"No--They wouldn't. That's what I say. They won't."
"You had better," she went on, "begin with Grant-Jackson. But even that
isn't necessary. It would get to him, it would get to the Body, like
wildfire."
"I see," said poor Gedge. And indeed for the moment he did see, while his
companion followed up what she believed her advantage.
"Do you consider it's _all_ a fraud?"
"Well, I grant you there was somebody. But the details are naught. The
links are missing. The evidence--in particular about that room upstairs, in
itself our Casa Santa--is _nil_. It was so awfully long ago." Which he knew
again sounded weak.
"Of course it was awfully long ago--that's just the beauty and the
interest. Tell Them, _tell_ Them," she continued, "that the evidence is
_nil_, and I'll tell Them something else." She spoke it with such meaning
that his face seemed to show a question, to which she was on the spot of
replying, "I'll tell Them you're a----" She stopped, however, changing it.
"I'll tell Them exactly the opposite. And I'll find out what you say--it
won't take long--to do it. If we tell different stories _that_ possibly may
save us."
"I see what you mean. It would perhaps, as an oddity, have a success of
curiosity. It might become a draw. Still, They but want broad masses." And
he looked at her sadly. "You're no more than one of Them."
"If it's being no more than one of Them to love it," she answered, "then I
certainly am. And I'm not ashamed of my company."
"To love _what_?" said Morris Gedge.
"To love to think He was born there."
"You think too much. It's bad for you." He turned away with his chronic
moan. But it was without losing what she called after him.
"I decline to let the place down." And what was there indeed to say? They
_were_ there to keep it up.
V
He kept it up through the summer, but with the queerest consciousness, at times,
of the want of proportion between his secret rage and the spirit of those from
whom the friction came. He said to himself--so sore his sensibility had
grown--that They were gregariously ferocious at the very time he was seeing Them
as individually mild. He said to himself that They were mild only because _he_
was--he flattered himself that he was divinely so, considering what he might be;
and that he should, as his wife had warned him, soon enough have news of it were
he to deflect by a hair's breadth from the line traced for him. _That_ was the
collective fatuity--that it was capable of turning on the instant both to a
general and to a particular resentment. Since the least breath of discrimination
would get him the sack without mercy, it was absurd, he reflected, to speak of
his discomfort as light. He was gagged, he was goaded, as in omnivorous
companies he doubtless sometimes showed by a strange silent glare. They'd get
him the sack for that as well, if he didn't look out; therefore wasn't it in
effect ferocity when you mightn't even hold your tongue? They wouldn't let you
off with silence--They insisted on your committing yourself. It was the pound of
flesh--They _would_ have it; so under his coat he bled. But a wondrous peace, by
exception, dropped on him one afternoon at the end of August. The pressure had,
as usual, been high, but it had diminished with the fall of day, and the place
was empty before the hour for closing. Then it was that, within a few minutes of
this hour, there presented themselves a pair of pilgrims to whom in the ordinary
course he would have remarked that they were, to his regret, too late. He was to
wonder afterwards why the course had at sight of the visitors--a gentleman and a
lady, appealing and fairly young--shown for him as other than ordinary; the
consequence sprang doubtless from something rather fine and unnameable,
something for example in the tone of the young man or in the light of his eye,
after hearing the statement on the subject of the hour. "Yes, we know it's late;
but it's just, I'm afraid, _because_ of that. We've had rather a notion of
escaping the crowd--as I suppose you mostly have one now; and it was really on
the chance of finding you alone----!"
