to eat--though neither had much appetite--the supper provided for
them by Mrs. Raps, Hamish Traherne, his cassock protected from the
threatening storm by a heavy ulster, was making his promised effort
to “talk” with the master of Oakguard. Impelled by an instinct he
could not resist, perhaps with a vague notion that the creature’s
presence would sustain his courage, he carried, curled up in an inside
pocket of his cloak, his darling Ricoletto. The rat’s appetite had
been unusually good that evening and it now slept peacefully in its
warm nest, oblivious of the beating heart of its master. Carrying his
familiar oak stick in his hand and looking to all appearance quite as
formidable as any highwayman the priest made his way through the sombre
avenue of gnarled and weather-beaten trees that led to the Renshaw
mansion. He rang the bell with an impetuous violence, the violence of
a visitor whose internal trepidation mocks his exterior resolution.
To his annoyance and surprise he learnt that Mr. Renshaw was spending
the evening with Mr. Stork down in the village. He asked to be allowed
to see Mrs. Renshaw, feeling in some obscure way suspicious of the
servant’s statement and unwilling to give up his enterprise at the
first rebuff. The lady came out at once into the hall.
“Come in, come in, Mr. Traherne,” she said, quite eagerly. “I suppose
you’ve already dined but you can have dessert with us. Philippa always
sits long over dessert. She likes eating fruit better than anything
else. She’s eating gooseberries to-night.”
Mrs. Renshaw always had a way of detaching herself from her daughter
and speaking of her as if she were a strange and somewhat menacing
animal with whom destiny had compelled her to live. But the priest
refused to remove his ulster. The interest of seeing Philippa eat
gooseberries was not strong enough to interrupt his purpose.
“Your son won’t be home till late, I’m afraid?” he said. “I
particularly--yes, particularly--wanted to see him to-night. I
understand he’s at the cottage.”
“Wait a minute,” cried the lady in her hurried, low-voiced tone. “Sit
down here, won’t you? I’ll just--I’ll just see Philippa.”
She returned to the dining-room and the priest sat down and waited.
Presently she came hurrying back carrying in her hands a plate upon
which was a bunch of grapes.
“These are for you,” she said. “Philippa won’t touch them. There! Let
me choose you out some nice ones.”
The servant had followed her and now stood like a pompous and
embarrassed policeman uncertain of his duty. It seemed to give
Mrs. Renshaw some kind of inscrutable satisfaction to cause this
embarrassment. She sat down beside the priest and handed him the
grapes, one by one, as if he were a child.
“Brand orders these from London,” she remarked, “that’s why we get
them now. I call it extravagance, but he _will_ do it.” She sighed
heavily. “Philippa,” she repeated, “prefers garden fruit so you mustn’t
mind eating them. They’ll get bad if they’re not eaten.”
The servant hastened on tip-toe to the dining-room door, peered in,
and returned to his post. He looked for all the world, thought Mr.
Traherne, like a ruffled and disconsolate heron. “He’ll stand on one
leg soon,” he said to himself.
“When do you expect your son home?” he enquired again. “Perhaps I might
call at the cottage and walk back with him.”
“Yes, do!” Mrs. Renshaw cried with unexpected eagerness. “Do call
at the cottage. It’ll be nice for you to join them. They’ll all be
there--Mr. Sorio and the Doctor and Brand. Yes, do go in! It’ll be
a relief to me to think of you with them. I’m sometimes afraid that
cousin Tassar encourages dear Brand to drink too much of that stuff he
likes to make. They will put spirits into it. I’m always telling them
that lime juice would be just as nice. Yes, do go, Mr. Traherne, and
insist on having lime juice!”
The priest looked at the lady, looked at the servant and looked at
the hall door. He felt a faint scratching going on inside his cloak.
Ricoletto was beginning to wake up.
“Well, I’ll go!” he exclaimed, rising to his feet.
At that moment the figure of Philippa, exquisitely dressed in a dark
crimson gown, emerged from the dining-room. She advanced slowly towards
them with more than her usual air of dramatic reserve. Mr. Traherne
noticed that her lips were even redder than her dress. Her eyes looked
dark and tired but they shone with a mischievous menace. She held out
her hand sedately and as he took it, fumbling with his ulster, “I hope
you enjoyed your grapes,” she said.
“You ought to apologize to Mr. Traherne for appearing before him at all
in that wild costume,” remarked Mrs. Renshaw. “You wouldn’t think she’d
been at the dentist’s all day, would you? She looks as if she were in a
grand London house, doesn’t she, just waiting to go to a ball?”
