Alberta with great astonishment. He had been told nothing of Sargon
being worse nor of his misbehaviour; he had been thinking of him rather
enviously as growing steadily stronger and better and gratifying day by
day a happy and expanding curiosity. He had looked forward presently to
another talk and another phase in this odd belated adolescence. It was
as though an interesting story had come to an abrupt end in the middle,
as though all its concluding chapters had been torn out rudely and
unreasonably.
This mood of frustrated sympathy lasted over the cremation of Sargon
at Golders Green. Bobby went to that queer ceremony. He arrived late
with Billy; the coffin that held the little body stood ready to glide
into the furnace, the Church of England burial service had already
begun. There were very few people in the chapel. Christina Alberta in
the black she had worn for her mother was in the front seat, as chief
mourner, between Paul Lambone and Devizes. Behind her with an air
of earnest support were Harold and Fay Crumb, astonishingly in deep
mourning and following the service meticulously in two prayer-books.
An unpleasant-looking individual with a very long pock-marked sheep’s
face, small eyes and habitual-looking blacks turned round and stared
at Bobby as he came in. He was accompanied by a very large blonde
lady who seemed to have slept in her mourning under a bed. Relations
of the deceased? The air of relationship was unmistakable. Behind,
a young woman and two detached old ladies seemed to be indulging a
simple propensity for funeral services at large. They completed the
congregation.
Christina Alberta looked unusually small and overshadowed by her two
odd men friends. It was a grey day outside, and the general effect of
the gathering was thin and scattered and damp and chilly. The organ
was playing as Bobby came in, and he thought he had never heard a less
musical organ. The service as it went on sounded more and more trite
and theological and insincere. What an old second-hand damp mackintosh
the Church of England is, thought Bobby, for a striving soul to wear?
But then what can any religion in the world really be in the face of
normal death? Theologically one should rejoice when a good man dies,
but none of these religions had had the pluck to brazen it out to that
extent. None can get rid of the effect of confrontation with a blank
amazing interrogation. Was there anything within that coffin there that
heard or cared a jot for those sombre mummeries?
Bobby’s thoughts converged upon that still thing within the coffin. The
little face would be wearing a waxen unaccustomed dignity; the round,
preposterously innocent blue eyes would be closed and a little sunken.
Where were those thoughts and hopes, now, that Bobby had listened to
a few weeks since? Sargon had talked of flying, of visiting India and
China, of doing noble work in the world. He had said that half his life
still lay before him. He had seemed to be opening like a flower on the
first sunny morning of a belated spring. And it was all delusion; the
door of death that had slammed upon him was already closing then.
Surely those hopes had been life! In them if in anything was something
of the life that lives and cannot die. But was it yonder? No. That in
the coffin there was no more than a photographic impression, a cast
garment, the parings of a nail. There was more of Sargon now in Bobby’s
brain alone, than in that coffin. But Sargon, where was he? Where were
those dreams and desires?
Bobby became aware of the voice of the officiating clergyman driving
high, like a flying bird, over the welter of his thoughts: “_But some
men will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they
come? Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened unless it die.
And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not the body that shall be, but
bare grain, it may chance of wheat or any other grain: But God giveth
it a body, as it hath pleased him, but to every seed its own body...._”
“Queer, tortuous, ingenious fellow that Paul,” thought Bobby. Now
what exactly was he driving at there? Queer fellow! Bad manners too
with his “Thou fool.” A rather strained analogy this about the seed,
“sown in corruption.” After all a seed was the cleanest, most living
bit of vegetable matter you could have; it had to be sown in clean
mould. Growing plants you manured perhaps, but not seed-boxes. But
there was a queer insistence in the discourse of the “difference,” the
discontinuity, of the new life. What was to come was to be altogether
different from what was sown. Bobby had never noted that before, never
noted how plainly the apostle insisted that no body, no earthly sort of
body, no personality, ever came back.
“_The glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial
is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the
moon, and another glory of the stars; for one star differeth from
another star in glory._”
What was the drift of that? Was it translated properly? What had Paul
been up against in Corinth? After all, why couldn’t the Church speak
to one’s living needs instead of disinterring this Levantine argument?
