this. When you’re dealing with me, you are dealing with some one who’s
lost the power of being frightened by words, some one who’s broken
the world’s crust and peeped behind it, some one who’s seen the black
pools--did you guess there were black pools in this world?--and has
seen the red stains in them and who knows what caused those stains!
Damn it all--Hamish Traherne--what did you take me for when you talked
to me like that? A common, sensual pig? A vulgar seducer of children?
A fellow to be frightened back into the fold by talk of honour and the
manners of gentlemen? I tell you _I’ve seen bats in the dawn_--and seen
them too, with images in my memory that only _that sound_--do you hear
it still?--could equal for horror.
“It’s because Linda knows the horror of the sea that I love her. I love
to lead her to it, to feel her draw back and not to let her draw back!
And she loves me _for the same reason_! That’s a fact, Mr. Hamish, that
may be hard for you to realize. Linda and I understand each other. Do
you hear that, you lover of rats? We understand each other. She does me
good. She distracts me. She keeps those black pools out of my mind. She
keeps Philippa’s eyes from following me about. She takes the taste of
funguses out of my mouth. She suits me, I tell you! She’s what I need.
She’s what I need and must have!
“Bah! I’m chattering like an idiot. I must be drunk. I _am_ drunk.
But that’s nothing. That’s one of the vices that are _my_ virtues.
I’ll tell you another thing, while I’m about it, Hamish Traherne.
You’ve wondered sometimes, I expect, why I’m so good to Baltazar.
Quite Christian of me, you’ve thought it, eh? Quite noble and
Christian--considering what he is and what I am? That just shows
how little you know us, how little you know either of us! Tassar can
no more get away from me than I can get away from him. We’re bound
together for life, my boy, bound together by what those black pools
mean and what _that sound_--you wouldn’t think you could hear it here,
would you?--never stops meaning.
“Bah! I’m drunk as a pig to-night! I’ve not talked like this to any
one, not for years. Listen, Traherne! You have an ugly face but you’re
not a fool. Wasn’t it Saint Augustine who said once that evil was a
mere rent in the cloak of goodness? The simple innocent! I tell you,
evil goes down to the bottom of life and out beyond! I know that, for
I’ve gone with it. _I’ve seen the bats in the dawn._
“Yes, Tassar’s gone far, Hamish Traherne, farther than you guess.
Sometimes I think he’s gone farther than _I_ guess. _He_ never talks,
you know. You’ll never catch _him_ drunk. Tassar could look the devil
in the face, and worse, and keep his pretty head cool!--Oh, damn it
all, Traherne, it’s not easy for a person never to open his mouth! But
Tassar’s got the secret of that. He must get it from my father. There
was a man for you! You wouldn’t have dared to talk to him like this.”
Several times during this long outburst, Mr. Traherne’s fingers had
caused pain to Ricoletto. But now he flung out his long arms and
clutched Brand fiercely by the shoulders.
“Pray--you poor lost soul,” he shouted, “pray the great God above us to
have mercy upon you and have mercy upon us all!”
His arms trembled as he uttered these words and, hardly conscious
of what he was doing, he shook the heavy frame of the man before him
backwards and forwards as if he had been a child in his hands. There
was dead silence for several seconds and, unheeded by either of them, a
weasel ran furtively across the path and disappeared among the trees.
The damp odours of moss and leaf-mould rose up around them and, between
the motionless branches above, the stars shone like pin-pricks through
black parchment. Suddenly Brand broke away with a harsh laugh.
“Enough of this!” he cried. “We’ve had enough melodramatic nonsense
for one night. You’d better go back to bed, Traherne, or you’ll be
oversleeping yourself to-morrow and my mother will miss her matins.”
He held out his hand.
“Good night!--and sleep soundly!” he added, in his accustomed dull,
sarcastic tone.
The priest sighed heavily and groped about on the ground for the hat
he had dropped. Just as he had secured it and was moving off, Brand
called out to him laughingly,
“Don’t you believe a word of what I said just now. I’m not drunk at all.
I was only fooling. I’m just a common ruffian who knows a pretty face
when he sees it. Talk to Linda about me and see what she says!” He
strode off up the avenue and the priest turned heavily on his heel.
