Let us take the case of a refined and sensitive man who has fallen, as
many have fallen, under the influence of drink. Let us suppose him to
have sunk lower and lower into the hell of it until delirium tremens
puts a temporary end to his excesses. Let us suppose him to be
convalescent, in sweet surroundings, in capable hands, relieved, for the
time at least, by the strange gold drug of his craving for alcohol. His
mind is clear, his perceptions are acute, he is once more a sane human
being. He looks back upon his degradation with wondering horror. It is
not as though he has passed through a period of dark madness of which
the memory is vague and elusive. He remembers it all—all the incidents,
all the besotted acts, all the benumbed, enslaved surrender of his soul.
His freed self regards perplexedly the self that was in bondage. They
are two different entities—and yet they are unquestionably the same. He
has not been mad, because he has felt all the time responsible for his
actions, and yet he must have been mad so to dishonour the divine spirit
within him. The latter argument prevails. “I have been mad,” he says,
and shivers with disgust.
In some such puzzled frame of mind did Quixtus, freed from the obsession
of the Idea, regard his self of the last few months. He remembered how
it had happened. There had been several shocks; the Marrable disaster,
the discovery of Angela and Hammersley’s betrayal, that of the
disloyalty of his three pensioners, the cynical trick of his uncle. He
remembered toying with the Idea on his homeward journey, the farcical
faithlessness of the drunken housekeeper—and then, click! the hag Idea
had mounted on his shoulders and ridden away with him, as Al Kohol (the
very devil himself) rides away with the unresisting drunkard. Every
action, every thought of this strange period was clear in his memory. He
could not have been mad—and yet he must have been.
To strain the analogy a trifle, the nightmare in the train and the
horror of the morning had been his delirium tremens. But here the
analogy suffers a solution of continuity. From that climax of devil
work, the drunkard descends but slowly and gradually through tortures
innumerable to the normal life of man. Shock is ineffective. But in
Quixtus’s case there was a double shock—the seismic convulsion of his
being at the climactic moment, and the sudden announcement of that,
which to all men born is the only Absolute, final, immutable.
And then click! the hag that had ridden him had been thrown from his
shoulders, and he had looked upon the dead through the eyes of a sane
man. And now, through the eyes of a sane man he regarded the incredible
spectacle of his self of yesterday. He turned from it with shivers of
disgust. He must have been mad. A great depression came upon him. He had
suffered grievous wrongs, it is true; no man since Job had been more
sorely afflicted; the revelations of human baseness and treachery had
been such as to kill his once childlike faith in humanity. But why had
loss of faith sent him mad? What had his brain been doing to allow this
grotesque impulse to over-master it? At the present moment, he assured
himself, he had neither more nor less faith in mankind than when he had
walked a maniac through the London streets, or during last night’s
tortured journey in the train. Yet now he desired to commit no
wickedness. The thought of evil for evil’s sake was revolting. . . . The
self that he had striven to respect and keep clean all his life, had
been soiled. Wherein lay purification?
Had he been mad? If so, how could he trust his memory as to what had
happened? By the grace of God those acts of wickedness whose
contemplation he remembered, had been rendered nugatory. Even Tommy had
not materially suffered, seeing that he had kept the will intact and had
placed two thousand pounds to his banking account. But could he actually
have committed deeds of wickedness which he had forgotten? Were there
any such which he had committed through the agency of the three evil
counsellors? He racked his memory in vain.
The time at Marseilles passed gloomily. Poynter, the good Samaritan,
started the first evening for Devonshire to satisfy his hungry soul with
the unutterable comfort of English fields. Clementina and Quixtus saw
him off at the station and walked back through the sultry streets
together. The next day he was left much to his own company, as
Clementina broke the news of death to the child and stayed with her for
comfort. He wandered aimlessly about the town, seeking the shade, and
wrapping himself in his melancholy. When he saw Sheila in the afternoon
she was greatly subdued. She understood that her father had gone to
Heaven to stay with her mother. She realised that she would never see
him again. Clementina briefly informed Quixtus of the child’s grief. How
she had cried and called for him most of the morning, how she had fallen
asleep and had awakened more calm. To distract her mind and to give her
the air, they hired a taxi-cab and drove on the Corniche Road past the
Restaurant de la Réserve. Sheila’s tiny body easily nestled on the seat
between them, and she seemed comforted by the human contact. From Pinkie
she also derived great consolation. Pinkie was stupid, she explained,
and she couldn’t talk; but really she was a fairy princess, and fairy
princesses were always affectionate. Pinkie was stuffed with love as
tight as she could hold.
