residence at Canteloup, and after he had gone down he used to come
regularly once a fortnight during term to visit her. That horrible
mutual reserve, which poisons the social life of most families and
which had effectively made of their brotherly and sisterly relation a
prolonged discomfort in the past, began to disappear. They became the
best of friends.
"I like you, Dick, a great deal better than I did," said Millicent one
day as they were parting at the gate of St. Mungo's after a long walk
together.
Dick took off his hat and bowed. "My dear, I reciprocate the
sentiment. And, what's more, I esteem and admire you. So there."
Millicent curtsied, and they laughed. They both felt very happy.
VI
"WHAT a life!" said Dick, with a sigh of weariness as the train moved
out of Euston.
Not a bad life, Millicent thought.
"But horribly fatiguing. I am quite outreined by it."
"Outreined" was Dick's translation of _éreinté_. He liked using words
of his own manufacture; one had to learn his idiom before one could
properly appreciate his intimate conversation.
Dick had every justification for being outreined. The spring and
summer had passed for him in a whirl of incessant activity. He had
written three long chapters of the _New Synthetic Philosophy_, and had
the material for two more ready in the form of notes. He had helped to
organize and bring to its successful conclusion the great carpenters'
strike of May and June. He had written four pamphlets and a small army
of political articles. And this comprised only half his labour; for
nightly, from twelve till two, Pearl Bellairs emerged to compose the
masterpieces which supplied Dick with his bread and butter. _Apes in
Purple_ had been published in May. Since then she had finished _La
Belle Dame sans Morality_, and had embarked on the first chapters of
_Daisy's Voyage to Cythera_. Her weekly articles, "For the Girls of
Britain," had become, during this period, a regular and favourite
feature in the pages of _Hildebrand's Sabbath_, that prince of Sunday
papers. At the beginning of July, Dick considered that he had earned a
holiday, and now they were off, he and Millicent, for the North.
Dick had taken a cottage on the shore of one of those long salt-water
lochs that give to the west coast of Scotland such a dissipated
appearance on the map. For miles around there was not a living soul
who did not bear the name of Campbell--two families only excepted, one
of whom was called Murray-Drummond and the other Drummond-Murray.
However, it was not for the people that Dick and Millicent had come,
so much as for the landscape, which made up in variety for anything
that the inhabitants might lack. Behind the cottage, in the midst of a
narrow strip of bog lying between the loch and the foot of the
mountains, stood one of the numerous tombs of Ossian, a great barrow
of ancient stones. And a couple of miles away the remains of Deirdre's
Scottish refuge bore witness to the Celtic past. The countryside was
dotted with the black skeletons of mediæval castles. Astonishing
country, convulsed into fantastic mountain shapes, cut and indented by
winding fiords. On summer days the whole of this improbable landscape
became blue and remote and aerially transparent. Its beauty lacked all
verisimilitude. It was for that reason that Dick chose the
neighbourhood for his holidays. After the insistent actuality of
London this frankly unreal coast was particularly refreshing to a
jaded spirit.
"Nous sommes ici en plein romantisme," said Dick on the day of their
arrival, making a comprehensive gesture towards the dream-like
scenery, and for the rest of his holiday he acted the part of a young
romantic of the palmy period. He sat at the foot of Ossian's tomb and
read Lamartine; he declaimed Byron from the summit of the mountains
and Shelley as he rowed along the loch. In the evening he read George
Sand's _Indiana_; he agonized with the pure, but passionate, heroine,
while his admiration for Sir Brown, her English lover, the impassive
giant who never speaks and is always clothed in faultless hunting
costume, knew no bounds. He saturated himself in the verses of Victor
Hugo, and at last almost came to persuade himself that the words,
_Dieu_, _infinité_, _eternité_, with which the works of that
deplorable genius are so profusely sprinkled, actually possessed some
meaning, though what that meaning was he could not, even in his most
romantic transports, discover. Pearl Bellairs, of course, understood
quite clearly their significance, and though she was a very poor
French scholar she used sometimes to be moved almost to tears by the
books she found lying about when she came into existence after
midnight. She even copied out extracts into her notebooks with a view
to using them in her next novel.
"Les plus désespérés sont les chants les plus beaux,
Et j'en sais d'immortels qui sont de purs sanglots,"
was a couplet which struck her as sublime.
