HOW A STONE THROWN DROVE THE WEDGE FURTHER YET. OF A TERRIBLE NIGHT
IN A BIG GALE, AND A DOOR THAT SLAMMED. THE WEDGE WELL IN
The speculative weather-wisdom of the tattooed capstan-driver was
confirmed when three in the morning came, and the full of the tide.
The wind must have gone round to the southward, or to some equally
stimulating quarter, to judge by the work it got through that night in
the way of roofs blown off and chimney-pots blown down; standing crops
laid flat and spoiled for reaping; trees too full of leaf to bear such
rough treatment compelled to tear up half their roots and fall, or pay
tribute to the gale in boughs snapped asunder in time to spare their
parent stem. All these results we landsmen could see for ourselves
next day, after the storm had died down, and when the air was so
delightful after it that we took walks in the country on purpose to
enjoy it. But for the mischief it did that night at sea, from
sportively carrying away the spars of ships, which they wanted for
their own use, or blowing a stray reefer from the weather-earring, to
sending a full crew to the depths below, or on jagged rocks no message
from the white foam above could warn the look-out of in time--for the
record of this we should have belated intermittent newspaper
paragraphs, ever so long after.
But the wind had not reached its ideal when, at the end of a pleasant
evening, Sally and her belongings decided that they must just go down
to the beach and see the waves before going to bed. Wasn't there a
moon? Well--yes, there was a moon, but you couldn't see it. That made
a difference, certainly, but not a conclusive one. It wasn't a bad
sort of a night, although it certainly was blowing, and the waves
would be grand seen close. So the party turned out to go down to the
beach. It included the Julius Bradshaws and Dr. Conrad, who had looked
in as usual. But the doctor found out that it was past eleven, and,
recalled by duty, returned to his Octopus.
The waves, seen close, would have been grand if you could have seen
them from the beach, or as much of it as they had left you to stand
on. But you really could only guess what was going on out in that
great dark world of deep thunder, beyond the successive rushes of mad
foam, each of which made up its mind to tear the coast up this time;
and then changed it and went back, but always took with it stones
enough for next attempt. And the indignant clamour of the rushing
shoals, dragged off to sea against their will, rose and fell in the
lulls of the thunder beyond. Sally wanted to quote Tennyson's "Maud"
about them, but she couldn't for the tremendous wind.
The propensity to throw stones into the water, whenever there are
stones and water, is always a strong one, even when the water is black
mountain ranges, foam-ridged Sierras coming on to crush us, appalling
us, even though we know they are sure to die in time. Stones were
thrown on this occasion by Sally and her stepfather, who was credulous
enough to suppose that his pebbles passed the undertow and reached
the sea itself. Sally was prevented by the elements from misusing
an adjective; for she wanted to say that the effect of a stone thrown
into such a sea was merely "homoeopathic," and abstained because her
remark would have been unheard.
Fenwick wanted to say that it was like the way a man dies and vanishes
into the great unknown. He, too, refrained from this, but only partly
for the same reason. Its want of novelty made another.
All the others soon wanted to say it was time to go home to bed, and
tried to say it. But practice seemed easier, and they all turned to
go, followed by Fenwick and Sally, cheerfully discussing the point of
whether Sally could have swum out into that sea or not. Sally wanted
to know what was to prevent her. Obvious enough, one would have said!
* * * * *
But Rosalind noticed one thing that was a pleasure to her. The
moment Sally came in, her husband's dream-afflictions went out. Had
he ever spoken of one in her presence? She could recall no instance.
This evening the return to absolute cheerfulness dated from the
reappearance of Sally after she had changed everything, and made her
hair hold up. It lasted through fried soles and a huge fowl--done
enough this time--and a bread-and-butter pudding impaired by too many
raisins. Through the long end of a game of chess begun by Sally and
Dr. Conrad the evening before, and two rubbers of whist, in which
everybody else had all the good cards in their hands, as is the case
in that game. And through the visit to Neptune above recorded.
