I
I continued to feel, as I have said, that there was much in Malory’s
story which remained to be satisfactorily explained, for I was convinced
in my own mind that his interpretation of Ruth Pennistan’s flight,
plausible as it was, was totally misleading, with the dangerous
verisimilitude of a theory which will fit all, or nearly all, the facts,
and yet more entirely miss the truth, by a mere accident, than would a
frank perplexity. I think that he himself secretly agreed with me, a
conviction I arrived at less by his own doubting words after the reading
of the letter, than by his manner towards me when he had finished the
story, and his mute, but none the less absolute, refusal to discuss, as
I in my interest would willingly have discussed, certain points in his
narration. I received the impression that he had chosen me as his
audience merely because we knew nothing of one another beyond our names,
from a craving to pour out that long dammed-up flood of emotion and
meditation. I had—a somewhat galling reflection—played the part of the
ground to Malory’s King Midas. I think that his indifference towards me
turned to positive dislike after our week of intimacy, and this belief
was strengthened when, with scarcely a farewell, he took an abrupt
departure.
I will confess that I was hurt at the time, but an unaccountable
instinct buoyed me up that some day, it might be after the passage of
years, I should again be thrown in contact either with him or with his
_dramatis personæ_. How this came about I will now tell, though I do not
pretend that any more mysterious purpose than my own desire intervened
in the accomplishment of my hopes. Perhaps Malory would say that War was
my fate, my god in the machine; perhaps it was; I do not know. The
definition of fate is a vicious circle; like a little animal, say a
mouse, turning after its tail.
I left Sampiero in 1914, a year after I had parted there from Malory,
and my earlier prophecy justified itself, that our acquaintance would
not be continued in our own country. In fact, amid the excitement of the
war, I had almost forgotten the man, his habitual reticence, his sudden
outburst into narrative, and the unknown, unseen people with whom that
narrative had been concerned. But now as I idled disconsolately in
London, discharged from hospital but indefinitely unfit for service,
there stirred in my memory a recollection of the Pennistans, who were to
me so strangely familiar, and I resolved that I would go for myself to
pick up the thread where Malory had dropped it, to work on the fields
where he had worked, and to probe into the lives he had tried to probe.
Hearing that the small help I could give would be welcome, I started
out, much, I suppose, as Malory had started, with my bag in my hand, and
reached the tiny station one evening in early April. The stationmaster
directed me across the fields, by a way which I felt I already knew, and
as I walked I wondered what had become of Malory; presumably he had
turned his hand to a fighting trade, or had he sought some bizarre
occupation congenial to him, in the bazaars of Bagdad, or in a North Sea
drifter, or had the air called to him? I could not decide; perhaps the
Pennistans would have news of his whereabouts.
But they had none. He had sent them a field post card from Gallipoli,
and since then he had again disappeared; they did not seem very much
surprised, and I guessed that in their slow instinctive way they had
felt him to be a transitory, elusive man, who might be expected to turn
up in his own time from some unanticipated corner. They suggested,
however, that I should walk over to Westmacotts’ on a Sunday, and
inquire from their daughter Ruth about Mr. Malory.
I cannot say that I was unhappy at the Pennistans’, for, though I
fretted a good deal at my comparative inactivity, the peace and
stability of the place, of which Malory had so often spoken, stole over
me with gradual enchantment of my spirit, like the incoming tide steals
gradually over the sands. During the first days I took a curious delight
in discovering the spots that had figured in his story, the fields, the
dairy, and the cowshed, in recognising the pungent farm smells which had
pleased his alert senses. These things were the same, but in other
respects much was changed. The three bullock-like sons were gone, and
few men remained to work the land. Rawdon Westmacott, they told me, was
at the war, so was Nancy’s husband. And on sunny days I used to watch
the aeroplanes come sailing up out of the blue, the sun catching their
wings, and tumble, for sheer joy it seemed, in the air, while the hum of
their engines filled the whole sky as with a gigantic beehive.
One detail I noticed after several days. The cage of mice which Malory
had given to Ruth was no longer in the place I expected to see it, on
the kitchen window-sill.
The unexpected had favoured me in one particular. Malory had mentioned
that the old woman was ninety-six in the year he had gone to
Pennistans’, and although he had never, so far as I remembered, given a
date to that year, I reckoned that she must, if alive now, have passed
her century. I was certain I should find her gone. Yet the first thing I
saw as I entered the house was that little old huddled figure by the
fire, head nodding, hands trembling, alive enough to feed and breathe,
but not alive enough for anything else; she spent all her days in a
wheeled chair, sometimes in the kitchen, sometimes in her own room, the
quondam parlour, on the ground-floor across the passage; sometimes, when
it was very warm, beside the garden-door out in the sun. She must always
have been tiny, but now the frailty of her shrunken form was pitiable.
Her wrists were like the legs of a chicken. Her jaws were fallen in,
thin and flabby; her eyes never seemed to blink, but stared straight in
front of her, at nothing, through everything....
I had Malory’s bedroom. It was bare, whitewashed, monastic, and appeared
to me peculiarly suitable as a shrine to his personality. I wondered
whether he had spent any part of his wandering life in the seclusion of
a cloister, and as I wondered the realisation came over me that Malory
was in spirit nearly allied to those mediæval scholars, so unassuming,
so far removed from the desire of fame, as to dedicate their anonymous
lives to a single script, finding in their own inward satisfaction the
fulfilment of personal ambition. And as I thought on Malory, in that
clean, bare room, I came to a closer understanding of his kinship with
many conditions of men, of his sympathy with life, nature, and
craft—Malory, the man who had not been my friend.
As the week passed, I found myself greatly moved by the prospect of
seeing, of speaking with Ruth. As I drew near to Westmacotts’, I felt
the physical tingling of intense excitement run over me. I was about to
meet a dear companion, to hear the sound of her voice, and to look into
the familiarity of her eyes. Another picture swam up out of the mist to
dim my vision, a babbling music filled my ears like the sound of waves
in a shell, and the faintest scent quivered under my nostrils; gradually
as these ghosts emerged from the confusion I defined the Italian
hill-side, the rushing stream, and the dry, aromatic scent of the
ground. Was this, then, the setting in which Ruth walked and spoke for
me? I was startled at the vividness of the impression, and at the
incredibly subtle complexity of the ordinary brain.
Although Malory had never, so far as I could remember, given me any
description of Westmacott’s farm, whether of impression or detail, I
recognised the place as soon as I had emerged from a little wood and had
seen it lying in a hollow across the ploughed field, a connecting road
which was little more than a cart-track running from it at right angles
into the neat lane beyond. I recognised the farm-house, of creamy
plaster heavily striped by gray oak beams, its upper story slightly
overhanging, and supported on rounded corbels of the same bleached oak,
rough-hewn. I was prepared to see, as I actually saw, the large barn of
black, tarred weather-boarding, terminated by the two rounded
oast-houses, and should have missed it had I not found it there.
