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THE NEST
THE WHITE PAGODA
THE SUICIDE
A FORSAKEN TEMPLE
MISS JONES AND THE MASTERPIECE
BY ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK
(MRS. BASIL DE SELINCOURT)
AUTHOR OF "TANTE," "FRANKLIN WINSLOW KANE," "A FOUNTAIN SEALED," "THE
SHADOW OF LIFE," ETC.
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1913
Copyright, 1902, 1904, 1912, 1913, by
The Century Co.
Copyright, 1898, by Charles Scribner's Sons
_Published, January, 1913_
PREFACE
It seemed suitable, when making a selection of short stories for
publication in book form, to include my first attempt with my last, and
therefore the very juvenile production--"Miss Jones and the
Masterpiece"--finds a place with the others.
My thanks are due to the Editors of the _Century Magazine_, _Scribners'
Magazine_, and the _English Review_, for allowing me to republish the
stories that appeared in their pages.
_November, 1912._
CONTENTS
THE NEST
THE WHITE PAGODA
THE SUICIDE
A FORSAKEN TEMPLE
MISS JONES AND THE MASTERPIECE
THE NEST
CHAPTER I
He seemed to have had no time for thinking before he sank into a corner
of the railway carriage and noted, with a satisfaction under the
circumstances perhaps trivial, that he would have it to himself for the
swift hour down to the country. Satisfactions of any sort seemed
inappropriate, an appanage that he should have left behind him for ever
on stepping from the great specialist's door in Wimpole Street two hours
ago. When a man has but a month--at most two months--to live, small
hopes and fears should drop from him: he should be stripped, as it were,
for the last solitary wrestle in the arena of death.
But the drive, from the doctor's to the city and from there to
Paddington, had seemed unusually full of life's solicitations. The soft,
strained eyes of an over-laden horse, appealing in patience from the
shade of dusty blinkers; the dismal degradation of a music-hall
poster--a funny man with reddened nose and drunken hat, as appealing in
his slavery as the horse; the vaporous blue-green silhouettes of the
Park on a silvery sky;--he had found himself responding to these with
pity, repugnance and pleasure as normally as if they meant for him now
what they always would have meant. That such impressions were so soon to
cease must change all their meaning,--at least, so one would have
supposed; he began to think of that and to wonder a little over the
apparent stoicism of those intervening hours; but, while the mood had
lasted, the fact that he had come to the end of things, that there was a
pit dug across his path, had done hardly more than skim on the outskirts
of his alert yet calm receptivity. He seemed never to have noticed more,
never to have been more conscious of the outer world and so little
conscious of himself.
Now, in the train, the outer world, wraith-like in a sudden summer
shower, became the background as it sped on either side, and thoughts
were in the foreground, thoughts of himself as doomed, and of the life
that he had loved and worked in, as measured into one shallow cupful at
his lips. Even yet it was almost absurd, the difficulty he found in
realising it. The doomed figure detached itself, became that of a
piteous, a curious alien, whom one watched respectfully and from a
distance. From a safe shore he observed the tossing of the rapidly
sinking skiff with its helpless occupant. It required a great pull,
push, and effort of his whole being, like that of awakening from a
half-dream, in order to see, in order to say to himself, really
believing it, that he was the man. Wonder, rather than dread or sorrow,
was still the paramount feeling, though, oppressively, as if he picked
his steps about the verge of an echoing cavern, turning away his eyes,
there lurked behind all that he felt the sense of sudden emptiness and
dark.
It was wonderful, immensely absorbing and interesting, this idea of
being himself doomed. Self-conscious, observant, sensitive as he was, he
still thought more than felt. It was at last credible and indubitable
that he _was_ the man, and he was asking himself how he would take it;
he was asking himself how he would bear it. He was amused to observe
that the pathetic old human vanity, by no means stunned, was pushing its
head above the tossing surface in order to assure him again and again
that he would bear it very well. It should be a graceful and gallant
exit. If there were to be dark moments, moments when the cavern sucked
him in and had him, if he was to know horror and despair, no one else,
at all events, should know that he knew them; no one else should share
his suffering. Up to the edge of extinction he would keep silence and a
stoic cheerfulness. The doctor had promised him that there would be
little pain; there would be knowledge only to conceal.
