It was the stillest room. The two calm bands of blue crossed the window.
In the sunlight the gulls came flying back. Marmaduke looked out at
them. Were they the same sea-gulls or another flock? Then quietly he
closed his eyes. Stillness--calm. But something else was rising to him
from them. Darkness; darkness; a darkness worse than death. Oh! death
was sweet compared to this. Compared to this all his life had been
sweet; and something far dearer than life was being taken from him. He
only knew the terrible confusion of his whole nature.
He opened his eyes again with an instinct of escape. There were the
bands of blue, and, still passing in their multitudes, leaving him
forever, the proud, exultant sea-gulls. The man still knelt beside him.
He heard his own voice come:--
“What do you mean?”
“I never meant to tell you! I never meant to tell you!” a moan answered
him. “But--seeing you lying there!--dying!--my son!--who has given his
life for England!--And how I have longed for you all these years!--My
romance, Marmaduke--How could I be silent? Forgive me! Forgive me, my
boy. Yes, mine. My known children are dear to me, but how far dearer the
unknown son, seen only by stealth, in snatched glimpses! It is true,
Marmaduke, true. We were lovers. She loved me. Do not ask. Do not
question. We were young. She was very beautiful. It was springtime;
daffodils were in the woods. She said that she had never known any one
like me. She said that her life was hollow, meaningless. I opened doors
to her, I read to her. Browning--I read Browning,” he muttered on, “in
the woods; among the daffodils. It was a new life to her--and to me. And
we were swept away. Don’t blame us, Marmaduke. If there was wrong, there
was great beauty--then. Only then; for after, she was cruel--very cruel.
She turned from me; she crushed and tore my heart. Oh!--I have
suffered! But no one knew. No one ever dreamed of it. Only she and I.
My God!--I see her in your hair and eyes!”
It was true. It was absolutely true. Through his whole being he felt its
inevitability. Everything was clear, with a strange, black, infernal
clearness. His life lay open before him, open from beginning to end:
that beginning of tawdry sentiment and shame--with daffodils; and this
end, with daffodils again, and again with tawdry sentiment and shame.
He was not a Follett. He had no part in the Folletts. He had no part in
Channerley. He was an interloper, a thief. He was the son of this
wretched man, in whose very grief he could detect the satisfaction--oh,
who more fitted to detect such satisfaction!--of his claim upon a status
above his own. He was all that he had always most despised, a
second-rate, a third-rate little creature; the anxious, civil, shrinking
Marmalade of Cauldwell’s office. Why (as the hideous moments led him on,
point by point, his old lucidity, sharpened to a needle fineness, seemed
to etch the truth in lines of fire upon the blackness), hadn’t he always
been a pitiful little snob? Wasn’t it of the essence of a snob to
over-value the things one hadn’t and to fear the things one was? It
hadn’t been other people, it had been himself, what he really was, of
whom he had always been afraid. He saw himself reduced to the heretofore
unrecognized, yet always operative, element in his own nature--a timid,
watchful humility.
Oh, Channerley! Channerley! The wail rose in his heart and it filled the
world. Oh, his woods, his daffodils, his father’s smile--gone--lost
forever! Worse than that--smirched, withered, desecrated!
A hideous gibbering of laughter seemed to rise around him, and pointing
fingers. Amy’s eyes passed with another malice in their mockery; and
Robert would never turn to him now, and Griselda would never look at
him. He saw it all, as they would never see it. He was not one of them,
and they had always felt it; and oh,--above all,--he had always felt it.
And now, quite close it seemed, softly rustling, falsely smiling, moved
his loathsome mother: not only as he remembered her in youth, but in her
elegant middle years, as he had last seen her, with hard eyes and alien
lips and air of brittle, untouched exquisiteness.
Suddenly fury so mounted in him that he saw himself rising in bed,
rending his dressings, to seize the kneeling man by the throat and
throttle him. He could see his fingers sinking in on either side among
the clustered hair, and hear himself say, “How dare you! How dare you!
You hound! You snivelling, sneaking hound! You look for pity from me, do
you!--and tenderness! Well, take this, this! Everything, everything I am
and have that’s worth being and having, I owe to them. I’ve hated you
and all you mean, always--yes, your fear and your caution and your
admiration and your great high forehead. Oh, I see it! I see it!--it’s
my own! And though I am only that in myself, then take it from me that I
hate myself along with you and curse myself with you!”
It came to him that he was slowly panting, and that after the fever-fury
an icy chill crept over him. And a slow, cold smile came with it, and he
saw Jephson, the wit of the office, wagging his head and saying, “Little
Marmalade take a man by the throat! Ask me another!”
No; little Marmalade might win the V.C.; but only when he thought he was
a Follett. Was that what it all came to, really? Something broke and
stopped in his mind.
He heard his father’s voice. How long ago it had all happened. He had
known for years, hadn’t he, that this was his father?
“Marmaduke! Mr. Follett! What have I done? Shall I call somebody? Oh,
forgive me!”
His father was standing now beside him and bending over him. He looked
up at him and shook his head. He did not want any one to come.
“Oh, what have I done?” the man repeated.
“I was dying anyway, you know,” he heard himself say.
