Cyprian did not return to the flat. He went out into the restless
London streets. Block after block he passed, from the more
fashionable quarters to the outskirts of the park, walking swiftly to
escape pursuing Memory, until at last the damp darkness of the river
divided the myriad scintillating eyes of the city.
Further along the Embankment dead forms lay huddled where the shadows
lay deepest, every now and again to start erect, galvanized into life
by the angry flash of a police-lantern.
As he paused to strike a match against a stone bench, shaped like an
incompleted coffin, one of these corpses twitched itself upright.
"Fit ter drop!" it muttered, still in the throes of uneasy slumber;
"Gawd! fer one bloody night to fergit meself in."
Cyprian replaced his pipe in his pocket and fumbled.
"Here," he said, "I don't know who you are, and you don't know who I
am, but if you, too, are in need of sleep and a little forgetting, go
and buy it with this, which will not buy it for me."
With the astonished gratitude of a "Gawd bless yer bleedin' eyes,
Gov'ner" (even here it was God, God, God, thought Cyprian, who
refused to be shut out of Man's tortured intellect even while it
anathematized His works) this invisible wreck of Humanity, made in
His image, slouched away to drink itself blind to sorrow for a short
time in some starless rat-hole known only to its kind.
And Cyprian sat and smoked on the deserted seat, still redolent with
the effluvia of rotting rags, until a suspicious arc of light
searched him out in his sins and a voice, hoarse with hectorings,
commanded him to move on.
Morning found him so far from home that a sleepy taxi-driver whom he
hailed rolled a jaundiced eye on receiving the directions of this
individual whose damp, crumpled clothes and unclean collar showed
unmistakable evidence of an unusual brand of night-on-the-tiles, and
Cyprian was obliged to disburse half the fare in advance.
His physical exhaustion stood him now in good stead and he slept
deeply on the shabby leather cushions the whole way back to the flat.
Slept again on his undisturbed bed, afterwards, till the scandalized
valet roused him for tea; his first meal in twenty-four hours.
Before he set sail for the East, he made one attempt, and only one,
to renew correspondence with Ferlie.
The letter conveyed nothing to her of the true state of his mind. In
despair he had closed it on a pathetic admission, "I fear I have no
gift of expression." She answered him, but her own methods of
expression were, as usual, fantastic. In the letter she enclosed a
small gold key. "A gift for a gift, Cyprian. I suppose it was
inevitable that you should shut the gates upon me. I send the sign
that only you can unlock them."
He placed the key upon his watch-chain, and, with Herculean efforts
of self-control, refrained from any attempts to discover her meaning.
She had always been such a rebel; she had always been so sure of the
light within her and, alas, she had always been so sure of the light
within him.
A few weeks later, when, the honeymoon accomplished, Ferlie and her
husband had returned to town, Mr. Carmichael died.
The operation proved successful enough but, somehow, he never really
rallied. Perhaps the predominant feeling that his day's work was now
ended lessened the incentive to live.
He smiled with grim satisfaction the afternoon Peter came to see him;
a Peter who had already begun to regard the Human Form Divine in the
same light as the Butcher regards the liver and kidneys which he
slaps down upon the marble slab to dissect for purchasing housewives;
a Peter who would be decidedly happier using the knife than saving
the unwary limb that might stray his way.
Peter's hair was untidy, his eyes bloodshot, his collar unhygienic,
and his finger-nails in half-mourning. His appearance was altogether
unsterilized and self-assured. He cried, with a loud voice. His
opinions on certain experimental operations, his criticisms on those
neighbouring embryo surgeons at work on the same yellow preserved leg
as himself, his versions, punctuated with spasms of hearty merriment,
of the latest hospital yarn, portraying his fellow-students as a set
of inquisitive young ghouls more triumphant over an eminent
physician's sponge forgotten in a victim's intestines than troubled
with sympathy for the latter's bereaved relatives.
"And I'll tell you exactly what they did to you, Father; it's old
Gumboil's favourite amusement. First he cuts open the..."
