Archie was walking back to the house in Grosvenor Square from Oakland
Crescent, on the afternoon of Helena's wedding. Owing to the acute
suspense of the European situation, the plans of the newly married
couple had been changed, and, instead of setting off at once in the
yacht for a month in the Norwegian fjords, they had gone to a house of
Lord Harlow's in Surrey to await developments in the crisis or some kind
of settlement. It was still uncertain whether England would be drawn
into the war, though opinion generally regarded that as inevitable, and
in this case no doubt Lord Harlow, an ex-Guardsman, would rejoin his
regiment. Archie's mother, after the departure of the bridal couple, had
also left town for Lacebury, taking with her Jessie and Colonel Vautier
for a few days' visit; but Archie had decided to stop another night in
London.
There had been the usual crowds and chatterings and excitement, the
front pew kept for a princess, the signing of names in the vestry, the
red carpets and wedding-marches, and the whole ceremony had filled
Archie with the greatest amusement. But the subsequent proceedings had
not amused him so much, and Helena's departure, looking prettier than
ever, with her husband, had annoyed and exasperated him. He did not like
to think of them together, and, though only a couple of nights ago he
and Martin had found good cause for whispers and laughter over this, it
was not so diverting when it actually occurred as it had promised to be.
Part of that midnight seance which he could not at first remember had
found its way into his conscious mind, and he knew that had been talked
about, and had ascertained, with considerable relief, that Jessie had
not been able to hear it. But now there was a savage bitterness in his
mind about it; Helena seemed to have played him false again. She ought
to have refused to marry the Bradshaw at the last moment, and it was an
ineffectual balm to know she did not care for him. Perhaps, as Jessie
had once said (though withdrawing it afterwards), she cared for nobody,
but now Archie believed that she cared for him. It maddened him to think
that she was the Bradshaw's "ABC," and in those circumstances he had
judged it better to remain in town for the night, and distract his mind
and soothe his longings with the amusement and aids to forgetfulness
which London was so ready to offer to a young man who was looking for
adventures.
But London proved disappointing: it did not seem to be thinking of its
amusements at all. Archie called to see a friend who last week had shown
himself an eager and admirable companion, but, found him to-day
disinclined for another night of similar diversion, for he could neither
think nor talk about anything else than the imminence of war. Archie
felt himself quite incapable of taking any active interest in that; it
weighted nothing in the balance compared with the stern duty of seeking
enjoyment and forgetting about Helena. What if England did go to war
with Germany? Certainly he hoped she would not; she had made no more
than a friendly understanding with her Allies--indeed they were not even
Allies, they were but well-disposed nations--but, even if she did, what
then? There was an English fleet, was there not, which cost an immense
amount of money to render invincible; but it was invincible. Why, then,
should he bother about it, since he was not a sailor? It was further
supposed that Germany had an invincible army; and there you were! And if
England had no army at all to speak of, it was quite clear she could no
more fight Germany on land than Germany could fight her by sea. So what
on earth prevented a little dinner at a restaurant and an hour at a
music-hall and a little supper somewhere and anything that turned up?
Something always turned up, and was usually amusing for an hour or two.
But his friend thought otherwise, and kept diving out into the street to
get some fresh edition of an evening paper hot from the press and
crammed with fresh inventions, and Archie left this insane patriot in
disgust at his excitement over so detached an affair as a European war.
He tried a second friend with no better success; there was a certain
excuse for him, as he was a subaltern in the Guards. But for the first
friend there was none, as he was only in an office in the city.
There were still four or five hours to get through before it would be
reasonable to think about dinner, after which, even if he started alone,
the hours would take care of themselves very pleasantly; but he had to
fill the interval somehow. There were some proofs of his book waiting
for him at home, and, hoping to get interested in this first-born public
child of his brain, he sat down with a view to correcting them. But he
found himself reading the pages as if there was nothing intelligible
printed on them. True, if he forced himself to attend, he could see that
grammatical sentences succeeded each other; but they conveyed no further
impression. There was a lot about the sea, but why on earth had he taken
the trouble to write it? He could remember writing it; he could call up
an image of himself sitting in the garden at Silorno, eagerly writing,
conscientiously erasing, walking up and down in the attempt to frame a
phrase that should exactly reproduce some mood of his mind. But what had
inspired those strivings and despairs and exultations?
