IT was a puzzle to John as much as to the palpitating lady, and in the
maze of his puzzledom the gleam of humour that visited him during
their interview lost its way. Walter Herold's eyes, however, twinkled
maliciously when he heard John's account at once rueful and pig-headed.
Then he grew serious.
“It will be comic opera all the time. It can't be done.”
“It 's going to be done,” said John, obstinately. “There's nothing else
to do. If I were a rich man, I could work wonders with a scratch in my
cheque-book. I could hire an unexceptionable colonel's or clergyman's
widow to do the business. But I'm not. How I'm going to get the house
together, as it is, I don't know. Besides,” he added, turning with some
savageness on his friend, “if you think it a comic-opera idea, kindly
remember it was you who started it.”
Though Herold was silenced for the moment, to the back of his mind still
clung the first suggestion he had made. It was the common-sense
idea that, given a knowledge of John's relations with the Southcliff
household, would have occurred to anybody. John had it in his power to
befriend the unhappy child without trying the rash experiment of raising
her social status. Wherein lay the advantage of bringing her up as
a lady? A pampered maid in a luxurious home does not drag out the
existence of a downtrodden slave. Such have been known to smile and
sing, even to bless their stars, and finally to marry a prince in
grocer's disguise, and to live happy ever afterwards. With John's
description of the girl's dog-like eyes in his memory, Herold pictured
her as a devoted handmaiden to Stellamaris, a romantic, mediaeval
appanage of the sea-chamber. What more amazingly exquisite destiny could
await not only one bred in the gutter, but any damsel far more highly
born? Her silence as to the past could be insured under ghastly
penalties which would have no need of imagination for their appeal. That
of course would be an ultimate measure. He felt certain that a couple
of months' probation in the atmosphere of the Channel House would compel
any human being not a devil incarnate to unthinking obedience to the
Unwritten Law. By following this scheme, Unity would achieve salvation,
Stellamaris acquire a new interest in life, and John himself be saved
not only from financial worries, but from grotesquely figuring in comic
opera. As for Miss Lindon, he felt certain that she would fall down on
her knees and offer up thanksgivings to the God of her grandmothers.
But of this scheme John would hear no word. He bellowed his disapproval
like an angry bull, rushed out, as it were, with lowered head, into the
thick of house-agents, and before Herold could catch him in a milder
humour he had signed the lease of a little house in Kilburn, overlooking
the Paddington Recreation Ground. By the time it was put in order and
decorated, he declared, Unity would be in a fit condition to take up her
abode there with Miss Lindon and himself.
“Where is this convalescent home you 're going to send her to?” asked
Herold.
John did not know. A man could not attend to everything at once. But
there were thousands. He would find one. Then, it being the end of the
week, he went down to the Channel House, where, by the midnight train on
Saturday, Herold joined him.
It was Herold who laid John's rash project before Sir Oliver and Lady
Blount.
“Why in the world,” cried the latter, checking the hospitable flow
of tea from the teapot and poising it in mid air--they were at
breakfast--“why in the world does n't he send the child to us?”
John, in desperation, went over his arguments. The discussion grew
heated. Sir Oliver, with a twirl of his white moustache, gave him to
understand that to take folks out of the station to which it had pleased
God to call them was an act of impiety to which he, Sir Oliver, would
not be a party. His wife, irritated by her husband's dictatorial manner,
demurred to the proposition. John had every right to do as he liked. If
you adopted a child, you brought it up as a matter of course in your
own rank in life. Why adopt it? Why not? They bickered as usual. At last
John got up in a fume and went to cool his head in the garden. It was
outrageous that he should never be allowed to mismanage his own affairs.
There was the same quarreling interference when he proposed to go to
Australia. He lit his pipe and puffed at it furiously. After a while
Lady Blount joined him. She declared herself to be on his side; but, as
in most sublunary things, there was a compromise.
“At any rate, my dear John, give your friends a little chance of helping
you,” she said. “If you set your face against Walter's plan, at least
you can send the child down here to recuperate. Nurse Holroyd will keep
a trained eye on her, and she can play about the garden and on the beach
as much as she likes. I do understand what you 're afraid of with regard
to Stella--”
“Oliver and Walter are wooden-headed dolts,” cried John.
She smiled wifely agreement. “There need be no danger, I assure you. We
can give the child a room in the other wing, and forbid her the use of
Stella's side of the house. Stella's room will be guarded. You may trust
me. Have I ever failed yet? And Stella need never know of her presence
in the place. After all,” she continued, touching his coat-sleeve, “I
think I am a bit nearer to your life than your Aunt Gladys.”
John laughed at the flash of jealousy.
“If you put it that way, it's very hard to refuse.”
“Then you 'll send her?”
He knocked the ashes out of his pipe against the heel of his boot, thus
hiding the annoyance on his face, but he yielded. “For her convalescence
only.”
The touch on his arm deepened into a squeeze.
“If you had said no, I should have been so hurt, dear.”
“I only want to do what's decently right,” said he.
“I think you 're acting nobly,” she said.
“My dear Julia,” said he, “I'm not going to listen to infatuated
rubbish.”
