He sighed and shut his eyes, as though to conceal their expression from
me. He was thinking of Emmy Wendle. How passionately he had hoped that
I should prove her, necessarily and _a priori_, virtuous!
There are certain sensitive and idealistic people in whom the discovery
that the world is what it is brings on a sudden and violent reaction
towards cynicism. From soaring in spheres of ideal purity they rush
down into the mud, rub their noses in it, eat it, bathe and wallow.
They lacerate their own highest feelings and delight in the pain.
They take pleasure in defiling the things which before they thought
beautiful and noble; they pore with a disgusted attention over the foul
entrails of the things whose smooth and lovely skin was what they had
once worshipped.
Swift, surely, was one of these--the greatest of them. His type our
islands still produce; and more copiously, perhaps, during the last
two or three generations than ever before. For the nineteenth century
specialised in that romantic, optimistic idealism which postulates that
man is on the whole good and inevitably becoming better. The idealism
of the men of the Middle Ages was more sensible; for it insisted,
to begin with, that man was mostly and essentially bad, a sinner by
instinct and heredity. Their ideals, their religion, were divine and
unnatural antidotes to original sin. They saw the worst first and
could be astonished by no horror--only by the occasional miracle of
sweetness and light. But their descendants of the romantic, optimistic,
humanitarian century, in which my Uncle Spencer was born and brought
up, vented their idealism otherwise. They began by seeing the best;
they insisted that men were naturally good, spiritual, and lovely. A
sensitive youth brought up in this genial creed has only to come upon a
characteristic specimen of original sin to be astonished, shocked, and
disillusioned into despair. Circumstances and temperament had permitted
my Uncle Spencer to retain his romantic optimism very much longer than
most men.
The tardy recognition of the existence of original sin disturbed my
Uncle Spencer’s mind. But the effects of it were not immediate. At
the moment, while he was in Emmy’s pretty and intoxicating presence,
and while she was still kind, he could not believe that she too had
her share of original sin. And even when he forced himself to do so,
her childish ingenuous face was in itself a complete excuse. It was
later--and especially when he was separated from her--that the poison
began slowly to work, embittering his whole spirit. At present Emmy’s
confession only served to increase his passion for her. For, to begin
with, it made her seem more than ever in need of protection. And next,
by painfully satisfying a little of his curiosity about her life, it
quickened his desire to know all, to introduce himself completely into
her history. And at the same time it provoked a retrospective jealousy,
together with an intense present suspiciousness and an agonised
anticipation of future dangers. His passion became like a painful
disease. He pursued her with an incessant and abject devotion.
Relieved, partly by my Uncle Spencer’s spiritual ministrations, partly
by the medicating power of time, from her first access of remorse,
depression, and self-reproach, Emmy began to recover her normal high
spirits. My Uncle Spencer became less necessary to her as a comforter.
His incomprehensible speculations began to bore her. Conversely, the
jokes of the cheerful ones seemed more funny, while the gallantries of
the journalist and the bank clerk appeared less repulsive, because--now
that her mood had changed--they struck her as less incongruous and
indecorous. She was no longer, spiritually speaking, in church. In
church, my Uncle Spencer’s undemonstrative and unimportunate devotion
had seemed beautifully in place. But now that she was emerging again
out of the dim religious into the brightly secular mood, she found it
rather ridiculous and, since she did not return the adoration, tiresome.
“If you could just see yourself now, Uncle Spenny,” she said to him,
“the way you look.”
And she drew down the corners of her mouth, then opened her eyes in a
fishy, reverential stare. Then the grimace in which my Uncle Spencer
was supposed to see his adoration truly mirrored, disintegrated in
laughter; the eyes screwed themselves up, a little horizontal wrinkle
appeared near the tip of the snub nose, the mouth opened, waves of
mirth seemed to ripple out from it across the face, and a shrill peal
of laughter mocked him into an attempted smile.
“Do I really look like that?” he asked.
“You really do,” Emmy nodded. “Not a very cheerful thing to have
staring at one day and night, is it?”
Sometimes--and this to my Uncle Spencer was inexpressibly painful--she
would even bring in some third person to share the sport at his
expense; she would associate the bank clerk, the opera singer, or the
journalist in her mocking laughter. The teasing which, in the first
days, had been so light and affectionate, became cruel.