“Have you ever been in a motor-car before?” asked Quixtus.
“Oh yes. Of course I have,” she replied in her rich little voice. “Daddy
had one in Shanghai. He used to take me out in it.”
Then her lips quivered and the tears started and she flung herself
weeping against Clementina.
“Oh, daddy! I want my daddy!”
The essential feminine in Clementina sprang to arms.
“Why did you start her off like this by talking of motor-cars?”
“I’m dreadfully sorry,” said Quixtus. “But how was I to know?”
“Just like a man,” she retorted. “No intuition worth a cent.”
At dinner, a melancholy meal—theirs was the only table occupied in the
vast, ghostly _salle à manger_—she apologised, in her gruff way.
“I was wrong about the motor-car. How the deuce could you have known?
Besides, if you talked to the child about triple-expansion boiler, her
daddy would be sure to have had one at Shanghai. Poor little mite!”
“Yes, poor little mite,” said Quixtus, meditatively. “I wonder what will
become of her.”
“That has got to be our look-out,” she replied sharply. “You don’t seem
to realise that.”
“I don’t think I do quite—even after what you said to me yesterday. I
must accustom myself to the idea.”
“Yesterday,” said Clementina, “you declared that you had fallen in love
with her.”
“Many a man,” replied Quixtus with a faint smile, “has fallen in love
with one of your sex and has not in the least known what to do with
her.”
The grim setting of Clementina’s lips relaxed.
“I think you’re becoming more human. And, talking of humanity—there’s a
question that must be cleared up between us, before we settle down to
this partnership. Are you intending to keep up your diabolical attitude
towards Tommy Burgrave?”
The question had been burning her tongue for over twenty-four hours;
from the moment that he had appeared in the vestibule the day before,
after his sleep, and seemed to have recovered from the extraordinary
nervous collapse which had aroused her pity. With considerable
self-restraint she had awaited her opportunity. Now it had come—and
when an opportunity came to Clementina, she did not go by four roads to
take it. Quixtus laid down his knife and fork and leaned back in his
chair. Knowing her attachment to the boy, he had expected some reference
to his repudiation. But the direct question disconcerted him. Should he
have to render equally sudden account of all the fantastic iniquities of
the past? Then something he had not thought of before entered his amazed
head. He had never countermanded the order whereby the allowance was
automatically transferred from his own banking account to Tommy’s. He
had intended to write the letter after having destroyed the will, but
his reflections on plagiarism in wickedness which had led to the
preservation of that document, had also caused him to forget the other
matter entirely. And he had not thought of it from that day to this.
“As a matter of fact,” said he, looking at his plate, “I have not
disinherited Tommy; I have not discontinued his allowance, and I have
placed a very large sum of money to his credit at the bank.”
Clementina knitted her brows and stared at him. The man was a greater
puzzle than ever. Was he lying? If Tommy had found himself in opulence,
he would have told her. Tommy was veracity incarnate.
“The boy hasn’t a penny to his name—nothing except his mother’s fifty
pounds a year.”
He met her black, keen eyes steadily.
“I am telling you the facts. He can’t have inquired about his bank
balance recently.” He passed his hand across his forehead, as
realisation of the past strange period came to him. “I suppose he can’t
have done so, as he has never written to acknowledge the—the large
amount of money.”
The man was telling the truth. It was mystifying.
“Then why in the name of Bedlam did you play the fool with him like
that?”
“That is another matter,” said he, lowering his eyes. “For the sake of
an answer, let us say that I wanted to test his devotion to his art.”