What a pitiful face it was, this weary, loosened, futureless old face
above him! What a frightened face! What long years of slow disgarnishing
lay behind it: youth, romance, high hopes, all dropped away. He had come
to-day with their last vestiges, still the sentimental, romancing fool,
self-centred and craving; but nothing of that was left. He was beaten,
at last, down into the very ground. It was a haggard, humiliated,
frightened face, and miserable. As he himself had been. But not even
death lay before this face. For how many years must it go on sinking
down until the earth covered it? Marmaduke seemed to understand all
about him, as well as if he had been himself.
“Sit down,” he said. He heard that his voice was gentle, though he was
not aware of feeling anything, only of understanding. “I was rather
upset. No; I don’t want any one. Of course I forgive you. Don’t bother
about it, I beg.”
His father sat down, keeping his swollen eyes on the motoring-cap
which, unseeingly, he turned and turned in his hands.
“Tell me about yourself a little,” said Marmaduke, with slow, spaced
breaths. “Where do you live? How? Are you fairly happy?”
He knew that he was not happy; but he might, like most people with whom
life had not succeeded, often imagine himself so, and Marmaduke wanted
to help him, if possible, to imagine it.
“I live near London. I used to do a good deal of University Extension
lecturing. I’ve a clerkship in the Education Office now.” Mr. Thorpe
spoke in a dead obedient voice. “A small salary, not much hope of
advance; and I’ve a large family. It’s rather up-hill, of course. But
I’ve good children; clever children. My eldest boy’s at Oxford; he took
a scholarship at Westminster; and my eldest girl’s at Girton. The second
girl, Winnie, has a very marked gift for painting; she is our artist;
we’re going to send her to the Slade next year when she leaves the High
School. Good children. I’ve nothing to complain of.”
“So you’re fairly happy?” Marmaduke repeated. Oddly, he felt himself
comforted in hearing about the good and happy children, in hearing about
Winnie, her father’s favourite.
“Happy? Well, just now, with this terrible war, one can’t be that, can
one? It is a great adventure for me, however, this work of mine,
motoring about France. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything I cared so
much about since--for years,” said Mr. Thorpe. “It’s a beautiful
country, isn’t it? and the soldiers are such splendid fellows! One gets
a lot out of it. But happy? No, I don’t suppose I am. I’m pretty much of
a failure, and I started life with great imaginings about myself. One
doesn’t get over that sort of disappointment; one never really gets over
it in a way.” Mr. Thorpe was looking at him now, and it was as if there
were a kindliness between them. “Things have been rather grey and
disagreeable on the whole,” he said.
“They can be very grey and disagreeable, can’t they?” said Marmaduke,
closing his eyes.
He was very tired, and as he lay there quietly, having nothing further
to know or to suffer, having reached the very limits of conscious
dissolution, something else began to come to him. It seemed born of the
abolition of self and of the acceptance of the fact that he was dead to
all that had given life worth or beauty. It would have been very good to
be a Follett; though, he saw it now, he had over-prized that special
sort of goodness--with so much else from which he had been, as really,
shut out; but he was not a Follett; nor was he merely this poor,
insignificant father. He did not quite make out in what the difference
lay and he did not rejoice in it, for there was no rejoicing left in
him. But, even if the difference were only an acquired instinct (dimly,
the terms of his complacent readings in biology and sociology returned
to him), even if it were only that, not anything inherent and
transmissible, it was, all the same, his own possession; something that
he and the Folletts had made together; so that it was as true to say
that he had won the V.C. as to say that they had. The lessened self that
was left to him had still its worth. To see the truth, even if it undid
you, was worthy; to see so unwaveringly that it was good to be a Follett
even when you weren’t one, had the elements of magnanimity; and to
accept the fact of being second-rate proved, did it not?--if you still
cared to prove it; he felt himself smile as gently at the relinquished
self as he had smiled at his father,--that you were not merely
second-rate.
There was now a sound of stumbling movement; doors opening and shutting;
nurses, surgeons in the room; and his father’s face, far away, against
the blue bands, looking at him, still so frightened and so miserable
that he tried again to smile at him and to say, “It’s all right. Quite
all right.”
At all events he had been decent to the poor old fellow. His thoughts
came brokenly, but he was still seeing something, finding something; it
was like a soft light growing. At all events, he had behaved as a
Follett would wish to behave even when brought to such a pass. No--but
it wasn’t quite that, either; it was something new. He had behaved as
any one decent should wish to behave. And the daffodils glimmering to
his vision seemed to light him further still. “We are as common as
daffodils,” came back to him. Daffodils were for everybody. Foolish
little boy who, on the distant spring morning in the woods of
Channerley, dug them up to take them to his own garden!
He was there among them with his little red-and-yellow cart, and the
thrush was singing high above him, in the rosy topmost branches of an
elm.
Beautiful woods. Beautiful flowers of light and chivalry. How the
sunshine streamed among them!
“Dear Channerley,” he thought. For again he seemed to belong there.
Gentle hands were tending him and, as he turned his cheek on the
pillow, it was with the comfort--almost that of the little boy at
Channerley being tucked up in the warm nursery to go to sleep--of
knowing that he was dying, and that, in spite of everything, he had
given something to the name.
[Illustration: decorative bar]