Emmy would have been distressed, no doubt, if she had known how much
she hurt him. But he did not complain. All she knew was that my Uncle
Spencer was ridiculous. The temptation to say something smart and
disagreeable about him was irresistible.
To my Uncle Spencer’s company she now preferred that of the journalist,
the bank clerk, and the opera singer. With the bank clerk she talked
about West End actors and actresses, music-hall artists, and cinema
stars. True, he was not much of a gentleman; but on this absorbing
subject he was extremely knowledgeable. The singer revealed to her the
gorgeous and almost unknown universe of the operatic stage--a world
of art so awe-inspiringly high that it was above even the West End.
The journalist told her spicy stories of the Brussels stage. My Uncle
Spencer would sit at the fringes of the group, listening in silence and
across a gulf of separation, while Emmy and the bank clerk agreed that
Clarice Mayne was sweet, George Robey a scream, and Florence Smithson a
really high-class artist. When asked for his opinion, my Uncle Spencer
always had to admit that he had never seen the artist in question.
Emmy and the bank clerk would set up a howl of derision; and the opera
singer, with biting sarcasm, would ask my Uncle Spencer how a man who
professed to be fond of music could have gone through life without
even making an attempt to hear Caruso. My Uncle Spencer was too sadly
depressed to try to explain.
The days passed. Sometimes a prisoner would be sent for and examined
by the German authorities. The little old nobleman like a teapot was
released a week after my Uncle Spencer’s arrival; and a few days later
the haughty and monocled one disappeared. Most of the peasants next
vanished. Then the Russian anarchist was sent for, lengthily examined
and sent back again, to find that his arm-chair was being occupied by
the journalist.
In the fourth week of my Uncle Spencer’s imprisonment Alphonse
fell ill. The poor man had never recovered from the effects of the
practical joke that had been played upon him on the day of his arrival.
Melancholy, oppressed by fears, the more awful for being vague and
without a definite object (for he could never grasp why and by whom he
had been imprisoned; and as to his ultimate fate--no one could persuade
him that it was to be anything but the most frightful and lingering
of deaths), he sat brooding by himself in a corner. His free pardon,
signed Von der Golz and sealed with the image of the Sacred Cow, he
still preserved; for though he was now intellectually certain that the
paper was valueless, he still hoped faintly in the depths of his being
that it might turn out, one day, to be a talisman; and, in any case,
the image of the Cow was very comforting. Every now and then he would
take the paper out of his pocket, tenderly unfold it and gaze with
large sad eyes at the sacred effigy: _Pour l’amélioration de la race
bovine_--and tears would well up from under his eyelids, would hang
suspended among the lashes and roll at last down his brown cheeks.
They were not so round now, those cheeks, as they had been. The skin
sagged, the bright convex high-lights had lost their brilliance.
Miserably he pined. My Uncle Spencer did his best to cheer him.
Alphonse was grateful, but would take no comfort. He had lost all
interest even in women; and when, learning from my Uncle Spencer that
the Indian was something of a prophet, Emmy asked him to read her hand,
he looked at her listlessly as though she had been a mere male and not
a male impersonator, and shook his head.
One morning he complained that he was feeling too ill to get up. His
head was hot, he coughed, breathed shortly and with difficulty, felt a
pain in his right lung. My Uncle Spencer tried to think what Hahnemann
would have prescribed in the circumstances, and came to the conclusion
that the thousandth of a grain of aconite was the appropriate remedy.
Unhappily, there was not so much as a millionth of a grain of aconite
to be found in all the prison. Inquiry produced only a bottle of
aspirin tablets and, from the Russian countess, a packet of cocaine
snuff. It was thought best to give the Dravidian a dose of each and
wait for the doctor.
At his midday visit the inspecting officer was informed of Alphonse’s
state, and promised to have the doctor sent at once. But it was not,
in point of fact, till the next morning that the doctor came. My Uncle
Spencer, meanwhile, constituted himself the Dravidian’s nurse. The
fact that Alphonse was the widower of his housekeeper’s sister, and
had lived in his city of adoption, made my Uncle Spencer feel somehow
responsible for the poor Indian. Moreover, he was glad to have some
definite occupation which would allow him to forget, if only partially
and for an occasional moment, his unhappy passion.