Here was the record of them, and it seemed now to be about nothing. "The
rain in the night had washed the white soil into the rim of the sea, and
it was clouded like absinthe." He could well remember the search for,
and the finding of that particular simile. He and Harry had been into
Genoa a week before, and, out of curiosity, had ordered absinthe at a
cafe. The drink, _qua_ drink, was mildly unpleasant, resembling aniseed,
but it had been worth while having it, merely to have got that perfectly
fitting simile. The effect, too, had been rather remarkable; it produced
a sort of heady lightness and sense of well-being; colours seemed
strangely vivid and intensified, and...
Archie got up from his meaningless proofs. It was absinthe that would
help him to fill up those dull hours till dinner-time, and he remembered
having seen in some little French restaurant in Soho the stuff he
wanted. Very likely you could get it anywhere, but he wanted it from
that particular place, for there had come in one evening, when he dined
there, a most melancholy-looking person who had ordered it and sat and
sipped. Somehow the man's face had made an impression on him, so unhappy
was it. He remembered also his face half an hour afterwards, when he
began his dinner, and no serener, more contented countenance could have
been imagined... So he must have his absinthe from that restaurant;
clearly they had a very good brand of it there.
As he drove out alone that evening to dine, he heard the newsvenders
shouting out the English ultimatum to Germany, and saw the placards in
the streets. The shouting sounded wonderfully musical, and below the
roar of the street traffic was a muffled harmony as of pealing bells.
The drab colours of London were shot with prismatic hues; never had the
streets appeared so beautiful. There was even beauty in the fact of the
outbreak of war, for England was going to war for the sake of liberty,
which was a fine, a noble adventure. And how lovely the English girls
and boys were, who crowded the pavements! They were like beds of
exquisite flowers. For himself, he was going back to dine at the French
restaurant in Soho, for that would be in the nature of supporting our
new Allies. Afterwards there were the streets and the music-halls, and
all the mysteries of the short summer night. Then dawn would break,
rose-coloured dawn, with her finger on her lips, and sweet, silent
mouth, a little ashamed of her sister, night, but sympathetic at heart.
Dawn was always a little prudish, a little Quakerish.
* * * * *
The days of a divine August went by, and the line of German invasion
swept forward like a tide that knows no ebb over all Belgium and
North-East France. The British Expeditionary Force started, and was
swept back like the flotsam on the seashore. The call came for the
raising of an army, and east and west, north and south, the recruiting
offices were like choked waterways, and still the flood of men, in whose
hearts the fact of England had awoke, poured in. Hospitals were gorged
with the returning wounded; women by the hundred and by the thousand
volunteered as nurses, and went to hospitals to be trained. The whole of
comfortable England, intent hitherto on its sports, its leisure, its
general superiority to the rest of the world, suddenly became aware that
an immense and vital danger threatened it. A chorus of objurgation arose
from the brazen-throated press, each organ striving to shout the
loudest, at the unpreparedness of the country, and much valuable energy
was spent in headlines and recriminations. There was a shortage of guns,
a shortage of ammunition, a shortage of everything which constitutes the
sinews of war. The only thing of which there was not a shortage was of
those who threw aside all other considerations, such as income and
secure living and life itself, and gave themselves to assist, in what
manner they could, the cause for which England had gone to war.
To Archie this all seemed a very hysterical and uncomfortable attack of
nerves. In several ways it affected him personally, for William, than
whom there was no more reliable servant, was among the first to leave
his well-paid situation and present himself at a recruiting office.
Archie hated that: there would be the nuisance of getting a new servant,
who did not know where precisely he ought to put Archie's tooth-powder,
and how to arrange his clothes. William had announced the fact too, in
the suddenest of manners; he brought it out as he brought in Archie's
morning tea.
"And if you can spare me at once, my lord," he said, "I had better go on
Saturday."