This vanity, and there was satisfaction in it for all his ironic
insight, was not so selfish as it seemed; the next turn of thought led
him to this. For no one had a right to share his suffering; or perhaps
it would be more magnanimous to say that the some one of whom he was
thinking had a right to be spared the sharing of it. He shared so few of
the things that mattered with Kitty that she might well claim immunity.
His wife's figure, since the very beginning, had been hovering near his
thoughts, not once looked at directly. It might be horribly painful to
look at it, but he suspected that it would not be so painful as to look
at the other near thing that he must leave behind: his work; the work
that with all its grind and routine--so hard to harness to at first--had
now become so much a part of himself. The fact that he might come nearer
to despair, nearer to the crumbling edge of the cavern, when he thought
of leaving his work than when he thought of leaving his wife, was in
itself a pain; but it was an old pain in a new guise. Kitty had for so
long been one of the things that counted for less than his work. Vanity
even raised its voice high enough to say ruefully that they might get on
badly without him at the Home Office; the country itself might suffer.
He smiled; but the dart told; it was perhaps feathered with truth. Yes,
everything most essential in him, everything that most counted, was
answered, called forth in his work. It was in that that he would most
truly die. For, of course, in the many other, the young, the ardent, the
foolish hopes, he was dead already. And it was round the figure of his
wife, that light and radiant figure, sweet, soft, appealing, that those
dead hopes seemed to gather, like mist about a flower.
Poor, lovely little Kitty: the sight of the rain-dimmed meadow-sweet, by
the brookside in a passing field, brought her before him in this aspect
of innocent disillusioner. For nothing essential, nothing that counted
in him, was answered or called forth by Kitty except a slightly ironic
tenderness. He didn't judge life from his own failure to find splendid
mutual enterprise and sacred mutual comprehension where his lover's
blindness had thought to find it. Nor did he judge Kitty. His own
blindness was the fault, if fault there were, and even that blindness he
could now see tolerantly. The dart and pang had gone from his memory of
young love; his smile for it was indulgent; he was even glad that the
memory was there, glad that he had known the illusion, even if it were
at the price of failure in that happy realm of life. Little of the
sadness could have been Kitty's; she had not known the bitterness of his
slow awakening; she was easily contented with the tame terms of
unillumined life. A charming home; a fond husband; a pretty, diligent
part to play in the political and social life of the countryside; the
nicest taste to show in dress and friends;--Kitty, he imagined, thought
of her life as completely successful. And why not? He himself saw love
as an episode and contentedly accepted the fact that for the flower-like
woman and the man who works there can be, eventually, no deeper bond.
He knew two or three other women who interested him more than Kitty ever
could; to them he went when he wanted to talk about anything he cared
for. Kitty was sweet to see; she made him very comfortable; she rarely
irritated him. With friends and Kitty what did he want of women more?
Outside these domestic and drawing-room circles was the world of men and
ideas in which he lived, in which his real life had its roots.
Yet, as the train neared the little country station, as familiar lanes
and meadows glided slowly past the windows, he became aware that his
thoughts had more and more slid from this outside life, this world of
work and reality, and that from thinking of the little part that Kitty
played in it he had come to thinking of Kitty and to the thought that he
was to see her for the last time.--Yes; that crashed in at last. At last
something seemed to come to him which, in the pain of it, was completely
adequate to the situation. It was the Kitty of six years ago that he saw
most clearly, the girl he had fallen in love with, his bride; but there
were all the other memories too, the little silent memories, the
nothings, the everythings of daily life together; small joys, small
sorrows. The breakfast-table, Kitty behind the coffee, reading aloud to
him some scrap of her morning budget; the garden, Kitty showing him how
a new flower was thriving; Kitty riding beside him in the dew to an
early meet; and, suddenly, among all the trivial memories, the solemn
one that hardly seemed to go with Kitty at all,--Kitty's face looking up
at him, disfigured with grief and pain, as he told her that their
child--it had died at birth--was dead.
The other women, the interesting ones, the women who, more or less, knew
their way about his mind and soul, were forgotten, blotted out
completely by the trivial and the solemn memories. He felt no desire to
see them, no desire at all to say good-bye to them; that would be to
bring them near. But he did want to see Kitty, at once. She was not near
mind or soul; but she was near as life is near; near like the pulse of
his heart; and, with all the other things, he felt, suddenly, that Kitty
was his child, too, and that paternal yearning was mingled with the
crying out of his whole nature towards her. For it was crying out; and,
if she was his child, in what deep strange sense was he not her child,
too.