From the first, Alphonse was certain that he was going to die. To my
Uncle Spencer he foretold his impending extinction, not merely with
equanimity, but almost with satisfaction. For by dying, he felt, he
would be spiting and cheating his enemies, who desired so fiendishly to
put an end to him at their own time and in their own horrible fashion.
It was in vain that my Uncle Spencer assured him that he would not die,
that there was nothing serious the matter with him. Alphonse stuck to
his assertion.
“In eight days,” he said, “I shall be dead.”
And shutting his eyes, he was silent.
The doctor, when he came next day, diagnosed acute lobar pneumonia.
Through the oppression of his fever, Alphonse smiled at my Uncle
Spencer with a look almost of triumph. That night he was delirious and
began to rave in a language my Uncle Spencer could not understand.
My Uncle Spencer listened in the darkness to the Dravidian’s
incomprehensible chattering; and all at once, with a shudder, with
a sense of terror he felt--in the presence of this man of another
race, speaking in an unknown tongue words uttered out of obscure
depths for no man’s hearing and which even his own soul did not
hear or understand--he felt unutterably alone. He was imprisoned
within himself. He was an island surrounded on every side by wide
and bottomless solitudes. And while the Indian chattered away, now
softly, persuasively, cajolingly, now with bursts of anger, now loudly
laughing, he thought of all the millions and millions of men and women
in the world--all alone, all solitary and confined. He thought of
friends, incomprehensible to one another and opaque after a lifetime
of companionship; he thought of lovers remote in one another’s arms.
And the hopelessness of his passion revealed itself to him--the
hopelessness of every passion, since every passion aims at attaining
to what, in the nature of things, is unattainable: the fusion and
interpenetration of two lives, two separate histories, two solitary and
for ever sundered individualities.
The Indian roared with laughter.
But the unattainableness of a thing was never a reason for ceasing to
desire it. On the contrary, it tends to increase and even to create
desire. Thus our love for those we know, and our longing to be with
them, are often increased by their death. And the impossibility of ever
communicating with him again will actually create out of indifference
an affection, a respect and esteem for some one whose company in
life seemed rather tedious than desirable. So, for the lover, the
realisation that what he desires is unattainable, and that every
possession will reveal yet vaster tracts of what is unpossessed and
unpossessable, is not a deterrent, is not an antidote to his passion;
but serves rather to exacerbate his desire, sharpening it to a kind of
desperation, and at the same time making the object of his desire seem
more than ever precious.
The Indian chattered on, a ghost among the ghosts of his imagination,
remote as though he were speaking from another world. And Emmy--was
she not as far away, as unattainable? And being remote, she was the
more desirable; being mysterious, she was the more lovely. A more
brutal and experienced man than my Uncle Spencer would have devoted
all his energies to seducing the young woman, knowing that after a
time the satisfaction of his physical desire would probably make him
cease to take any interest in her soul or her history. But physical
possession was the last thing my Uncle Spencer thought of, and his love
had taken the form of an immense desire for the impossible union, not
of bodies, but of minds and lives. True, what he had so far learned
about her mind and history was not particularly encouraging. But for
my Uncle Spencer her silliness, love of pleasure, and frivolity were
strange and mysterious qualities--for he had known few women in his
life and none, before, like Emmy Wendle--rather lovely still in their
unfamiliarity, and if recognised as at all bad, excused as being the
symptoms of a charming childishness and an unfortunate upbringing. Her
solicitude, that first day, about poor Alphonse convinced him that she
was fundamentally good-hearted; and if she had proved herself cruel
since then towards himself, that was more by mistake and because of
surrounding bad influences than from natural malignity. And, then,
there was the way in which she sang the “Brabançonne.” It was noble,
it was moving. To be able to sing like that one must have a fine and
beautiful character. In thinking like this, my Uncle Spencer was
forgetting that no characteristic is incompatible with any other, that
any deadly sin may be found in company with any cardinal virtue, even
the apparently contradictory virtue. But unfortunately that is the
kind of wisdom which one invariably forgets precisely at the moment
when it might be of use to one. One learns it almost in the cradle; at
any rate, I remember at my preparatory school reading, in Professor
Oman’s _Shorter History of England_, of “the heroic though profligate
Duke of Ormond,” and of a great English king who was none the less, “a
stuttering, lolling pedant with a tongue too big for his mouth.” But
though one knows well enough in theory that a duke can be licentious
as well as brave, that majestic wisdom may be combined with pedantry
and defective speech, yet in practice one continues to believe that
an attractive woman is kind because she is charming, and virtuous
because she rejects your first advances; without reflecting that the
grace of her manner may thinly conceal an unyielding ruthlessness and
selfishness, while the coyness in face of insistence may be a mere
device for still more completely ensnaring the victim. It is only in
the presence of unsympathetic persons that we remember that the most
odious actions are compatible with the most genuinely noble sentiments,
and that a man or woman who does one thing, while professing another,
is not necessarily a conscious liar or hypocrite. If only we could
steadfastly bear this knowledge in mind when we are with persons whom
we find sympathetic!