“Yes, at the dentist’s,” Mrs. Renshaw went on, speaking quite loudly,
“at the dentist’s in Mundham. She’s got an abscess under one of her
teeth. It kept her awake in the night. I think your face is still a
little swollen, dear, isn’t it? She oughtn’t to stand in this cold
hall, ought she, Mr. Traherne? And with so much of her neck exposed. It
was quite a large abscess. Let me look, dear.” She moved towards her
daughter, who drew hastily back.
“She won’t let me look at it,” she added plaintively. “She never would,
not even when she was a child.”
Hamish, fumbling with his fingers inside his ulster, made a grotesque
grimace of sympathy and once more intimated his desire to say
good-night. He discerned in the look the girl had now fixed upon her
mother an expression which indicated how little sympathy there was
between them. It was nearly half past nine when he reached Rodmoor and
knocked at Baltazar’s door. There was some sort of village revel going
on inside the tavern and the sound of this blended, in intermittent
bursts of uproar, with the voices from Stork’s little sitting-room.
Both wind and rain had subsided and the thunder-feeling in the air had
grown less oppressive.
Traherne found himself, as he had been warned, in the presence of
Raughty, Sorio and Brand. Ushered in by the urbane Baltazar he greeted
them all with a humorous and benignant smile and took, willingly
enough, a cup of the admirable wine which they were drinking. They all
seemed, except their host himself, a little excited by what they had
imbibed and the priest observed that several other bottles waited the
moment of uncorking. Dr. Raughty alone appeared seriously troubled at
the new-comer’s entrance. He coughed several times, as was his habit
when disconcerted, and glanced anxiously at the others.
Sorio, it seemed, was in the midst of some sort of diatribe, and
as soon as they had resumed their seats he made no scruple about
continuing it.
“It’s all an illusion,” he exclaimed, looking at Mr. Traherne as if he
defied him to contradict his words, “it’s all an absolute illusion that
women are more subtle than men. The idea of their being so is simply
due to the fact that they act on impulse instead of by reason. Any one
who acts on impulse appears subtle if his impulses vary sufficiently!
Women are extraordinarily simple. What gives them the appearance of
subtlety is that they never know what particular impulse they’re going
to have next. So they just lie back on themselves and wait till it
comes. They’re eminently _physiological_, too, in their reactions.
Am I not right there, Doctor? They’re more entirely material than we
are,” he went on, draining his glass with a vicious gulp, “they’re
simply soaked and drenched in matter. They’re not really completely or
humanly _conscious_. Matter still holds them, still clings to them,
still drowns them. That is why the poets represent Nature as a woman.
The sentimental writers always speak of women as so responsive, so
porous, to the power of Nature. They put it down to their superior
sensitiveness. It isn’t their sensitiveness at all! It’s their element.
Of course they’re porous to it. They’re part of it! They’ve never
emerged from it. It flows round them like waves round seaweed. Take
this question of drink--of this delicious wine we’re drinking! No woman
who ever lived could understand the pleasure we’re enjoying now--a
pleasure almost purely intellectual. They think, in their absurd little
heads, that all we get out of it is the mere sensation of putting
hot stuff or sweet stuff or intoxicating stuff into our mouths. They
haven’t the remotest idea that, as we sit in this way together, we
enter the company of all great and noble souls, philosophizing upon
the nature of the gods and sharing their quintessential happiness!
They think we’re simply sensual beasts--as they are themselves, the
greedy little devils!--when they eat pastry and suck sugar-candy at
the confectioner’s. No woman yet understood, or ever will, the sublime
detachment from life, the victory over life, which an honest company of
sensible and self-respecting friends enjoy when they drink, serenely
and quietly, a wine as rare, as well chosen, as harmless as this! Women
hate to think of the happiness we’re enjoying now. I know perfectly
well that every one of the women who are connected with us at this
moment--and that only applies,” he added with a smile, “to Mr. Renshaw
and myself--would suffer real misery to see us at this moment. It’s an
instinct and from _their_ point of view they’re justified fully enough.
“Wine separates us from Nature. It frees us from sex. It sets us among
the gods. It destroys--yes!--that’s what it does, it destroys our
physiological fatality. With wine like this,” he raised his glass above
his head, “we are no longer the slaves of our senses and consequently
the slaves of matter. We have freed ourselves from matter. We have
_destroyed_ matter!”
