in every room. Hunting men, men of the house and
neighbours lay huddled in the arm-chairs just as they had ridden in
from the previous day. With blazing fires and copious liquor they had
kept grief or fear at bay during the night. I dared only then to look
into the courtyard. It was empty!
My nerves had suffered such a strain that I wished to return to England
immediately, in spite of my affection for the children. But their grief
for their father was pathetic and I decided to remain for a few days
trying to soothe them one moment and to fit them into black cotton
clothes the next. The remaining days I spent at Gortinealy brought me
however a climax of unexplained mystery and horror. The body was being
waked and I continually overheard the conversation of the servants and
neighbours, who were camped in the house and making the fullest use of
the cellars. I gathered that I was far from being the only one to have
seen the uncanny visitors of the day. But the amazing thing was that
they seemed to have expected those wild howling animals as naturally
as they expected the undertaker at the approach of death. All had seen
or heard what I had heard or seen and yet nobody was going mad except
myself. I heard one voice saying casually enough: “Aren’t they saying
there’s no foxes in the other end of the county this fortnight? Every
cover drawn blank and the old women saying all the foxes are gone to
Gortinealy to see the old man dead!”
Every night for nearly a week they waked the Master’s corpse, sitting
and smoking in relays and telling tales of his great charity to his
hounds and kindred spirits and of his prowess in the field from evening
till dawn. I avoided what seemed to me a painful form of heathen orgies
except one night when I was asked to look upon the poor Master’s face
once more before it was lowered into the grave for ever. I could not
refuse, and old Timotheus offered to take me into the big room where it
was laid out in the sickly candlelight.
We went down the creaking stairs and I peeped into half-darkness.
The room gave me the feeling of being full of people or things. The
candles had mostly guttered out but, when my eyes caught their focus, I
thought at first that I saw mourners kneeling round the coffin, tiny,
sharp-faced hob-goblins but no! they sprang up like noiseless and
beautiful cats and leaped over the furniture and out of the open window
into the courtyard. But they were not cats! I could make no mistake
what they were, for too often I had seen their mangled pieces brought
home after a day’s hunting. They were slender live foxes! wriggling
through the furniture like maggots! God have mercy!
Timotheus had dropped to his knees and was reciting prayers at fever
heat. Not until the last vestige of fur had slipped from the room did I
dare take even a first step forward. Timotheus rose and went before me,
but I was not ready for the next shock. I saw him lean over the visage
of the dead and stay riveted. I did not look myself, thank God! but I
heard the words he gasped. It was only one sentence, the last words I
heard in that terrible house, but they will be the last words I shall
have the happiness and relief to forget if ever I lose my memory. For
all that Timotheus let past his lips was: “Holy of Holy! but they have
the face ate off him!”
INSPIRATION
It was a long time before it dawned on Marmaduke McSmith that he must
be an artist and a great one possibly. Unfortunately his profession
was that of an undertaker’s clerk, which did not allow him all the
leisure or any of the atmosphere necessary to greater kinds of writing.
This was specially so during the bronchitis season. A writer: since
his artistry almost necessarily took the form of pen and ink, for
scrivener he was bred. Doubtless had he been educated to ply the brush
on front doors or upon bath tubs his instinct would have turned toward
portraiture. But the pen had been his technical medium and year after
year he had written mortuary letters and filed the missives of mourners
and the orders of the orphan. There was a faint suggestion of widows’
houses about his ledger, and the tears of the fatherless had diluted
his ink.
All day he sat behind a curtain in the office of the old-established
firm of Gammon and Hardwash. In the front window were two cremation
urns, and like a relic of the past hung a large hatchment scrolled with
an extinct coat of arms. Good taste combined with good business to
keep all sight of coffins to the inner parlour. Not a hint was heard,
not a funeral note. As befitted a member of the British Undertakers’
Association, Marmaduke McSmith was deeply absorbed by the detail and
technical knowledge of the burial craft. The _Undertakers’ Journal_ at
his side seldom added a new detail or afforded a new suggestion to his
mind. He read little else except the obituary notices in every morning
paper. In this form he sipped his daily portion of the world’s news.
His life was that of a booking clerk to Hades. But his proficiency
delighted the customers, and his mastery of minutiæ edified Gammon and
Hardwash. Envious clerks whispered that it was only a matter of half
a century before he actually became a partner; coequal with Gammon,
consubstantial with Hardwash!
He had the true undertaker’s outlook. He often amused himself by
measuring people with his eye in the street for their coffins or
guessing straight off the style and class of funeral they could afford.
He perceived the living world in the terms and catalogue of death. Oak
and elm meant to him no stately foliaged trees but polished caskets
underground. He had a marvellous mind for “ruffles and sheets,” for
breastplates and handles, for cars and cortège. Happy it might be
said was the corpse which received the funeral classified as “Class V
Adults,” a form of mortuary pomp he had devised to the last detail. In
the firm’s catalogue it was simply described as “Gammon and Hardwash’s
Jubilee model,” for some of the leading ideas in the disposition of the
cortège had been taken from an attentive study of the second Jubilee
procession of Queen Victoria. It was a masterpiece of taste and economy
and was referred to feelingly in the trade as “Mourner’s Pride.”
It was a marvel that so young and inexperienced a man as Marmaduke
McSmith should have devised the nonpareil of the undertaking world. He
was assuredly intended for high place. He might be President of the
Undertakers’ Association yet. But all this was only the sepulchral
gossip of the parlours, rumours caught on the chilly little winds that
blow down the alleys of one Necropolis or another.
In his way Marmaduke was developing into an artist. Whatever department
he touched he adorned. He was given the delicate supervision of the
Embalming. He promptly made himself adept in the theory and practice of
human conserves. He was generally chosen to nick the wrists and groins
of the dead before inserting the blood-pumping tube. His gestures were
those of the cunning surgeon rather than the job butcher. He never
lost dignity. He never allowed the embalming fluids to be spoken of as
pickles! Then he was given the firm’s correspondence. All day he sat
perusing the letters and orders that flowed as regularly as death into
the letter-box of the firm, corpse measurements, sentimentalities,
absurd requests for shells of sandalwood and silk and plush linings,
dogs’ coffins, catafalques for favourite cats; all of which he read
methodically and answered discreetly, practically and soothingly, and
great was the business of Gammon and Hardwash. He wished that clients
would write more sensibly and often imagined the brief and businesslike
letters he would have written in their place. He possessed a neat pen,
but it was a long time before it dawned upon him that it might be the
pen of a great artist and that he must write about the living and not
the dead.
Had he lived in ancient Egypt when that country was possessed and ruled
by one gigantic undertakers’ trust, when embalmment was the national
art, and literature found its outlet on the lids of coffins, he might
have stayed in the business and realised himself as an artist among
the dead. But as he scribbled his first creative phrases on the backs
of requiem and obituary cards and sketched his poetical drama in
empty corners of his ledger he felt the overwhelming call to follow
his Inspiration and cut adrift from this sepulchral business in which
he felt he was being slowly buried. But it required pluck as well as
decision to swim from his secreted moorings into the literary tide. He
knew that he would be without cable or anchor and his eyes had often
peered through the curtains on that haggard crowd of clerks and hacks
and journalists making their way by day and by night towards Fleet
Street and the great printing and publishing houses. He knew how much
genius and inspiration had been gulfed in that stagnant Niagara. He
knew those waters were oily with the midnight oil and that their eddies
were lingering signs of the struggling writers who had sunk beneath
the surface. Still the artist in him bade him go out and seek his
Inspiration there. He felt confident of his ability to wear the Palm,
but a little diffident of his enjoyment of the pains and penalties
which crown the palmward path.
Anyhow he had saved enough to afford a three months’ lifebelt, while
he took the risk. All Art is a risk. Perhaps the Artist represents the
form that gambling takes among the immortal gods, who set the pieces
of human life on the earth’s green baize. Perhaps it amuses them to
lay odds on the Oddities of Life? Perhaps the gods have Favourites as
much as the betting public? It is a gamble whether the divine fire
can find itself. It was a risk whether in those three months he could
catch anchorage, security or even success and literary position. But he
shuddered when he looked at the scurrying whirlpool of souls perhaps
once as divinely inspired as he, caught now a hundred times more
miserably in the shabby nets of underpaid slavery. There was a side to
his nature which appreciated the dignity and seclusion of Gammon and
Hardwash. On rainy days and in the bronchial season this was specially
the case. The more unpleasant the weather, the snugger he kept himself
in the little curtained parlour where he wrote and worked. Better be a
dormouse hibernating warmly and well fed in his nest than a starving
and unnoticed lion.
He never took the plunge until he was inspired by Queenie Elkington to
resign without asking pension or character from Gammon and Hardwash.
They used to meet after work was over outside the Tube and sit together
in eating-house corners and he used to read her his poetical drama. She
listened wonderingly. She was full of admiration for his punctuation
even. There was music in his commas and he could convey ecstasy with a
semicolon. She was the kind of audience a writer loves, fair in every
way.
It was Queenie who persuaded him that he must suffer for his Art.
Was starvation necessary? he asked her. She told him that any soul
worth its mettle would welcome the pain of its enclosing body. Her
words gave him vision and a direct metaphor from life. He felt that
to cling to his present stability and petty comfort was stagnation
and worse--embalmment! Just as grooms develop horse sense and equine
features, so he was in danger of becoming a walking corpse. Undertaking
is a mummifying profession. Sometimes he felt as though he were bound
by invisible shrouds. And all the while Queenie was hinting liberty,
offering to share her dressmaking wage with him and incidentally her
starvation. He knew that her hours were twice his and her wage a half
of his salary. Between his salary and her slavery a gulf indeed seemed
to stretch. Slavery that was primitive, terrible, logical, and perhaps
the only setting civilisation still had to offer the bulk of women.
She was tempting him to abandon his steady stagnation and clutch the
flying success to which she felt inspired to inspire him. And if he
missed, she would slave for him. He hardly knew sometimes whether she
was tempting or testing him. In the end he felt merely tired. Better be
a starving poet, he felt, than a tired undertaker.
The Artist’s head was lowered over his empty teacup and he murmured:
“Will the London sparrows bring me bread or the ravens boil me tea?”
A quick sheen danced through her eyes and into his, telling him how
wonderfully he spoke words and prophesying the lightning that would be
evoked by his writing in the future. The Artist could see his genius
flashing under her eyelids and his epigrams unborn curling to her
lips. Talking to her seemed to cause poetry to swim into his brain and
he took the plunge. The old-established firm of Gammon and Hardwash
regretted the departure of the most sepulchral and unlively of their
assistants.
As she had swayed him, so she buoyed him. Once he had made an Artist’s
despairing gesture towards life and suffered himself to be carried
along upon the tide, she attended to the rest. She toiled to make
life in the single room of a tenement practicable. He wrote all day
and rested wearily at night while she finished her over-work, not on
the delicious teas of fifty years ago but on the black-stewed juice
reboiled from the night before. He generally had enough to eat, and
the first poems and stories, that she placed for him with editors,
served to stave off starvation. But starvation is not easily sated, and
besides the Artist owed it to Humanity to devote his time to a great
poetical drama. Like many of those whose lives are inspired with the
enrichment of Humanity as a whole, humanity is forgotten at home. His
Drama grew upon him and he no longer looked with pity into Queenie’s
white face. Love even dwindled aside if not away. He looked to her
greedily for food and inspiration. He used the light in her eyes like
an invisible fire to ferment the images in his brain. As she grew
whiter and thinner, his verbalisation increased and his pen glowed with
the current of poetic drama he was laying upon sheet after sheet. Had
he worked faster, perhaps she would not have had to live so long on
half-rations. But the Artist took a slow, luxurious pleasure in his
work, and she would not have had him hurried for worlds.
By the time his Poetic Drama was complete their affairs were rather
desperate. She took it out to market. It was one thing to find editors
who did not mind throwing guineas like solitary bones to poets, but to
find a manager willing to produce the most stupendous Drama of modern
times was the quest of a lifetime, and her repeated suggestion that it
was a lineal and lyrical successor to the works of Shakespeare fell on
what might be called Baconian ears. One manager she was able to draw
into discussion at least as to its merits, though he was amused at the
idea of placing Drama before the public that was not only serious and
poetic but beautifully written. He had produced the wildly successful
Revue, “Moneytime is Honeytime,” to say nothing of the winsome farce
called “Blue-eye’s Eighth Husband.” He was a nice, oil-scrubbed
gentleman with permanently waved black wire round his head. He was
always kind to ladies on the ground that kindness should be reciprocal.
On hearing her mention of Shakespeare he made a personal allusion to
Romeo and Juliet which was lost on her. But he promised to read the
Drama and make a decision on the morrow.
Next day when she returned, he asked her to come to supper forthwith as
an instalment of payment. In a frenzied moment she concluded that he
intended to produce the Drama. As she ate his fresh food that evening,
her wits gathered themselves out of weary hope and arranged themselves
pleasantly on the hall steps of achievement. He made no remarks about
the Drama, on which she could have passed an examination, having
typed and overtyped and undertyped every line many times. He asked
her how often she ate such a supper and whether she took champagne at
breakfast, and finally if the dramatist was her husband. To all of
which questions the answer was necessarily in the negative. Though
he appeared satisfied, he proceeded to detail some of the possible
expenditure needed to produce Poetic Drama on the English stage. It
was a question of the expenditure to be lavished on a funeral. Great
Drama was dead and Mr. McSmith’s Drama was great, he reasoned. He only
wished he had the money to embalm such a Drama and keep it on the stage
regardless of the public. The omen in his words unnerved her for a
moment. A dead hand seemed to be stretched out of the undertaking past
to crush the flower of the poetic present. Tears welled in her eyes and
she looked hopelessly at the Manager, who promptly judged that the
appropriate moment had come to make acceptance of the Drama. He began
discussing rehearsals and alluding to royalties, to all the details,
the cabbages and kings of the Theatre, the chances of a king in a box
at an opening night or of cabbages being thrown at the actors on the
last. Nevertheless Mr. McSmith’s Drama was accepted. Thinking only of
the Dramatist, she made a practical reflection as to the price to be
paid him. “The price of what?” asked the Manager. “The price you would
be willing to pay for the acting the drama?” He observed her coolly and
observed: “What price would you pay us for producing it?” Then it was
all trickery and deception! Was that cold face one of mockery or----?
She rose to go.
But he still fingered the manuscript and motioned her to stay. It was
several minutes before she quite caught his drift. It struck her with a
dim sickness at the back of her brain. Then he did expect such payment
as she could make. The situation planted itself round her with ruthless
logicality. Art needed a triangle for its woof to be woven. There was
the Artist, there was his Inspiration and finally the medium by which
his Art reached the world, whether it was publisher or picture-dealer
or producer. Without each other they fell into nothingness. Queenie
realised that it was not enough to have been the Inspiration. She
must find the producer and unite all three as it were in her own
person. Dramatic art could not live until the breath of production had
been breathed into its verbal coils. Very simply and without tears
she decided she must pay the producer, and returned, leaving the
manuscript of the Drama at the theatre. She felt no resentment when she
surrendered herself.
Late that night she told the man whom she had loved, and, what was
greater, whom she had inspired, that his Drama had been accepted on its
merits. Then followed days when they both battened on expectancy and
drank the thin, vibrating wine of hope. Rehearsals drew near. Contracts
appeared in black and white. Rehearsals were successful; and the
first night blazed like a comet out of space, the night that affords
a greater consummation to the Artist than to the lover. For the first
night to the Dramatist is twofold. To him the acts of creation and
of birth are simultaneous. Solemnly outwardly, and sinkingly within,
Marmaduke McSmith sat through the hours listening to his own words
trembling and tossing on the lips of the hired interpreters, while
his songs were mercifully tempered by the slow thrill of the choric
accompaniment. By his side sat the woman whose whole being had served
to bring him to this accomplishment. Marmoreal was her countenance,
but her eyes shone with the steady light of sapphires, the unalterable
triumph of Art over chaos and night. His eyes glistened one moment like
diamonds as panic swept through them and twitched the optic nerve, but
the next moment they grew dulled and lulled with the auto-intoxication
of pride. Queenie and Marmaduke watched and watched till all was sung
or said and he suddenly caught a sweeter sound than even his own
words--the repeated cheering of success. All was over! The critics were
rushing to their inkpots, the first-nighters were moving towards supper
and the Artist was receiving friends in his box, blown and bloated
suddenly with the ovation of fame. The golden effluvia of compliments
and applause bathed his hot brow. He struggled down to the stage puffed
and bewildered; speechless save for the few words he was made to
mumble through the blinding calcium.
It was Fate that thrust him into the Manager’s room, where he had left
his overcoat, and suffered him to receive one flashlight of Queenie
Elkington. The Manager’s evil kiss was upon her marble cheek. Marmaduke
blustered between them and dragged her home. He looked at the wretched
woman trembling half in pride for him and half in shame for herself.
Then he asked: “When did he start doing that?” The inspiration faded
out of her eyes. “It wasn’t the first time, was it?” She answered him
simply, “No, not the first time. He kissed me the day I brought him
your manuscript.” The Artist searched furiously in her cloudless eyes
and found nothing in the way of regret.
The next weeks were carried breathlessly upon the Drama’s triumphant
wings. Press reviews descended like a mist of coloured laudation.
Resonant interviews swamped the thin stream of prickling criticism. The
Artist really had no need to worry about his Inspiration. For the time
fame was poured to him from silver flagons, and wealth handed up on a
gold plate. Vanity of vanities! but all authorship becomes vanity. When
the most beautiful member of the chorus knelt and kissed his hand he
felt strangely moved. It was because his hand had written the Drama.
Men thought it an honour and women thought it lucky to touch that hand,
those inspired fingers. He was very pleased with the action of the
chorus girl, and the following day he noted that she was fairly fair,
and the week following that she was pretty pretty, so to speak. And the
more he liked her, the angrier he felt with Queenie for letting the
Manager embrace her on that night of nights. It was rather bitter, but
bitterness when it stays and curdles in the mind often brings about a
decision. Perhaps it was a stroke of luck after all, for it dawned on
his mind that he had a perfect excuse for leaving Queenie when he felt
so inclined, and he told her so. He spoke to her as a father might
speak to an erring daughter. She had served him well and he would
always think kindly of her, but now that he was famous he could not
afford to have his name connected with a woman who was susceptible to
anything as vulgar as a theatrical manager. He was an Artist and he
owed a duty to his Inspiration. He turned her out. His drama touched a
hundredth performance that same night.
She had no redress and she passed silently and whitely into the black
roaring night, into the whirlpool above which she had sustained him in
his months of obscurity. For the last time the light glittered in her
eyes, though it met no response from his iris, which was blurred with a
little red patch as he went his way, floating buoyantly, basking in a
limelit sea, watching his own portentous shadow bulge in the theatric
moonlight. He thoroughly enjoyed being the successful dramatic writer
of the day. He was very agile at bearing the Palm. Actors and Managers
came buzzing and puffing round him, pleading and imploring him to write
another play. It was weeks before he consented even to return to work.
It was without misgiving eventually that he dipped pen into the silver
inkstand presented by the staff after the five hundredth performance;
the pen by the way tipped with a real ruby, the grateful tribute of
the Chorus. For inspiration there was the new beloved practising steps
in a Poiret gown on his expensive Persian carpet. Yet it was not all
as inspiring as might have been expected. The Artist wrote phrases at
intervals and the week’s work filled many sheets, but too often he
found himself chewing the ruby knot at the end of his pen. Then he
would call the chorus girl to his knee and peer into her eyes, which
were lit with artificial radiance. They lacked the stellar light which
used to beckon him from Queenie’s orbs. He looked in them and always
saw the fiery fume of his own pleasure. There was nothing mysterious
or new, nothing that he did not know before. He never saw the shapes
he used to see of dreams personifying in his partner’s eyes. But on
the material side he was much better off. He drank Tokay instead of
tea, and ate fresh caviare instead of stale seed cake. And he twirled
his pen and his hair and the chorus girl in turns. And nothing very
wonderful happened on paper. He was still twirling all three a year
later when his first drama had been given a rest on the stage and
managers were asking anxiously and then angrily why he had not filled
his contract to write another. He had thought he was safe in giving
himself a year to write and he had written reams, but he did not dare
show them to the managers. Compared to the first it was merely corked
wine.
He felt that he needed a rest and the inevitable and harassing month
on the Riviera followed. The chorus girl died of influenza in an hotel
after losing six months’ royalties for him in the local Casino. When he
returned to London he found he was in debt and that his furniture was
being sold out of his flat. He sat down to twirl pen and thumbs again,
but only succeeded in breaking the encrusted ruby off his penholder
with exasperation. Eventually he mislaid it. It was found next morning
and safely placed in a pawnbroker’s safe by a careful charwoman. The
silver inkpot had become caked with the ink which flowed in but not
out. Hours he passed staring blankly into blank paper and trying to
crush the half-formed answers to the eternal query why could he not
write another Poetic Drama as beautiful and as wonderful as the first.
But the fire was gone and he could not catch the wistful pleasantry
which the critics were fond of divining in his lyrics. It would not
come to the surface of his mind as it had, when he lived humbly and
cheaply, lacking all that he now enjoyed in such abundance. As though
abundance can ever be enjoyed, as cats drowning in cream have never
failed to observe. He lacked nothing now except perhaps the one thing
necessary!
At last he arose darkly and miserably in the night. There was nothing
left to be done but to wander forth in search of his lost Inspiration.
He felt leaden-footed and soiled in the soul. If his mind still moved
it was like a hobbledehoy and no longer a Pegasus. He started in mad
search for what he had lost. He swam into the first dance hall and
listened to the jazz-rhythms with their slow and broken cross-ripples.
He watched the undulating shoulders of the dancers as they circled
and cross circled. But neither rhythm nor song did they lend him.
Then he passed into a drinking cabaret and began sipping the yellow
and pink-coloured mixtures called cocktails which are to true wine as
mosaics are to real sculpture. But again he found no release. In vain
he drank unintoxicating intoxicants, quenchers that proved unquenching,
potations that were impotent, and the chill, stupefying drench which
neither cheers nor inebriates and is called wormwood.
The Artist was at the end of all artificial expedients, and it was
very late when he came to close truths with himself, and walked
deliberately toward the mean street where he believed Queenie was
living. He had left her with enough to live on and paid the rent on
their old lodging for a year in advance. He crept into the ghastly
tenement building. He knocked and knocked vainly. There was no answer.
He leaned miserably against the door and it swung open. He slipped into
the foul passage and stood before the single room in which his first
Drama, his masterpiece, had been written. It was tightly closed, but
the lock snapped under his thrust. He felt resentful against the room
and against the woman whom he had left there, and resentful against
himself, for an Artist only hates himself when he realises that his
Art has deserted him. A stale odour and a dead draught met him as he
entered. He called and there was no answer. He knew his way round
the room in the dark and he groped in the corner for the gas jet. He
turned it on, but it made no lucent response to a lighted match. The
gas meter was empty and then he noticed that he had turned the gas off
instead of on. He twisted it back and forward. By the light of a second
match he looked round the room and his eyes fell on the bed where his
Inspiration lay cold and self-slain before her time.
In a moment all his ambition and hope seemed to be turned off as
completely as the gas. He was where he was before he met Queenie
Elkington. He turned and shuffled back to his flat. He knew now that
the virtue had gone out of him, and why. The Artist in him shrivelled
into the undertaker’s clerk. He sat down before the ink-crusted silver
inkstand and began writing on a blank sheet slowly in scrivener’s
copperplate. He wrote to order the most beautiful coffin procurable.
It must be made of scented wood and lined with silk, and the fittings
must be of solid silver. In it he explained that he intended to bury
all that was precious to him, his guardian angel in the past, what
might have been his ambition in the future, and the Inspiration which
had forsaken him in the present. And this pathetic letter he sealed and
addressed to the old-established firm of Gammon and Hardwash.
BALTHASAR THE CRUEL
Don Balthasar was called the Cruel for a number of very satisfying and
respectable reasons. As a child he had flayed a live monkey, which
had been brought to amuse him in an ebony cage. And he had been fond
of biting off the heads of singing birds or slipping hot needles into
their eyes according as he wished to make them sing or not. Arrived at
the age of discretion, he showed his seriousness of purpose by taking
a breakneck journey across Spain without sleep and almost forfeiting
his meals in order to be in time for the execution of his illegitimate
brother. His hands had so often failed of killing him that he was
seized with the idea of making his eyes at least fratricidal. But Don
Balthasar was always morbid.
On the other hand he showed some remarkable traits. His restless energy
was an example to the lethargic princelets by whom his boundaries were
neighboured. In the infliction of pain or the pursuit of domestic
vengeance he would endure what only the bravest and strongest
would dare. He had a fine sense of the rules of chivalry and his
discrimination in matters of taste was never challenged. When he said a
ruby was a ruby, it was not disputed even in the Orient; and for sign
of his passionate hobby toward precious stones he wore a large ruby
in his iron helm about as large as a cuckoo’s egg dyed in carmine.
He personally supervised the cutting and trimming of the velvet
vestments used in his private chapel. His chapel was decorated with an
excruciating picture of Saint Bartholomew the Apostle being deprived
somewhat reluctantly of his apostolic skin. And Don Balthasar’s clothes
kept busy several Moorish haberdashers during the greater part of the
year.
He had peculiar notions as to property, particularly towards what had
ceased to be his property or had ever been dignified by his ownership.
For instance, he aped the royal Castilian etiquette, which allowed no
lesser man to bestride a horse that had once been ridden by a King of
Spain or to marry even a forgotten and abandoned lady love who had
once enjoyed the royal embrace. Don Balthasar, once at the end of a
long siege discovering in his net a damsel, whom he had seduced in
boyhood, comfortably married to a burgess of the fallen town, insisted
on strangling him with his own hands that he might realise how high an
honour the unfortunate burgess had presumed to pay himself. The burgess
who had been found in possession of the Don’s discarded romance died
in the market-place with his broken eyeballs staring into the quaint
features of Don Balthasar called the Cruel, who considerately provided
him with a funeral furnished neither above nor below his rank. What
time he could spare from the adornment of his person or the adjustment
of etiquette he devoted to the beleaguerment of Castles upon which he
or his ancestors had the shadow or phantom of a claim.
At the moment of writing he was engaged in laying close siege to the
Castle of his arch-enemy Don Ximenes. His tactical array resembled
rather a game of chess than one of those conflicts of sanguinary
hordes into which the beautiful mediæval science of war developed. Don
Ximenes was not in his lair, for Don Balthasar had been conveniently
apprised of his secret absence on a neighbouring campaign to which
Don Balthasar had not been invited. He could not lose the opportunity
to bring two thousand men against Don Ximenes’s Castle, which was in
those days of supreme fortification adequately held by the Seneschal
and twelve men. When walls were impenetrable and ramparts unassailable
except by the slow poising and escalading of ladders, they were
sufficient to ward and defy a host. The Castle of Don Ximenes was as
solidly built and magnificently engineered as any Castle in Spain,
which was saying a great deal. It was originally a Moorish stronghold.
The great dungeon-keep covered one side of the quadrangle. It was
crenellated and thinly slashed with murderous arrowholes. The other
three sides were flanked at each corner by turrets massively gathered
to each other by a fortified passage running round the whole rampart.
The dry moat was cut out of the quick rock. Across the moat rose a
bridge like the hump of a donkey’s back and protected by a barbican.
The angles and embrasures commanded and cross-commanded every approach.
While the Seneschal watched from the top of the keep, two men held each
turret, three remained in the barbican and three took turns to sleep.
The Seneschal had no more than enough men and provender to hold the
Castle for Don Ximenes, and it was weary work peeping over the ramparts
at every move made by the redoubtable Don Balthasar.
Don Balthasar with his masses of fresh troops attacked or feigned
attack at all hours, even at night when his camp fires blazed red with
feasting and revelry. Each time an alarm was given by lighting a torch
at the menaced turret, the Seneschal would collect the sleepers and
hurry them as a reserve to the ramparts to meet each successive attack.
Every third or fifth day there was a general attack and a number of
surprise attempts to hook scaling ladders to some unwatched portion of
the wall. With poles and sledge-hammers the Seneschal and his faithful
few dislocated or smashed the feelers of the prying ladders as fast
as they appeared above the walls. But day was as weary as night, and
only the obstinate loyalty of the Seneschal made the hours pass without
question or murmuring among his men. His determination was unflexed.
Everything he could possibly value was at stake: the impregnable
old keep in which he had been reared as a child, his loyalty to his
lord, and incidentally his own wife and daughter who, unknown to the
besiegers, were helping to consume his slender store behind the walls.
It was a strong satisfaction to him to know that ten feet of masonry
lay between their charms and Balthasar called the Cruel.
The Castle possessed all the strength and subtlety of construction and
design that Moorish and Gothic architects could give after handling and
remodelling each other’s work. Don Balthasar found it quite impossible
to take it by assault and sat down in permanent circumsession. Within,
there was enough to tide them over until Don Ximenes’s return, provided
he returned with the New Year. But occasionally the Seneschal caught
sight of a lean look. While the camp echoed with revelry and the air
was thick with the steam of feasting, none of the besieged ever ate to
satisfy or drank into the delicious preludes of intoxication. And there
was a constant lack of sleep, which is a great subduer of grumbling
and tedium. But no suspicion of the garrison’s loyalty ever glided
through the mind of the Seneschal. He would not allow the possible
fall of the Castle to dwell in his mind. He only looked forward to the
day of triumph when the portcullis would be drawn and the Don Ximenes
enter into his keep as inviolate as upon the day he had left it. If the
Castle fell--well, there was nothing worse that Don Balthasar surnamed
the Cruel could do to him.
Nevertheless murmuring had arisen and sometimes was hardly hushed
before the sore-tried Seneschal stumbled into hearing. Though the
besiegers were making no progress, time was; and time was on the side
of Don Balthasar. To the garrison it became acutely clear that their
days were shortened. There was enough provender for a month or for
three months of semi-starvation. Two grim days already appeared on
the horizon: the day when the Seneschal would announce half-rations
and the day when, drowsy with hunger, they would be surprised and one
turret would be taken and occupied with fresh troops, who would pour
like a Moorish poison through the passages and into the stony veins
of the Castle until every corner was captured. The Seneschal would
undoubtedly fight to the end. When they had filled their tiny tasks
they would perish like pawns. The life of foot soldiers was not sweet
in Old Castile, but it was thought by their lords to be much sweetened
by a death in their private service and defence. They could but accept
their approaching fate with the devotion of feudal hirelots. It was
already a matter of weeks or even days, and meantime Don Balthasar’s
banners flaunted the landscape. He was only waiting for the first sign
of weakness to show itself, if not in the fortifications, at least in
the less enduring minds of men.
The weak spot in the garrison manifested itself one evening as the
tired Seneschal was dragging himself to his place of rest. The best
prospect before him was a name among those who had served their lords
to the death. The garrison had less rosy expectation in the memories
of Spanish chivalry. They would be forgotten.... Two men-at-arms stood
in the Seneschal’s roadway. They had spent the day guarding one of the
turrets and they had come to tell him simply that they were going to
mutiny. Knowing how essential they were to the defence, they had no
fear of instant execution. The Seneschal might as well surrender the
Castle forthwith as dispense with their services. The Seneschal bowed
his grey face. Tired as he was, he still struggled for time and thought
and breath. He told them that, if they wished to mutiny, the Castle
could no longer be held and he would send them over the ramparts to
announce the surrender to Don Balthasar the following morning. He only
asked them to keep their share of the watch that night. The morrow
could care for the morrow. His only present endeavour was to hold the
Castle for that night. The mutineers appeared to refuse his courteous
offer, for they stood shaking their heads in an awkward way. Then they
spoke.
They were not mutinying with any desire to save their skins. Least of
all did they wish to join Balthasar or put him in possession of the
Castle. They were loyal men and true to their lord. The Seneschal
gave them an ironical glower. They were ready to fight to the end,
they continued to observe. They only asked for a little consolation in
the last days of their lives. They insisted that they were loyal and
true to the great law which bound men of valour to their lords. And
they would yet obey the Seneschal in all matters except perhaps where
a stronger than military custom constrained their souls. This was all
pointless speech, and the Seneschal made a sign to express that he
thought so. However, they mentioned their readiness to fight to the
end on condition that their last hours were sweetened with love. Their
tranquil smile hardly seemed to clash against the Seneschal’s baffled
misunderstanding. He, poor man, was feebly perplexed. If they had asked
for a larger ration of bread or wine he would gladly have reduced that
of his own family to satisfy them. But they might as well have asked
him for the excitements of the chase or the luxuries of the Moorish
bath within the Castle’s narrow world. For a moment they seemed to him
mad; rendered mad by the rigours of the siege. His next hope was that
they would fight the better for being insane. But what a moment to
think of love! And he answered them with a kind laugh:
“Would that I could satisfy your wishes, my dear children, but you must
not ask for a well of wine in the desert or for loaves to rain from
heaven. Love will come to you some day among the beautiful girls of the
town when Don Ximenes has returned to his own. Come, return to your
noble duty, and some of the best wine will be served you on the morrow.
Oh, my children.”
“But we do not need your red wine,” replied the mutineers. “If we are
to die, we prefer we should drink something better than red wine.”
“My children, I would not hesitate if by opening my purse or my veins I
could furnish you with a wine worthy of your valour during this siege.
If I could encourage you to hold out against Don Balthasar, there is
nothing that I would not promise you. And my word is true as you have
always known.”
“We do not ask for promises or words. We would prefer to accept what
you have to offer on the spot.”
“But I have nothing, my children, except what you know is in the store.
If these are our last days (which may the Most Serene Virgin otherwise
dispose!) at least you shall feed and drink well.”
But the mutineers still looked at him with their dull stare. “Well, in
the Holy Virgin’s name,” shouted the Seneschal, “what do you want?”
“We want love, and if you will allow us a little share of love we will
hold the Castle with you till the last of us is killed. It will not be
well for any of us to fall alive into the hands of Don Balthasar.”
“Yes, make love,” murmured the tired Seneschal, “make love and be
happy.” And he turned slowly away. “But where will you find love in
this prison of stone?”
“We thought it convenient as well as pleasant to offer our courteous
love to your family.”
The poor Seneschal’s face turned ashen; “You mean my daughter as the
price of remaining at your duty?” And his determination to hold the
Castle at all costs received a fiercer blow than any that had been
dealt by the enemy. But still his staggering mind was essaying how to
hold on and on. The mutineers came to his rescue when words failed him.
“We are willing that you choose upon which one of us you will bestow
your daughter.”
“And will you return to your duties if I bestow her on the morrow?” he
asked. The Seneschal’s word was good and they saluted him with their
swords.
“You shall have her,” groaned the unhappy man, as he laid his hand upon
the younger and fresher of the two, “but if the God of Castile and the
Most Serene Virgin suffer me to bring this Castle through the siege I
will not spare you.”
The mutineers laughed; “Be not troubled. Our days shall end long before
Don Ximenes returns. Don Balthasar will see to that.” The younger one
added: “When may I make the acquaintance of the beautiful daughter you
have promised me?”
“On the morrow,” hissed the Seneschal; “have I not said it? I cannot
disturb her this night.” The mutineer returned to his turret. His
companion remained bulking in the narrow stone passage.
“And I, my master, must my last days be passed without love or solace
because my companion in arms has borne less years of fighting and has
less scars to show in his boy’s face?”
“Come,” murmured the exhausted Seneschal, “That is no reason for
leaving the ramparts. You are a fine battle-pocked warrior and you
could not spend your last days more happily than by facing the army of
Don Balthasar.”
The grisled warrior seemed to hesitate over what was most likely to
felicitate his last days on earth. Then he spoke quite abruptly: “Give
me your wife and I will fight better.” It was like saying “check”
to a chess player playing with members of his own family instead of
wooden pieces. The Seneschal bowed his head in utter despair and the
other slowly turned his back. His nod was as good as his word under the
circumstances. At that moment a torch flared from the central keep, and
the Seneschal rushed to the scene of attack hurrying his reserves on
the way. A frontal attack was being made in full force and he rushed
from turret to turret shouting hoarse commands and disengaging the
cruel little hooks and feelers, that were pushed over the walls, with
his own hands. Never had the garrison fought so magnificently. The
intrepid coolness and energy of the two mutineers was beyond praise or
emulation. They fought with their hands, their feet and their toes,
hacking, pushing, kicking, and biting, now in one corner and now in
another. With their bare hands they uprooted ladder after ladder and
with swift leverage hurled clusters of men headlong into the hard dry
moat. The Seneschal caught sight of the pair at moments and his loyal,
long-tried heart was at rest.
The attack died down with severe loss to Don Balthasar. The garrison
had reason to feel pleased as they snatched portions of rest during
the night. The Seneschal reposed in the bosom of his family. He was
weary unto death, but he felt unable to sleep. At the back of his mind
throbbed the safety of the Castle. It was his main preoccupation, and
it still gripped him in spite of the new bitterness, which underlay
his thought like a festering toothache. “No, it was monstrous, unheard
of in the annals of war and chivalry, that he should sacrifice his
daughter and his wife!” He moaned in agony. Beside him lay his wife,
the long brown hair across her face. He sat up in his leathern armour
as stiffly as though another attack had been signalled. Slowly he
recollected that he had given her away with his word.... At that moment
his daughter sighed in her sleep, and he cried aloud once more. Did
loyalty to his lord demand that he leave nothing undone even to his
own undoing? Must he give wife and daughter like provender into the
jaws of those who were defending his lord’s castle? It was unutterable,
unspeakable, unbelievable. Who would help him in his biting loneliness,
when he could not even think of a road out or even of words in which to
pray? Unthinkingly he muttered aloud “Most Serene Virgin! A thousand
candles and a pilgrimage to St. James of Compostella.” Then silence
fell, and the weary Seneschal felt an unanswered prayer eddying in his
empty heart. To whom could he turn in his distress? His dear lord was
far away. He would never see him again. Again he cried to the Virgin,
and again silence followed his cry. He shivered with fear and fury. He
swayed miserably to and fro on his knees. If he slept not, he would
scarce be able to fight on the morrow. A thousand curses that his last
days on earth should be embittered beyond the endurance of the loyal
and the deserts of the faithful. At one time he began to despair.
Perhaps it would be better to hurl himself off the ramparts and let
his dead body announce the end of the siege to Don Balthasar the next
morning. No, that would leave wife and daughter to the mutineers. He
pulled himself to the top of the mighty keep. There were the flickering
lights of Don Balthasar’s camp. Would the Serene and Holy Virgin make
no answer, give no sign to one so fiercely tried? He had dedicated his
daughter a hundred times to the Immaculate Serenity. Well, what was the
use, if she could do nothing to save her child? He began to expostulate
with the Blessed Virgin and reasonably. Could she do nothing with
all the armies of Heaven recognising her as their Commandress? He
scolded her with the childlike faith of the mediæval warrior, who saw
the Virgin like the Tournament Queen learning over heavenly barriers
and deeply interested and concerned in all the affairs of heart and
chivalry on earth. “Take or abandon her,” the Seneschal shouted into
the night, “you know best, most sweet and serene Lady, whether she
shall be yours or for Don Balthasar. If you will not save her I will
give her to him called ‘The Cruel!’” He lifted his waving hands to
Heaven as a man carried down a whirlpool. Not a star fell. No vision
appeared.
His mind was now set and he returned to the armoury, pulled a vellum
leaf out of a Breviary and began writing a letter to Don Balthasar.
Anything rather than throw his daughter to the lout on the ramparts.
The Don was a Cavalier and a great gentleman of Spain. He began
scratching the titles of Don Balthasar in the fullness of all the
laudatory etiquette of the time. Then he explained that two of his
soldiers had mutinied, which placed the Castle in Don Balthasar’s hands
whenever it should seem agreeable to him. He begged Don Balthasar
to understand that he was not surrendering the Castle of his lord
foolishly or fearfully. The mutineers with Moorish impudence had
demanded his wife and daughter as the price of keeping their place on
the ramparts. He ventured to place the matter before the august eyes
of Don Balthasar himself, who, as the paragon of chivalry and loyalty
and such matters in Spain, could advise his troubled servant whether
loyalty to his family or to his lord came first, and whether he was
bound to persevere at the price of offering his wife and daughter to
these foul mutineers. He appealed to Don Balthasar for a ruling. He
would bow to his decision.
He carefully sealed the letter with his lord’s seal, and went on
the ramparts. He lit and waved a torch with slow movements in sign
of parley or surrender. He was quickly noticed, and Don Balthasar’s
secretary approached with an escort. The Seneschal threw the letter
over the ramparts and staggered back to rest. A whisper passed through
the Castle.
In the morning the garrison were not surprised to see an unarmed
company approaching the barbican waving the personal standard of Don
Balthasar. The Seneschal himself descended from his watchpoint on the
keep and leaning through the crenellations picked a letter from the top
of a spearpoint. He read it slowly and its purport burst like the first
glimpse of harbour on the eyes of the shipwrecked, for Don Balthasar
commended his loyalty and fidelity, and was grieved to hear that two
of his soldiers had mutineered and shown a lesser sense of loyalty
to their lord. He considered that the terms they had offered their
Seneschal were arrogant and outrageous, and foul beyond the foulness
of the pit. He wished the Seneschal to mind not their threats, but to
let them both desert to his camp. He gave his word that their desertion
would not afflict the Seneschal in a military sense. Let him send them
under safe conduct forthwith.
The mutineers were waiting in their turret when the Seneschal reached
them. They had watched the coming of the embassage eagerly, and doubted
not that the Seneschal had made a desperate bid for terms to save
the Castle now he knew he could hold it no longer. Ineffectually for
certain. With his prize in his jaws Don Balthasar was not the one to
let it drop for a kiss given to his greedy cheeks. They awaited the
Seneschal as the player who has called Checkmate and knows that any
further struggle is useless. The Seneschal showed neither levity nor
seriousness in his face. He spoke gently and firmly as though he was
discussing some minute part of their routine. “My children, you have
against all your loyalty to your lord offered to mutiny and go over to
Don Balthasar unless I give you my wife and daughter. I have decided to
surrender the Castle rather than allow such a misery to be inflicted
upon me, and I bid you accompany Don Balthasar’s men and tell that
great and terrible lord that I can no longer defend the Castle and will
accept his commands. Go!”
The mutineers looked up with angry surprise. They felt they were
being cheated out of their rights, out of their agreement, out of
their pleasure. They had expected the immediate fulfilment of their
demand. At any rate the siege was over. They could only rejoice that
their weariness was at an end, though they would have preferred a
few more weeks’ fighting, lightened as they had hoped by the wicked
debauchery they had devised at their unfortunate Seneschal’s expense.
For one baffled moment they hesitated. But the Seneschal had left
them no choice, and they turned to accept the freedom they had not
desired. They walked on to the ramparts amid their scowling comrades
and lowered themselves with a rope that the Seneschal grimly held
for them. With a malevolent grin they slid down into their new
allegiance. At least they would be fed well that night, when they
brought Don Balthasar good news. They marched away stretching their
cramped legs between the riders who had come to meet them. Within an
hour they stood before Don Balthasar called the Cruel. He did not
waste his time with them. He mentioned his detestation of all kinds
of disloyalty, especially to an absent lord. He showed no surprise
or gratitude on hearing that the Castle was now within his reach. To
their terror-struck excitement they learnt that the terrible one had
been informed of the predicament in which they had placed the loyal
Seneschal. He briefly informed them that he was unwilling to profit by
so base an action even if it did place the Castle in his power. The
mutineers stared at him with dull amaze.
The Seneschal was more agreeably surprised an hour later when he saw a
scaffold being erected in front of the barbican, and his two defaulters
being bound and deliberately executed. A roar of laughter and derision
rose from the Castle walls. It was almost worth the surrender to enjoy
so majestic a jest on the part of Don Balthasar. With parched throats
and weary lungs the garrison shouted _Vivas_ to Don Balthasar’s name.
As for the Seneschal, he could only utter delirious thanks to the
Virgin, who had delivered him so mightily from domestic shame and
agony. She had strange and devious ways, the _Serenissima_, for coming
to the rescue of her clients. This was really her most brilliant
master-stroke!
The Seneschal laughed his first laugh during the siege, and he was
still smiling when the riders of Don Balthasar again approached
the barbican waving the signal of parley. It must be for the final
surrender of the Castle, thought the Seneschal. Sadly he picked the
letter of summons from the tip of the spearpoint handed to him.
He broke the heavy seal and coloured cord fastening the vellum. It
brought him the greeting of his enemy, who further made plain his
great regret that contrary to the laws of war he had killed two
of the garrison after they had left the Seneschal under his safe
conduct. But he had done what he thought was due to himself and to the
honour of all Christian princes. Treachery among men-at-arms could
not be too speedily or sternly punished. But lest he had taken any
unfair advantage of the heroic garrison he was sending two suitable
men-at-arms to take the place of the mutineers! By their fidelity to
himself they were sworn to fight exactly as the Seneschal disposed
and directed them. There was no doubt! Two stalwarts were waiting for
admittance at the barbican and their escort was already riding away.
And the letter was signed in the big, gawky lettering of Don Balthasar
himself who was called the Cruel!
A SAVING PHANTASM
When they parted they parted good friends. Gregory Cappleston was more
than a gentleman. He was very affluent; and he refused to let Matilda
Bryant suffer financially by his marriage. He was bound to marry to
keep up the grand old name of Cappleston. Aunts, aged and dowager,
expected him to marry if he was to expect anything from them. He was
a rough-and-ready fellow, Gregory Cappleston. At the University he
was called “Cobblestones.” He wanted to be kind, but he did not cause
particularly smooth-going to those who came his way. He found it hard
to leave the woman who had lived with him since Oxford days, but it
was harder to find a wife and tie himself to her for the rest of his
days. Matilda felt this turn in her life hardest, but she suppressed
the sighs of her soul even when she read Gregory’s engagement in that
column of marriages and engagements of the _Morning Post_ which may far
more truly be called one of agony.
Still, she ought to have been preparing for the wrench for years.
Presumably she had known other men before, and should have experienced
the circumstantial shock of a thoughtless man’s thought-out departure.