“We can say it as much as we please, but I don’t believe it.”
“I will ask you, Clementina,” said he, courteously, “as a great personal
favour to let it pass at that.”
“All right,” said Clementina.
He went on with his dinner. Presently another thing struck him. He was
to find a plaguey lot of things to strike him in connection with his
lunacy.
“If Tommy was penniless,” said he, “will you explain how he has managed
to take this expensive holiday in France.”
“Look here, let us talk of something else,” she replied. “I’m sick of
Tommy.”
Visions of Tommy’s whooping joy, of Etta’s radiance; when they should
hear the astounding news, floated before her. She could hear him telling
the chit of a girl to put on her orange-blossoms and go out with him at
once and get married. She could hear Etta say: “Darling Clementina, do
run out and buy me some orange-blossoms.” Much the two innocents cared
for darling Clementina! There were times when she really did not know
whether she wanted to take them both in her arms in a great splendid
hug, or to tie them up together in a sack and throw them into the Seine.
“I’m sick of Tommy,” she declared.
But the normal brain of the cultivated man had begun to work.
“Clementina,” said he, “it is you that have been paying Tommy’s
expenses.”
“Well, suppose I have?” she replied, defiantly. She added quickly,
womanlike divining the reproach to Tommy, underlying Quixtus’s
challenge: “He’s a child and I’m an old woman. I had the deuce’s own job
to make him accept. I couldn’t go careering about France all by
myself—I could, as a matter of practical fact—I could career all over
Gehenna if I chose—but it wouldn’t have been gay. He sacrificed his
pride to give me a holiday. What have you to say against it?”
A flush of shame mounted to Quixtus’s cheek. It was intolerable that one
of his house—his sister’s son—should have been dependent for bread on
a woman. He himself was to blame.
“Clementina,” said he, “this is a very delicate matter, and I hope you
won’t misjudge me; but as your great generosity was based on a most
unhappy misunderstanding——”
“Ephraim Quixtus,” she interrupted, seeing whither he was tending, “go
on with your dinner and don’t be a fool!”
There was nothing for it but for Quixtus to go on with his dinner.
“I tell you what,” she said, after a pause, in spite of her weariness of
Tommy as a topic of conversation; “when Tommy met you in Paris, he
didn’t know what you’ve just told me. He thought you had unreasonably
and heartlessly cut him adrift. And yet he greeted you as affectionately
and frankly as if nothing had happened.”
“That’s true,” Quixtus admitted. “He did.”
“It proves to you what a sound-hearted fellow Tommy is.”
“I see,” said Quixtus. “Well?”
“That’s all,” said Clementina. “Or if it isn’t it ought to be.”
Quixtus made no reply. There was no reply possible, save the real
explanation of his eccentric behaviour; and that he was not prepared to
offer. But Clementina’s rough words sank deep in his mind. Judged by
ordinary standards, his treatment of Tommy had been unqualifiable;
Tommy’s behaviour all that was most meritorious. In Tommy’s case wherein
lay the proof of the essential depravity of mankind? His gloomy faith
received a shock which caused him exceeding discomfort. You see, if you
take all the trouble of going mad for the sake of a gospel, you rather
cling to it when you recover sanity. You are rather eager to justify to
yourself the waste of time and energy. It is human nature.
After dinner she dismissed him. He must go out to a café and see the
world. She had to look after the child’s slumbers, and write letters.
Quixtus went out into the broad, busy streets. The Cannebière was
crowded with gasping but contented citizens. On every side rose the
murmur of mirth and cheerfulness. Solid burgesses strolled arm in arm
with their solider wives. Youths and maidens laughed together. Swarthy
workmen with open shirt-collars showing their hairy throats, bareheaded
workgirls in giggling knots, little soldiers clinging amorously to
sweethearts—all the crowd wore an air of gaiety, of love of their kind,
of joy in comradeship. At the thronged cafés, too, men and women found
comfort in the swelter of gregariousness. Night had fallen over the
baking city, and the great thoroughfare blazed in light—from shop
windows, cafés, street lamps, from the myriad whirling lamps of trams
and motors. Above it all the full moon shone splendid from the intense
sky of a summer night. Quixtus and the moon appeared to be the only
lonely things in the Cannebière.