“I’m not quite sure,” said Doctor Raughty, going carefully to the
fireplace where, on the fender, he had deposited for later consumption,
a saucer of brandied cherries, “I am not sure whether you’re right
about wine obliterating sex. I’ve seen quite plain females, in my time,
appear like so many Ninons and Thaises when one’s a bit shaky. Of
course I know they may appear so,” he went on patiently and assiduously
letting every drop of juice evaporate from the skin of the cherry
he held between his fingers before placing it in his mouth, “appear
desirable wenches, I mean, without our having any inclination to meddle
with them but the impulse is the same. At least,” he added modestly,
“their being there does not detract from the pleasure.”
He paused and, with his head bent down over his cherries, became
absolutely oblivious to everything else in the world. What he was
trying now was the delicate experiment of dipping the fruit, dried by
being waved to and fro in the air, in the wine-glass at his side. As he
achieved this end, his cheeks flushed and nervous spasmodic quiverings
twitched his expressive nostrils.
“I am inclined to agree with the Doctor,” said Brand Renshaw. “It
seems mere monkish nonsense to me to separate things that were so
obviously meant to go together. I like drinking while girls dance for
me. I like them to dance on and on, and on and on till they’re tired
out and then--” He was interrupted by a sudden crash which made all the
glasses ring and ting. Mr. Traherne had brought down his fist heavily
upon the rosewood table.
“What you people are forgetting,” shouted the priest, “is that God is
not dead. No! He’s not dead, even in Rodmoor. Nature, girls, wine,
rats,--are all shadows in flickering water. Only one thing’s eternal
and that is a pure and loving heart!”
There was a general and embarrassed hush after this and the priest
looked round at the four men with a sort of wistful bewilderment. Then
an expression of indescribable sweetness came into his face.
“Forgive me, children,” he muttered, pressing his hand to his forehead.
“I didn’t mean to be violent. Baltazar, you must have filled my glass
too quickly. No, no! I mustn’t touch a drop more.”
Stork leaned forward towards him.
“We understand,” he said. “We understand perfectly. You felt we
were going a little too far. And so we were! These discourses about
the mystery of wine and the secret of women always betray one into
absurdity. Adrian ought to have known better than to begin such a
thing.”
“It was my fault,” repeated Mr. Traherne humbly. “If you’ll excuse me
I’ll get something out of my pocket.”
He rose and went into the passage. Brand Renshaw shrugged his shoulders
and lifted his glass to his lips.
“I believe it’s his rat,” whispered Dr. Raughty softly. “He lives too
much alone.”
The priest returned with Ricoletto in his hand and resuming his seat
stroked the animal dreamily. Baltazar looked from one to another of
his guests and his delicate features assumed a curious expression, an
expression as though he isolated himself from them all and washed his
hands of them all.
“Traherne refers to God,” he began in a flutelike tone, “and it’s
no more than what he has a right to do. But I should be in a sorry
position myself if my only escape from the nuisance of women was to
drag in Eternity. Our dear Adrian, whose head is always full of some
girl or another, fancies he can get out of it by drink. Brand here
doesn’t want to get out of it. He wants to play the Sultan. Raughty--we
know what an amorous fellow _you_ are, Doctor!--has his own fantastic
way of drifting in and out of the dangerous waters. I alone, of all of
you, have the true key to escape. For, between ourselves, my dears,
we know well enough that God and Eternity are just Hamish’s innocent
illusion.”
The priest seemed quite deaf to this last remark but Brand turned his
hatchet-shaped head towards the speaker.
“Shut up, Tassar,” he muttered harshly, “you’ll start him again.”
“What do you mean?” cried Sorio. “Go on! Go on and tell us what you
mean.”
“Wait one moment,” intervened Dr. Raughty, “talk of something else for
one moment. I must cool my head.”
He put down his pipe by the side of his saucer of cherries, arranging
it with exquisite care so that its stem was higher than its bowl.
Lifting his chair, he placed it at a precise angle to the table,
returning twice to add further little touches to it before he was
half-way to the door. Finally, laying down his tobacco pouch, lightly
as a feather upon the seat of the chair, he rushed out of the room and
up the stairs.
“When the Doctor gets into the bathroom,” remarked Brand, “we may
as well put him out of our minds. The last time he dined with me at
Oakguard he nearly flooded the house.”
Mr. Traherne pressed his rat to his cheek and grinned like a satyr.
“None of you people understand Fingal,” he burst out, “it’s his way
of praying. Yes, I mean it! It’s his way of saying his prayers. He
does it just as Ricoletto does. It’s ritual with him. I understand it
perfectly.”