Cappleston never imagined her pained for a moment. He was not
insensitive, however, to her genuine grief when he cheerfully announced
the settlement he had made on her. Nobody can live on a woman’s love
for many years without responding to some of the myriad ripples of her
inmost thought. True, that with tragedy they become confused and break
off, and on the sand of hardship they are stayed and disappear. But
in the spectroscope of Matilda’s mind a real love for the man, with
whom she had contracted herself quarterly for the last three years,
shone white. If the colours of her aura could have been analysed, there
would have been found no red tinge of malice therein, no green line of
jealousy, no purple splosh of hate. The white soul is rare even among
good and virtuous women.
She loved Gregory sufficiently not to wish him to sacrifice his life to
her. She was incapable of a scene. She loved him enough to love herself
for her own self-suppression. She felt as though she were giving her
soul an opiate with a steel needle. It was so like him to make over
a lump sum to her without noticing the lump in her throat. He kissed
her for the last time, and she wished him happiness in marriage as few
mothers have wished their own beloved sons. As she walked out, he felt
sorry, but not sorry in another way, that he would see her no more.
That was in the letter and the spirit of their agreement. She had
played the game, he reflected. And he was certain that he had, too. He
was a Cappleston!
The marriage was a great success. How could it be otherwise? The
pandemonium of an advertised social event, the honeymoon reflected
in the _Daily Mirror_, the town house purchased from the dissolving
partnership of the Plantagenet-Goldenburgs, their first country house
party discreetly portrayed in the _Sketch_, the shower of pleasant,
meaningless snippets which Press Agencies supplied from the _Powder
Puff_, the _Flapper_ and other recognised organs of fashion are still
within the memory of Society. Gregory began nibbling at a political
career with a good conscience. He had had his past like most men, but
unlike most men he had shown a post-amorous generosity which satisfied
him almost to feelings of virtue.
Domestic beatitude was his proper reward, and he passed into paternal
tranquillity watching the race of Cappleston projected into yet another
generation, and his children growing up like little dissected parts of
his own youth. He watched them playing about the house and reflected
on that wonderful measure of repayment he had been able to make to
his wife. So many women had no children. He had been generous in his
paternity. Generosity was his strong feature. That was why he felt
women had always liked him, to use a mild expression. There had been
Matilda, for instance--but he dismissed her from his mind.
* * * * *
He was quite disturbed when her name was announced by the butler. It
was seven years since they had parted. It was unexpected and it was
undesirable, this visit. He tore a preparatory blank cheque out of his
book before she came in. He was always prepared to meet women with that
astonishing generosity of his. “Mrs. Bryant,” said the footman. She
showed no make-up to cover the difference of seven years. It was not a
professional--hardly a predatory--visit, he reflected. Shabby clothes
and daylight were not heart-overwhelming. He gave her a chair.
“I am glad to see you looking so well, Matilda,” he began
chivalrously, “but you should have written to me through my lawyers if
you wanted to see me.”
“I am not in need of anything that comes through lawyers, Gregory,” she
answered. “I only wanted to see you again for the last time, you know.”
Gregory was puzzled.
“But I am not leaving the country,” he said. “Why should you want to
say good-bye to me?” “But I am,” she shot, and with a pause, “for
another country, and I am taking the shortest and cheapest path
possible. I am done with the half-world in which I live. You know that
for me middle age must be what old age is to other folk. It is death,
and I believe in taking death by the forelock. But I wanted to see you
once again and to say that you were the best thing I found in this
world, and I would always have lived with you even had you lost all
your money. I rather hoped the chance would come to show you that. But
it never did, and then you married and were happy, and your happiness
made me happy in a sort of way. Good-bye.”
“You’re not going to kill yourself?” asked the astonished Cappleston.
She nodded vacantly. Cappleston was immensely touched. She had
confirmed the high opinion he had of himself. And she had come without
an ulterior object just to say good-bye. It was amazing. He felt that
something was required of him. He was inartistic and could not rise to
the dramatic. But as a patron of several Church livings he admonished
her gently as to the heinousness of self-destruction and how unpleasant
coroners’ verdicts were liable to be for surviving friends. He was one
of those men who live in dread of painful impressions in public.
She was not to be dissuaded of her purpose, but she agreed to see him
before she committed the supreme act of bodily renunciation. He offered
to increase her little income, but she smiled pathetically and passed
out of his presence. She was content to have looked once again into
his eyes. Her love had not failed. It was no mere memory. She would
certainly keep the promise he had obtained from her.
Cappleston was left to reflect on his proffered generosity. He had
never known a woman refuse money before. But it was a woman’s way to
want what she wanted to the exclusion of all else for the moment. For
the moment she wanted to see him. He felt suitably pleased. He was glad
he was not a woman to be swayed by whims and fancies, to be utterly
dependent on men’s good will and charity. He felt glad to be a man and
to feel virtuous. He realised how much more generous he was than other
men, and threw himself back in his chair with the easy content of a man
who has always enjoyed life without making his conscience suffer. Then
a whole year passed.
* * * * *
Gregory Cappleston, M.P., was sleeping alone in his dressing-room when
he woke with a jerk and saw a figure standing at the foot of his bed.
He looked and could not doubt, for he believed in his senses and in
very little else in life. It was Matilda, and he was intensely annoyed
that she should have been so ill-advised, not to say criminal, to
penetrate into the sleeping-room. It was indiscreet, outrageous and
very dangerous, and he hissed all this and more at her. He made more
than the protest of the British householder and the patron of Church
livings. He ordered her to leave the house instantly, and as quietly
as she came--without waking his wife in the adjoining room. He was
too sleepy to imagine how she could have entered without ringing or
waking the servants. He faced her look of piercing sadness with an
angry stare, but it never wilted. Then it faded away, and Cappleston
rather angrily discovered he was alone. He felt as though he had been
the victim of some clever conjuring trick. He switched on the electric
light, and at that moment the voice of Big Ben rang through the London
hemisphere--one! two! three! He confirmed the clock of Empire by his
own watch, and perceived that he was not dreaming.
He rose and searched the room. It was locked, and nothing had been
displaced. He suddenly developed a creepy and almost guilty feeling
for no reason. It was not in consonance with the mind of a virtuous
householder and a benefactor to his species. Then it struck him full.
Perhaps he had seen a ghost! Perhaps, however, it was only a bad dream.
Perhaps it was a sign. Perhaps he ought to do something. What about
Matilda? He fumbled for her address on the card he had kept in his
pocket-case. It was a flat in Maida Vale, quite impossible for him to
reach at this hour of the night. Nor respectable either, but he could
send his valet to inquire early in the morning. He rang his night bell.
His valet appeared, and hoped he was not ill. Cappleston gave him the
card and told him to go to the address and find out what was happening
to the lady whose name it bore.
Further, Cappleston ordered him to refuse to take _no_ as an answer.
He must find out how the lady in the second flat was, and return as
soon as possible. If he had any trouble he could send a policeman in
a cab to fetch himself.... An hour passed, and a second hour before
a policeman rang at the door. Cappleston let him in. The policeman
explained that a strange man had been found trying to force entrance
in a flat at Maida Vale and excused himself by giving Mr. Cappleston’s
name. He had been taken in charge, and the police would like to have
evidence of his identity or sanity.
Cappleston, with a weary “It is all right,” swung himself out of his
dressing-gown and dressed. He accompanied the policeman without a word
to Maida Vale. He found his valet between the caretaker and a policeman
on the second floor. He had never been there before, but he told the
caretaker enough to show that he had a right to entry, in fact that
he paid the rent of the flat in all probability. Besides, he had very
bad news for the occupant and he demanded entrance. He was prepared
to stand the financial damage of any breakages, also the remuneration
necessary to their trouble. The police exchanged highly intelligent
glances, and the caretaker said he was not the one to stand in the way
of the law. Some panes of frosted glass were cut out of the door with
a chisel, and the door opened from outside. The occupant, it appeared,
had given strict orders that nobody was to disturb her till ten the
next morning.
Cappleston entered and opened door after door. The farthest room of
the suite was a bedroom. He switched on the light. Matilda was lying
on the floor breathing heavily, while an empty bottle remained in
her outstretched hand. Cappleston ordered a doctor to be brought,
and a policeman saluted ... a precious half-hour passed before any
revival was possible. But the doctor gradually brought her out of
unconsciousness. When she caught sight of Cappleston’s worried face,
she cried aloud: “Forgive me, forgive me. I did not keep my promise.”
“But I rather think you did,” he answered, “for that is how I happen
to be here. You came into my room at three this morning, and it is now
half-past five. How can you explain it?” She could not explain it.
Women can explain anything, but they do not always need to. Strange
powers are always at their aid. She confessed that she had taken a
strong overdose; and the sympathetic police withdrew at this moment
with several bank-notes of Cappleston to be shared, or to be used
for the repainting of Scotland Yard, or whatever use gratuities to
policemen are put to. “But,” she continued, “I remembered when it was
too late my promise to you. I had passed over the border, and my last
feeling was a bitter regret that for the first time I had broken my
word to you, the very first time in my life. Will you ever forgive me?”
“You need no forgiveness,” said Cappleston, holding her hand while the
doctor felt the pulse in the other, “for you came into my room and
stood looking at me from the foot of my bed. I could guess then what
had happened. I never knew you to fail me in any way. You always played
the game, and your word was always better than any gentleman’s. Thank
God, we were in the nick of time, for the doctor says you would have
been dead by ten o’clock. Matilda, I have seen your ghost while you
were yet alive. Or was it your soul? It was the whitest thing I have
ever laid eyes upon!”
JEALOUSY
Jealousy is the worst and most terrible in the sinful category.
Jealousy may not be the unforgivable sin, but it is certainly the
unforgiving one. Jealousy is not to be defined or analysed. There is a
method in madness and a refinement in Love, but Jealousy knows neither
how to plan nor how to relent. It is a torrential surge of misgiving
and misdirection that bides no hour and keeps no banks. It is the
strongest emotion known to man, for it has no gradations, no preludes,
and no convalescence. It leaps fully armed and full-grown upon the
jealous brain, and gives no peace to the jealous nor if possible to the
jealoused. In man or woman it conspires and consummates the acts of
madness and crime, which are sometimes but only pardoned to those who
act under stress of emotional love.
Jealousy is the perversion of Love. It is unto Love what the Apples of
Sodom are to the fragrant orange-blossom. It is even what Atheism is
to Faith, and Turpitude is to Sanctity; and perhaps great lovers must
tread along the gulf of Jealousy just as the great contemplatives never
realise the divine ecstasy until after they have sighted the appalling
abyss which may be described as Time without God, otherwise Hell, for
Heaven is God without Time.
Jealousy is more cruel than Love, though Love, in all conscience, is
cruel enough. Love more often destroys the lover than the beloved,
but Jealousy seeks only the destruction of the jealoused. Jealousy
is the diseased elephantiasis of sentiment, Love smitten to leprosy!
Vision the divine and rosy Eros suddenly turned into a leper white as
snow! Vision the once resilient and rainbowed wings caked and cracked
like the flukes of a rotten fungus! Vision the delicate little limbs
puffed and pustuled, and the divine brow puckered and blistered, the
mother-of-pearl ears chipped and chapped, the mouth opened like an old
wound instead of a fresh budding rose! Vision the eye rotting wickedly
into its cavity--and even so you have not sufficiently symbolised
Jealousy, the bane of mankind, and apparently of godkind as well, since
it is written that they include some who are jealous!
John Goldenough was jealous, yet he was highly respectable. He was the
active and reliable head of the firm of Goldenough Brothers, the famous
plumbers, whose plumbing had accompanied the flag and made the remotest
and most tropical countries sanitatious to their conquerors.
The Goldenough plumbing had won medals at every exhibition since the
Great Exhibition of 1851, when a diploma signed by the Prince Consort
had been awarded to the head of the firm. Miniature products of the
firm adorned the famous Doll’s House, minutely constructed by the
experts and artists of the British Empire, and delighted Royalty,
young and old, by their realistic efficiency. It was the boast of John
Goldenough’s father that the sun never set on Goldenough plumbing. Be
that as it may, John Goldenough was a very jealous man.
Commercially he was jealous. It was not only domestically that he
cherished this cancer. Otherwise he was unimaginative. With an assured
competence of means he devoted himself to the comfort of himself and
his family. He was not yet forty, and he was the head of Goldenough
Brothers. Pitt was Prime Minister at twenty-five. John Goldenough was
the flower of British bourgeoisie, and he might be said to incarnate
the Nonconformist Conscience. There was nothing against him at Bank or
Chapel, unless in the arcana of his heart he possibly kept something
against himself. He was a jealous man, that was all. But human society
understood and appreciated his jealousy, for, if it constrained him to
narrow ideas, it led to impeccable business honesty. He was jealous to
a farthing in the accounts of his firm or of himself.
But he was also jealous of family affections, though this the world
considered rather creditable, touching almost. He could not allow
himself to be supplanted in the home circle for a moment even by
another member of the same family. In fact there was a dark page to
his record which only his subconscious memory reflected from the
darkened mirror of the past. As the first-born he had been adored by
his mother until his nerves became restive if they were not basking in
the sunlight of her maternal hyperpossession. He felt ill if she was
not worrying or fussing herself over him. He expected and required not
only her attention but her continued and foolish infatuation. When her
second son was born he became furiously jealous.
During these long ante-natal months she had shown herself less and less
absorbed in him, and he had become conscious of some impending rival.
Uneasily he sensed that her adoration was being drained elsewhere, and
the moment his baby brother arrived, he knew that he must take second
place. Jealousy ran like secret poison into his every tissue and vein,
though he was too young to know or understand what and why he felt.
Possibly he was no more responsible for his jealousy than for having
the measles. Anyhow, he bided his opportunity perhaps unconsciously,
but sullen and pertinacious. He watched his baby brother being soothed
and swaddled, pampered and christened. It was a little more he felt
than he could stand. Months passed, and the new baby occupied more and
more of the nursery space and more and more of his mother’s affection.
After six months the baby was introduced into the night nursery as
well. A nurse slept between the two brothers while a nightlight floated
in a basin of water in the middle of the room. One night John found
himself wandering round the room in a state of horror. Nightmare was
upon him. He felt he was being cramped and suffocated by the new baby.
Fear mingled with jealousy and self-preservation shot the speckled
spectrum of his hatred. In a violent effort to be rid of the besetting
menace he picked the nightlight out of its watery cage, and threw it
upon the barely moving heap of down. A light flame flickered into the
air, but John had skipped back into bed before the baby cried, and
the nurse awoke too late to put out the flames. In vain was the alarm
given. By the time the household had quenched the fire, baby was singed
and suffocated to death, partly by the smoke and partly by the efforts
made to extinguish the last spark. Through the house rang one piercing
cry--the cry of Rachel mourning, the cry that from the beginning to
the end of the world can never be appeased, the inconsolable cry of a
mother wailing for her child.
John was only six at the time of the tragedy, but from that moment his
restlessness disappeared. He was no longer troubled by nightmare, and
continued on his former course like a normal and well-behaved little
boy. Of necessity his mother renewed and redoubled the old affection
for her only son. Years began to pass, untroubled and undimmed for
either. The pathetic and beautiful mother idealised and idolised her
son. He repaid her with an adoration that was partly a reflected
adoration of himself. There was no rival. He had no brother, and she
had no lover, and each thought the other perfect. She never dared marry
one of the very many suitable suitors who appeared on the scene after
her husband’s death. John’s jealousy was always enough to scare her. He
always slept beside her, and she would not face or contemplate the days
and nights when she must relegate him to the attic. She liked to be
near him in case he stirred or cried in the dark. She was not content
with being his night nurse. She became his governess and would let no
one teach him except herself. They became more intimately involved in
each other’s lives than they had been before his birth. They had been
the same body. Now they were the same soul and mind, and he was the
dominant. It seemed forgotten that there had ever been a baby brother.
It was true even in her case that the mother can never forget the child
she has borne, but she saw both the boys in the survivor. Without the
least suspicion of the distant crime she innocently loved the slayer
and the slain with one passionate and abiding love. The plasticity of
boyhood wiped all trace from his memory. He was not conscious of his
one awful act of infantile incendiarism. But in the lower levels of
his nature it still lay memorified like one of those buried fossils by
which the gentle earth remembers her past monsters. And close to the
hushed record under the running surface stream of daily life lay the
dismal dragon of Jealousy, but no fossil. It was always there, though
it was given no inducement or provocation to break forth. It had lain
there waiting while Master John became a schoolboy, and a successful
one. He had gained too many prizes and enjoyed too many successes to
feel the least dislike or envy or disgust of others at school. He
took a successful course at the University, and after coming of age
he took over his deceased father’s business. He was a born plumber,
a Master-plumber, and in fact he proved the Empire’s Super-plumber.
Tubs, piping, lavabos, taps, sinks and shower-baths were his sphere. He
applied not merely intelligence but genius to the problems of Imperial
Sanitation. He received an Indian decoration and a testimonial from an
Australian Premier. He prolonged the lives of the Royal Family more
than all the prayers in the Prayer Book on their behalf.
Respectability demanded only one thing further. He must marry. His
mother had long dreaded the day when she would be supplanted herself.
She had kept herself free for him. It was more than she could expect
that he should keep himself eternally free for her. As she had been
nurse, governess and playmate, sister and mother to him, she would
doubtless, had they lived in a Ptolemaic civilisation, been ready to
sacrifice herself yet further. But happily the Nonconformist Conscience
takes a rather sturdy stand. So when John Goldenough married the
daughter of the chief clerk in his own firm, his mother was glad
enough to be allowed to remain as their housekeeper.
John Goldenough’s wife was more than pretty. The daughter of an
employee who had risen with the years in the Goldenough employ, without
pretence of blood or breeding, she appreciated the social honour which
had been paid her, and was loyally prepared to merge her personality
and prospects in the Lord of Sanitation, who had fallen in love as
much with her love for him as with her pretty little face. Unwittingly
he had transferred to her the whole accumulated sleeping powers of
jealousy, with which as a child he had surrounded his mother. As little
witting, she mistook the jealous symptoms for an excess of love for
herself. His mother slowly sank into a second place that was lower than
servile. She never murmured when he took her rings and gave them to his
sweetheart. It was no theft, for he slipped them from her fingers while
she sat sadly watching and mutely wondering. She realised that he was
sloughing the old love for the new, and she felt the prick of sacrifice
when she saw the stones glitter on the wife’s fingers the following
night. She knew that she had been replaced utterly and for ever. Then
it was that she began to mourn that she had never dared have other
children because she had been terrified by her son’s queer jealousies.
But she had had the pleasure of spoiling him. It was spoiled goods
in a way that she was passing on to another, if that could be any
satisfaction to her.
John Goldenough’s love for his wife passed by the path of passion into
jealousy, his underlying and besetting mood. Jealousy is as delicious a
sauce as can flick the palate of a woman, who is in love with the man
who exercises jealousy on her behalf. But when her love has been worn
to boredom and only a stump of convention marks the spot where once
grew the fairy tree of their romance, jealousy thrives like poison-ivy
round the dead wood. During the first ten years of their marriage John
Goldenough had forbidden his wife to bear him children, partly out of a
sense of economy and partly, though this he never admitted, because he
wished to keep his wife’s love concentrated upon himself.
Himself an only son, he intended to have an only son towards the end
of his married life, and thought it perfectly appropriate and proper
to keep his issue within this drastic limitation. He liked to feel
her sentimental as well as her material dependence upon him. This
dependence he thought could be prolonged while she was childless. That
she should entertain an admirer had hardly crossed his imagination. As
it was, he could not bear other men to sit beside her at table, and
the politest and most constrained givers of compliments to his wife
were thrown into terrified exit. In the end neither his friends nor
hers cared to call, esteeming themselves fortunate if he showed himself
merely nervous and not in some way objectionable. He had been jealous
at different times of her mother-in-law and even of her maidservant.
She was compelled to shed them both. If his love had become jealousy,
hers had become fear.
Despairing of finding some anchor for the desire she still had to
love something, she let a child live and quicken under her heart. It
was some time before she let her husband know what was coming. When
he realised it, all his queerness came to the surface. Though he
hung around her still like a hawk around a chicken coop, he showed no
gentler shade of feeling toward her. His eyes seemed to pass through
her and to strike into the oblique future. However interesting she
might have become, he was no longer interested in her personally. His
mind and soul were concentrated on the coming child, of whom he quickly
became jealous to the exclusion even of the poor all-including mother.
The sense of paternal possession proved stronger than any marital
pride. As father of the coming child he demanded some sympathy and
praise, and finally took to his bed in expectation of visits, gifts,
and finally congratulations.
John Goldenough’s thoughts carried him afar. The occasion was solemn
enough in all conscience. It was possible that a future head of
Goldenough Brothers was shortly approaching the earth. If the child
were male, what a vista opened before the heir and successor of
himself! In political circles a Plumbing Peerage had already been
mooted, and if Plumbing, like Beer, Shipyards and tintacks, was to
produce a Peerage, who could be more suitable than John Goldenough?
To the man in the street the plumbing age was synchronous with the
rise and fame of the great firm. And each time that John Goldenough’s
name was mentioned, the pulse of every plumber in the Empire beat
higher. It was an heir to his future Peerage that he imagined. He
could not sufficiently impress upon his wife the care, the thought,
and the isolation which must surround her in a prospect of such
importance. Dull and listless, she awaited the days of dreariness;
the weeks of weariness, which prelude motherhood. He had caused her
to occupy a room at the end of the passage, in which he himself lay
camped, intercepting her presents and friends, and taking up more of
the doctor’s time than the patient herself. He felt a new importance,
and demanded the same reverence in the home that he received in the
plumbing world. He resented every attention she received, all of which
in some oblique process of thought he wished to be applied to himself.
The child was his, and he felt an uncontrollable sense of possession
welling under his sense of pompous pride. He grudged every moment
that the child remained part of its mother. He longed for the speedy
dissolution of their company, when he could take the child into his
arms and show the world that it was his and his only.
The moment came unexpectedly, for neither the doctor nor nurse was
under the roof when John Goldenough was awakened from sleep by the
premature groans of his wife. He roused himself and hurried into the
room in which she was confined. He stumbled twice and switched on the
light with delay. To his horror he saw that he was late. The child had
been born! He rushed to the bell to ring the alarm and to bring medical
aid. Then he hesitated, rushed to the bedside and lifted the baby into
the awaiting cot and blanket. It was a boy, and a fierce burst of pride
and satisfaction outweighed any anxiety rising in his mind for the
mother, who lay quietly breathing in the exhaustion of accomplished
pain. It was a boy! That was the great thing. Goldenough Brothers would
be perpetuated through the ages!
Vistas of cosmic thought swept through his brain during those seconds.
He looked back unto the foundation of Goldenough Brothers if not as far
as the beginning of the world, and he looked ahead and saw the firm
majestically installed around the world. Where the name of Goldenough
was not known was simply not civilisation; that was all. If he had
had imagination, his mind might have visualised the firm in Biblical
guise contracting for the water-pipes of Babel. But his social and
personal pride was sufficient to inspire him to mutter, “John, second
Lord Goldenough,” as he lifted and laid down the infant. He covered him
with the blanket and returned to the bell. With his finger upon the
knob again he hesitated. He heard an arresting groan from his wife.
It was the first notice he had taken of her. Once more his thought
flashed ahead murkily, and he foresaw her recovery, her maternal
triumph, her possession of his boy, perhaps as intimate and absorbing
as his mother’s devotion to himself. And he shuddered with jealousy.
It was his boy and he wanted no mother’s tender care to soften the
strong abiding bond between father and son. He glanced at the child’s
cot. In the far past of buried deeds and dead thoughts he recalled a
child’s cot similar to this one. It gave him a dreamy sensation of some
previous existence, some underground occurrences, but very far back. He
could not recollect the circumstance, but the sight of the baby in the
cot filled him with a vivid and fierce desire to be rid of something.
Flaming jealousy demanded blood. His eye fell full on his wife, and
a passion of murderous envy coloured the very retina of his eye. He
could not bear to think that the success, the joy and the satisfaction
of the boy’s birth would redound to her. He would have liked to kill
her, and to throw the nightlight upon the sheets if he could be certain
that they would have risen in solid, enveloping, destroying flame.
His finger still hovered on the unpressed bell. The alarm had not been
given, and it crossed the cunning of his frantic mind that, if he
waited a while, perhaps she would die of her own exhaustion. She had
not recovered consciousness. Perhaps she never would.
He stood feeling the bell knob. She gave another deep groan, and moved
as though in helpless signal for aid. He guessed that she was slowly
expiring of hæmorrhage. The baby was quiet, and he needed only to
stand there waiting and watching till the right moment came to sound
the bell. He would be found there striving to save her by her bedside,
the perfect type of the mourning, maladroit husband. It was a question
of timing the doctor’s arrival in order that it might appear that
everything had been done, but that the Hand of God had been lifted
against good Brother Goldenough, so prosperous and happy in all other
affairs of life. In his mind he was already dictating the notices which
would appear in the local Press in edifying eulogy of his dead wife and
in considerate sympathy for himself. His finger trembled on the bell.
Still he waited. A rattle of breath had begun to sound in her uncovered
throat. Her broken body began to heave like a rudderless ship. Then she
fell quiet and seemed to sink like a corpse under the debris of the
bed. With a calm finger John Goldenough deliberately rang the electric
bell.
The house was roused, but it was half an hour before the doctor arrived
in a terrible state of anxiety. He had confidently prophesied the
birth for the following week. Meantime hysterical maids had chafed his
wife’s hands and poured brandy into her icy mouth. The doctor felt her
pulse and turned aside to the baby, which he lifted and examined with
continued anxiety. John Goldenough had retired, leaving the medical
profession to clear his work.
Returning to his room he waited for the first bulletin. Nurses arrived
and the doctor’s colleagues were summoned. Apparently she was making a
fight of it yet. An hour passed.
The doctor, with a ghastly face, presented himself at John Goldenough’s
door. “I am sorry to have to bring such bad news.”
John Goldenough looked up with assumed despair. “My poor wife, my poor
wife!” he said, and buried his face with much fantastic sobbing in his
hands.
The doctor laid his hand on his shoulder and said: “Your wife, I am
happy to say, will live, though she has had a narrow escape.”
John Goldenough stood upright. “What is your bad news, then?” he asked
feebly.
“The boy is dead. He must have been born an hour before my arrival. His
umbilical cord was never fastened, and he bled to death. If I could
have arrived only half an hour sooner!” And he passed out.
THE DRUMMER OF GORDONMUIR
Two years before the war broke out, I became trustee to Allan Gordon,
of Gordonmuir, in the county of Argyle and kingdom of Scotland. He
was not more than a fledged schoolboy when he inherited his uncle’s
property and the nominal chieftainship of the clan. My connection was
distant, but I was persuaded by his aunt to supervise his affairs. A
week later, I found myself sitting in the “Flying Scotchman” with an
old lawyer for colleague, who confided to me that he did not expect the
estate to bear our travelling expenses.
Late that night, after a ten miles’ drive from the station in the
drenching embrace of a Scotch mist, we reached Gordonmuir. I was
chilled to the heart when I first viewed the mixture of Indian bungalow
and mediæval dungeon that made up Allan’s mansion. In the centre was
a stone keep, ivy-clad, crumbling, and crenellated. On either wing
in the inclosure, where they used to herd the stolen cattle, was a
modern shooting box attached with the minimum of architectural art. My
companion shivered in the gaunt doorway like one of his old parchments
crackling in a draught. But Allan ran out, as cheery and cock-a-hoop as
the chieftain’s feather in his bonnet. He seemed the one representative
of joy and life within that grisly precinct.
We passed the whole of the next day discussing wills and mortgages
in the dead jargon of Scots law. My colleague wished to pay off the
mortgages and the annuity due to Allan’s aunt, but there was equally
the question of Allan’s allowance at the university to be considered,
and I plumped for as much as the rickety estate would allow. I felt
that college life comes but once, and not to everybody, and that three
hundred pounds was necessary to uphold the dignity of a young laird
thrown among Jews and Saxons.
The lawyer insisted on cutting it down to fifty, to preserve what he
called a “feenancial aspeect.” But Allan was satisfied; and so was I,
when I found that his gratitude took the form of free trout-fishing
for life. Trustees are not generally rewarded; in fact, as my gloomy
colleague reiterated, they are oftener liable to terms of imprisonment
for inadvertently touching trust money with other than the legal end of
the poker. So I left the rest of the business to his care and started
out to test Allan’s trout--in my opinion the most valuable stock he
possessed.
The old lawyer remained perfectly content wheezing snuff to blow away
the damp that rose out of the old parchments, while Allan and I were
whipping the neighbouring lakes with iron-bodied flies twisting at the
end of silver gut. After a week’s work, the lawyer left us to ourselves
for good.
“There are grand sheepskins in your chest,” he told Allan, on
departing, “and specimens of Scotch law in all its manifold
application. And there’s much of interest concerning your family, much
of good report and some of ill--and one tale among the papers that I
reserve for your ears alone, though your gillie, Murdoch, whom I have
been questioning, can serve you the popular version.”
When the lawyer had gone, I never cared to ask Allan what this might
be; and reticence is to be encouraged in youth. It was not for two
years that I was to learn.
Meantime, I had taken vacations regularly at Gordonmuir. Every autumn
I travelled north with a skein of trout lines and feather flies in my
lap. It is the one perfect occupation in a train. It plies the heart
with reminiscence and expectation by turns. It soothes away more hours
of motion than reading or talking, and it leaves the mind active and
the fingers nimble at the end of the journey. Often have I thought of
patenting it as a railway amusement, but then the true and complete
anglers whom it would occupy are diminished to few in the land.
I used to arrive at Gordonmuir with my cap and pockets bristling
with silk flies and lengths of gut every autumn. And Gordonmuir in
autumn!--when the skies have settled into their summer sheen and the
red heath is running to dull purple; when the long, billowy hills lie
reflected on the waters that float above their foundations in the
Hebridean sea, hills that change their marine flora a few yards above
the rocky tide belt for all the sweeter weeds of earth--sea pinks for
mountain heather and the long yellow tide ribbons for the crisp bracken
and harts-tongue ferns. Hills of transformation and wonder! At their
feet the heavy, opaque water of the sea lounges over rocks studded
with green limpets and suckstones, while in their hollows, under the
clouds above, the bubbling springs run into fresh streams and lakes.
But the best contrast of all is furnished by the coarse, lubberly
fish that basks under the shadow of the rocks, fit only for the seine
net and the spear of the poacher; a fish without a soul. But a good
Providence replaces him in the higher, dew-fed waters with the merry
brook trout--as gamy a jester, in his motley of red spot and yellow, as
ever tumbled at one end of a fifty-foot line.
It was this perennial sport that drove away the gloom and discomfort
attached to Allan’s residence. He kept no servant but Murdoch, who
was better at twisting flies than making beds, and could stalk game
more easily that he could cook it. The house itself remained dreary
even when flooded by the five thousand acres of sunshine included in
the property. It looked what it was--the half-dismantled mansion of a
line of fighters and spendthrifts. Even at night, Allan’s red family
claret and silver-sconce lights--sole heirlooms besides a lock of the
Pretender’s hair--were as insufficient to clear the gauntness of the
atmosphere as the burning sunset and white starlight to drive the
evening mists from the hills.
But our days were largely spent in the open air, and evening found
us too tired to care whether our shelter was uncanny or not. Matters
ghostly were drowned in the steam of smoking cakes and trout baked
so fresh that their red spots showed like red wax under the melting
butter. And now that the old days have passed away and that the iron
has swept over our home life, it is good to look back and enjoy their
memory.
By the summer of last year, Allan had completed his second year at
Oxford, and I was enjoying my third successive holiday for his and
his estate’s benefit. We had fished together through a sun-smitten
June, and filled a rush basket daily with peacock-coloured troutlings.
About the middle of July, a strange thing broke the lazy monotony of
life--the first, and I hope the last, of its kind to come to me.
We had finished our supper one night, and I was sitting alone at the
open casement of the dining-room, watching the wonderful twilight night
that doubles summertime for those who live in northern latitude. It was
so light that the birds were stirring and calling on the moors around.
So full was the air of the elusive, haunting sounds of the Highlands
that I found myself listening to a steady drumming beyond the chestnuts
in the avenue without remembering exactly how or when it started. It
was a distinct tap-tap-tap, followed by a sequence of rub-a-dubbing,
and then a full drum symphony; a simple old tune, but, coming in the
white night, it sounded eerie beyond words.
For the moment I could only imagine it was some kind of monstrous
woodpecker, and I went upstairs to ask Allan if there were such a
species. He laughed loud at my ornithology, and in a burst of rank
college wit mixed a long name out of the Latin for owl and my own
patronymic for the new midnight bird, discovered by a south Briton
travelling in high latitude.
But his mirth quieted when I insisted that it sounded like a drum. He
seemed startled, and jerked down the creaky stairway. A minute later he
rang for Murdoch, and I heard him talking in a calm undertone, which I
confess did not prepare me for the quaking tones of his gillie’s reply.
It did not sound like the brawny mountaineer I had known for weeks
without suspecting a chink in his heart. But there could be no doubt,
judging from his voice, that Murdoch was exceedingly afraid. And fear
in the unsubtle is not as the fear of the educated--it is something
far more primitive. A college man can temper his fears with scepticism,
but an honest, superstitious gillie is without help. Murdoch was as
changed as the hills in winter. He trembled, and the sweat ran off his
face.
“Oh, Master Allan, Master Allan, I know well that drumming! It can only
be the Drummer of Gordonmuir that I was telling to you.”
“Holy God!” said Allan. “Not so soon again! Who can he come for now?
I’m not nearly old enough.”
“Heaven will need to watch over you day and night, my poor Master
Allan,” moaned Murdoch.
This sounded strange to me. I had never heard Allan invoke his Creator
before, for he had streaks of Scotch righteousness remaining in his
otherwise untheological nature. He turned around as I descended the
stairs.
“Come in here and listen!” he said.
The drumming had ceased.
“I don’t hear a sound of it. Perhaps it was imagination,” I said,
listening carefully.
“No, I mean listen to the story,” he answered quickly. “But first tell
me honestly what you made of it.”
“Well, Allan,” I could only reply, “I’ve already told you that since
there is no species of woodpecker that drills into Scotch timber
at midnight with a sound you can hear a mile off, it struck me as
remarkably like a drum.”
Allan stood at the open window for a moment before shoving the casement
down with a jerk.
“That’s what it is exactly, and probably my aunt is dead now.” And he
left me in the room with this enigma, in order to comfort Murdoch, who
was on his knees outside, muttering what sounded uncommonly like spells
against witchcraft.
He sent Murdoch to bed, and then poured out some brandy.
“I suppose you have some inkling of what that drum means,” he said,
handing me a glass. “I’d better tell you the story now, at least what
our friend, the lawyer, put together from letters in the muniment-room.
You know, of course, that we have a fetch, like all well-regulated
families in the Highlands. The whole county believes in the Drummer
of Gordonmuir, who plays the unholy part of death-watch to our little
establishment. The lawyer found a paper that described the movements of
the clan when we turned out for Prince Charlie in 1745. Apparently they
shared in his first successes, for they sent back an English drummer
prisoner. Two of them were left to guard him, and, because he wouldn’t
play some rebel air, they lowered him down the wellhead up to his shins
in water. But, barbarous as they were in those times, I don’t think
they intended his death.
“After the Battle of Culloden, there was some alarm of the English
coming, and they scattered to the hills, forgetting their prisoner, I
suppose; at least they left him to his friends, if they believed they
were coming. But the English never came, and the poor drummer was left
drumming vainly in that wellhead to attract attention. It must have
been a weary death.
“Weeks afterward, the clansmen crept home, and my ancestor had to
invent excuses and alibis to save his property from confiscation. They
found the prisoner lying in the well with his sheepskin drummed right
through and the drumsticks chewed in his teeth. It was an ugly thing to
find under the place where our rearing and living and dying were due to
go on till doomsday. If ever a spirit had the leisure, and, I am sorry
to say, just cause to possess itself of a family mansion, it was surely
that drummer.
“At first there was talk about building on a fresh site, but lack of
funds drove them to the alternative of burying the drummer, with an
iron stake to pin his body to the bottom of the sea in a place where
two tides meet. I suppose they got the recipe from some old witch who
had escaped the faggots in the previous century. They burned the drum
on a fire of dead men’s bones, and filled up the wellhead with all
manner of heathenish rites.
“But it was not the least good. The drummer rose out of the sea, and
he has drummed every Gordon of Gordonmuir, male or female, cradled or
crutched, into the kirkyard when their day came. He drums up yonder
whenever one of our family is going to die. He generally gives us a
week or a month’s warning, as he feels inclined. Murdoch will tell
you how he drummed my poor uncle frantic before he died, four years
ago. That’s why he is scared for me. Personally, I feel too hale to be
anxious, and, besides, I have come to the comfortable conclusion that
my aunt is dying and her annuity with her.” And he tried to laugh.
Neither of us could strip or sleep that night, sitting bolt upright
over our brandy till the morning. We listened and listened, and whether
it was only the wild echo of my imagination or that Allan’s aunt was
very hard of dying, I am persuaded that we heard the drumming come and
go, go and come, the whole night.
It was several days before we warmed to the fishing again, and even
then Murdoch’s gloom turned us into mutes. Allan cheered up, however,
became hilarious even, when a judicious inquiry as to his aunt’s health
brought a favourable reply. My last traces of uneasiness were dissolved
a day later in the death struggles of a tremendous six-pound trout with
a back of Tyrian purple and a hooked under jaw like Punch.
In such wise we fished away our last days together on earth, and I
would not change their manner even if I had them back again.
The gradual approach of autumn made the passage of July more beautiful
than ever. The stone pines stood waiting for winter in their burnished
green, while the chestnuts below flushed to crimson as if with
modesty at the coming nudity of their boughs. Under them all, the
wood bracken sobered to yellow and then to burnt madder, until it
became indistinguishable from the earth tint. Farther below, the
summer-coloured sea heaved through masses of orange weed the sunlight
seemed to have charmed out of her submerged gardens. And with the dying
splendour of summer passed away the last days of peace.
August brought war.
It makes a short story to tell what occurred in the weeks following.
Allan left Gordonmuir immediately to rejoin his university’s training
corps, of which he was a member. His family name and county standing
procured him a probationary commission in a Scotch regiment already
serving in France. He left for the war, with Murdoch as his soldier
servant, and I saw him no more. He did not reach the actual front
until after the retreat of the British army from Mons, but he was in
time to share in the astounding battle of Ypres, and, alas! to perish
in its final stages. The brief War Office telegram announcing his
death, with Lord Kitchener’s regrets, was sent to his trustees.
Allan was the last of the Gordons of Gordonmuir. As his sole relative,
his aunt, declined to live there in his stead, the house has been
abandoned, and it may be said that the curse of the Gordons has come
home to roost in its decaying timbers for ever.
Yet that is not all.
Six weeks later, I found myself a few miles behind the battle front
where Allan had been killed. I had volunteered my services as an
interpreter, and was posted to the unwarlike business of searching the
German prisoners for documents and diaries, which I translated for
the intelligence of the general staff as well as my limited German
permitted.
One day I was crossing the street in the little French town where we
were quartered when some of our wounded were brought in. One of them
called out to me by name in a piteous tone, but I did not recognise who
lay under the red linen bandages till the voice went on:
“Eh, man, do ye not remember that famous trout we were catching
together?”
It was Murdoch. He had been hit in the head, and was raving, but he
knew me and continued to call for me and Allan, while they lifted him
into the temporary hospital. I visited him regularly, and when he was
better, he was able to tell me the circumstances of Allan’s death:
“It was terrible, just terrible, from the start to the finish. We were
marched one way and another and posted at last about the city they call
‘Wipers.’ Master Allan was given a ditch to hold, which is no proper
covering for a Highland gentleman. To the right was a wood lined by
an English regiment, and on the other side of us was the colonel and
the rest of our men. The shells never stopped falling out of the air
like invisible rocks that blew to dust before you could mark them.
Soon the Germans began to come across the fields as packed as a shoal
of fish, and squalling like the gulls that follow the fish in the
bay--stout-looking men with spikes on their heads like the first show
of a stag’s antler.
“We all fired away, making easy shooting. Master Allan took my rifle,
and I sat loading for him until it was too hot to touch. When all
the men next to us were killed, we picked up their rifles and stood
together committing manslaughter without thought of judge or jury. But
the Germans never ceased coming, and the men in our ditch grew fewer
and fewer with the shell fire. Every now and again there came a burst
among us like a quarry blast, save that it was limbs and pieces of men
that fell out of the air afterward instead of bits of rock. And blood
enough there was running out of that ditch to taint the Solway Firth.
“At last, after the wounded were taken to the rear, there was only
Master Allan and myself left. A little farther on, we could see the
colonel and a single private loading his rifle for him. The colonel
sent him for reinforcements, but he never came back. Then the colonel
signalled to me to join him. I crawled down the ditch to his side, and
he told me to take word to his commander that his bit of the line was
worn away, and to ask should he rely on angels or fresh troops to hold
it.
“I left them there, Master Allan and the colonel, firing their
shoulderful of rifles in unison, so as to give the Germans the
impression that they were still in good force. I started crawling and
running in turns till I came across an outpost, who took me to the
general’s head-quarters--just a table behind a blackened hayrick, but
it was good protection.
“The general gave a grim laugh when I delivered the message, and told
me that he had just sent the last cooks and camp followers up to the
line with rifles.
“‘And tell your colonel,’ he added, with a look that might have been
either despair or mockery, ‘that he had better rely on angels for lack
of more material reinforcement, but you can also add that we do not
expect the Germans to come on again. They seem to have had enough of it
for to-day.’
“I set out to make my way back, and had crossed half-way over the
sticky fields when I heard a sound that set my heart beating harder
than the German cannonading could make it. You would hardly believe it,
but I heard the rolling of a drum up in the clouds. At first I couldn’t
distinguish it above the booming of the guns and the crackling of the
rifle fire. But there came a lull, and the drum began rapping out like
the crying of the moor fowl between the discharges of a thunderstorm,
and it brought the tears to my eyes and the fear of God to my heart,
for I know the Summoner of Gordonmuir by now, and, oh, to think that
he should have crossed the seas to play the last of the Gordons of
Gordonmuir home! It was a grand and wonderful sound to hear the noise
of battle dying away to our right and the artillery bursting out on our
left, and all the while, above German and Scotch and English, our bonny
Drummer playing the devil’s own march out of God’s sky!
“But before I found the ditch again, I lost my way and the darkness
came over me. I was hit by a bullet in the leg, and the loss of blood
took the heart and the feeling out of me, and I just lay down within
sound of the Drummer and waited to die. In the morning, they picked me
up unconscious, but not too badly hurt, for I was back in the line a
fortnight later.
“But Master Allan and his colonel, they found them lying where I had
left them, in the midst of a pile of empty rifles. The Germans never
dared come up to the pair of them, though they could have marched
straight forward and none to hinder them. Maybe they were afeared and
maybe their bones were too heavy, and maybe the Drummer of Gordonmuir
had drummed holy terror into their souls. I am thinking that the
Germans must be an unholy people and displeasing to Almighty God, that
He should allow the heathen spirits and kelpies out of the woods to
come all the way from Scotland to discourage them!”
Poor Murdoch! He was hard hit this time, and he began to rave again.
It was the same story he told again and again until the night he died,
holding my hand and calling out to Allan. I have no doubt that he is
acting gillie to him somewhere in the next world, beyond space and the
other side of time. He would not have wished to live after his chief.
* * * * *
A month later, a postscript to this story reached me as strangely
as such things can occur. I was sitting up one night in my billet,
translating a batch of German papers and sorting what useful
intelligence I could glean from the epistolary rigmarole, when a
written date stabbed me like a knife.
It was the date of the day on which Allan had been killed, and it
headed what purported to be a private soldier’s account of the fighting
from the side of the attack. I read it through very carefully and then
made a translation, not for the use of the general staff, but for the
trustees of Gordonmuir. The last page ran as follows:
_Before Ypres, October 31, 1914._
In spite of the fierce attacks which we delivered during the day,
the English line was not perceptibly thinned in any direction where
we could push our final thrust. At one point of attack we could
distinctly hear the drums of the enemy playing all the time to the
rear, which showed that they had available men in that direction.
This, together with a slackening of fire, gave us to understand that
it was a ruse. We shifted our attack accordingly down the line, but
up to this moment we have not yet broken through.
THE SUPREME COMPLIMENT
She was very beautiful, far and away the most beautiful feminine
divinity of our generation. It was a puzzle how the Manufacturer of
Gods and Goddesses achieved her manufacture with the human elements at
His disposal, for even the most exquisite skeleton of whittled ivory
as a background and the finest modelling of the refined and rosy clay
of girlhood, all tightly and attractively enclosed in the thinnest
and most transparent chicken-skin, could not account for the charm of
Melissa Delme. Minute were the saphenous veins underlying her satined
skin. Her eyes were glaucous as those of the grey-eyed Athena. Her hair
was as barley-sugar finely spun. Her lips tied a tiny tulip. Her feet
were quicksilver. No reference to her stage success is needed. From the
moment that she first appeared at the Hounslow Hippodrome to the series
of rapturous farewells for ever associating her name with Worthing
Pier, her professional path was a rose alley and her private life a
continual and seraphic serenade.
Perhaps that was why it was so dull. It was all Up without Down. Her
whole life worked like a little piece of divine clockwork. Delicate as
was her art, her success was machinelike. It was too perfect to admit
of any criticism or even of much discussion. It is true there was some
division in the Clubs as to whether she sang better than she acted or
whether she played the violin better than either. At White’s a vote
was actually taken and her power of song exalted above her expression
in music. The Travellers’, on the other hand, decided that she danced
even better than she sang. At the Bachelors’, however, these matters
remained too painful for discussion.
So her life remained unutterably dull. Every man who met her fell in
love punctually at the third minute, and remained doing and saying
and presumably thinking the same things at scheduled intervals. The
London male seemed to be furbished and furnished from the same gigantic
slot-machine. She had only to drop a pennyworth of smile and press
with her hand, for the same wearisome sequel to follow, the same inane
amatory collapse, the same letters, the same flowers to match the cut
and dry compliments, the same proposals. For a fortnight she once fled
to America in wild hope of variety and adventure, but returned sadly
after enduring the same accents and the same accidents from New York to
Chicago, and back.