But when, after half-an-hour's chat over the day's events with
Rosalind, midnight and an extinguished candle left Fenwick to himself
and his pillow in the little room next hers with no door between,
which Mrs. Lobjoit's resources dictated, there came back to him first
a recollection of his suppressed commonplace about the stone that had
vanished for ever in the world of waters; then a hazy memory of the
same thing having happened before and the same remark having been
made by himself; then a sudden jerk of surprise, when, just as he was
thinking of sleep, he was able to answer a question Space asked him
spontaneously about where this happened, with what would have been,
had he been quite awake, words spoken aloud to himself. "That time
at Niagara, of course!" And this jerk of surprise left him wide-awake,
struggling with an army of revived memories that had come on him
suddenly.
He was so thoroughly waked by them that a difficulty he always had
of remaining in bed when not asleep dictated a relighted candle
and a dressing-gown and slippers. It was akin to his aversion to
over-comfortable chairs; though he acknowledged beds as proper
implements of sleep, sleep being granted. And sleep seemed now so
completely out of the question, even if there had been no roaring of
the gale and no constant thunder of the seas on the beach below,
that Fenwick surrendered at discretion, and gave himself up a helpless
prisoner in the grasp of his own past.
Not of the whole of it. But of as much as he could face here and now.
Another mind that could have commanded some strange insight into the
whole of this past, and his power or powerlessness to look it in the
face, might have striven to avert its revival. That blow might have
been too overwhelming. But there was enough, as we shall see, in
the recollection that came back of the decade before his return to
England, to make his breath catch and a shudder run through his strong
frame as he pressed his palms hard on his eyelids, just as though by
so doing he could shut it out.
Thank God Rosey was asleep, or would be soon. He would have time to
think how he could tell the story he could not be silent about--that,
he felt, might be impossible--and yet keep back one ominous portentous
fact that had come to him, as a motive force in his former life,
without the details of his early history that belonged to it. That
fact Rosey must never know, even if ... well!--so many things turned
on it. All he could see now--taken by surprise as he was--was that,
come what might, that fact should always be kept from _her_. But as
to concealing from her his strange experience altogether, that was
hardly to be thought of. He would conceal it while he could, though,
provisionally.
One o'clock by his watch on the dressing-table under the candle. St.
Sennans must have struck unheard. No wonder--in this wind! Surely it
had rather increased, if anything. Fenwick paced with noiseless care
about the little room; he could not be still. The sustained monotone
of wind and sea was only crossed now and then by a sound of fall or
breakage, to chronicle some little piece of mischief achieved by the
former on land, and raise the latter's hopes of some such success in
its turn before the night should end....
Two o'clock by the dressing-table watch, and still the noiseless
slippered feet of the sleepless man came and went. Little fear of any
one else hearing him! For the wind seemed to have got up the bit that
was predicted of it, and had certainly gone round to the suth'ard. If
any sleeper could cling to unconsciousness through the rattle of the
windows and the intermittent banging of a spectral door that defied
identification--the door that always bangs in storms everywhere--the
mere movement of a cautious foot would have no effect. If unable to
sleep for the wind, none would be alive to it. It would be lost in
the storm....
Three o'clock! Did you, who read this, ever watch through a night
with something on your mind you are to be forced to speak of in the
morning--a compulsion awaiting you as a lion awaiting the _début_ of
a reluctant martyr in the arena of the Coliseum? Did you, so watching,
feel--not the tedium--but the maddening speed of the hours, the
cruelty of the striking clocks? Were you conscious of a grateful
reliance on your bedroom door, still closed between you and _your_
lion, as the gate that the eager eyes of Rome were fixed on was still
a respite from _his_? Fenwick was; keenly conscious. And when on
a sudden he heard with a start that a furtive hand was on the
old-fashioned door-latch, he, knowing it could be none other than
Rosalind, sleepless in the storm, felt that the lion had stolen a
march on him, and that he must make up his mind sharp whether he would
go for complete confidence or partial reserve. Certainly the latter,
of necessity, said Alacrity. There could be no doubt of it, on her
account--for the present, at any rate.