These things the young man said before being quite admitted, and they were
words any one might have spoken who hadn't taken the trouble to be punctual
or who desired, a little ingratiatingly, to force the door. Gedge even
guessed at the sense that might lurk in them, the hint of a special tip if
the point were stretched. There were no tips, he had often thanked his
stars, at the Birthplace; there was the charged fee and nothing more;
everything else was out of order, to the relief of a palm not formed by
nature as a scoop. Yet in spite of everything, in spite especially of the
almost audible chink of the gentleman's sovereigns, which might in another
case exactly have put him out, he presently found himself, in the
Birthroom, access to which he had gracefully enough granted, almost
treating the visit as personal and private. The reason--well, the reason
would have been, if anywhere, in something naturally persuasive on the part
of the couple; unless it had been rather again, in the way the young man,
once he was in the place, met the caretaker's expression of face, held it a
moment and seemed to wish to sound it. That they were Americans was
promptly clear, and Gedge could very nearly have told what kind; he had
arrived at the point of distinguishing kinds, though the difficulty might
have been with him now that the case before him was rare. He saw it
suddenly in the light of the golden midland evening which reached them
through low old windows, saw it with a rush of feeling, unexpected and
smothered, that made him a moment wish to keep it before him as a case of
inordinate happiness. It made him feel old shabby poor, but he watched it
no less intensely for its doing so. They were children of fortune, of the
greatest, as it might seem to Morris Gedge, and they were of course lately
married; the husband, smooth-faced and soft, but resolute and fine, several
years older than the wife, and the wife vaguely, delicately, irregularly,
but mercilessly pretty. Some how the world was theirs; they gave the person
who took the sixpences at the Birthplace such a sense of the high luxury of
freedom as he had never had. The thing was that the world was theirs not
simply because they had money--he had seen rich people enough--but because
they could in a supreme degree think and feel and say what they liked. They
had a nature and a culture, a tradition, a facility of some sort--and all
producing in them an effect of positive beauty--that gave a light to their
liberty and an ease to their tone. These things moreover suffered nothing
from the fact that they happened to be in mourning; this was probably worn
for some lately-deceased opulent father--if not some delicate mother who
would be sure to have been a part of the source of the beauty; and it
affected Gedge, in the gathered twilight and at his odd crisis, as the very
uniform of their distinction.
He couldn't quite have said afterwards by what steps the point had been
reached, but it had become at the end of five minutes a part of their
presence in the Birthroom, a part of the young man's look, a part of the
charm of the moment, and a part above all of a strange sense within him of
"Now or never!" that Gedge had suddenly, thrillingly, let himself go. He
hadn't been definitely conscious of drifting to it; he had been, for that,
too conscious merely of thinking how different, in all their range, were
such a united couple from another united couple known to him. They were
everything he and his wife weren't; this was more than anything else the
first lesson of their talk. Thousands of couples of whom the same was true
certainly had passed before him, but none of whom it was true with just
that engaging intensity. And just _because_ of their transcendent freedom;
that was what, at the end of five minutes, he saw it all come back to. The
husband, who had been there at some earlier time, had his impression, which
he wished now to make his wife share. But he already, Gedge could see,
hadn't concealed it from her. A pleasant irony in fine our friend seemed to
taste in the air--he who hadn't yet felt free to taste his own.
"I think you weren't here four years ago"--that was what the young man had
almost begun by remarking. Gedge liked his remembering it, liked his
frankly speaking to him; all the more that he had offered, as it were, no
opening. He had let them look about below and then had taken them up, but
without words, without the usual showman's song, of which he would have
been afraid. The visitors didn't ask for it; the young man had taken the
matter out of his hands by himself dropping for the benefit of the young
woman a few detached remarks. What Gedge oddly felt was that these remarks
were not inconsiderate of him; he had heard others, both of the priggish
order and the crude, that might have been called so. And as the young man
hadn't been aided to this cognition of him as new, it already began to make
for them a certain common ground. The ground became immense when the
visitor presently added with a smile: "There was a good lady, I recollect,
who had a great deal to say."
It was the gentleman's smile that had done it; the irony _was_ there. "Ah
there has been a great deal said." And Gedge's look at his interlocutor
doubtless showed his sense of being sounded. It was extraordinary of course
that a perfect stranger should have guessed the travail of his spirit,
should have caught the gleam of his inner commentary. That probably leaked
in spite of him out of his poor old eyes. "Much of it, in such places as
this," he heard himself adding, "is of course said very irresponsibly."
_Such places as this!_--he winced at the words as soon as he had uttered
them.
There was no wincing, however, on the part of his pleasant companions.
"Exactly so; the whole thing becomes a sort of stiff smug convention--like
a dressed-up sacred doll in a Spanish church--which you're a monster if you
touch."
"A monster," Gedge assented, meeting his eyes.
The young man smiled, but he thought looking at him a little harder. "A
blasphemer."
"A blasphemer."
It seemed to do his visitor good--he certainly _was_ looking at him harder.