And I knocked, and the sense of reality still failed to return to me.
Some one opened the door. I saw a young woman in a blue linen dress,
with a child in her arms, and other children clinging about her skirts.
My first impression was of astonishment at her beauty; Malory had led me
to expect a subtle and languorous seduction, but I was not prepared for
such actual beauty as I now found in her face.
“Are you Mrs. Westmacott?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” she said, “are you the gentleman that’s stopping with
father?”
“I see you know about me.”
“Yes, sir; mother was over yesterday, and said you’d likely be coming.
Won’t you come in, sir? if you’ll excuse the children. There’s only me
to look after them to-day.”
I went into a clean and commonplace kitchen, and Ruth wiped a chair for
me with her skirt, and put the baby into its cradle. She then sat down
beside it, and with her foot kept the cradle moving on its rockers. I
glanced round, and on the window-sill, among the pots of red geranium, I
espied a wire cage with some little mice huddled in a corner.
“Mrs. Westmacott,” I said, feeling that the beginning of the
conversation rested with me, “you and I are quite old friends though you
may not know it.” I hated myself for my jocularity. “You remember Mr.
Malory? He has spoken to me about his life here, and about you.”
I was looking at her; I saw that marvellous, that red rose blush of
which Malory had spoken, come up under her skin till her cheek was like
the rounded beauty of a nectarine. And I wondered, as I had wondered
before; I wondered....
“And what news have you of Mr. Malory?” she asked.
“None,” I said. “I thought perhaps you might have heard.”
“I? If Mr. Malory was to write at all, would he not have written to you?
Why should he write to me?”
“I hope,” I said, “that nothing has happened to him.”
She had answered me before I had finished speaking.
“Nothing has happened to him.”
“Why,” I said surprised, “how are you so certain?”
She looked suddenly trapped and angry.
“It’s an odd name,” she said at last, “one would notice it in a casualty
list.” She rushed on. “We poor women, you know, have to keep our eye on
the lists; there’s few officers, but many men, a mistake’s soon made,
and my husband is there in France. This is my husband.” She lifted a
photograph and showed me the keen, Arab face I had expected.
“Mr. Malory always told me your husband was a very handsome man. Are any
of your children like him?”
I wished that Malory could have seen the softening of her face when I
spoke of her children.
“No, sir,” she said, and I could have sworn I heard an exultant note in
her voice. “They mostly take after their grandmother, I think,” and
indeed I could see in the sleeping baby an absurd resemblance to Mrs.
Pennistan. “Now my sister’s children, she has two, and one is fair like
her, and one is as dark as my husband.”
I do not know what impulse moved me to rise and go over to the cage of
mice.
“I have heard of these, too, from Mr. Malory,” I said. “You have had
them six, seven, eight years now?”
“Oh, sir,” she cried amused, “those are not the pair Mr. Malory gave me.
Those are their great-great-great-great, I don’t know how many greats,
grandchildren. I’ve bred from them and bred from them; they’re friendly
little things, and the children like them.”
“How do they breed now?” I asked.
“Well,” she replied, “they mostly come brown, I notice; I fancy the
strain’s wearing out. From time to time I’ll get a black and white that
doesn’t waltz—waltzing mice Mr. Malory used to call them—and from time
to time I’ll get a waltzer; there was a lot of them at first, one or two
in a litter, but they’re getting rare. That little fellow,” she said,
pointing—and as she stood beside me I was conscious of her softness and
warmth, and felt myself faintly troubled—“I’ve known him waltz once only
since I’ve had him, which is since he was born. I look at them,” she
added unexpectedly, “when they’re blind and pink in the nest, and wonder
which’ll grow up brown and which’ll waltz and which be just piebald.”
“You speak like Mr. Malory,” I said.
She laughed as she turned away.
“Is that so, sir? Well, Mr. Malory always liked the mice, I don’t know
why. He lived with us over a year, and maybe one takes on a manner of
thinking in a year, I don’t know.”
Somehow I felt that the section of our conversation dealing with Malory
was closed by that remark. We hung fire for a little. Then I asked her
to show me over the place, which she did, and after that we had tea in
the kitchen, brown bread cut from the big loaf, honey from her own
hives, and jam of her own making. I watched her as she laid the cloth,
noted her quick efficiency, was conscious of her quiet reserve and her
strength, saw her beauty foiled and trebled by the presence of her
children. After tea she made me smoke a pipe, sent the children out to
play, and sat opposite me in a rocking chair with sewing in her hands
and more sewing heaped near her on the floor. It was very pleasant in
that warm interior, the fire crackled, the big clock ticked. I thought
what a fool Malory had been.
I walked home in the dusk, hearing what he had never heard from those
meadows: the thudding and bruising of the distant guns.
II
Little by little I learnt the details which linked the end of Malory’s
story to the point where I was to take it up. Rawdon Westmacott, in
spite of his wife’s entreaties to settle in another part of the country,
had insisted on returning almost directly after their marriage to his
farm, and there, ignored by her own family and by the whole horrified,
scandalised countryside, Ruth had dwelt in a companionship more terrible
than solitude. For Westmacott had followed unbridled his habitual paths
of drunkenness and violence. How grim and disquieting must have been
that situation: not two miles separated Pennistans’ from Westmacotts’,
not two miles lay between the parents and the daughter, yet they were
divided by league upon league of pride, across which their mutual
longing quivered as heat-waves upon the surface of the desert. The
mother, I think, would have gone, but Amos, with that Biblical austerity
which Malory had noted in him, forbade any advance towards, any mention
of, the prodigal. The ideal of decency, which is the main ideal of the
country people, had been outraged, and this Amos, the heir of tradition,
could not forgive. During the greater part of the first year, neither
Ruth nor her mother can willingly have stirred far from their own garden
door. The torment, the gnawing of that self-consciousness! The
apprehension of that first Sunday, when Amos with set jaw forced his
wife to church! with what tremulousness she must have entered the little
nave, casting round her eyes in secret, dreading yet hoping, relieved
yet disappointed. She bore traces of the strain, the buxom woman, in the
covert glance of her eyes and the listening, searching expression of her
face. I have seen her start at the sound of the door-latch, and look up
expectantly as she must have looked in those days, afraid and longing to
see the beloved figure in the door.
The tension came to an end at last, for Nancy, whose will might not be
crossed, burst out with indignation at the treatment of her sister and
set off angrily for Westmacotts’. She returned within an hour with the
information that Rawdon was dead drunk in the kitchen and that Ruth’s
child would surely be born before morning. Mrs. Pennistan had not known
of the child; she leapt to her feet saying that she must go at once, and
upbraided Amos for having withheld her so long from her own flesh and
blood. Amos rose, and saying gloomily, “Do what you will, but don’t let
me know of it,” he left the room.
