The day came, at last, when she was able to approach the subject with
Cyprian, lying in a hammock beside her under the trees.
He had, up to now, avoided all reference to his unsatisfactory
departure, armed with fishing tackle, into hostile territory.
As she sat making tea, late in the whispering afternoon, preparatory
to hailing the padre from his drudging attempts in the Mission school
to explain the evil of coveting your neighbour's pig, likewise his
pandanus grove and his coco-nuts and anything that is his, including
his wife, she looked up to catch Cyprian's whimsical expression.
"Which of us apologizes this time, Ferlie? Me?"
"I'll let you off," she replied shakily, "If you'll make adequate
restitution by getting well."
"I am well."
She took his cup of tea to him and placed it within reach of the
uninjured arm. His stiffened shoulder still prevented free use of
the other.
"The monsoon will be breaking soon," dreamily twisting a floating
curl round his finger as she stooped, "Shall we remain on here and
beset the even tenor of Jelly's existence with a similar problem to
his bigmatical ones?"
"Cyprian. He _is_ a little saint!"
"I know it. You are both saints, and I eye the haloes with envy, but
not much hope. I want you, as well as your halo."
"Take!" said Ferlie. But she went back to her chair and sat looking
at John chasing Thu Daw across the clearing.
He followed their flight and then said, "We can't stay. 'Unto each
his mother beach, bloom and bird and land.'"
"That's true," agreed Ferlie, and rolled Thu Daw's ball back to him
from under her chair.
"What will we do about it, Cyprian?"
"What indeed? John's future is clear. Winchester, I suppose, and
Oxford, and so to Black Towers, finally. You are right to remind me
where the greater responsibility lies. At an English school, would
he find himself out of it? Would they take him?"
"If we could circumvent the first question he could live the other
down."
"Why should he be forced to live down my--sins?"
"The alternative is Burma, and, there, you and I have much to live
down, whatever course we take."
"Ferlie! For God's sake reassure me on one point."
To that stifled passion she instinctively reached out comforting
hands.
"You--you are not thinking of separation?"
She said, "I hardly know. It seems to me we cannot go back now on
what we have done. As we might tell Peter, 'there must be pioneers!'
... But I do think our pioneering is going to lie along a very rough
road and I am afraid--for you."
The sight of Jellybrand on his way from the school checked Cyprian's
reply. The padre beamed joyously as Ferlie waved him to the second
straw chair.
"W-would you believe it? My choir can now sing the w-whole of
'There's a Friend for little children,' by heart. W-we are going to
have it at Benediction to-night. The Bishop is not quite certain
w-whether I ought to be allowed Benediction, as an extra service, but
I hope to be able to persuade him to my point of view when he visits
us. He's not a very Protestant Bishop, and most w-wide minded."
"Does it make any difference to Friend-of-England and Co. which you
have?" asked Cyprian.
"Nothing makes any difference to them, but it makes a very great
difference to me to be allowed to teach and practise w-what I believe
to be necessary."
"If I were the Bishop," said Ferlie, "I shouldn't be able to help
feeling that you must know best and that you mattered more than he
did. He has so much to encourage _him_. Does your brain never
bother you into believing the work useless and the source of all your
inspiration a dream?"
He crossed his knees, displaying a badly cobbled rent in the trailing
uniform he loved too proudly to lay aside more often than was
absolutely essential. "Even my poor intellect questions sometimes.
Doubts come and go, but nothing can take away one's past spiritual
experiences."
"I don't know that a single unlooked-for spiritual experience can
influence a mind which leans naturally towards agnosticism," put in
Cyprian suddenly. "There is a work-a-day agnosticism which satisfies
most men, supported by certain ethics, coloured with what for nearly
the last two thousand years has been regarded as Christianity.... It
is not my fault if I have not a temperament which can rest content on
Faith. I did not make my brain."
"That is just the point," said Ferlie. "You are incapable of making
a single thing about yourself. But you are able, if you wish, to
insist that your brain, and all the attributes of your particular
temperament shall serve instead of rule you. Faith is within the
reach of all who reach out towards it. The Christ, whose ethics you
adopt, explained that whenever He met educated doubting men."
"But sometimes," said Jellybrand, "one fears to presume."
Ferlie saw that he was thinking of that night in the forest when she
had defied him to test his own faith for her sake, and she replied,
"Perhaps that should be considered an experience especially given to
me."