Archie felt peculiarly devilish that morning; it rained, and the
absinthe that should have arrived last night had not come.
"I think it's very inconsiderate of you, William," he said. "But I
suppose you expect to get on well, and draw higher pay than you get
here. So I shall have to raise your wages. All right; I'll give you a
pound a month more, and don't let me hear any more about it."
He knew perfectly well that this was not William's reason, but it amused
him to suggest it. He wanted to see how William would take it. The fact
that he knew that the man was devoted to him made the point.
William busied himself with razors and tooth-brushes, replying nothing.
"Can't you hear what I say?" asked Archie, pouring himself out his tea.
William faced round.
"Yes, Master Archie," he said. "I heard. But I knew you didn't mean
that. You know how I've served you and worked for you all these years.
You would scorn to think that of me, I should say."
Archie had noticed the "Master Archie" instead of "my lord"; both
William and Blessington often forgot that he was "my lord," and it
always used to please him that to the sense of love he was still a young
boy. And, in spite of his irritation and peevish morning temper, it
touched some part of him that still loved below the corruption that was
spreading over him like some jungle-growing lichen. But he had to force
his way through that to reply.
"You must do as you think right, William," he said.
William had finished the arrangements of his dressing, and stood for a
moment by his bedside with Archie's evening clothes bundled on to his
arm.
"Yes, Master Archie," he said. "And you'll be joining up too before
long, won't you? I should dearly love to be your soldier-servant, sir,
if you could manage it."
All Archie's ill-humour returned at that unfortunate suggestion.
"Perhaps you had better not be impertinent," he said. "That'll do."
William's face fell.
"I had no thought of impertinence, my lord," he said. "I only thought--"
"I told you that would do," said Archie.
* * * * *
Three days afterwards William left. He came to say good-bye to Archie,
who did not look up from the paper he was reading. Archie was suffering
inconvenience from his departure, and this was the best way of making
William feel it. But when the door had shut again, and William was gone,
he felt a sudden horror of the thing that seemed to be himself, and he
ran out, and called William back. All these days he had not had a word
or kindly gesture for him...
"Good-bye, William," he said. "I wish you all good luck. I've treated
you like a beast these last days, and I'm awfully sorry. You're the best
fellow a man could have, and you must try to forget the horrid way I've
behaved."
William stood with his hand in Archie's for a moment.
"You're always my Master Archie, sir," he said.
* * * * *
Well, there was an end of William: before he had got back to his paper
again Archie wondered what had possessed him to throw a kind word to a
dog like that, who had left him at three days' notice to join this
ridiculous military conspiracy. William did not care how much he
inconvenienced Archie, who had always treated him more like a
subordinate friend than a servant. He had helped William in a hundred
ways: had given him old clothes, had constantly asked after his mother,
had left his letters about for William to read if he chose. It seemed
rank treachery...
Others were treacherous too; his mother, for instance, was immediately
going up to town, to take charge of the house in Grosvenor Square, which
was to be turned into a hospital for wounded officers. She was to become
a sort of housekeeper, so Archie figured it, and merely superintend
domestic arrangements. She would have nothing to do with the nursing and
the surgery, which had a certain fascination... He could picture a sort
of pleasure in seeing a man's leg cut off, or in standing by while
doctors pulled bandages off festering wounds. To feel well and strong
while others were suffering had an intelligible interest: to witness
decay and corruption and pain was a point that appealed to him now. But
Lady Tintagel was going to do nothing of the sort: she was just going to
be a housekeeper. It was very selfish of her; Archie would certainly
want, from time to time, to go up to town and spend a night or two
there, and now he would have to go to a hotel or a club, instead of
profiting by the spacious privacy of his father's house. Charity begins
at home; and his mother had started charity on most extraneous lines.