I know nothing of the meeting between mother and daughter, but I imagine
that the sheer urgency of the situation mercifully did much to smooth
the difficulty of the moment. The crisis over, a new order of things
replaced the old: relations were re-established, and Ruth henceforward
came and went between her present and her former home. Only, the
Pennistans’ door was barred to the son-in-law, as their lips were barred
to his name. At the most, his phantasm hovered between them.
Now I have told all that I could reconstruct, and most of this I heard
from Nancy, who was a frank, outspoken girl; common, I thought her, and
ordinary, but good-hearted underneath her exuberance. She had lived at
home since her husband had gone to fight. She was very different from
her quiet sister, as different as a babbling brook from a wide, calm
pool of water. I heard a great deal of abuse of Westmacott from her,
even to tales of how he ill-treated his wife; and I also heard of her
own happiness, confidences unrestrainedly poured out, for she was
innocent of reserve. To this I preferred to listen, though, truthfully,
she often bored and sometimes embarrassed me. I soon discovered that for
all her fiery temper she was a woman of no moral stamina, and I didn’t
like to dwell in my own mind upon her utter annihilation under the too
probable blow of war.
The blow fell, and by the curse of Heaven I was there to see it; the
reality of the danger had always seemed remote, even in the midst of its
nearness, for such nightmares crawl closer and closer only to be flung
back repeatedly by the force of human optimism. I had never before
realised the depths of such optimism. Her first cry was “It cannot be
true!” her first instinct the instinct of disbelief. In the same way she
had always clung to an encouraging word, however futile, and had been
cast down to an equal degree by an expression of pessimism. I suppose
that when the strings of the human mind are drawn so taut, the slightest
touch will call forth their pathetic music.... Poor Nancy! I had seen
her husband on leave for ten days during which her eyes were radiant and
her voice busy with song; he went; and was killed the day after his
return to France.
Not very long afterwards I got a letter from Malory, forwarded and
re-forwarded, which, coming out of the, so far as he was concerned,
silence of years, reminded me forcibly of the day he had broken silence
at Sampiero. It gave me a queer turn of the heart to see that the
envelope I held in my hand had gone first of all to Sampiero, to our
little lodging house, had been handled, no doubt, by the hunch-backed
postman I had known so well. I could see him, going down the street,
with his bag over his shoulder, and my letter in his bag. I could see my
old landlady with the letter in her hand, turning it over and over, till
light broke on her, and she remembered the Englishman, and hunted up his
unfamiliar address, and wondered, perhaps, whether he, too, had fallen
in the war.
I give Malory’s letter here.
“... I read his name in the official list, and can only suppose that it
is my Daphnis, as I know he was in a Kentish regiment. Oh, these yeomen
of England, of whom I always thought as indigenous to the soil, born
there, living there, dying there, buried there, with no knowledge beyond
their counted acres, but knowing those so well and thoroughly, tree by
tree, crop by crop, path by path through the woodland! They have been
uprooted and borne to foreign shores, but they are England, and it is
for their own bit of England, weald, marsh, or fell, that they die.
“They have lived all their lives in security, and the security of
centuries lies behind them, as the volume of ocean lies behind each wave
that laps the shore. Now the mammoth of danger and unrest prowls round
their homesteads, and a hand whose presence they did not suspect moves
and removes them, pawns in the game. How can they understand? They do
not. They only cling, for the sake of sanity, to what they know: their
corner of England and their own individuality, rocks which have been
with them since they were born, and which in the thunderstorm about
their ears they can retain unaltered.
“I live amongst them now, and I know.
“I have been once in a great earthquake, and I know that the secret of
its terror is that the earth, the steady immutable earth, betrays the
confident footstep. So in this earthquake men cling to themselves and to
their land, as they know it, as immutable things.
“I am living now in a great peace; I do not hear the din around me; I am
as one in the centre of those tropical winds, where all that is in the
path of the hurricane is destroyed, but in the still and silent centre
birds sing and leaves do not stir. Or I am as a totally deaf man, the
drums of whose ears are burst. I am happy.
“But the others, who are in the path of the wind, they are clouted and
pushed and beaten, blinded and deafened by the cyclone. They are made to
gyrate as the little mice were made to gyrate. What is it, oh God, that
drives us, poor creatures?
“I am not one of those who, at this moment, hold that the war is supreme
and all-eclipsing. The war is not eternal, and its proportions are
relative; only life is eternal, and fate is eternal. Fate! Do you
remember the Pennistans, and how fate, the freaky humorist, played her
tricks upon them? There was no escape for them then, there is no escape
for us now.
“If all mankind were resigned to fate, sorrow would take wing and fly
from the world.
“I think of this present stirring of nations as the stirring of huge
antediluvian beasts, kicked up out of their slumber by a giant’s foot,
and fighting amongst themselves like the soldiers of Jason. No human eye
can follow the drift of war, as no human mind can encircle the entirety
of modern knowledge. We are as men in the valley, with mountains rising
around, and, beyond each ridge that we climb, a farther ridge. It is for
the geographers of the future to come with their maps and measure peak
after peak to their correctness of altitude. And it is for us to
remember that as the highest peak is as nothing upon the perfect
roundness of the globe, so is our present calamity as nothing upon the
perfect roundness of the scheme of destiny.”
Again that strange impulse to confide in me! in me the stranger whom he,
if anything, disliked. I wondered whether our whole lives were to be
punctuated by these spasmodic confidences, and whether the forging of a
number of such links would finally weave together a chain of friendship?
I reflected that he, the analyst, could probably explain the kink in
men’s brains by which confidential expansion is not necessarily based on
sympathy, but I admitted to myself that I was routed by the problem.
I liked his letter; it produced in me a sensation of peace and light,
and of a great broadening. I envied him his balance and his sanity. I
envy him still more now that peace has come, and that the rapid
perspective of history already shows me the precision of his judgment.
I showed part of the letter to Ruth, curious to observe the impression
which Malory’s reflections would produce on a primitive and uncultivated
brain. I knew that that letter was not the outcome of a transitory or
accidental frame of mind, but that, like a rock gathering speed as it
bowls down the side of a hill, the swell and rush of his considered
thought had borne him along until his fingers, galloping to the
dictation of his mind, had covered the sheets I now held in my hand.
Ruth frankly understood no word of his letter. She merely asked me in
her direct way whether I thought Mr. Malory was sorry her brother-in-law
had been killed. Privately I thought that some devilish cynicism in the
man, some revolting sense of artistic fitness, would rejoice in a
detached, inhuman fashion, at the pertinence of the tragedy.
He said in his next letter to me—a reply to a letter of mine:—
“... Destiny and nature are, after all, the only artists of any courage,
of any humour. Do they take Rawdon Westmacott? for whose disappearance
all concerned must pray; no, they take Daphnis, who, of the thirty or
forty million fighting men, is in the minority that should be spared.
“From the beginning they have exercised their wit on these innocent
country people. How can we escape from their humour, when it gambols
around us in the unseen? we cannot escape it, we can only hope to cap it
with the superlative humour of our indifference.