Melissa Delme remained on the stage for two years of crowded life
and crowded audiences. But the greater the crowds that flocked to
see and hear her, the more lonely she became. She was too bright a
constellation to become companionable. Had she been less a paragon she
might have found a paramour. But she remained as intact and virtuous as
a marble statue in the midst of a shopful of brittle and vulgar Chelsea
china. She was really a little too beautiful and it had made her
capricious and careless. Some women try to resemble posters, but it was
the posters that tried to look like Melissa Delme. She had long ceased
to care whether she was admired or not. She only cared whether she
admired herself. All other admiration was commonplace, but the flashing
compliments of her mirror were Narcissan and acceptable. Externally she
became exquisitely unique. Within she remained unabatingly bored. She
never expected to fall in love. The God, Who made her, had exhausted
Himself, and in finishing His masterpiece forgot or withheld one thing,
the capability of receiving or feeling love. So she remained the
divine masterpiece and mistress of no man. Then the time came when she
was understood to be considering proposals and they multiplied, but
without disclosing more originality than so many tenders from British
tradesmen. The first note of variety occurred in the letter of a
Cabinet Minister in Holland. She read it and took it as a joke, but in
the end she married him and took a Dutch treat. Tell it not in White’s
and whisper it not at the Bachelors’ Club! It appeared that he held a
very responsible position in his own country as Minister of Cheeses. So
she settled down in the romantic Hague and gave birth to a succession
of little Dutch dolls. There is no foundation to the rumour that she
was the only woman to cause jealousy to the Queen of Holland. She was
never anything but virtuous, beautiful and bored. In the end her beauty
bored herself. She was too beautiful; that was all. There was no flaw
in her morals or in her looks. She was only discovered to be not quite
human, which was not surprising as she had been created a Goddess.
But it is historical to relate that supreme efforts were made during
her sparkling career on the stage to deviate her virtue and to keep
her for England.
When all ordinary compliments had failed, the more ingenious of
her admirers set themselves on the path of invention. One of them
sent her a beautiful leather toilet bag with every article made in
chocolate--chocolate hair-brushes, chocolate flasks and bottles,
chocolate scissors and manicure with enough silver-paper to give
the illusion of reality. She played with it for half an hour before
she sent it to the Children’s Hospital. I mention this comparative
success, for the idea was originally mine and was carried out by my
dear friend Ernest Beaugent, who spent the best years of his life
and genius courting Melissa Delme. His hot rival during those years
was his brother Peter, who on hearing of the success of my chocolate
immediately and recklessly capped the gift the next day by sending
her a whole portmanteau stuffed with sweets. That was possibly
why confectionery figured so considerably in his later bankruptcy
proceedings. Then Melissa took to skating, and all her admirers
ransacked the dealers for skates--iron skates, steel skates, American
skates, Swiss skates, Norwegian skates. However, Peter triumphed for a
winter by having a pair of skates made of gold with steel blades. Gold
skates could not be trumped, and it was not till the spring that Ernest
found occasion to cap the compliment.
It was over camellias. In those days flowers were often unprocurable
in England. There was no flower express from the Riviera. The flower
industry in the Channel Isles had not been developed. To ask for a
bunch of camellias in January was like asking for plovers’ eggs at
Christmas. Yet that was exactly what Melissa asked of Ernest one
Monday morning, presumably to be quit of his attentions for the week.
She was going to the Opera on the Wednesday and said she would much
like to carry a bouquet of camellias. Instead of offering her the
moon on a silver salver or a slice of the sun, would he be practical
enough to procure so simple a nosegay? Ernest went out thinking. That
night he crossed to Paris. Melissa must have thought no more of him,
for he afterwards learnt that she had ordered herself a large spray of
artificial blossoms. He crossed to Paris because he did not believe
that the camellias were really impossible to obtain. He happened to
be a railway director by trade, and one of an inventive turn of mind.
Though born a gentleman and bred a graduate, he had surprised Victorian
society by becoming a competent engine-driver. He had qualified in all
the tests, and every Saturday instead of a ride in the Park or joining
a shooting-party he used to drive an Express to some watering-place
on the South Coast. He was on the Company’s reserve list of drivers
in case of invasion or railway strike. And in emergency he was always
liable to be summoned. Several times he had driven Royalty without
mention of his name being made in the Court Circular. It remains, by
the way, for a Labour Government to insert among the names of guests or
preachers who have the honour of boring their Majesties the names of
the honest engineers and stokers who have the honour of driving them.
Ernest’s Directorship enabled him to keep back the next train due to
leave for Calais, which being duly caught he sat back and let thoughts
run through his brain valves with an open throttle. He reached Paris
the next morning and called on his French colleagues, who were
Directors of the lines to the Riviera. Haltingly but obstinately he
explained how important it was that he should have certain flowers in
London by the evening of the following day. It was believed that there
was one horticulturist in the South of France who kept a camellia farm.
He had long held the repute of a mad Englishman among his French
colleagues and his predilection for driving engines appeared only
a vagary of sport. It was more conceivable to them that he should
want a special train to fetch camellias from the Riviera, but even
so whether it was, as he said, for a wedding or, as they suspected,
_pour complimenter une dame_, it seemed an inconceivable luxury. They
suggested telegraphing and arranging for the next train from the
Riviera to bring a few blossoms on his behalf. He assented wildly and
waited a day and a night in Paris. He was fond of describing how the
Riviera Express reached Paris on the early morning of Wednesday leaving
him one half-hour to transfer the expected bouquet of camellias to the
first train leaving for London. What was his amazement when he found
the officials of the train struggling under three huge baskets full!
There was just time to convey them from the _Paris, Lyon Méditerranée_
station to the train at the _Gare du Nord_. That evening he reached
her apartment and sent a fresh bouquet to her while she was dressing.
The answer was an invitation to her box that night. He had moved her
at last! The compliment had shot home and it only remained for him to
crown his deed by scattering the remainder of the flowers outside her
doors as a surprise. He emptied three basketfuls. There were a hundred
bunches at least in each and to his delight they carpeted the whole of
the tiny space between her dressing-room and her sitting-room. Bunch by
bunch he flowered the floor and went his way. The result could only be
imagined. When Melissa Delme swept out of her room in an opera cloak
of the colour of green agate with a silver lining she felt her feet
treading on something soft. It was a minute before she realised that
the carpet had changed its touch and texture during the time she had
taken to change herself into evening clothes. Later in the evening she
allowed Ernest to know that he had added a full minute’s delight to her
simpler emotions. It was undiluted triumph!
News of Ernest’s _coup_ percolated the Clubs and led to more and more
serious attempts to win the unwinnable. His contemporaries racked
their brains and their bank accounts in the endeavour to surprise and
please her, but she was difficult to surprise and impossible to please.
For her generation she remained more than a little unattainable. She
was the great unattained. In fantasy I can visualise her now. She had
green-pupilled eyes like emeralds washed under spring water, and hair
that was neither gold nor bronze. Her step was long famous on the
boards. It was said by critics to be precisely composed of a Fairy’s
falter, an Angel’s tread and a Dryad’s trip. The divinities entrusted
with her composition had very deceptively fitted layers of Aphrodite
and Adonis in the mould without vitiating the exquisiteness of her sex.
Her boyishness made her girlishness even more feminine. Her femininity
framed her boyishness to perfection. While she reigned on the stage,
her dazzling purity, based on boredom and the unfortunate omission of
one vital element in her celestial make-up, made the acting profession
even more respectable than it really is. Clergymen’s daughters applied
for places in the Chorus; an Archdeacon’s wife wrote a play called
“Archidiaconal Functions,” which three Bishops incidentally denounced
by Pastoral without having read, and several Dowagers wrote to Mr.
Edwardes of the Gaiety Theatre giving permission for their unmarried
daughters to play leading parts.
And all the while Ernest was devising new ways of surprising her, and
his brother was trying to cap and supplant him. Ernest’s love became
Platonic perforce. He took the habit of inquiring her holiday movements
and taking the engine-driver’s place on the metals. It pleased him
fiercely to think that her life unwittingly was in his hands; that he
was even directing her path and her speed; that while she lay back in
cushioned companionship he kept lone watch spying out her lightning
track, as though it had been granted to him to carry her through space.
The first time he had hopped off the cab at the end of the journey and
revealed himself under his oily rags she was more than surprised. For
the second time in his life he had pleased her. No admirer hitherto had
adopted such an unexpected disguise of approach. The second time he
appeared to her as an engine-driver she took no notice. In the end he
was content to drive the trains in which she was travelling out of pure
and unrewarded intellectual love.
Peter had no profession or accomplishments, so he could only waste ways
and means to keep step with his brother’s courtship of Melissa. He
once crossed the Continent to watch her change trains at York. She was
staying in a country house, to which he had failed of an invitation,
but he travelled two days and a night to be in time to meet her on the
platform and to carry her wraps to the next. Then he waited bareheaded
while her train drew out.
Soon after this romantic excursion Peter’s affairs passed from bad to
worse financially, and finally a family conclave met to decide whether
to cut his losses or cut him adrift. Peter was the only light-hearted
person at this domestic trial and investigation. Though Melissa was
never mentioned, it was found that his debts had been largely incurred
in planning and conducting surprises, parties and compliments on
her behalf. His family were grave but generous. Ernest, as head of
the family, took a lenient view towards one whom he considered an
ineffectual rival; the game was in his hands. He suggested that his
brother should leave the country and promise his family not to return
provided they guaranteed him a tolerable income out of their own
inheritances. Peter’s future was thus settled. After the meeting Peter
approached his brother and rather limply muttered that he was sorry
to have caused all this trouble, but that if his brother would lend
him sixty pounds down that day he would gladly sail to Australia and
forgo the annuity his relations so kindly proposed for him. He promised
they would never hear of him again unless he struck gold or won the
Melbourne Cup. Ernest looked into his brother’s sheepy eyes and felt
moved both to pity and economy. It was surely better to present him
with sixty pounds then and there than to give him a banker’s order for
an annual hundred. He drove him to the Bank and gave him the sum in
crisp new notes, said good-bye handsomely and returned to his Club. He
had reason to feel virtuous, generous and comfortable.
An hour later he was about to sit down to a good dinner when a
messenger arrived from the Terminus station-master with an emergency
summons to drive a Special to the South Coast that evening. He looked
at his watch. He had twenty minutes to get to Victoria and look over
his engine. It always did him good mentally and physically to drive a
fast train to the sea, especially a small one made up of Saloon and
Guard’s Van. He could imagine making a speed record with no stops.
He was at Victoria in ten minutes. His overalls were ready and his
favourite fireman was already wiping the clutches with an oil rag. It
was a new powerful engine, the finest on the line, and he spent every
minute before the start fingering and touching levers and parts. Steam
had brought the boiler to the point of exasperation. At the sound of
the whistle he loosed the engine with a sniff and a plunge across the
Thames. It was exhilarating to gather speed and he had no thought
of the occupants of the Saloon--semi-royalties or South American
millionaires, no doubt. He gave them a rippling run over the steel
threads through Surrey and Kent. The engine throbbed and danced to
all the emotions that are procurable to steam and grease and steel,
and Ernest made the dash of his life--one indeed that he was never to
forget, though it was years before he dared tell, even in the secret
recesses of his Club.
As he neared Folkestone he felt proud of his own driving. He had not
lost a minute out of the fastest expected time. He was moving the
engine across the points as slickly as a dancer moves his partner in
and out of corners on a dancing floor. He slowed the train down to an
exact standstill like a musician bringing to final poise and close some
great piece upon the organ. He felt the great instrument of hissing
pipes and pounding pistons and escaping winds sink under his powerful
handling to a solemn standstill. But when all was over and the fireman
was creeping round the front of the engine with the oiler, Ernest felt
a certain curiosity to see what particular Pasha or Serene Highness or
Great Mogul or plain New Yorker could have afforded the cost of such
a trip. Slipping off the panting mass of metal he passed round the
station into the waiting-room, through which the passengers were bound
to pass. With a greater throb at heart than the engine had given in
its fastest moments, Ernest reeled. He had recognised that the Serene
Highness in this case was Melissa Delme. He could only pull the greasy
cap off his head and stand to foolish attention. Whether she deigned
to recognise him or not he never knew, for he devoted his eyesight
to exchanging a long and meaning look with the Pasha. The Pasha was
brother Peter! Ernest said he just stood and choked, as though he had
swallowed a lump of train grease. When the couple had both disappeared
in the direction of the Boulogne boat he began to feel that there was
something magnificent in his brother’s performance. Ernest crawled home
on a goods train and on arrival at Victoria inquired what the cost of
the Special had been. He was told that it had cost just sixty pounds!
A STUDY IN SMOKE
All that winter of the war men laboured at furious speed to furnish
the guns which the British Government had forgotten to make before the
war. Guns were needed imperatively for the navy, and even more for the
hapless army bogged in Flanders mud. So the factories and foundries of
Woolhurst worked at full pressure. The factories screamed and glittered
through day and night, and the foundries drew a muffled roar as an
occasional red mist burst out of their chimneys and a gun or part of a
gun was cast. It was slow but furious work--furious in the detail of
fire and molten metal, slow in the aggregate of fitting and testing
each mighty gun. Furious work for the sweltering workers, stokers, and
moulders, but slow, infinitely slow, to the waiting officials, and
slowest still for the officers and men waiting for gun equipment by
land or sea.
To beget a gun on official paper is a different thing from its long
generation and growth in the foundries. An order can order but not
quicken a gun’s delivery. The most imperious official cannot make the
molten metal more malleable to man’s dire need.
Thousands of workers wrought like cogs in a machine, surrendering
their thought and strength to the metal. The pay was good and the toil
overwhelming. There was no time or strength left to think of anything
except the immediate toil. They were fascinated and caught like moths
upon the outskirts of that chaotic bonfire for which they were binding
iron faggots and filling steel squibs. Cranes, lorries, and trucks
picked up their output and disappeared. There was no time to ask a
question. The harder and fiercer they worked, the sooner the war would
be over. Only madmen and Socialists asked why. The argument stood that
the higher and brighter the bonfire was piled, the sooner it would be
burnt out to a finish. No one in the Woolhurst factories queried the
uselessness and meaninglessness of all their labour except Ben, the
local Labour leader. Whatever he was known as to the officials, he was
Ben to his fellows, and always had been, in strike and out of strike
time. He worked with the rest but he did not think with them. The
bitter humours, which a little reading and much agitating had left in
his brain, were not dissipated in the burning fires of the foundry. He
grew bitter as he grew wearier. He felt careless whether he gave his
full power to the work of destroying the workmen of another country. It
was only the war of one ant-hill against another. Patriotism had not
caught him in the board-school, and less during his apprenticeship to
work. His education was what he had given himself out of the _Labour
Press_ and from second-hand copies of Marx and Carlyle. As he grew
careless, he grew clumsier and earned the curses of the foreman, as
far as curses availed against the hot blasts. He hated his work and
all around him.... He hated the great gun which they were casting in
molten form. He could see the white-hot metal pouring like milk out of
the furnace. The sight did not exhilarate him in the way it seemed to
inspire the others. His muscles relaxed and his eyes went languidly out
of focus. The seething mass of blazing liquid drew his languor into
itself. The foreman was still cursing. It needed only a touch to upset
his balance. Without a splash or a ripple he passed into the fiery mass
... an accident!
There are times when a ship cannot be stopped for a paltry individual
who has fallen overboard, and the foundry could not be held up for one
man’s remains. A big gun is worth many human lives. Besides, he had
disappeared. Cremation was complete and total.
By the time the glowing liquor had passed into the moulds and entered
into the long process of cooling, the human moth was charred to the
nothingness of carbon, and every bone and particle was digested by the
steel. His tomb not only enclosed but absorbed him. He had become part
and ingredient of his own sepulchre.... And there could be no inquest,
for there was no relic for a coroner’s inspection. Long before the gun
was adjusted with all its minute and meticulous parts, long before
it was tested and sent to a naval dockyard, the unfortunate man it
contained was forgotten, and had become as nameless and anonymous as
the gun itself. Nameless was the six-inch gun that was sent to sea, and
nameless let the cruiser remain on which it was hoisted.
* * * * *
For weary weeks _H.M.S. ----_ patrolled the northern mists, with a
brighter interval in the Mediterranean. Undeviating drill and perpetual
practice brought crews and armament to a stage of perfection bordering
on staleness. The chaplain came into the captain’s room with a puzzled
look.
“Sick?” queried the skipper.
“No,” said the chaplain, “I have been talking to the men.”
“Not done talking to them yet?” laughed the other, who took a
good-natured but perfectly sceptical view about chaplains and their
functions.
“Well, I should say,” suggested the chaplain, “that they have been
talking to me lately.”
“What about?”
“About spirits!”
The captain shifted his foot and spun round: “I thought it was your
business to talk to them about spirits, and what you didn’t know about
the spiritual simply wasn’t spirits”--and he laughed outright.
“This is not my kind of spirit.”
“The men will want to be teaching me my job next!” exclaimed the
captain.
“These are not the spirits of the Prayer Book so much as ...”
“What?”
“The spirits that are called ghosts.”
“Well, are there no ghosts in the Bible?”
“Yes, but not quite the same kind that the men have come to believe is
on board this ship.”
Anything affecting the nerves of the men became a preoccupation of the
skipper, and he grew grave.
“Go on.”
“Well, sir, it is very like a hallucination, but I thought you had
better know what the men are thinking about, in case it is interfering
with their work. They do not like handling one of the starboard
six-inch guns.”
“What do you mean? It is brand-new and tested to the ounce.”
“The men think there is a spirit in that gun and that he appears every
time they fire the gun.”
“Cannot they blow him out?”
“No, for it is in the smoke after firing that they discern the figure
of a man, and they think that he will end by sinking the ship....”
There was a longish silence, for the captain was far too good a sailor
not to know the part superstition plays in a sailor’s life. Devoid
of religion himself, he was calculating the result of such a fear
on the gun’s crew. For months the Grand Fleet had been chafing at
anchor, with intervals spent bursting through the fogs or charging
the mists. Mysterious performances known as P. Z. exercises, devised
by admirals, carried out by captains, and rectified in practice by
humble individuals in chart-rooms, occupied most of their seagoing.
The exact strategists were learning that accuracy and certainty were
more difficult to obtain on the water than on paper. The reckonings of
ships varied, and the value of given fire against given armament did
not always respond to theory. Even blindfold chess gave more certain
results. This was blindfold boxing against an enemy who was as often
below as above the waters. Months of phantom-chasing took its effect
on men’s minds. Crews became used to being called to action preceding
no action. Destroyers reported enemies that melted into mist, and
imaginary submarines caused panic in the Firth and the Flow. The
invisible enemy preyed more substantially on their minds than would
have been the case had action materialised. The strain told, and the
sarcastic elements seemed to mimic the thunder of guns whose smoke only
curled into the mocking clouds.
The practice day following the conversation of chaplain and captain on
_H.M.S. ----_ was fine and clear. The Dreadnoughts were slowly making
line to the practice-ground, preceded by the cruisers in formation,
while the destroyers ran in and out like bicycles twisting amongst
huge motor-buses. The captain of _H.M.S. ----_ took his position on
the bridge, and asked the chaplain to stand on the far end to note the
firing, while he remained at the other.
“Watch the firing of the forecastle-guns, and especially of the
starboard six-inch. I shall be glad to have your detailed report.”
At a signal from the flag-ship the fire-control of the cruisers was
tested. They fired in turn at a slow-moving target. The turn came for
_H.M.S. ----_. The port forecastle-gun emitted a cloud of smoke, a
great rolling blanket of white vapour. Captain and chaplain pierced it
with their glasses, and it had rolled away before the splash of the
shell showed where the aim had fallen short. The cruiser swung slowly
round, and the brand-new 9·2 fired for the tenth time in its existence.
Captain and chaplain watched the smoke without raising their glasses.
It slowly melted in the bright breeze, disintegrating and discolouring
of itself. It was quite thin before a man’s figure could be discerned
struggling in the dissolving smoke. It seemed obvious, matter-of-fact,
and chemical, except that it was a figure of smoke. The figure was
only comprehensible for a moment or two, for the wind elongated his
writhings; and his limbs, as though on the rack, were torn apart with
delirious speed. But the impression of human agony remained with every
human being who watched the torment of the smoke. Only the officer
controlling the fire watched the target and noted how near the shell
fell this time. By the time the next shot was fired, not a wisp of the
ghostly smoke remained.... And the fear of doom remained in every
heart on board that night except with the captain and the chaplain. The
chaplain had decided clearly that it was either a fantasy or a divine
omen. In the latter case it was for the good, and in the first case it
did not matter. As for the captain, he was both puzzled and unafraid.
The chaplain had noted the firing and its results very carefully as
directed, and he handed his notes to the captain, who read them in his
cabin. They were accurate and corresponded to the official account in
the log.
“You make no mention of the smoke,” suggested the captain.
“No.”
“Well, I saw a very distinct outline of a man in the smoke, and I
expected you would have recorded it.”
“No,” replied the other. “I particularly left the spook to you. It
would have been no evidence for me to have seen and reported it, for I
am officially supposed to believe in spirits.”
“Well,” said the captain, “I who do not believe in them have seen this.”
“Blessed rather are those who have not seen and yet have believed,”
said the chaplain.
“That is hardly my case,” replied the captain, “for I have most
distinctly seen and yet have not believed.”
Both turned then as sensible men to consider the effect of the
hallucination, or whatever it was, on the crew of the gun, and
incidentally on the whole ship. The men had come to regard it as a bad
omen. To them it was worse than carrying round a corpse. They thought
the gun was haunted and that, however deadly its firing to the enemy,
it would in the end prove more fatal to the ship. They believed they
were on a doomed vessel. It was no use changing the crew of the gun, as
the whole ship seemed involved.
“Provided I can drop a hit on the enemy with that gun in action, I do
not so much mind if the ship sinks under me,” was the captain’s final
deliberation....
The long wait of months was broken for some by the instantaneous
decision of mine or explosion, for others by change of latitude and
ship; for some, indeed, it was never broken; but for a few it was
crossed by the magic signal, “action!” On a joyous day for _H.M.S.
----_ issue was joined in the North Sea with a German raider supported
in the dim distance by enemy light forces. The captain gathered all the
threads of his life and training into his hand, and stood glued to the
bridge. The chaplain went down to steady the men, who in the glad glow
of coming action forgot all their troubles of body or mind. The moving
smoke on the horizon was the sign of retreating enemy, and cruisers
with torpedoes were dashing to cut them off. Every heart on board beat
in steady throb of unison with the ship’s engines. Precious minutes
passed, and the smokes on the horizon were no nearer. The largest
smoke was separating from the others. Half an hour passed and a hull
was outlined. It corresponded to the raider, one of those sweet prizes
which had been dashing in and out of middies’ dreams for months. As
the raider drew off from her escort, chancing a northern mist, _H.M.S.
----_ followed into the gathering vapour. Fire was being exchanged
between the others, but he reserved the raider to his own. Careless
whether she was dropping mines, he pushed into her direct wake. In ten
minutes he would open fire. And he did.
The fore-guns flashed in turn and eager glasses picked up the splash
of the first shell falling short. The captain groaned, but his groan
was choked with relief as he watched the next shell drop with a red
flash on the raider’s bridge. He telephoned his congratulations to the
gun’s crew, who received them in British silence. The red glare of fire
was rising from the raider under the British fire. She was blazing
steadily, and the captain no longer kept check of his guns. They were
being fired in irregular but enthusiastic salvoes. The German flag was
visible, white against the yellow smoke, so good were the captain’s
glasses. Another glance and the flag was gone. He immediately gave the
signal to cease firing. A destroyer ran in and fired a torpedo, whereat
the raider turned quietly over....
Leaving the rescuing to the destroyers, the captain of _H.M.S. ----_
cheerfully inquired if there had been any casualties. The chaplain
joined him on the bridge with a list.
“I am afraid there have been a few.”
“I never knew we were hit.”
“No, we were not hit by the enemy, but unfortunately a six-inch gun
starboard exploded after firing one shot, the second shot of the
action, and the whole crew were killed or wounded.”
The captain buried his face in his hands, forgetful that this was the
end of the perfecting day of his career, when years of preparation were
tested in action. Action and victory had come and also unlooked-for
disaster.
He could return home and report a brilliant and decisive action, but
the nature of his casualties necessitated an inquiry. A great deal
of evidence was taken as to the explosion of the six-inch breech,
and as little as possible was allowed to reach the public. It was
proved that the gun had been made with every possible care, being
tested and regulated in every way. The metal itself was subjected to
a close examination, and found to be of the best. The only flaw was
traced to a slight superfluity of carbon, which remained inexplicable
amid the alloy, and no blame was attached to the maker, or to the
crew or captain who had had charge of her in action. This carbon had
undoubtedly brought about a weak point in the gun, and under pressure
she had exploded, though in practice she had been successfully fired.
It was an explanatory but unsatisfying report....
A month later--“Carbon is a material cause at least,” remarked the
captain to the chaplain, “and carbon could have come from a man.”
“That is a possible solution, if you think it likely that some man fell
accidentally into the gun when it was cast,” replied the chaplain.
“I know it,” said the captain, “for it was my suspicion, and a private
and careful inquiry has placed me in possession of the fact that this
gun came from a foundry where a man had been actually lost in the
molten metal.”
Both sat in stony silence, and then the captain rose to go.
“Whatever I saw and you saw and the ship’s crew saw, the cause was
material and a man.”
“Yes, and as you have had reason to observe, a man is a spirit,” said
the chaplain, returning to his duties....
THE MISSIONARY
The life web of Theodosia McSolomon was short but vividly painted and
could only be picked and plaited together from different angles of
the globe. To begin with, she was brought up strictly, straitly, and
even sanctimoniously by her father and mother, who were Presbyterian
Minister and Ministress in a secluded corner of the County Armagh in
Ireland. It was called Gortaherrin. She grew up to honour her father
and mother, though she could hardly have wished the long days promised
in the land for such servitude. She could hardly have desired long
life in their lifetime, for she served them more as a slavey than as a
daughter. Her brother Theophilus helped her with the harder work in the
kitchen until he went to college, whereupon she sank into the position
of servant except on Sundays, when she occupied the front pew at the
Meeting House. It remained a sign to her of salvation, social as well
as celestial.
She grew into graceful girlhood, tall, and healthy as the wild rush
under the sweetening sky; waxen-white, not the white of sickness, but
the white of the hawthorn’s limelight bloom on the hedgerows in spring.
Her nature stayed deliciously unspoilt, for she had never known a kind
word or a kind action, nor expected either. She lived on buttermilk
and eggs, and turf-baked soda-bread. She seemed content with her fate,
but for no particular reason except that fate was not discontented
with her. She had the essentials of life without a single extra.
Face-powder, love-letters, corsets were of the Devil! She was not
unhappy, for she had never known what it was to be happy. And healthier
she grew and fairer and more wiry in all her curving limbs, but her
hair was not wire. It was best described as spun primrose petals; spun
into a thin silken weft. It was of a texture that made the daffodil
look coarse and the yellow-wagtail seem painted. The closest clue in
nature was the glint of the full harvest moon on the yellow shooks of
the bogland corn when ripe and reaped. It was as thin and nearly as
transparent as a thread of baby’s spit, each hair of her. And she wore
it in the shape of a little tight unwieldy bun like a tennis ball that
has collected cobwebs.
Her garments were ghastly. One annual skirt. Mother’s old hats trimmed
with ribbon. Father’s cast combinations patched and reefed with
thick darning thread. A scarecrow’s purgatory in sum! The good girl
sincerely did not wish to be any expense to her dear parents. She was
given no opportunity to be so. Mother would have liked to have been
affectionate, but affection had been mangled out of her. She asked
nothing of a life in which she perceived nothing. All was in the life
to come. Without meaning it, she weighed like wet washing on Theodosia.
Father was always as erect as an arrow and as indeflectible as the
Grace in which he was imbued and abounding. He stood in Grace up to
the ear-lobes. His high hat was smooth with Grace and his boots were
greased therewith. His only trouble in life was how to give unto others
out of his over-abundance of Grace. Mother had Grace, sufficient for
salvation, though father had had his doubts of her once, returning
from their honeymoon. Theodosia ought to have had Grace, for everything
humanly possible had been done to instil the divine condiment into her
soul. However, she had always been a very unresponsive child. Even at
her baptism she had not cried, to the amazement and disappointment of
the old Irish woman who held her and believed that departing demons
should cause screams in the normal way. Apparently they had preferred
to stay. And later Theodosia’s honey-coloured hair had given further
anxiety to the old woman who had tended her with some goats and hens in
childhood. It was not quite the same colour as the scutched flax which
yellow hair should resemble. It was stranger still. Her mother must
have been overlooked by the fairies before Theodosia was born. Farmers’
maids would never let her see the churn or a new-born calf for fear of
blinking the milk or overlooking their cattle. They thought her hair
unlucky. It was not a decent human colour.
In the vacation her brother brought home a fellow-student from Trinity,
Josiah McWherry. He was a lithe and likely lad. All day Josiah and
Theophilus studied for the Ministry, and in the evening they conversed
with the Minister’s family. The Minister was of great use to the boys
on any point of philology or philosophy. He had swept gold medals into
the full of his student’s cap. On Sunday nights he would only talk
Doctrine, and he was still fervent against Unitarians, with whom there
had been great controversy in his youth. He used to talk about the
great Doctor Hanna--“Roaring Hanna.” And he always ended upon a great
orthodox note: “As the Father is God, so is the Son God, and the Holy
Ghost is God.” He was a Trinitarian to the backbone, and would have
stood stiffer than a stake in the flames. However, there was nothing
except Unitarians and Papists for him to feel stiff about in his young
day. Home Rule and women’s bicycling came later. Spiders scuttled and
beam-lice somersaulted when he spoke on either of those subjects. One
was the destruction of the Union with England, and the other of the
marriage-union. He would not give Home Rule to Papists or to women. It
was by the firelight, listening to Dr. McSolomon, that Josiah first saw
the glint of silvery golden-grey in Theodosia’s hair. When she leaned
over the blazing turf, the red light played through the long plaits.
They were allowed to be let down in the evening, and the effect by fire
was like mulled claret poured over melting butter--not that Josiah knew
the joys of claret at any temperature. But he looked long and often at
the primrose hair and contrasted it with the flower face, which was
always as white as snow--white as the fuller’s earth, thought Josiah
scripturally. But he kept his thoughts to his presbytical self, and not
till he returned to Trinity did he indite a series of sensible letters
concerning sights in Dublin, which Theodosia was allowed to read after
perusal by each parent in turn. Naught suspecting or imagining, she
wrote a nice answer full of Gortaherrin news, and a pleasant, callow
correspondence was opened between the Manse and that famous seat of
learning in Dublin. Correspondence was encouraged, as it gave city news
to the old birds. Josiah returned for the next vacation, and ventured
to propose to Theodosia. She accepted him from a mixture of ingrained
modesty and obedience. Her parents were not informed owing to her
total innocence, and took no suspicion until an incautious love-letter
sent to her (care of a romantic local post-mistress) and sewed into
Theodosia’s pillow was found by Theodosia’s mother and handed to
Theodosia’s father, who was unable to speak for several days. He always
acted slowly and deliberately. Hasty wrath or unweighed reprobation
was neither in his policy nor of his temperament. Theodosia was not
lectured or beaten or accused of any specific crime, but she was
locked into her bedroom for a fortnight and nourished upon the bread
of affliction and the water of tears. The letter received no allusion
at home, but she never received another. Josiah McWherry wrote four
Sundays in succession and received no answer. Puzzled, he stopped
writing. She obviously did not enjoy reading in ink what she had
allowed him to whisper over the firelight or when she was washing the
delph. He was a faint lover.
She took her medicine well, though she imagined she had touched the
outskirts of romance. A gentle thrill had attuned her, though Josiah
had only proposed a nice arrangement for her, a sort of transfer
in domestic service for the future, and she had wrongfully kept it
from her parents. Love was a term of mixed meaning to her. Love was
something peculiar to God, and mortals who indulged in love got
into trouble. God so loved the world that He had damned most of
their neighbours, the Roman Catholics for sure, and the more-worldly
Episcopalians, who went to the Horse Show and Monte Carlo to spend
their rents. Theodosia came out of her room chastened. The rod of John
Calvin had been thrust under her milky skin. It was a priceless skin,
for which many a woman of the world would have flayed her own in
exchange. It was as clear and clean as wind-flowers reflected in the
moonlight water.
She had not seen her father during the fortnight. He was waiting for
her in his study. With one terrible frown he absolved and abolished
the past. Then he revealed the future. Correspondence of any kind
was forbidden. She must promise never to write to Josiah again, and
she promised, giving her simple word, that was as adamantine as that
of Medes and Persians. She had undoubtedly written more than one
love-letter herself, or Josiah would not have been beguiled into his
evil communications. Dr. McSolomon regarded her as a lapsed child until
she had atoned. Grace might still be applied mercifully. Grace had
been noticed to reside to a fuller degree than usual in a neighbouring
minister, Mr. Caleb McRoarty, a sober, steady and godly-minded widower
living in those circumstances which never receive the meed of pity and
attention accorded to the state of widowhood. When has a merry widower
been bespoken? Mr. McRoarty might be expected to call any day and press
his suit, which Theodosia was reminded needed no pressing. She would
have a chance to become mistress of her delph and her mangle, and to
preside over a Manse of her own.
This was the second time Theodosia felt her life stirred to the core.
It gave her intense repulsion and she shrank like a flower into its
half-opened bud. When Mr. McRoarty called, she wished for the first
time that she had never been born, but she showed no tremor, no
protest, no scene. She had a deep feeling that her life must turn
far otherwise, and, when her parents left her in the kitchen with
Mr. McRoarty she heard him with present smiling and absent mind. He
was well-meaning and inclined to be absorbent. The first touch of
absorption was pain to Theodosia, but in the circumstances Mr. McRoarty
believed his caress had been not only permissible but acceptable. He
embraced her over and over. It was his way of clinching a bargain. He
had already given her father a cow. It was an exchange in kind, and
Theodosia seemed willingly his. Sentiment might be thrown into the
bargain. But his clutching arms tore down the curtain, and she suddenly
glimpsed life in a Manse with this black-coated but fangless gorilla.
He was not cruel or vicious to look at, not very amorous even, unless
it was of her hair, which he fastened into a plait and rubbed over
his mouth. Theodosia started like a sensitive human violin. She could
not bear to be scraped by those large hands, though they thumbed the
Gospel; or kissed by those thin lips, though anointed with the dew of a
thousand sermons. She shivered and writhed until he stopped. She stood
in a stupor without saying a word till he went out and bade good night
to her complacent parents.
Then the break came. Hurrying into the kitchen she washed until she had
washed her face clean and clean, and brushed until she had brushed his
stickiness out of her hair. What was she to do? She felt like wax that
could not rid itself of his impression. She blew out the candle and
still saw him gibbering round her in the dark with the horrible agility
of old men who momentarily believe themselves young. His flaccid kisses
still sounded in her ear-drums. She lit the light again and determined
to write to Josiah, who was living with his father in Belfast. Yet she
had promised, and to break a promise was to go to Hell. Then the elfin
element in her made a nudge. Why not send Josiah an empty envelope? It
was a sign to be interpreted and it was not exactly writing a letter.
She addressed an envelope and wrote nothing within. But would he
understand that it meant an empty heart, blank despair and appeal for
help? But the fairy part of her worked like a charm. She snipped off a
primrose tress of her hair, placed it inside the envelope and ran with
it in the night to the post office. She couldn’t have written less. She
couldn’t have sent more. And she had not broken her Christian word!
Josiah had the courage or curiosity of youth to understand, for he
came over from his father’s Manse three days later. She was lucky
enough to see him in the road before he took the turn into the Manse.
She ran to meet him and to tell him all. When they came to the Manse
door, her father was waiting. He did not seem to mind Josiah’s
arrival, and let him stay to supper, questioning him kindly about his
examinations. Josiah found himself alone with the old man and plucked
courage to mention his case. “Theodosia and I had kind words together
last vacation and I hope you did not mind the letters I could not help
writing to her. I know she showed them to you.”
Dr. McSolomon smiled a deep and saturnine smile. He so seldom smiled
that the motion produced a little stiffness in his face for the rest
of the evening. When it was time for Josiah to leave, he informed him
quietly that Mr. Caleb McRoarty had made successful application for
Theodosia’s hand and that he intended marrying them himself the next
month. As a matter of fact Dr. McSolomon had only intended to inform
Caleb of this the next morning. That evening Josiah informed Theodosia.
This was the third shock she had felt in her life, pleasurable or
otherwise. Pleasurable had been the coming of Josiah to Gortaherrin,
far from pleasurable the wooing of Caleb; but the bare announcement of
her marriage with Caleb, though the greatest shock of all, gave her
neither pleasure nor pain. It conveyed the emancipation of disaster.
Everything was combining to the decisive moment, even Caleb who had
shot his bolt too soon. She had felt his horrid hook, like the minnow
grazed by the rusty pin of a schoolboy’s coarse fishing line. If it
were not for the memory of that foul embrace she would have remained
and swallowed the fate her parents designed for her; unconsentingly
no doubt; ruefully resentful perhaps, and cowed unto humiliation, and
certainly embittered to all time. In thirty years she thought she would
probably resemble her mother, a bootmat in disposition, and rather like
an old boot in shape. Her hair would become like her mother’s, snowy
white. While there was colour in her hair, it seemed there was hope.
Hope for what? Josiah had already started walking down the drive. She
slipped from the kitchen door across the fields and awaited him in
the high road. When she acted, she always acted without thinking, out
of a lonely and gallant instinct. She was of the blood of the martyrs
of the Covenant, and then the fairy in her bade her not lose the man
she had once summoned out of the void by casting with a lock of hair.
She went and she met him hasting away with that lock clutched in his
hand. When she glimpsed it she knew that fate was blazing her path.
He had hardly risen to the moment, but it was her fate, not his, that
possessed the moment. Perhaps he had no fate, only a soul and that a
cut and dried and preserved specimen. Perhaps she had no soul, only a
tremendous fate. She simply told him that she was coming with him to
the station, and at the station she told him she would come with him
to Belfast, where he was living with his father, and in Belfast she
intended to tell him she would marry him. He began nervously counting
the money in his pocket as soon as she broached Belfast. There was just
enough to bring them both there. He trembled counting it to the station
master. She noticed his emotion and pressed his other hand. She could
feel her lock of hair rustling between his damp fingers, and she knew
it was well. They sat and talked for two wonderful hours to each other
in the ill-lit third-class compartment, and even in the dirty oil-light
her hair assumed supernatural glow. Their plan was unsophisticated.
They would join hands before his father and swear themselves man and
wife according to the marriage law of Scotland. They did so on arrival
and remained the night under the roof of the surprised Josiah Senior,
Theodosia sleeping with the still more surprised Mrs. Josiah Senior,
while father and son discussed the next move in the kitchen. They
decided that Dr. McSolomon must be faced with a clean breast, the
fullest apology must be offered and humble entreaty made to suffer
their marriage to remain. They both agreed that Theodosia, knowing her
father so well, was the proper person to carry this out.
Next morning, Theodosia was singularly and poignantly recalled from
the realm of romance to acute realism, when she left the bedroom of
Mrs. Josiah Senior for the breakfast table and heard her bold rescuer
suggest that she should return and explain matters to her father.
She sat shyly and silently, wondering and watching. Then she shook
her tangled head and Mr. Josiah Senior said that he would take the
journey to prepare the way for her, and he was as good as his word.
He returned late in the evening and reported that terms were possible
though the wrath of Dr. McSolomon was terrible. He learnt from the
mother that he had deliberately cursed his daughter, and a frightened
farm-girl had expressed the fears of the household by saying that his
curses had killed the house spiders in their webs! On learning that
some form of service, some rag of respectability, had been clutched
by the sinful pair in the presence of a Minister of the Gospel, he
had remained silent for an hour and had then declared that since the
neighbours, assisted by the romantic postmistress and the Episcopalian
station master, had already put the gossip over ten parishes that his
daughter had run away with another Minister’s son, Josiah had better
marry her outright and keep her for ever. He made no conditions except
that Josiah should go abroad with her or, if he continued to work for
the Ministry, go on the mission field. He forbade utterly Josiah or
Theodosia setting foot within Gortaherrin Manse until the hour of their
death or his, but he held out the appetising suggestion that he would
come and unite them finally under their new roof in Belfast.
That delicate and indelible scene actually occurred. Josiah had had
the presence of mind to leave the house by the back entrance when
he sighted the rectangular Minister of Gortaherrin standing at the
doorstep. There could be no description of the hard white mask in
his face save that every angle was an acute angle. The gesture with
which he had smoothed his grey silky beard was an indication that
he considered scandal had been averted by narrow margins, though
his brother Minister showed him the large, unseductive bed in which
Theodosia and Mrs. Josiah Senior had passed and continued to pass night
time. Next to scandal, Dr. McSolomon hated most the sense of being
thwarted, and Theodosia had thwarted him bitterly. She had raised a
power before which domestic tyranny had failed and the walls enclosing
the Manse had fallen like the walls of Jericho. Bitterly he thought of
Rahab and the scarlet thread which that ingenious lady had shown from
her window, and he cursed Rahab and Theodosia in the same breath. He
declined to see or bless his daughter, but, to save allusions in the
local paper and his good name from the postmistress, he was willing
to be present with his wife at a public ceremony and the sooner the
better. Josiah agreed to take Theodosia into the foreign mission field,
and the rite took place in accordance with the Presbyterian Church of
Ireland. Josiah took Theodosia to be his lawful wedded, lawful bedded
wife, and slept with a gentle primrose cloud about his head. Neither
before nor after the ceremony did Theodosia’s father speak to her
except for one terrible moment when for the first time they were alone
in the waiting-room of the railway station, and Theodosia, greatly
moved, threw herself on her knees to ask a father’s blessing, if not
his forgiveness. But Dr. McSolomon never unbent, though at least he
spoke two words: “Shoo, Whore!”
He was of the iron calibre of the Covenanter, indeflectible of Grace
and inexorable of judgment. When his eye offended him he plucked it
out, and when his daughter offended him he vomited her overseas. It was
very doubtful to him now whether she would save her soul, but at least
he had saved appearances. He was of the relentless stock that breeds
martyrs and of the blood that crieth against Nineveh. But home scandal
is worst.
* * * * *
The Reverend Josiah McWherry and Mrs. Theodosia McWherry had passed
four years on the Mission in China. They had had a stiff and rather a
dull time, as it were sowing tame oats. They had struggled and scraped
and saved to make ends meet, for there had been born to them three
children, and Theodosia was expecting to complete her book by adding
a synoptic fourth to Masters Matthew, Luke and Mark McWherry. Josiah
saved souls and halfpennies with equal avidity. If the extreme opposite
of spendthrift is a theological virtue, it was his. The expenses of
mission life were formidable though a Society in Chicago advanced a
bounty of fifty pounds on every child born in the mission field. So
economical were the evangelising pair that they actually saved a little
on the bounty won for each child. Theodosia understood that they were
putting aside the money needed to revisit Ireland and never grudged
the pinch in dress or food. Besides, she thrived on the rice, and her
skin was still unspoilt by the sun and her hair remained the colour
of pale primrose. Suave Orientals observed her beauty with a polite
wonder. Though they were quite untouched by the Reverend Josiah’s
God, they secretly observed and admired Josiah’s goddess. Josiah
became mechanical, with his mind set and focused on the double task
of saving Chinks in his tin chapel and tin in his chink-box. Chink,
chink! The lot of a missionary is not a particularly happy one. His
fellow whites succeed in living down any notion he may instil into the
East of the moral perfections of home Christendom. He himself ceases
to believe in Europeans, and the Orientals seldom begin to believe in
him. It is the working of the old paradox, that Christianity began
as an Oriental religion, a sublime teaching of the Desert, and, when
brought back to the East in Western trousers and upon elastic-sided
boots, becomes unrecognisable there as religion at all. The puzzled
Orientals observed domesticated missionaries preaching from a pulpit of
middle-class mind and second-class comfort One Who abandoned Mother and
declined wife. The McWherrys were as unsuccessful as might have been
expected in the task of presenting a suburban Calvin to the children
of Confucius, and were intensely relieved by a call to minister to a
semi-European community in Hong-Kong. It sounded pleasantly provincial
after the frontier misery of the Mission, and they accepted the call.
They took the first steamer down the coast out of the little Chinese
port; Matthew, Luke and Mark with them. There was the additional reason
that Hong-Kong was provided with white doctors, and Theodosia stood
in need of one in about two months’ time. They agreed that the call
must be providential. They were two days at sea and never out of sight
of the coast, when Theodosia was prematurely seized with pangs and
premonitions. Her condition grew more serious and it became obvious
that she would arrive at Hong-Kong with an addition to their party, for
whom no ticket had been provided, and, as Josiah calculated with panic,
no bounty could be claimed. For the high seas are extra-diocesan and a
child born at sea cannot be described truthfully or even theologically
as born on the mission field. Theodosia lay calmly in her berth showing
no traces of panic nor pain. But Josiah’s panic was considerable. It
was financial. Though he sat sympathetically holding her hand, he was
harassing his wretched mind with the agonising chances of losing fifty
pounds, if she were quickly and successfully delivered at sea. It was
not only unlucky, he felt, but it was unchristian to let an innocent
family be deprived of their right to so great a sum. It was even
intolerable. But any minute it might be so.
The day grew into night, and a long harassing darkness began for both.
Morning came and nothing serious had happened. Theodosia only thought
of the child. Josiah only thought of the bounty. He looked out upon the
smooth sea and beheld a land which was never quite out of sight. The
ship’s doctor was of opinion that her child would not be born that day
but would certainly appear before they reached the landing stage of
Hong-Kong. It set Josiah thinking and finally he went on the bridge and
suggested to the captain that it would please the powerful Missionary
Societies if he took his ship into the nearest port for the event. Land
doctors had naturally more experience than sea doctors of such cases.
Of course he had heard of such things as “Water Babies” and he laughed
nervously. He was terribly anxious for the sake of his wife. The
captain only remarked that he knew no port within three days’ journey
except Hong-Kong.