And that analogy of the seed; was it after all a good one? Whatever
comes from a seed must itself die again; it is no more immortal than
the plant that came before it. The clergyman was going too fast, too,
to follow him closely. Better get a prayer-book at home afterwards and
read all this.
“_O Grave where is thy sting? O death where is thy victory? The sting
of death is sin and the strength of sin is in the law._”
No. There was no following that. It sounded like nonsense. One just
missed the implications. It was like listening to some one who was
too far off to be heard distinctly but who made eloquent gestures and
noises.
The service came to an embarrassed pause. Everyone was motionless,
arrested.
“_Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live.... He cometh
up and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow...._”
Set in motion by unseen hands the coffin went gliding towards the
furnace doors which opened to receive it. There was a deep roar, a
sound like a mighty rushing wind, an elemental and chaotic sound....
Life is a faint dispersed film upon one little planet, but flames roar
like this and great winds rush and whirl, out to the remotest star in
the unfathomable depths of space. That deep disorderly tumult is the
true voice of lifeless matter, not of dead matter, for what has never
lived cannot be dead, but of lifeless matter, outside of and beneath
and beyond life.
Everyone in the chapel seemed still and bowed and hushed and dwarfed to
minute dimensions until the furnace doors had closed again upon that
soulless devouring clamour.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
_May at Udimore_
§ 1
Bobby _forgot_ that glimpse of the elemental powers that the furnace
doors had given him altogether, for such things do not remain
naturally in the mind. They inconvenience life. But the voice of the
clergyman hustling the arguments of St. Paul along, and the scene in
the Crematorium Chapel with the little coffin waiting to be launched
into eternity and the few still black mourners dotted among the yellow
benches came back to him very vividly when Paul Lambone began to quote
and twist those familiar sentences about the contrast between the
corruptible and the incorruptible and expand a fantastic philosophy of
his own. Bobby had always intended to read that funeral service over
again slowly and judicially, but he had never done so and he regretted
it now very much. It left him--and Paul of Tarsus--at the mercy of
Paul Lambone, and he knew that Paul Lambone loved ingenious slight
misquotations.
It was a very warm, serenely still May evening, and Lambone’s party
sat after dinner in the twilight, some just inside the house and some
on deck-chairs upon the terrace. They looked out over the marsh and
over the still sea. The sky was like the inside of a deep blue globe
on which an ever increasing multitude of starry midges was alighting,
and Rye and Winchelsea crouched low beneath it, black low lumps with a
street light and a window or so showing minutely. Receding out to sea
was a liner quite brightly lit. With a swift steadiness the beam of the
nearer lighthouse swept the distant flats, came near, lit the faces of
the talkers, lit the room, called a church tower and a group of trees
into existence and dropped them back into the darkness and forgot about
them and passed on. And then presently it was coming again, a thin
white streak of light hurrying far away across the levels.
When one’s attention wandered from the talk one became aware of an
abundance of nightingales. They were nightingales newly come from the
south. One or it might be two were in the trees close at hand; others
remoter wove a gauze curtain of faint sweet sounds over the visible
universe.
Bobby sat on the step between the room and the terrace with his back
against a pillar and with his empty coffee-cup beside him. He had put
himself there by the feet of Christina Alberta, who was deep in a big
arm-chair and very still. Her face was dim except when her cigarette
glowed and showed a red-lit unfamiliar face. And yet that afternoon
she had been the most familiar thing in the world to him; she had
kissed him and pulled his ears and he had kissed her bare shoulders
and clasped her in his arms. Devizes too was silent and preoccupied.
He sat over against Christina Alberta on the other side of the opening
of the room; and he was so much in the twilight that except when the
lighthouse beam lit his face, only his shining shoes and socks were
clearly visible to Bobby. There had been times when Bobby had thought
that Devizes was in love with Christina Alberta, and he had a vague
inexplicable feeling that to some extent she was or had been in love
with Devizes. He had a sense of unfathomed deeps in their relationship,
but he did not know where these deeps lay. If Christina Alberta loved
Devizes she would have said so. Bobby knew of no reason why she
should not. But to-day she had hugged and kissed Bobby so that it was
impossible to believe she loved anyone else.