Desiring Emmy as passionately as he did, my Uncle Spencer would not
have had much difficulty in persuading himself--even in spite of her
recent cruelty towards him--that the spirit with which he longed to
unite his own was on the whole a beautiful and interesting spirit;
would indeed have had no difficulty at all, had it not been for that
unfortunate confession of hers. This, though it flattered him as
a token of her confidence in his discretion and wisdom, had sadly
disturbed him and was continuing to disturb him more and more. For out
of all her history--the history in which it was his longing to make
himself entirely at home as though he had actually lived through it
with her--this episode was almost the only chapter he knew. Like a
thin ray of light her confession had picked it out for him, from the
surrounding obscurity. And what an episode! The more my Uncle Spencer
reflected on it, the more he found it distressing.
The brutal practical man my Uncle Spencer was not would have taken
this incident from the past as being of good augury for his own future
prospects. But since he did not desire, consciously at any rate, the
sort of success it augured, the knowledge of this incident brought him
an unadulterated distress. For however much my Uncle Spencer might
insist in his own mind on the guiltiness of external circumstance and
of the other party, he could not entirely exonerate Emmy. Nor could
he pretend that she had not in some sort, if only physically, taken
part in her own lapse. And perhaps she had participated willingly. And
even if she had not, the thought that she had been defiled, however
reluctantly, by the obscene contact was unspeakably painful to him.
And while the Indian raved, and through the long, dark silences
during which there was no sound but the unnaturally quick and shallow
breathing, and sometimes a moan, and sometimes a dry cough, my Uncle
Spencer painfully thought and thought; and his mind oscillated between
a conviction of her purity and the fear that perhaps she was utterly
corrupt. He saw in his imagination, now her childish face and the rapt
expression upon it while she sang the “Brabançonne,” now the sweet,
solicitous look while she commiserated on poor Alphonse’s unhappiness,
and then, a moment later, endless embracements, kisses brutal and
innumerable. And always he loved her.
Next day the Dravidian’s fever was still high. The doctor, when he
came, announced that red hepatisation of both lungs was already setting
in. It was a grave case which ought to be at the hospital; but he had
no authority to have the man sent there. He ordered tepid spongings to
reduce the fever.
In the face of the very defective sanitary arrangements of the prison,
my Uncle Spencer did his best. He had a crowd of willing assistants;
everybody was anxious to do something helpful. Nobody was more anxious
than Emmy Wendle. The forced inaction of prison life, even when it was
relieved by the jokes of the cheerful ones, by theatrical discussions
and the facetious gallantry of the bank clerk and the journalist, was
disagreeable to her. And the prospect of being able to do something,
and particularly (since it was war-time, after all) of doing something
useful and charitable, was welcomed by her with a real satisfaction.
She sat by the Dravidian’s mattress, talked to him, gave him what
he asked for, did the disagreeable jobs that have to be done in the
sick-room, ordered my Uncle Spencer and the others about, and seemed
completely happy.