At noon Josiah was feeling as desperate as a Minister of Providence
feels it is right to feel, and again he mounted the bridge. This time
he demanded to be put ashore in the long-boat with his wife. He had
consulted her and she had vaguely consented, believing they were not
far from their destination. “My wife is anxious to be put ashore before
her baby is born. I insist on our being placed in the long-boat.” The
captain only remarked that in such circumstances a sea doctor was
better than no doctor at all. It might look very calm, though it did
happen to be the season of the year for typhoons. However, he consented
and ordered the ship’s stoppage. He was aware of the propriety of not
offending the Missionary Societies. They provided a great deal of
traffic on the coast. His action could be interpreted as an attempt to
save human life and he would allow a crew of three to row the lady with
her husband ashore. The three children, Matthew, Mark and Luke, were
left with the stewardess.
Theodosia was carried out of the bowels of the comfortable ship and
lowered down the companion ladder into a bed prepared in the stern of
the long-boat. The shore did not look more than an hour’s row away.
With broad grins the two seamen began rowing toward land, while a third
steered, and Josiah continued his indefatigable attentions in the
stern. As the boat drew away from the ship, the light of the sinking
sun flickered and rested a moment on an untidy tress of primrose hair.
It was the last detail visible to a few curious and pitying passengers
who stood watching from the main deck--a gleam of primrose hair
disappearing rapidly into the Yellow Sea.
* * * * *
As a matter of fact Theodosia suffered less mental agony on this crazy
trip with Josiah than during their elopement to Belfast. Then her mind
had been on the rack. Now it was only her body that suffered as the
slow pain got hold of her and she lay back under an open sky festooned
with the gathering indigo of virulent storm. Shore was considerably
farther than the atmosphere had let them imagine, and, though it
remained clearly visible, they did not seem to have drawn closer during
the first hour. Another hour passed and once or twice a tremor shot
through Theodosia’s body while she uttered not the ghost of a groan.
Each time he felt her quiver, Josiah felt fifty pounds being wrenched
out of his pocket. The very tide under the churning boat seemed to be
drifting away with his well-earned bounty. Her very hair seemed like
a bunch of melting yellow sovereigns to his feverishly anxious sight.
From time to time he urged the rowers with imprecations, mild but loud.
Land drew decidedly nearer and the outlines of the harbour he had
visioned were taking shape in his eyes. Even if the baby were born on
the landing stage, the bounty might yet be won. Josiah unfortunately
had no sporting sense or he might have been as thrilled as the native
seamen by the gamble he was making. It was a woman’s life against fifty
pounds! Theodosia rapidly passed beyond all emotion save pain.
“Ahoy! Boat Ahoy!” descended upon them through a megaphone. They
held their rowing and then their breath. Above them towered a great
liner through the yellow misting, immense, massive and majestic. It
was slowly bearing down upon them. Transfixed with dread, Theodosia
watched with the helpless feeling growing upon her that the mighty
ship would cut the child within her into halves. For herself she had
no thought, and Josiah had no thought for her either as he stood up
and shouted “Ahoy! Ahoy! Ahoy!” The liner deliberately stopped and a
companion ladder was lowered. For the second time that day Theodosia
found her child-bed the cynosure of a sympathetic passengers’ deck. By
this time she was feeling weird as in a dream. Some strange destiny
was approaching her in that mighty ship of the high seas. She found
herself hoisted through the air, taken into a comfortable stateroom
and treated for starvation and shipwreck by three stewardesses. The
rowers and Josiah were similarly treated in the saloon, and discovered
to be thirsty rather than hungry. A real thrill was supplied to the
lazy and luxurious passengers when it was announced at dinner that the
rescued lady had been delivered of a child! As a rule European ladies
do not choose the China seas as the best place for an accouchement or
an open boat in typhoon weather as the most propitious surroundings.
It seemed rather remarkable and caused talk amongst the crew, who were
the first to learn the underlying cause from their rescued mates. The
grim truth began to circulate through the ship, from crew to officers,
from stewardesses to lady passengers, from pursers to gentlemen in the
smoking-room. The indignation was spontaneous and summary. Josiah
received morally freezing shoulder blades wherever he turned.
Meantime Theodosia lay in a comfortable bed, for the first time in
her life. She was placed in one of the state-rooms of the royal
suite, which a Persian Prince courteously placed at her disposal. Her
experiences were widening. She had experienced child-birth before,
but she had never drunk champagne. It had the dizzier effect. Then
they brought her fruit and titbits daily. Ladies in beautiful clothes
came to watch and wash the baby. A purse was subscribed to provide
him with a loving cup. The baby cried and crowed without realising
the fluke that had dropped him into a bed of clover, whereas he might
have easily been tossing like a broken eggshell in the China seas. The
captain of the ship and the Persian Prince applied for the position of
godparent, and were present at the baptism, performed by the ship’s
chaplain with distilled water. The whole ship was interested. The only
person unnoticed on the occasion was Josiah. Theodosia was particularly
pleased that the Prince had accepted the position of godfather. What
would Gortaherrin have thought?
Oddly enough the captain was an atheist and the Prince was no less than
the living head of one of the great Mohammedan sects, who venerated him
as a remote descendant of the Prophet, and believed him incapable of
sin and ready of miracle. His bath-water was collected very carefully
every morning by worshippers and dispatched in sealed cans for the
degustation of the faithful--throughout Pan Islam. Some was sipped in
the Afghan hills and some was swallowed in the Sahara. In India it
was administered as a powerful spiritual tonic at the moment of death.
The lower classes used it to cure diseases. But its main virtue was
internal, and the faithful had acquired almost a taste for the scented
Parisian soaps in which the Prince was pleased to cleanse his body. The
salaciousness of his instinct was perhaps offset by the saponaceousness
of his hide.
He was by chance one of the first to welcome Theodosia when she was
brought on deck. She was stretched under an awning, while ladies took
turn to hold silk parasols between her and the breeze. She lay with
her white skin shining like a river-run salmon, fresh and fruitful,
unflecked and unflushed--while her primrose hair moved delicately in
the warm air. It was a colour that the Prince had never seen before in
his long experience of light-skinned women, European or Eurasian. And
he studied it as he would have studied the water of a diamond or the
wine in a ruby. Theodosia was quite unconscious of his admiration. Two
things stood clear in her soul. Her baby lived, and her love for Josiah
was dead, dead as that money bounty. But the present hour felt like
Paradise.
Unconsciously and then consciously her mind had shed Josiah. She had
overheard the unceasing indignation of the passengers who came to
pet the baby. Women looked at her as though she had suffered some
great martyrdom for her sex or for her religion, or as though she had
been rescued from the arena. Men bowed with tender smiles or stood
eyeing her as though she were some fair form of fish pulled out of
the sea. Josiah used to creep about her with an expression that might
have called for pity, had there been anyone to pity. But of all on
shipboard none pitied and none pardoned. Theodosia only asked him what
there was to pardon. She was perfectly cheerful and politely hoped
Josiah was not as sick as he looked.
There was always some new friend to talk to her and she never felt
ashamed, for her old clothes had been put aside for ever. The first
class passengers collected a trousseau for her. For the first time in
her life she had sampled the soft delight of wearing the finest French
underwear, fringed with gossamer lace and spliced with tyrianthine
ribbons. Her body was massaged every day by rhythmic fingers, and her
legs were encased in silk stockings of so fragile and transparent
a web that the colour of her veins was apparent. She was laid upon
cushions and given winsome wines that made her gay or sleepy and
deliciously aware at intervals of a new world and new impulses. She
knew continual pleasure and happiness for the first time in her life.
She was surprised to find herself flooded by such tender and luxurious
emotions. Life had always been rugged and hard, with a hardness against
which she had never kicked. It was only once in her life that she
had desired with desire, and that desire had been fulfilled. She had
wilfully compelled Josiah to come to her and take her away to Belfast.
She could never desire again as she had desired then. She acquiesced
now in whatever life brought her of weal or woe. She had not shrunk
from pain and death, when it seemed to be her portion. When fate
flowered, she did not decline the lovely pleasure. She had endured the
Chinese mission without a murmur; filth, discomfort, poverty, lonely
childbearing and her queer dread of the Orientals. She always had a
quiet fear they would get her some day. She had read of Boxers. Now her
life had taken a wonderful twist, thanks to Josiah’s idiocy and greed.
She learnt that she would be deposited by the liner in Japan in a few
days.
The Prince was particularly active in his attentions and curious as to
her future. He hung about in a wonderful dressing gown, an heirloom
in his family, contrasting with the London trousers and boots below.
Josiah showed no emotion except anxiety as to who would pay for the
return trip. That was rather unexpectedly settled by the Prince,
who, after some entrancing conversations with Theodosia and a very
heart-to-heart talk with Josiah, proposed to pay Josiah’s journey back
and to give Theodosia a much needed holiday, at his expense also, in
Honolulu and California, whither the ship was bound. Josiah said he was
the only gentleman on board. He was certainly the only one to speak to
Josiah.
Theodosia’s glowing health and acquiescence of mind enabled her to
recover quickly from the creasing of childbirth. She took her children
naturally. They had come as a consequence of her immense and primitive
desire to escape from Caleb McRoarty. China was another consequence and
she had accepted the rough and tumble of her lot. Even when Josiah had
thrown her into an open boat she had not uttered one repining word.
She had not desired comfort or even life. She had always felt she
was paying a penalty. And now it all turned to this, the admiration
and adoration of a whole ship. It was a far cry from Belfast, and
Gortaherrin had shrunk into a point upon the other side of the globe.
Josiah had dwindled into something incredibly small. All feeling
for her father had died in the waiting-room at the railway station
in Belfast, when he cursed her for her harlotry, and now it had died
for Josiah for whom she had given up her father. She felt as much for
Josiah as for the skinned body of one of the kids she used to see
hanging at the Irish crossroads. As for her mother, she was only the
ridiculous rag-accompaniment to her father. Theodosia was primitive
and could grasp only one thing at a time. Once Josiah had been the
one and absolute idea, and now he had shivered to nothingness. He had
come to her on the wings of her great desire, the desire of the bird
to escape from the cage. He had been the wings of her desire and she
did not mind seeing them crumpled now. At least they had carried her
to the empyrean. She watched his ghostlike face hanging round her
cabin. He really looked like a goat’s ghost if there were such things,
ridiculous, inane and unwanted.
A new idea had come into her life. She was enjoying it! The great
physical wrench she had endured combined with the beautiful clothes,
in which she was dressed, to give her the glorious emotion of the
chrysalis when it has been bred to butterfly. She was lying on the
deck at delicious ease. Her feet were encased in white, gold-brocaded
shoes, and her body lapped in a rose dress faintly frothed, as it were,
by a shawl of lighter pink falling from her shoulders. Flesh-coloured
were her silk stockings and like a web of rosy silk was her flesh. The
two plaits of her primrose hair attracted so much attention that she
left them hanging. They were rather like the pollened antennæ of some
florivorous insect; their soft sheen like the pellucid cinnamon of
the rain-washed sunset of spring. She had rather despised her natural
coloured hair compared to the bright hennas and auburns and chalybeates
of the ladies aboard. It never occurred to her that hers was the only
undyed foliage and her face the only unrouged petal in the first-class
dining saloon. But it had been obvious to every man with taste on the
ship, and the Prince was a man of exquisite taste as well as of highly
religious sensibilities.
One day he approached her not for the first time truly, but for the
first time they discussed religion. The idea of accompanying him on a
holiday had charmed and absorbed the innocence of her mind. She had
felt no remorse in sending Josiah back from Nagasaki, nor had Josiah
felt any qualm when the Prince, with the generosity that a great
Christian nobleman might not have shown, had paid him the forfeited
bounty out of his own pocket in consideration of the plucky attempt
Theodosia had made to save it. Fifty pounds was nothing to him. He
had given eight thousand the previous month for a French race-horse.
The only prick of conscience she felt was her desertion of the
new mission-post even for a month. The children could remain with
Josiah, except the baby, and His Serene Highness played with Baby too
charmingly. How surprised she was to learn that he was the head of a
great religion. She found herself growing sad at the thought of his
perdition. But it was satisfactory and a little wonderful to be arguing
with the head of a real Mohammedan sect. It would be a good chance
to find out how Moslems really felt towards Presbyterian principles.
Perhaps?--and her heart leaped--she might be able to convert this
prepossessing Prince. How wonderful! He was a sort of Senior Moderator
in his own community, and must have untold influence.
* * * * *
They were together. “If you are a Mohammedan,” she asked him, “are you
not a teetotaller?” “No, I always drink wine.” “But the example must
be wrong for your followers?” she queried. “They never drink wine, but
they do not mind me doing so. They believe that by saying a few words
I can always change wine into water betwixt the cup and the lip. They
are very faithful.” Theodosia shivered. She felt like having tea with
Antichrist. But he was so sweet playing with Baby. She dared ask him if
he had many wives. No white man had ever dared ask him such a question,
much less a white woman; and he had known a gamut of one and a gallery
of the other. He trembled with rage, and then with amusement. He had
never met a white woman like this before, and a missionary’s wife as
well. He had always shared the official contempt for missionaries
and the official indifference to their wives. He had the Oriental’s
disgust for the wives of professed holy men. In fact, a Maharajah’s
hundredth concubine seemed less displeasing to him and to God than the
missionary’s lady with her black jet brooch, and Jumble Bazaar written
all over her clothes. “Yes,” he told Theodosia, “I have many wives at
home, and they are all good friends.” Theodosia looked at this heathen
with great pity. “Would you never give up the poor dear ladies and
let them become Christian?” “I do want to give them up and to marry
one nice Christian instead,” the Prince stated with a delicious
smile. Theodosia woke to possibilities. “They need a Queen among them
to instruct and help them,” he added, “a white golden-haired Queen.”
He was watching how she would take it. She clapped her hands. “How
splendid! They could all become Christian. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if
you married a white lady. How I should like to be her!”
The Prince hardly knew whether he was talking to a schoolgirl full
of the “Arabian Nights,” or to a very mysterious and self-concealed
courtesan. But he knew that he was fascinated and not merely drawn
fleshward. It was moonlight, and the Pacific Ocean was full of
filtering sounds and suppressed purples. From time to time a great
phosphorescent sheet shot across the ship’s track like the sea’s
luminary echo or defiance of the moon. Butterfly by day and moth by
night, Theodosia felt freed of her shell, and the name of her shell was
Josiah.
The Prince was beginning to see his way. At Honolulu he suggested that
Theodosia should return with him to Persia instead of continuing to
California. Theodosia was quite willing and began to visualise a new
future. Though the Prince had hinted that she might become the white
Queen he had alluded to, it was clearly impossible as she herself was
married, and then he was possibly married in some queer way to all
those dark ladies. An extra one might not make a difference for him,
but it would puzzle the Belfast Presbytery. In the end he proposed,
with his unfailing tact, that she should enter his harem as English
governess to his wives. She could share their limited life and, if
she liked, she could consecrate herself to their conversion. All
Theodosia’s scruples were overcome at a puff, and she began to feel
as radiant in conscience as in body and mind. She no longer felt she
was acting treacherously to Christ and Kirk. Under her conscience,
however, a subconscience warned her and a subconsciousness tempted her
to unknown delight, and, when she succumbed again and again, the very
warning became an overwhelming delight or expectation of delight. All
this occurred in the undebating and unchallenged recesses of her soul,
where modern ideals and primitive instincts keep company.
As long as she talked a little religion every day with the Prince,
Theodosia felt that all was justified. Josiah only made two converts
a year in China. She might really devote six months to a convert so
important as the Prince. It was true that he would only talk religion
when she refused to hear him on any other subject. He preferred to tell
her of Parisian theatres, and his race-horses and the splendours of
his royal palace. He found himself unaccountably checked every time he
tried to touch sex, though she allowed his ebony hands to move on her
canary-coloured hair. Though she was deeply versed in her Scriptures
and had an eye for his soul, he had a number of arrows in his Moslem
quiver which surprised her. And this it was that surprised him most.
The only thing she ever asked him for was his soul. White women with
whom he went even as short a trip as London to Paris generally asked
for pearls. But to go to Honolulu and back and be asked to become a
Presbyterian was a rich experience. And he desired her exceedingly.
With hushed desire he desired.
Woman though she was, she mistook his desire for her body for
nervousness on behalf of his own soul. Religion often confuses a woman
with her own halo. She asked him delightfully what could hold him back
from Christianity, or why she might not smooth away any particular
difficulty. He smiled his catlike smile and asked: “You say that Allah
childed by Miriam the Virgin?” Theodosia nodded. “And the Child was
God?” Another nod. “Then the Only God became many Gods?” “Only two!”
she threw in a little hastily, for he sharply rapped: “And the Holy
Ghost, of whom you were speaking yesterday?” “Yes, the Holy Ghost also
is God,” she admitted, “but no others.” “Allah is become three Gods
then,” he said, and spoke no more. Sometimes she would have persuaded
him that the Son also was God and the Holy Ghost, God, but he stroked
her and soothed her enthusiasm with Oriental calm. “I would find it far
easier to believe that Miriam the Virgin is God,” he said one evening.
“Gracious!” quoth the daughter of the Manse, “do not become a Roman
Catholic, whatever you do.” He laughed. “You have so many different
Churches among the Christians, and so many Gods, that I cannot discern
which is right.” Yet he always seemed to be laying his difficulties
at her feet, when he lowered his head on her shoulder. She showed no
repulsion, which was to him astonishing. Never had he met white woman
the like. “Women are to me religion,” he continued. “The great prophets
have made it a choice between women and religion. I have found that
they are the same.” She did not quite understand his meaning, but she
quickly composed the only meaning attachable to his words in their
circumstances. He must be fond of her and, because he was fond of her,
he must want to become a Christian, she assumed. She looked round into
the high-bred dusky face on her shoulder and without moving her lips
touched his with her mouth. She intended it as a friendly little act of
gratitude, as though she were stroking the nice old tame tiger behind
bars in the Dublin Zoo. At most he might have purred. The effect on
the Prince was, however, different. He tossed his lighted cigar into
the sea like a tiny redheaded rocket. Then he caught her mouth between
his lips and drew it slowly into his, while his arms crept round her
body, and his ring-jewelled claws spread themselves on her chest like
a panther holding its surprised prey. She saw his face slowly rise
from hers, and in the dark his feline teeth flashed with tiny but
exquisitely set diamonds. She kept quite cool, though dimly realising
how romantic a Governess she would be expected to be.
* * * * *
In Persia Theodosia came into her fairy own. Geographically she knew
not where she was, within hundreds of miles. She had been brought
inland by native bearers, had been carried in litters, with her
baby, and finally thrown amongst the ladies of the harem. There
she had been clothed in Eastern dress and looked to herself like a
perpetual Christmas card. She was strangely remote from any idea of a
Presbyterian missionary. Her feet, cased in rich-smelling morocco, were
no longer the elastic-sided feet of those who bring good tidings upon
the mountain-tops. The dusty, rusty dresses of the Jumble Sale were
no more. The thread-worn skirts were replaced with something more in
accordance with the surrounding Jungle. Her mother’s black jet brooch
had been destroyed or lost by the Prince, who gave her pearls instead.
She wore them for his pleasure, half stripping herself at night in
order to keep cool--pearls in long strings, falling festoons, white
waves of pearls. He liked to watch her concealing her modesty behind
their dangling sheen, and she would lie back like a flower which has
weathered long vernal frosts and is bursting bud more brightly for the
delay. In that tropical Asian summer she bloomed like a flower of the
Irish spring. And her hair was in perpetual flower, summer or winter,
with its strange and indescribable coloration, milk of dandelion,
cream of marigold or quintessence of honey. It gave the Prince a queer
religious exaltation.
Theodosia did not fail to fall in love with her lover. It had all come
with such a rush. Not until she was ensconced in his harem did she
realise that he intended her to occupy the position of a favourite
wife, and that even among the dark ladies she was favourite, and that
his holy favour was upon her. In the Palace and the Palace gardens she
was accounted something divine. Servants fell prostrate before her.
Days of wonderful ease and luxury followed. Weird sights and colours
came to her through slitted shutters. Theodosia was clothed in Oriental
dress by silent slaves every morning, though when she dined with her
Prince a vitiation of taste insisted on Parisian gowns. He was really
a dazzling creature, not handsome but forceful and intoxicating in his
converse and behaviour. Gorgeous was his dress, taken clean out of
the “Arabian Nights,” though at moments he wore beautifully tailored
London suits, which Theodosia used to mistake for the first signs of
Christian disposition. She had given up the attempt to convert him.
He always listened with agreeable politeness and then countered with
something too unexpected or upsetting for words. Indulgently he would
hear what were to him the utterly preposterous doctrines of Irish
Presbyterianism, and then quietly inquire how any Prophet, however
well spoken of in Belfast, could be the bodily son of Allah. Or he
would quote cleverly from the Scriptures and the Koran until she was so
muddled that she knew not which he was drawing argument from. And when
challenged on a doctrine she would coyly refer to John Knox or John
Calvin, and once she referred to her father’s great hero, Dr. Hanna of
Belfast, and the Prince asked if Hanna was a lady preacher, and laughed
her to scorn.
When she had had her little say, he would read her ecstatic words from
the Song of Solomon and give her coffee filled with a sharp-sweet
little flavouring, and then she would forget everything except his
marvellous love-making. To the subtleties and ecstasies of love she had
always remained a stranger. She had known nothing more intoxicating
than her own desire, and that she had achieved. Josiah had always
treated her with Presbyterian primness, wooing her with perfectly
wooden propriety. Her ecstasy of Josiah’s embrace lay in release from
home. When home dwindled into hemi-spheral distances, the ecstasy of
Josiah ceased. He was a dull lover, in other words a perfect husband,
and he retained a certain prosaic modesty of courtship by his total
absence of any poetry of motive or motion. On occasions of connubial
felicity he never did more than read her a chapter from the Epistles of
St. Paul. The difference between St. Paul and Solomon was considerable.
The Prince remembered the word of the Prophet, whose blood ran in his
tropical veins, and how Mohammed had said to every faithful, “Woman is
thy field, plough her after thy will.” And he made love to Theodosia,
to all her emotion and to all her soul, and with his body did worship
and with his soul did adore her until she would swoon in his arms, and
only awake from swoon to become sufficiently and sweetly conscious
that she was swooning again. Often an Asiatic moon looked through the
forests and gardens and lighted on her beautiful primrose hair as it
lay in wet wythes across the hot mouth of His High Serenity and Holy
Highness, who was graciously pleased for the moment to forget his
race-horses in France and his chorus girls in England, and even the
Exalted Star of India, which he had received during his last visit to
Calcutta. For her part, Theodosia awoke to all that he roused in her.
Whithersoever he called, she followed him even in a dream. Surely he
had never known white woman like her, for she was the first to respond
to his love and not to his pearls. And she satisfied his soul as well
as his body. He found something strange and almost uncanny in her
hidden beauty and unconscious charm. She came to exercise a magical
effect on him, and when he remembered how she had come to him out
of the seas, like Aphrodite through the foam, she became poetry and
passion, a veritable goddess in his eye. Her sway and power became
tantamount in the seraglio and, had she cared, supreme through the
Palace and through the dominions of the Prince.
It was so strange, in his eyes, that she never asked him a favour
and even gave him back the jewels with which he delighted to heap her
sinuous body. Through unguents and the fingers of her attendants she
had acquired a grace and dexterity for which her health and simplicity
of life had prepared the way. When she lay sleeping she lay like a
white snake that had just sloughed its scales, firm and warm and
rippling. The Prince was appreciative of the gifts of Allah and felt
frequently grateful that he was of the kindred of the Prophet.
It was true that he was often criticised in the Orient for his
excessive love of things European, of English clothes, white women
and French luxuries, but it was never dreamed or hinted that he could
betray the faith of Islam. Astuteness as well as piety combined to keep
him steady on that point. With the European Governments he was on the
best of terms. His subtle religious influence was always thrown on the
side of the English Raj, and a letter from his pen was always accorded
special attention whenever he deigned to point out some unnoticed
excellence of English rule or to convey some sentiment of the East to
her understanding rulers. Though excluded from certain clubs, he stood
socially very high in Europe.
Nevertheless there were movements abroad in Asia, and the ways of the
Prince were not well seen by the Nationalists and devotees of Asiatic
Bolshevism, and he was freely criticised and even cursed among many who
should have been his followers. He had the misfortune to be equally
distasteful to students with European culture, who applied a knowledge
of the Higher Mathematics and chemistry to bomb manufacture in the
East, and to the fanatics, who hated him for the horrible rumour that
he had introduced a white missionary woman into his household.
But no rumour reached Theodosia, who was lulled to ease and at moments
lifted to ecstasy, until she forgot her father and her father’s Kirk.
The strictness that had been bred into her with a ramrod lapsed. She
gave herself up to her lover until she could hardly bear to pass a day
or a night without him. The sound of revolution and uprising never
reached her. She never read apprehension on his strained features or
realised that he loved her every hour as though it might be their
last. She loved him each time as though it were the first. It was her
perennial spirit. They were great and wonderful lovers, that was all.
* * * * *
The end was bound to come and it came. A day broke with ominous quiet
over the Palace. The Prince had departed that morning on business
of state for many days. He was travelling on his way to India. His
secretary had just telegraphed the number of guns that the station
master and the British Government were expected to provide, also
the height and trappings necessary for the elephants privileged to
carry his baggage and the holy bath water.... An hour or two passed
of perfect calm.... Then a low wail arose outside the Palace and a
frightened woman crept into the women’s quarters, spreading word that
the holy one, the beloved of the Prophet, had been assassinated at the
railway station. A moan swept through the harem like a subconscious sob
of Suttee, as though every woman that had ever lain in his arms was
turning her face to the wall to die. Slaves threw themselves on the
ground and tore out their hair, mourning their dead lord with pitiful
and heart-lacerating sounds. From outside the Palace rolled the rumble
of confusion and disaster. Cries and occasional shots pierced the still
of the afternoon air.
Theodosia, much astonied, felt neither grief nor fear. She had loved
him as she could never love a husband or one of her own race. He was a
vivid unreality, a weird monster, who came to her in dream, half Cupid
and half Caliban, but he had appealed to the fairy part of her nature,
and he had raped her soul till she felt there was none left. Therefore
she sat without regrets and without remorse carelessly waiting what
might come. As the shouts outside grew fiercer, women were thrown into
hysterics of fear and grief.
Nobody knew now what might come. Theodosia was the only one who might
have been expected to feel some tremor, to show some fear, for within
her moved the child of the Prince. She kept her mind unstricken within
herself that the child might not be frightened in the womb or released
before the hour. Something stronger than herself upheld her. An
immortal mood lifted her above the accidents of Oriental revolution.
She was not overmatched by circumstances nor overthrown by approaching
fate. She did not trouble to imagine the future in which she lived or
died. She sat there vacant-minded with full body and high heart in that
Palace of mourning and terrified despair. More than ever before in her
life she knew that she was not of those around her. The mysterious
sense of power and isolation drew her apart, which had once drawn her
apart from her family in Ireland. During another hour fell expectancy
hung over all. At last came knocks, cries and repeated inquiry. The
guards had left their post so that the fanatics were able to enter
without a word. The revolutionary students had settled the fate of the
Prince at the railway station. It remained for the strict reactionaries
to carry out a visitation of the harem.
The infidel wife of the favoured child of the Prophet had long been a
ribald rumour upon the lips of their enemies. They had smarted too long
under the taunts of other Moslem sects. Armed men, reeking with dust
and fury, intruded. The harem was laid desecrate. The women crouched
upon the floor of the inner chamber awaiting the sword. Theodosia
retired to the room which privilege had accorded her and sat bolt
upright. It had struck her that they would not dare to kill her while
she carried child, the sacred child of the head of their own religion.
But was it likely that they could know of her condition? She was only
thinking how to save her child. Fate seemed always condemning her to
child-bearing in perilous places. She stripped her pregnant body and
threw over herself the beautiful opera cloak that her lover had given
her. Then she waited. She could hear the harem being interrogated and
repeating the formulas of Antichrist: “There is one God and Mohammed
is his Prophet!” Each woman repeated the words with abject and craven
eagerness. Theodosia was listening and wondering whether their
repetition on her own lips would save her child or not. A certain pride
sat in the place of her soul.
The search for the infidel woman followed. The inner apartments were
ravaged, but the fanatics were surprised to see a white woman advancing
coolly towards them, clad in a dark electric blue and green cloak
fringed with ostrich fluff round her neck. There was a wild cry:
“There is one God and Mohammed is his Prophet!” She stood smilingly
shaking her head. Her nonchalance roused their fury and a man advanced
threateningly. She saw the glint of steel in his hand and her feet
froze to the marble steps. She was surrounded by assassins on every
side, and she was not unaware of the danger. She opened her cloak and
lifting it upon both arms, said simply, “Respect the child of the
highly favoured son of the Prophet.” They drew back, crying, “It is
true! She bears the child of the Prophet. Let her acknowledge Islam
and live!” She stood there watching them idly and carelessly as in a
dream. “Acknowledge there is one God and Mohammed is his Prophet!” they
screamed, with swords and daggers lifted within striking distances.
“There is one God,” she replied, and a silence as of death weighed
upon the Palace and upon her words. “The Father is God, and the Son is
God, and the Holy Ghost is God!” A groan passed through the fanatics
on hearing this Christian blasphemy within the very dwelling of the
head of their faith. Was it possible that this white infidel had been
tolerated within, as rumour said, in order to corrupt the Moslem wives
of the holy one and to defile the very hearth of their religion with
Christianity? Now they knew the worst. They threw themselves upon her,
and holding her wrists and ankles, carried her within and out of sight
of the other women.... There was a pause and no sound was heard in
that Palace until the cry of a newly-delivered child. A crowd of men
and women had gathered outside. To them was shortly carried a dusky
new-born boy. All knelt in adoration, for it was a Prince of the blood
and kindred of the Prophet, and the hereditary head of the faith.
Perfect and unscratched and unbruised was the child, as always are
children born Cæsareanwise.
But even in that last hour of agony Theodosia found joy to look upon
the child that was born into the world, before it was taken away from
her for ever, and strength to cry aloud to her torturers, “The Father
is God and the Son is God!” She could say no further, for a strong
hand took her throat and she felt a ropelike strangulation shorten
and finally quench her consciousness. Fiercely the blood seethed in
her temples and the breath battered the tissue of her lungs. Swiftly,
swiftly the fairy blood danced out of her heart and poured in torrents
upon the floor. Slowly, slowly she died, not unworthily of a daughter
of John Calvin, and was at eternal rest.
In the days of the Roman persecutions she would have not failed to
become a spouse of Christ. She could have stood in the arena as calmly
as she stood in the seraglio, and let her body be meshed by the net of
the _retiarius_ as smilingly as she had lifted the folds of her opera
cloak. When the women crept back frightened in the morning they found
her body where her slayers had left it. Round her twisted neck was
tightly tied a long plait of her primrose-coloured hair. It lay like
a spilth of wild honey upon a broken bough of a white ash-tree in the
first break of dawn, after a stormy night in some far away country of
the West.
MIDIR AND ETAIN
Once upon a time the Kingdom of Meath was as rocky and stone-bound as
the fields of Connaught to-day. Etain the girl fairy lived with Midir
the King of the Elf-mounds of Ireland. She was the most beautiful of
her kind, for the folk of Ireland judged beauty ever afterward by Etain
the beautiful, but she was unstable and fitful. She had a mind and a
half-memory, as well as a full memory. It was out of her half-memory
that Midir heard her speak in her sleep of other lovers beside himself.
With brooding on her strangeness he became a stranger to her in his own
mind. With that he left her and went riding upon his coal-black horse.
A snow-white hound ran for shadow by its side, for no fairy horse can
throw a shape upon the ground.
It was a second wife he brought home. She was also of the fey, and her
jealousy was more terrible than the jealousy of women born. She dealt
secretly with her Druids to ply Etain with spells. They made Etain as
a butterfly that eateth flowers. Etain fluttered vainly into Midir’s
sight, but his eyes were cast elsewhere and the Druids’ wind blew Etain
like a silken leaf across moor. Seven years she was carried hither and
thither by the king-winds of Ireland until she lighted in the palace of
Midir’s dear foster-son by the Boyne water. He knew her for woman under
fey and built her a little house with windows instead of doors, and
fed her with bog myrtle and rowanberries. At evening she would assume
her ancient beauty. For the Druid spell was by the Sun and by the
Moon and lost power in the twilight, which is neither of sunshine nor
moonlight. Midir’s Druids knew she was come by Boyne water and hastened
till they found her bower hanging like a swallow’s room to the palace
walls. Etain was drying her wings in the light. With a magic blast they
tossed her again upon the elements, and for seven years she floated
like a little satin cloud hither and thither.
A lesser wind dropped her into the court where the people of Ulster
sucked sweet hydromel from methers. Etain fell into the cup beside the
King’s wife. It was a woman’s cup and white with milk, so that she
swallowed Etain for a white curd. In earthly shape was Etain reborn and
then was she called Etain, for her fairy name was not revealed then or
thereafter by dream or Druid. With Ulster’s princely daughters she was
reared till the noon of maidenhead. One day they bathed together in the
blue speckled sea. A strange horseman rode by upon a coal-black horse,
and a seagull sailed for silvery shadow under its hoofs. All but Etain
slipped into the waves, but she stood, caught in her half-mind. The
stranger said, so that she heard:
“She was so delicate that a Queen quaffed her unwitting. Her place is
not with earth children. For her sake Meath shall be smoother than sea
and the Elf-mounds of Ireland laid in ruin. The men of Ireland shall
measure beauty by her name for ever.”
He said, and slipped behind air and was unseen. Hither and thither the
princely maidens of Ulster waded for wonder and for fear of his words.
But Etain stood trembling like a winged thing in a draught of fire.
Eochy was King of Ireland and lived in the demesne of Meath. For the
man of Meath is the ruler of the men of Ireland. But the rocks of Meath
gave no place to his horses, and the rushes no milk to his cows. He
was wont to ride round Ireland visiting every King and Kingling of his
allegiance. His loneliness for one was not healed by the company of the
many. He stayed unwedded, not finding mate among the royal women of
Ireland. Harpers he had sent upon horses and wizards upon air to find
one willing and worthy to queen Ireland. Lastly he rode out with only
a favourite harper alone with him. Toward evening they found Etain. A
purple mantle stitched with silver hung across her shoulder. With a
silver comb she drew her hair into plaits. Her cheeks were red as the
sun upon the West, and her arms were whiter than the snow falling at
dawn. Her teeth were pearls dashed in the foam of the sea. Her eyebrows
were darker than the wing of the bright beetle.
The King asked her name. “I am Etain of the Elf-mounds,” she said; for
by dreaming she had happed upon the place she came from. He asked if
she were betrothed, and she told him that the Kings and noblemen of the
Faery came wooing her by all the wells and waterways of Ireland. To
forsake all the women of the world the King promised, if she would but
come with him to Meath. But for love of the World-under-wave she would
not queen Ireland.
Eochy returned to his home. By day he lay him down, and by night he
rode and swam. Love of Etain let him not enjoy the life and valour of
the world. Druid and harper could not quell the pangs of his pain nor
the sorrow of his sickness. A leech came, who could tell the disease in
the house from the smoke curling on the roof-top. “No need to lament,”
quoth he, approaching the palace, “this man is undone by one of the two
peerless plagues which afflict the men of Ireland. It is envy or it
is love.” He saw the King and said: “It is not envy. It is beyond the
dream of Druid and the healing of harpers. The herb of the physician
cannot attain thereto.” The King rose and said: “My disease hath run
deeper than my covering of skin. My love is a kingdom of strength and I
am held therein. I am wrestling with a spectre. I am tossed to Heaven
and I am thrown into the sea. I am enamoured of an echo.”
“Better seek the rock that gave you the echo,” said the leech, and
the King set riding again with his harper. When they approached the
dwelling of Etain, the King sent his harper to play in her hearing
while he waited the distance of the sound away. Etain saw the King
passing and took no notice, for she saw the darkness of his horse’s
shadow upon the rocks. But of his sweetest the royal harper harped.
When he played of the wonders and wooings of Meath, Etain listened
and the Boyne river passed from her memory, and the Kingdom of the
Elf-mounds from her half-memory. She rose to reward the harper. Nothing
would he take but to tell her his story. He told her of Eochy, High
King of Ireland, wasting away for her sake, until she took pity and
told him to send the King to tryst at dawn that he might live and not
die of her.
At dawn of dawn one drew near to her, and courted her with tales of
the beauty and bravery of Meath. She soothed his love and went her way
in the twilight. In the true dawn came the King, and when he found
her gone he wished to lie down and die. His harper found Etain and
persuaded her to tryst with the King at the dawn of the morrow. Once
again it was the wraith that came to Etain in the twilight of dawn,
but with the likeness and the voice of Eochy. The wraith told her that
the women of Meath had lost all beauty in the night. Etain said: “It
is with Eochy and not with you that I trysted at dawn lest he should
come to his death.” The wraith replied: “It were better that you should
court me than the sick King, for I was your lover in the aforetime.”
Ever was Etain remembering, and the wraith spoke to her by the fairy
name that lay in her half-memory, and said: “I am Midir and by the
sorcery of Druids we were driven apart. Again have I found thee as
ever of enduring beauty and faithless mind. When I prattled to thee of
the Methians thou thoughtest I was their King. King am I only of those
who pass under wave and beyond world.” Then was Etain divided between
her love for Faery and her anger at the trick which Midir had played
against her, and she made pretence that she would marry the man who
had Meath for his own. Answered Midir: “Can I not give thee all the
may-meadows and well-waters of Ireland for bride gift?” Answered Etain:
“Even so would I not exchange the Methian royalty for thy lineage,
which is none that men know.” “True said,” replied Midir, “for there is
no lineage where there is neither birth nor death.” Fiercely he pressed
her to return with him to the Elf-mounds, saying: “Thou shalt live for
ever with the primrose-haired. Thou shalt be Queen of the tribes who
pass all-seeing and unseen through the hills of Ireland. Pleasant are
the plains of Ireland, but there is a Plain which is beyond pleasure.
Delicious to the minds of men is the sweet hydromel that the women
of Ireland brew in vats, but the drink of my country enchanteth every
sense together.”
Etain would have laid away her pretence then and gone with Midir, but
Eochy drew near with his harper, and the earthly harper drowned the
dream of Faery. For a year and a moon and a night Etain lived with
Eochy in the Kingdom of Meath, and theirs were all the boundaries of
all Ireland. Whoever is Lord of Meath kingeth every bound of Ireland.
“The Setting is with the Jewel,” as the Brehons have said. Their
allotted time passed and they chanced to sit in the hall of banquet.
The inner gates were closed. The armed men were withdrawn from the
ramparts, for it was against the chivalry of Ireland to make attack
after nightfall. The porter stood alone in the court. A warrior was
seen passing within the gates. The porter knew not his face nor his
accoutrements and still-stood with fright. His knees kissed and his
heels fled from each other. Eochy heard the clinking of his knees and
cried aloud to the porter: “Who knocks?”
“Midir of the Elf-mounds,” was the reply, “and I am come to play
against the royal harpers for a fee.”
The King of Ireland consented, both for his love of harmony and for
his love of the hazard. Now the best harpers in Ireland are they who
have learnt their tunes from the herdsmen who listen at the holes of
the Elf-mounds, and Midir made sure that no harper of Eochy would
play other than echoes of his own music. Very cunningly he played the
music of challenge, and sang of the youth and beauty of the world that
is ever young, until the old wine in the casks stored under the roof
became fresh wine of the grape and poured down the walls. When he had
finished, the very warriors and poets of Eochy cried: “Victory indeed!”
Then the King called his favourite harper, who had been stolen out of
his cradle by a water-wench, and had heard better music under wave than
ever upon earth. Long he played and all listened, Midir most of all. It
was no music of Elf-land or echo of the elfin tune, but the music of
the cities which have been drowned in the Western sea. The night winds
carried the music into the trees outside the royal rath of the King
and, though it was winter, they burst into bloom. When he had ended,
all present cried: “Victory over victory!” Midir asked the fee he
should pay to the royal harper of Ireland. “Clear the plains of Meath
smooth of stone!” said the harper, who knew whence Midir came. Midir
went as he came.
At dawn the royal steward went out and found the fields as smooth as
the face of the clouds, and a great host with fairy oxen carrying away
every stone except the magic stones of the Druids, and sinking them
into the bogs and waterholes of Ireland.
But Midir was unsatisfied and came to the King the next night, passing
porter and portals into the room of banquet. The King asked his need,
and he said: “A game of royal chess.” The board was set of gold and
silver squares, and the King slew half of Midir’s chessmen. Midir
pretended anger, and bade the King choose whatever stake he would.
“Rid the fields of Meath of every rush,” said the King. At dawn the
royal steward went out and reported that a multitude of small folk were
hewing down the last rushes as men destroy a forest.
The next night Eochy came again and asked another game. The King gladly
consented to show his skill. Midir played with the wisdom of his own
people, and he left no piece but his own standing upon the board, and
the King’s kingpiece. The King inquired his stake. “To hold Etain the
beautiful in my arms for a moment of time,” said Midir. The King was
troubled and bade him return after the month.
At the end of the month Eochy filled his halls with chosen warriors and
trim swordsmen, and sent men riding to and fro upon the ramparts. Midir
passed through them all. “A debt is due to me,” he said. “I have not
considered yet,” said the King. “Etain the beautiful thou hast promised
me.” “But only for a moment of time,” said Eochy. Fear came upon Etain,
for the year of her forgetfulness was passing from her. To the King
she clung, saying: “Until thou resign me I will not go from thee.” “I
will not resign thee,” said Eochy, “but he may take thee in his arms
for a moment of time as thou art, and in the midst of my warriors, and
while my horsemen gallop the battlements.” “Well said,” quoth Midir,
“for a moment of love time is longer than all time.” To Etain then he
whispered her fairy name.
She withdrew not from his arms, but passed away with him as she had
come, through the lattice of the roof. Eochy the King rose and cried
aloud as a sheep shouteth to an eagle bearing away her lamb. When the
warriors in the court heard the cry of the King, they leaped against
each other with their swords in their hands and shame in their eyes.
And the riding men spurred to and fro upon the ramparts. Yet no one was
seen to pass, and though the King of Ireland rode into the night with
his harper and his Druid he never came by Etain the beautiful. But the
fields of Royal Meath to this day are smooth of stone and rid of rush.
KATHLEEN
I cannot prove that animals have souls, but I would go so far as to say
that the apparatus of a soul is there. Instinct is obviously not soul,
and, moreover, is based on hereditary earth-fears and earth desires.
With death, instinct dies like any other quality--like the power of
smell or the colour of the fur. Reasons given to prove that animals
have no souls are that they cannot laugh or they cannot pray, or they
do not leave behind those wisps or waifs of floating personality which
we call ghosts. Only beings with souls to lose or save have the faculty
of impregnating place and time with those unsolved emanations, which we
attribute to some great emotional violence or grief or crime, when we
say that such and such a house is haunted. But then, if the material of
a house can be haunted--that is, possessed by spirits, good or evil,
of the past--why should it not be possible for an animal to become
possessed and, being sentient and animate, to reproduce such effects as
that same spirit would have on a human body?
But of themselves animals have no souls. Otherwise, one might sadly
imagine what a multitude of ghosts would haunt the human race. Would
not the old coach roads be infested with phantom horses once worn
slowly to death in order to keep the system of mails and stages, before
the era of railways, up to time? Would not numberless donkeys haunt the
sea sands? And all the cats and dogs left to starve in deserted houses
should provide the spectral shapes of their anguish and despair, all
manner of feline phantoms and canine come-backs. But, however inhumanly
an animal dies, it is just because it is not human that it leaves no
avenging or haunting emanation on time’s spectroscope.
But an animal is susceptible of lodging a soul or spirit escaped from
some other source. Holy Writ and Mediæval Sorcery combine to reassure
us on that point. The driving of the evil spirits out of their human
host into the Gadarene swine was the greatest experiment in Psychical
Research since the seance of Endor, when the witch raised Samuel from
the dead with the deliberate dare-devilry of a Kensington Pythoness.
The Gadarene swine showed that the bodies of animals could be properly
possessed by spirits, and of course the necromantic Middle Ages
broidered every single Gospel fact to the full, and recorded every kind
of fantastic variant such as familiar spirits occupying owls and men’s
souls entering into wolves; all the horrible legend of lycanthropy, to
give it its right name. The accepted fact that spirits could so easily
make themselves at home in an animal’s body led the theologians to
the theological deduction that an animal could not possibly have had
a soul. It was empty, in fact. A human body, of course, is not easily
occupied by spirits unless the person has been foolish enough to get
out of his body and lose the way back. However, that is another story.
To return to Psychical Research and the animal world, nothing is
better attested than the perception of the unseen to which the
primitive instinct of a dog is liable. Our eyes are often too scaled
or civilised to see what is happening in our own drawing-rooms. Dogs
sometimes follow with their eyes some passing apparition which is held
from their owner’s sight. And they rise and shiver in that numbing
ice-breath, which is so common a concomitant of that which comes from
the unseen. I have known of caged birds dying, well, it was said of a
cold draught, but really of sheer terror....
Of leaving ghosts themselves animals have no specific record though
they frequently figure in ghost stories. But the survivals and
superannuations of human personality do return under animal form.
There was the case of a Scotch recluse, who had a morbid little way
about him, and was always upsetting his prosaic family by threatening
to return to them in the body of one of his many pet sporting dogs.
He was so insistent on this subject that the moment he died his
family had all his dogs destroyed, but he came back all the same and
rather unpleasantly, for visitors used to complain of the whining
and scratching of a dog at their door during the night. Horses have
certainly been known to make their distress known to their owners by
telepathic means, whether they have thrown a foal untimely or stumbled
into wire in the dark.
An old school friend of mine, Edward (and the family name I leave out)
was convinced that a woman’s spirit dwelt in his favourite mare, but
the circumstances he would never allow to be studied scientifically
or published in any way. As he has long left the country, and as I
think that I alone saw the story from start to finish (and can now
evolve some theory) I will tell it as well as I can, always making the
reservation that it is an unpleasant story in the extreme. However,
with the necessary changes in names and places it can do no harm to
present it to the morbid.