The wide world, the real world, the outside world of work and
achievement, collapsed like a crumpled panorama; he was covering his
eyes; he was shuddering; he was stumbling back to the nest, wounded to
death, there to fold himself in darkness, in oblivion, in love.--How
near we are to the animal, he thought, smiling, with trembling lips, as
he saw the station slide outside the windows at last, saw the face of
the station-master--he had never before known that the station-master
was such a lovable person--he seemed so near the nest that he must be
lovable--saw, beyond the flower-wreathed palings, the dog-cart waiting
for him. But his deeper self rebuked the cynical side-glance. The
trembling smile, he knew, had more of truth:--how near we are to the
divine. The pain and ecstasy of this moment of arrival made it one of
the most vivid and significant of his life. Almost worth while to know
that one is to die in a month if the knowledge brings with it such
flashes of beauty of vision. The whole earth seemed transfigured and
heavenly.
Dean, the coachman, gave acquiescent answers to his questions on the
homeward drive. He heard the sound of his own voice and knew that he was
speaking as he wanted to be sure of speaking for these next weeks, with
ease and lightness. He would be able to keep up before Kitty. Until the
very end she should be spared everything; there was joy in the thought,
and no longer any vanity. He would see her, be with her, and she should
not know. He would see her happy for their last month together. He
clasped the thought of her happiness--with her--to his heart.
Like all ecstasies, it faded, this rapture of his return. By the time
the house was reached, the lovely little Jacobean house that they had
found together, the buoyancy was gone and what was left was a sweetness
and a great fatigue. He was to see her; that was well; and here was the
nest; that was well, too. But he wanted to fold his wings and sleep.
Mrs. Holland was not in the house, the butler told him, she and Sir
Walter had gone down to the river together. Holland felt that he would
rather not go after them. He would wait so that he should see Kitty
alone when he first saw her. He liked Sir Walter, their friend and
neighbour; it would not be difficult to act before him, and he knew that
he could begin acting at once; but, for this first meeting of the new,
short epoch, he must see Kitty alone. So he had his tea in the
library--queer to go on having tea, queer to find one still liked
tea--and looked over some papers, and saw, outside, the afternoon grow
stiller and more golden, and knew that all dreads were in abeyance and
that the somnolence, as of a drugged sweetness and fatigue, still kept
him safe.
He was conscious at last of a purely physical chill; the library was
cool and he stepped into the sunlight on the lawn, walking up and down
among the flowers and, presently, across the grassy terraces, to the
lower groups of trees, vaguely directing his steps to the little
summer-house that faced the west and was as full of sunlight at this
hour as a fretted shell of warm, lapping sea-water. They could not see
him, on their way up from the river, nor he them, from here, and after a
half-hour or so of dreamy basking it would be time to dress for dinner,
Sir Walter would have gone and Kitty would be at the house again.
He followed the narrow path, set thickly with young ashes and sycamores,
and saw beyond the trees the roof of the summer-house heaped with
illumined festoons of traveller's-joy, and then, when he was near, he
heard voices within it, Kitty's voice and Sir Walter's.
Hesitating, half-turning to go back, it was as if a childish panic of
shyness seized him, so that he smiled at himself as he stood there, in
the arrested attitude of an involuntary eavesdropper. But the smile
faded. A look of bewilderment came to his face. Kitty was weeping and
Sir Walter was pleading with her, and so strange was Sir Walter's voice,
so strange what he was saying to Kitty, that all the strangeness of the
day found now its culminating moment.
He walked on, slowly, unwillingly, helplessly, walked on, as he now
knew, into some far other form of suffering than any that had been
foreseen by him that afternoon.
A rustic seat ran round the summer-house. On the side most hidden he
sank down. He did not choose the hidden side. He had no feeling of will
or choice; had they come out upon him he would have looked at them with
the same bewildered eyes. But, dully, he felt that he must
know,--know,--why Kitty was unhappy.
Sunken on the seat, among the traveller's-joy, exhausted, yet alert, his
head dizzy and his heart stilled, as it were, to listen, it was this
amazement and curiosity that Holland felt rather than anger, jealousy,
or grief.
Kitty was unhappy; Sir Walter loved her, and she loved Sir Walter. Sir
Walter was imploring her to come away with him. "But you do love me,"
was the phrase that he repeated again and again, the strong protest of
fact against her refusal.