Yet in the last three or four months she had gone about with Devizes
a lot; Bobby had seen her mind responding and changing with her talks
with this man. She used to quote him, and she would say things exactly
like the things he said. It had been a great inconvenience and trial
to Bobby, this preoccupation. And then suddenly he found Devizes
wasn’t the lover at all, never could have been a lover. That day she
had proved that up to the hilt. And now in a state between pride and
servitude Bobby sat at her feet. He sat at her feet and close to her;
Devizes in the darkness was remote, a full three yards away.
Except for Lambone’s unquenchable flow it had not been a very talkative
party. To-night it was less talkative than ever. “This is too perfect,”
Margaret Means had sighed. “I can’t talk. I just thank God I am alive,”
and she had nestled into her big deck-chair upon the terrace. This was
the girl--it had suddenly become apparent to Bobby a fortnight ago in
London--whom Devizes intended to marry. Abruptly she had come upon the
scene to destroy the triangle that had obsessed Bobby’s imagination.
A sweetly pretty fragile thing she was; in the twilight she seemed as
faint and fragrant as nightstock, and she was a wonderful pianist.
Last night she had played for two hours. Paul’s sister, Miss Lambone,
had been evoked from somewhere in the west of England to come and be
hostess to the engaged couple. Bobby had tried to talk to Christina
Alberta about Margaret, but Christina Alberta hadn’t wanted to talk
about her. “You see,” said Christina Alberta compactly, “she has opened
the whole world of music to him. That’s what brought them together.
She’s clever; she’s very clear and clever.
“I’d never heard of her--until you mentioned their engagement.
“They’ve gone to concerts together and that sort of thing. He’s known
her much longer than he has known me.”
“When did you first meet Devizes?”
“About the time my Daddy came to Midgard Street. As recently as that.
It’s hardly six months. Paul Lambone took me to him to get advice
about Daddy. But _they_ have been going about--for more than a year.
I thought it was just music that interested them. They’d seemed to be
friends. And I thought he didn’t mean to marry again. He just suddenly
decided.”
Christina Alberta reflected. “That’s the way with life, Bobby. Things
accumulate, and then you suddenly decide.”
“Had she been undecided? Had she made him wait?”
“Not her,” said Christina Alberta with a remarkable hardness in her
voice.
“No,” she said. “_He_ decided.”
She seemed to feel there was still something to express. “He just took
hold of the situation.”
§ 2
This was Bobby’s second visit to Udimore. Paul Lambone had suddenly
seen fit to gather this party; apparently on the spur of Devizes’
engagement. In the interval Bobby had seen Christina Alberta a number
of times and developed an immense sense of relationship to her. It
filled his life. He had always been dreaming things about her from the
time when he anticipated her with blue eyes and a fragile person, and
always she was and did things that tore his dreams to shreds. This
made her profoundly interesting. More and more he had become dependent
upon her for interest. He wanted to marry her if only to make sure he
wouldn’t lose the interest of her. She had refused--twice. Without any
of the graces proper to the occasion. “No fear, Bobby,” she said. “It
wouldn’t do. I’m not the woman you take me for.”
“You never are,” he said. “I don’t mind that.”
“You’re the dearest companion,” she said. “I like the way your hair
grows.”
“Then why not make it yours, and be companions for ever?”
“Nothing more frightful,” she said, and so dismissed the proposal.
They went about together; they spent much of their spare time together
except for those distressing occasions when she would suddenly throw
him over to go to a theatre or walk with Devizes. Or to go to Devizes
to talk. She never hesitated to throw him over for Devizes. Yet Bobby
got a lot of her. She didn’t know much about theatres or music-halls
or restaurants or dancing-places or that sort of thing, and Bobby was
discreetly competent in that province. The Malmesburys felt themselves
deserted, and Susan was vindictive in her resentment at his frequent
absence from her bed-time rituals. Tessy, Bobby declared, remained his
dearest friend; but when he tried to tell her all about himself in the
old, old fashion--which he did when Christina Alberta was away with
Devizes--he naturally had to tell her all about Christina Alberta. But
Tessy declined in the most emphatic way to be told about Christina
Alberta. It was extremely surprising and disappointing to Bobby to find
out how incapable Tessy was of appreciating the endless interestingness
and charm of Christina Alberta. It was a blind spot in her mind. She
seemed to assume that Christina Alberta was no better than she should
be, whereas she was much better. It estranged Bobby and Tessy very
much, and it was a great sorrow to Bobby.