For his part, my Uncle Spencer was delighted by what he regarded as a
reversion to her true self. There could be no doubt about it now: Emmy
was good, was kind, a ministering angel, and therefore (in spite of the
professor’s heroic though profligate duke), therefore pure, therefore
interesting, therefore worthy of all the love he could give her. He
forgot the confession, or at least he ceased to attach importance to
it; he was no longer haunted by the odious images which too much
brooding over it evoked in his mind. What convinced him, perhaps,
better than everything of her essential goodness, was the fact that
she was once more kind to him. Her young energy, fully occupied in
practical work (which was not, however, sufficiently trying to overtax
the strength or set the nerves on edge), did not have to vent itself
in laughter and mockery, as it had done when she recovered from the
mood of melancholy which had depressed it during the first days of her
imprisonment. They were fellow-workers now.
The Dravidian, meanwhile, grew worse and worse, weaker and weaker every
day. The doctor was positively irritated.
“The man has no business to be so ill as he is,” he grumbled. “He’s not
old, he isn’t an alcoholic or a syphilitic, his constitution is sound
enough. He’s just letting himself die. At this rate he’ll never get
past the crisis.”
At this piece of news Emmy became grave. She had never seen death at
close quarters--a defect in her education which my Uncle Spencer, if
he had had the bringing up of her, would have remedied. For death was
one of those Realities of Life with which, he thought, every one ought
to make the earliest possible acquaintance. Love, on the other hand,
was not one of the desirable Realities. It never occurred to him to ask
himself the reason for this invidious distinction. Indeed, there was no
reason; it just was so.
“Tell me, Uncle Spenny,” she whispered, when the doctor had gone, “what
_does_ really happen to people when they die?”
Charmed by this sign of Emmy’s renewed interest in serious themes, my
Uncle Spencer explained to her what Alphonse at any rate thought would
happen to him.
At midday, over the repeated cabbage soup and the horrible boiled meat,
the bank clerk, with characteristically tasteless facetiousness, asked,
“How’s our one little nigger boy?”
Emmy looked at him with disgust and anger. “I think you’re perfectly
horrible,” she said. And, lowering her voice reverently, she went on,
“The doctor says he’s going to die.”
The bank clerk was unabashed. “Oh, he’s going to kick the bucket, is
he? Poor old blacky!”
Emmy made no answer; there was a general silence. It was as though
somebody had started to make an unseemly noise in a church.
Afterwards, in the privacy of the little room, where, among the filing
cabinets and the dusty papers, the Dravidian lay contentedly dying,
Emmy turned to my Uncle Spencer and said, “You know, Uncle Spenny, I
think you’re a wonderfully decent sort. I do, really.”
My Uncle Spencer was too much overcome to say anything but “Emmy,
Emmy,” two or three times. He took her hand and, very gently, kissed it.
That afternoon they went on talking about all the things that might
conceivably happen after one were dead. Emmy told my Uncle Spencer all
that she had thought when she got the telegram--two years ago it was,
and she was working in a hall at Glasgow, one of her first engagements,
too--saying that her father had suddenly died. He drank too much, her
father did; and he wasn’t kind to mother when he wasn’t himself. But
she had been very fond of him, all the same; and when that telegram
came she wondered and wondered....
My Uncle Spencer listened attentively, happy in having this new glimpse
of her past; he forgot the other incident, which the beam of her
confession had illumined for him.
Late that evening, after having lain for a long time quite still, as
though he were asleep, Alphonse suddenly stirred, opened his large
black eyes, and began to talk, at first in the incomprehensible
language which came from him in delirium, then, when he realised that
his listeners did not understand him, more slowly and in his strange
pidgin-French.
“I have seen everything just now,” he said--“everything.”
“But what?” they asked.
“All that is going to happen. I have seen that this war will last a
long time--a long time. More than fifty months.” And he prophesied
enormous calamities.
My Uncle Spencer, who knew for certain that the war couldn’t possibly
last more than three months, was incredulous. But Emmy, who had no
preconceived ideas on war and a strong faith in oracles, stopped him
impatiently when he wanted to bring the Dravidian to silence.
“Tell me,” she said, “what’s going to happen to us.” She had very
little interest in the fate of civilisation.
“I am going to die,” Alphonse began.
My Uncle Spencer made certain deprecating little noises. “No, no,” he
protested.
The Indian paid no attention to him. “I am going to die,” he repeated.