“Around how many homes must it be gambolling now! from the little centre
in the Weald of Kent, which is known to both you and me, to the little
unknown centres of human life in the heart of Asia, where anxiety
dwells, and where no news will ever come, but where hope will flag and
droop day by day, till at last it expires in hopeless certainty.
“If you do not hear of me again, you may conclude that the arch-joker
has taken me also, but remember that I shall have had the laugh on him
after all, for I shall not care. However, I shall probably be spared,
for no man or woman would weep for me.
“One’s chief need, one’s principal craving, I find, is to get Death into
his true proportion. We have always been accustomed to think of Death as
a suitable and even dignified ending to life in old age, but to regard
the overtaking of youth by Death in quite a different light, as an
unspeakable calamity. Here, of course, such an overtaking is of everyday
occurrence. This, you will say, is a truism. I answer, that there is no
such thing as truism in war; there is only Truth.
“If I take all my reflections about Death, slender as is their worth,
and pass them through a sieve of analysis, what do I get? I get, as a
dominant factor, Pity. Pity, yes, pity that these young men should have
missed the good things life would have given them; not horror so much
that they should be in the blackness below the ground, as pity that they
should not be above it in the light....”
An intense anger and irritation rose in me at his passive acceptance of
what he termed fate. If man must struggle against his fellow-men in
order to survive in the life-battle, then why not against fate also? He
who does not resist must inevitably be crushed. It was at this stage
that my great scheme began to formulate in my mind, by which I should
defeat fate for the sake of Malory and Ruth; partly, largely, for the
sake of their happiness, but partly also, I must admit, for the triumph
of taking Malory by the hand and showing him how with the help of a
little energy I had overcome the destiny he had been passively prepared
to accept as inevitable. I would pit my philosophy against his
philosophy, and incidentally bring two muddled lives to a satisfactory
conclusion.
I hugged my scheme to myself in the succeeding months as a lunatic hugs
an obsession.
III
I was a little disturbed by the thought that even I could not make
myself wholly independent of what, for want of a better word, I had to
call fate; independent of a certain Providence whose concurrence I daily
implored, but on whose nature I deliberately tried to set a more
religious complexion than did Malory, who was frankly, in every
instinct, a pagan. Wriggle as I might, I could not wriggle away from the
fact that as prime essentials to the success of my scheme stood the
survival of Malory and the non-survival of Westmacott. If the unknown
chose to thwart me in these two particulars, my cherished plan must come
to naught, but a conviction, whose very intensity persuaded me of its
truth, entered into my spirit that in this respect at all events all
would be well.
As the war progressed I fell into one of the inconsistencies of our
nature, for as the news of Malory continued good I came gradually to
feel that his safety up to this point was growing into a kind of earnest
for his safety in the future—a conclusion in itself totally
illogical—whereas the equally continued safety of Westmacott, whom I so
ardently desired out of the way, distressed me not at all.
Was I presumptuous in thus constituting myself the guardian angel of two
lives? I was only a poor wreck, flotsam of the war, cheated of the man’s
part I had hoped to play, and nursing my scheme like an old maid cheated
of the woman’s part she, on her side, should have played on earth.
I shall not dwell longer than I need upon the days of the war,
considering them rather as an incident, a protracted incident, than as a
central point in my story, for we have no need or desire to revive
artificially the realities we have lived through. I quote, however,
Malory on this subject:—
“... Our sons will scarcely be _our_ children, for the war will have
fathered them and mothered them both. The children of the war! growing
up with the shadow of that great parent in the background of their
lives, a progenitor dark as the night, yet radiant as the sun; torn with
misery, yet splendid and entire with glory; poor and bereft by ruin, yet
rich with gold-mines as the earth; a race of men sprung from loins broad
and magnificent. They will stand like the survivors of the Flood when
the waters had retreated from the clean-washed world. What will they
make of their opportunity? They will not, I trust, hold up a mirror to
reflect the familiar daily tragedy, but out of the depths of their own
enfranchised hearts will call up a store of little, lovely, sincere,
human, and simple things wherewith to make life sweet. They must be as
children in a meadow. Let us have done with pretence and gloom. There is
no room now in the world for the introspective melancholy of the idler.
We hope for a world of active sanity.”
He reverted several times to the men who had been torn from their homes,
the men who, but for war, would never have gone beyond the limit of
their parish. He compared himself angrily with them, and I perceived
that his theory, in embryo at Sampiero, had struck deep roots under the
rain of present day realities.
“... I want to shout it aloud: objectivity! objectivity! action, the
parent of thought. We had worn thought to a shadow, with hunting him
over hill, plain, and valley. We were miners who had exhausted the drift
of gold. Thank God, we are daily burying fresh gold for our successors.
We were sick with the sugar of introspection; introspection, subtlest of
vanities; introspection, the damnable disease. We were old and outworn
in spirit. The soil bore weakly crops, and cried out for nourishment. We
are giving it blood to drink, and it grows fertile in the drinking.
“I am aware of the coarsening of my fibres; I grow more conscious of my
body, less conscious of my mind. I am very humble. I know that the
meanest hind who turned the ridges under the ploughshare had a truer
value than I, the critic, the analyst—I use the words disparagingly—the
commentator. He silently constructed while I noisily destroyed.”
Malory continued at great length in this strain, and I read between the
lines of his letter that he had devoted much of the intolerable leisure
of his soldier’s life to the evolution of a new creed, not really new to
him, for its precepts were and must always have been in his blood, but
now for perhaps the first time formulated and taken close to his heart.
He wrote to me more and more openly, and I knew that I was getting the
expression of his inmost thoughts. I have all his letters—for they came
now in numbers though with great irregularity—and have sometimes thought
that I have not the right, nor he the right to compel me, to keep them
to myself. As he said:—
“... All men have creeds, and I behold myself a faddist in a universe of
faddists. I cannot be wholly right, nor they wholly wrong. But I argue
in my own defence, that a creed such as mine, resting on many pillars,
the most mighty of which is the pillar of tolerance, is at least
inoffensive in a world it does not even seek to convert. I offer my
little gift—and if it is rejected I withdraw my hand, and tender it
elsewhere.
“I am not concerned with practical matters, nor with controversial
subjects; I am not a political or a social reformer, nor a nut-eater,
nor a prophet of the Pit. I am not, I fear, a very practical preacher
even in my own region, for my words, were I ever to spread them abroad,
could germinate only in the ready tilled field of a contented soul, and
will put no bread into the mouth of the hungry. So I desist, for mere
reflection is of no value in our times, and he alone has justified his
existence who has relieved the poor, benefited the sickly, or fed the
starving.”
I do not wholly agree with him.
At least in one particular I will take his advice, and will not dwell
further upon those years. We know now that, interminable as they seemed
at the time, they passed, and in a golden autumn peace came to the earth
like sleep returning after night upon night of insomnia. Malory wrote to
me on that occasion also, a letter more full of sarcasm, bitterness, and
sorrow than any I had yet received.