He cast off her hand somewhat roughly, but continued to walk with her
up and down the terrace, talking intimately of his plans concerning the
adopted child and the psychological problem she presented. No man, in
his vain heart of hearts, really resents a woman calling him a noble
fellow, be she ten years old or his great-great-grandmother. They parted
soon afterward, Lady Blount to prepare herself for church, which Sir
Oliver and she attended with official regularity, and John to worship
in his own way--one equally acceptable, I should imagine, to the
Almighty--in the sea-chamber of Stellamaris.
He found Herold there, in the midst of a dramatic entertainment, with
Stellamaris and Constable for audience. How familiar and unchanging was
the scene! The great, bright room, the wood fire blazing merrily up the
chimney, the huge dog lifting his eyes and stirring his tail in welcome,
and against the background of sea and sky the fairy head on its low
pillow. Stella smiled, put a finger to her lips, and pointed to a chair.
“Go on,” she said to Herold.
“We 're in the middle of the first act, just before my exit,” said the
latter.
John became aware, as he listened, that Herold was sketching the piece
in which he was playing, a fragrant comedy full of delicate sentiment
and humour. His own scenes he acted in full, taking all the parts.
Stella lay entranced, and fixed on him glorious eyes of wonder. How
could he do it? At one astonishing moment he was a young girl, at
another her sailor sweetheart, at another a palsied, mumbling old man.
And when, as the old man, he took the weeping girl under his arm
and hobbled away on his stick, leaving the young fellow baffled and
disappointed, it seemed an optical illusion, so vivid was the picture.
He recrossed the room, smiling, the real Walter Herold again; Stella
clapped her hands.
“Is n't he perfectly lovely!”
“Stunning,” said John, who had often witnessed similar histrionic
exhibitions in that room, and had always been impressed with their
exquisite art. “I wish you could see the real thing, dear.”
Stella glanced out to sea for a moment and glanced back at him.
“I don't think I do,” she said. “It would be too real.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Herold clapped John on the shoulder. “Can't you see what a subtle little
artistic soul she has?” he cried enthusiastically. “She has evolved for
herself the fundamental truth, the vital essence of all art--suggestion.
She means that, in order that the proper harmony should be established
between the artist and the person to whom he is making his appeal,
the latter must go a certain way to meet him. He must exercise his
imagination, too, on the same lines. The measure of your appreciation,
say, of Turner, is the length of the imaginative journey you make toward
him. When a thing needs no imaginative effort to get hold of it, it's
not a work of art. You have n't got to go half way to the housemaid
to realize a slice of bread and butter. That's where so-called realism
fails. Stella 's' afraid that if she saw us all in flesh and blood on
the stage, nothing would be left to her imagination. She's right in
essence.”
Stella smiled on him gratefully. “That 's exactly how I feel, but I
could n't have expressed it. How do you manage to know all these funny
things that go on inside me?”
“I wish I did,” said Herold, with a touch of wistfulness.
“But you do.” She turned to John. “Does n't he, Belovedest?”
Herold glanced at the clock. “I must run. I promised Sir Oliver to go to
church. We 'll have the rest of the play this afternoon.”
“Why don't you go to church, too?” Stella asked when Herold had gone.
“I 'm not so good as Walter,” he replied.
“You are,” she cried warmly.
He shook his head. He knew that Herold's churchgoing was not an act of
great spiritual devotion; for the Southcliff service was dull, and
the vicar, good, limited man, immeasurably duller. It was an act of
characteristic unselfishness: he went so as to be a buffer between
Sir Oliver and his wife, who invariably quarreled during their sedate,
official walk to and from morning service, and on this particular
occasion, with fresh contentious matter imported from the outside, were
likely to hold discourse with each other more than usually acrimonious.
“Walter's a sort of saint,” said he, “who can hear the music of
the spheres. I can't. I just jog along the ground and listen to
barrel-organs.”,
They argued the point for a while, then drifted back to Herold's acting,
thence to the story of the play.
“I wonder what 's going to happen,” said Stellamaris. “If Dorothy does
n't marry her sailor, I shall never get over it.”
John laughed. “Suppose the sailor turns out to be a dark, double-dyed,
awful villain?”
“Oh, he can't; he's young and beautiful.”
“Don't you believe that beautiful people can be villains?”
“No,” said Stella; “it 's silly.” She looked for a while out to her
familiar sea, the source of all her inspiration, and her brows were
delicately knitted. “I may as well tell you,” she said at last with
great solemnity, “a conclusion I've come to after lots of thought--yes,
dear Belovedest, I lie here and think lots and lots--I don't believe the
Bible is true.”
“My dear Stella!” he cried, scandalized. He himself did not believe
in the Jonah and whale story or in many other things contained in Holy
Writ, and did not go to church, and was sceptical as to existence of
anthropomorphous angels; but he held the truly British conviction of the
necessity of faith in the young and innocent. Stella having been bred
in the unquestioning calm of Anglican orthodoxy, her atheistical
pronouncement was staggering. “My dear Stella!” he cried. “The Bible not
true?”