“And you,” he said to my Uncle Spencer, “you will be let go and then
again be put into prison. But not here. Somewhere else. A long way
off. For a long time--a very long time. You will be very unhappy.” He
shook his head. “I cannot help it; even though you have been so good
to me. That is what I see. But the man who deceived me”--he meant the
journalist--“he will very soon be set free and he will live in freedom,
all the time. In such freedom as there will be here. And he who sits
in the chair will at last go back to his own country. And he who sings
will go free like the man who deceived me. And the small grey man will
be sent to another prison in another country. And the fat woman with
a red mouth will be sent to another country; but she will not be in
prison. I think she will be married there--again.” The portraits were
recognisably those of the Russian countess and the professor of Latin.
“And the man with carbuncles on his face” (this was the bank clerk, no
doubt) “will be sent to another prison in another country; and there he
will die. And the woman in black who is so sad....”
But Emmy could bear to wait no longer. “What about me?” she asked.
“Tell me what you see about me.”
The Dravidian closed his eyes and was silent for a moment. “You will be
set free,” he said. “Soon. And some day,” he went on, “you will be the
wife of this good man.” He indicated my Uncle Spencer. “But not yet;
not for a long time; till all this strife is at an end. You will have
children ... good fortune....” His words grew fainter; once more he
closed his eyes. He sighed as though utterly exhausted. “Beware of fair
strangers,” he murmured, reverting to the old familiar formula. He said
no more.
Emmy and my Uncle Spencer were left looking at one another in silence.
“What do you think, Uncle Spenny?” she whispered at last. “Is it true?”
Two hours later the Indian was dead.
My Uncle Spencer slept that night, or rather did not sleep, in the
living-room. The corpse lay alone among the archives. The words of the
Indian continued to echo and re-echo in his mind: “Some day you will
be the wife of this kind man.” Perhaps, he thought, on the verge of
death, the spirit already begins to try its wings in the new world.
Perhaps already it has begun to know the fringes, as it were, of
secrets that are to be revealed to it. To my Uncle Spencer there was
nothing repugnant in the idea. There was room in his universe for what
are commonly and perhaps wrongly known as miracles. Perhaps the words
were a promise, a statement of future fact. Lying on his back, his eyes
fixed on the dark blue starry sky beyond the open window, he meditated
on that problem of fixed fate and free will, with which the devils in
Milton’s hell wasted their infernal leisure. And like a refrain the
words repeated themselves: “Some day you will be the wife of this good
man.” The stars moved slowly across the opening of the window. He did
not sleep.
In the morning an order came for the release of the journalist and the
opera singer. Joyfully they said good-bye to their fellow-prisoners;
the door closed behind them. Emmy turned to my Uncle Spencer with a
look almost of terror in her eyes; the Indian’s prophesies were already
beginning to come true. But they said nothing to one another. Two days
later the bank clerk left for an internment camp in Germany.
And then, one morning, my Uncle Spencer himself was sent for. The
order came quite suddenly; they left him no time to take leave. He was
examined by the competent authority, found harmless, and permitted to
return to Longres, where, however, he was to live under supervision.
They did not even allow him to go back to the prison and say good-bye;
a soldier brought his effects from the Ministry; he was put on to the
train, with orders to report to the commandant at Longres as soon as he
arrived.
Antonieke received her master with tears of joy. But my Uncle Spencer
took no pleasure in his recovered freedom. Emmy Wendle was still a
prisoner. True, she would soon be set free; but then, he now realised
to his horror, she did not know his address. He had been released at
such startlingly short notice that he had had no time to arrange with
her about the possibilities of future meetings; he had not even seen
her on the morning of his liberation.
Two days after his return to Longres, he asked permission from the
commandant, to whom he had to report himself every day, whether he
might go to Brussels. He was asked why; my Uncle Spencer answered
truthfully that it was to visit a friend in the prison from which he
himself had just been released. Permission was at once refused.
My Uncle Spencer went to Brussels all the same. The sentry at the door
of the prison arrested him as a suspicious person. He was sent back
to Longres; the commandant talked to him menacingly. The next week,
my Uncle Spencer tried again. It was sheer insanity, he knew; but
doing something idiotic was preferable to doing nothing. He was again
arrested.
This time they condemned him to internment in a camp in Germany. The
Indian’s prophecies were being fulfilled with a remarkable accuracy.