“... So here we are at last at the end of this long, long road, more
like straight railway-lines than like a road, which is a poetical thing.
I look back, and I see iron everywhere: iron hurtling through the air
and smashing against the soft flesh of men and the softer hearts of
women; iron thundering in the sea; masonry toppling; careful labour
destroyed; skies full of black smoke; giant machines. Impressionism is
the only medium to express the war. In this chaos little men have
laboured, trying to put their brains round the war like putting a string
round the globe; and pitting their little bodies against the moving tons
of iron, like a new-born baby trying to push against a Titan. What has
emerged? a new, a great tradition, greater than the Trojan or the
Elizabethan; a new legend for the ornament of art. For it all comes down
to art in the end; the legend is greater than the fact; the mind
survives the perishing matter. We are the heirs of the past. The man of
action is the progenitor of the dreamer. What am I saying? The
progenitor? he is the manure, merely the manure dug into the soil on
which the dreamer will presently grow. Poor, inarticulate,
uncomprehending men have died in their anonymous millions to furnish a
song for the future singer, a vicious, invertebrate effete, no doubt; a
moral hermaphrodite of a worthless generation.
“How many before me have asked, What is Truth? is it indeed a flower
which blooms only on a dung-heap?
“... I have seen so many men here die in their prime, who were precious
to mankind or all in all to their individual loves, yet they have been
taken, and I, the valueless, the solitary, am left. Is there a purpose
behind these things? or am I to believe that fate is, after all, the
haphazard of chance?”
We held no peace rejoicings at Pennistans’, for Nancy’s sake; peace was
to her an additional sorrow. During the war she had had the feverish
interest of having given her greatest sacrifice to the ideal of the
moment, but as the horror faded away so the memory of those who had died
faded also. Nancy and her kindred ceased to shine as the heroic, and
became merely the unfortunate, a sad and scattered population to whom
the war would last, not a few years, but all their lives. Shattered
women and shattered men; but to us the war appeared already as a
nightmare interlude from which we had wakened.
I was now confronted with my own particular purpose, the one I had
bargained with myself to carry out; I turned it over and over in my
mind, and though by the light of reason I could perceive no solution to
the obvious difficulty presented, yet my curious instinct persisted,
that all would be well. I was certain that my purpose was a good one. I
contemplated a Malory changed, softened, hardened, sobered, steadied, by
the red-hot furnace of war; he had called himself an inconstant man; I
felt that he would be now no longer inconstant. I contemplated a Ruth
intolerant, after her four years lived in liberty, of her former
bondage. I saw them fuse, in my own mind, in mutual completion.
In the meantime, Westmacott stood ominously in the centre of the road.
I heard first of his return from Amos, as I stood with Mrs. Pennistan
watching the folding of the sheep. Amos had brought the sheep with him
in a cart from Tonbridge market; he was taciturn while he turned them
out from under the net into the hurdled fold, but when the hired man had
driven away the lumbering cart, he said, jerking his thumb over his
shoulder,—
“Wife, who d’you think I met on the road yonder?”
She stared at him, and he added, in his laconic way,—
“Rawdon.”
“He’s back?” she said, dismayed.
Amos expanded.
“Ay. They’ve a system for bringing them home, it seems, according to
their employ: farmers and food producers come first.”
“Then Malory,” I said involuntarily, “will come among the last lot as a
man of no occupation.”
“That’ll be it. We’ll be looking soon for those boys of ourn,” he said
to his wife.
She smiled gladly at him, but remained pensive. Then she asked,—
“Was he alone, Amos?”
“Ay. He’d his pack on his back, too, so I doubt he’d come from the
station. He’d his back to Penshurst and his face towards home. He
touched his cap at me, friendly, and I twirled my whip to him, friendly,
too.”
“I’m glad of that,” his wife murmured.
Amos shrugged.
“A man’s glad to welcome his son-in-law back from the wars,” he said
ironically as he turned to go.
Mrs. Pennistan and I strolled out towards the road.
“He’s dead against Rawdon; always was,” she said in a distressed tone.
“I was for making up, and making the best of it, but Pennistan isn’t
that sort. He’d sooner have life unbearable than go a tittle against his
prejudices. After all, Rawdon’s married to Ruth, and the father of our
grandchildren, and there’s no going against that. He’s an unaccountable
hard man, my man, when he chooses. I couldn’t never do nothing with him,
and Nancy she’s the same.”
“And Mrs. Westmacott?” I asked.
The distress in her tone deepened.
“I used to think Ruth a good quiet girl, but since the trick she played
me over her marriage I haven’t known what to think. I’ve lain awake o’
nights worrying over it. You’ve heard the whole tale from Mr. Malory.
Gentle she was until then, and a good daughter to me, I must say, and
then ... gone in a night withouten a sign, and never a word to me in
explanation since. What’s a mother to make of that?”
I could have laughed at the poor woman’s perplexity. I thought of the
hen whose brood of ducklings takes suddenly to the water.
“But has she never alluded to her ... her elopement?”
“Never a word, I tell you. I asked her once, and she put on a look as
black as night, and I never asked her again. I’ve sometimes wished Mr.
Malory could speak to her, I’ve a fancy she might answer him freer; and
yet I don’t know.”
“I’ve never fully understood,” I said, wishing to make the most of my
opportunity, “whether she cares at all for her husband or not?”
“Small wonder that you haven’t understood,” said Mrs. Pennistan tartly,
“when her own mother is kept out in the dark. It’s my belief she hates
him, and it’s my knowledge that he ill-treats her, but at the same time
it’s my instinct she loves him in a way. It sounds a hard thing to say
of one’s child, but I’ve always held Ruth was a coarse, rough creature
at times under her smoothness.”
She instantly repented of her words.
“There, what am I saying of my own kith and kin? I get mad when I get
thinking of my girl, so you mustn’t lay too much store by my talk.
Pennistan’d give it me if he heard me.”
I persisted.
“Then you think that, when she ran away with him, she hated him and
loved him both together?”
Mrs. Pennistan paused for a long time.
“Well,” she said at last, “if you ask me what I think, it’s this. There
was a deal more in that running away than any of us knew at the time.
What it exactly was I don’t know even now. I doubt Ruth doesn’t know
either, or if she does know, she doesn’t own to it, not to herself even.
I doubt Rawdon knows most about it.”
I saw another man becoming inevitable.
“And Mr. Malory?”
She shot at me a quick suspicious look.
“You’re Mr. Malory’s friend, what do you know?”
“I know nothing,” I said. “He didn’t know himself.”
“No,” said Mrs. Pennistan suddenly, “that’s the truth. He didn’t know
himself. He wasn’t a man to fancy those things. To me it was as plain as
daylight, but Pennistan he always scoffed at me, and I daren’t speak it
to Ruth, and I’ve thought since that maybe I was wrong after all. Maybe
she went with Rawdon because she loved Rawdon: maybe she didn’t go, as
I’ve sometimes thought, because she was afraid.... It’s hard, isn’t it,
to see into people’s hearts, even when you live in the same house with
them? Day in, day out, and you know little more of them than the clothes
they wear and what they like to get to eat.”