Because Christina Alberta _was_ good--and interesting--beyond dispute.
She was growing with tremendous rapidity mentally and in her knowledge
of the world. Every time he met her she seemed more of a person, with
richer, fuller, more commanding ideas. She seemed to be living every
moment of her time. She was working now at the Royal College of Science
under Macbride. She was taking hold of her new studies there with
tremendous enthusiasm. She was in love with comparative anatomy. Bobby
had always thought that comparative anatomy was dry, pedantic stuff
about bones, but she declared it lit up the whole story of life for
her. It changed her ideas about the world and about herself profoundly.
“It is the most romantic stuff I have ever read or thought about,” she
said. “It makes human history seem silly.”
She took him three times to the Natural History Museum at South
Kensington to show him something of the fine realizations that stirred
her mind. She made it clear to him how the bones of a wing or the
scratches of a flint could restore the storms and sunlight and passions
of ten million years ago.
And then suddenly a week ago Christina Alberta had consented to marry
Bobby. She had taken back her two refusals. But the way she did it
made it like everything else she did, astonishing and disconcerting.
She had a confession to make, and for a time until he could think it
over thoroughly that confession seemed to Bobby to explain her refusals
completely and to clear up everything about her.
She got him to take her to Hampton Court. But they did not go into the
gardens because they saw through the park gates that the chestnuts of
Bushey Avenue were in full blossom; they went instead by the pond and
up under the riotously flowering branches. A belated spring was coming
now in a hurry, warm and brilliant. The trees were glorious. It was as
if a bright green sea was splashing up warm creamy foam under a shower
of cannon shots. The blue sky hummed with light.
“The spring has come fast now that it has begun to come,” she said.
He felt she had something to say and waited.
“I never know, Bobby--this year less than ever--whether spring is the
happiest time in the year or the most miserably restless. Everybody and
everything is falling in love.”
“I didn’t wait for spring,” said Bobby.
“But what of the frogs that can’t find water?” said Christina Alberta.
“There’s water where there are frogs,” said Bobby.
“Everybody is marrying and giving in marriage,” she said. “I thought--I
thought--Dr. Devizes at least was an inconsolable widower. But the
spring tides have caught even him. They catch everybody.”
“They’ve caught you?”
“I don’t know. I’m miserable, Bobby, and restless and all astir.”
“Then let yourself go.”
“One aches--alone.”
“But are you alone?”
“Fairly.”
“There’s me.”
“Bobby dear, what do you want in me?”
“_You._ To be with you. To be always about with you. And to be loved by
you.”
“It’s kind of you.”
“Oh, nonsense! _Kindness!_”
“Listen, Bobby,” she said, and made a long pause.
Her voice when she spoke had adopted the ease of casual conversation.
“Do you believe in chastity, Bobby? Could you love a girl who
wasn’t--chaste?”
Bobby winced as if she had struck his face with a whip. He went white.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Plainly,” she said.
For a time neither of them said a word.
“You have had _your_ experiences,” she thrust. “In France. They all
did.”
Bobby made no answer to that.
“Now you know,” she flung at him.
For a little while the light had gone out of Bobby’s world.
“Did you love the man?” he asked.
“If I did I don’t remember it. It was just--curiosity. And the stir of
growing up. And the intolerable sense of being forbidden. No--I think I
was almost--cold-blooded. I liked the look of him. And then I disliked
him.... But there it is, Bobby. That’s how things are.”
Bobby weighed his words. “I’d care if it were any girl but you.
You--you’re different. I love you. What has or hasn’t happened to you
doesn’t matter. At least--it doesn’t matter so much.”
“You’re sure it doesn’t matter so much?”
“Quite.”
“Sure for good?”
“Yes.”
“From this moment you forget, you begin to forget what I have told you?
As I want to forget it?”
“It will go soon enough if you want to forget it. It doesn’t matter at
all. I see now, it doesn’t matter at all.”
“But why on earth do you want to marry me, Bobby? What is there in me?
I’m ugly, rude, greedy, inconsiderate. I’ve no purity, no devotion.”
“You’re incessantly interesting. You’re straight, swift, and endlessly
beautiful.”
“Bobby, truly! Does it look like that to you?”
“Yes. Doesn’t my manner--? Don’t you _know_?”