Millicent, meanwhile, did the housekeeping with extraordinary
efficiency, took a great deal of exercise, and read long, serious
books; she humoured her brother in his holiday romanticism, but
refused to take part in the game.
The declaration of war took them completely by surprise. It is true
that a _Scotsman_ found its way into the cottage by about lunch-time
every day, but it was never read, and served only to light fires and
wrap up fish and things of that sort. No letters were being forwarded,
for they had left no address; they were isolated from the world. On
the fatal morning Dick had, indeed, glanced at the paper, without
however noticing anything out of the ordinary. It was only later when,
alarmed by the rumours floating round the village shop, he came to
examine his _Scotsman_ more closely, that he found about half-way down
the third column of one of the middle pages an admirable account of
all that had been so tragically happening in the last twenty-four
hours; he learnt with horror that Europe was at war and that; his
country too had entered the arena. Even in the midst of his anguish of
spirit he could not help admiring the _Scotsman's_ splendid
impassivity--no headlines, no ruffling of the traditional aristocratic
dignity. Like Sir Rodolphe Brown in _Indiana_, he thought, with a
sickly smile.
Dick determined to start for London at once. He felt that he must act,
or at least create the illusion of action; he could not stay quietly
where he was. It was arranged that he should set out that afternoon,
while Millicent should follow a day or two later with the bulk of the
luggage. The train which took him to Glasgow was slower than he
thought it possible for any train to be. He tried to read, he tried to
sleep; it was no good. His nervous agitation was pitiable; he made
little involuntary movements with his limbs, and every now and then
the muscles of his face began twitching in a spasmodic and
uncontrollable tic. There were three hours to wait in Glasgow; he
spent them in wandering about the streets. In the interminable summer
twilight the inhabitants of Glasgow came forth into the open to amuse
themselves; the sight almost made him sick. Was it possible that there
should be human beings so numerous and so uniformly hideous? Small,
deformed, sallow, they seemed malignantly ugly, as if on purpose. The
words they spoke were incomprehensible. He shuddered; it was an alien
place--it was hell.
The London train was crammed. Three gross Italians got into Dick's
carriage, and after they had drunk and eaten with loud, unpleasant
gusto, they prepared themselves for sleep by taking off their boots.
Their feet smelt strongly ammoniac, like a cage of mice long
uncleaned. Acutely awake, while the other occupants of the compartment
enjoyed a happy unconsciousness, he looked at the huddled carcasses
that surrounded him. The warmth and the smell of them was suffocating,
and there came to his mind, with the nightmarish insistence of a fixed
idea, the thought that every breath they exhaled was saturated with
disease. To be condemned to sit in a hot bath of consumption and
syphilis--it was too horrible! The moment came at last when he could
bear it no longer; he got up and went into the corridor. Standing
there, or sitting sometimes for a few dreary minutes in the lavatory,
he passed the rest of the night. The train roared along without a
stop. The roaring became articulate: in the days of his childhood
trains used to run to the tune of "Lancashire, to Lancashire, to fetch
a pocket-handkercher; to Lancashire, to Lancashire . . ." But to-night
the wheels were shouting insistently, a million times over, two words
only--"the War, the War; the War, the War." He tried desperately to
make them say something else, but they refused to recite Milton; they
refused to go to Lancashire; they went on with their endless Tibetan
litany--the War, the War, the War.
By the time he reached London, Dick was in a wretched state. His
nerves were twittering and jumping within him; he felt like a walking
aviary. The tic in his face had become more violent and persistent. As
he stood in the station, waiting for a cab, he overheard a small child
saying to its mother, "What's the matter with that man's face,
mother?"
"Sh--sh, darling," was the reply. "It's rude."
Dick turned and saw the child's big round eyes fixed with fascinated
curiosity upon him, as though he were a kind of monster. He put his
hand to his forehead and tried to stop the twitching of the muscles
beneath the skin. It pained him to think that he had become a
scarecrow for children.