Unexpectedly, he chuckled.
"W-would you like to spend a happy hour now torturing our prisoner?
It might entertain the invalid. I have often w-wondered w-what I
should have done if he had not confessed and you had proceeded to
carry out your intention of making a second St. Sebastian of him
w-with revolver bullets."
"Did she intend doing that?" asked Cyprian. "Ferlie, what a joke!"
"It was no joke, I assure you," contradicted Jellybrand, "She stood
there--w-would you believe it?--w-with that horrid little w-weapon
pointing in all directions at once, and rank murder in her face."
Then Ferlie said a horrible thing. So horrible for her that the
padre dropped his tea-cup and Cyprian raised himself upright to meet
her blazing eyes.
"I'd have re-crucified Christ!" said Ferlie.
In the petrified silence which followed Cyprian extended his one arm.
She went to him, startled into comprehension of her own words, and
hid her face in his sleeve.
"It's all right," muffled tones assured them. "Do you suppose that,
because you don't understand, all Heaven doesn't?"
Neither answered, till Cyprian said uncertainly,
"You might make me terribly conceited, Ferlie."
"Or terribly humble," she answered, still in the dark.
Jellybrand mopped up, with his handkerchief, the mess he had made,
and poured himself out some more tea. His wrist was unsteady and he
slopped the milk afresh over the table.
"I meant to tell you both"--they heard his words stumbling towards
them through a clogging mist--"I have thought a good deal about
you--and prayed. But, somehow--I suppose because I am not quite sure
of my right to advise--light has not come to me yet. The solution
slowly dawning may be a mirage. I must leave you to judge of that.
It is not for me to follow the w-wise across the desert. My place is
in the fields w-with the blind flocks. Still, since you must go back
and live practical lives in a practical w-world, there is such a
thing as rendering unto Cæsar. In this case--to a custom, if an
unlawful custom, as many considered Cæsar's tribute. Yet, the
disciples were permitted to pay that, to give their enemies no
handle. You could pay it--this tribute to our so-called
Civilization--by obtaining your divorce and contracting, according to
the law of the land, to live together as it permits you. A marriage
in a registry office counts as no marriage to a Catholic; but this
you know. Your lives together after it w-would be a matter for
yourselves and your own consciences, supposing you can continue to
live together under the same conditions you have observed up to now.
If you find you cannot, then I, honestly, see no w-way out but the
one w-which seems to spell living death to both of you--separation.
"There is another consideration. The Roman Communion and its rules
are outside my scope. You know best w-whether it w-will permit a
w-wife separated from her husband, in such special circumstances, to
remain under the innocent protection of another man, in a state
fulfilling the demands of both Civil and the Ecclesiastical Law. In
my own very humble opinion--and I speak after much consideration--the
thing is permissible. But I live so far beyond the reach of those
dogmatic burdens w-with which Man impedes his progress to bear as
offerings along the steep road to God. Clever theologians w-would,
doubtless, frustrate my arguments, in one sentence. I can only say
that I do not think they could alter my feeling in the matter.
"The views of any Church are immaterial to one of you, who has been,
hitherto, a law unto himself. They are not immaterial to me; but my
heart is ready to let the situation rest between you and the Greatest
of all Lovers, who sees further than His disciples in the Church."
The speaker pushed his untasted tea aside with a little clinking jerk
of china, and moved swiftly away from the two under the restless
palms.
In the distance they watched him climb the steps of the toy ark and,
a moment later, the cracked bell clanged.
* * * * * *
Cyprian spoke first, when the cadences of the concertina would have
been inciting to hilarity most listeners superior to the Nicobarese
and inferior to the angels.
"Did you ever hear of Er, the son of Armenius? No. You never trod
the mill of the ordinary Greek classics. Er was a brave man who was
killed in battle, and the story goes that, ten days later, his body
was discovered quite fresh. The twelfth day they laid him on a
funeral pyre, when he wisely came to life again. He brought news
that he had been permitted to see the other world and return, and
described a long and complicated vision--Socrates' idea of the
justice meted out to Man after death.
"While I was ill my brain was troubling itself with an account of the
method by which the sky's vault was held together, in the vision, at
either end, by a belt of light."
"What are 'whorls'?" Ferlie asked him suddenly.