XV
BROKEN VOICES
Nance and Linda were not long in growing accustomed to their new mode
of life. Nance, after her London experiences, found Miss Pontifex’
little work-room, looking out on a pleasant garden, a place of refuge
rather than of irksome labour. The young girls under her charge were
good-tempered and docile; and Miss Pontifex herself--an excitable
little woman with extravagantly genteel manners, and a large Wedgewood
brooch under her chin--seemed to think that the girl’s presence in the
establishment would redound immensely to its reputation and distinction.
“I’m a conservative born and bred,” she remarked to Nance, “and I can
tell a lady out of a thousand. I won’t say what I might say about the
people here. But we know--we know what we think.”
Nance’s intimate knowledge of the more recondite aspects of the trade
took an immense load off the little dressmaker’s mind. She had more
time to devote to her garden, which was her deepest passion, and it
filled her with pride to be able to say to her friends, “Miss Herrick
from Dyke House works with me now. Her father was a Captain in the
Royal Navy.”
The month of July went by without any further agitating incidents.
As far as Nance knew, Brand left Linda in peace, and the young girl,
though looking weary and spiritless, seemed to be reconciling herself
fairly well to the loss of him and to be deriving definite distraction
and satisfaction from her progress in organ-playing. Day by day in the
early afternoon, she would cross the bridge, under all changes of the
weather, and make her way to the church. Her mornings were spent in
household duties, so that her sister might be free to give her whole
time to the work in the shop, and in the evenings, when it was pleasant
to be out of doors, they both helped Miss Pontifex watering her phloxes
and delphiniums.
Nance herself--as July drew to its close and the wheat fields turned
yellow--was at once happier and less happy in her relations with Sorio.
Her happiness came from the fact that he treated her now more gently
and considerately than he had ever done before; her unhappiness from
the fact that he had grown more reserved and a queer sort of nervous
depression seemed hanging over him. She knew he still saw Philippa,
but what the relations between the two were, or how far any lasting
friendship had arisen between them, it was impossible to discover. They
certainly never met now, under conditions open to the intrusion of
Rodmoor scandal.
Nance went more than once, before July was over, to see Rachel Doorm,
and the days when these visits occurred were the darkest and saddest
of all she passed through during that time. The mistress of Dyke House
seemed to be rapidly degenerating. Nance was horrified to find how
inert and indifferent to everything she had come to be. The interior
of the house was now as dusty and untidy as the garden was desolate,
and judging from her manner on the last visit she paid, the girl began
to fear she had found the same solace in her loneliness as that which
consoled her father.
Nance made one desperate attempt to improve matters. Without saying
anything to Miss Doorm, she carried with her to the house one of Mrs.
Raps’ own buxom daughters, who was quite prepared, for an infinitesimal
compensation, to go every day to help her. But this arrangement
collapsed hopelessly. On the third day after her first appearance, the
young woman returned to her home, and with indignant tears declared she
had been “thrown out of the nasty place.”
One evening at the end of the month, just as the sisters were preparing
to go out for a stroll together, their landlady, with much effusion and
agitation, ushered in Mrs. Renshaw. Tired with walking, and looking
thinner and whiter than usual, she seemed extremely glad to sit down on
their little sofa and sip the raspberry vinegar which Nance hastened
to prepare. She ate some biscuits, too, as if she were faint for want
of food, but all the time she ate there was in her air an apologetic,
deprecatory manner, as though eating had been a gross vice or as though
never in her life before had she eaten in public. She kept imploring
Nance to share the refreshment, and it was not until the girl made at
least a pretence of doing so that she seemed to recover her peace of
mind.
Her great, hollow, brown eyes kept surveying the little apartment with
nervous admiration. “I like it here,” she remarked at last. “I like
little rooms much better than large ones.” She picked up from the
table a well-worn copy of Palgrave’s “Golden Treasury” and Nance had
never seen her face light up so suddenly as when, turning the pages
at random, she chanced upon Keats’ “Ode to Autumn.” “I know that by
heart,” she said, “every word of it. I used to teach it to Philippa.
You’ve no idea how nicely she used to say it. But she doesn’t care for
poetry any more. She reads more learned books, more clever books now.
She’s got beyond me. Both my children have got beyond me.” She sighed
heavily and Nance, with a sense of horrible pity, seemed to visualize
her--happy in little rooms and with little anthologies of old-world
verse--condemned to the devastating isolation of Oakguard.