Arrived at his flat, Dick drank a glass of brandy and lay down for a
rest. He felt exhausted--ill. At half-past one he got up, drank some
more brandy, and crept down into the street. It was intensely hot; the
pavements reverberated the sunlight in a glare which hurt his eyes;
they seemed to be in a state of grey incandescence. A nauseating smell
of wetted dust rose from the roadway, along which a water-cart was
slowly piddling its way. He realized suddenly that he ought not to
have drunk all that brandy on an empty stomach; he was definitely
rather tipsy. He had arrived at that state of drunkenness when the
senses perceive things clearly, but do not transmit their knowledge to
the understanding. He was painfully conscious of this division, and it
needed all the power of his will to establish contact between his
parted faculties. It was as though he were, by a great and prolonged
effort, keeping his brain pressed against the back of his eyes; as
soon as he relaxed the pressure, the understanding part slipped back,
the contact was broken, and he relapsed into a state bordering on
imbecility. The actions which ordinarily one does by habit and without
thinking, he had to perform consciously and voluntarily. He had to
reason out the problem of walking--first the left foot forward, then
the right. How ingeniously he worked his ankles and knees and hips!
How delicately the thighs slid past one another!
He found a restaurant and sat there drinking coffee and trying to eat
an omelette until he felt quite sober. Then he drove to the offices of
the _Weekly International_ to have a talk with Hyman, the editor.
Hyman was sitting in his shirt-sleeves, writing.
He lifted his head as Dick came in. "Greenow," he shouted delightedly,
"we were all wondering what had become of you. We thought you'd joined
the Army."
Dick shook his head, but did not speak; the hot stuffy smell of
printer's ink and machinery combined with the atrocious reek of
Hyman's Virginian cigarettes to make him feel rather faint. He sat
down on the window-ledge, so as to be able to breathe an
uncontaminated air.
"Well," he said at last, "what about it?"
"It's going to be hell."
"Did you suppose I thought it was going to be paradise?" Dick replied
irritably. "Internationalism looks rather funny now, doesn't it?"
"I believe in it more than ever I did," cried Hyman. His face lit up
with the fervour of his enthusiasm. It was a fine face, gaunt,
furrowed, and angular, for all that he was barely thirty, looking as
though it had been boldly chiselled from some hard stone. "The rest of
the world may go mad; we'll try and keep our sanity. The time will
come when they'll see we were right."
Hyman talked on. His passionate sincerity and singleness of purpose
were an inspiration to Dick. He had always admired Hyman--with the
reservations, of course, that the man was rather a fanatic and not so
well-educated as he might have been--but to-day he admired him more
than ever. He was even moved by that perhaps too facile eloquence
which of old had been used to leave him cold. After promising to do a
series of articles on international relations for the paper, Dick went
home, feeling better than he had done all day.
He decided that he would begin writing his articles at once. He
collected pens, paper, and ink and sat down in a business-like way at
his bureau. He remembered distinctly biting the tip of his pen-holder;
it tasted rather bitter.
And then he realized he was standing in Regent Street, looking in at
one of the windows of Liberty's.
For a long time he stood there quite still, absorbed to all appearance
in the contemplation of a piece of peacock-blue fabric. But all his
attention was concentrated within himself, not on anything outside. He
was wondering--wondering how it came about that he was sitting at his
writing-table at one moment, and standing, at the next, in Regent
Street. He hadn't--the thought flashed upon him--he hadn't been
drinking any more of that brandy, had he? No, he felt himself to be
perfectly sober. He moved slowly away and continued to speculate as he
walked.
At Oxford Circus he bought an evening paper. He almost screamed aloud
when he saw that the date printed at the head of the page was August
12th. It was on August 7th that he had sat down at his writing-table
to compose those articles. Five days ago, and he had not the faintest
recollection of what had happened in those five days.
He made all haste back to the flat. Everything was in perfect order.
He had evidently had a picnic lunch that morning--sardines, bread and
jam, and raisins; the remains of it still covered the table. He opened
the sideboard and took out the brandy bottle. Better make quite sure.
He held it up to the light; it was more than three-quarters full. Not
a drop had gone since the day of his return. If brandy wasn't the
cause, then what was?
As he sat there thinking, he began in an absent-minded way to look at
his evening paper. He read the news on the front page, then turned to
the inner sheets. His eye fell on these words printed at the head of
the column next the leading article:
"To the Women of the Empire. Thoughts in War-Time. By Pearl Bellairs."
Underneath in brackets: "The first of a series of inspiring patriotic
articles by Miss Bellairs, the well-known novelist."