Jessie had followed this lead, "the lead of so-called trumps," as Archie
framed a private phrase. She would start by being not even a
housekeeper, but a sort of kitchen-maid at the same hospital. She had an
insane desire to work, to do something that cost her something, instead
of engaging a kitchen-maid, and paying her wages to go to some hospital
or other. There was a craze for "personal service," instead of getting
other people to do work for you, if you felt work had to be done. People
wanted to "do their bit," to employ an odious expression which was
beginning to obtain currency. The nation was going to be mobilized; hand
and heart had to serve some vague national idea. Occasionally, as on the
night when war was declared, Archie saw an aesthetic beauty in the
notion of upholding rights and liberties; but he had not then reckoned
with the fact that personal inconvenience might result from that
quixotic revolution. Quixotism was fine in theory, but it was a dream,
not to be encouraged in waking hours, when far more important and
realizable commodities, like whisky and absinthe, engaged the true
attention.
But, whoever else was treacherous, his father at least was loyal, and
showed no sign of becoming a butler or a footman, to correspond with his
wife and Jessie. Occasionally some grave report concerning the German
advance through Belgium used to reach his brain, and he would walk up
and down his room in the evening with a martial tread, and a glance at a
sword that hung above his writing-table, and wish he was younger and
able to "have a go" at those invading locusts. But invariably this mood,
which was always short, was succeeded by another, not bellicose but
domestic.
"This damned war is going to break up home-life in England," he would
say, "and I've no doubt that was what the Germans aimed at. And they're
succeeding too. Look at this house: there's you mother going to leave
us, and there's Helena's husband expecting every day to be sent to
France, and there's Jessie leaving her father to wash up dishes. What's
going to become of our English homes if that goes on?--for, mark you,
they are the root of our national life. It's digging up the trees' roots
to break up English homes. You and I, Archie, are the only ones who are
staunch to our homes. Pass me that bottle, will you?"
"May I help myself on the way?" said Archie.
"Yes, of course, my dear boy. I say, it was a funny state of things when
you and I used to have our evening drinks alone, instead of enjoying
them and chatting over them together. Your man, William, too, he's gone
and enlisted, hasn't he? The old bulwarks of England are going fast: the
homes are being broken up, and the very servants come and go as they
choose. An establishment was an establishment in the old days: it all
stood and fell together, if you see what I mean. But I wish I was young
enough to have a go at the Boches."
"I'm thinking of going," Archie would say, merely in order to enjoy his
father's reply.
"Well, in my opinion, you'll be doing a very wrong thing, then," said
Lord Tintagel. "I hope you won't seriously think of that. I tell you
your duty is here, with your poor old father. When I'm gone you may do
what you please, and I daresay you won't have very long to wait. But,
while I'm here, I hope you'll remember that they say in church 'Honour
thy father and thy mother.' You can't go behind the commandments, or the
psalms, whichever it is."
But these sessions in Lord Tintagel's room of an evening, with the
liquid in the decanter sinking steadily like a well in time of drought,
were becoming rather tedious to Archie. Since his discovery of absinthe
they had even become rather gross, and he congratulated himself on
having seen the sordidness of mere swilling. That sort of thing was only
fit for coarse, rough tastes; it seemed to him to lack all delicacy and
aesthetic value, and he often left his father, who congratulated him on
his abstemiousness after no more than a friendly glass of good
fellowship, and went upstairs to his room to enjoy subtler and more
refined sensations. Indeed, his chief interest in that half-hour or so
in his father's room was derived from the sight of his father's heavy
potations, the struggle of his maundering thoughts to emerge into
language, much as a tilted half-moon struggles to pierce the flying
clouds on some tempestuous night. The sight of his father's
deterioration and gradual wreck somehow fascinated him; there was decay
and corruption there, and those no longer aroused in him that horror
with which in dream he had observed the emergence of the writhing worms
from the white statue of Helena. Such things were no longer disgusting
and repulsive: they claimed kinship with something in his soul that was
very potent. Once Martin had alluded to that vision as a warning, and he
had not taken that warning, in consequence of which he had passed an
utterly miserable month after Helena's rejection of him. Now values had
altogether changed: decay no longer revolted him. But, with a hypocrisy
that had become characteristic of him, he told himself that the sight of
his father's nightly intoxication was a lesson to himself. He must
observe that degrading spectacle, and learn from it what the result of
too much whisky was. And then he retired to his bedroom to think it over
as he sipped the clouded aroma of his absinthe.