“I see you’ve got ‘The Bride of Lammermoor’ up there,” she remarked
presently, and rising impetuously from her seat on the sofa, she took
the book in her hands. Nance never forgot the way she touched it, or
the infinite softness that came into her eyes as she murmured, “Poor
Lucy! Poor Lucy!” and began turning the pages.
Suddenly another book caught her attention and she took down “Humphrey
Clinker” from the shelf. “Oh!” she cried, a faint flush coming into
her sunken cheeks, “I haven’t seen that book for years and years. I
used to read it before I was married. I think Smollett was a very great
writer, don’t you? But I suppose young people nowadays find him too
simple for their taste. That poor dear Mr. Bramble! And all that part
about Tabitha, too! I seem to remember it all. I believe Dickens used
to like Smollett. At least, I think I read somewhere that he did. I
expect he liked that wonderful mixture of humour and pathos, though of
course, when it comes to that, I suppose none of them can equal Dickens
himself.”
As Mrs. Renshaw uttered these words and caressed the tattered volume
she held as if it had been made of pure gold, her face became
irradiated with a look of such innocent and guileless spirituality,
that Nance, in a hurried act of mental contrition, wiped out of her
memory every moment when she had not loved her. “What she must suffer!”
the girl said to herself as she watched her. “What she must _have_
suffered--with those people in that great house.”
Mrs. Renshaw sighed as she replaced the book in the shelf. “Writers
seem to have got so clever in these last years,” she said plaintively.
“They use so many long words. I wonder where they get them from--out of
dictionaries, do you think?--and they hurt me, they hurt me, by the way
they speak of our beloved religion. They can’t _all_ of them be great
philosophers like Spinoza and Schopenhauer, can they? They can’t all of
them be going to give the world new and comforting thoughts? I don’t
like their sharp, snappy, sarcastic tone. And oh, Nance dear!”--she
returned to her seat on the sofa--“I can’t bear their slang! Why is it
that they feel they must use so much slang, do you think? I suppose
they want to make their books seem real, but _I_ don’t hear real people
talking like that. But perhaps it comes from America. American writers
seem extraordinarily clever, and American dictionaries--for Dr. Raughty
showed me one--seem much bigger than ours.”
She was silent for a while and then, looking gently at Linda, “I think
it’s wonderful, dear, how well you play now. I thought last Sunday
evening you played the hymns better than I’ve ever heard them! But they
were beautiful hymns, weren’t they? That last one was my favourite of
all.”
Once more she was silent, and Nance seemed to catch her lips moving,
as she fixed her great sorrowful eyes upon the book-shelf, and began
slowly pulling on her gloves.
“I must be going now,” she said, with a little sigh. “I thank you for
the raspberry vinegar and the biscuits. I think I was tired. I didn’t
sleep very well last night. Good-bye, dears. No, don’t, please, come
down. I can let myself out. It’s a lovely evening, isn’t it, and the
poppies in the cornfields are quite red now. I can see a big patch of
them from our terrace, just across the river. Poppies always make me
think of the days when I was a young girl. We used to think a lot of
them then. We used to make fairies out of them.”
Nance insisted on seeing her into the street. When she entered the room
again, she was not altogether surprised to find Linda convulsed with
sobs. “I can’t--I can’t help it,” gasped the young girl. “She’s too
pitiful. She’s too sad. You feel you want to hug her and hug her, but
you’re afraid even to touch her hand!” She made an effort to recover
herself, and then, with the tears still on her cheeks, “Nance dear,”
she said solemnly, “I don’t believe she’ll live to the end of this
year. I believe, one of these days, when the Autumn comes, we shall
hear she’s been found dead in her bed. Nance, listen!”--and the young
girl’s voice became awe-struck and very solemn--“won’t it be dreadful
for _those two_, over there, when they find her like that, and feel how
little they’ve done to make her happy? Can’t you imagine it, Nance?
The wind wailing and wailing round that house, and she lying there all
white and dreadful--and Philippa with a candle standing over her--”
“Why do you say ‘with a candle’?” said Nance brusquely. “You’re talking
wildly and exaggerating everything. If they found her in the morning,
like that, Philippa wouldn’t come with a candle.”
Linda stared dreamily out of the window. “No, I suppose not,” she said,
“and yet I can’t see it without Philippa holding a candle. And there’s
something else I see, too,” she added in a lower voice.
“I don’t want--” Nance began and then, more gently, “_What_ else, you
silly child?”