The dizziness lifting, the heart beating more normally, Holland knew
more. Kitty was unhappy and loved Sir Walter, but, deeper than that, was
the truth that she was happy in her knowledge of his love, deeper than
that--though this depth was of thankfulness in her husband's heart--was
the truth that the love was as yet a beautiful pastime; there was joy
for her in her own sadness, drama in her pain; she was a child with a
strange toy in her hand; it charmed her and she had not learned to dread
it.
Her husband's comprehension of her, of her childishness, her fluidity,
her weakness, actually touched with respect his comprehension of Sir
Walter; for Sir Walter's strength was reverent, even in his recklessness
there was dignity. Holland knew that he spoke the truth when he said to
Kitty that she might trust him for life.
It was the real thing with Sir Walter. With Kitty the real thing could
be little more than the response to reality in others. There was the
danger that her husband steadied himself to look at, as he sat in the
sunlight outside the summer-house and listened.
The dizziness was quite gone. He had never felt a greater mental
clarity. He knew that he must be suffering; but suffering seemed
relegated to some region of mere physical sensation. He saw and
understood so many things that he had never seen or understood before.
He felt no jealousy, not a pang of the defrauded, injured male, not a
throb of the broken-hearted lover; yet it was not indifference to Kitty
that gave him his immunity; he had never cared more for Kitty; it was,
perhaps, in a tenderer key, as he cared for the station-master, as he
cared, now, for Sir Walter. He was himself soon to die and, as
personalities, as related to his own life, people had ceased to count;
but as lives that were to go on after he was dead, they counted as they
had never done till then; and Kitty most of all. It was this intense
consciousness of her youth, of all the years of life she had to live,
that pressed with such clearness and such fear upon him. She had all her
life before her and she held in her hands a terrible, a beautiful toy
that, suddenly transformed to an engine of destruction, might shatter
her.
Sir Walter was going. He said that he would come again to-morrow.
"Nicholas will be here," said Kitty. She no longer wept. Her voice, now
that the stress of the situation was over, had regained its pensive
sweetness.
"Yes," said Sir Walter, "that's what's so odious, darling; he will
always be here and everything will be twisted and horrible. I like your
husband."
"He is a strange man; I sometimes think that he cares for nothing but
his work; he is all thought and no heart. I don't believe that he would
really mind if I were to go away with you. He would smile, sadly and
ironically, and say: 'Poor, silly child.' And then he would turn to his
papers. I'm nothing to him but a doll, a convenient, domestic doll. And
he doesn't care for playing with dolls except for a little while now and
then." Kitty spoke with a sober pathos that did not veil resentment.
"Ah, you can say all that to me--and expect me to go on bearing seeing
you wasted and thrown away!" Sir Walter broke out. "What stands between
us? Why must we go on suffering like this?"
"Isn't it a great joy--to know that the other is there,
understanding--and caring?"
"A killing sort of joy."
"How cruel, how wrong you are," Kitty murmured; but her husband knew
that for her, indeed, the joy was deep, and that it was in such moments
of power over an emotion she could rouse yet dominate that she had her
keenest sense of it.
"I can't help it," said Sir Walter. "I shall always want you to come
away with me."
"Good-bye:--for to-day."
"It's you who are cruel."
At that, silence following, Holland knew that Kitty's quiet tears fell
again.
Sir Walter was subjugated. He pleaded for pardon; promised not to
torment her--to try not to torment her. A trysting-place was fixed on
for next day and Holland felt another chill of fear at Kitty's swift
resource and craft in planning it. The child knew how to plot and lie.
It thought itself nobly justified, no doubt, and that its fidelity to
duty gave it the right to every liberty of conscience. And before Sir
Walter went there was a moment of relenting that showed how near was the
joy of yielding to the joy of ruthlessness, "For this once,--for this
once only--" Kitty murmured. And Holland knew that Sir Walter held her
in his arms and kissed her.
After his departure Kitty sat on for some moments in the summer-house.
She sighed deeply once or twice and Holland fancied, from her light
movements, that she had leaned her arms on the table and rested her head
on them. He heard presently, that she was softly saying a prayer, and at
the sound, tears filled his eyes. Then, rising, she collected her basket
of flowers, her parasol, her books, and walked away with slow steps
along the path leading to the house.