The conversation at this point seemed to have a peculiarly irritating
effect upon Sorio. He fidgeted and looked about him uneasily. Presently
he made an extraordinary gesture with one of his hands, opening it,
extending the fingers stiffly back and then closing it again. Baltazar,
watching him closely, remarked at last, “What’s on your mind now,
Adriano? Any new obsession?”
They all looked at the Italian. His heavy “Roman-Emperor” face quivered
through all its muscles.
“It’s not ritual,” he muttered gloomily, “you’d better not ask me what
it is, for I _know_!”
Brand Renshaw smiled a cruel smile.
“He means that it’s _madness_,” he remarked carelessly, “and I dare say
he’s quite right.”
“Fingal Raughty’s not mad,” protested Mr. Traherne, “I tell you he
bathes himself just as my rat does--to praise God and purge his sins!”
“I wasn’t thinking about the Doctor,” said Brand quietly, the same
cruel gleam in his eyes. “Mr. Sorio knows what I meant.”
The Italian made a movement as if he were about to leap upon him and
strike him, but the reappearance of Fingal, his cheeks shining and his
face softly irradiated, distracted the general attention.
“You’d begun to tell us, Stork,” said the Doctor, “what _your_ escape
is from the sting of sensuality. You wipe out, altogether, you say, God
and Eternity?”
Baltazar’s feminine features hardened as if under a thin mask of
enamel. Brand shot a malignant glance at him.
“I can answer that,” he said, with venomous bitterness. “Tassar thinks
himself an artist, you know. He despises the whole lot of us as
numbskulls and Philistines. He’ll tell you that art’s the great thing
and that critics of art know much more about it than the damned fools
who do it, all there is to be known, in fact.”
Baltazar’s expression as he listened to his half-brother’s speech was
a palimpsest of conflicting emotions. The look that predominated,
however, was the look of a woman under the lash, waiting her hour. He
smiled lightly enough and gesticulated with his delicate hand.
“We all have our secret,” he declared gaily. “Brand thinks he knows
mine but he’s as far from knowing it as that new moon over there is
from knowing the secret of the tide.”
His words caused them to glance at the window. The clouds had vanished
and the thin ghostly crescent peered at them from between the curtains.
“The tide obeys it,” he added significantly, “but it keeps its own
counsel.”
“And it has,” put in Sorio fiercely, “depths below depths which it were
better for no corpse-world to interfere with!”
Dr. Raughty, who had cleared his throat uneasily several times during
the last few moments, now called the attention of the company to a
scorched moth which, hurt by one of the candles, lay shuddering upon
the edge of the table.
“Hasn’t it exquisite markings?” he said, touching the creature with
the tip of his forefinger, and bending forward over it like a lover.
“It’s a puss-moth! I wish I had my killing-bottle here. I’d keep it for
Horace Pod.”
Sorio suddenly leapt from his seat and made a snatch at the moth.
“Shame!” he cried, addressing indiscriminately the Doctor, Horace Pod
and the universe. “Poor little thing!” he added, seizing it in his fist
and carrying it to the window. When, with some difficulty and many
muttered imprecations he had flung it out, “it tickled me,” he remarked
gravely. “Moths flutter so in your hand.”
“Most things flutter,” remarked Brand, “when you try to get rid of
them. Some of them,” he added in a significant tone, “don’t confine
themselves to fluttering.”
The incident of the moth seemed to break up, more than any of the
preceding interruptions, the harmony of the evening. Dr. Raughty,
looking nervously at Sorio and replacing his pipe in his pocket,
announced that he intended to depart. Brand Renshaw rose too and with
him, Mr. Traherne.
“May I walk with you a little way?” said the priest.
The master of Oakguard stared at him blankly.
“Of course, of course,” he replied, “but I’m afraid it’ll take you out
of your road.”
It was some time before they got clear of the house as Baltazar with a
thousand delicate attentions to each of them and all manner of lively
speeches, did his best, in the stir of their separation, to smooth
over and obliterate from their minds the various little shocks that
had ruffled his entertainment. They got away, however, at last and
Brand and the priest, bidding the rest good night, took the road to the
park. The sky as they entered the park gates was clear and starry and
the dark trees of the avenue up which they walked, rose beside them in
immovable stillness.
Mr. Traherne, putting his hand into the pocket of his ulster to derive
courage from contact with his pet, plunged without preamble into the
heart of the perilous subject.
“You may not know, Renshaw,” he said, “that Miss Herrick and her
sister are leaving Dyke House and are going to live in the village.