Jessie came down for another week-end before she took her kitchen-maid
situation, and brought the news that a fresh draft of Lord Harlow's
regiment was ordered to the front, and that he would leave for France
within the next day or two.
Archie felt a wild desire to laugh, to skip, to show his intense
appreciation of these tidings. But he remembered that Jessie was not his
confidante to that extent, and checked his exuberant inclination.
"Poor Helena!" he said, with an accent of great sincerity. "She must be
broken-hearted. Why, they've only been married a fortnight, if as much."
It was excellently said, and Jessie felt she would have shown herself an
infidel, with regard to the general decency of the human race, if she
had not accepted those words with the sincerity with which they surely
must have been uttered. She resolutely put away from her all those
misgivings that had assailed her when first she knew of Archie's changed
attitude towards her sister.
"You have been a brick about Helena," she said. "I want to tell you
that. Your forgiveness of the way she treated you seems to me beyond all
praise."
"Oh, nonsense," said he lightly. "Besides, it was so dreadfully
uncomfortable being always angry and miserable. Martin showed me that.
But about Helena: how is she bearing it?"
It was now Jessie's turn to be obliged to cloak her meaning.
"Very calmly and bravely," she said.
"She would," said Archie enthusiastically. "One always felt there was a
steel will behind all Helena's gentleness. What will she do, do you
think? Would she perhaps like to come down here? There isn't much to
offer her, but then London in August doesn't offer much either."
Suddenly all Jessie's mistrust stirred and erected itself. She could not
believe that this scheme, which would throw Helena and Archie completely
together, could be made with the apparent innocence with which it was
put forward. How was it possible that Archie, who so few weeks ago was
in such depths of misery and bitterness, could honourably suggest so
dangerous a plan? It could not be Archie who suggested it: it came from
that smiling white presence which she had seen in his room not many
nights ago. And it was just that which she could not say to him.
"It's nice of you to think of that," she said.
"Not a bit: it would be nice for me, not nice of me. And besides," he
added, with an amazing cynicism, "it would be my way of 'doing my bit,'
which everybody is talking about, if I could make things cheerfuller for
pretty women like poor Helena, whose husband has gone out to fight."
The moment he had said it he was sorry. But for the moment he had
forgotten he was speaking to Jessie: the sentence had come out of his
mouth as if he was but talking to himself. Also it introduced the
suggestion of his own forbearance to enlist.
There was a rather awkward silence, and he felt irritated with Jessie
for not changing the subject which he had so incautiously brought
forward. But that was like her. She had no tact in such matters,
refusing to be insincere, when insincerity was so simple a matter. His
irritation grew on him, and at the same time he wanted to know what
Jessie thought of his remaining inertly here, while all his
contemporaries were enlisting. Why he wanted to know he did not define:
the motive perhaps belonged to the time when Jessie had been so good a
friend, and perhaps he knew that she was so still.
"Or do you think that I ought to behave like William, and serve my
country?" he asked.
Jessie sat with eyes downcast for a moment. Then she raised them and
looked him in the face, with all her affection and sincerity alight in
them.
"Do you really want to know what I think, Archie?" she asked.
"Certainly I do."
"Well, I can't understand your not doing it," she said. "At the same
time, I think it is a matter about which you must decide for yourself."
The sincerity of his manner equalled hers. He never spoke with more
apparent frankness.
"Shall I tell you why I don't?" he said. "It's this. Do you remember one
night our finding that my father was breaking the contract he made with
me about drinking? Do you remember how sordid and horrible the discovery
was?"
Jessie remembered quite well how Archie had laughed at it.
"I remember the evening," she said.
"Well, we've renewed our contract," said he, "and I'm the only person in
the world who can keep my father to it. If I left him he would drink
himself to death. Where, then, do you think my duty lies, Jessie? Isn't
it clearly for me to save my father? Can there be a more obvious duty
than that? Do you think I have a very delightful life down here, all
alone with him? Wouldn't it be vastly easier for me to join my friends
and go out alongside of them? I know my conduct lays me open to
misconception, but I must be thick-skinned over that. But I hope you
won't misjudge me. Besides, my father has said that he forbids me to go.