I was sorry for her. She went on,—
“Your children, they seem so close to you when they’re little; they come
to you when they’re hungry, and they come to you when they tumble, and
you cosset them; and then when they’re big you find you’re the last
person they want to come to. It’s cruel hard sometimes on a woman. But
they don’t mean it,” she added, brightening, “and my children have been
good children to me, even Ruth.”
* * * * *
I met Westmacott, the formidable man, the day after his return, a
Sunday, walking on the village green with his wife and the two eldest
children. As I looked at him I felt a little pang of horror on realising
how ardently I had desired this man to die in the trenches, and now, as
he materialised for me out of a mere name into a creature of flesh and
blood, I grew dismayed, and was overcome by the reality of the obstacle.
Perhaps I had always unconsciously thought of him as a myth. And now
here he was, and Ruth shyly introduced me.
I fancied I caught a sullen look on her face, a look of suffering, long
lulled to sleep, and suddenly returned. Perhaps for the last four years
he had been a myth to her also.
By his home-coming he soon waked the echoes of scandal; his way of life,
they said, had not been mended by the war, and after the long restraint
of discipline he broke loose into his old debauches. I noted the growing
of that sullen look on Ruth’s features; she made no comment, but I
divined the piling-up of the thunderstorm. So, I thought, she must have
looked during the month of her engagement to Leslie Dymock, when Malory
in his error had considered her as a nun in her novitiate. The kettle,
she had said, is long on the hob before it boils over.
She spent less time at Pennistans’ than formerly, pride and obstinacy
withholding all confession from her lips or from her actions. Amos was
gloomy, and Mrs. Pennistan oppressed. As for me, I lived dreamily,
content to let the river of events carry my boat onwards. I made no
prophecies to myself, I experienced no impatience; Malory was not yet
home, and I believed that by the time he got home my problem would have
resolved itself automatically.
IV
How? I never formulated, but I suppose now, looking back, that the
prosaic solution of divorce lay behind my evasions. I did not take into
account the dreary conventionality of the English side to Ruth’s nature.
People like the Pennistans do not divorce; they endure. Nor do they run
away; yet Ruth had run away. Which would prove the stronger, her
life-long training, or the flash of her latent blood?
There came a day—for I have dallied a long time over Malory’s letters
and my own reflections—when Ruth came into Pennistans’ kitchen, hatless,
with her three children clinging round her skirts. Her father and mother
stared at her; she gave no explanation, and Amos, who was a great
gentleman in his way, asked for none, and moreover checked the doleful
inquiries of his wife, to whom the prompt and vulgar tear was always
ready. I saw then a certain likeness between the father and the
daughter; that apostolic beard of his gave him a southern dignity, and
his scarlet braces marked his shirt with a blood-red slash, as red as
her lips over her little teeth white as nuts. She could remain at the
farm as long as she chose, he said. She had, he did not add, but his
eyes added it, a refuge from all mankind in her father.
No reproaches, no recriminations, and when Mrs. Pennistan, after Ruth
had gone out with all apparent calm to put her children to bed, began
anew to wonder tearfully what had happened, and to suggest lugubriously
that as Ruth had made her bed, so she must lie in it, he checked her
again and frightened her into silence by his sternness. She went out
weeping, and Amos and I were left together.
I offered to go, but he assured me that my presence in the house would
be a help, adding that he supposed I had heard something of his
daughter’s story, and that her marriage was not a happy one. It probably
cost him a great effort to say this. I tried to make it as easy as I
could for him. He then asked me to remain with Ruth should her husband
follow her, and should he, Amos, or one of her brothers, not be in the
house.
I could see that he thought it likely Westmacott would come over sooner
or later.
I was greatly elated at the turn things had taken, and felt that my
belief in the lucky star of my scheme had been justified. I had no doubt
now that Ruth would rid herself of Westmacott, and do for herself what
the war had not done for her. I hung about the farm all day, partly to
oblige Amos, who had his usual work to attend to, but principally to
satisfy the tense spirit of expectation which had risen in me since the
morning. As the player sees an imaginary line running between his ball
and the objective, so I imagined a string running between the moment at
Sampiero when Malory had said, “Do you know the Weald of Kent?” and this
moment when I, a tardy, but, I flattered myself, an essential actor,
waited about Pennistans’ threshold for the advent of Rawdon Westmacott.
All the beads but one were now threaded on that string; I must watch the
last and final threading, before I could put on the clasp.
Towards evening I espied Westmacott entering a distant field, and
something in me gave a fierce leap of exultation. I then realised the
practical difficulties of the position. Here was I, left on guard, but
physically quite unable to grapple with the wiry man should he lay hands
on me, or on his wife. I thought for an instant of summoning Amos, but
as instantly rejected the idea: the final act must lie between
Westmacott, Ruth, and myself. Had I been alone, I would have chanced his
violence; as it was, I must consider the woman. I ran quickly into the
house, up to my room, and brought down my service revolver.
When I came into the kitchen carrying this weapon, Ruth, who was sitting
there sewing, as placidly, I swear, as she had sat sewing in her own
kitchen the first time I had seen her, looked at my loaded hand and up
into my face with a grave, inquiring surprise. I reassured her. Her
husband, I told her, was coming across the fields and would doubtless
insist on seeing her, and considering the nature of the man I had
thought it best to have an unanswerable threat ready to hand. With that
muzzle we would keep him at bay.
Ruth rose very quietly and took the weapon from me. I had no idea of
resistance. Malory himself could not have felt more definitely than I
that the words we were to speak, the actions we were to perform, were
already written out on a slowly unwinding scroll.
She asked me to leave her alone with her husband; to my feeble protest,
made by my tongue, but barely seconded by the vital part of my being,
the part so intensely conscious, yet at the same time so pervaded by a
sense of trance and unreality,—to that feeble protest she replied,
bitterly enough that she had faced him many times before and with my
weapon on the table beside her would face him with additional confidence
and security. She had already taken it from me, and now laid it on the
table, speaking as one does to a child from whom one has just taken a
dangerous toy. She smiled as she spoke, so serenely that I felt sure she
had accepted the revolver merely for the sake of my peace of mind. She
charged me to keep the children away, should I see them drawing near to
the house, and with that injunction she took me kindly by the shoulders
and turned me out into the garden.
Westmacott entered it at the same moment by the swing-gate. His looks
were black as he passed me and strode into the house he had not darkened
since his marriage. I stood out in the garden alone in the dusk. I
looked in through the latticed window of the kitchen, seeing every
detail as the detail of a Dutch picture, lit by the fire; the window was
very largely blocked by the red geraniums, but I could see the deal
table, the swinging lamp, the brass ornaments gleaming by the fireplace,
the pictures on the walls, the thin ribbon of steam coming from the
spout of the singing kettle; I could even see the brown grain in the
wood of which the table-top was made. I saw Ruth standing, and
Westmacott looking at her; then he caught sight of me, and with an angry
gesture dragged the curtain across the window.