“Yes,” she said gravely; “I suppose I know.”
She came to a stop in front of him with her arms akimbo. They stood
looking at one another, and Bobby winced as if he was going to cry. Her
face was grave and troubled, and then at the sight of his expression
her smile broke through. Her gravity vanished. She was a different
Christina Alberta. She was suddenly the gayest conceivable thing to
him, confident and impudent.
“If you were to kiss me, Bobby, right here and now in Bushey Park,
would they lock us up?...”
Most wonderful it was to Bobby to take her in his arms. A new
Christina Alberta was revealed to Bobby; Christina Alberta seen from a
distance of six inches or so, an amazingly beautiful Christina Alberta.
One might have thought she had never lived for anything but being loved
by Bobby.
“You’re learning,” said Christina Alberta after a little while. “Now do
it all over again, Bobby. Nobody seems to be looking....”
§ 3
Neither Lambone nor Devizes had seemed in the least surprised at their
engagement. Indeed their attitude of gratified expectation was almost
embarrassing. The young couple had come down to Udimore with Devizes
and Miss Means under the ample protection of Miss Lambone almost as
though they had been appointed for each other from the beginning of
things.
But at Udimore there were further surprises and perplexities for
Bobby. All day Saturday Christina Alberta seemed to be not so much
in love as in a thoroughly bad temper. She seemed far more concerned
by the fact that Devizes was going to marry Miss Means than by the
generous devotion that Bobby was prepared to lavish upon her. She was
inattentive to his various little manœuvres to get isolated with her.
The two couples played tennis after tea until it was time to dress for
dinner; she was badly out of practice and fundamentally unorthodox, and
Margaret played with a smoothness and sweetness that roused her to a
pitch of viciousness only too evident to Bobby’s fine perceptions. It
seemed to Bobby that Devizes also noted her annoyance, but Miss Means
was blissfully unobservant of anything in the world but Devizes.
On Sunday morning Christina Alberta carried off Bobby through the
distant cheerfulness of church bells for a walk to Brede Castle. And
she announced to Bobby that she did not intend to marry him.
Bobby protested. “You don’t love me?”
“Haven’t I kissed you? Didn’t I hug you? Haven’t I ruffled your hair?”
“Then why don’t you want to marry me?”
“I do not want to marry anyone. I don’t love anybody. Except of course
you. But even you, I can’t marry. I want to be loved, Bobby, yes. But
not to be married.”
“But why? Not the--the old reason?”
“No. I took your word about that. But all the same I don’t want to
marry you, Bobby.... I think it’s because I don’t want to be bound up
with anyone’s life. I don’t want to be a wife. I want to be my free and
independent self. I’ve got to grow. That’s it, Bobby. I want to be free
to grow.”
Bobby made protesting noises.
“I don’t want some one seeing me grow all the time. You’d always be
looking at me, Bobby; I know you would.”
It was useless of Bobby to say he wouldn’t. He would.
“I didn’t know that things were going to take me like this until I
fixed to marry you. I wanted to marry you when I consented--honestly
I did. I wanted dreadfully then to get close to some one, as close as
possible, and to be kissed and told ‘There! There!’ and to keep there.
It was a comfort for me, Bobby. You are a comfort for me. I’d ache to
madness without you. But how close we come when we love, Bobby, and how
far away we are all the time! How can we know each other when we hardly
know ourselves? When we don’t _dare_ know ourselves?
“You are such a dear, Bobby. You are so warm and kind that it seems
ungrateful not to give myself to you with both hands. But I just
can’t. I’m not a normal woman perhaps. Or something has happened to me
unawares. Perhaps life has cheated me out of something.... Oh, I don’t
know, Bobby. I want some one dreadfully; I want you dreadfully and I
don’t want you at all. I’d rather be dead than a female thing like
Margaret Means. If _that’s_ marrying----!”
“But I thought,” said Bobby, “after all that’s happened----”
“No.”
“I’ll wait ten years for you,” said Bobby, “on the chance of your
altering your mind.”
“You are the dearest comforter,” said Christina Alberta, and stopped
short....
And suddenly she had put her hands upon his shoulders and clung to him
and broken into a wild passion of weeping.
“Wetting you instead of wedding you,” she sobbed and laughed. “Oh, my
poor Bobby! you dear lover!”