He laughed, his fingers busy with her hair.
"I can well believe that I babbled about them. Er's idea of the
eight whorls, inserted in one another was founded on the Greeks'
conception of astronomy. Never mind. I'll lend you the
translation....
"I am only prefacing my own vision (if you can call it that when you
know) with the mention of all this, to show you how my mind has been
running on Plato for the sake of one passage in his Republic,
portraying Earthly Love as a frantic and savage Master."
Said Ferlie, "He is a Master who can be enslaved."
"Your faith tells you so. I only saw it in my--dream. Do you know
that I believe, like Er, I have been dead?"
"You were dead. Your heart had stopped beating. You must have been
unconscious for a long time. And now, being you, you are wondering
whether knowledge acquired during an experience in Death should be
pushed aside by your well-balanced living mind. What did you see?"
"It was not exactly a seeing. It was a knowing. I was dead and I
knew I was dead. But I was still alive, most terribly and
poignantly. You were the Dead--on this side of the Dark, belted
down, like Er's universe, from the light. But I was struggling so
passionately to return and be dead with you here, rather than alive
with all those other Living, that, like Er, I think I was shown the
way to break through....
"One has heard of people in trances waking in the grave. Can you be
sure with me, Ferlie, that this was more than a trance?"
"God knows I can!" she said earnestly.
"You need not have been afraid. I would have wrenched the way
through to you if you had not come back to me. For that reason I
took your revolver."
After a silence he said, "Then I see now why I was allowed to find
the way. I was not worth such a sacrifice ... the sacrifice of your
unfinished work here. That is quite clear."
"Ah, never! Never till that night did I know the depths of my own
weakness. For the memory I must go humbly all my days. Cyprian,
believe, rather, that you have been allowed the vision because only
through its acceptance can you receive the strength which must make
me strong."
"Well, whatever the explanation," said Cyprian, "it is only certain,
as it was to another man before me, that, whereas I was blind, now I
see. I see the truth of the Resurrection."
Bright with revelation was Ferlie's face.
"Dear, it is enough and more than enough. The rest follows as it is
needed, making all things possible for us who can look forward into
Eternity. I fear nothing, in whatever shadowy valley our steps may
be turned ... now. The light will break some time when our eyes are
strong to bear it. We have been united in all things save the one
thing that was needful: belief in the Life Everlasting. Without that
faith our love must have mastered us. And I knew it. Your Frantic
Master drives as his slaves those who see no further than the end of
this fragment of life. Cyprian, my lover, do you not understand how
it is that I am not afraid to stay beside you now?"
Across the gilded bamboo leaves the children's voices stole to mingle
incongruously with the shouts of the returning fishermen, to the
drawling melody of----
"A Friend Who never changeth, Whose love will never die.
Our earthly friends may fail us,
And change with changing years ..."
Cyprian slipped out of the hammock and raised Ferlie to her feet.
* * * * * *
Yet, finally, the leadership, even in mystical matters, was to
devolve on him.
There were only thin wooden walls to the little forest bungalow.
Ferlie and he had been sleeping indoors since his illness so that she
might have all medicines and the paraphernalia for nursing within
easy reach.
Therefore, it happened that in turning his head restlessly to escape
an intruding beam of moonlight through the curtainless door, he
roused himself with sudden completeness, straining to catch the
echoes of quiet sobbing.
He only paused an instant.
Ferlie was lying face downwards: her forehead on her arms, which
gleamed lily-coloured in the pure light.
He knelt beside her, attempting to raise her head.
"My dear... My dear..."
She grasped thankfully at the steadying sensitive fingers. "Help me,
Cyprian! You were always, really, the stronger. Help me to conquer
it.... I know you have thought that everything mattered a great deal
more to you than to me. That I was satisfied with the knowledge that
the end is not yet. But sometimes--at night--Heaven is very far away
and earth is most powerfully real, and doubts creep over me, who have
laid the great burden of this faith on you, whether I am fit to bear
the burden of my own human loving. You see, Cyprian, there is one
instinct given to women at Creation; the roots of which are in
Creation itself.
"John is mine by duty and Thu Daw is yours by desire, but I
want--and, at the moment, I'd sell my soul to eternal death to make
it come true--your son in my arms ... through love...."