And the war did last for more than fifty months. And the carbuncular
bank clerk, whom he found again in the internment camp, did, in fact,
die....
What made him confide in me--me, whom he had known as a child and
almost fathered--I do not know. Or perhaps I do know. Perhaps it was
because he felt that I should be more competent to advise him on this
sort of subject than his brother--my father--or old Mr. Bullinger, the
Dante scholar, or any other of his friends. He would have felt ashamed,
perhaps, to talk to them about this sort of thing. And he would have
felt, too, that perhaps it wouldn’t be much good talking to them, and
that I, in spite of my youth, or even because of it, might actually be
more experienced in these matters than they. Neither my father nor Mr.
Bullinger, I imagine, knew very much about male impersonators.
At any rate, whatever the cause, it was to me that he talked about
the whole affair, that spring of 1919, when he was staying with us in
Sussex, recuperating after those dreary months of confinement. We used
to go for long walks together, across the open downs, or between the
grey pillars of the beechwoods; and painfully overcoming reluctance
after reluctance, proceeding from confidence to more intimate
confidence, my Uncle Spencer told me the whole story.
The story involved interminable discussions by the way. For we had
to decide, first of all, whether there was any possible scientific
explanation of prophecy; whether there was such a thing as an absolute
future waiting to be lived through. And at much greater length, even,
we had to argue about women--whether they were really “like that”
(and into what depths of cynicism my poor Uncle Spencer had learned,
during the long, embittered meditations of his prison days and nights,
to plunge and wallow!), or whether they were like the angels he had
desired them to be.
But more important than to speculate on Emmy’s possible character
was to discover where she now was. More urgent than to wonder if
prophecy could conceivably be reliable, was to take steps to fulfil
this particular prophecy. For weeks my Uncle Spencer and I played at
detectives.
I have often fancied that we must have looked, when we made our
inquiries together, uncommonly like the traditional pair in the
stories--my Uncle Spencer, the bright-eyed, cadaverous, sharp-featured
genius, the Holmes of the combination; and I, moon-faced and chubby,
a very youthful Watson. But, as a matter of fact, it was I, if I may
say so without fatuity, who was the real Holmes of the two. My Uncle
Spencer was too innocent of the world to know how to set about looking
for a vanished mistress; just as he was too innocent of science to
know how or where to find out what there was to be discovered on any
abstracter subject.
It was I who took him to the British Museum and made him look up all
the back numbers of the theatrical papers to see when Emmy had last
advertised her desire to be engaged. It was I, the apparent Watson,
who thought of the theatrical agencies and the stage doors of all the
suburban music-halls. Sleuth-like in aspect, innocent at heart, my
Uncle Spencer followed, marvelling at my familiarity with the ways of
the strange world.
But I must temper my boasting by the confession that we were always
entirely unsuccessful. No agency had heard of Emmy Wendle since
1914. Her card had appeared in no paper. The porters of music-halls
remembered her, but only as something antediluvian. “Emmy Wendle?
Oh yes, Emmy Wendle....” And scratching their heads, they strove
by a mental effort to pass from the mere name to the person, like
palæontologists reconstructing the whole diplodocus from the single
fossil bone.
Two or three times we were even given addresses. But the landladies of
the lodging-houses where she had stayed did not even remember her; and
the old aunt at Ealing, from whom we joyfully hoped so much, had washed
her hands of Emmy two or three months before the war began. And the
conviction she then had that Emmy was a bad girl was only intensified
and confirmed by our impertinent inquiries. No, she knew nothing
about Emmy Wendle, now, and didn’t want to know. And she’d trouble us
to leave respectable people like herself in peace. And, defeated, we
climbed back into our taxi, while the inhabitants of the squalid little
street peered out at us and our vehicle, as though we had been visitors
from another planet, and the metropolitan hackney carriage a fairy
chariot.
“Perhaps she’s dead,” said my Uncle Spencer softly, after a long
silence.
“Perhaps,” I said brutally, “she’s found a husband and retired into
private life.”
My Uncle Spencer shut his eyes, sighed, and drew his hand across his
forehead. What dreadful images filled his mind? He would almost have
preferred that she should be dead.
“And yet the Indian,” he murmured, “he was always right....”
And perhaps he may still be right in this. Who knows?