We were all at school together, Edward, Lord Petersfield (that was
not his name) and myself, and Eton will make a very good disguise for
the name of the Public School. Edward and Petersfield were prominent
in athletics from the first, though Petersfield was always ahead. He
was a bullnecked fellow with a face and nose of the type the Americans
feelingly describe as “plug-ugly.” He had no brain, and being a peer’s
son would never have been expected to use it if he had one, but he had
tremendous grit and determination to collect all that he wanted in the
shape of silver cups and coloured caps--in glorification of his bodily
prowess. On the whole they prove delusive trophies to English youth,
choking off higher ambitions and satisfying young men with a physical
fitness which cannot last. Petersfield was really supreme of this type,
brave, unscrupulous, thick-skinned and self-centred. He was the finest
kick at football in the school or any school. I can still see the ball
darting more than bouncing from his toe like a billiard ball from the
cue, or describing long parabolas across the playing field like one
of those drawings which illustrate the curve and velocity of cannon
balls. And his pride and self-conceit! Well, it was our fault, for we
worshipped as much as we disliked him. I think we feared him as well.
He had such a relentless way of hurling others out of his path. He
insisted on being first choice always. He had to be captain. He had to
be winner. He had to be the record maker. Being second was poisonous to
him. He could not stand being honourably beaten. He was a fine winner
but a bad loser.
It was the same in later life. He was a fine billiard player, but,
being once defeated in a passing game at the club, he put down his
cue and never played again. Defeat, however honourable, was the only
thing that appeared to hurt him. To the racket and bruises of an
athletic career he was impervious. Besides, he gave as good as he
took. His curiously ugly face was attributed to a streak of foreign
blood. Certainly he had a full-blooded Oriental grandmother. Boys of
foreign descent more often showed a taste at school for pretty clothes
and expensive sweets. It was odd in those days to see one, captain of
an English school Eleven charging and barging, and swearing like any
muscular Christian. Of course there was plenty of English blood on his
father’s side, and it was only while he was a small youth that he was
chaffed about the colour of his Asiatic relations with that considerate
tact which the English schoolboy has made his own. He soon could look
after himself, and played cricket as well as football for the school.
The mixture of blood made him strong as a mongrel and his endless
conceit made him courageous. He was steeled, not unnerved, by the
presence of a large crowd, and could be depended upon to make runs on a
bad pitch. But he was always disliked.
Between Petersfield and Edward there had been a feud as fags when they
first came to school, and it had always rankled. As soon as Petersfield
found his level he had tried to bully Edward, and I remember the day
when Edward decided to stand him no longer. He found himself cornered
in another boy’s room, and seeing Petersfield descending upon him he
snatched a knife from the table, and thrust it with a boy’s frenzy
into his enemy. There was a lot of blood and a serious row. Luckily
Petersfield was tough and no artery was severed. The parents of both
boys were summoned by the Headmaster, and it was wisely decided to
hush everything up. For the rest of their school life they were often
athletic rivals, but they managed to keep out of each other’s way.
They both reached the Eleven eventually, and whatever ill-humour
remained was discharged on the football field. Petersfield left all his
contemporaries behind, and was regarded as the best kick the school had
ever produced, which set his selfishness and self-conceit running into
a settled mould.
The privileges and good things of the English aristocratic life were
abundantly his. The combination of wealth from abroad, title from home,
and athletic prowess at school opened every club and country house to
Petersfield. He went wherever he wished, and nine mothers out of ten
encouraged their daughters to follow and flatter him without thinking
whether he was likely to make an ideal husband, or perhaps because
English mothers seem to believe that the ideal husband is the third
stage of the idolised schoolboy who has become an idle bachelor.
Petersfield and Edward used to meet again in after life during the
hunting season. In face of the solemn realities connected with the
pursuit of foxes they could well afford to forget their disagreements
at school. Edward used to hunt regularly, for in those days hunting was
not out of the reach and pocket of those English country families for
whom the sport had been divinely designed. The time had not yet come
for the sport to become the monied luxury of townsmen rather than the
occupation of squires, when men of wealth would command the hunts their
fortunes supported, and when their lack of horsemanship and speed in
the field would be met by a supply of well-aniseeded foxes and even
three-padded Reynards, amputated for the benefit of sporting stalwarts
who had paid to be in at the death. The King of Sports would have to
be brought within range of the Kings of Commerce and Stock-broking. In
the greater days of fox-hunting, Petersfield and Edward both rode in
the first flight. Hunting was a serious matter in Leicestershire then,
and it was a joy to behold how the hard-riding squires and gentlemen
jockeys kept the after-Christmas crowd at a polite distance by forcing
a tempestuous pace over the oxers and leaving the colliding Cockneys
to drift into the distance. On such occasions there arose a closer
understanding between Edward and Petersfield. They were both well
mounted, and had no quarrel in the open. Indeed, by this time they must
have forgotten the old rivalry at school. But it had left an impression
on my mind, and, remembering how Petersfield had been able to snatch
prize after prize in front of Edward’s nose, I would have been well
satisfied to see him forfeit one of the more substantial gains in life
to my friend.
There came a splendid season with record runs interspersed through the
finest of hunting weather. The Leicestershire colonies settled down to
their Elysian fields with no cloud on the horizon except the prospect
of having to find a new Master for one of the best-known packs.
Fortunately neither Petersfield nor Edward had any ambition that way,
otherwise I would have been really grieved had Petersfield snatched
the Mastership to himself. For any such public and honourable post I
considered that Edward had far higher qualifications. His temper was
more even, and he often thought of others besides himself.
When the time came for the renewal of their rivalry I noticed with
interest and relief that it was over a woman that they were stirred,
first vaguely and hesitatingly, and at last very relentlessly.
Nevertheless the fair sex lead to far less unpleasantness in England
than what are called sporting disputes. An Englishman who is kept out
of some great sporting position or done out of his place in a team of
eleven will harbour vendetta all his life. But for a jilting fiancée or
a forsaking wife he will find a kind of bored consolation elsewhere.
The arrows of love are fortunately blunted by the northern climate.
England is a man’s country not a woman’s. Affairs of honour, if they
arise, rise in the realm of sport, not of gallantry. Cheating at cards,
accusations of foul play, even labelling a man a dangerous shot, will
set men fiercely apart, and will blind accuser and accused to the
consequences. But as a rule men do not fight duels over women or lose
their heads merely because they have lost their hearts. There are
always as many mermaids in the sea as ever emerged from its waves. It
was unfortunate and unnecessary, therefore, that Petersfield and Edward
should have discovered that the one and only girl for them resided in
the same person. Trouble stared them in the face the moment Kathleen
FitzClare arrived to stay at the same hunting lodge where they were
guests. But her charms are no part of my story or at least any detailed
description of them. Their effect certainly is. They seemed to affect
Petersfield and Edward both with the same deadly fascination, for
they both began to court her in the intervals of pursuing the fox.
I was thrown constantly with all three, and found myself something
of a neutral pacemaker for Edward, with an inclination to ride off
Petersfield if I could. But the game was so obviously one where the
third man cannot interfere. The contest was as keen as could be
expected among men whose first thoughts lay with hunting all the time.
The game went to Petersfield.
Though I think on a desert island or on a social level Kathleen would
have chosen Edward for the amiabilities which the other never had,
Petersfield could urge a number of qualities in his cause, which
counted high in the England of those days. A prospective Peerage still
argued nobility and probably gentle blood. His wealth was based on land
reinforced by a fortune abroad. He was unpopular, but his position was
strong, and he could stroll into Parliament or a first-rate club, or
most country houses, with very little preliminaries.
He was still pushing for prizes and generally picking them up whether
he had to make an exertion or not. Perhaps he won them too easily, for
he never had to give that concentration of purpose and pain by which
alone the greatest trophies are won. He had distanced us all at school
without taking the trouble to train himself, and in later life it was
the same. Of him it was said that he could have played cricket for
England and won the Grand National. He had the calibre for both but not
the self-denial. He took his sport for his personal pride and pleasure
and not for its own reward. It was his pleasure to keep his strong body
magnificently fit, but he had no use for asceticism or reducing his
weight or the toils of first class cricket and steeplechasing. And his
pride was sufficiently served by the ease with which he could hold his
own among the amateurs of his time. Nor was he the sort to love a woman
with the bloodless devotion of a Harry Esmond. When he saw an easy
and pleasurable chance to make love he took it. Edward became deeply
in love with Kathleen, but Petersfield forced the pace and in the end
he took her away. The day came when Edward realised that it was all
up. We were coming up the stairs when we caught sight of Petersfield
and Kathleen on the higher landing together. He was leaning backward
and she seemed almost to be dragged forward by the eddy of his lips.
I swore softly, but Edward turned a little pale and said nothing.
Petersfield looked rather like one of those Satyrs that are so often
depicted on classical altars. Well it made me hot and Edward cold, poor
fellow! I do not suppose Petersfield was ever particularly passionate,
but as she turned round I could see the glint of his teeth as he drew
his mouth across her shoulders.... Their engagement was announced soon
after.... At the wedding a curious incident happened. Edward crept into
the church at the last moment, and, as luck would have it, ran into
the bride. Without a word but with a face like marble she broke her
wedding bouquet and handed one half to Edward. Nobody but myself saw
the incident.
Edward seemed quite crushed for a long time after she married
Petersfield, but his early training had prepared him for being
knocked out from the same quarter. He never mentioned it to me then
or afterwards. As for Kathleen--for all that the world knew, it was
a happy marriage. Her relatives were wildly pleased and marriages
are made to please relatives. She kept her end up and always showed
herself well groomed and proud when she appeared in public, and perky
and pleasant in the private houses she visited. Her behaviour showed
the normal attitude with which women equally conceal the most fantastic
tragedies or some secret happiness. You never can know by their conduct
whether women have cancer or a lover. The same intangible veil conceals
the most terrible secrets within. A man will make a hullabulloo over
either, and tell all his friends in the Club sooner or later. Men are
fools. Women will talk about everything that concerns the secrets of
others, but their own they keep more often than people know. Kathleen
kept hers and no one was a penny the wiser. But the marriage did not
last. Neither women nor horses ever lasted Petersfield long. He was
always passing restlessly on his way to try another. But there was no
scandal or divorce in Kathleen’s case. In fact nobody thought anything
was amiss until she was found dead one morning, and the Coroner stated
at somewhat embarrassing length his reasons for supposing that she had
taken an overdose of sleeping draught accidentally!
She had been out hunting the day before, and Edward told me that he had
had a long talk with her. They had always remained close friends and
met more and more gladly. This occasion had been Edward’s last memory
of her, and they had met at the covertside and ridden into a corner
field together. She had talked to Edward with more than her usual gay
manner, with a real tenderness in fact, as though she were going for
a far journey and they were not likely to meet again that season and
for longer. She had shewn herself more interested in Edward than in
the hounds, and had insisted on his wheeling his horse round and round
behind the covert. He could not remember that she had told him anything
important, certainly nothing to illuminate the dark tragedy of the
morning after, but her manner had impressed him deeply. She seemed to
be prescient of a coming disaster and unwilling for him to leave her
side. She had kept him there, he could not tell whether it was ten
minutes or an hour, but the hunt had meantime disappeared. Then with a
handshake and allowing him to kiss her hand she had ridden home leaving
him an imperishable souvenir. Of course he never saw her again, but,
what was so curious, he could not recall a word that she had said.
He was fortunately able to keep the incident from the Coroner whose
interpretation would almost certainly have been wrong.
Edward felt her death terribly and took a good deal of the widower’s
pose and portion upon himself. Petersfield continued hunting that
season as though nothing had happened, but Edward grew moody and
disappeared. He was always imaginative, and imaginative people, instead
of being bored, brood and brood, and so a year passed. Petersfield
married again without much ado, but Edward did not think it was any
slight to Kathleen’s memory. Rather he came to think that, now her
husband had remarried, she was more than ever his own, and the feud
between the two men collapsed into its own ashes.
* * * * *
After a break of two seasons Edward was hunting again. Petersfield
was now Master of the pack, but nothing could ever induce the least
collision between the two. Edward’s ambitions and desires had been
steadily blunted through life. He had taken an honourable second so
often. There seemed nothing left for him but to enjoy good health and
a place in the ranks of sport. When they met in the field, he and
Petersfield exchanged cheery greeting. It was a good season and they
had plenty of hunting matters to discuss. They were having rattling
runs and the Hunt made lively reading in the rather monotonous
chronicle of foxhunting which spoils a daily column of _The Times_ for
the ordinary reader. Edward distinguished himself riding a young mare
which his father had bred, a nice black satin-coated creature that made
up for her slender shoulders by the cat-like cleverness with which she
took double fences and complicated obstacles. She became a familiar
beauty spot in the Hunt, and more than one generous offer was made
for her, but Edward enjoyed her mixture of cunning and staying power
which generally brought him to the front and sometimes gave him a hard
run to himself and the huntsmen. With all that money could buy him in
horseflesh, Petersfield could never appear on a mount like Edward’s.
One day, returning from the day’s sport, Edward told me with a quiet
bitterness that the bad blood was beginning to mount once again between
himself and Petersfield. I asked what in Heaven’s name it could be for?
“Over the mare of course. Petersfield cannot bear being passed when the
pace really begins to tell and I pass him every time. He has offered me
a record price for her.”
“You refused him, I hope,” I said. “I don’t see why he should have
everything in life.”
Edward nodded in a queer sort of way as though it was no good. I was
with him the next day when Petersfield swaggered up and congratulated
Edward on his riding during the week. “You won’t let me double my offer
of yesterday?” he laughed. Edward sat still. Petersfield continued:
“You know. What’s the name of the mare that you ride?” Edward looked
him fair in the face and said “Kathleen!”
It was the first and only time I saw Petersfield taken aback. He rode
back to his hounds without saying another word. Then Edward told me why
he had called her by the name of the dead woman he had loved. It was
only a whim brought on by an accident.
“The first time I rode her to hounds,” he began, “she stopped dead in
the corner of a field and would not move away. She whinnied and pawed
the ground not out of fear but as though to attract my attention. It
was no use trying to push, much less to punish such a willing goer,
so I dismounted and tried to find out what was worrying her. I got
off and looked round. Then I recognised the spot. It was the corner
where I had said good-bye to Kathleen three years previously. It all
came back to me then, and most curiously I immediately remembered for
the first time what Kathleen had been speaking to me on that strange
and ever-regretted afternoon. It was about old friends being best and
how pleasant it was to come back to them in after years, and would I
always allow her to feel like that toward me. That was about all. And
the scene dug up the old impressions in my memory so fresh that I lay
my head across the mare and fairly shook with grief. I thought she
understood almost, and when I mounted her again she trotted off and we
joined the hunt. She galloped like mad and I forgot her shying in the
first field after the exhilaration of that run. She just showed her
heels to the whole field. Though we often passed that field again, she
never stopped or repeated her action. But what had happened linked her
up in my mind with Kathleen and that is why I called her by the same
name.” So said Edward.
I saw a good deal of him that season and admired the perfect
partnership established between him and his mare. It was more like
telepathy than horsemanship. He told me that the mare could read his
thoughts before he passed them to her mouth or to his heels. She never
tired in the field and he was only afraid she would some day strain
herself. He had entered into the relations that an Arab bears to his
horse. They became inseparable companions. Not only in the field, but
in the stable; and out of the hunting season, Edward made the mare
the pet of his life. She moved, galloped and jumped under him with
something of the spirit-like obedience that a medium gives to a strong
control. I don’t think it was out of simple sentiment or in mockery of
the might-have-been that he called her Kathleen. I had to realise that
he really believed that Kathleen, the dead Kathleen, had found a way of
coming back to him out of the next world. I thought he might have saved
himself his emotions when he uttered her name in reply to Petersfield,
who, unless he was more thick-skinned than we thought, must have seen
how deep the old sorrow lay. Anyhow, Edward had taken the idea into his
cranium and as it gave him great consolation it must be regarded as a
good idea. It seemed fantastic enough that Kathleen, having presumably
regretted her marriage in the next world as well as in this, should
have found this rather round-about way of redeeming her frustrated love
for poor Edward. He, just like a man, was convinced that she had loved
him even when she chose the other man. He was convinced that he had not
lost her after all and suffered none of that imaginative agony in which
lovers think of the dear unattainable dead as annihilated in space or
crying a ghostly grief in the icy void. Edward was spared all that, and
a good gallop on the mare ridded him of loneliness and depression of
any kind. In the end he would never let anyone but himself ride her,
and after every ride he rubbed her down, and fed and watered her. She
appreciated his care and carried him and kept him in the first flight
all the season. They were a real ornament to the Hunt.
The bad times came to the old gentry and the squires. New taxes
and old mortgages hit them harder and harder and numbers fell out
of the County ranks, selling their Halls and Manors to financial
looters and legalised plunderers. The character of hunting began to
alter. Extraordinary people came a-hunting, packs changed hands and
the money-interest could always be felt, even in the necessity that
arose for artificially slowing the speed of the foxes. Huntsmen were
required to show kills rather than sport. The bad times hit Edward’s
father rather heavily and he had been unlucky in trying to recoup his
lost income in the Argentine. The family in consequence suffered not
merely decay but swift and total disaster. Unsuspected debts rose to
the surface and everything saleable had to be sold. Books followed
furniture, and finally went the horses. Edward’s father had a certain
call on the mare he had reared, and Kathleen had to be sold with the
rest. If it had not been for his father’s distress, I think Edward
would have preferred to shoot her there and then. But there was no way
of getting her out of the storm that was engulfing the fortunes of
the house, and she was expected to make the sale a success. She would
attract buyers who might likely buy the other horses.
Edward avoided Tattersalls the day of the sale. I went to watch the
bidding. The mare was well known in the world of horse-buyers and there
was a keen tussle between different hunts to purchase her. A dealer
bought her for four hundred guineas, a very fine price. Edward went
abroad after the sale to live in the Colonies, where bankrupt men may
live free and ride a horse. I saw him no more.
I spent that winter hunting, varied with excursions to races,
steeplechasing for choice. Amateur riding is always more amusing if not
such an exact science as professional work. Towards spring I attended
some point to point racing in the Midlands. There was a small crowd
at either end, and I took up a position in the middle of the course
beside the most formidable fence. Several of my friends were riding and
Petersfield was a strong favourite. Petersfield had never chequered
my life, but I confess I would rather have seen him second than have
won a good sum on his win. With my glasses I recognised him at the
start. I watched the starter and the anxious drop of his flag and the
solid burst of horses and riders opening like a fan and thinning out
as each obstacle brought one of them down. The race became a string
with Petersfield leading. He was riding beautifully and his mount was
tossing away the sods like a runaway ploughing machine. They splashed
through a water obstacle. The race seemed to me Petersfield’s, as I
watched him shoot past and over the fence at which I was standing. He
threw his mount like a cricket ball at the next fence, when suddenly
the horse doubled itself up and stopped dead. Petersfield slipped over
its head, landed on his feet and made a desperate effort to remount.
The horse’s front legs danced in the air. Petersfield jerked down the
sinewy snakehead and bundling the reins into his hand was scrambling
back into the saddle. He had lost the lead but it was exciting to see
if he could still win. There was a chance. No, there wasn’t! He was
ready again, but the survivors were two fences away. Not till then did
he seat himself squarely and face the jump, but not a step would his
horse take. So far from pricking his mount to the frenzy of the wind,
his spurs seemed only to transfix it to stone. The race was being won
at the other end. It was won! And Petersfield threw himself angrily out
of the saddle. It must have been maddening to him.
He seemed rather puzzled by what had happened. He walked round to the
horse’s head with an ugly look. If he wanted to punish the animal he
had the brute to himself for they were half hidden behind the fence....
I turned towards the finish and had started walking away when I heard
a quick, half-human squeal. I turned round again and realised to my
horror that it was not the horse but Petersfield who was squealing and
for an obvious reason. The animal had its mouth more than full with
Petersfield’s bull neck. He was down on the grass and she was holding
him there. I ran as hard as I could, hurling my stick at the horse’s
sides. But I could not dislodge the animal until I had snatched and
dragged the reins. With a sickening thrill I saw the heavy mouth move
across his neck and the big row of foaming teeth.... Good Heavens! He
had been shaken like a rat before I had rescued him. Not till then did
I recognise Edward’s famous mare. Her eyes were red-hot, and her ears
were laid back like a hare’s crouching in her form. It was the mare
called Kathleen all right!
I never let Edward know and indeed I never met him again. Why should
I? Men return from the undiscovered ends of the world and from foreign
countries but not from the Colonies. The Colonies are the Empire’s
blotting paper. They absorb all the superfluous ink and the mistakes
and the blots. Financial undoing is the most considerable of social
mistakes, and Edward was glad to be absorbed by the dreary dazzle of
Australia. I never saw him again. Whether the news of Petersfield’s
death ever reached him I do not know. I have no doubt he would have
laid a different interpretation to the scene at the fence than I did,
had he seen or known. I managed to account for it to my own mind. I
don’t think anything so absurd as that Kathleen, the dead woman, came
back to avenge an unlucky marriage, or to be near to Edward.... It
was all a matter of the power of thought. Thought when harnessed to
emotion is a soluble output which can penetrate and influence material
or living bodies, not necessarily human. In concentrated form the
emanations of the past often strike us as ghosts and we generally
feel them more often than we see them. If such an emanation hits a
receiving or containing agent, there is no limit to the tricks it can
play, duping the brain, catching the eye, even causing audibility.
In this case I think Kathleen had decided to kill herself, and all
her personality went out to Edward the day before, when she made
that queer and lingering farewell. Edward did not catch the tragedy
or meaning of it, but the emotion intended for him had saturated the
spot I believe. He was more receptive a year later when he came riding
to the same place, but even so the fierce thought and unconscious
exhalation of Kathleen’s dead agony pervading that corner of earth
where they had parted found its receiver in the sensitive mare he was
riding. Something of her no doubt survived bodily annihilation, and
that shred of unliving, earth-bound personality as it were impregnated
the primitive instinct of the mare, so that she came to answer Edward’s
craving for Kathleen’s return to him in any guise or in any shape. The
negative and positive poles were established between man and mare and
no wonder he felt the horrible material reaction of having to sell
her.... But I don’t for a moment think it was Kathleen. I only suppose
that the mare somehow became mixed up with Edward’s own feelings and
sensation, which would account for the unpleasantness of that scene
that I witnessed by the fence.... It was really only the memory of
those teeth that gave me such a queer turn.
JOHN SALTUS
I remember meeting John Saltus for the first time as vividly as any
coloured patch in my life. It was in the middle of Clubland and a day
that I was feeling unusually sore after being blackballed for the
Bachelors’. I was vaguely trying to decide whether to join the Y.M.C.A.
or to chance the ballot of the Athenæum under a _nom de plume_. For I
had to have some place in London in which to lunch. My real name I had
disgraced irretrievably, unintentionally enough, but foolishly beyond
belief. I need not recall that celebrated baccarat case in which I had
been mixed. It was quite enough to keep me out of any London Club. I
had been a fool, and folly, alas, does not connote innocence.
It simply made me a pariah in Mayfair. I had played at a table where
a Duchess with thirty thousand a year had been very rightly fleeced.
I enjoyed watching her being cheated by my best friend. There was a
sudden scene and I was held as an accomplice. Nothing could be proved,
but nothing was ever disproved. I went sniffing about Belgravia like an
hyena with his teeth drawn. In the suburbs of course I became rather
a lion, and tradesmen’s wives, and even my own wife’s tradesmen,
welcomed me to their Sunday socials. The hand that was believed to
have cheated at the tables of the great was greeted with considerable
sympathy by the great provision dealers, who, I may say, by less
dramatic methods extract even larger sums from the same tables. But
every class admires some vice from which it is circumstantially free.
Possessors of great wealth secretly admire burglars--an admiration
which sometimes breaks out in mild kleptomania. Atheists cause a secret
fascination to the wives of clergy. Sinners bow to the innocent. The
innocent kneel to sinners. It is based on the love of opposites. Many a
perfect draughtsman has cherished the ambition to write one drivelling
lyric. Browning said he liked “to know the butcher paints,” which the
Exhibition at the Royal Academy shows is often the case. Anyhow, as one
who had once cheated by accident at cards, I became the object of much
vicious veneration in Golders Green.
In Mayfair I was used to being cut as often as a pack of cards. Tom
Smithson was the only friend who stuck to me and showed his belief in
me by proposing me every year for the Bachelors’. And this, I remember
so well, was my fourth blackballing and here was Smithson coming down
St. James’s Street accompanied by a man to me unknown. Smithson was
the queerest fellow. He always claimed to be the rightful Duke of
Northumberland. He said the Percies had chivied him out.
Smithson turned sheepish the moment he caught sight of me, a natural
consequence, I supposed, of the social denigration I had received under
his auspices that morning. I only felt that he owed me the necessary
lunch to cover his humiliation and mine. It was the least he could
do. But after making an obvious effort to disembarrass himself of his
companion he showed signs of wishing to avoid me. I could not believe
I was such a pariah that he would not even introduce a friend. I felt
stirred to force an introduction for myself, and the casual crowd
assisted the manœuvre, for we were thrown into touch by an eddy of
passers. Even so, he chose to forget our names! He only placed a hand
on each of our shoulders and murmured: “I am going to leave you two
excellent fellows together without telling you who you are. You are
both well known in your way and you should have rather an amusing lunch
trying to find out who the other is. I have an engagement myself. I am
so sorry.” And he slipped into White’s with the nervous superiority of
an archangel leaving two imperfect beings outside the Paradisal fence.
I was left alone with the stranger.
“Lunch is a good idea, as ideas go,” I ventured to say, “but unluckily
I have no Club as yet.” A tinge of disappointment crossed his iron-grey
face as he echoed, “Nor have I!” I felt frank and did not mind telling
a stranger, who did not even know my name, that I had been badly
blackballed at the Bachelors’ that morning. At the word blackball he
turned livid white.
“I have never been blackballed, I suppose because nobody has ever
dared to propose me for a London Club,” he stated with a mechanical
smile. I then perceived the good looks under the sullen pitch of his
countenance. I proposed that we should evacuate the blind rut into
which Smithson had thrown us by quickly disclosing our names and
lunching in the first restaurant. I revealed my humble autonym, for
which he feigned immediate recognition, and, while I was wondering
which of the minors or minims his might represent in English art or
letters, he bespake his nomenclature: “I am John Saltus; you know
Saltus?”
Hope of lunch compelled me to utter some such pretended surprise as:
“Oh, Saltus? Not John Saltus? Why, of course. I am so glad to meet
you. So curious, isn’t it, after all these years?” But my over-ready
recognition seemed to pain rather than please. I had been as polite as
I could be under extempore circumstances, and yet he seemed annoyed.
Did he also prefer to keep his name under a bushel? Surely he couldn’t
be a pariah as well as myself? “I should like to have honoured myself
by giving you lunch at the Athenæum,” I said, trying to be more than
courteous.
“At the home of literary discoveries and lost wits?” he murmured with a
ghastly smile. I felt quite annoyed, for the Athenæum was to me one of
the fixed points in the English world, like _Punch_ or Lord’s Cricket
Ground or our sanitary system, and I could not brook the scornful.
“In that case will you partake with me at my favourite Aerated Bread
Shop?” I continued to say. He bowed, and we walked towards the City.
My favourite shop was empty, except for a mother giving her schoolboy
sons a farewell holiday meal. The quick lunchers and cheap eaters had
gone. It was late in the afternoon. I was lunching with a cynic, a not
unpleasing form of appetiser.
With his bitter sauce he irrigated the homely pudding of life until I
half enjoyed his quaint misanthropy. It was so unusual in an Aerated
Bread Shop. The lady at the next table seemed equally interested and
strained her ears to overhear what he had to say. The schoolboys gulped
as though about to be left stranded on some cakeless shore or some
iceless Sahara. They were in the middle of a second strawberry ice when
their mother caught the eye of John Saltus. There was a flash of real
recognition, and I watched her rise to her feet, flint-faced, and order
the boys to follow her out of the shop. In vain they protested, with
streaming lips. “Your father would not like you to eat here; no, not
for a moment,” and with her eyes, half afraid and half horrified, fixed
on Saltus she withdrew her brood. They left their ice unfinished. She
made one jerk with her parasol, as though she had just found a decayed
rat in the soup, and was gone.
I am neither curious nor critical. The past cannot interest me and the
future, being only the unborn past, is even dull to me. As for the
present, the evil of the day is sufficient to the day. Confidences
bore me and I never encourage _le récit d’une vie_. But this time I
felt that a little explanation was in season. I was used to being
blackballed at the clubs, but, when it comes to women stamping out of
Aerated Bread Shops rather than allow their children to eat in the same
room, I confess I felt a little annoyed.
I was wondering which of the seven unforgivable sins against Society
Saltus could have committed. Had he sinned like me basely at baccarat?
Or had he forged a Lord Chamberlain’s ticket to the Royal Enclosure
at Ascot or gone uninvited to the Gillies’ Ball at Balmoral? Had the
police arrested him embracing his wife with over fervour amid the
moonlit shadows of Hyde Park? Or, even more iniquitous, had he affixed
the pennant of the Royal Yacht Squadron to a houseboat on the Upper
Thames? I could not imagine.
Well, I never asked, and we walked together that afternoon as though
some subtle bond lay between us. We were fellow-pariahs and clung to
each other. There are some to whom the joys of ostracism make their
appeal and who even enjoy being seen with the notorious. But it was a
kind of self-protection that held us together.... That winter I often
lunched with Saltus and enjoyed his company. I came to appreciate
the fine-grained cynicism of his talk, and I guessed that he liked
me because I was neither curious nor critical. Such friendships can
last. All the same, I could not help observing that his notoriety was
greater than mine, for I often saw men turn aside from us, or at least
Saltus imagined they did, and his brow puckered like a frill and his
long shapely hand tightened upon mine. It was not one of the radiant or
rhapsodical friendships of my life, but I felt spellbound at times and
all the more attracted to his company. I felt I knew him well enough
to propose a jaunt in Paris. I knew he went abroad for his summers,
instead of pursuing those very uninteresting fauna at home, the deer,
salmon and grouse. I felt that Paris was a safe proposal, the great
caravanserai of the uninvited and unwanted and unmentionable of all
nations. To my surprise he bit his lip and said: “Paris? Not Paris. I
can never return there.” With an apologetical farewell he left me the
next moment.
Next day I received an invitation to follow him to his chalet in
Switzerland. I never knew he had one, but the address conveyed
meaning to the railway agent, and a week later I had taken my ticket.
Switzerland seemed an odd place for an Englishman seeking social
concealment. However, I am not curious and my mind was occupied by the
decision I had to make between the firms of Cook or Lunn. Lunn seemed
localised in Switzerland and the name bespoke avalanches of London
Alpinists, but Cook was a world-fact, one of the Catholicities from
which there is no escape. I was in suspense between Cook the Guelf and
Lunn the Ghibelline, between Capulet Cook and Montagu Lunn. It was
about as considerable a decision as my mind can attain to.
Eventually I purchased a ticket at Cook’s and drifted into a herded
party labelled Lunn, at whose expense I obtained a free transit between
two Paris stations. Saltus had written to me previously from Germany.
I wondered whether he minded my coming by Paris.... At any rate, the
next day I looked out of the carriage and took my first glimpse of the
Alps. I found them magnificently disappointing. However, I had not been
curious to see them, so I had no right to be critical.
The Alps at last, bleak and cloudless. I could but feebly compare them
in my mind to God’s family pewter and silver stacked in useless and
aggravated confusion along the horizon. Brightly polished and metallic
they glistened in the sun, silver-plated with the crystallised snow and
hall-marked with ancient volcanic scars. I felt no doubt as to their
Maker. But my mood led me to view them relatively and from distances in
which they grew smaller. My imagination resolved them to the contours
of the Mountains in the Moon, which hung aloft that night like a steel
mirror parodying the Alps of earth. In that cosmic illumination which
we call moonlight I imagined the Alps as seen from Saturn or from the
sun, reducing them to mental and relative dust. What interested me
most, watching those mountains, was their human associations and the
dim thought that in crevasses hidden throughout those heights as remote
from man’s eye as the sepulchre of Moses lay the frost-eaten skeletons
of dead mountaineers, all the lonely legion who had gone up on the
hills and never returned. The great peaks seemed memorable, glamorous
and tragic. Without history until men travelled and travailed on them,
without dramatic power till men perished in their fastnesses and
fissures, dumb and inane the great hills encumbered the earth.
Switzerland is Switzerland, and three things in Switzerland do not
stop. Firstly, the wonderfully made clocks; secondly, the ever-tinkling
cattle bells, and, thirdly, the Tourists, who at certain and fortunate
periods take flight. I arrived in the lull between summer-climbing
and winter-sports while the voice of the tourist was low in the land.
Saltus met me at the station in the valley and conducted me to the
funicular railway leading to his chalet. We began to move slowly up the
heights. It was like tobogganing uphill in a kind of collapsed tramcar.
We passed through a mist of bell-music. Upon the cattle of a hundred
hills the little bells jangled and tinkled. If the bells were intended
to trace a lost cow I should imagine the expedient to be as practical
as tying a blue ribbon round every sheep on the English Downs. But I
dwell on a particular sound which, for me, is always associated with
Saltus.
At the top of the funicular we dismounted and began walking through
a forest of fir trees, which lost all charm for me when I read a
notice to say that it was reserved for hotel visitors! and in the
wild thickets Saltus pointed out one of those melancholy timberbuilt
depots for consumptives. Farther we met a fellow-countryman, who
turned and, looking at Saltus with staring hectic eyes, seemed to
fly horrorstruck, as far as I could judge. We were now passing on
footpaths through the forest proper, and in half an hour we reached
his chalet. It was a dark and dismal den though furnished with modern
comforts. A heavy overhanging drip-board shaded the dark-stained timber
stories from sun or snow. Piles of books filled the low-ceilinged room
amid much mountaineering gear and instruments that I connected with
astrology--star charts and astrolabes, crystal balls and the like.
This was a new side to Saltus’s character, and I decided that it
accounted for the dread which his neighbour had shown when we passed
in the forest, as well as for the awed demeanour of the two Swiss
servants, who worked in the chalet by day and withdrew to some Alpine
kraal by night. I found a clue to Saltus, at least to the extent of his
misanthropy. His chalet held no Visitors’ Book, and there appeared to
be no visitor’s room.
I presumed I was the first visitor to reach his abode, for a camp
bed and blankets were pitched for me in a corner of the dining-room.
I stayed a month with him without making any attempt to lift the
personal mystery. I discovered that he was wealthy, and a rich man
without friends is a curious phenomenon. He was also an epicure, for
the food and cooking were excellent. But there was no variety. Certain
vegetables and meats appeared but others never appeared in the round.
Yet Saltus surveyed the menu book every morning with an eagle eye.
However, I settled down to this solitary form of companionship. Lunn
had forgotten me and to Cook I must have been as one that had gone
down into the pit, though never had I dwelt at a higher elevation in my
life. Of his necromancy Saltus was very open and showed me many things
in old books, but I came to regard it as a hobby rather than a practice
on his part. I could not feel that his clever cynical mind would waste
or loose itself entirely on such barren investigations. His servants
thought he had attained some proficiency in the darker arts, for I
noticed that whenever he entered the room they crossed their thumbs in
his direction. I knew what this meant. They feared him for the evil
eye. Did the lady in the Aerated Bread Shop also fear the evil eye? I
wondered to myself. It was no business of mine whether the ban upon him
was social or supernatural. I would not ask and I could not blame. He
could make me his revelation when he wished.
But it was a slight surprise to find that this velvet-dressed lounger
and affecter of the occult was a first-class mountaineer. I learnt
by observation that he was so keen that he never lost a chance to
go out on a search party. There were plenty of accidents in his
locality. In face of the chalet rose the colossal cloudpick known as
the Spindelhorn, and the ranges of the Schwindelhorn stretched at our
back. More than once I saw him go out at a night call with the guides
when some party had been reported lost. He seemed to have a passion
for danger and not for fame. Unrecorded were these heroic climbs,
except what he cared to tell me after he had rested. He told me one
day with visual effect how he had been forced to make a glissade down
a splitting snow-field. For a moment he had been suspended by the rope
over a crevasse, but he laughed as though life held far more terrible
situations. It was a ridiculising yet a haunted laugh. But it was a new
rôle for this misanthrope to adopt, that of a human St. Bernard, for he
never took out his gear except to find the lost. I never knew what to
make of it. His expeditions on the hills always left him in a strangely
exalted condition, and for a day the cynicism would fall from his real
nature like a bright barren husk. I even imagined him sentimental
within. The snows and storms of the Alps had no terrors for him; if
anything they were a refreshment to his silent, sullen soul.
He never left the chalet except to walk in the woods, and always
avoided seeing anybody except myself and the servants. Yet he had no
appearance of having shrunk into himself or of collapsing into ignoble
obscurity. He kept himself in the most magnificent strength and fettle,
and his agility in drawing himself over the rocks on the very mild
climbs we took together was little less than caprine. And all the while
his mystery seemed farther away than ever from solution. This was no
broken man, whose co-operation on a jaunt was half the battle. Why
did he behave as though his presence polluted the very whiteness of
Switzerland? Yet he used to stand for hours watching the Spindelhorn
as though he were sifting the snows in his inmost soul. I looked
carelessly into his eyes sometimes. They were the cold green colour
of the glaciers. They made me shiver and desire to ask questions less
than ever. They reminded me of the eyes of a man who had died long ago.
The chalet was comfortable enough to a bachelor, but it suffered from
what I can only describe as a great spiritual emptiness. Neither good
nor evil spirits could find lodging there. It was a sort of vacuum.
When I saw all his necromantic gear, I had a feeling that, as he had
found himself cut by the living, it was only natural that he should
wish to scrape up acquaintance with the dead. One day he told me that
he had never imagined once in his life that any survival of the human
personality was possible. I supposed his secret was that, though
endowed with fine faculties, mental and bodily, he had somehow become
dispossessed of his soul, if ever he had one! I felt as though I was
really the only human person walking about in that house. His body and
his mind were unconnected by the third quantity of soul, which makes a
person. He was a unique figure, a striking character in his way, almost
a personage; but he was not a real person. He was only a psychical
mannequin, after all! However, I was comfortable and I lived on with my
automaton friend as with a muscular phantom. I was fond of coining such
phrases, but none of them exactly caught John Saltus.
I felt that my patronising pity was inadequate to the power that
lay behind his detachment of purpose and life. He was something
more than an Alpine Diogenes in his tub. He had something of the
martyrised nobility of Prometheus chained to the rocks. But why
he lived on those heights, so lonely and so unsatisfied, a woman
visitor would have gone mad in a week trying to find out. He was not
consumptive. His mountaineering was occasional. His tastes lay with
civilisation, and eventually I realised that his astrology was all
a blind. The inspiration or fascination or redemption which he drew
from the everlasting hills eluded me. What possible sin or secret
demanded that he should live in his wooden eyrie, issuing forth on
rare and dangerous expeditions? What did he expect the snows of the
Schwindelhorn to wipe away from his past?
I used to feel that he was a ghostless body, that he was ever watching
those heights for the return of his soul. They were not unpopulated,
those uncanny crevasses and glaciers. Human beings had been lured and
trapped into their embrace. I could conceive ghosts among those emerald
cracks in the sides of the lacquered mountain. There, as in a vision,
the dead climbers eternally negotiate the trackless passes, while the
noiseless flick of their shadowy axes moves upon the face of the ice,
and phantom pulls phantom along the endless rope.
* * * * *
One day the end came with such an unexpected explanation. We were
watching the fronting heights, the trillion tonnage of micaed granite,
that rises in sheeted cliffs and light-green landing stages, where
alpine men actually live, and the higher barren ledges and ragged
belts of hirsute fir-trees growing on the gigantic rock jowls and only
waiting for a drift of snowlike soap and the razorlike effect of an
avalanche to give the illusion of a grandiose operation in Titanic
shaving. And over all rose the snowy peaks, worn fine by the workings
of sun and rain, or tangled and wounded by the primeval chaos.
Leaving him, I had turned back to the chalet when I suddenly heard him
cry to himself: “Onions and veal, onions and veal, there is no peace!”
Ridiculous words they sounded, but from Saltus they came with all the
force and enunciation of Greek tragedy. And he sighed the words again
and again: “No peace, no peace!” While his green eyes still ranged
the panorama of the Alps. I knew not what to think. Had he sent his
soul out into the waste and had it returned empty to him again? He
rejoined me at lunch and showed himself almost human--not that he was
not always courteous and hospitable and (when he wished) the fount of
good conversation. Whatever his tragedy was, he had seemingly merged it
into nature. Whatever had been the primitive shades and sensitiveness
of his character, he had reduced himself to the slow patience of the
unemotional. He was the triumph of undecontrollable control. In a month
of close company those were the only revealing words he had let slip.
And they were the most anguished I had ever heard drop from a human
creature in my life. Otherwise I could not recollect once seeing him
hurried or angry or grieved. I could not conceive him passing in or out
of love. Swearing or praying, those two easily reversible processes
of approach to the Creator, were not for him. Fortunately I still
remained, on the whole, neither curious nor critical.
When he joined me, he told me he had seen an avalanche on the sides
of the Schwindelhorn. Emotion in his face took the form of chalky
solemnity. “I never watch an avalanche without wishing I were under
it”; and again he said with unusual feeling, “I believe I could bring
myself to pray to be buried under those moving snows if my prayer could
be heard.” I said I hoped that the avalanche had brought no accident
in its train, and that if he liked I would go down the funicular to
the Club that evening to find out if it were so. He nodded grateful
agreement. “Yes, do find out. If there has been trouble, I should like
to be out on the Alps to-morrow.”
I crawled down by the funicular that evening and found my way to the
English Club. The avalanche had caused some stirring among guides and
visitors. At least one party was known to have been making in the
direction taken by the avalanche. Alpenstocks were clashing and heavy
boots beating upon the boarding. Anglo-Saxon superiority upon the
mountains was being demonstrated. Casual English voices could be heard
with their peculiarly unhumorous drawl. I made bold to inquire if this
activity had been caused by rumour of accident. A quiet man looked up
and nodded. Then he said: “You come from Saltus, don’t you? I have
noticed you with him several times.” I assented. “You live with him?”
I nodded. “You eat with him?” I nodded. “Then I bet you haven’t smelt
an onion for a twelvemonth,” and he laughed coarsely. “I am afraid I
don’t understand you, sir,” I said. “Then wait till this search party
gets clear. I dare say they will send for Saltus, if they don’t strike
the party which was due to return last night.” And I waited, curious
perhaps for the first time in my life. The word “onion” rang like an
echo of fatality in my ears.
An hour later we were alone in the club-room, and the other began his
yarn. Mercifully it was quickly told. “So you eat with John Saltus day
after day and your flesh never creeps?” I sat, nodding and nodding, in
a waking trance, but I could not fall asleep. Like the Ancient Mariner,
the other told me his ghastly tale as follows:
“I knew John Saltus in Paris when we were both students. We lived in
the same rooms for a time. But for a year we always fed at a crowded
little restaurant in the Latin Quarter. It was very cheap and very
good. The restaurant was kept by an old artist, fallen on evil days,
and his handsome wife. We all admired and feebly affected Madame.
Saltus had a friend who went further and made love to her. They used
to eat together. One day I saw the old man serving them both with a
livid face. It really seemed a little hard that they should eat his own
food under his nose and make him wait on them both. Two days later I
arrived late for the evening meal. To my surprise only Saltus and his
friend were sitting there. I joined them, and Saltus explained: ‘The
old man has been feeling ill. He refused us admission, but we insisted
and tried to put it right. Anyhow, he has closed his windows and let in
no one but us. Madame has not appeared yet. She must be doing penance
in the kitchen. However, you have missed nothing. The cooking has been
execrable. We have had horrible horsemeat with onions. Can’t you catch
the smell? You had better go on to another restaurant. They are too
much upset here. Our friend has disorganised the establishment by his
love-making. The wonder is that he has been served at all. And now
Monsieur has not returned from the kitchen. We had better pay the bill
and go. I will go in and spare him the trouble of looking upon his
rival again.’ All these words and sentences have remained indelible
upon my mind,” continued my informant.
“When Saltus came back from the kitchen he was a changed man. He could
not speak, but motioned us all to follow him. Madame lay dead on the
table, her breasts terribly mangled and her whole body dissected. Her
husband had fled and was picked out of the Seine the next day. The
stove was burning hard and a saucepan of onions was frizzling to a
stinking cinder. No need to discuss or analyse the menu. Saltus has
been that way ever since. He thinks he has committed some unforgivable
sin or incurred some uncleansable degradation in the sight of men.”
I ran out into the moonlit night. It was late, and I walked about,
unable to sleep, and watched the sunrise redden the snowy veins of
the Schwindelhorn like a pink unguent applied by Dawn to heal the
black bruise of night. I can never forget the first delicate pink that
sprayed or rather perfumed the mountain until the sun brought a ruddier
rush of light over the mountain-head, and Day succeeded with all her
diamond whiteness. And the stark beauty of the Spindelhorn and the
Spittlehorn rose up behind me with a whiteness as of fuller’s earth.
Then I could understand Saltus longing for the untarnished hills. It
was not curious that he should have drawn himself into the heights that
his flesh might be cleansed by the snow and his bones one day made one
with the unpolluted Alps. But I never returned to his chalet.
LOADED DICE
I was recently passing a few days at Monte Carlo, tempted more by
the weather than the spirit of gambling. I was mooning about in the
sunshine, if I may so describe a very pleasant though unproductive
manner of spending the time. The hot-house plants and tropical trees
which grow out-of-doors in the Riviera are alone worth the pleasure of
the trip. The principality of Monaco needs no foreign loans to run its
government, for the tax paid by the Casino is sufficient to balance its
expenses. The flowers benefit by the local affluence, for their beds
are as carefully made as though they were occupying a royal suite, and
they themselves receive as much toilet as ladies of fashion. Palms,
prickly-pear cactus, and all kinds of thick, watery-fleshed plants
thrive in the dry terraces between the mountains and the Mediterranean
Sea. The top-heavy, gouty, black-fibred palm-trees give a ludicrous
impression of old elephants’ legs suffering, if such a medical horror
is possible, from the disease called elephantiasis! The fruit of the
prickly-pear looks like lumps of coloured putty temporarily stuck upon
the gawky leathery leaves. Another amusing plant with stiff spiked
leaves a yard long looks, when it begins to wither, like strips of
zebra hide cut into ribbons. Sun and dew work hand in hand all winter
to make the vegetation as delightful to passing visitors to Monte
Carlo as it must be consoling to constant losers!