Nance has got work at Miss Pontifex’ and Linda is going to play the
organ regularly for me. I believe there’s been something--lately”--he
hesitated and his voice shook a little but, recovering himself with
a tremendous effort, “something,” he went on, “between Linda and
yourself. Now, of course, in any other case I should be very reluctant
to say anything. Interference in these things is usually both
impertinent and useless. But this case is quite different. The girl is
a young girl. She has no parents. Her sister is herself quite young
and they are both, in a sense, dependent on me as the priest of this
place for all the protection I can give. I feel responsible for these
girls, Renshaw, responsible for them, and no feelings of a personal
kind with regard to any one,” here he squeezed Ricoletto so tightly
that the rat emitted a frightened little squeal, “shall interfere
with what I feel is my duty. No, hear me out, hear me out, Renshaw!”
he continued hurriedly, as his companion began to speak. “The matter
is one about which we need not mind being quite open. I want you, in
fact, to promise me--to promise me on your word of honour--that you’ll
leave this child alone. I don’t know how far things have gone between
you. I can’t imagine, it would be shameful to imagine, that it has gone
beyond a flirtation. But whatever it has been, it must stop now. It’s
only your word of honour I want, nothing but your word of honour, and I
can’t believe you’ll hesitate, as a gentleman, to give me that. You’ll
give me that, won’t you, Renshaw? Just say yes and the matter’s closed.”
He removed his hand from his pocket and laid it on his companion’s
wrist. Brand was sufficiently cool at that moment to remark as an
interesting fact that the priest was trembling. Not only was he
trembling but as he removed his hat to give further solemnity to
his appeal, large drops of perspiration, known only to himself, for
darkness dimmed his face, trickled down into his eyes. Brand quietly
freed himself and moved back a step.
“I’m not in the least surprised,” he said, “at your speaking to me
like this, and strange as it may seem it does not annoy me. In fact
it pleases me. I like it. It raises the value of the girl--of Linda,
I mean--and it makes me respect you. But if you imagine, my good Mr.
Traherne, that I’m going to make any such promise as you describe, you
can have no more notion of what I’m like than you have of what Linda’s
like. Talk to _her_, Hamish Traherne, talk to her, and see what she
says!”
The priest clenched his fingers round the handle of his oak stick. He
felt rising in him a tide of natural human anger. Mentally he prayed
to his God that he might retain his self-control and not make matters
worse by violence.
“If it interests you to know,” Brand continued, “I may tell you that
it’s quite possible I shall marry Linda. She attracts me, I confess
it freely, more than I could possibly explain to you or to any one.
I presume you wouldn’t carry your responsibility so far as to make
trouble about my marrying her, eh? But that’s nothing. That’s neither
here nor there. Married or unmarried, I do what I please. Do I convey
my meaning sufficiently clearly? I--do--what--I--please. Let that be
your clue henceforth, Mr. Hamish Traherne, and the clue of everybody
else in Rodmoor, in dealing with me. Listen to me, sir. I do you the
honour of talking more openly to you to-night than I’m ever likely to
talk again. Perhaps you have the idea that I’m a mere commonplace
sensualist, snatching at every animal pleasure that comes my way?
Perhaps you fancy I’ve a vicious--what do you call it?--‘penchant’--for
the seduction of young girls? Let me tell you this, Mr. Hamish, a thing
that may somewhat surprise you. I’ve walked these woods till I know
every scent in them by night and day--do you catch that fungus-smell
now? That’s one of the smells I love best of all!--and in these walks,
absolutely alone,--I love being alone!--I’ve faced possibilities of
evil--faced them and resisted them, mind you!--compared with which
these mere normal sexual lapses we’re talking about are silly child’s
play! Linda does me good. Do you hear? She does me good. She saves
me from things that never in your wildest dreams you’d suppose any
one capable of. Oh, you priests! You priests! You shut yourselves up
among your crucifixes and your little books, and meanwhile--beyond
your furthest imagination--the great tides of evil sweep backwards and
forwards! Listen! I needn’t tell you what that sound is? Yes--you can
hear it. In every part of this place you can hear it! I was born to
that tune, Traherne, and I shall die to that tune. It’s better than
rustling leaves, isn’t it? It’s deeper. It’s the kind of music a man
might have in his head when doing something compared with which such
little sins as you’re blaming me for are virtues! Did you see that bat?
I’ve watched them under these trees from midnight to morning. A bat
in the light of dawn is a curious thing to see. Do you like bats, Mr.
Traherne, or do you confine yourself to rats?