Detached as he was he was interested--he was at least amused. "Then you
don't claim or at any rate don't insist----? I mean you personally."
He had an identity for him, Gedge felt, that he couldn't have had for a
Briton, and the impulse was quick in our friend to testify to this
perception. "I don't insist to _you_."
The young man laughed. "It really--I assure you if I may--wouldn't do any
good. I'm too awfully interested."
"Do you mean," his wife lightly inquired, "in--a--pulling it down? That's
rather in what you've said to me."
"Has he said to you," Gedge intervened, though quaking a little, "that he
would like to pull it down?"
She met, in her free sweetness, this appeal with such a charm! "Oh perhaps
not quite the _house_----!"
"Good. You see we live on it--I mean _we_ people."
The husband had laughed, but had now so completely ceased to look about him
that there seemed nothing left for him but to talk avowedly with the
caretaker. "I'm interested," he explained, "in what I think _the_
interesting thing--or at all events the eternally tormenting one. The fact
of the abysmally little that, in proportion, we know."
"In proportion to what?" his companion asked.
"Well, to what there must have been--to what in fact there _is_--to wonder
about. That's the interest; it's immense. He escapes us like a thief at
night, carrying off--well, carrying off everything. And people pretend to
catch Him like a flown canary, over whom you can close your hand, and put
Him back in the cage. He won't _go_ back; he won't _come_ back. He's
not"--the young man laughed--"such a fool! It makes Him the happiest of all
great men."
He had begun by speaking to his wife, but had ended, with his friendly, his
easy, his indescribable competence, for Gedge--poor Gedge who quite held
his breath and who felt, in the most unexpected way, that he had somehow
never been in such good society. The young wife, who for herself meanwhile
had continued to look about, sighed out, smiled out--Gedge couldn't have
told which--her little answer to these remarks. "It's rather a pity, you
know, that He _isn't_ here. I mean as Goethe's at Weimar. For Goethe _is_
at Weimar."
"Yes, my dear; that's Goethe's bad luck. There he sticks. _This_ man isn't
anywhere. I defy you to catch him."
"Why not say, beautifully," the young woman laughed, "that, like the wind,
He's everywhere?"
It wasn't of course the tone of discussion, it was the tone of pleasantry,
though of better pleasantry, Gedge seemed to feel, and more within his own
appreciation, than he had ever listened to; and this was precisely why the
young man could go on without the effect of irritation, answering his wife
but still with eyes for their companion. "I'll be hanged if He's _here_!"
It was almost as if he were taken--that is, struck and rather held--by
their companion's unruffled state, which they hadn't meant to ruffle, but
which suddenly presented its interest, perhaps even projected its light.
The gentleman didn't know, Gedge was afterwards to say to himself, how that
hypocrite was inwardly all of a tremble, how it seemed to him his fate was
being literally pulled down on his head. He was trembling for the moment
certainly too much to speak; abject he might be, but he didn't want his
voice to have the absurdity of a quaver. And the young woman--charming
creature!--still had another word. It was for the guardian of the spot, and
she made it in her way delightful. They had remained in the Holy of Holies,
where she had been looking for a minute, with a ruefulness just marked
enough to be pretty, at the queer old floor. "Then if you say it _wasn't_
in this room He was born--well, what's the use?"
"What's the use of what?" her husband asked. "The use, you mean, of our
coming here? Why the place is charming in itself. And it's also
interesting," he added to Gedge, "to know how you get on."
Gedge looked at him a moment in silence, but answering the young woman
first. If poor Isabel, he was thinking, could only have been like
that!--not as to youth, beauty, arrangement of hair or picturesque grace of
hat--these things he didn't mind; but as to sympathy, facility, light
perceptive, and yet not cheap, detachment! "I don't say it wasn't--but I
don't say it _was_."
"Ah but doesn't that," she returned, "come very much to the same thing? And
don't They want also to see where He had His dinner and where He had His
tea?"
"They want everything," said Morris Gedge. "They want to see where He hung
up His hat and where He kept His boots and where His mother boiled her
pot."
"But if you don't show them----?"
"They show _me_. It's in all their little books."
"You mean," the husband asked, "that you've only to hold your tongue?"
"I try to," said Gedge.
"Well," his visitor smiled, "I see you _can_."