I was now shut out from all participation in this act of the drama, but
I did not care; I felt that what must be, must be, that the inevitable
was right, and, above all, ordained. Come what might, no human agency
could interfere. I smiled to myself as I thought of Malory’s triumph
could he behold my resignation, and as I smiled I felt Malory’s presence
in the garden, waiting like me, and, like me, entirely passive. I saw
his face; his iron gray hair where it grew back from his temples; I saw
the tiny hairs in his nostrils, and the minute pores of his skin. My
head was swimming, and the vividness of my perception stabbed me.
Then a little scent floated out to me, and I wondered vaguely what it
was, and what were the memories it awakened, and in some dim, extremely
complicated way I knew those memories were awakened by a mental rather
than a physical process, and that they were, at best, only second-hand.
A narrow street, yoked bullocks, and the clamour of a Latin city....
These meaningless and irrelevant words shaped themselves out of the mist
of my sensitiveness. I linked them and the picture they created to the
violence of feeling within the little room behind the drawn curtain, and
as I did so they fell away together from the twilit English garden, the
English country; fell away to their own place, as a thing apart; or
shall I say, they stood behind the English country as a ghostly stranger
behind a familiar form? This was the ghost of which Malory had always
been conscious. Then I knew that my troubled perplexity was but the echo
of Malory’s first perplexity, and I narrowed it down with an effort of
will to the scent of roasting chestnuts. The ancient woman in her
bedroom was at her usual occupation.
I folded my arms and leant my back against the house wall; I heard the
rise and fall of angry voices within the room; I found that I could look
only at little things, such as the cracks in the stone paving of the
garden path, or the latch on the gate, and that the horizon, when I
raised my eyes towards it, swam. I tried to drag back my failing sense
of proportions. As I did this, clinging on to and deliberately ranging
my thoughts in ordered formation, there emerged the dearness and
all-eclipsing importance of my scheme to me in the past; I realised that
never for a moment had it been absent from my conscious or my
sub-conscious thought. So, I said to myself, this is the phenomenon of
poets, and are they, I wonder, as passive as I am when after months of
carrying their purpose in their brain, the moment comes of its fruition?
Have they, like me, no feeling of control? I remembered what Malory had
said of the corelation of human effort.
I looked towards the darkened window and, hearing the drone of voices,
beheld myself again as the brother of the poet whose puppets, brought by
him to a certain point, continue to work along the lines he has laid
down, as though independent of his agency. I would resume control, I
thought, when this so terribly inevitable act had played itself out.
Then I would step in, lead Malory to Ruth, and again step out, leaving
them to the joy of their bewilderment.
Why should I have cherished this scheme so passionately? so passionately
that my desire had risen above my reason, carrying with it that strange
conviction that by the sheer force of my will events would shape
themselves—as indeed they were shaping—under my inactive hand? Why? I
could not explain, but as the twilight deepened rapidly in the garden I
saw again Malory’s grave, lean face, heard his half-sad, half-happy
comments, was pierced by the pitiable and unnecessary tragedy of his
loneliness—Malory away in France, unconscious of the intensity of the
situation created around him, without his knowledge and without his
consent, by a woman who loved him and a man who, I suppose, loved him
too.
It was at that moment, when I had worked myself up into a positive
exaltation, that I heard a sudden angry shout and a shot from a
revolver.
I awoke, and I confess that before rushing into the house I stood for a
dizzy second while a thousand impressions wheeled like a flock of
startled birds in my brain. It was over, then? Westmacott was dead, I
was sure of that. Would the mice, two miles away, be waltzing? I had an
insane desire to run over and look. Westmacott was dead; then I had
killed him, I was his murderer as much as if I stood in Ruth’s place
with the smoking revolver in my hand. It was over; the recent tradition
of war, where life was cheap, had joined with Concha’s legacy for the
fulfilment of my purpose. What a heritage! for that double heritage, not
fate, had helped me out. Blood, war, and I were fellow conspirators.
I stood for a second only before I burst open the door, but the strength
of my impression was already so powerfully upon me that when I saw
Westmacott by the fire holding the revolver I did not believe my eyes.
When I say I did not believe my eyes I mean that I was quite soberly,
deliberately persuaded that my eyes were telling an actual falsehood to
my brain. Westmacott could not be standing by the fire; he must be lying
somewhere on the ground, huddled and lifeless. I removed my eyes from
the false Westmacott standing by the fire, and sent them roving over the
floor in search of that other Westmacott from whom life had flown.
I ran my eyes up and down the cracks between the tiles until they came
to a darkness, and then, running them upwards, I reached the face of
Ruth. She was there, shrinking as she must suddenly have shrunk when he
snatched the revolver from her. In her face I read defeat, reaction,
submission. She had struck her blow, and it had failed; and she and I
were together beaten and vanquished.
I knew that my attempt would be hopeless, but a great desperation seized
hold of me, and I cried out, absurdly, miserably,—
“There are other methods.”
She only shook her head, and, pointing at the revolver, said,—
“It kicked in my hand.”
I looked across the room, and running to the fire I picked up some bits
of china which had fallen in the grate; I tried to fit them together,
repeating sorrowfully,—
“Look, you have broken a plate, you have broken a plate to pieces.”
V
For how long we stood gazing at those ironical shards I do not know.
There are moments of suspension in life when the whirling mind travels
at so great a rate that everything else seems stationary; so, now, we
were touched into immobility while our minds flew forward into space and
time. I cannot say what the others found in that fourth dimension of
thought; I, personally, returned to earth utterly inarticulate, with
these two words shaping themselves and singing over and over in my
brain: Futile creatures! futile creatures! It was as though some little
mocking demon sat astride my nerve cords, drumming his heels, and
chanting his refrain. I could have shaken myself like a dog coming out
of water to shake him off. Then I became aware of Westmacott’s voice
speaking at an immense distance.
He must have been speaking for some time before the sound pierced
through to my ears, for I saw Ruth moving in obedience to his voice
before I had grasped what he was saying. Her movement made the same
impression upon me as his voice: muffled, slow, and infinitely remote;
she crept, rather than she walked, and when she raised her hand she
raised it with such torpid and deliberate effort that she seemed to be
dragging it upwards with some heavy weight attached. As for her feet,
they positively stuck to the ground. Westmacott said something more; he
pointed. She turned, still with that slow laborious deliberation, and
moved like a shackled ghost from the room.