He wandered down to the quay and back again in ever-growing depression.
He felt lost, an alien among this humanity that clung together for
mutual happiness; he envied the little soldier and his girl gazing
hungrily, their heads almost touching, into a cheap jeweller’s window. A
sudden craving such as he had never known in his life, awoke within him;
insistent, imperious—a craving for human companionship. Instinctively
he walked back to the hotel, scarcely realising why he had come; until
he saw Clementina in the vestibule. She had stuck on her crazy hat and
was pulling on her white cotton gloves; evidently preparing to go out.
“Hullo! Back already?”
“I have come to ask you a favour, Clementina,” said he. “Would it bore
you to come out with me—to give me the pleasure of your company?”
“It wouldn’t bore me,” replied Clementina. “Precious few things do. But
what on earth can you want me for?”
“If I tell you, you won’t mock at me?”
“I only mock at you, as you call it, when you do idiotic things. Anyhow,
I won’t now. What’s the matter?”
He hesitated. She saw that her brusqueness had checked something natural
and spontaneous. At once she strove to make amends, and laid her hand on
his sleeve.
“We’ve got to be friends henceforth, Ephraim; if only for the child’s
sake. Tell me.”
“It was only that I have never felt so dismally alone in my life, as I
did in that crowded street.”
“And so you came back for me?”
“I came back for you,” he said with a smile.
“Let us go,” said Clementina, and she put her arm through his and they
went out together and walked arm in arm like hundreds of other solemn
couples in Marseilles.
“That better?” she asked after a while, with a humorous and pleasant
sense of mothering this curiously pathetic and incomprehensible man.
The unfamiliar tone in her voice touched him.
“I had no idea you could be so kind, Clementina. Yesterday morning, when
I was ill—I can scarcely remember—but I feel you were kind then.”
“I’m not always a rhinoceros,” said Clementina. “But what am I doing
that’s kind now?”
He pressed her arm gently. “Just this,” said he.
Then Clementina realised, with an odd thrill of pleasure, how much more
significance often lies in little things than in big ones.
They walked along the quay and looked at the island of the Château d’If
standing out grim in the middle of the moonlit harbour, turned up one of
the short streets leading to the Rue de Rome, and so came into the
Cannebière again. A table, just vacated on the outer edge of the terrace
of one of the cafés, allured them. They sat down and ordered coffee. The
little sentimental walk arm in arm had done much to dispose each kindly
towards the other. Quixtus felt grateful for her rough yet subtle
sympathy, Clementina appreciated his appreciation. The atmosphere of
antagonism that had hitherto surrounded them had disappeared. For the
first time since their arrival in Marseilles they talked on general
topics. Almost for the first time in their lives they talked of general
topics naturally, without constraint. Hitherto she had always kept an
ear cocked for the pedant; he for the scoffer. She had been impatient of
his quietism; he had nervously dreaded her brutality. Now a truce was
declared. She forebore to jeer at his favourite pursuit, it not entering
her head to do so; Quixtus, a man of breeding, never rode his hobby
outside his ring, except in self-defence. They talked of music—a band
was playing in the adjoining café. They discovered a common ground in
Bach. Desultory talk led them to modern opera. There was a little
haunting air, said he, in _Hans Joueur de Flûte_.
“This?” cried Clementina, leaning across the table and humming it.
“You’re the only English creature I’ve come across who has ever heard of
it.”
They talked of other things—of travel. Her tour through France was
fresh in her mind. Sensitive artist, she was full of the architecture.
Wherever she had gone, Quixtus had gone before her. To her after
astonishment, for she was too much interested in the talk to consider it
at the time, he met her sympathetically on every point.
“The priceless treasures of France,” said he, “are the remains of
expiring Gothic and the early Renaissance. Of the former you have the
Palais de Justice at Rouen—which everybody knows—and the west front of
the Cathedral at Vendôme.”