"Peter, I am surprised at you!" broke in his horrified mother.
Thus had the path of Peter been made smooth and his way plain by
Ferlie's brilliant marriage.
"I staked little enough on her," said Mr. Carmichael, relishing the
jest of Martha and Mary's antiquated establishment. "Your mother was
mistrustful of education for her own sex; she did quite well for
herself without it, didn't she? Ferlie seems to have justified the
conviction that the old-fashioned girl gets the matrimonial plums.
At any rate, you will owe your sister a good deal. See that she
stays happy."
Of his son-in-law, whom he only saw once, he said very little.
"Impossible to judge them by the young men of my day. This type did
well enough in the War crisis."
He did not leave his wife badly off. With Peter on the way to being
floated, and Ferlie secure, she had her widow's pension to herself,
besides a little private means and the sum the big town-house
eventually fetched when Ferlie bought it, pandering to a dream of her
mother's that Peter might one day practise there and retain the
Carmichael traditions in the old setting. Till that satisfactory day
it could nearly always be sub-let.
Somewhat doubtful of the Christian aspect of her husband's expressed
desire for cremation Mrs. Carmichael, while respecting his wishes,
determined that the rest of the funeral obsequies should be
sufficiently orthodox to disarm his Creator.
"No proper tombstone, you see," she complained damply to Ferlie.
"The design should, so obviously, have been a severe cross, quite
plain, with perhaps a weeping angel praying. Then a dove of peace
hovering, and maybe a few lilies. The simpler the better, you know.
And a scroll at the foot, or an open book with one of those grand old
texts--Isaiah, is it, or Ecclesiasticus?--anyway, one of the
Prophets--'Fear not for I have redeemed thee.' So comforting. Or
else the one about panting for living waters that always makes me
feel thirsty myself. Your dear father was so fond of rhetoric."
Ferlie, not quite sure whether the weeping angel was destined to wear
a delicate semblance to the bereaved wife, nor convinced that the
cross could be considered suitably symbolic of the faith of one who
had ever regarded it as the undeserved gibbet, brought upon him by
himself, of a well-meaning Eastern agitator nearly two thousand years
ago, was inclined to demur.
"Father never evinced either the slightest fear of his condemnation
hereafter, nor any faith in an ultimate redemption," she protested,
"and I think it would have been rather hypocritical to parade a
thirst for living waters after death in anyone who can hardly be
described as having gasped for them during life."
Then, responding to her mother's grievously shocked demeanour, she
relented into explanation.
"I think I never admired Father so much in his life as I did at his
death. He closed his eyes, restfully and unfearingly, upon the
consciousness of work well done and principles truly upheld. What
business is it of ours if they were mistaken principles? So many
people, who profess to cling to the creeds supported by the Churches,
live as if they had none, and then drift out on a tide of terrified
remorse and shame. But, personally, I would not feel fit to
intercede for Father's 'forgiveness,' if he really requires to be
forgiven for being true to his lights."
Ferlie's mother was too religious to see it, and, since it seems to
follow that the brighter the hope of Eternal Life, the blacker the
garb in which it must be approached, there was much melodious moaning
at the bar when her husband's ashes were interred upon the shores of
that Eternal Sea which brought us hither and upon which, in
imagination, she had safely launched his sceptical soul.
A week later she was still sewing bands of crepe on to Peter's
various coats and seeking consolation in those little details of
mournful respect she was able to accord her Dead.
* * * * * *
In due course, Aunt Brillianna, returning from the uttermost ends of
Italy, was overwhelmed by the volume of water which had poured under
the Family Bridge during her inexcusable retirement.
As the younger relatives, who had expectations at her hands,
remarked: "Anything might have happened to her at her time of life."
Why, Death had happened to her nephew!
To Ferlie at the Black Towers she went: that historical country
residence of long-ago Greville-Mainwarings.
The place bored Clifford, Ferlie informed her, and just now he was
obliged to be in town.
Clifford let her do what she liked at Black Towers, so long as she
did not offend old Jardine, the retainer who acted as head seneschal
and cherished insurmountable objections to innovation of any kind.