Of course I could leave him; he doesn't lock me up. But I can't see how
I should be right in leaving him. I'm the one anchor he has left."
He paused a moment, thinking over, with that stupendous swiftness of
brain that was the result of Martin's inspiration, all he had said, and
remembered his light cynicism with regard to his "bit."
"I know I rather shocked you just now," he said, "when I spoke of its
being 'my bit' to console pretty women whose husbands had gone out. But
sometimes one has to be flippant to conceal one's real thoughts on a
serious subject, for I did not foresee then that we should talk it out.
So there's the end of that jest."
So that had been a jest, not to be taken seriously. But it was a grimmer
affair for Jessie not to be able to take seriously Archie's seriousness.
For a moment the frankness of his manner had convinced her, but very
soon her conviction collapsed like a house of cards as he went on
speaking. The horribleness of the discovery of his father's drinking,
for instance, when what she remembered was Archie's laughter! If he
could say that, what credence could possibly be placed in the picture he
had drawn of himself as his father's last hope? Or what in the image of
himself as one who must silently bear cruel misconception? She could
believe none of it...
Yet it was not the Archie whom she loved with all the sweetness and
strength of her nature who spoke, but the Thing that was possessing him
and filling his soul from the reservoir of some immense abyss of pure
evil. She felt sure she did not misjudge him; true and infinitely tragic
was her comprehension.
"It is entirely for you to decide, Archie," she said. "I think I fully
appreciate the worth of your reasons."
Indeed, she knew not what else to say, though the bitter doubleness of
her words cut her to the heart. But, if she could help Archie at all,
she must at all costs retain such confidence as he gave her, must not
give him the chance of quarrelling with her.
To her great relief, he seemed to accept the literal value of her words,
and took her arm. And this time she felt in her soul that there was
sincerity in his speech.
"You are a good friend, Jessie," he said. "Don't give me up, will you?"
"I couldn't," she said quietly.
* * * * *
They were strolling together by the edge of the lake in the hour of
sunset, and Jessie, though sick at heart and tortured by the weight of
her forebodings, and the tempest of fire and blood which had burst on
Europe, yet tried to open her heart to the sweet spell of the tranquil
evening. Somewhere behind the cloud of evil which had so suddenly taken
shape in that host of barbarians who already had overrun Belgium, and
which, no less, was invading the spirit of the boy she loved with the
uttermost fibre of her being, there shone the eternal serenity of
Omnipotent Mercy. But He dealt through human means; it was through those
who had left love and home and ease behind them to perish in France that
that torrent would be stayed, and through her, though in ways she could
not conjecture, would come the delivery of her beloved. And in the
rose-flecked sky, the leafy towers of the elms, the bosom of the lake,
that Power also dwelt, no less than in the hearts that yearned for its
presence and its manifestation. As in a glass darkly she beheld its
reflection, which nothing could ever shatter. Of that she must never
lose sight, nor cease to keep her inward eye fixed on the gleam, which
some day would signal to her.
About a week later Archie was spending a delectable morning at the
bathing-place. Never had there been so superb an imitation of Italian
weather in England as this year, and day after day went by in unclouded
brightness and strong, fresh heat. In those delightful conditions it had
been perfectly easy for him to take his mind completely away from the
war, and the misconceptions which he was possibly suffering under. He
gave every morning but the briefest glance to the paper, for there was a
tiresome uniformity about the news, and a monotonous regularity about
the daily map, which marked the progress of the German line across
North-East France. He gave hardly more thought to Helena, who seemed to
think it more appropriate to stay in London with her father, just for
the present, but had written the most characteristic of letters, saying
how sweet Archie's sympathy was to her, and how acute her anxiety
concerning her husband. Certainly at the moment this was the right
attitude to take, and Archie really did not much care whether she was
here with him or not, for he had found his way into the Paradise that
forms the portico of the palace where the absinthe-drinker dwells, and
not yet had he penetrated into the halls of Hell that lie beyond.