“But I’ve just been to Vendôme!” cried Clementina. “That wonderful
flamboyant window!”
“The last word of Gothic,” said Quixtus. “The funeral pyre of
Gothic—that tracery—the whole thing is on fire—it’s all leaping
flame—as if some God had said ‘Let this noble thing that is dead have a
stupendous end.’ Vendôme always seems to me like the end of the Viking.
They sent the hero away to sea in a blaze of fire.”
Richelieu, the little town not far from Tours where every one goes, yet
so unknown—built by the great Cardinal for his court and to-day
standing with hardly change of stick or stone, just as Richelieu left
it, Quixtus had visited.
“But that’s damnable!” cried Clementina. “I thought we had discovered
it.”
He laughed. “So did I. And I suppose everybody who goes there views it
with the eyes of a little Columbus.”
“What did you like best about it?”
“The pictures of the past it evoked. The cavalcade of Richelieu’s
nobles—all in their Louis Treize finery—the clatter of the men-at-arms
down that broad, cobble-paved central street. The setting was all there.
It was so easy to fill it.”
“That’s just what Tommy did,” said Clementina. “Tommy made a fancy
sketch on the spot of the Cardinal entering in state in his great heavy
_carrosse_ with his bodyguard around him.”
This led them on to pictures. She found that he was familiar with all
the galleries in Europe—with most of the works of the moderns. She had
never suspected that he had ideas of his own on pictures. He hated what
he called the “nightmare of technique” of the ultra-modern school.
Clementina disliked it also. “All great art was simple,” he remarked.
“Put one of Hobbema’s sober landscapes, the Saint Michael of Raphael,
amidst the hysteria of the Salon des Indépendants, and the four walls
would crumble into chaotic paint.
“Which reminds me,” said he, “of a curious little experience a good many
years ago. It was at the first International Art Exhibition in London.
Paris and Belgium and Holland poured out their violences to unfamiliar
eyes—mine were unfamiliar, at any rate. There were women sitting in
purple cafés with orange faces and magenta hair. There were hideous
nudes with muscles on their knee-caps, writhing in decadent symbolism.
There were portraits so flat that they gave you the impression of
insects squashed against the wall. I remember going through, not
understanding it one bit; and then in the midst of all this fever I came
across a little gem—so cool, so finished, so sane, and yet full of
grip, and I stood in front of it until I got better and then went away.
It was a most curious sensation, like a cool hand on a fevered brow. I
happened not to have a catalogue, so I’ve never known the painter.”
“What kind of a picture was it?” asked Clementina.
“Just a child, in a white frock and a blue sash, and not a remarkably
pretty child either. But it was a delightful piece of work.”
“Do you remember,” she asked, “whether there was a mother-o’-pearl box
on a little table to the left of the girl?”
“Yes,” said Quixtus. “There was. Do you know the picture?”
Clementina smiled. She smiled so that her white, strong teeth became
visible. Quixtus had never seen Clementina’s teeth.
“Painted it,” said Clementina, throwing forward both her hands in
triumph.
One of her hands met the long glass of coffee and sent it scudding
across the table. Quixtus instinctively jerked his chair backward, but
he could not escape a great splash of coffee over his waistcoat. Full of
delight, gratitude, and dismay, Clementina whipped up her white cotton
gloves and before waiters with napkins could intervene, she wiped him
comparatively dry.
“Your gloves! Your gloves!” he cried, protesting.
She held up the unspeakable things and almost laughed as she threw them
on the pavement, whence they were picked up carefully by a passing
urchin—for nothing is wasted in France.
“I would have wiped you clean with my—well, with anything I’ve got, in
return for your having remembered my picture.”
“Well,” said he, “the compliment being quite unconscious, was all the
more sincere.”
The waiter mopped up the flooded table.
“Let us be depraved,” said Clementina in high good humour, “and have
some green chartreuse.”
“Willingly,” smiled Quixtus.
So they were depraved.
And when Clementina went to bed she wondered why she had railed at
Quixtus all these years.