"It's a grim-looking pile," said Aunt Brillianna, sniffing the odour
of musty armour in the subdued hall. "You look as if you had been
living among ghosts, child."
"It's quite natural that I should not look very well just now," said
Ferlie.
And Aunt B. scolded herself for not having foreseen that it would be
so. Family Name to carry on and all the rest of it.
But where was this Clifford? A flattering portrait of
him--life-size, in oils--blocked one end of the dining-room. She
studied it for a long time; made a few non-committal noises; reserved
her opinion until she had scrutinized his Father and Grandfather in
the long Gallery above. And when she had made up her mind she still
reserved her opinion for the benefit of her own reflection in the
bedroom mirror.
"Presentably aristocratic. On the downward grade. Will Ferlie act
as a strong enough brake, even with a child in her arms? Lord! What
a mouth! A few more years shall roll and then if degeneracy does not
set in I'll--anyway, I'll leave Ferlie all my emeralds," resolved the
old lady.
She would hardly have been reassured could she have seen the original
of the portrait at that instant in Ruth Levine's flat.
"And Peter?" inquired Aunt B.
"Peter, when he is not classifying the internal machinery of some
antiquated corpse, is examining Roman Catholicism."
"Whatever for?" asked Aunt B. interested.
"For the fun of listening to Mother arguing against it, I think,"
said Ferlie, unenthusiastically. "I told Mother that, if her views
were really so strong, she had better tell him that she had no
objection to his conversion."
Aunt B. chuckled. "You have become very wise in your generation,
Ferlie. And did she?"
"She could not resist correcting the term to 'perversion'," said
Ferlie, "and it would have been so easy to have kept it at 'vert'."
"Her father, the bishop, must often have shown himself impressively
sarcastic upon the query, 'Can there any good come out of the
Vatican?'" mused Aunt B. "And your mother always had an indefensible
memory for things best forgotten."
"What on earth does it matter to anybody but Peter? His argument is
that, as he has no time to go into the matter of a Personal God's
existence thoroughly himself and is by no means convinced that the
same Deity has ceased to exist at the bidding of admirable
rationalists like Father, it is best for him to join a cocksure
religion, wherein he knows what he has got to believe and he knows
what he has got to do. I think Peter could only be held by a
religion that was cocksure. And he is, also, a little mistrustful of
his own judgment these days, and certainly all for strengthening the
matrimonial chain."
"And your own views, Ferlie?"
"To give according as one receives," said Ferlie wearily.
Far from satisfied was Brillianna Trefusis on her way back to town.
She had been told that Cyprian Sterne had shown little or no interest
in Ferlie's affairs and her shrewd brain was being interrogative.
What had he thought of this marriage who knew the Ferlie-nature so
well?
"Perhaps--Another Woman," reasoned Aunt B., "though, somehow, the
idea does not fit. I used to consider the situation dangerous
because the child got such little understanding at home. But, apart
from the difference in ages, those two 'belonged'."
Then she warned herself that her imagination was getting out of hand.
Ferlie, at present, would have been more unnatural without moods than
with them.
* * * * * *
Who could tell that, on opposite sides of the Equator, Ferlie and
Cyprian were both battling against that apathy which descends, like a
canopy of darkness, upon ultra-sensitive spirits who have reached
their limit of controlled mental suffering, blinding a vision
ordinarily (since the high gods are just) unusually clear to
distinguish between immortal and merely mortal beauty, and affecting
them with that terror, however diffidently one may approach the
Example, which wrung a cry of agony from the Leader of all Christs,
whose lips were silent in the utmost extremities of bodily pain?
And these, as yet devoid of the Christ-Power assured to every
struggling heart that responds to its stirring, whose sun is
withdrawn and who possesses no artificial light to relieve the
paralysing blackness of the Shadowy Valleys of Self-mistrust, may
well lose their way in strange unexplored by-paths before they win
through into the open country to find the dawn-star shining still
above the distant hills.