Whether one hazards a stake or not, it is always interesting to sit
outside the Casino and watch the different types who frequent that
most levelling of institutions. Fortune is the most democratic of
divinities, and often tosses into the lap of the humble what she
has filched from the purse-proud. Great or small, adventurer or
artistocrat, sharp or flat, she has a levelling effect on them all
in time. They are all at the mercy of her infinite and ironical
whimsicality.
Monte Carlo has this in common with certain other places in the world,
like Charing Cross Station, the Piazza of St. Peter’s, and Niagara
Falls, that the world, with or without his wife, passes there sooner
or later. If you wait, you will soon run into an acquaintance, and
already you have a curious feeling that half the people you have ever
known have passed that way. For once I sat waiting an hour without
recognising a face. It was like a long run of the _rouge_ at the table.
The _noir_ seemed more and more certain to come. The next to pass
must be a friend. So it was, for I recognised the worn, old-fashioned
features before me. But where had I met them previously? The name came
back to me with an effort. I remembered now. It was an old friend of my
father’s, and we had met in Hyde Park twenty years before, when I was a
boy at Eton. I never forgot the gold sovereign he gave me to take back
to school. I remembered, too, my father having pointed him out to me as
the greatest gambler of his generation. I vaguely knew that his whole
fortune had disappeared at the tables.
I was feeling lonely, so I followed him into the gambling-rooms and
claimed acquaintance, which he was polite enough not to refuse. He
was not gambling himself, so he had time to take me round the tables
and explain to me in theory one or two unfailing systems for breaking
the bank. In practice I afterwards found out, and even suspected at
the moment, they had as often bankrupted the would-be ruptors of the
bank, but he only remembered the one or two brilliant moments in his
career when he had cleared out a table and left it closed for the
day. I found it more interesting listening to this old-time player
than watching the motley crowd who clutched the gold-spangled skirts
of Fortune as she slipped by, in silences only broken by the mocking
formulas of the croupiers and the whirring of the fatal ball. At the
tables were sitting girls who had better been playing draughts in
their schoolrooms, and hawk-eyed beldames who seemed ready to stake
the price of their coffins on the winning number. Only when they won
did a muscle relax in their tired faces. The presiding croupiers were
a perpetual lesson in the art of concealing emotions. But as they were
never allowed to join in a stake, they shovelled the money like so
many beans. What perfect flunkeys they would have made for the Sphinx!
“_Messieurs, faites vos jeux_,” sang the croupiers, and a minute later
came the warning signal, “_rien ne va plus!_” followed in a few long
seconds by the announcement of the winning number, red or black, odd
or even, and the swift scraping in of the lost stakes. And so it would
be all afternoon and into the night and the next day again and the
day after ... crack! a sudden shot broke through the great room and
everybody who was not watching a stake rushed into a corner, where some
unknown plunger had just taken the last plunge into eternity by blowing
out his brains. The attendants collected from every corner and formed
a hedge round the dead man. Quickly and soundlessly they began moving
him out by a side-door, while gamblers picking up their stakes ran to
dip a finger in his blood for luck. In five minutes he had disappeared
as though he had fallen off a liner into a boiling sea. Monte Carlo
cannot afford to have scandals on the premises any more than any
well-established and well-connected institution, and is generally
more successful than others in concealing them. Blood is soon mopped
up, especially if the passers believe that it is a charmed fluid. The
roulette ball was soon spinning round again, and the only trace of the
tragedy was the struggle of a dozen gamblers to sit where the suicide
had been sitting all the afternoon. It is a superstition that the dead
gambler’s spirit does not leave the rooms immediately with death, but
remains to avenge his ill luck on the bank; and against the unknown
forces of the underworld even the bank cannot win.
I had had enough of it, and we strolled out on the terrace, my
companion becoming amused to talk to such a novice in gambling matters
as I then was. From the altitude of twenty years’ experience he began
to give me his views on Luck, which some call Providence and some
the Deuce. “Gambling,” he said, “is worth while to me whether I win
or lose. When I win I cannot spend my money more pleasurably than by
playing it again till I lose in the end. The bank must win. Let it!”
We sat down and looked across the Mediterranean as the sun slowly sank.
The horizontal rays crossed eighty miles of sea, and for a moment the
ghostly glimmer of Corsica appeared like a mirage and then disappeared
under the claret-coloured flood. My companion talked on: “For me it has
always been better to have played and lost than never to have played at
all. That is even the reason I never married. I felt I had a perfect
right to lose all I had, provided I had no dependents. I had very few
friends either, and I have managed never to borrow, and I have played
for twenty years. I have nothing on my conscience or, for the matter of
that, on my bank-account now. I have had my great days and known the
ecstasy of sudden wealth as no gold-digger has ever felt it--thousands
made in one evening. I have taken zero twice running with a doubled
stake. You have no idea what transcendent bliss that brings a gambler’s
brain. I have done best when I trusted to the inspiration of the
moment. There is luck, and there is bad luck, but that is really as far
as I have ever been able to get. And luck often comes to those who feel
the fascination of the table least. I have seen a man casually back the
winning number and stroll off before it was declared. People are always
forgetting their stakes, curiously enough, and there are always harpies
who watch on the chance of claiming them. The croupier cannot refuse
a claim. I do not think I ever forgot a stake. I can remember all the
winning numbers on my great days still.”
I asked him what the pleasures of memory meant to him, and he confessed
that they were considerable. I asked him if he believed in any gambling
superstition, whether he thought sitting round a gambling-table ever
produced any result one could compare with spiritualism; for instance,
the result of touching a dead gambler’s blood, which we had witnessed
an hour or two before.
“No,” he said, “but I have come to the conclusion that it often makes
a difference to the luck at a table who is sitting at it. Some people
cause others to win. That is how it works out.” I asked him if in all
his experience he could think of an instance when a psychic influence
had been at work. He sat back thinking. Then he said quietly: “I do
not answer your question. I cannot say yes or no, so I say nothing.”
“Then you must have met something that was inexplicable,” I pressed.
“Perhaps,” he answered; “but I have never told anybody.” I knew my
only chance of hearing it was to say nothing or lead the conversation
elsewhere, so I just waited. He got up and began walking again. When
we came in front of the pigeon-shooting green, which juts like a tiny
grass-green arena into the sea, he stopped and pointed to a corner of
the fence. A pigeon popped out of a trap, took flight, and fell to an
invisible gun. Another flew out, but fell the wrong side of the fence
into the open sea, where fishermen were waiting to retrieve it from
boats. Each marksman was allowed two shots to bring the pigeon down.
It seemed deadly monotonous. Then my friend spoke: “That is where the
first incident happened.” I knew now I had only to keep silent to hear
what he had to say. “I used to shoot pigeons a good deal in company
with a friend of mine. When we lost at the tables we often made good by
winning the prize for shooting. I sometimes won, but my friend never.
Whatever he gambled at he lost, roulette, _chemin-de-fer_, baccarat,
and dice. He fell into the hands of the sharpers, a gang who induced
him for a long time to believe that he was winning. Then they played
him with loaded dice and he lost a fortune. One evening I was with him
and the dice fell six times the same against him and every time for
double or quits. He challenged the dice and they agreed to saw the
ivory cubes asunder. A third party was called in and in breathless
silence the dice were broken up. My friend picked up each piece with
a face whiter than ivory himself, but there was no suspicion of a
fraud to be found. If they had been playing with loaded dice they had
substituted others. Sleight of hand can work wonders. I have no doubt
my friend’s challenge had been perfectly justified, but he was up
against the deliberate wickedness of this world. For a moment he turned
over the fragments of the dice. The scoundrel who had been playing
with him smiled and murmured: ‘_C’est drôle, pas un grain de plomb_’
(‘That’s funny, not a grain of lead’). My friend put down his bank-book
and went out. That evening he killed himself.
“After I had seen to his burying I felt miserable and went for a long
trip. When I returned I instinctively made my way to Monte Carlo.
I could not change my thoughts or get my friend out of my mind,
so I decided to return to the scenes of our long companionship. I
immediately found that my luck had improved at the tables. Then a very
strange thing happened. I sent for my guns and entered for the _grand
prix_ at pigeon-shooting. I found myself in winning fettle. You always
know at the tables or on the green if you are in a successful mood.
On the first day I killed fourteen pigeons out of fifteen. The second
day saw me in the running for the championship. If you miss five birds
you have to withdraw from the shooting, and soon only four guns were
left. In the end two of us were left. We had each shot twenty-four out
of twenty-six. Then the other missed and I only had to kill one bird
to win. Seconds are long on such occasions and my eye was caught by
a little sailing-boat out to sea. I could not get my eye off it and
out flew the pigeon, not like an easy owl but like a flighting snipe.
Ping! I missed my first shot and he swerved. Then I fired to the other
side. Ping! I thought, in fact I was sure, I had missed, but no, I had
just done the trick. As he flew over the fence he suddenly shot low
as though something rose in his path, struck the top of the fence,
and fell stone-dead on the right side of the line. I was heartily
congratulated by everyone on my prowess. I can tell you it was one of
the good moments of my life and as the retriever brought back my last
bird I strolled to the man in charge to see where I had hit my lucky
bird. The dog man was handling the pigeon all over. I asked him if I
hit the head or the body. He began plucking the feathers. When the bird
was bare he looked up with a perplexed grin and said: ‘_C’est drôle,
pas un grain de plomb!_’ As soon as I heard the fatal words I walked
away feeling sick. I did not shoot a pigeon again for many a long day,
not until I was absolutely in want of money. And for months I tried to
get those words out of my head.
“Years passed, but I never would let my mind dwell too long on the
reason why that last pigeon could have shied and knocked its brains on
the fence for my special benefit. It was possible that my last shot
passed close overhead and drove it downward with the shock it caused
in the air. I have heard of duck being killed by the sheer force of a
gun’s explosion without being struck by the pellets. So I attributed
my good fortune to a combination of natural reasons and my own skill.
And the years passed. I went on gambling and gambling, and I must say
I had begun to forget my companion of other days. But one evening at
Monte Carlo sitting at a table I caught sight of a face opposite which
instantly telegraphed my friend back to me. It was the scoundrel who
had cheated him at dice of all his money and indirectly of his life.
He was obviously down on his luck, shabbily dressed and playing small
stakes with furtive apprehension. I know that look so well. A man often
has it the first time he throws a stake. He generally has it when he
throws his last. I could see that he had not recognised me, but to my
horror, when I had a run of luck, he took special notice and came up
to address me. He began talking about a system of his own in which he
suggested that I should take a share. However, my own was working very
well that day and I played on till I had won five thousand francs.
“When I came back to my hotel I was surprised to be told that a
friend of mine was waiting in my room for me, and even more so to
find that this ugly customer had followed me out of the Casino and
somehow discovered where I was staying, for while I strolled home he
had skipped ahead and imposed on the concierge with some trumped-up
tale. Anyhow, he had been admitted and was there, staking his life and
liberty on the chance of making me disgorge a little of my winnings.
As he had a revolver pointing at me from the moment I entered my room,
I would have been inclined to buy him off as cheaply as I could. But I
remembered, what he did not, that I had a blood feud with him of many
years’ standing. My revolver was in my outside pocket and we fired
about simultaneously. I missed him, shattering the window behind, but
he hit me in the shoulder. His pellet ran under my shoulder-blade like
a knife. We stood facing each other and aiming. I was trying to fire,
but something held me like a vice, and I could not. Every second I
expected he would shoot me through the head. I could see his fingers
twitching round the stock of his gun. But as I covered him I noticed a
horrible look come into his features, and, if I was held, he was held
doubly. Though I had missed him clean, a look of fear shot through his
eyes, not the fear of a coward or a fool, or even the fear of one man
of another, but the veritable fear of the evil for the Evil One when he
cheats them at the end. He was staring over my shoulder into the empty
bedroom behind me with glazed eyes and a tremor running through his
body. He never said a word but fell back dead!
“Just then the concierge and the police threw open the door and I found
myself arrested. I declined to tell my story except in the presence
of a British consul, and was taken first to a doctor, who found my
wound slight, and then to the guard-house, where I was detained for
the night, but I must confess I never slept with a lighter conscience.
In the morning there was an inquiry before the authorities and I saw
from the first that I had matters in my own hand. It was shown that
I had left the Casino a winner and my assailant a heavy loser, that
he had made his way on a false excuse into my room and that I had
been found wounded. There was every suspicion that he had provoked
the quarrel. I was only anxious that the affair should be taken down
in black and white for my future good name, and I was quite ready to
be accused and saddled with an act of justifiable manslaughter. The
magistrates after consultation with the police said that they would
be delighted to release me, but that they would be much obliged if for
the purposes of their report I would tell them exactly how I had killed
the deceased. I pointed to my revolver lying on the commissary’s desk.
‘No, _monsieur_,’ I was politely told, and they all shook their heads
mysteriously. ‘No, _monsieur_, you may have fired, but you must have
killed him in some other way.’ I looked bewildered. Then the commissary
went on in a quiet voice to say that they had found no bullet-hole, and
he ended: ‘_C’est drôle, pas un grain de plomb!_’ But, whether from
loss of blood or excitement, I had fainted.”
AT THE HIGH TABLE
The port was passing at the High Table of St. Zacchaeus’ College in
the University of Cambridge, port not as diners at Claridge’s or the
Ritz know port, but grand old College port that deceased Bursars,
untroubled by wife or work, had spent time and taste laying down in
the College cellars in the fifties and sixties. Nobody knew how much
of the best survived there, but regularly at the great College Feasts
of St. Zacchaeus, such as his _Nativitas_ or the anniversary of the
Translation of his Relic from the local Cathedral to the mediæval
College founded in his name, as well as on the day marked curiously in
the Calendar of the late or pseudo-Lincoln Use, “_Sanctus Zacchaeus
inter sycamoris_,” the best and most wonderful of ports appeared at
the High Table. Each of the older Dons sipped the cloistered nectar as
though it was his last glass, and guests made gentle inquiry of its
abundancy or likelihood of appearance at the Feasts of the following
year. There was no certainty, but it was rumoured that a Junior Bursar
had boasted--in his cups--that enough remained to flood the front court
of the College unto one and three-quarter inches deep. But he was not a
mathematician!
The port was passing and three times the hospitable Master of St.
Zacchaeus’ had filled his glass and mine. Since the War the College
Feasts had been kept very quietly, and the younger Fellows elected
since that sanguine deluge were already rising and asking the
Master’s leave to return to their studies. They were an entirely new
type compared to the mottle-faced old Dons; less human and far more
efficient. The Master contemplated their departure good-humouredly.
“They are a far harder working lot than we ever were,” he mentioned,
“though they do rather resemble hair-dressers’ assistants. Praiseworthy
young men and very concentrated in their ways. That young gentleman who
has refused port, was, I believe, once a Canadian cowboy, but after a
distinguished service in the Army took advantage of the call to ‘Hands
across the Sea’ to study Law with us, and so successfully that we made
him a Fellow. Though he keeps his hands off the port he is no milkmaid.
In fact, I believe he came to one of his colleagues, who had been kind
and lent him books, and offered to arrange the disappearance of any
person to whom he had most objection in the University.”
The Master was in talking mood and several of us collected round him.
“Strange times are upon us, gentlemen, but no doubt we seemed just as
strange to the generation that went before us. I have lived to see a
race of Undergraduates who do not go to Chapel, and of Dons who have
invested their Fellowships in wives or motor-cars. I really feel that
the Don who cranks his own car has forded the Rubicon.” And he laughed
pleasantly at his own little joke. We laughed hugely.
We sat back against the old red-leathered chairs on the dais under the
solemn dust-laden pictures of the holy or unholy founders (according as
politics or religion might move the mind of the spectator) and watched
the last flicker of the sunset stir through the coloured oriel-window
and reflect itself in the great West window of the Chapel. For modern
glass it was very beautiful. The Chapel was of course mediæval, but
the old stained glass, together with the Relic of Saint Zacchaeus, had
been barbarously destroyed by the infamous iconoclast Dowsing in the
seventeenth century. But it was piously held that the big sycamore
growing in the Fellows’ Garden had sprung from the ashes of the saint
and it was solemnly watered and secretly cherished as a rival to
Milton’s mulberry and Newton’s apple tree in neighbouring colleges.
With the era of Gothic revivals and restorations the glass had been
replaced in the mullioned windows. The West window was certainly very
magnificent, but the choice of subjects had always puzzled me as an
Undergraduate. They seemed such an incongruous selection, but there
they were in their full Munich blazonry! Like most Undergraduates it
had not been for me to inquire or question. But as the dying light
threw them into rainbow splendour, I ventured to ask the Master whether
the subjects had been chosen by the Donor or by the College. I always
understood the window had been given by some old retired Fellow long
deceased. For answer the Master merely passed the port again and asked
me whether I had a sufficiently low opinion of Royal Commissioners,
who had come to harrow his last years upon earth. I replied that
when Commissioners began to inquire into the finances and statutes
of Colleges like St. Zacchaeus I regarded them as somewhat above the
common run of burglars, but infinitely lower, morally and socially,
than the Familiars of the Inquisition. With which reply he seemed far
from displeased.
About ten minutes later he gave me a signal proof of his pleasure,
for he took up my previous question concerning the West window and
said: “Yes, they are very curious and unexpected subjects to find in a
College Chapel. It can only be said of them that they are scriptural.
But their display there is not meaningless,” and he began unweaving one
of those curious stories which lie in the experience or recollection
of the wisest and most venerable of us. Beneath the outer crust of
stratified anecdote and ordinary gossip there lies some story in almost
every man’s life, which he is generally as reluctant to dispense as a
cellarer his best port. It is often a ghost story, and most men are
unwilling to confess that the inexplicable has ever crossed their
plain path of life. Or, like much in Heaven and earth, a streak of the
so-called indelicate gives it a taste that is not always agreeable. But
in Life and in Literature, in books sacred or profane, in dealing with
God or with mankind, these matters must be accepted as an essential
part of the Divine dispensation or of human nature. It is not necessary
to make them seem the sole circumstance or interest of our minds, but
it is difficult to go far in Life or Literature without realising and
if possible understanding them. Sex is the quintessence of the Body
just as ghosts are distillations of the spirit.
Wise is the man who without seeking either is prepared to meet them
spadewise, that is to say knowing how to recognise and describe a spade
as a spade. And the old Master from whom I had never heard a word
touching either the weird or the sexual side of life began quite simply
to talk about both.
“In the old days, before the last Royal Commission interfered with the
working of University life, I must admit that a great deal required
reform, though reform is one of the words I dislike most in the
language. For instance, this was a College of unmarried men entirely;
and at the time of the Dissolution, for how else can I describe an era
when our Fellows were, not entirely owing to their own fault, very
dissolute, I am sorry to say that this College provided not a Boathouse
on the River or a Cricket Pavilion nearer home, but frankly a brothel
in Barnwell--for the elder members of course.”
The last light of evening sank into the unrecognisable panes of the
Chapel window and the porters were lighting the gas jets in the Court.
The Master’s words seemed a bitter commentary on the history of this
home of peace and learning and spiritual refreshment. It seemed
incredible that it could have been so, but in the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries all things were possible in an English University.
I waited a little expectantly for him to continue. “Men came up from
the great public schools and settled down upon the bounty of the past.
There was little competition among them either here or in the outside
world. They lived lives of leisure in College like their relations
in family livings and squires’ pews, and both their minds and bodies
went to seed. Occasionally there was a great flash of scholarship in
the void, like Porson--a rare flash in the Academic pan. For the most
part they turned queer or stagnant or ridiculous. There was nothing
to occupy them. Some sank under the college wines like a rich-flowing
river of Lethe. Statutes hedged them and custom prescribed them a rut,
which was stupid as well as narrow. But before they became decayed
curios they were men like us all, and when they came up and settled
down to celibacy without idealism, and study without enthusiasm, and
manhood without athletics, well, what could you expect without a
certain amount of moral wreckage? The College, which always enjoyed a
noble income, allowed them to overstep certain Statutes both human and
divine, and handsomely too. Young and vigorous men, cut off from life
by rule, were, so to speak, initiated into the mysteries of life by
their colleagues. Frankly our Fellows often lived in sin.
“It was all very irregular. Of course, it was not common or general,
but no doubt Barnwell had its convenience in saving us from scandal
within the College. Whether it was regarded as a luxury or a necessity,
the College afforded it. Again I say that those days were far from
being our days. Englishmen were freer of speech and action then. I
appreciate the great change that has now come for the better. It is
right that Dons should be allowed to marry.”
Darkness had fallen upon the beautiful pile of pinnacles and towers
outside, and the silver candlesticks on the High Table threw but a
feeble and ironical little light into the court so lately deluged
with successive hours of sunlight, stark, golden or rubicund in turn.
But the hours of sun and sundial had passed, and we were sitting into
the hours that are illumined by electric bulbs and counted upon the
mechanical faces of clocks. The Master was trying to bring himself back
into a forgotten era. His speech flowed precisely. His choice of words
did not fail. He was reckoned an accomplished after-dinner speaker, and
there were few College Halls whose rafters and gilded lanterns had not
rung at some time to laughter and applause evoked by his rich store of
the academical anecdote.
He continued: “When the Dons were compelled to be celibate, matters
were strangely arranged, as I say. In those days there came to this
College one of the finest spirits that have ever been cased in a human
body. He was a Greek in body and mind, and he knew his Greek as few of
his generation. He came here conquering and to conquer. Mentally and
athletically he was capable of anything. But we did not encourage him.
If he wished to read for the University prizes, well and good. Nobody
prevented him. And if he wished to row in the University boat, well
and good. As a matter of fact he did neither. Whatever he touched, we
saw him take up with tremendous enthusiasm. And then unfortunately,
when it seemed likely that he would remain as a Fellow with us and pass
permanently into our Society, he was taken by one of us to this house
in Barnwell--not that it was anything unnatural or strange in those
days, nor do I suppose that it would be unnatural at any time, but it
would be thought nowadays stranger than fiction.
“I believe it was his best friend who took him and introduced and
initiated him to those mysteries of creation with which the Creator
invested the human race. There he made a liaison with a woman who
matched him, not in learning, but certainly in intelligence, and
surpassed him in physical powers. When he returned to College he was
far from quiescent, and related his adventure rapturously to his
friends, concluding with the mediæval snatch, ‘_Mihi est propositum in
taberna mori_.’ He said this several times as though he meant it. He
was one of those men who carry out what they take up with all their
might. He threw himself into his liaison with the energy of one sex and
the intensity of the other. And our College life sped upon its way.
“One night at a very late hour the College porter was roused by the
bell at the outside gates, and admitted a member of the College whom
he was too sleepy himself to identify. But he was sure that it was
the only time the bell was rung after twelve during that night. Under
subsequent question no member of the College confessed returning late
that night. The College has never been one to retire or rise early, and
that night at two o’clock I crossed the Court, and I met the man I have
been speaking of. He was walking quietly towards his rooms. His fine
brow and athletic tread stamped the encounter in my mind. I was not
mistaken, and I never doubted that it was he, and I was afterwards able
to swear that I had seen him at that hour. It was about the same hour
that the porter opened the front gate.
“The next morning we were informed that our bright companion was lying
dead in Barnwell, and that the Borough Police were taking possession
of his body. Armed with our special privileges and statutes, several
of us, including the dead man’s friend, made our way into that suburb
which has never ceased to hold sad associations for me. We identified
him lying there with a rapt and, I thought, slightly mocking expression
on his face. There was a terrible beauty written upon it, and his
friend was deeply affected, for he knelt down and began praying aloud,
at least we imagined they were prayers he uttered, though from time to
time we overheard like a cruel antiphon the words ‘_Mihi est propositum
in taberna mori_.’ Suddenly we realised how the dead man’s idle wish
had come true and smitten him to dust.
“There was no time for weeping and, as we learnt that, after all, the
police had not yet been apprised, we decided to cut scandal down in
its roots and to transfer the body in a trusty cab to the College. I
will never forget our solemn progression through the half-awakening
streets of Cambridge with the corpse sitting between us bolt upright,
or our arrival at the front gate, which as a rule was only swung open
for the Master or the Sovereign--but which was opened full to admit
the cab driven by a discreet cabman. As soon as we had laid the body
in his rooms we availed ourselves of one of our mediæval privileges
to hold the inquest within our own walls. But the police heard
rumours, or perhaps the five pounds we gave the discreet cabman led
to indiscretions on his part in a public-house, for the scandalised
Borough endeavoured to lay sacrilegious hands upon the rights of the
College, and demanded the body. Evidence was given that the deceased
had returned to the College late the previous night, and presumably
had died within academic walls. This, of course, was the curious part
of the story. The porter was certain that he had heard the bell at
two because it coincided with the striking of the bell in Great St.
Mary’s Church, and also that he had admitted a tall gentleman whose
name he had omitted to take. There he was at fault. The rest of the
College (and we were very small in numbers then) were prepared to
swear that they were within the walls of the College before midnight,
and finally there was my affirmation that I actually saw the deceased
cross the court that night. The Magistrates and police were a good
deal troubled, but they had no evidence and only rumours on the other
side. The porter’s evidence carried the most weight. The word of the
Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity might be doubted and even the oath
of the Regius Professor of Law might be found to be unsound, but the
statement of the Head Porter of St. Zacchaeus stood.
“We held the inquest in the College precincts, and had no difficulty
in returning a verdict of heart failure, which was the medical truth.
But the wings of scandal began to beat round our academic calm, and it
was thought better that the friend of the deceased, who was perhaps
answerable for leading him into temptation in the beginning, should go
down from the University as quickly and as quietly as the body of his
poor friend.... He went, and disappeared. A quarter of a century later
he presented the great West window to the College as a peace offering
to the living and a secret memorial to the dead. Remembering the
circumstances which I have told you in outline, and not forgetting the
remarkable vision which I saw in the College court, you may be able to
guess for the first time why the subjects in the window were chosen.”
There was a deep silence at the High Table, and the shadows of fifty
years seemed to descend upon the gas-lit court and to fill the hall
even into the recesses of the great gilded lanterns rising out of the
roof. In the distance the outline of the chapel darkened the very
night, and I was only sorry that I should have to wait till morning in
order to gaze at the coloured glass in the West window with a thrill
and a wonder that I had never yet thought possible in contemplating a
religious or symbolic object. I could not help asking the Master whose
was the mediæval mind that had dared choose the subjects. “I chose
them,” he said simply.
A SAINT
The first time that I was really impressed by the possibility of
supernatural power working outside the common or beaten path of
materialism was in a Devon country-house. I always believed material
things or ordinary events could be affected by the spirit, for instance
that it was quite useful to pray for or against rain, and that a fine
afternoon generally rewarded the Vicar’s prayers before a Bazaar or
School-treat. But that quite extraordinary things were liable to happen
out of the blue because of unseen and unknown forces used to be beyond
my reasonable expectation. It is not so with me now.
I was staying in a beautiful but nameless old Manor House in
Devonshire, cut off from road and rail. The only approach was down a
breakneck hill, a kind of gravelly toboggan run into the smiling valley
below. Coombes of red, red terracotta earth enclosed the landscape
and over the hill-tops floated a glimpse of distant sea. A Devonshire
coombe is a pretty piece of landscape pretending to be a switchback
railway. It was spring, and spring in Devon gives a springier feeling
than anywhere else in England, whether it is the beauty of the Devonian
maids or the wonderful red colour of the earth.
The Manor House was Tudor, dating from the time when Englishmen took up
home, beer and bowls and gave up Castles, archery and the San Graal.
It was built on monastic ground and had passed through the hands of a
succession of families, each of which had fulfilled the curse attached
to Abbey lands by slowly extinguishing their seed and silver and cellar
through the several and appropriate means of drink, debauch and lawyers.
The Manor was inhabited by what are known as Devon worthies, which
means folk who are worthier of Devon than other folk, or perhaps that
Devon is worthier of them. Every day I wandered out between showers.
As a matter of fact I had hit the comparative lull between the vernal
deluges and the summer rainy season. It was delicious though wet work
watching the patches of gorse, which clung like the rags of a golden
fleece to the hill-sides, while the white bloom of the bird-cherry
trees lay on the twig-tops like a late snowstorm that had forgotten
itself and dried instead of melting in the sun. The harebells ran
like blue ink through the wood-bottoms. An occasional bee-orchis
sanguified the hedge, like a bluebell whose stalk had been soaked and
its leaf spotted with red wine, though from closer it looked like a
purple-hooded cobra in the green grass; and splotches of delicate
primrose never ceased to advertise the purity and colour of Devonshire
cream.
The house was in the possession of the hereditary Lord of the Manor,
Sir Petronille Pawkins, Bart., a very robust and pugnacious gentleman
with the usual collateral relationship with Sir Francis Drake, a
violent temper behind his shirt and plenty of good wine in his cellar.
All were in evidence during the party. His mother, the Dowager Lady
Pawkins, had never been put out to grass, and had subsided into a
rather cheery kind of housekeeper. Certainly she took the place of the
pale silent wife everywhere except in the Oratory. The old lady came of
Catholic stock and, though frankly she had taken to drink, she had not
lost the Faith, which she had handed on to her rowdy son. The terrible
undercurrent and possible moral of this story will excuse my saying
anything so brutal about a lady who is dead and, I am certain, now with
the Blest.
She lived in the house, rather terrorising the wax-pale wife. The
Dowager had a reputation for enjoying the cellar as much as her son,
so that the two hostesses were a great contrast. The Dowager was fat,
cheerful and, to my regret, generally tipsy. She had married the last
Baronet as a convent girl and, beyond adding a modern Chapel and a
Catholic heir to the family, gave no further example of piety. The
beautiful Flemish tapestry in the drawing-room of the adoring Magi was
an heirloom, not an evidence of devotion.
She was mixing cocktails for the guests before dinner when I arrived.
She explained that this domestic duty fell to her because the present
Lady of the Manor did not approve of drinking at all, and was always
trying to induce Sir Petronille to take the pledge. This Sir Petronille
declined to do on the curious grounds that his father had died of drink
and that he owed something to his memory. She too was of Catholic
stock, from some forgotten sanctuary behind the Fens. She was young and
preferred to leave the brunt of entertainment to her mother-in-law.
They were too unlike for any rivalry to rise between them. She reminded
me of a candle burning away in the daylight to an unseen flame. Life
itself was hardly apparent in her eyes, which seemed to look backwards
into her inner self and not upon the wicked world into which she had
been given in marriage.
The house party was various. As they sat round the dinner table the
first night, I could not help dividing them into the two categories of
Bottles and Barrels. It is an amusing game to play with oneself at a
dull dinner party. In the first place so many people are shaped like
a Barrel or a Bottle. And so often the mental contents are similar.
Bores are simply empty barrels, except (what is worse) when they are
overflowing ones. Social bottles seldom run to more than conversational
soda-water. Very rare is the sparkling vintage, and it is one that
needs to be deftly uncorked. I am afraid the Dowager was a typical
barrel. The human bottles did not strike me as worth tapping, even Sir
Petronille. There were two talkative Americans who could only have been
tolerated under the rule of Trappists and even then might have proved
unbearable to the Trappists. They were rather like people who had
stepped out of books with very little to say worth putting back into
books. Their flow of soul was as soda water without the water. There
were some neighbours who provided the news of Exeter and even from as
far as Torquay, which is the English Deauville, only more so. And there
were a few literary men and a budding politician from London who talked
rubbish. Naturally we pattered the Metropolitan movies, a cursory
list of which may help to date this story twenty years hence. We said
all there was to be said about Wembley, about the Labour Parties, the
Opposition Parties and Lady Colefax parties; about Steve Donoghue’s
riding; about the Rodeo riding; and Lord Dudley’s marriage.
It was the last party that the unexpected might be expected to
happen. But good port covers much ordinary conversation, whereas
_vin ordinaire_ is difficult to conceal with the brightest chat. We
had reached the stage between the first and second glass of port when
the servants suddenly disappeared apparently with a scuffle. Our host
followed with an oath. Something had gone wrong below stairs. We would
have carried on polite conversation until relieved, had not a drift of
pungent smoke crossed the doorway. We left the room and hurried to the
staircase in time to hear an alarm of fire. The customary scenes at an
English country-house fire followed. The unselfish shifted furniture.
The selfish shifted for themselves. The budding politician assumed a
mediæval helmet and gave loud and continued orders from the stairs with
some such caption in his mind’s eye for the next day’s _Mirror_ as
“Young statesman acts as fireman!” The men servants stood in different
corners of the library, which was found to be in flames, discharging
Minimax squirts at each other. The chemicals slowly changed the colour
of their livery, but not the stolid cast of their countenances. The
ladies rushed up and down stairs impaled on the dilemma of saving the
hats in their rooms or leaving their evening wraps in the hall. The
rest of the party brought buckets and jugs of water which did as much
damage to the carpets as the Minimax to the shelves and curtains. But
true to its classical derivative the Minimax minimised the maximum of
fire. Amid much hissing and smoking the flame was quenched and the
damaged furniture carried into the garden, to wit: a gutted sofa, two
charred chairs and a stinking carpet. Everybody congratulated each
other on delivery from atrocious death, a telephone call was sent to
the Insurance Company, and beer was provided for the expected and
expectant firemen of the neighbouring Borough, who arrived in the
early morning.
During the rest of that evening the fire supplied an agreeably
thrilling note to the conversation. The escape of the party was
celebrated with duplication and even multiplication of the port wine.
The Americans were shocked and then delighted and even unpersuaded to
uphold the reputation of a dry country against the enticements of a
drinking Baronet and a wet spring. Lady Pawkins was terribly upset,
whether by the fire or the drinking. She hardly appeared at all during
the next three days, leaving the house affairs almost entirely to her
mother-in-law.
It was remembered that Sir Petronille had only remarked that the smoke
had spoilt the port left on the table, and that it was a damnable
nuisance the fire had not started a quarter of an hour later. The
insurance agent arrived and a cheque for damages was paid. All was as
it should be. Sir Petronille’s wife looked a little paler, and nothing
happened for three days....
We were returning to tea in the late afternoon when we found the
servants extinguishing a fire in an empty bedroom. There was nothing
but smoke and smell left by the time we arrived. It was a horrible
nuisance. Our host’s oaths took the sheepish grins off the servants’
faces. The insurance agent arrived again and re-estimated damages.
It was curious that there had been no grate fire in the room, but it
was generously attributed by the agent to forgotten cigarette ends.
Everybody looked at each other foolishly, and then somebody blurted
out that it was only the ladies who smoked cigarettes. The men smoked
cigars and pipes. The agent bowed and smiled; “I have no doubt some
lady was forgetful,” he suggested. He was anxious to turn the incident
into a good advertisement for the company. “But they don’t smoke
in empty bedrooms!” shouted the Dowager. The agent bowed again and
withdrew with his report. There was a general laugh, I don’t know why.
A second fire was excessively unlucky, and the only consolation which
could be offered to the host was that he had surely exhausted his share
of bad luck for a life-time. That evening the party kept sober and,
when towards ten o’clock the butler entered and with a very scared
face reported that a third fire had just been extinguished in the
Chapel itself, the party resembled so many aldermen and church-wardens
proceeding to view the site of municipal disaster.
It turned out to be a slight outbreak and only a few smouldering
hangings had to be removed. It was promptly attributed to one of the
altar candles or to the blue light which Lady Pawkins kept burning
before the statue of the Lourdes Madonna, now generally taking the
place of the mediæval Mother and Child in the shrines of the Catholic
community. But it was proved that no candle had been lit since Mass
was said on the previous Sunday, and that only the supernatural could
have caused the hangings to be ignited from the lamp. Lady Pawkins had
been in the Chapel until just before the dinner gong, so all scent was
once more at fault. There was no scent in fact except the obvious and
unpleasant smell of burnt cloth.
Three fires within four days was incomprehensible indeed. Either
it was an amazing coincidence, and by the law of chances could not
possibly recur, or it was the work of a firebug--more politely called
a pyromaniac. There must be somebody in the house with a Freudian
fancy for setting random fire to the furniture in broad daylight.
Even so, it was impossible to strike a cause. The staff was old and
warranted. Many had been reared under the family they served. A fire
in the Manor House was unheard of. Guests and servants were anxious
equally to prove alibis for themselves. The odd thing was that nobody
had been alone when any of the fires had started, except Lady Pawkins
praying in the Oratory; and the Oratory fire occurred while she was
out. It was more than strange. That evening the ladies were as voluble
as the men were thoughtful. The budding politician said he owed it to
his constituents not to expose himself to suffocation in his bed. The
Americans rehearsed endlessly the great fire in Boston, the greater
fire in Chicago and the greatest of all in San Francisco. And there was
talk of the disaster to the _General Slocum_ and much other cheerful
and appertaining matter.
Nobody slept that night, and the gentlemen took turns to patrol
the passages. Nothing happened, nor during the next day, which was
a Saturday. There arrived detectives from one of the great London
agencies, and a Benedictine priest from the neighbouring monastery, who
came regularly to hear the confessions of the Ladies Pawkins. On this
occasion only the younger of the two was available. I regret to say
that the Dowager had, under the strain of three fires, become amusingly
drunk. I watched the younger woman pass into the Oratory and kneel,
paler-faced than ever. An hour later the monk passed out of the house.
She had apparently made up for the absence of other penitents, but what
on earth, I thought, could she have had to tell her confessor? But,
then, there are more things in Heaven and earth than.... Most of her
time was spent in the chapel praying, and the hours spared from her
devotions were lavished on the comfort of her guests. Her hospitality
was humble rather than brilliant. She was found one morning making her
mother-in-law’s bed, and nobody had any doubt of the unseen hands that
changed and rearranged the flowers in the rooms every afternoon. She
lived in the house, but she hardly seemed to be of the house party. Yet
she was indefatigable at every meal and in her care for the guests. For
their vinal welfare alone she showed indifference, if not abhorrence.
And, like most model hostesses, she made no attempt to add to the
gaiety of the party, though she never allowed a trace of tiredness
or boredom to cross her face. But her smile was worth more than much
laughter from the drunken.
Meantime the sleuth-hounds had arrived--one in the impenetrable
disguise of a valet, who spent long mornings and discreet evenings
brushing the threads out of our evening trousers. Another was ambushed
as literary adviser to Sir Petronille Pawkins, and it was given out
that the Baronet, who was almost illiterate, intended editing some
chapters of his very obscure family history. While we ate, they sought
clues and found them not. The sole result of their search was the
finding of a number of private letters in coat pockets, which letters
were surrendered to those least intended to see them. A number of
unpaid bills, addressed to the Dowager Lady Pawkins, were handed
by mistake to Lady Pawkins. And a letter from an Inebriates’ Home,
directed to Sir Petronille, gave the Dowager the shock of her life.
She, poor soul, had remained in a very intoxicated state owing to
reaction from the incendiarism. I surprised her one evening mumbling
to herself. It was a long rigmarole about trying to fight it (I presume
she meant the firebug), about her failure and what a disgrace it was,
and finally how good Alice was (Alice was the daughter-in-law). “She
won’t give in. She’ll beat it,” and the old lady burst into hysterics.
The local police carried out a portentous investigation of footprints
and thumbmarks to substantiate a theory of malicious arson from
without. The local constable found and rightly measured the inspector’s
bootmark in the garden clay, and the inspector found a finger-print on
a window-pane a few hours later which might or might not have been the
constable’s. The clues discovered by means of the house party would
have filled a shelf in the Scotland Yard museum.
Nevertheless, there were comic variations in the house-party life, and
people became quite amusing against the tragic background, though a
certain amount of discreet panic took place. Fear of the unknown hushed
the rowdiness of the party. The second fire had sobered them. After the
third few dared to take their normal rest. It was obvious to material
minds that, if fire could break out on a sofa or among hangings for no
reason during the daytime, it might do so during the night-time for a
better reason. Nobody cares to be roasted in bed, so we broke the party
into night patrols and relieved one another in watching the passages
and hunting for the most likely places for the spontaneous combustion
to occur which had been solemnly adduced by one of the theorists. The
leader of each watch was armed with the dinner-gong, on which he was
urged to sound the alarm. The next night was unquiet. The alarm was
given on two occasions, needlessly. One of the Americans dropped a
lighted cigarette into his bed, while trying to keep awake until his
time for watch. He promptly gave the alarm himself, and the presence
of half the household was required to satisfy his conscience that by
sitting on the sparks he had averted a catastrophe. The second alarm
was caused by the officer of the early morning watch tripping on the
stairs and falling, gong and all, to the bottom. The next morning
the representative of the Fire Insurance arrived and, after making
investigations on his own account, announced that the Insurance Company
had decided not to renew the policy as they were convinced that the
fires could not be accidental. He was convinced that fire had been
ignited, especially in the case of the chapel curtains, by the use of
paraffin or petrol. For the rest of that day everybody searched for
combustibles. But during this time no oil had been permitted in the
house, and even a box of firelighters, thanks to their specific name,
had been buried in the garden.
There was, of course, nothing to talk about at meals except these
strange happenings. The Devon Worthies could rake up no analogy
except rick-burning, and were inclined to lay the trouble to gipsies
or poachers, whom they classed with Bolshevists as the enemies of
all mankind. The Americans continued to talk with consummate fluency
about the San Francisco fire, with variations on the Boston fire
and the great Chicago fire, which was traced to an Irish widow’s
cow. The servants became so alarmed that they would only work in
pairs. Everything was done to facilitate the work of the detectives.
Their finds continued to be irrelevant, to say the least of it. They
discovered a secret staircase, which had been walled up a century
previously. They also discovered a cupboard full of empty bottles, to
which cupboard no member of the family could or would produce a key.
The next discovery was mine.
I was sitting in the drawing-room studying the Literary Supplement to
_Vogue_, when suddenly I saw the old Flemish tapestry of the Adoration
of the Magi stretched across the wall move! There was no draught
or motion of the air at the time. I thought it must be an ocular
delusion caused by my glasses. Nobody was pulling or even touching the
tapestry. But the threads in its texture were moving and wriggling like
ashen-coloured worms. The nimbus above the Virgin’s head was trembling
and crackling and the white elbow of her arm was twisting and slowly
blackening in front of my eyes. It was all happening in perfect silence
and for no apparent cause. That was the terror of it, and I dragged
myself out of my chair and forced myself to examine the tapestry
closer. The woof was crisping and crumbling under the action of intense
heat, though it was not yet on actual fire. I stared in a foolish and
fascinated sort of way until the sudden spurt of pungent smell roused
me to what senses were left to me, and I began feebly sounding the
alarm. At this moment Lady Pawkins came down the stairs and entered the
room. When I pointed out what was happening, she became deathly white
and rang the bell three times, the concerted signal for a fire in any
part of the house. Detectives and servants arrived almost immediately
and quickly extinguished the sparks running through the threads of the
tapestry before beginning an exhaustive inquiry, of which I was the
chief butt. The tapestry was handled, fingered and almost dissected.
All my words were taken down, and I was even searched for matches, but
in vain. I did not describe, a very curious sensation which had been
growing upon me, which was the ridiculous idea that Lady Pawkins was
somehow responsible for what had happened. The official theory was that
the oriel glass had acted like a magnifying glass in setting fire to
the tapestry.
After this, the atmosphere in the house became not only serious but
rather strained. It was like living in a crematorium with no honourable
chance of escape, a crematorium in charge of unseen and probably insane
attendants. Were we the victims of an abominable practical joke? Or was
there an invisible criminal or an unknown madman amongst the guests?
We had stopped suspecting the wretched servants. We grew more inclined
to look round among ourselves. Everybody laid what had happened to his
neighbour, but how to associate one iota of proof with any individual
was a hopeless difficulty. In vain, mental traps were set and the most
innocently seeming inveiglements devised. Nobody gave himself away by
deed or word or thought.
The atmosphere became quite impossible towards the end of the week.
It was far worse than the presence of a ghost or a supernatural
phenomenon. A White Lady or an immured nun or chained monk would have
afforded welcome relief. We could have slept peacefully amid spectral
rattles and death-warnings. But the menace hanging over the house
seemed to combine the terrors of the earthly and the unearthly. The
firebug that flieth by day giveth no warning, and, whatever was the
cause of the incendiarism, there was no comfort in the night. The house
party continued to its appointed end rather like a comic funeral, at
which the skeleton sat at every feast and lurked in every cupboard. At
night the house was watched by night-watchmen with instructions to fire
upon anybody attempting to fire the house. And all the while out of
doors the beautiful spring was bursting into moist melody. As for the
landscape, it was red, red earth all the way, with jerks of blue sea
over the hills and far away. The hedges burst into flowerage. Devon is
the only county rhymed with Heaven, but it has Paradisal parallels.
It seemed incongruous to see Nature so happy and busy, spinning the
loves of flowers and birds, while within the walls of the old house the
lords of creation sat in moody and suspicious silence. I must admit
that it was one of the most exciting weeks of my life, and certainly
I would never have missed the experiences: the uncanny supernatural
sensations, the actual personal knowledge of a fire and the study
of human psychology reacting to strain. On the whole everybody had
improved as human beings. People ceased to be boring or selfish.
Everybody became anxious to protect or reassure everybody else. The
common fear made us all friends, and we felt we would have something
to talk to each other about, whenever we met, for the rest of our
lives. The only person who seemed to show not the least change was Lady
Pawkins. Her time-table was totally unaffected by what had happened.
She still rose at an earlier hour than her servants and prayed in
her Oratory. On Sundays and Feast days she remained praying most of
the day. Even on weekdays she read the whole Office of the Church to
herself. She ordered the meals, and though she left the entertainment
to her cheery and collapsible mother-in-law, her personality none the
less penetrated the whole house. I was never more conscious of it than
at each outbreak of fire. Guests and detectives seemed to look upon
her as a phantom and of no importance in the search for the mystery,
and yet I reiterate the extraordinary impression I had received in the
subconscious part of my soul that she was somewhere at the origin of
all this trouble.
At last Saturday dawned and the visit was over for guests, who had
been struggling between an intense desire to depart and the thrill of
remaining. Most of them had recovered their balance at the prospect of
going. There were three extra detectives by the end of the week and
the very meals we ate were cooked under Scotland Yard supervision.
The Americans were drawing plans of the central heating system, which
would be necessary before they paid a second visit. We had long given
up trying to affix the deed to any particular person. It was all too
complicated.