For he had recollected, look you, that at the time of that stone-throw
into the rapids above Niagara he was a married man somehow separated
from his wife. And the way that he knew this was that he could
remember plainly that the reason he did not make an offer of marriage,
there by the great torrent that was rushing to the Falls, to a French
girl (whose name he got clearly) was that he did not know if his wife
was dead or living. He did not know it now. The oddity of it was that,
though he remembered clearly this incident hinging on the fact that
he was then a married man, he could remember neither the wife he had
married nor anything connected with her. He strove hard against this
partial insight into his past, which seemed to him stranger than
complete oblivion. But he soon convinced himself that a slight hazy
vision he conjured up of a wedding years and years ago was only a
reflex image--an automatic reaction--from his recent marriage. For
did not the wraith of his present wife quietly take its place before
the altar where by rights he should have been able to recall her
predecessor? It was all confusion; no doubt of it.
But his mind had travelled quickly too; for when Rosalind looked in
at his door he knew what he had to say, for her sake.
"Gerry darling, have you never been to bed?"
"For a bit, dearest. Then I found I couldn't sleep, and got up."
"Isn't it awful, the noise? One hears it so in this house.... Well,
I suppose it's the same in any house that looks straight over the sea."
"Haven't you slept?"
"Oh yes, a little. But then it woke me. Then I thought I heard you
moving."
"So I was. Now, suppose we both go to bed, and try to sleep. I shall
have to, because of my candle. Is that all you've got left?"
"That's all, and it's guttering. And the paper will catch directly."
She blew it out to avoid this, and added: "Stop a minute and I'll
take the paper off, and make it do for a bit."
"You can have mine. Leave me yours." For Fenwick's was, even now,
after burning so long, the better candle-end of the two. He took
it out of the socket, and slipped its paper roll off, an economy
suggested by the condition of its fellow.
But as he did so his own light flashed full on his face, and Rosalind
saw a look on it that scarcely belonged to mere sleeplessness like her
own--unrest that comes to most of us when the elements are restless.
"Gerry, you've been worrying. You know you have, dear. Speak the
truth! You've been trying to recollect things."
"I had nobody here to prevent me, you see." He made no denial; in
fact, thought admission of baffled effort was his safest course. "I
get worried and fidgeted by chaotic ideas when you're not here. But
it's nothing." Rosalind did not agree to this at all.
"I wish Mrs. Lobjoit could have put us both in one room," she said.
"Well, _we_ didn't see our way, you know," he replied, referring
to past councils on sleeping arrangements. "It's only for a week,
after all."
"Yes, darling; but a week's a week, and I can't have you worried to
death." She made him lie down again, and sat by him, holding his hand.
So unnerved was he by his glance back into his past, so long unknown
to him, and so sweet was the comfort of her presence and the touch of
her living hand after all those hours of perturbation alone, that
Fenwick made no protest against her remaining beside him. But a
passiveness that would have belonged to an invalid or a sluggish
temperament seemed unlike the strong man Rosalind knew him for, and
she guessed from it that there was more behind. Still, she said
nothing, and sat on with his hand grasping hers and finding in it his
refuge from himself. To her its warm pressure was a sure sign that
his memory had not penetrated the darkness of his earlier time. If
God willed, it might never do so. Meanwhile, what was there for it
but patience?
As she sat there listening to the roaring of the gale outside, and
watching with satisfaction the evident coming of sleep, she said to
herself that it might easily be that some new thing had come back to
him which he would be unwilling she should know about, at least until
his own mind was clearer. He might speak with less reserve to Vereker.
She would give the doctor leave to talk to him to-morrow. Fear of
what she would hear may have influenced her in this.
So when, sooner than she had expected, she caught the sound of the
first breath of indisputable sleep, she rose and slipped away quietly,
and as she lay down again to rest again asked herself the question:
Was it the galvanism that had done it?