Dick groaned in agony. He saw in a flash what had happened to his five
missing days. Pearl had got hold of them somehow, had trespassed upon
his life out of her own reserved nocturnal existence. She had taken
advantage of his agitated mental state to have a little fun in her own
horrible way.
He picked up the paper once more and began to read Pearl's article.
"Inspiring and patriotic": those were feeble words in which to
describe Pearl's shrilly raucous chauvinism. And the style! Christ! to
think that he was responsible, at least in part, for this.
Responsible, for had not the words been written by his own hand and
composed in some horrible bluebeard's chamber of his own brain? They
had, there was no denying it. Pearl's literary atrocities had never
much distressed him; he had long given up reading a word she wrote.
Her bank balance was the only thing about her that interested him. But
now she was invading the sanctities of his private life. She was
trampling on his dearest convictions, denying his faith. She was a
public danger. It was all too frightful.
He passed the afternoon in misery. Suicide or brandy seemed the only
cures. Not very satisfactory ones, though. Towards evening an
illuminating idea occurred to him. He would go and see Rogers. Rogers
knew all about psychology--from books, at any rate: Freud, Jung,
Morton Prince, and people like that. He used to try hypnotic
experiments on his friends and even dabbled in amateur psychotherapy.
Rogers might help him to lay the ghost of Pearl. He ate a hasty dinner
and went to see Rogers in his Kensington rooms.
Rogers was sitting at a table with a great book open in front of him.
The reading-lamp, which was the only light in the room, brightly
illumined one side of the pallid, puffy, spectacled face, leaving the
other in complete darkness, save for a little cedilla of golden light
caught on the fold of flesh at the corner of his mouth. His huge
shadow crossed the floor, began to climb the wall, and from the
shoulders upwards mingled itself with the general darkness of the
room.
"Good evening, Rogers," said Dick wearily. "I wish you wouldn't try
and look like Rembrandt's 'Christ at Emmaus' with these spectacular
chiaroscuro effects."
Rogers gave vent to his usual nervous giggling laugh. "This is very
nice of you to come and see me, Greenow."
"How's the Board of Trade?" Rogers was a Civil Servant by profession.
"Oh, business as usual, as the _Daily Mail_ would say." Rogers laughed
again as though he had made a joke.
After a little talk of things indifferent, Dick brought the
conversation round to himself.
"I believe I'm getting a bit neurasthenic," he said. "Fits of
depression, nervous pains, lassitude, anæmia of the will. I've come to
you for professional advice. I want you to nose out my suppressed
complexes, analyse me, dissect me. Will you do that for me?"
Rogers was evidently delighted. "I'll do my best," he said, with
assumed modesty. "But I'm no good at the thing, so you mustn't expect
much."
"I'm at your disposal," said Dick.
Rogers placed his guest in a large arm-chair. "Relax your muscles and
think of nothing at all." Dick sat there flabby and abstracted while
Rogers made his preparations. His apparatus consisted chiefly in a
notebook and a stop-watch. He seated himself at the table.
"Now," he said solemnly, "I want you to listen to me. I propose to
read out a list of words; after each of the words you must say the
first word that comes into your head. The very first, mind, however
foolish it may seem. And say it as soon as it crosses your mind; don't
wait to think. I shall write down your answers and take the time
between each question and reply."
Rogers cleared his throat and started.
"Mother," he said in a loud, clear voice. He always began his analyses
with the family. For since the majority of kinks and complexes date
from childhood, it is instructive to investigate the relations between
the patient and those who surrounded him at an early age. "Mother."
"Dead," replied Dick immediately. He had scarcely known his mother.
"Father."
"Dull." One and a fifth seconds' interval.
"Sister." Rogers pricked his ears for the reply: his favourite
incest-theory depended on it.
"Fabian Society," said Dick, after two seconds' interval. Rogers was a
little disappointed. He was agreeably thrilled and excited by the
answer he received to his next word: "Aunt."
The seconds passed, bringing nothing with them; and then at last there
floated into Dick's mind the image of himself as a child, dressed in
green velvet and lace, a perfect Bubbles boy, kneeling on Auntie Loo's
lap and arranging a troop of lead soldiers on the horizontal
projection of her corsage.
"Bosom," he said.