Westmacott and I were left, and we were silent, he perhaps from choice,
I certainly from inability to speak. I think now that he was less
shattered than Ruth or me, having played a more negative rôle; he had
merely stood there to be shot at, while Ruth and I had flung, she
direct, I indirect passion into the shooting. We were worn, spent,
exhausted, he had his forces still intact. An absurd phrase came into my
mind, so childish that I hesitate to write it down: Which would you
rather be, the shooter or the shootee? and presently I hit on the rhyme,
so that a sing-song began in my head:—
“Which would you rather be,
The shooter or the shootee?”
and still Westmacott stood there holding the revolver, and I stood there
holding the pieces of the broken plate, and all the while I seemed to
hear the corner-stones of my cherished schemes dropping to earth like
pieces of masonry after an explosion. We stood quite motionless.
Overhead somebody was moving about. Outside it was nearly dark.
Perception was beginning to return to me, bringing in its train a sense
of defeat. I had often wondered how the people in a play or in a story
continued to live their lives after the climax which parted spectator
and actor for ever, I had often followed them in spirit, come down to
breakfast with them next morning, so to speak, producing the situation
into the region of inevitable anticlimax. Here I was, then, at the old
game, an actor myself. I supposed that the play was at an end, and that
this was the return to life. That the play should end happily or
unhappily, was an accident proper to the play only; all that was
certain, all that was inevitable, was that life must be gone on with
after the play was over. You couldn’t stop; you were like a man tied on
to the back of a traction-engine, willy-nilly you had to go on walking,
walking, walking. The dreariness of it! I looked at the pieces of broken
plate in my hand, the sum total of all that passion, all that great
outburst of pent emotion. I threw back my head, and laughed long, loud,
and bitterly.
Westmacott regarded me without surprise, scarcely with interest. He
appeared cold and quite indifferent, entirely in possession of his
faculties. I grew ashamed under his dispassionate gaze, my laughter
ceased, and I laid the pieces of plate on the table. Then it occurred to
me we were waiting for something. The movement overhead had died away,
but as I listened I heard steps upon the stair, several sets of steps,
light pattering steps as of children, and heavier steps, as of a grown
person.
Then Westmacott stirred; he went across the room and opened the door. I
saw Ruth standing in the passage with her children. She was hatless as
she had arrived, but the glow of the lamp, hanging suspended from the
ceiling, where it fell upon the curve of her little head, drew a line of
light as upon a chestnut. Westmacott nodded curtly, passed out, and his
family followed him in a passive and mournful procession.
I watched them go, across the little garden, through the swing-gate, and
into the dusky fields beyond. They seemed to me infinitely gray,
infinitely dreary, infinitely broken, the personages of a flat and faded
fresco. All that pulsating passion had passed, like an allegory of life,
leaving only death behind. Gone was the vital flame from the human clay.
And nothing had come of it, nothing but a broken plate. What ever comes
of men’s efforts, I thought bitterly? so little, that we ought to take
for our criterion of success, not the tangible result, but the
intangible ardour by which the attempt is prompted. So rarely is the one
the gauge of the other! I looked again at the little train rapidly
disappearing into the darkness, a funeral cortège, carrying with it the
corpse of slain rebellion. I saw the years of their future, a vista so
stark, so arid, that I physically recoiled from its contemplation. How
hideous would be the existence of those children, suffering perpetually
from a constraint they could not explain, a constraint which lacked even
to the elements of terror, so dead a thing was it, in which terror, a
lively, vivid reality, could find no place. Death and stagnation would
be their lot.
The darkness of the fields had now completely swallowed them up, but I
still stood looking at the spot where I had last seen them, and saying a
final good-bye to the tale that place had unfolded to me. This time, I
was certain, no sequel was still to come. On the morrow I should leave
the Pennistans’ roof, with no hope that an echo of the strangely cursed,
ill-fated, unconscious family would ever reach me again in the outer
world.
A peace so profound as to be almost unnatural had settled over the land,
one or two stars had come out, and I wondered vaguely why Amos and his
people had not yet returned home from work. I supposed that they were
making the most of a fine evening. The Pennistans would accept their
daughter’s defeat, I was sure, with the usual stoic indifference of the
poor. At last I turned slowly in the doorway, a great melancholy soaking
like dew into my bones, so that I fancied I felt the physical ache.
Now I have but the one concluding incident to tell, before I have done
with this portion of my cumbersome, disjointed story, an incident which
has since appeared to me frightening in its appositeness, as though
deliberately planned by some diabolically finished artist as a rounding
of the whole. Malory had spoken of destiny and nature as being the only
artists of any humour or courage, and upon my soul I am tempted to agree
with him when I think over the events of that packed evening, of which I
was the sole and baffled spectator. I said this incident appeared to me
frightening; I repeat that statement, for I can conceive of no situation
more frightening than for a man to find himself and other human beings
shoved hither and thither by events over which he has no control
whatsoever, the conduct of life taken entirely out of his hands,
especially a man, like me, had always struggled resentfully against the
imposition of fate on free-will, but never more so than in the past few
weeks. Wherever I turned that night, mockery was there ready to greet
me.
I went again, as I have said, into the house with the intention of
waiting in the kitchen on Amos’s return. In this small plan as in my
larger ones I was, it appeared, to be thwarted, for as I passed down the
narrow passage I noticed that the door of old Mrs. Pennistan’s room was
open. I paused at first with no thought of alarm. I longed to go in, and
to tell the ancient woman of the futile suffering she had brought upon
her hapless descendants. I longed insanely to shout it into her brain
and to see remorse wake to life in her faded eyes. As I stood near her
door she grew for me into a huge, portentous figure, she and her love
for Oliver Pennistan, and I saw her, the tiny woman I had all but
forgotten, as a consciously evil spirit, a malign influence, the spring
from which all this river of sorrow had flowed. Then my steps were drawn
nearer and nearer to the door, till I stood at last on the threshold,
looking for the first time into the room. Some one, presumably the now
invisible servant, had lit the two candles on the dressing-table, and
these with the glow of the fire between the bars threw over the room a
fitful light. I had, curiously enough, no sense of intrusion; I might
have been looking at a mummy. Yet I should have remembered that the
occupant was not a mummy, for the familiar smell of the chestnuts had
greeted me even in the passage.
She was sitting in her usual place over the fire, her back turned to me,
and a black shawl tightly drawn round her shrunken shoulders. Again I
was struck by her look of fragility. I had a sudden impulse that I would
speak to her, and would try to draw some kind of farewell from her,
explaining that I was leaving the house the next day—though whether she
had ever realised my presence there at all I very much doubted.
As I went forward the crackle of a chestnut broke the utter stillness of
the room. I waited for her to pick it out of the grate with the tongs,
but she did not stir. I came softly round her chair and stood there,
waiting for her to notice me, as I had seen the Pennistans do when they
did not wish to startle her. Indeed, so tiny and frail was she, that I
thought a sudden fright might shatter her, as too loud a noise will kill
a lark.
I looked down at the chestnuts on the bar, and then I saw that they were
quite black. I bent down. They were burnt black and friable as cinders.
Sudden panic rushed over me. I dropped on to my knees and stared up into
the old woman’s fallen face. She was dead.