But two things happened that Saturday morning, which I have not
disclosed until to-day. The Benedictine chaplain arrived as usual
and, after hearing the news of the week from Sir Petronille, made
his way into the Chapel where he was joined by Lady Pawkins. As he
descended the stairs an hour later, the tension precipitated us into
conversation. He talked about the untoward occurrences and the ladies
of the family with the simplest gravity. He spoke with the kindest
benevolence and pity of the Dowager: “She put up such a strong fight.
But the holy have no peace in this house. She is at peace since she
ceased struggling with all her body and soul. Not so Lady Pawkins.” As
he spoke, I had the curious feeling in my mind that he had no doubt
either as to the source of the fires. When I described the horror of
the igniting tapestry to him, he was tremendously interested and asked
me to show him the exact place. The tapestry had not been put away and
still hung in the drawing-room with an ugly scar upon the Virgin’s
arm. He was really excited beyond measure when he saw the mark of the
flame, and I heard him muttering to himself: “Poor lady, poor lady!
How could she bear it?” Then he flung himself on his knees and began
to pray. I made allowance for his nerves and for his deep affection
for the Pawkins family and began re-examining the tapestry. I noticed
for the first time that the fire had been confined to the imagery of
the Blessed Virgin and to her arms alone. The Holy Child and the Magi
had not been touched. Something in the thread had kept the flame to
the same section of colour in the web. The good monk was very much
moved, and remained some time on his knees. I suppose he thought that
there was something sacrilegious in even the singeing of the Virgin’s
likeness.
An hour later I went to the Oratory to say good-bye to Lady Pawkins.
She was there immersed in prayer and it was some time before she
noticed me. Rising from her knees, she came slowly towards me and held
out her right hand with a quiet smile as though to apologise for all
that had happened during my stay. As she raised her arm I caught sight
of her skin under the hanging sleeve and my eyes froze to it. It was
burnt and charred to the bone! God! I was glad to get out of that house.
* * * * *
Then I was right, and she was in some mystical and appalling way at
the source of all that had happened; and the monk knew. Yes! I was
sure that he knew, and now I realised why he had fallen to prayer
before the burnt picture of the Virgin in the tapestry. Everything
began to fit itself together in my mind. The Dowager’s strange words
about herself and her daughter-in-law, coupled with those of the
monk--what was it that they meant? How was it that the poor drunken
Dowager had fought against it with all her might and soul, but that
the evil had been too strong for her, and why, since she had given up
struggling, had she been at peace? Could it be that though the old lady
had collapsed under demoniacal assault and let herself take to drink,
there was some mystical and tremendous excuse for her weakness, that in
the atmosphere of that house there was a power which would not permit
people to live quiet, ordinary, sober lives? That women who married
into the family found themselves attacked by an influence which gave
them no rest, which actually forced holy people into evil habits? Was
I right in guessing that the only chance a woman had in that house was
the overwhelming and simple practice of mediæval Sanctity, the gifts
of prayer, holiness and atonement carried to an heroic degree? Such a
woman was given the chance of becoming saintly or sodden--there was no
middle course.
So I guessed, but I never returned to confirm my guess. You can only
imagine my feelings a year later when I took up a newspaper and read
that the country residence of Sir Petronille Pawkins had been burnt to
the ground and that everybody had been saved in the house except Lady
Pawkins, who was believed to have returned to the Chapel to save the
holy vessels. I suppose she would not yield--more power to her burnt
elbows! But she must have gone to Heaven in a fiery chariot.
CANNES
Recently the most extraordinary and unexpected adventure has befallen
me, which I am anxious to preserve in the form of a Short Story.
It concerns a railway accident which occurred while I was travelling
through France to the Riviera. I ought to have been on the crashing
train and for some strange reason I was not. The reason is really
strange and remains to this day unexplained. But I have devised a
possible clue to the fantastic or psychical forces which were in play
and which prevented me being immolated in the catastrophe. There will
appear a climax if I tell my story rightly, but I am still waiting for
the _dénouement_. Roughly, this is the outline. I was summoned to an
aunt’s sick-bed at Cannes and had no time to book a berth in advance. I
attempted to travel in the restaurant car of an express. Friends left
me at the station. Witnesses in Paris knew that I was leaving that
night and, if possible, by that train. They read of the train’s crash
in the papers the next morning. My name was not in the casualty list
simply because I was not travelling in the train. I had deliberately
changed trains for a strange reason.
This is too bad for a start, for I have been very carefully trained in
the Pelman school of literature, and have subscribed to an expensive
course in the Finsbury School of Practical Journalism, and have had
several Short Stories corrected by a doddering ex-member of Parliament,
by the writer of social snips in a Methodist weekly, and an utterly
futile and yellowish novelist whose very decadence has decayed. I
should have remembered that it is necessary to give no hint of a Short
Story’s end, if the attention of trained readers is to be kept, and
that the catastrophe should be concealed till the practised palate of
the epicurean magazine-taster is prepared to assimilate it. But now I
have revealed the whole skeleton outline of my Story in one nutshell
paragraph. It is too bad, for the whole fact and even the mystery,
such as it is, leaks out of those first sentences, and I shall have to
continue with Pelmanic padding to the obvious end. However, perhaps I
shall get this Story into next year’s “Collection of the Worst Stories
of the Twelve-month,” which I believe are industrially collected into
an annual by two Chicago professors of belles-lettres and added to that
invaluable transatlantic series “What Not To Read.”
But I have a Story to tell, and with the help of a little volume
entitled “Short Story Writing for Profit,” by Michael Joseph, which has
fallen into my hands, I shall essay to tell it. His entertaining little
plan informs me that the theory of the Short Story may be likened to
the shape of a triangle--a long base, one long side, and a short drop.
I must keep this in mind, especially as my story conveys an illusion of
the human triangle. Let me at least preserve that triangular form which
is essential to the modern Short Story.
[Illustration]
I therefore set out to draw _A--C_, _Base of characters_, as per plan,
with _A--B_, _Incidents leading to the Catastrophe_, and _C--B_ the
_Climax_, with _B_ for _Catastrophe_. I have a feeling that with such
clear indications I cannot fail. My real difficulty is that I have
to adapt a true story to the Procrustean bed of fiction. I learn I
have got to provide a Title (done), an Opening (I am opening as I
write), the Body of the Story, and the Catastrophe upon Climax, and if
possible, but this is not essential, a _dénouement_.
The Opening is in the Gare de Lyon, which I reach about half-past seven
on a Sunday night on my way to the Riviera. I am not travelling for
pleasure, but in response to a summons to fetch my dear and favourite
aunt, who has been very fashionably ill at Cannes in company with
some of the best-known names in English Provincial Society. This year
anybody who counts in Leeds would cease to count in Leeds had they not
been numbered on a Riviera hotel register. The _salons_ of Liverpool,
the wit of Glasgow, and the beauty of Hull, Halifax and Huddersfield
have been emptied along the Garden of the Riviera like a rich manure.
Even poor old London, which since the war has been outmonied and
outclassed by the manufacturing cities of the North, contributed its
little quota of idle poor. My dear aunt went for her health, and I went
because I am in her Will. I had got as far as the Gare de Lyon in my
Story.
I do not feel like filling out _A--C_ with characterisations of either
my aunt or myself, so I will proceed to _A--B_ (Incidents leading to
the Catastrophe). The first incident lies in the fact that I can never
pass through the Gare de Lyon without a very vivid thought passing
through my mind. Thirty years ago (this dislocation of time is against
all the Short Story rules, but it is essential), this aunt of mine
stood in the Gare de Lyon and suddenly she saw a man running across
the platform, followed by another. He had the misfortune to trip and
fall, whereupon, to her horror, the other drew a revolver and shot him
not once, but many times, until the police removed him and his victim.
It was a crime of passion committed by a jealous husband on his wife’s
lover. As everything had been done on all sides of the triangle, nobody
had anything to say, and the drama was soon forgotten in the thousand
and ten more dramatic incidents of the Paris phantasmagoria. But my
aunt never forgot, and years later, when I was a small boy in Paris,
she showed me the scene of the murder and recounted the details. It
was the only murder she had ever seen, and the only one I had heard at
first hand, so it remained in my mind as fresh as blood. Every time I
crossed the Gare de Lyon, travelling South, it returned to my memory
with renewed force. And though I was in a special hurry, and in a state
of real agitation owing to the telegrams I had received from Cannes,
I halted at the fatal spot and remembered, as it were throwing myself
back in time and out of circumstantial focus. I enjoyed the curious
feeling that possibly I was the only person alive who knew exactly
what had happened there on that tragic day. It was part of my personal
tradition.
This murder is an Incident, not the Catastrophe in my story, which
I am still labouring to tell with such sanity and sincerity as my
reader will allow me. Friends in Paris sent me in their car to catch
the 8.10 _Rapide_. I had not reserved a sleeping place because the
train accommodation was filled for weeks in advance. I gave a voluble
porter ten francs, and explained that it was a case of necessity and
that I must reach Cannes the next day, as my aunt was ill; that I was
prepared to travel in the restaurant car the whole way, or even in
the baggage van. I only carried hand luggage, and while the porter
was making my arrangements I walked down the platform to loosen my
leg joints before what promised to be a night of cramp. The porter
rejoined me beaming, and assured me that he had arranged everything
by himself, that my bag was in the restaurant and that I would find
a seat in the corridor, when I suddenly noticed a passenger on the
platform far more hurried and agitated than I was. She walked up the
train, peering with quick movements of her neck into every carriage,
but in vain. Then she remained standing at one of the wrought-iron
pillars that sustain the roof, looking like the veritable picture of
despair. The train was late going out (half an hour of delay, the
porter told me), so I felt tempted to walk past her, and to my surprise
found her large, glassy eyes fixed full upon mine. I continued ten
yards and swung round. She was still there, and her eyes were still
riveting mine. I passed her not twice but half a dozen times, and each
time her eyes fixed, absorbed, hypnotised and terrified me. They were
not the eyes of a woman, who queries and accosts men in streets and
railway stations, the glittering and questingly plunderous eyes, nor
the brilliantly attractive orbs of the adventuress. Nor were they the
eyes of the widow and the mourner, those gushing fountains of violet
salts and pathetic brine. Tragic they were and haunting, restless and
insatiable, searchful and despairing. I felt quite unable to take my
place in the train, and continued walking up and down the platform,
and each time I received her eyes full into mine. It was naturally
not for me to speak, but I gave her every chance, and emboldened by
her piercing glance which shot pity, fear, pain, peril, I bent my
head towards her until our eyes cannot have been more than six inches
apart. Then I heard her saying simply, “_Changez! il faut changer de
train. Dites lui de changer de train._” I was so troubled that I could
make no reply. I passed her once again, and she said again, “_Il faut
changer de train._” When I looked back she had disappeared, and the
signal was being made for the train to start. But her eyes had not gone
out of mine, and I could still know them anywhere if ever I saw them
again. They were wonderful and wistful eyes, and a little terrible.
They never blinked or flinched or flickered. But what struck me most,
apart from their undeviating stare of agony and terror, was that they
were perfectly dry--the dry stare of the dead. I felt their presence
even more after their owner had disappeared into the rush and crush
of the station. I no longer felt like a real person, but as though I
were watching myself in a dream, and I did the absurd sort of things
that one does in dreams. I obeyed her entreaty to change trains without
questioning whether it was intended for me. I snatched my bag and
threw myself upon my surprised porter. He thought I had decided not
to travel at all, and could not understand me when I gave him another
ten francs and asked him to find me another train, presumably in the
same direction! There was a slow train in the parallel siding already
crowded and almost overfilled. Before he had found me a fresh seat,
the _Rapide_ was passing out of the station. I turned and watched
the slow, soundless egress of the train I should have occupied. I
did feel a fool, but again the dream-sense overcame me, and I looked
with a curious intense feeling into every face I could sight in the
disappearing carriages. One man was looking out of the window. Was he
the object of that woman’s wild search and agony? Another was preparing
to undress. Groups were settling down for the night. The restaurant car
was empty, but the white-capped _chef_ was busy in his tiny kitchen.
It all passed through my sense of vision like a phantom. The porter
touched me on the shoulder and led me to the slow train. He treated me
as one distracted but harmless. He placed me in a tight compartment
with six others, and committed me to their charge. I remained sitting
bolt upright for eighteen hours, past Dijon and Lyons; past Avignon,
where the rose of dawn met us; past Arles to Marseilles, where our
engine breasted the breeze of the Mediterranean and snorted with new
breath into Toulon and along the Amethyst Coast to Cannes.
At Cannes I felt as though I were awaking from a dream. I struggled
towards the hotel, where my convalescent aunt had been hanging
irresolute between life and death, and was now sufficiently well to
decide between two exquisite hats--one from Paris and another bought
in Cannes. Fortunately a friend in need had nursed her through the
crisis of pneumonia, and recovery was now a question of days. It was
Martha MacArthur, one of the world’s delectables. At my aunt’s bedside
I apologised for missing the _Rapide_ and arriving so late. Martha
started. “Missed it? Why, the _Rapide_ crashed last night, with great
loss of life!” As my aunt had just escaped from the jaws of germigerous
death, it was perhaps not the moment to acquaint her with my even more
astounding survival, but I felt an overwhelming desire to ask Martha
why I was alive. Mr. Joseph, in his “Short Story Writing for Profit”
remarks on page 118 that “certain names have a strong suggestion of
character about them. Martha suggests the dutiful housewife; Dolly,
Betty or Kitty the rather frivolous young lady.” According to the
rules I should have never introduced the name of Martha into this
Story, especially as Martha presented the very opposite of the dutiful
housewife as she slung me in her Rolls-Royce through the narrow streets
of Cannes, leaving perilously minute margins between her wheels and
trembling human obstacles. But Martha is one of the protected. Her golf
is Paradisal, her card play diabolical--I can speak from experience.
On our way to the Casino at Cannes--which is the great caravanserai
of the loose, losing and lost, I ventured at last to ask her why I
was alive. She took it as a reflection on her driving! Before I could
tell her my Story, we had entered the great Casino--which seems built
of dissected strata of coloured ice-cream; with great plate-windows
framing pictures of the Mediterranean, and electric chandeliers hanging
over potted palm trees like bunches of horrible glassy dates--and under
an enormous Chinese black and white lantern I unfolded my tale. It was
so strange, telling a ghostly yarn in that heated atmosphere to Martha,
who sat like a frond of Swiss edelweiss, cool and white and natural
in that huge orchidaceous hot-house, where monstrous flowers of the
Venus Fly Trap variety swayed to and fro in the scented air, seeking
whom they might conveniently suck--those flowers to whom champagne and
shampoo mean more than the daily dews and brushing breeze of heaven.
For a moment I imbibed my surroundings. I felt brought down to the real
earth; and a drink-soaked and perfumed earth. There was nothing ghostly
or dreamy within those walls. I told my weird yarn against a strongly
contrasting background.
Martha said nothing beyond tossing her multiwaved head of newly-hatched
canary fluff into the air. I asked her again, at the end as at the
beginning of my Story, why I was alive. Martha accepted and considered
my story. Then she said that I must have been attuned to see what
was probably invisible to others in the station. Had I ever seen the
face in the vision before? she asked. No! Did it seek to attract any
beside myself? I could not say. Possibly, in spite of the individual
fascination it concentrated on myself. Did I look for the face on
the train I took? Yes, I searched the train at Marseilles and again
at Cannes, but I had seen nothing. Martha’s little oval face became
Buddhistic with wisdom, and she said: “There must be a reason. There
must be a hidden law. Rhythm is the secret law of life. My golf is
rhythm. My dancing is rhythm. That’s why I won’t dance with you. My
card play is rhythm. That’s why you can’t play with me. My Rolls-Royce
is rhythm.” I shivered at this particular memory. “You must have been
in spirit-rhythm with some soul trying to communicate with another
passenger, perhaps the wife of one of those killed or injured, or the
mother. A psychological communication cord was pulled. That was all.”
I felt that I had been very lucky in noticing that cord being pulled.
I grew calmer and less exalted. The tables in the Casino were filling
with visitors. All the unmentionable and all the most-mentioned people
were crowding and jostling together. An Indian Prince entered with
his white wife, followed by her white lover, which looked like one of
Buchanan’s artistic “Black and White” Whisky advertisements. A lady
suddenly became lit with the vapours of wine, and began clapping a
broad-backed English Peer between his startled shoulders. Almost at the
next table to Martha was Monsieur Lazarus (of Paris). It was almost a
Scriptural touch. All the lights of Leeds and the bloods of Birmingham
were marshalling in that delightful atmosphere where baccarat is not
a sin and Sin itself is but a baccarat. English people had thrown off
their national hypocrisy for once. The doors revolved, and I noticed
Mrs. Grundy herself enter in company with a courtesan to whom she
had kindly given a lift, and who was gracefully lighting a cigarette
for her in return. They were all there--the _demi-mondaines_, the
half-world watching for gentlemen half-seas over to rifle. They were of
all sizes, from the Brighton flapper to the Double Dutch. But they gave
Leeds and Birmingham something appreciable to see and speak about and
even to handle.
We rose and wandered into the inner gambling hall, where the tables
were arranged according to prices. At the high table, roped and guarded
by attendants, some of the great intellects of Europe played baccarat
for huge stakes--thousands and tens of thousands of francs. The shoe
of cards was passing. There was an English Marchioness looking like
the last rose of last summer as the French bank-notes dropped like
faded pink petals from her fingers. There was a gorgeously-dressed
pickpocket, who still spied sentimentally for international service
and patriotically relieved stray Englishmen of their francs. There was
an exiled King playing for his hotel bill. There was a Bond Street
jeweller fleecing the clients he overcharged at home. There was a green
Egyptian Prince trying furtively to pick up a little cash with one
hand and royal honours with the other. He was financed by an American
Lady who liked sharing in the pseudo-curtsies he extracted from the
gullible. There was a transatlantic widow in hooded black, whose face
of suppressed fury when she lost money made the humanitarian glad that
there were no husbands left to her reproach. And there was a beautiful
Italian Countess, whose favours inclined to the most substantial
winner at the tables. She at least must have had a human heart. But
it takes women with hearts and men with intellect to play baccarat.
One felt sorry that the love and council-chambers of the world were
even temporarily deprived of so much. The shoe of cards was passing,
and the notes were passing into the maw of the Casino, the little
insatiable slit, which takes a tithe on all gains and on all losses. I
was fascinated watching the croupiers, men like dead, dissected fish,
whisk the cards and bank-notes about with their long, thin shovels of
pearwood, which moved as quickly as the dorsal fins of sharks basking
on a sea of green baize. And the evening was passing into night, and
night into dawn.
Martha continued to explain her Gospel of Rhythm. Luck at the tables
was rhythm, she said, and when one was out of luck, it meant that one
was simply out of tune or accord with some subtlety of rhythm. My
escape from the doomed train had been due to some rhythm into which I
had strayed with the receptive note uppermost. Luck and rhythm were
the same things. Then she asked me what I had been thinking of when I
came to the Gare de Lyon. And I suddenly remembered the murder that
always crossed my mind there and there only. I told her the story of
the murder that my aunt had once seen, and had passed so vividly into
my mind. “Exactly,” said Martha. “That accounts for it all. You must
have seen the wife trying to warn her lover that her husband was on his
tracks, and the astral reflection of her agony to get him to change
trains was projected into your mind rhythmically.”
It sounded a good solution. I could imagine it all: the secret visit
and departure; the discovery by the husband of the hour of the lover’s
train; his pursuit with a revolver, while the agonised wife made an
equally desperate attempt to warn the other first; her failure to
warn her lover; the husband’s successful search and then the drama of
blood. I suppose I had put myself into the mood to see her unhappy and
disembodied soul, which is for ever doomed to scour that platform on
a vain quest. Her words had accorded miraculously with my fate. Luck
and rhythm, then, were the same. And that’s my Story, though I have
not kept the rules of short story telling. What I have written down is
true in the essentials. If you want to know how true it is exactly, ask
Martha MacArthur!
THE NECROPHILE
The most extraordinary story I ever heard in my life came from the
mouth of a priest. It came quite unsought, for I was making a silent
retreat in a Carthusian monastery. It was likewise unexpected, for
I had gone to rest, not to rack, my mind. The rule of Saint Bruno
enforces a cessation of sound. And the Great Silence from vespers to
midday had rolled over the wearied souls in the guest house twice:
silence unbroken save by the solemn and rugged chant of the monks; real
chant and real monks. The surreptitious aid of organ pipes was unknown
in the Carthusian service. The roaring and wheezing of compressed air
through leaden guts and wooden tripery, however harmonious and tuneful,
had never been thought necessary in the Carthusian scheme for bringing
Multiplicity back to Unity, Created to their Creator and contemplatives
into that glowing orb of essential Contemplation which is God.
Supremely and serenely God contemplates, and the holy contemplatives on
earth enter His thoughts and His contemplation. And they contemplate
Him in return. If it were not so, how else could they endure that
appalling life of solitude, mewed in little prisons, toiling in lonely
workshops and solitary gardens, or, after rising to chant the sublime
office at midnight, returning to snatch a few hours of slumber, before
dawn recalls them to the choir and the Carthusian Mass. For, steeped
in the thirteenth century, they keep the ceremonies and liturgy of
their religion before it was demediævalised and emasculated by the
Renaissance. So delightfully do the Carthusians remain in their own
century that they still prostrate themselves flat at the Confiteor, and
wear stockings cut out of two pieces of linen and spliced together!
Knitting-needles would be heresy, and a sewing-machine modernism! It is
so throughout their rules and customs, which leave them with the proud
boast shared by no other Order. Never reformed because never deformed.
_Numquam reformata quia numquam deformata!_
We were a little wearied, for we had been listening to the great Office
of Matins chanted from midnight until two in the morning. Ensconced in
the hanging gallery, buried behind the huge printed prayer books of the
Carthusian rite, we had sat, letting the rival delights of slumber and
plain-chant dispute for our senses. At times it was like being carried
out to sea upon successive waves that choked one’s ear-drums. At
another time one felt sinking, sinking into the dull, matted vibrations
that eternally reach the ocean depths from above. Then the sound had
died down, and each holy father, wearing the ghostly white shroud in
which he will one day be buried, picked up his lantern and made his
way back through unending cloister to the cell in which he circumvents
death with pious irony. Death and the devil are put to considerable
mock in a Carthusian house. Death causes no alarm, no terror. All his
tricks, all his stage-effects have been put into daily practice by the
Religious. The utter loneliness that cuts off the soul from the whole
human family, the secretion behind narrow stone walls, the white
funeral clothes, the silence that forbids all the hum and humours and
humdrum of noisy, gossipy human life, reduce Death himself to parody.
And then? And then they see intellectually, that is to say they
contemplate while yet alive what the dead see to their exquisite joy or
lingering loss.
The guests were the usual habitants of monastery guest-houses. A poet,
who had failed of attaining perfect sonnet-form first on cocoa at
Oxford, and on cocaine subsequently in Paris. He was thinking, in some
despair, of joining the Holy Church. An architect successful enough in
his line, and with a rare knowledge of Gothic, but superficially and
glitteringly, for he was an atheist, and none can have real knowledge
of the Gothic grandeur without acknowledging the true religion and the
true God. God, shall we say? built the vault of Heaven, and strewed
the gargoyles of the constellations across its symmetry. Mediæval man
built the Gothic Cathedral in reply, and God saw that it was good.
God poised the planets in space to show what could be done without
actually breaking eggs, and man riposted with the flying buttress,
that marvellous hanging miracle of thrust and strain riveted into
immobility, and man showed God that he, too, could suspend stone in the
void. And again God perceived, almost to His delighted embarrassment,
that it was good.
None of us could understand how a Gothic architect could remain an
atheist. Once the Divine in man, that is to say his art, is realised,
it is only a step to the Divinity. There was also a Monsignor, an
Austrian and a mild-faced mystery. It was not until the end of the
retreat that we learnt a little of his identity. We were committed on
our honour to silence except during the hour of recreation, when we
moved round a high-walled garden, wondering desperately what things
were happening on the highway the other side--that is to say in the
world.
There were monks in the Monastery who had not seen a newspaper for
thirty years, and even happy ones to whom woman was an extinct animal.
A silent laybrother served our meals with shaven head and untrimmed
beard, looking like the shrouded figure of Time himself. After each
meal I expected him to leave a running hour glass on the table instead
of the cheese, and point toward it with bony fingers as though to
suggest that the course of our life was also finished. The strain of
silence was having its effect, and on the last day of the retreat we
became more and more communicative during the hour of recreation.
I told some very dull and uninspiring tale. I suffer from normality,
and my life is inclined to convention. The architect, while redoubling
his artistic appreciation of the Carthusian life, repeated his
atheistic ultimates toward life. He gave the rather absurd reason for
his attitude that he had been always disappointed by women. Who hasn’t,
including the Saints? I could not help retailing him a newspaper poster
I had once read in America which ran: “MAN TWICE DIVORCED REFUSES TO
BELIEVE IN GOD!” We all laughed, and the Monsignor began disclosing
his past. As we had expected, he had incurred some kind of disgrace
in his own country. He was not a fallen priest, but a Prelate on the
shelf. It was not owing to any scandal, he explained, and we believed
him, but owing to his intellectual backsliding that he had missed
his ecclesiastical career. Modernism had fired him with its bright
Will-o’-the-wisp, and he had not remained unsinged. However, he had
been permitted to retain priestly rank and dress, and to travel on his
own means. He was visiting the English cathedrals (an American rather
than a Christian form of pilgrimage) and had been so shocked by their
ghastly and sepulchral interiors that he had fled to the Carthusians
as he said to seek a little oil for his creaking soul. The actual
services he had seen had filled him with depression. As he expressed it
himself they reminded him of the facetiousness of undertakers! Better
he thought that the cathedrals had been destroyed than made ridiculous.
His was the true Catholic spirit.
He never forgot the holy office which was his, and made a serious
attempt to supplement the silent efforts of the Carthusians in
converting the architect. On our last evening of recreation we agreed
to make a concerted assault on our companion. We found that his atheism
was not based on any pose of disbelief, but on a total inability to
understand how a human body could rise formally and substantially from
the dead. “I don’t see why spirits shouldn’t survive like sheets of
luminous paint, but as for atoms rearranging their constituency in a
human body it is impossible,” he argued. “Annihilation seems far more
logical and probable, and proper after death.”
“Nevertheless,” said the Monsignor, “we believe in the resurrection
of the body from the dead.” And he proceeded to the theories of
scholastics. “You must understand that the body like the soul is
created not generated by the Creator. Creation is a more perfect and
sublimer act than generation. Soul and body are both called out of
the misty void, out of space, out of nothing, and therefore both
are capable of passing into complete abeyance again. The Creator can
uncreate and then recreate. The resurrection of the body is a form of
recreation. But He Himself will not annihilate an atom of His own work.”
The architect returned to the charge: “The atoms of a dead human
body pass into other bodies. Whose body shall they be on the Day of
Resurrection?” The reply was that Unity could bring about Multiplicity,
and just as the multiplication of the loaves was a scriptural miracle,
and the multiplication of the Host a constant occurrence in missionary
history, it was possible that atoms could be multiplied to serve their
different turns so to speak.
“Can God unmake? Can He annihilate the dust He has created?” asked
the architect. “No!” said the Monsignor, for they had settled down
to a duel, “but God is the cause of energy as the sun is of colour,
and as the sun can equally cause colour to rise or fade, so God can
cause energy and existence to come or collapse out of the atoms. That
is death! But the sun can one day recolour those identical atoms in
other leaves. The atoms can be the same, so that you really get a
resurrection of the body of the leaf. The human body can be similarly
restored.” Somehow it did not convince.
“What age will our bodies be when they rise again?” asked the
architect. “We shall be outside of Time and therefore quite ageless.
God is not a source or a sequence, but the primal power. He is the
Motor causing all motion. Our bodies are emanations from Him, and He
can cause or uncause them voluntarily.”
The conversation was only prevented from becoming quarrelsome by the
difficulty both combatants felt in wielding metaphysical terms. They
disagreed as to what atoms were, as to whether the divine power showed
itself in a materialistic manipulation of things or in a kind of cosmic
mania. The architect was at one time willing to admit the personality
of God, but only on the corollary that God was mad. It explained so
much, the crinks in the universe, the genius of man, the brilliance
of the stars, the comets tearing out of place. The madness of God was
of course a divine madness. “Yes,” said the Monsignor very solemnly.
“Bethlehem was madness, Nazareth was paranoia, and Calvary delirium.”
From the metaphysical the discussion became biological. The architect
admitted that fresh bouts of the life-spirit could reanimate dead
matter, but not the same set of atoms. Once dead, nothing could revive
a dead anatomy. Could the Monsignor record a single instance except the
legendary tale of Lazarus, who was probably in a state of coma, and
whose personal experiences by some extraordinary oversight on the part
of the Evangelists had been withheld from the human race?
The Monsignor became angry and took his challenge. “I believe it is
quite possible,” he said, “for the life-spirit to be restored to a
dead body long after physical death has occurred. I will tell you a
story for which I have the evidence. I shall make a series of positive
statements and leave it as such. The circumstances are morbid in
the extreme, but you will excuse my narration of them. I have never
breathed this story before, but I consider that I am justified if I can
at least refute your statement that the dead rise up never. I say they
do. I can give an instance which was not coma. Life can go, and life
can be reinfused.
“When I was a young priest in Vienna, before my rise to favour at
Court, I was, in addition to my parish duties, detailed for work at
the Morgue. I waited there three nights every week to receive the
unknown dead, and to give them the benefit of a religious reception.
Some of the dead were recognised, and a few were claimed. Relatives
were grateful for such Catholic rites as I could give to those, who had
generally died without Absolution or Sacrament. I loved saying Mass for
the Unknown dead lying in the Morgue, not knowing their names or their
lives. The Church is the Mother not only of the living, but also of the
dead, and her arms are strong to stretch down even into the pit. How
surprised some of these stray souls must have been to find the Church,
which they had forgotten on earth, following them with charitable hands
into the other world. I was stationed for two years at the Morgue.
“One day the police brought an unclaimed body and left it upon a
marble slab. It was that of a woman still in her beauty, and not more
than thirty years of age. I could see that she had been a woman of
pleasure, though, as is often the case, the extreme sadness of her face
counteracted the dis-sanctification of her body. Poor child! The Morgue
was seldom without one of her unclassed class. I could say Mass for
her which I could not for the suicides. The suicides the Church leaves
to God. He alone can say the Office of the Dead for those who have
destroyed the life which He gave to them, and which He alone has the
right to take.
“It happened that evening that the Commissioner of Police brought
an anonymous party apparently of relations to view the tragic human
relics in the Morgue. One of them appeared to be of rank, for the
Commissioner saluted him at every opportunity. They remained some time
in front of the woman’s body admiring the great beauty of her features
and inquiring her name. Though the records were examined, nothing
definite could be learned except that she was a courtesan, who had
had the misfortune to die during an evening party in the house of a
gentleman, who preferred to remain unnamed. His doctor had brought the
body and filled the necessary certificates, and the great gentleman,
at whose expenses she had perished, had sent a hundred kronen to
provide her funeral. It was understood that she had no family. In his
anxiety to learn her history the distinguished stranger asked for me
to be presented to him, and I found myself shaking the hand of a Duke,
connected with one of the German Royal Houses. When I was unable to
add to his information, he turned from me with wandering eyes and an
expression which to me seemed bordering on dementia. Curiously enough
he congratulated me on my good fortune in being chaplain at the Morgue,
but this I took for an excess of politeness on his part. It was not
considered a very high ecclesiastical position. He was closeted for
some time with the Commissioner and drove away.
“Later that night I was summoned to attend a dying man, who died
before I could do more than hear his confession. He was friendless,
and his body was taken to the Morgue. I followed. It was a late hour,
and I decided to finish reading my Breviary in the Secretary’s room.
While seated there, I was astonished to hear footsteps in the inner
hall, where the unclaimed dead were thrown on marble slabs. A shadow
was cast against the frosted-glass partition, and it was followed by
another. I stood involuntarily in the doorway. To my amazement it was
the Commissioner, who was again taking the Duke round the grim contents
of the room. I could not help overhearing them, and what I did not
overhear my horrified senses supplied. There are things that one has
read in books about sick souls or demented bodies, that I had never
dreamed of meeting. How can I explain?
“To forestall my story, the Duke I could realise was deeply afflicted
mentally, I do not say morally, for he was not responsible. It was
not hereditary but accidental. I learnt all this some time after. I
must explain that he had had a terrible experience at marriage. After
a passionate and romantic courtship his young wife had died of heart
failure in his arms a few hours after the ceremony. The marriage night
had become a watch night of the dead, during which he had passed a
ghastly vigil instead of enjoying an efflorescence of happiness. In
answer to his entreaties he had been left alone with the body of his
wife that night. His groans and prayers were heard until a late hour....
“The effect on the unhappy Duke was serious. His character, hitherto,
had been irreproachable, and his experiences in love matters exceeding
slight, considering the opportunities possible to his rank and fortune.
It was a stroke of incredibly bitter irony, which I should hesitate to
lay at the door of a benevolent Providence, that his marriage night
should have been of such horror. His bride was buried, but the effect
on the white tablets of his mind was lasting. To a large extent he
became a recluse, avoiding society, and more especially all the gay
world of women and wives and half-women and half-wives, who present
such an alarming phase of modern civilisation. Unfortunately his
loneliness was obsessed by one very gruesome but innocent form of
sentiment. He only fell in love with the dead, in whom he ocularly
memorised the last vision of his wife. There was no carnal wickedness
on his part, for he showed signs of a diabolical possession, that is of
not being his own possessor, and of indulging in uncanny and fantastic
wishes, which in his saner moments he would never have tolerated. His
friends proposed that he should be solemnly exorcised by the Church,
but his Confessor was nervous, and the modern Cardinal Archbishop
would never give his consent to anything so mediæval. In the Middle
Ages of course the most solemn and terrifying of rites would have
been performed, and I have no doubt that the poor Duke was actually
possessed by an unhappy demon--explain his malady how you will. He was
unable to resist this terrible instinct, this love of watching women
who were newly dead. I suppose it could be explained. The supreme
anguish and the supreme joy of his life had come to him on the same
day, and he had mingled them in the one night until agony and ecstasy,
delight and grief, life and death must have become indistinguishable.
But the result had been distressing in the extreme, and from time to
time the mad Duke emerged from gloomy solitude to satisfy his widowed
eyes. The police had orders, certainly not to facilitate his sepulchral
amours, but not to prevent him, for the doctors when consulted agreed
that if he were thwarted he would become dangerous. As it was, he was
studiously observant of the natural rights and feelings of the living,
and though when his secret agents heard of the death of a beautiful
woman they instantly visited the next of kin, he never pressed his
suit except with the most pathetic delicacy. In the cases when through
poverty or even through a curious form of snobbery (for with some folk
snobbery is stronger than reverence or death) he was permitted to see
the corpse, he always insisted on defraying the eventual expenses of
the funeral and, when the relatives allowed, of appearing at the grave
side of the object of his momentary affection. There is no human law
which forbids a man to love a corpse, provided the dead body is not
desecrated, and receives proper burial within the number of ordained
days. And the Duke was careful almost to the verge of scruple on this
point. However morbid this habit might be considered, it was overlooked
under two heads. There was the fact that the Duke’s aberration caused
no unhappiness to anyone except himself, and secondly that he suffered
the most agonising remorse and shame between each outbreak of his
singular passion for still life. The leading pathologists declared that
it was a very exceptional case.
“In any case the Duke was not interrupted in his Platonic love affairs
with Hades, though, poor man, I remember his pathetic grief, which
could be charitably construed into a madman’s ideas of being faithful
to a dead woman.
“However, I learnt all this long after that evening which was to
have such a curious effect on my subsequent life, the evening of the
Duke’s visit to the Morgue, a visit as I then imagined out of ordinary
curiosity. As I previously mentioned, I had returned late that night
to dispose of the friendless man, whose soul I had previously guided
as well as I could into the shadows of the other world. I was reading
the last words of my Breviary by the flickering gaslight, when suddenly
shadows passed the frosted glass, and to my horror I heard the Duke
making arrangements for the temporary watching of the beautiful woman
I had already seen him cover with piteous eyes. I gathered that it
was not considered discreet, and would entail a licence from the
police, to remove the body from the Morgue to his private house. So
saying, they both entered where I was standing. It was one of the most
embarrassing moments of my life. The Duke turned as pale as one of
the marble mortuary slabs, and the Commissioner actually seized me as
though to prevent my escape. When they realised that I was a priest,
they seemed relieved, for a priest becomes so used to the seal imposed
upon the confessional that even secrets which come to him in other
ways join that silence of the grave. They both read what came in my
face, and without a word nodded to each other, and passed on their
way. I finished writing the formularies descriptive of my unknown
client, and left him lying with the others. I noticed that he was on
the next slab to the mysterious woman. It was beyond human nature for
me to refrain from glancing a second time at her features. They were
beautiful with the pallid unreality of the sculptor’s art. I have
observed that if the sculptor attains the slightest line of beauty or
personality in his art, it is far more wonderful than the painter’s.
It is more difficult to raise life out of the marble depths than upon
the surface of canvas or paint. But to leave by brush or chisel any
idea of the life that has recently left the countenance is the most
difficult. And this lovely model from the Divine sculptor conveyed that
haunting expression which sometimes the mediæval tombs possessed, as
though life lingered in death. How can I describe it? If you have ever
seen a fort or town which has been surrendered to the enemy, there is
a moment of tremendous pathos after the flag has been lowered and the
garrison withdrawn, before the enemy have taken possession. The prize
lies like the body of Patroclus between contending rivals. So, I may
say, lay the body of this beautiful woman, over whom life and death had
contended, and now that the colours of life had been lowered she lay
awaiting the legions of death and corruption. I turned away, making
the Sign of the Cross, and said the _De Profundis_ for the absent
soul. It was well that it had passed from its hostel’s desecration.
The next morning the body was gone. And then the weeks and the months
passed.... I was agreeably surprised that winter to be summoned by my
Bishop, and told that the moment of my promotion had arrived. I was to
be sent to a fashionable parish, where I would find more leisure to
continue my taste for historical studies, which the Bishop was gracious
enough to say had met his attention when inspecting the Seminary. He
wished me to leave my curacy, and with it those unhealthy but rather
fascinating duties at the Morgue, while another priest took my place.
I bowed to the Bishop’s decision, and kissed his ring. As I rose to
leave his anticamera he mentioned without a trace of inner meaning,
as though he were saying the most natural thing in the world, ‘You
owe your promotion to the kind offices of the Duke.’ To my amazement
he mentioned the name of the Duke I had reason to remember under
ineffaceable circumstances. The Bishop looked at me with the gentle
wondering look as though to say: ‘Go in peace, my son, your career is
made. You know how to keep secrets. To those who can keep the secrets
of humanity or of the Church all things will come.’ At least this came
into a mind, alert to guess the reasons of the Duke’s action in my
favour.
“I found my new position delightful--new interests, new ecclesiastical
visions, new friends. My confessional was thronged, which is always
pleasing to a young priest. When one becomes older, one’s professional
vanity can be adequately satisfied by shriving one old washerwoman _per
diem_. One day the confessional bell rang out of my usual hours. I
descended into the Church and a woman heavily veiled began telling me
the history of her life. As a good confessor, I forget all she said.
It is a blank, but I can say that the sweat poured down my face before
I left my seat. She joined me in the sacristy as she wished to speak
to me of other matters, and once outside the sacred seal my memory of
course returns. I recall that she was anxious for me to arrange her
private wedding. She wished to be married at the dead of night, and
my name had been mentioned as the only one fit and willing to perform
the ceremony. I replied that I could do nothing without my Bishop’s
consent, but that I would take him the particulars immediately, if she
would leave me her name and address. She replied that that she could
not, but a carriage would come to fetch me that night to perform the
ceremony, which would take place in a private house. So saying she laid
the marriage fees on the table, and without letting me look through her
veil handed me a letter from her bosom, which she requested me to give
the Bishop. Then she withdrew.
“That afternoon I called on the Bishop without giving notice, and to my
surprise was admitted immediately. He listened quietly to my request,
which I never dreamed for a moment he would permit, but I gave him the
lady’s letter. He glanced at the contents as though he knew it all
in advance. Without a trace of surprise or reflection in his eyes he
nodded and told me to perform the ceremony that night if I was sent
for. I gasped something about papers and ecclesiastical authorisation.
He forestalled me with a packet of papers, bidding me fill all the
particulars except the names of those about to be married. He ordered
me under severe penalties to bring back the papers without attempting
to read the signatures. He himself would fill in the names in the body
of the document. I respectfully withdrew, and waited in my rooms that
evening with some of the trepidation that I can imagine a girl feeling
while waiting for her first romance.
“After a solitary dinner I waited and waited. I finished reading
my Office for the day, and still sat waiting. I was too excited to
pray, too curious to meditate, too tired to read any book of piety.
I waited from nine to eleven, and from eleven to half-past eleven. A
bell rang and to my amazement my friend the Duke was introduced. He
explained that he had come because he was not sure if I would come on
such a wild goose chase, and also because it was necessary for me to
come blindfolded. Under his guarantee I naturally lent myself to the
adventure, and left the clergy house in a two-horsed carriage with a
tight bandage round my eyes. The Duke never spoke to me, but he helped
me very graciously out of the carriage, and through a courtyard, and up
what seemed a very fine flight of stairs, for I quickly felt that I was
treading marble, not wood.
“Then my eyes were released and I found myself standing in a long
and richly curtained apartment. There were two witnesses blindfolded
like myself, standing in front of an altar brought apparently out of
a private chapel. Others there were none except the Duke and the lady
whose confession I had heard that afternoon. The Duke then asked me
to perform the marriage ceremony between them. I bowed and took up my
place before the altar beside which were laid the necessary vestments.
As in a dream I proceeded to recite the prayers and perform the
gestures which should symbolise and solderise the mystical union of
two human beings. I had reached the moment for the Duke to place the
ring on the finger of the bride, when she let slip her veil, and for
a minute I could neither speak nor move. I should have been prepared,
but it had never crossed my mind, not even as the wildest and maddest
possibility. My friends, the bride whom I was uniting in marriage with
the Duke was the woman whose body I had seen laid on a marble slab at
the Morgue a year previously!
“She stood there with the same transcendent beauty, but with the slight
flush of life and love recurdling in her cheeks. This was the woman
whom I had seen among the dead and for whose soul I had said Mass! The
dead shall rise up and praise Thee, O Lord!
“Truly I may say that love is stronger than death and that God had most
strangely permitted this woman to be raised from the dead, by the whim
of a madman’s sentiment. Though she had been a sinner she was found
not unworthy of what I account as a miracle. Like the Prince and the
sleeping Beauty in the Fairy tale the Duke had restored her to life.
Their marriage was naturally morganatic, but as the incident restored
the Duke to his normal senses, it was a marriage that neither Church
nor State cared to forbid.”
THE BEAU GESTE
The _Beau geste_ is rare enough but not unknown in English life.
Certainly there is no English paraphrase. “Beautiful gesture” bespeaks
the orator or actor without conveying a certain brilliance, a sense of
the unique and sometimes the sheer spirituality which is inherent in
the _Beau geste_. “Noble act” sounds like a subscription to a hospital.
The schoolboy who thought that _Beau geste_ was another French way
of saying _Bon mot_ could not have been further astray. The _Beau
geste_ must be heroically conceived and, what is harder, artistically
expressed!
The Saints have often shown themselves capable of the _Beau geste_,
which carried to a sublime degree in supernatural matters can often be
advanced as a reason for canonisation. An ordinary soul may cherish
the sense of the _Beau geste_ through a lifetime without finding the
occasion. Expression does require an occasion, a crisis or a crash.
Nothing became King Charles so well in his life as leaving it. Charles
on the scaffold, Sir Philip Sidney at Zutphen and Byron at Missolonghi,
knew how to make the _Beau geste_ to posterity. There is no life
however spoilt or degraded that cannot be irradiated if not redeemed by
the _Beau geste_ at its close. There is the _Beau geste_ of the sinner
as well as the _Beau geste_ of the righteous. The Good Samaritan was
of the latter and many a pardoning husband since. The _Beau geste_
of the profligate is rarer, but neither disgrace nor degradation can
tarnish the _Beau geste_ when it is made. The American clergyman,
who was executed for poisoning an unfortunate sweetheart when he saw
the chance of marrying a richer, seemed beyond the pale. There was
possibly nothing he could do to redeem himself, but with a supreme
effort he succeeded in blinding himself in prison. “If thine eye offend
thee pluck it out.” Well, he did so, and went not unjustified to the
gruesome chair. Again, the Dutch dancer, whose career of spycraft was
brought to book by the punctuation of a French firing squad, rose to
that occasion. Dressing herself for execution in a superb opera cloak
she only asked leave to give the signal unblindfolded. This was granted
by the officer on duty. She gave the signal by lifting her arms and
revealing her person to the bullets. “_C’était beau_” quoth the Gallic
centurion in charge.
Men and women are both capable of the _Beau geste_, but it takes a
woman to appreciate it sometimes, to accept its shining significance
or to bow to its grim subtlety. A woman’s _Beau geste_ is often lost
on a man’s intelligence but a man’s is never lost on a woman’s. Even
in connubial life the _Beau geste_ occurs and in the hour of greatest
disaster. Couples are too often coupled like railway carriages on
well worn lines by certificated couplers. They are expected to roll
placidly from Junction to Junction with occasional rests in the siding.
Everything is done to avoid accidents, but accidents will occur on the
best regulated lines and the collapse, like the start, of married life
can be relieved by a _Beau geste_ embalming even what may be a broken
memory for both. In any case a _Beau geste_ is never lost on a woman.
Let me think of two instances, one at the commencement, and the other
at the end of a married career.