Rogers wrote down the word and underlined it. Six and three-fifths
seconds: very significant. He turned now to the chapter of possible
accidents productive of nervous shocks.
"Fire."
"Coal."
"Sea."
"Sick."
"Train."
"Smell."
And so on. Dull answers all the time. Evidently, nothing very
catastrophic had ever happened to him. Now for a frontal attack on the
fortress of sex itself.
"Women." There was rather a long pause, four seconds, and then Dick
replied, "Novelist." Rogers was puzzled.
"Breast."
"Chicken." That was disappointing. Rogers could find no trace of those
sinister moral censors, expurgators of impulse, suppressors of
happiness. Perhaps the trouble lay in religion.
"Christ," he said.
Dick replied, "Amen," with the promptitude of a parish clerk.
"God."
Dick's mind remained a perfect blank. The word seemed to convey to him
nothing at all. God, God. After a long time there appeared before his
inward eye the face of a boy he had known at school and at Oxford, one
Godfrey Wilkinson, called God for short.
"Wilkinson." Ten seconds and a fifth.
A few more miscellaneous questions, and the list was exhausted. Almost
suddenly, Dick fell into a kind of hypnotic sleep. Rogers sat pensive
in front of his notes; sometimes he consulted a text-book. At the end
of half an hour he awakened Dick to tell him that he had had, as a
child, consciously or unconsciously, a great Freudian passion for his
aunt; that later on he had had another passion, almost religious in
its fervour and intensity, for somebody called Wilkinson; and that the
cause of all his present troubles lay in one or other of these
episodes. If he liked, he (Rogers) would investigate the matter
further with a view to establishing a cure.
Dick thanked him very much, thought it wasn't worth taking any more
trouble, and went home.
VII
MILLICENT was organizing a hospital supply dépôt, organizing
indefatigably, from morning till night. It was October; Dick had not
seen his sister since those first hours of the war in Scotland; he had
had too much to think about these last months to pay attention to
anyone but himself. To-day, at last, he decided that he would go and
pay her a visit. Millicent had commandeered a large house in
Kensington from a family of Jews, who were anxious to live down a
deplorable name by a display of patriotism. Dick found her sitting
there in her office--young, formidable, beautiful, severe--at a big
desk covered with papers.
"Well," said Dick, "you're winning the war, I see."
"You, I gather, are not," Millicent replied.
"I believe in the things I always believed in."
"So do I."
"But in a different way, my dear--in a different way," said Dick
sadly. There was a silence.
"Had we better quarrel?" Millicent asked meditatively.
"I think we can manage with nothing worse than a coolness--for the
duration."
"Very well, a coolness."
"A smouldering coolness."
"Good," said Millicent briskly. "Let it start smouldering at once. I
must get on with my work. Good-bye, Dick. God bless you. Let me know
sometimes how you get on."
"No need to ask how you get on," said Dick with a smile, as he shook
her hand. "I know by experience that you always get on, only too well,
ruthlessly well."
He went out. Millicent returned to her letters with concentrated
ardour; a frown puckered the skin between her eyebrows.
Probably, Dick reflected as he made his way down the stairs, he
wouldn't see her again for a year or so. He couldn't honestly say that
it affected him much. Other people became daily more and more like
ghosts, unreal, thin, vaporous; while every hour the consciousness of
himself grew more intense and all-absorbing. The only person who was
more than a shadow to him now was Hyman of the _Weekly International_.
In those first horrible months of the war, when he was wrestling with
Pearl Bellairs and failing to cast her out, it was Hyman who kept him
from melancholy and suicide. Hyman made him write a long article every
week, dragged him into the office to do sub-editorial work, kept him
so busy that there were long hours when he had no time to brood over
his own insoluble problems. And his enthusiasm was so passionate and
sincere that sometimes even Dick was infected by it; he could believe
that life was worth living and the cause worth fighting for. But not
for long; for the devil would return, insistent and untiring. Pearl
Bellairs was greedy for life; she was not content with her short
midnight hours; she wanted the freedom of whole days. And whenever
Dick was overtired, or ill or nervous, she leapt upon him and stamped
him out of existence, till enough strength came back for him to
reassert his personality. And the articles she wrote! The short
stories! The recruiting songs! Dick dared not read them; they were
terrible, terrible.
VIII