She flushed. “Oh, I believe it's all true as far as it goes,” she
exclaimed quickly. “But it 's not true about people to-day. All those
dreadful things that are told in it--the cruelty of Joseph's brethren,
for instance--did happen; but they happened so long, long ago. People
have had lots and lots of time to grow better. Have n't they?”
“They certainly have, my dear,” said John.
“And then Christ came to wash away everybody's sins.”
“He did,” said John.
“So it seems to me we can disregard a great deal of religion. It does
n't affect us. We are n't good like the angels, I know,” she remarked
with the seriousness of a young disputant in the school of Duns Scotus;
“but men don't kill each other, or rob each other, or be cruel to the
weak, and nobody tells horrible lies, do they?”
“I think we 've improved during the last few thousand years,” said John.
“So,” said Stellamaris, continuing her argument, “as the fathers have
no particular sins, they can't be visited much on the children. And
if there are no wicked people to go to hell, hell must be empty, and
therefore useless. So it's no good believing in it.”
“Not the slightest good in the world,” said John, fervently.
“And now that everybody loves God,” she went on, “I don't see what's the
good of religion. I love you, Great High Belovedest, but there's no need
for me to get a form of words to say 'I love you,' 'I love you,' all day
long. One's heart says it.”
“What 's your idea of God, Stella dear?” he asked in a curiously husky
voice.
She beckoned to him. He drew his chair nearer and bent toward her. She
waved her fragile arms bare to the elbow.
“I think we breathe God,” she said.
John Risca went back to Fenton Square and breathed the ghosts of the
night-before-last's sprats, and he journeyed to the Orphanage of Saint
Martha at Willesden and breathed the prison taint of that abode of
hopelessness, and he wrote hard at night in a tiny room breathing
the hot, electric atmosphere of a newspaper-office; and ever horribly
dominant in his mind was the woman whom once he had held in his arms,
who now performed degrading tasks in shameful outward investiture, and
inwardly lashed at him with malignant hatred through the distorted prism
of her soul, and he breathed the clammy dungeon atmosphere of his own
despair; and sitting at his writing-table one night, after having spent
the day in court listening to the loathsome details of a sickening
murder, a _crime passionnel_, with the shock of which the wide world was
ringing,--his American syndicate insisted on a vivid story, and he had
to earn the journalist's daily bread,--the ignorant, fanciful words of
Stellamaris flashed through his mind--“I think we breathe God.” He threw
back his head and laughed aloud, and then let it drop upon his arms,
folded over his wet page of copy, and sobbed in a man's dry-eyed agony
of spirit.
And as the prophet Elijah, when sore beset, found the Lord neither in
the wind nor in the earthquake nor in the fire, so did John Risca find
Him not in all these daily things through which he had passed. Life
was fierce, inhuman, a devastating medley of blind forces, making human
effort a vain thing, human aspiration a derision, faith in mankind a
grotesque savage Ju-ju superstition. There was no God, no beneficent
influence making order out of chaos; for it was all chaos. Jezebel and
her lusts and cruelties ruled the world--this cloaca of a world. Man
argues ever from particular to general, instinctively flying to the
illogic on which the acceptance of human life is based. To Risca,
at nine and twenty, his pain translated itself into terms of the
world-pain; and so will it happen to all generations of all the sons and
daughters of men.
After a while, as he sat there motionless, he grew aware of something
delicately soft touching his ear and hair. For a moment he had the
absurd fancy that Stellamaris stood beside him with caressing fingers.
It became so insistent that he dallied with it, persuaded himself that
she was there; he would have only to turn to see her in her childish
grace. He heard a sound as of murmured speech. She seemed to whisper of
quiet, far-off things. And then he seemed to hear the words: “The door
is open. Go out into the wide spaces under heaven.” He roused himself
with a start, and, looking about him, perceived that the door of his
sitting-room was indeed ajar, the ill-fitting old lock having slipped,
thus causing a draught, which poured over his head and shoulders. He
rose and clapped on his hat and went down-stairs. A ten-minutes' trudge
on the pavements would clear his head for the work that had to be
accomplished. But on his doorstep he halted. Away above the housetops on
the other side of the dingy square sailed the full moon, casting a wake
of splendour along the edge of a rack of cloud. And below it swam a
single star.
He caught himself repeating stupidly, “Stella Maris, Star of the Sea.”
With an impatient shake of the shoulders he went his way through the
narrow streets and emerged upon the broad and quiet thoroughfares
about the Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. On Westminster Bridge the
startling silver of the moonlit river brought him to a stand. The same
glory was overspreading the mild sea below the windows of the Channel
House. Perhaps Stella even then lay awake, as she often did of nights,
and was watching it and was “breathing God.” A great longing arose
within him to stand on the beach beneath her window in the wide spaces
under heaven. So he walked on, thinking vaguely of Stellamaris and her
ways and mysteries, and reached his home again in a chastened mood. Like
Elijah, he had found God neither in the wind nor in the earthquake nor
in the fire; but who can tell whether he had not been brought into touch
with something of the divine by the still, small voice that came through
the draught of the crazy door?