His pleasure in the fact of being alive, in the colours of morning and
evening, in the touch of cool waters, in the whispering of wind among
the firs, were quickened to an inconceivable degree; it was impossible
to want anything except the privilege of enjoying this amazing thrill of
existence. And with it there had returned to him the need of expressing
himself in writing; a new aspect of the world had been revealed to him,
and without struggle, but with an even-flowing pen he set himself to
record it, in veiled phrases and descriptions through which, as in
chinks of light seen at the edges of drawn blinds, there came hints and
suggestions of the fresh world that had dawned on him. Where before it
was the clear stainlessness of the sea, the purifying breath of great
winds that had been his theme, now instead the satyr crouched in the
bushes, the snake lay coiled in the heather. It was from the slime and
mud and from among blind crawling things that the water-lily sprang, and
where before the enchantment of life moved him, he felt now only the
call of putrefaction and decay. The lethal side of the created world had
become exquisite in his eyes, and the beauty of it was derived from its
everlasting corruption, not from the eternal upspringing of life. Lust,
not love, was the force that kept it young, and renewed it so that the
harvest of its decay should never ceased to be reaped. His mind had
become a mirror that distorted into grotesque and evil shapes every
image of beauty that was reflected in it, and rejoiced in them; it
seemed to him that all nature, as well as all human motive, was based
upon this exquisite secret that he had discovered. But it would never do
to state it with what he considered the bald realism of those ludicrous
sea-pieces he had written at Silorno; he must wrap his message up in a
sort of mystic subtlety so that only those who had implanted in them the
true instinct should be able to fill their souls with the perfume of his
flowers. Others might guess and wonder and be puzzled, and perhaps see
so far as to put down his book with disgust that was still half
incredulous; but only the initiated would be able to grasp wholly the
message that lurked in his hints and allusions. His style, underneath
this new inspiration, had developed into an instrument of marvellous
beauty, and often, when he had written a page or two, he would read it
out aloud to himself, in wonder at that exquisite diction, and all the
time he felt that he was reading aloud to Martin, and that Martin had
dictated to him.
He was employed thus on this particular morning down at the
bathing-place. He had already had a long swim, and, without dressing,
lay down on the short turf and got out his writing-pad, when his new
servant, who had taken William's place, came down with a telegram for
him. He was a very good-looking boy, quick in movement and swift to
smile, and already Archie wondered how he could have regretted the
departure of plain middle-aged William. Only last evening Archie, idly
glancing through a field-glass, had seen the boy far off in the meadow
beyond the lake in company with an extremely pretty housemaid whom he
had often noticed about the passages. The two had sat there some time
talking, and then Archie saw the boy look quickly round, and kiss her.
He liked that immensely; that was the way youth should behave. He almost
hoped that it was Thomas who had taken from his table one of those new
ten-shilling notes that he had missed. He mustn't do it too often, for
that would be a bore; but Archie liked to think the boy had taken it,
and perhaps converted it into a decoration for the pretty housemaid.
Anyhow, Thomas, with his handsome face and his kissings in the meadow,
and his possible pilferings, was an attractive boy, and clearly
developing along the right lines.
The boy hesitated a moment, seeing Archie dripping and naked.
"I beg your pardon, my lord," he said, "but there came a telegram for
you, and I thought I had better bring it down."
"Certainly, but why beg my pardon?" said Archie. "Don't be prudish. I
daresay you've got arms and legs as well as me, haven't you?"
Thomas grinned with that odd shy look that Archie had noticed before.
"Yes, my lord," he said.
"Then what is there to be ashamed of?"
Archie opened the telegram and read it, and suddenly bit his lip to
prevent his laughing.
"Is there an answer, my lord?" asked the boy. "I brought a form down in
case."
"Well done. Yes, there is an answer."
Archie hesitated a moment before directing the form to Helena. Then he
wrote:
"Deepest sympathy with the terrible news. Command me in all ways. Your
devoted Archie."
"Send that at once, will you?" he said.
When the boy had gone Archie read the telegram again, which was from
Jessie, and told him that Lord Harlow had been killed at the front. Then
he smothered his face in his bent elbow, and lay shaking with laughter.