So came again to Cyprian the inexorable phantom of that Master of
whose subjection he had been made falsely confident by the soothing
sympathy of a celibate's idealism and the magic of Ferlie's trust, a
few short hours back.
Though he came in the form of an angel of light; though he came in
the form of a roaring lion; though now in a more mysterious guise
than either, it was the same despotic power which drove and drew.
How to battle now with this image of shadowy radiance? And, after
all, why? He summed up the matter afresh. If there was not truth
here it was nowhere, and only in following the truth could man be set
free of his ills. Thus had taught that same Nazarene, whose spoken
word of two thousand years ago was causing all the trouble; since
even in the sceptical circles of modern scientific research men were
to be found to follow the gleam along His trail. Across which lay
Ferlie exhausted; himself hesitating above her in the knowledge that
she would yield, inevitably, to the guidance of his groping hands in
the dark.
He had said to her, "I see the truth of the Resurrection," and she
had replied that all else followed; but she had not then meant to
signify the strength for this sacrifice. And he saw, blindingly,
that there might be no half-measures. The ghost of an unborn child
barred the way of compromise.
Shaken with pain, mental and physical, Cyprian of the once
all-satisfying ethical agnosticism called with the impotent despair
which is akin to anger upon that Lover who stood between them as
lovers, and who was becoming in conception unwaveringly the same as
the God who brooded over the disciplined Churches.
"Why should Ferlie let them torture her?" he had asked fiercely again
and again of himself in the past, and now that the power lay with him
to stay the hated pressure he found himself weakly refraining instead
with the question, "why should I let them torture me?"
Even if separation had spelt material death for them both, Ferlie's
Church would concentrate only upon the spiritual death their life
together must effect.
Had not the time really come to dismiss as out-worn sentimentality
this talk of a soul's death?
His own, such as it was, and _if_ he might barter, and gladly, for
the fathomable happiness of To-day, despite that secret glimpse of
wisdom imparted during his unconscious hours. But what of Ferlie's
soul, such as That was, and now in his keeping--a stainless loyal
Existent?
He had fought to make it see with material vision and the mastering
Force had fought on his side.
Yes, she had indeed fallen, spent, in the fearful starlessness and it
was his at last exultingly to lead.
Incoherent shreds of forgotten argument worried him. Magi or
shepherds ... the wise with their great responsibilities....
He became contemptuously aware of the aguish shaking of his body.
How did one pray? ... How _did_ one pray? ... The opalescent tropical
dawn found him still at her side, his hold unrelaxed of hands now at
rest, the glory of her hair making a halo about the face of a very
tired sleeping child.
Above the dim blue mists still shrouding the patient jungle the sun
floated, a scarlet ball, heralding the resurrection of another day.
Resurrection. That whisper continued with its insistence upon
horizons beyond the vision of all earthly eyes.
Others, like the legendary Er, had proved that the pulsing of the
soul does not cease with the pulsing of the heart; nevertheless it
was well-nigh impossible to rest one's faith in this matter upon the
experiences of others. Just in this matter. One was prepared to
believe the incredible statements of scientists and astronomers
without wrestling individually with their proofs. Why not,
therefore, the vision of those who had eyes to see and ears to hear
beyond the grave? His own past contact with that death-state was
failing to inspire now that his body felt, once more, gloriously
alive. One had to remember not to forget.
"Nothing," had said that exasperating duplicate of St. Francis in the
islands, "can take away one's spiritual experiences."
To that slender link with the future he must trust. Many had not so
much and yet walked untroubled.
Was there not some special revelation for those who, not having seen,
were yet ready outside Gethsemane's gates with the bitter admission,
"Thou has conquered, O pale Galilean"? The wraith of the dying
Emperor, forced to accept such defeat, seemed to smile mockingly at
him from the distorted patches of light and shade outside.
Cyprian appreciated afresh that Ferlie would hardly prove courageous
enough to face her own defeat now without waiting on his decision.
His to lead, forward or back.
And with the poignant realization something snapped. He rose stiffly
to his feet to stand a moment at the window, drawing the salt
sea-breeze into his lungs.
The surrender had become suddenly possible.
He lifted tired eyes to the on-stealing light and his lips moved.
They framed the one word which Ferlie, waking, might have recognized
as representing the clarion call of her utter triumph.
"_Vicisti_," said Cyprian.