I remember a young Italian Prince, the future head of a family, whose
veins ran with patrician and papal blood. At one moment of his life
he insisted on entering a _mésalliance_ by marrying a very beautiful
courtesan, whom many of his friends had known under attached but
detachable circumstances. They were naturally very distressed when he
insisted on crowning his deep love with marriage. It seemed unnecessary
and suicidal and caused his family the utmost apprehension. As a matter
of fact courtesans who have made their career and their fortunes may
yet make admirable wives. Everything however was done in this case
to avert the catastrophe. Even the lady, who loved him with equal
nobility of passion, refused to allow him to sacrifice himself. But
her unselfishness made him more desperate and more determined to wreck
his prospects at her feet. His friends were equally determined, and in
a last effort to avert the marriage confronted him with legal proofs
that his intended bride had been confined of an illegitimate child. Of
her lovers he was aware, but this was new to him, and for a moment he
was staggered. Recovering himself, he said, with one superb gesture
of contempt, “Then it was by an immaculate conception!” and married
her the next day. It was the _Beau geste_ of a great lover and of a
Catholic nobleman. A Protestant bourgeois would have virtuously slunk
out of the affair and left her to the streets.
But John Betterman, whose marriage story supplies me with the second
of my instances, was just a well-meaning and wealthy English
public-school man, two generations away from Trade and, if truth be
told, three generations off a butler. There was no glowing blood in his
descent and no noble obligations held sway in his composition, but when
his wife left him he behaved with real magnanimity. And in his case the
_Beau geste_ repaid him a hundredfold. Like most of us, he had to pass
through the experience of feminine desertion.
John Betterman was no lover, and, much as he loved the affectionate
woman who married him for his well-furnished house in Belgravia, his
choice cook, butler and housekeeper, he could never inspire her with
more than a deep appreciation. Affectionate appreciation lasted until
his wife fell in love with one of those American officers who caused
such havoc in the Allied ranks. Cornelius Murphy stood about six foot
four and looked a cross between George Washington and Adonis. He danced
like an Archangel on the tight-rope, and Broadway had taught him to be
a real lover. He was fatal, like all his type, to the unsophisticated
women of Europe. John Betterman’s wife had dreamed of such a find
before she met him. Once she had found her dream, she never stopped
meeting him. Captain Murphy received a standing invitation for lunch,
dinner and tea and a sitting invitation for most moments between. It
came under the Hospitality to Allies scheme. After the Armistice they
danced together for six weeks. The Armistice was not made applicable
to the war of sexes, which raged all the fiercer after the suspension
of masculine hostilities. Man’s earthly warfare was not intended to
be against his own sex. He must eternally meet the approaches and
desertions of the beloved enemy, whose adorable artillery has always
included all the refinements of poisoned breath, scraps of paper and
submarine poignarding. The question was how would John Betterman take
it. Quiet, inoffensive and obedient husbands can be far more dangerous
than the blustering Pasha.
Cornelius Murphy and Mrs. Betterman withdrew to a Railway Hotel, from
which she telephoned the first news of her flight to her husband. He
took the parting like a hero. He would cause the necessary reasons for
her to divorce him, and he only asked her to come and fetch her things
the next day and promised that she would not find him in the house. He
added his word of honour. With a sudden sigh she hung up the receiver,
but grateful that she was spared pursuit or scenes. “I will go round
to-morrow and fetch my clothes and all I need travelling abroad,”
she said to Murphy. “It is such a relief that he takes it so kindly.
English gentleman, you know.”
“No, you don’t,” shot Murphy, alert and suspicious, “No such thing as
an English gentleman when it comes to that. It’s bound to be a trap.
You’ll find lawyers and detectives waiting for you.”
Immediately she felt stung with a faint pity for her husband and
insisted on obeying his last unselfish request. “No,” she said firmly,
“I know John Betterman. He would cut off his hand rather than set a
dirty trap. I shall go to-morrow alone.”
“For God’s sake, you shall not!” shouted Murphy. She drew herself up
and said, “It is the price of my remaining with you to-night.” He bowed
his head ashamed. “I was afraid some harm might come to you, darling.
If I were your husband and could trap you I would kill you.”
The next morning he motored her to her husband’s house and waited
while she collected her luggage. A letter was waiting for her on the
hall table in his handwriting. She opened and read. A cheque for ten
thousand pounds fell to the floor. There was no mention of it in the
letter, which ran simply:
DEAR JULIA,
I have been a good husband but not good enough for you. You have been
a perfect wife and to you I assign no fault. If there is something
lacking in your life you must complete yourself elsewhere. When I
come to the end of my life, I shall be as glad as I am now unhappy
that I did not hinder you mounting a flame, which would bring any
other woman unto earth and ashes but upon which I know you will
rise to the highest heaven. When your life is complete, perfect and
finished, let my love still lie like a wreath of immortelles at your
feet.
JOHN.
She cried a little when she read it. A new kind of feeling rose in her
heart which possibly she could not explain. It has been said that every
man kills the thing he loves. Perhaps it is sometimes true that a woman
loves the thing she kills. It was her soul’s response to his _Beau
geste_, the tiniest seed of a love he had never awakened in their whole
married life.
Cornelius Murphy was relieved when he saw her emerge, but he spied her
tears in a second. “Is he there? Did he frighten you?” and he pulled
out his army pistol and dragged her across the threshold. She did not
like his roughness and deliberately backed into the house. Murphy
followed. “Of course he’s not here. I only felt a little sorry going
away, that is all,” she explained. “I guess he had better not follow
us,” said the other and, by way of a visible hint, he loaded his pistol
and left it in the tray of visitors’ cards. Then they both went to
America.
When John Betterman returned to his house that evening it looked as
empty as the shell without the pearl. He gave one glance at the pistol
in the hall, read the name, “Capt. Cornelius Murphy, 105 U.S. Cavalry,”
and gave orders that it was never to be touched. In the morning he
stood staring at that implement of ruffianism and feeling ironical
amusement. But the impetus of his _Beau geste_ was unabated and he
consulted his lawyers on his wife’s behalf. They showed the same sleek
sympathy which coffin-makers always extend to their clients and gave
him the necessary instructions how to enable his wife to divorce him
with least expense and most credit to herself. It was necessary that
he should find a lady who was willing to share the same room (nothing
more, but to be legal hardly less) at an hotel and to forward the
written testimony to the proper quarters.
That evening, accordingly, John Betterman walked round and round the
purlieus of Victoria Station until he was accosted by a cheery lady
with a head of red tow, who suggested drinks in Victoria Station. To
this proposition he agreed, and under these amical surroundings she
confided to him that she was locally known as “Pink Tart” and that
she was ready to pass the evening with bachelors for the sum of ten
shillings sterling. John Betterman offered her five pounds on condition
that she spent the night sitting on one chair, while he sat reading in
another, and that she made no sign of her existence until the morning.
Her name was Susan Honeyman, and she decidedly wished there were
more wealthy lunatics and less impoverished rakes in the vicinity of
Victoria Station.
Evidence of this extraordinary evening was duly furnished to the
lawyers of Mrs. Betterman, who brought proceedings for divorce in the
most respectable fashion, and received a good deal of broadcasted
sympathy from readers of the best read column in the _Daily Press_,
especially when the flagrant details of Mr. Betterman’s infidelities
were exposed and even the nickname of Miss Susan Honeyman was set down
in stark print and read eagerly by those who would never have allowed
it to soil their lips.
John Betterman felt these shameful and painful details intensely,
but he had come to take a strange and fantastic pleasure in his own
sufferings. His suffering and his shame were for the sake of the woman
he loved. He could ask no more.
Every night washed he his pillow with his tears and imagined deeper
sufferings and further humiliations for himself. Toward his wife he
felt no resentment in the least, not even a little. It had all turned
and curdled into a bitter resentment against himself, bitterer than
death. The months passed and his wife’s divorce was made absolute.
He had borne up his heart while in the twilight stage of “decree
nisi,” but dark finality bowed him to the ground. All that night he
sat wishing to make an end of himself. At last he felt that death
and suicide were too good for him. He must make himself suffer even
more than he had suffered all those weeks, but how? He felt that no
scourging could have hurt him as much as that undefended divorce trial,
the crushing allusions of the paid lawyers, the scornful comment of
the Judge, and, what cut him like vinegar poured into a slit spleen,
the nickname of the woman with whom he was proved to have passed the
stipulated time of lust. If it had been a “Green Goddess” or a “Black
Beauty” it would not have looked so ridiculous in the evening papers,
but the fatal synonym of Miss Susan Honeyman lost him all sympathy even
from himself. He could not help hating himself like Hell.
The next night the house became more than he could endure, and he
strode into the lamp-speckled dark. This way and that, like an
unimaginative madman longing by some astounding stroke to trouble the
mocking world, he sought some action that would help her and hurt
himself, even if it were criminal. He would have gladly gone to prison
to explain this sin of hers. No! by the sweet bones of Christ! she was
sinless and immaculate! But he would willingly have gone to prison to
serve some long sentence incurred by Murphy so that she might live
happily with him. He would out-Enoch Enoch Arden in that way. How could
he sufficiently lower and degrade himself to justify her desertion of
home and husband in the face of the world?
A familiar figure reeled against him near Victoria Station. “Got
any more fivers for sitting up to watch you read all night?” quoth
a coarse but kindly voice. Why, of course he had, and he laughed a
skeleton laugh as he recognised his old friend, who had often told
her friends the story of her midnight escapade with a madman and was
often reminiscent of the divorce proceedings in which her name and
style had been taken by hired lawyers in vain. “Out for a lark?” she
asked, but John Betterman was in dead earnest, when he asked her to go
even further than on their former meeting and consent to marry him at
a registry office the next day. Miss Honeyman would have been really
surprised had she not taken his proposal for a joke. “Why, won’t one
night at the hotel do you again? What do yer want marrying me at the
end of me life?” And she roared with laughter. Only once before had
she been asked in marriage, and that was by her original seducer, who
had subsequently thrown her on the streets. However, John Betterman
not only treated her to supper but gave her twenty pounds to pay her
arrears of rent and buy a decent dress to make a proper appearance the
next morning. No wonder that she went her way rejoicing, astounded at
her luck in falling in again with so profitable a madman. It was in
hopes of another windfall and not of the matrimonial position that
she made her way to the registry the following day. To her amazement
and perhaps a little to his own, John Betterman awaited her, prim
and punctual, but with a look of insane pride in his face. He took a
perverted pride in the depth of degradation and misery he found it
possible to inflict upon his own soul. Before noon they were united
legally by the law of England, and by three o’clock Mrs. John Betterman
the second was lying quite drunk under his dining-room table. It was
years since she had tasted champagne. She had that excuse. She lay
there while John Betterman wrote to his first wife. He wished to put
her into a position from which she could for ever more look down upon
him. He took no further notice of his second wife. Had an angel from
Heaven picked her up and made her drunk with the wine of celestial
grapes she could not have been enjoying greater bliss. In fact at each
interval of sick gratitude she constantly expressed her opinion that
such was the actual case.
He looked up when he had finished writing and at the same moment heard
the bell ring. His housekeeper entered. It was a cable from America
sent by his first wife and it read with tragic simplicity:
“All I have done has been a horrible mistake. I am on the returning
boat. Please meet me on Saturday at Liverpool and forgive your
adoring wife.”
He looked up and remained watching Mrs. Betterman the second slowly
drag herself into a chair and fumble with a cigarette. He twisted
the cable into a spill, touched a red coal and lit her fag. Then
he left her in charge of his housekeeper and went to bed. All his
other servants had given notice and left long ago. On the whole he
decided that it was wisest to keep her under liquor until Saturday.
It was still Tuesday. When his first wife reached Liverpool a special
messenger awaited her with a sealed letter from John Betterman
announcing his legal marriage with his second wife and asking her,
his first, to accept the remainder of the fortune at his disposal. He
himself remained in the gutter.
It was her turn to receive a shock. She sat stunned in her cabin,
unable to go ashore, thinking over the year. It had been a bitter
experience and this was the knife. Murphy had taken her money and,
after dancing her almost to death in the lowest haunts of New York,
had left her for a professional dancer and disappeared. It was the
British Consul who had advanced the money for her return, and this was
her return. In her misery stood forth the miraculous white flower of
sea-engendered love for her husband. It seemed inconceivable to her
that she had not loved him before. She only knew that she had loved
him ever since she had hesitated for one fatal second on his empty
threshold. The thought of his _Beau geste_, infinitely divisible and
intangibly volatile, had caught in some secret recess of her heart and
flowered during the dismays and miseries of her American trip. But
love, real love, is cheap at any price. It was a wonderful experience
for her to feel as she did. Though fate had driven her down a blind
alley and the cup she had snatched had been broken across her bleeding
lips, yet here was a cup more tempting and a more perfect delight. Lust
had carried her across the Atlantic. Love had accompanied her home.
She felt how marvellous it was to feel as she felt even in her intense
suffering. She had never dreamed it was possible. What tinsel all dream
is to one thread of reality!
That night John Betterman gave a holiday to his housekeeper and opened
his own door every time the bell rang. His instinct was right, for the
second ring that he answered was hers. When he opened she knelt, and he
lifted her gently past the threshold that was once theirs. They looked
at each other and he perceived what certainly he had never seen in
her eyes before. She whispered, asking forgiveness, and then with the
lover’s practical outlook, whether the coast was clear? Where was the
other woman? He shuddered and pointed upstairs. She insisted on meeting
her successor. He told her that after nine o’clock she was generally
insensible to the world of visitors and motioned her towards her former
room. Feeling it was part of her penance, she followed and beheld lying
across the bed a rather jovial-looking drab breathing liquor heavily
from the gills. It was an awful moment for her and John Betterman.
Their two faces of agony met and she discerned from his the reflection
of her own great love. And there lay this wretched creature between
them. It was maddening that they should suddenly love each other as
greatly as they did; maddening, too, that they had taken the trouble to
marry and divorce in the past. Yet it was maddening in a delicious way
that they had found each other at last. If they had never divorced they
might never have fallen in love with each other. But they did not try
to think. He picked her up in his arms and the great flash of immortal
love made them one as they stood gazing at each other in trance. She
slipped to his knees.
There she only petitioned that, as she had forsaken him as wife, he
would not spurn her as mistress. The connubial chamber was filled but
she understood now why he had filled it with the filth of the street
rather than seek a presentable second hand rosebud. It was his love for
her. She understood the self-torture he had inflicted upon himself,
his refusal to try and find happiness. She had the woman’s instinct
to realise that this snoring slut symbolised as great a compliment
to herself as though her adoring lover had committed suicide on his
deserted doorstep. Poor John Betterman had committed worse than
suicide. He had assumed a mental torture that no Inquisition would
have imposed. He had clad his soul in the most ghastly of public _San
Benitos_ and made the most piteous _auto-da-fé_ that a despairing man
could make. It all rushed upon her and she only begged to share in his
humiliation. She only asked to lower herself with him into the gutter.
She had forfeited the position of wife but she prayed to be allowed to
live as his hireling in the mews round the corner. She was content to
live in shame. She would go on the streets if he would be her lover.
She promised she would never intrude into his house. He would find her
whenever he wished, humbly waiting upon the hour of his divine visit.
He plucked her from his knees and kissed her ecstatically. There came
an unconscious grunt from their nuptial bed and its temporary incubus
took the occasion to snort.
They could not help laughing. They were lovers and everything turned
to amazing happiness or screaming humour. There could happen nothing
disgusting or distressing to them. The unconscious second wife was
only delightfully ridiculous. The poor thing on the bed had no soul
really, no meaning. She was just a frightful phantom. The next day John
Betterman took rooms over the mews for his first wife and their strange
_ménage_ took root and continued, John Betterman keeping this horrible
but harmless creature under his roof, allowing her five shillings a
day for drink, and leaving her entirely to his housekeeper to prevent
scenes in public. Though she was his legal wife, he had never dreamed
of living with her. She was merely allowed to infest his house like a
tame elemental, smelling as unpleasantly as they say elementals smell,
but far less uncanny. Instead of casting or buying her out, he simply
allowed her to sink brandy-logged in harbour. He was very kind to her
and she could not last very much longer. After dinner every evening he
retired to the mews, neighbours said to escape the horrors of married
life. On Saturday nights the phantom struggled into the purlieus of
Victoria Station, where she returned happily to her old life except
that she treated any men she could induce to come with her. If John
Betterman’s brandy hadn’t been so good she would have sunk underseas
long before. She really was living quite a happy animal life, without
care or worry, comfortably found in bed and board and drink. The
police knew her circumstances and let her alone. She was cheerfully
hail-fellow-well-met with half the boosers and all the broken men and
women of the locality. Sometimes they bamboozled her of her money, but
she was never blackmailed. The wretched company she kept contained
sinners but not beasts. She was believed to have a store in her
stocking and found to be very generous. She always drank to her last
penny. And some outcast was always ready to see her safely home. A year
passed....
She met the beast-type one night, a ruffianly swashbuckler, who spent
his time frightening prostitutes by pretending to be a detective and
squeezing their hard-earned gains. He had heard of Mrs. Betterman’s
reputed savings and when her red, frouzled hair was thrust into his
shirt one Saturday night he devised unto himself prompt and easy
plunder. He swore at her foully and she rather liked him for it. When
he had drunk her last penny, he wanted to take her to her lodging.
She brought him staggering home. John Betterman’s house was empty and
she used her key to open the door. Without turning on the light, she
dragged him upstairs, with the promise of a case of whisky under her
bed, which was true enough, though she forgot that the whisky had been
drunk weeks before. When he found there was no drink, he demanded
money, made avaricious and surprised by the comfort and richness of
her room. He would not take “no” for an answer, but she was used to
dealing with pugnacious gentlemen, and though it was a long time
since she had had to push one downstairs, she was able to master her
carousing companion. He fell heavily through the darkness. She judged
by his swearing that he was not seriously hurt. It was a nuisance.
She would have to follow and let him out of the door. She switched on
the lights in the hall. He was picking himself up. A long, cadaverous
looking fellow with a big nose, who might have been a cashiered cashier
or a Mormon elder in better days, and a hatchet-shaped cheek, was
reeling towards her. She shoved him against the door, where he stood
at bay begging and then threatening. He refused to leave the house
until she paid him and began twisting her wrist until the rotten bones
cracked. Furious with pain, she cut his mouth with the wedding-ring
on her free hand, cut him again and again, till he spluttered blood.
It stung him to singular fury and he looked round for a weapon. By
a chance, that was not so curious, his eye fell on the hall table,
and a clean revolver lying amid the grey visitors’ cards. His hand
closed familiarly upon it and without hesitation he discharged it into
the drunken red halo beside him. With a heart-rending cry the second
Mrs. Betterman fell into a shrivelled heap, but the dirty blood which
trickled from her mouth and gaping temple was not as red as her hair.
Her slayer stood looking at her sullenly. Then he realised that it was
a good chance to go, and blew the second cartridge through his throat.
The police were quickly summoned by the hysterical housekeeper and
spent an hour taking down wholly unnecessary information, for the ends
of Justice had already been served. There was no thought of suspecting
a third person in the crime as the name on the revolver corresponded
with cards and envelopes addressed in the dead man’s pocket. Early next
morning, John Betterman came home and was surprised to find waiting for
him a letter from the Coroner.
THE EVIL EYE
This is a plain tale of that mediæval belief--the Evil Eye--playing its
course in a modern London suburb. Perhaps it is all nonsense ... like
vampires in Kensington. Anyhow, Peter Joneson made a mistake in caring
to come to Mrs. Guilda Faning’s flat every day. Mr. John Faning made a
mistake in not caring that he came, and Mrs. Faning made the mistake
of not caring whether her husband cared or not. None of their feelings
then approximated to definiteness, which was probably a mistake and in
the end a pity. Peter Joneson’s at least tended towards definiteness
and Mrs. Faning was pleased to accept his definite admiration of her
person and personality.
Peter Joneson used to come almost every afternoon and stay as long
as he could. If he missed tea at the flat, he used to write rather a
dull letter of apology or send some smutty flowers bought from the old
woman sitting outside the public-house. He became a piece of movable
furniture in the flat, like an old armchair for Guilda to rest on
mentally or Mr. Faning to shift sometimes from the room unconsciously.
Peter was punctual at coming and good at going. But it was all rather
hazy. He was like a mouse to Guilda. Mr. Faning was one of the happily
uninspired men who want nothing in life. Peter, of course, felt he
wanted something. Guilda only wanted to want something. For want of
something, she began to train herself to want Peter. Peter, of course,
wanted her in a comfortable sort of way but without evil prepense. She
never dreamed of hunting Peter, for she had instinctive woman’s pride,
if her suburban breeding did not allow her good taste. It was enough
that she began to like Peter for the reflex of her liking to reflect
itself fivefold from the lenses of his eyes. The invisible flash and
counterflash did not produce discordancy but touched the same key,
was wafted on the same plane and formed the same ray. The attraction
between them was complete.
But she made a mistake in showing him one day that she loved him, and
Peter made the mistake of showing her husband that he had discovered
that she loved him, and finally Mr. Faning made the mistake of showing
his wife that he had begun to dislike the man she liked. For, of
course, she only liked him the more. Hitherto, nothing had mattered.
Peter had poised his own mind open and for the first time felt her
emotions moving with his. He had always been prepared to fall in love.
Not she, and she still hesitated to admit the great and spicy wind
that bloweth from the South, after having been so long satisfied with
the puffs and draughts and teacup-tempests that make up middle-class
temperament in suburban flats. They had all three agreed in the wish
to live comfortably and quietly. Neighbourly flirtation had suited
both the Fanings, and Peter had made a well-conducted collusive foil
to the husband. The passion that had suddenly flashed between him and
Guilda was as upsetting to all as a hawk lighting on a canary cage or a
thunderstone falling into a suburban rockery.
Mr. Faning was quite upset, for love had crossed his wife’s path once
before. During courtship he had had a serious rival whom Guilda had
loved to distraction, and the stronger she had loved the sadder and
sicker the chosen lover had become until he died. This tale must be
told without subterfuge or keeping back the point. Guilda said he had
died of love, and married her second string. The neighbours said that
Mr. Faning had put weed-killer in his tea. An old housekeeper with a
drop of gipsy blood had said that Guilda, whether she knew it or not,
had the evil eye and would be the death of any person she really loved.
Mr. Faning, however, married her and had lived quite happily without
a day’s illness ever since. This Mr. Faning had taken to disprove
the theory thoroughly. Guilda used to laugh a little when he stated
this view. More logically put, it showed that she did not love her
husband or that the evil eye on her part was mythical. Just an empty
superstition and she had put it quite out of her mind. Her married life
had been quite uneventful and unsorrowed except for one thing. Whenever
she had trained and come to love a dog, it was run over or disappeared
mysteriously. There was Fido, crushed by a cart; there was Carlo, who
had been twisted in the spokes of a butcherboy’s bicycle, and Horatio
Bottomley, a magnificent bulldog, whom she had loved above all her pets
individually and above the whole human race generally. Well, they had
all come to grief and those whose bodies had been recovered lay in the
dank little garden between the gate and the door of her house.
And now romance had come with all its light radiancy of prelude,
exciting her mind to an intense pitch of curiosity as to what lay
behind the next turning. She was in no hurry. She still cared for her
husband exactly the same, without loving him. Peter she loved without
really caring for him. She was still careful of her husband’s throat
when he went out at night, while of Peter’s sore throat she seemed
rather oblivious. Perhaps it made him more interesting because the sore
throat had been developed in her service. Sensitive to the possibility
of romance in the prosaic and humdrum surroundings of her home, Guilda
felt that Peter’s mechanical arrivals with teapot and sugar basin must
be changed. She quietly enjoined him to come at a later hour and never
by the front door. He must climb into her drawing-room by the balcony
and wait until she answered his taps. Somewhat against his will, Peter
had submitted to this daily ordeal until the servants were as used
to one form of entry as the other, and the policeman standing at the
corner received a hint from Mr. Faning himself that his friend was not
practising to be a burglar. Mr. Faning had been puzzled by this new
departure, or new form of entry rather, but vaguely supposed it would
satisfy Peter’s absurd affection for his wife.
It didn’t. Peter left strips of skin on the rusty iron trellis-work
and caught chills on wet draughty winter evenings. His hacking cough
gave Guilda a sensation she thought she had long ago buried. And
Peter, had he known, had no reason to complain of his cold, for it
heightened Guilda’s love. Attraction had passed into love with her.
It was then that Mr. Faning became aware, not of Peter’s love, which
mattered nothing to him, but of Guilda’s which he had never possessed
himself. This did seem to matter to him a great deal. It was no use
her explaining that she only made Peter climb in for a joke. Mr. Faning
banned a joke that made himself as ridiculous as Peter. Peter was told
he was a good fellow, but his visits were limited in future to one
a week, and would she be kind enough to admit him after ringing at
the front door? As for Guilda, he told her that she was the laughing
stock of the parish. Everybody knew she was pretending to be living
in Mayfair and trying to show the neighbours that she secretly had a
lover. It must stop!
Guilda’s face crimsoned and her passionate fury allowed her no retort.
She could have reconciled a jealous outburst from her husband with her
romance, blows even and threats of divorce. But to be called the joke
of the parish was more than she could bear. When he strode out angrily,
she waited for Peter’s taps impatiently at the drawing-room window.
They came.
She preferred to be the tragedy of the parish rather than its joke. It
had never occurred to her that she could be ridiculous. Romance was
not ridiculous and she grated her teeth. There was a strange look on
her face when she opened the glass door behind the curtains and let
Peter come in coughing. Her eyes looked passionately upon him and a
great tremor shook his lungs. It was some time before he could recover
himself. She stroked his back and he dropped gratefully into a chair.
For the first time pity passed into her love and love itself became
fused to passion. She told him to follow her to her room, which Peter
had never seen, never even imagined. It was quite like other bedrooms.
That rather puzzled him, the same sort of furniture. All the wooden
atmosphere of Maple’s, all the china soul of Whiteley’s, was there
expressed with just the necessary alleviation of the feminine, the silk
stockings hanging on the chair, the powder-puff and three dog collars
on the dressing-table. He felt deliciously bewildered and tried to say
something. One of her new garters, bought at a Selfridge sale, was on
the bed. He was sorry it was not on the floor or he would have picked
it up. As it was, he said “_Honi soit qui mal y pense_,” as he touched
it. At that moment Mr. Faning came in.
Guilda had already begun to pour out water into a basin and, picking
a towel off the rack, slipped Peter’s hands into the warm water. Mr.
Faning stood watching until she had washed them free from the soot and
dried them between the fresh folds of the clean towel. Then Faning
burst out angrily: “I came back just to see that this joke wouldn’t go
too far, and I find you in my wife’s bedroom! Never come back into this
house again.” He turned to his wife and re-knifed her with the foolish
words “joke of the whole parish!” She never answered him, but bowed her
head and kissed each of Peter’s hands.... Peter went out shaking like a
reed. When he reached his own rooms he found himself spitting blood. He
stayed in for several days.
Peter felt very distracted those days. He made no effort to
communicate with the Fanings. He felt he had lost a man friend, and
the affectionate companionship of his wife. Companionship he had
regarded as heavenly, but a red-blooded intrigue struck him with all
the discomforts of hell. He sat dimly facing the prospect of fire. He
had been so happy in his paradisal peace. He had now no choice but to
clear out altogether or throw himself beyond the old relationships
of family friend, and consider the Faning household in the sombre
guise of mistress and enemy. It was appalling to think of, and he spat
blood steadily through a night until his landlady became alarmed and
sent for the doctor. He was found to be quite ill, and suffering from
tuberculosis.
It was a month before he returned from the hospital. He had never let
Guilda go far from his mind. How could he? He intended to be faithful
to Mr. Faning’s injunction, and not cross the forbidden threshold....
But as soon as he was walking about again he made a point of passing
the flat every afternoon on his return from the office. Always at the
same hour, at the hour of tea, he came, and stood, and went, while a
fragrance as of the delicious teas of the past smote his memory each
time. He knew then how deeply he was still in love with her. It gave
him a queerly increasing throb each time. His regularity in passing
under the old lodestar was noted by servants, and brought to Guilda’s
notice with the half-humorous and half-sympathetic understanding which
can make servants and mistresses kin. One evening Guilda was watching
for his passage, and threw him down a token. It was not a very romantic
one, but token it was.
Peter was startled to be hit on the shoulder by an object flying out
of the dusk as he stood absorbing his sip of evening melancholy. He
picked it out of the mud. It was a dog’s collar, which he recognised,
carried home, and considered carefully. He did not dare to look up.
As he had suspected, it was one of the three dog collars that graced
Guilda’s dressing-room. Apart from a hundred teas and the washing of
his hands it was the first present she had ever given him. He turned
it over again and again in his hands, and then he began turning it in
his mind. He could not be faithless to the token she had given him,
even though it was but a morgan fey beckoning out of the fog. An unseen
light flickered before his closed eyes. A tremendous sadness passed
into his temperament such as he had never felt before. It left him so
uncomfortable that he tried to find a more ordinary name for it. He
decided that it must be a form of illness. It was a natural weakness
and reaction after the first days of convalescence. He was coughing
again, but thank God! without spitting blood.
The dog collar was perplexing. It might be interpreted in several ways.
Firstly, he might be considered a dog and needing a collar and leash!
Secondly, was he a drawing-room pet once more? Thirdly, she had once
told him how deeply she had loved her dogs. Could he aspire to a share
in the great love she had had for Fido, or in the holy emotion she once
felt for Horatio Bottomley? He began to question himself seriously. But
it was gratifying to be even noticed and, though the dog-collar had
descended on the bridge of his nose like a leathery meteorite, it had
already assumed the glamour of daystar in his mind. It was probably a
contemptuous joke on her part, he told himself, perhaps even an act
of hostility from Mr. Faning. He hated even to think that it might
possibly be a practical joke on the part of a servant. He remembered
the fate of Malvolio and shivered under the smart of ridicule. Of
course there was the thousand-and-oneth chance, which makes the test of
the lover--the chance that nobody would dream of following in commerce
or in politics, or even in gambling, but the lover follows the
thousandth chance. Deep below the strata of ten respectable generations
there lay some spark of the Restoration in Peter Joneson, some chip
even of some far-off but possibly prepossessing cavalier, enough to
send him that evening to linger a second time under the Fanings’ flat.
Half timid he felt, for his body was trembling all over, but half
determined, as though he were fated to press his suit and be done with
it. However, he took his stand under the flat, and fear was all but
making him move after he had cast one rhapsodical glance through the
fog when he stopped dead still! He thought he saw Guilda move against
the blinds of her bedroom, and all the pleasant pusslike purring in
his soul became embattled passion. Peter decided to climb to the top
floor of the flat, the floor beyond the balcony where Guilda slept.
Fastening the dog collar round his wrist, he screwed his shaky clerk’s
hands to the sticking point and crawled up the trellis work. In two
minutes he was gasping on the balcony and a fine sweat was blinding
his eyes. Then he swung himself on the railing and began pulling his
febrile body up the stone work. He had luckily lost a good deal of
weight lately, but this was offset by loss of strength. He reached
half-way, and felt he could get no further. The fog thickened, and he
waited to gather his last energy. He would see Guilda. That he was
sure of, and he bargained with his gods that if he saw her this once
he was willing never to see her again. This once, this once, and his
strength swayed on the tottering side of weakness. He could not tell
whether it was weakness or strength that beat in his veins. He was not
a psychologist or he would have known that it was neither. However,
he hoped it was new strength, and began to drive his nails into the
mortared chinks. He spent whole moments hanging by his finger-tips.
What agony! His grateful palm closed round a helpful ledge. It was
her window-ledge! And he drew himself up with a last effort. He was
kneeling on the very sill and a warm light was bathing him, but he had
not the necessary last half-ounce of strength left to raise his arm
and tap the old signal. He sat puffing and sighing until Guilda heard
unusual sounds and not catlike, or, she thought if it was, it was a
very sick cat. She came to the window. Peter saw her shadow swim into
the blind like some enormous bird, and, like a vulture’s crooked wings,
her long arms, trailing bands of vesture, moving to the window-bolt and
slowly opening it behind the undrawn blind ... “Peter, I knew it was
you. I have been thinking of you all the evening. I had an idea that if
I thought strongly enough you would come.” Peter extended his smeared
and bleeding hand, on the hilt of which was fastened her dog collar.
She laughed as she helped him into the room. It was the merry laugh of
love achieving love.... The window redescended. In the fog no one had
seen. So Peter Joneson came within sight and touch of attaining the
unattainable. He sank wearily but dreamily into an arm-chair. Dear,
dear Guilda! She was pouring out the nice warm water again in a basin
and bringing it to him. She was kneeling at his feet again with a nice
crisp towel. He suppressed a frightful fit of coughing, which would
not have chimed with the delectation of the moment. She had wiped the
soot off his skin, and softened the clotted blood, and was drying his
fingers, when suddenly the fresh blood began to spurt into the basin.
There was quite a nasty cut there. He must have struck a snag of
glass in the mortar. She uttered an exclamation of grief which pierced
his flesh as the glass did not. At the same moment the inclination to
cough became his imperative and dominant sensation within. He felt
he would burst if he could not shake his lungs into his throat. But
with a stifling exercise of will power he drove it down his gullet,
while Guilda tried to slake the flow of his blood. It did not seem
possible to stop. She pulled the dog collar tighter and tighter round
his wrist, and still the drops flowed. Peter watched her as in a kind
of delicious nightmare, but he felt something heavier than iron was
sinking on his chest. He must try and shake it off. Perhaps it was only
a dream. He was awakened from his dream by a fierce thrill running
through his body. His wide eyes stared at Guilda--stared and stared.
Good God! her hands were laid on his cut. He could feel her staunching
his blood. “Don’t, oh don’t trouble!” he cried on the top of a heaving
crash in his breaking lungs. “Don’t! don’t! don’t!” “But I love and
adore you, Peter. Can’t you feel how I love you?” And Peter, in
frenzied and prostrate terror felt his blood surge fiercely, unsatedly,
passionately--and then the crash came. His body broke asunder, and
he slipped from her with a single gasp. He coughed savagely, and
sank at her feet. He could just clasp them before he passed into
unconsciousness.... She simply stared.
When he awoke he felt endreamed not with the soft drowsiness that
follows sleep, but startled with the horrible ticking beat with which
one comes out of an anæsthetic. He tried to remember if he had been
going to have an operation and could not, but there was a doctor
standing there, and holding his pulse with a grey face and a watch.
Oh, thank heavens! It was the watch, and not his heart that was making
that awful tick, tick, tick! Faning was standing there, which was
curious, looking at him with a look still more curious. And why was he
in a strange bedroom? Then he caught sight of Guilda. She was carrying
a basin across the room full of blood.... Then he remembered. She had
washed his hands, and his eye followed her gratefully across the room.
But he was growing weaker. Never had he felt so weak before. He was
too exhausted to make sign or sound. He could hear the doctor talking;
“I am sorry you did not send for me earlier, Mr. Faning, during the
night, for he has been bleeding without cessation, and he must have
been very anæmic before....” Peter’s eyes strayed to the bijou clock on
the dressing-table. It was eight o’clock! Then he must have been two
hours unconscious. He must have fainted. Then he noticed that it was
daylight. Then he lay back, and gave up the ghost. Simply died!
The doctor, as a matter of fact, had been expecting him to die since
six o’clock. He had cut the main artery in his wrist and had died owing
to blood failure during the night. The doctor sat a little puzzled.
He had seen cases of bleeding to death before, and the rarer cases
of bleeders who are liable to shed blood at a touch. But this was an
accident, and he mentioned to Mr. Faning that it would involve an
inquest. Faning blanched, for he wisely hated scandal more than sin,
and the idea of a dead body being found in his wife’s bedroom was a
confusing prospect. Coroners were so unsympathetic in these days. He
suggested it to the doctor, and the doctor agreed that an inquest
would be awkward. What was particularly difficult for him was to
explain where the man’s blood had gone to. There was only a pint or
two in the basin and on the towels, and yet his veins were practically
emptied. It would be a puzzling inquest, and had better be avoided.
Guilda crept to the doorway and watched her husband and doctor deciding
action. No servant was allowed to pry into her room that day, and it
was given out that Guilda herself was unwell. She dropped into bed at
Faning’s orders, and lay there half frightened, but weirdly sad and
content. She slept until the evening without thinking of the corpse her
husband had locked into the bathroom. At tea-time the doctor returned,
and, when no one stood in the street, they pitched the body over the
balcony into the garden where it fell with a sodden crash. Then they
waited and waited, but no policeman came, no newsboy gave the alarm.
Their plan was imminent and certain of success. The body would be found
cold that night or in the morning by the milkman, and every policeman
on the beat would testify to the peculiar character of the gentleman
and his way of entering his friends’ houses. It suddenly occurred to
the doctor that something would be missing. “The blood?” he said:
“there is no blood in the garden.” Fortunately no servant had cleaned
the basin, and the clotted fluid was diluted with hot water and carried
carefully outside into the garden, and splashed about the crumpled
figure under the trellis-work. Softly it sank into the gritty earth of
two dogs’ graves.
THE WEIRD GILLY
Once upon a time--and a long time gone, before the wind and the rain
had come to live in Ireland--O’Donnell held festival with the fine
gentlemen of Donegal.
They sat in the house at Ballyshannon which he had graven of yew and
thatched with gulls’ plumes, and they feasted upon new of all meats,
and old of all liquors. As they drank high and deep, their plaited hair
fell over the wine cups their fathers had taken out of the graves of
the Danes. In face of O’Donnell himself sat the Joyless Jug. It was
called so because it had been used to fetch water by the patron saint
of all the O’Donnell’s. It never ran dry on O’Donnell’s table, and this
by the marvelling was esteemed a miracle.
As the company peered through the lime-white arches of the hall into
O’Donnell’s apple garden, they saw a strange gilly pricking the sour
fruit with a javelin. O’Donnell sent a Saxon slave to bring him in. The
stranger gave astonishment to them all. He wore patched hose over his
swinging shanks, and a mantle that would have wrapped a mare and foal
was gathered to his girdle. A naked sword trundled at his heel-tip, and
he carried three charred javelins of holly. The puddle water splashed
out of his deerskin brogues while his ear-tips peeped through his
mantle hood.
“God save you and ripen your apples,” quoth he, and, as he smacked his
lips, the wine leaped in their cups.
“And who and wherefrom and whither exactly art thou?” asked O’Donnell.
“My habits take me to Islay in Scotland one day, to the Island of Man
another, and to Rathlin the next, for a ranting rambling rover I am.”
“Your name? and you are welcome,” said O’Donnell.
“The Gilly of the Gael.”
“It is enough; sit where you would drink, and drink where you sit.”
“Indeed,” said the Gilly, “I will sit, or I will sit not, as it pleases
me. I would hear music to play the ache out of my legs and the water
out of my shoes.”
O’Donnell called his harpers to play smooth and soothing strains out
of their live harps. They were the pride and power of O’Donnell’s
entertaining.
When the gilly had listened a while through his hood, he spoke to the
harps: “I have never heard minstrelsy the like--not since I heard the
musicians of Beelzebub tinkling iron with their sledgehammers on the
nethermost ground-tier of Hell!”
He seized a harp himself, and shook the last melody out of it. Then
he played to the gentry of Donegal and such music that all the women
travailing in the town and the gallants gashed in battle lying within,
were soothed to sleep and stupor.
“I perceive thou art an harmonious rogue,” said O’Donnell, and he
forgave him the insult he had delivered upon the harps.
“One day I am sweet, one day I am bitter,” quoth the Gilly, “one
morning under sun, one evening under moon, and here one day, and not
here the next.”
O’Donnell saw a source of endless entertainment for the men of Ulster,
and he told off twenty gallow-glasses, as they valued their straw and
ale, to guard the gates, and he hid twenty horsemen in the apple grove.
But the Gilly was gilly to no Lord.
“Watch for me, ride for me,” cried he, “or I am clean away.” The
gallow-glasses sprang to seize him leaving. But he passed them, and he
ran through the horsemen, spearing their apples as he went. Then the
riders rode each other down in tumult, and the gallow-glasses fell upon
each other’s knives.
But the Gilly was gone--and he left a herb for their healing, a little
bundle of starwort, with O’Donnell’s watcher on the hills.
* * * * *
At that time it chanced that the son of Desmond had gathered the men of
South Munster to proclaim himself Desmond against his father. Hove the
weird gilly within hearing;
“God save you, and keep sprigs to your trees!” he cried entering.
“And who art thou of all royal rascals and runners?”
“I am Duartane O’Duartane, runner to the King of Ireland,” he told
him, “and I have run Ireland from the shelly shore of Sligo to the mud
mountains of Thomond.”
“Play or be hung,” said Desmond, thinking the squelch of his brogues
was all his music.
The Gilly would not play, but when they ridiculed him he caught the
harp from a blind harper of Desmond so swiftly that the harper thought
the wind had taken it. First he made the harp sound, and then to sing,
and at last to speak. The harp said:
“The music is not more lasting than the harp that begot it, and the
sprig is not stronger than the tree that grew it.”
“Thou art a traitor to thy clan,” cried the young Desmond to the harp,
and his men-at-arms cut the harp-strings with their swords. The Gilly
slipped aside and called out: “One day I am sweet, another I am sour,
one day in North Donegal, one day in South Munster,” and away he
vanished like a twang of his music.
It happed at the time of the Gilly’s raid and riot through Ireland
that M’Keogh of Leinster, the hereditary crown-bearer and coroner to
the MacMurrough, lay sick of a bog-palsy in his leg. The twelve royal
physicians of Leinster were gathered about the one leg, for until he
could walk the new MacMurrough might not come by his crown. To be
crowned by a sick man was against the Brehon law of Ireland.
Swung the Weird Gilly to sight.
“Who art thou, watering my garden with thy brogues?” cried M’Keogh.
“A medical student picking plants,” answered the Gilly, “and if you
promised to put away all niggardliness, I would heal the sorriness of
your shank.”
“So be it,” said M’Keogh, and sent his gold robes to patch beggar’s
rags at his gate.
The Gilly slit a leaf of nightwort with his javelin and dropped it then
and there on M’Keogh’s leg. With that, M’Keogh’s leg rose under him and
started to run out of the house, and M’Keogh with it, and the twelve
royal leeches of Leinster running after. There was no catching him till
he tired toward evening. When they brought him back he offered the
Gilly his one daughter for wife.
“It is well,” said the Gilly, “be she foul or be she fair, she shall be
mine.”
That night a banquet was spread with porridge for plenty and water for
wine. But when the guests were gathered, a servant ran in crying:
“The foreign physician is over the hills and faster than a russet hare
between a day and a night of March.”
“We knew he was a false rascal,” declared the twelve royal doctors of
Leinster.
At this time it chanced that Conor of Connaught was preparing to avenge
a foul insult done upon the dead and the living of his country. A
Connaught crone had lent a basket to a hag of Munster and had received
neither it nor its eric-price in return. Sped the Gilly within speech
of them. He was crossing the ridge of Ireland that runs from Dublin to
Galway.
“Who art thou, running with thy ribs wrapt up in a mantle?” asked Conor.
“I am the Gruesome Gilly and I run through Ireland to see good wars and
fair fighting, and if you would have me now I will join gladly.”
“Will any hiring purchase you?” quoth Conor.
“Nothing unfair to be done to me,” answered the Gilly.
So he marched with the fighting men of Connaught and of Far-Connaught,
till they overstepped the marches of Munster. Heaven gave them
blessing, boon and victory, for they carried away two spotted cows from
the Hag of Munster, and her one-horned bull, as a solace for the basket.
When the men of Munster learnt of the disgrace befallen them, they
marched for half a day and half a night. But the Gilly kept them at bay
with his javelins in one hand, while he drove along the cattle with
the other. He kept running betwixt the prey and the pursuit till he was
past the fords of the Shannon. It was the greatest cattle-spoil of the
time, and gave hymning to harpers and piping to poets for a spring-tide.
When they came to Conor’s house, Conor drained the first flagon of wine
and left the Gilly thirsty. “The drink goes with the deed,” said the
Gilly, and, before the words were with Conor, he had disappeared.
At the same time, O’Kelly the King of the Kellies was bidding men to
banquet. Came the Gilly within call.
“Art thou a Kelly of Munster or a Kelly of Leinster?” was all the
O’Kelly would ask a stranger.
“I am neither, but a good conjurer,” said the Gilly, “and for five
flagons I will prove the goodness of my art.”
“Prove,” said O’Kelly, and five hundred Kellies shouted “Prove!”
“I will wag one ear, while the other is still,” said the Gilly, and all
the Kellies were silent for it seemed not easy to be done.
Then the man of tricks tied one ear with the end of his mantle and
wagged the other. O’Kelly gave him five flagons full.
“I will show thee another,” said the Gilly, and pulling a long thread
out of his mantle, he tossed it in a ball to the clouds. He drew his
mantle over the end of the thread and a hare ran up and away to the
clouds, and then a beagle, and then a dogboy, and, last of all, a
fairy-woman. They listened to the merry hunting cry, until all had
entered the mists. Then the Gilly reeled down the thread, and there was
the hound picking the hare’s bones and the dogboy meshed in the hair of
the fairy-woman. O’Kelly called for another trick.
“I know only one better,” said the Gilly, and vanished.
That day MacMurrough King of Leinster was banqueting in his house.
There were sixteen harpers playing for him to choose which should be
the choice harper of Leinster.
“Whence art thou?” asked MacMurrough.
“One day am I in Islay and another in Man, one day with the heat and
the next with the cold, one day with Conor and another with Kelly,”
answered the Gilly.
“How do my harpers harp with those of Conor and Kelly?” asked the King.
“There is no music I would compare them with,” said the Gilly, “except
the melodious thunder of the Porters in the Pit.”
The King ordered him to be strung forthwith.
When they had gibbeted him on the crow’s perch, they returned and met
him coming out of the King’s house. They ran back and found it was the
King himself they had hung, and the Gilly had left a sliver of batsbane
for his anointing before burial.
That time the Gilly was gone without saying farewell or fare-ill. Away
he vanished with his roguery and ranting, with his wandering and his
wizardry, as all magicians and artists, that shall be since or ever,
must vanish and leave but a little breath of wonderment with the folk
of the world.
OREMUS
JOHN LONG, LTD., PUBLISHERS, LONDON, ENGLAND, 1924
_Wyman & Sons, Ltd., Printers, London, Reading and Fakenham_
Transcriber’s Note:
Obvious errors in punctuation have been silently corrected in this
version, but minor inconsistencies and archaic forms have been retained
as printed.
The French in the Baudelaire prayer has been silently corrected.
The following changes have been made:
On page 102: belives _to_ believes
On page 131: work _to_ word
On page 184: or _to_ of
On page 213: Spindlehorn _to_ Spindelhorn
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
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