“Philippa’s red lips,” she murmured softly, “red as if she’d put
rouge on them. Do you think she ever does put rouge on them? That’s,
I suppose, what made me think of the candle. I seemed to see it
flickering against her mouth. Oh, I’m silly--I’m silly, I know, but I
couldn’t help seeing it like that--her lips, I mean.”
“You’re morbid to-day, Linda,” said Nance abruptly. “Well? Shall we
go to the garden? I feel as though carrying watering-pots and doing
weeding will be good for both of us.”
While this conversation was going on between the sisters in their High
Street lodging, Sorio and Baltazar were seated together on a bench by
the harbour’s side. The tide was flowing in and cool sea-breaths, mixed
with the odour of tar and paint and fisherman’s tobacco, floated in
upon them as they talked.
“It’s absurd to have any secrets between you and me,” Sorio was saying,
his face reflecting the light of the sunset as it poured down the
river’s surface to where they sat. “When I become quite impossible to
you as a companion, I suppose you’ll tell me so and turn me out. But
until then I’m going to assume that I interest you and don’t bore you.”
“It isn’t a question of boring any one,” replied the other. “You
annoyed me just now because I thought you were making no effort
to control yourself. You seemed trying to rake up every repulsive
sensation you’ve ever had and thrust it down my throat. Bored?
Certainly I wasn’t bored! On the contrary, I was much more what you
might call _bitten_. You go so far, my dear, you go so far!”
“I don’t call that going far at all,” said Sorio sulkily. “What’s the
use of living together if we can’t talk of everything? Besides, you
didn’t let me finish. What I wanted to say was that for some reason
or other, I’ve lately got to a point when every one I meet--every
mortal person, and especially every stranger--strikes me as odious and
disgusting. I’ve had the feeling before but never quite like this. It’s
not a pleasant feeling, my dear, I can assure you of that!”
“But what do you mean--what do you mean by odious and disgusting?”
threw in the other. “I suppose they’re made in the same way we are.
Flesh and blood is flesh and blood, after all.”
As Baltazar said this, what he thought in his mind was much as
follows: “Adriano is evidently going mad again. This kind of thing is
one of the symptoms. I like having him here with me. I like looking at
his face when he’s excited. He has a beautiful face--it’s more purely
antique in its moulding than half the ancient cameos. I especially like
looking at him when he’s harassed and outraged. He has a dilapidated
wistfulness at those times which exactly suits my taste. I should miss
Adriano frightfully if he went away. No one I’ve ever lived with suits
me better. I can annoy him when I like and I can appease him when I
like. He fills me with a delicious sense of power. If only Philippa
would leave him alone, and that Herrick girl would stop persecuting
him, he’d suit me perfectly. I like him when his nerves are quivering
and twitching. I like the ‘wounded-animal look’ he has then. But it’s
these accursed girls who spoil it all. Of course it’s their work,
this new mania. They carry everything so far! I like him to get wild
and desperate but I don’t want him mad. These girls stick at nothing.
They’d drive him into an asylum if they could, poor helpless devil!”
While these thoughts slid gently through Stork’s head, his friend was
already answering his question about “flesh and blood.” “It’s just that
which gets on my nerves,” he said. “I can stand it when I’m talking to
you because I forget everything except your mind, and I can stand it
when I’m making love to a girl, because I forget everything but--”
“Don’t say her body!” threw in Baltazar.
“I wasn’t going to,” snarled the other. “I know it isn’t their bodies
one thinks of. It’s--it’s--what the devil is it? It’s something much
deeper than that. Well, never mind! What I want to say is this. With
you and Raughty, and a few others who really interest me, I forget the
whole thing. _You_ are individuals to me. I’m interested in you, and I
forget what you’re like, or that you have flesh at all.
“It’s when I come upon people I’m neither in love with nor interested
in, that I have this sensation, and of course,” and he surveyed a group
of women who at that moment were raising angry voices from an archway
on the further side of the harbour, “and of course I have it every day.”
Stork looked at him with absorbed attention, holding between his
fingers an unlit cigarette. “What exactly _is_ the feeling you have?”
he enquired gently.
The light on Sorio’s face had faded with the fading of the glow on
the water. There began to fall upon the place where they sat, upon
the cobble-stones of the little quay, upon the wharf steps, slimy
with green seaweed, upon the harbour mud and the tarred gunwales
of the gently rocking barges, upon the pallid tide flowing inland
with gurglings and suckings and lappings and long-drawn sighs, that
indescribable sense of the coming on of night at a river’s mouth, which
is like nothing else in the world. It is, as it were, the meeting of
two infinite vistas of imaginative suggestion--the sense of the mystery
of the boundless horizons sea-ward, and the more human mystery of
the unknown distance inland, its vague fields and marshes and woods
and silent gardens--blending there together in a suspended breath of
ineffable possibility, sad and tender, and touching the margin of what
cannot be uttered.
“What is it?” repeated Sorio dreamily, and in a low melancholy voice.
“How can I tell you what it is? It’s a knowledge of the inner truth,
I suppose. It’s the fact that I’ve come to know, at last, what human
beings are really like. I’ve come to see them stripped and naked--no!
worse than that--I’ve come to see them _flayed_. I’ve got to the point,
Tassar, my friend, when I see the world _as it is_, and I can tell you
it’s not a pleasant sight!”
Baltazar Stork regarded him with a look of the most exquisite pity,
a pity which was not the less genuine because the emotion that
accompanied it was one of indescribable pleasure. In the presence of
his friend’s massive face and powerful figure he felt deliciously
delicate and frail, but with this sense of fragility came a feeling
of indescribable power--the power of a mind that is capable of
contemplating with equanimity a view of things at which another
staggers and shivers and grows insane. It was allotted to Baltazar by
the secret forces of the universe to know during that hour, one of the
most thrilling moments of his life.
“To get to the point I’ve reached,” continued Sorio gently, watching
the colour die out from the water’s surface and a whitish glimmer,
silvery and phantom-like, take its place, “means to sharpen one’s
senses to a point of terrible receptivity. In fact, until you can hear
the hearts of people beating--until you can hear their contemptible
lusts hissing and writhing in their veins, like evil snakes--you
haven’t reached the point. You haven’t reached it until you can smell
the graveyard--yes! The graveyard of all mortality--in the cleanest
flesh you approach. You haven’t reached it till every movement people
make, every word they speak, betrays them for what they are, betrays
the vulture on the wing, and the hyena on the prowl. You haven’t
reached it till you feel ready to cry out, like a child in a nightmare,
and beat the air with your hands, so suffocating is the pressure of
loathsome living bodies--bodies marked and sealed and printed with the
signs of death and decomposition!”
Baltazar Stork struck a match and lit his cigarette.
“Well?” he remarked, stretching out his legs and leaning back on the
wooden bench. “Well? The world is like that, then. You’ve found it
out. You know it. You’ve made the wonderful discovery. Why can’t you
smoke cigarettes, then, and make love to your lovely friends, and let
the whole thing go? You’ll be dead yourself in a year or two in any
case.
“Adriano dear,” he lowered his voice to an impressive whisper, “shall I
tell you something? You are making all this fuss and driving yourself
desperate about a thing which doesn’t really concern you in the least.
It’s not your business if the world does reek like a carcass. It’s
not your business if people’s brains are full of poisonous snakes and
their bellies of greedy lecheries. It’s not your business--do you
understand--if human flesh smells of the graveyard. Your affair, my
boy, is to get what amusement you can out of it and make yourself as
comfortable as you can in it. It might be worse, it might be better. It
doesn’t really make much difference either way.
“Listen to me, Adriano! I say to you now, as we sit at this moment
watching this water, unless you get rid of this new mania of yours,
you’ll end as you did in America. You’ll simply go mad again, my dear,
and that would be uncomfortable for you and extremely inconvenient
for me. The world is not _meant_ to be taken seriously. It’s meant to
be handled as you’d handle a troublesome girl. Take what amuses you
and let the rest go to the devil! Anything else--and I know what I’m
talking about--tends to simple misery.
“Heigh ho! But it’s a most delicious evening! What nonsense all this
talk of ours is! Look at that boy over there. He’s not worrying himself
about grave-yards. Here, Harry! Tommy! Whatever you call yourself--come
here! I want to speak to you.”
The child addressed was a ragged barelegged urchin, of about eleven,
who had been for some while slowly gravitating around the two men. He
came at once, at Baltazar’s call, and looked at them both, wonderingly
and quizzically.
“Got any pictures?” he asked. Stork nodded and, opening a new box of
cigarettes, handed the boy a little oblong card stamped with the arms
of some royal European dynasty. “I likes the Honey-Dew ones best,”
remarked the boy, “them as has the sport cards in ’em.”