_A Closed Incident_
A week later he very nearly did kill her. The good which men imagine,
and the diminished version of it which, when it actually takes place,
has so little recognizable likeness to the thing desired, found
exemplification in this event. For though Mr. Trimblerigg had often
wished Davidina out of life, it was a serious shock to him when by
sheer accident he one day pushed her into the water, and was forced for
a considerable while to believe that she was drowned.
It happened late one evening, on the edge of night, as brother and
sister were returning from a shopping expedition, upon which, rather
against his will, he had been forced to accompany her to help carry
parcels. Taking the short way back, they came by a wood to the home
fields at a point where a deep flowing stream was crossed by a narrow
foot-bridge. There had been rain; the plank was slippery, the stream
in flood; it was getting dark. Mr. Trimblerigg thought that he was
carrying more than his share of the parcels, and the unappreciative
companionship of Davidina had made him cross. Embarked upon the plank
Davidina suddenly stopped to change over her parcels so as to get help
of the hand-rail; and Mr. Trimblerigg coming close behind gave her an
impatient nudge harder than he knew.
With an exasperated scream Davidina missing the hand-rail toppled and
swung sideways. With quaint heroism she threw him her parcels as she
descended streamwards. Two of them Mr. Trimblerigg managed to field;
the third made the lethal plunge after her, and being of lighter
substance jaunted gaily along the swift current into which she had
wholly disappeared.
For a few ghastly seconds that seemed like the threshold of eternity,
Mr. Trimblerigg, encumbered with his parcels, stood fixed. The thought
flashed that here and now he had done something that he could not
help, for he remembered that he did not swim; and though it was a pure
accident, he had a swift apprehension that this would be a difficult
and also a humiliating matter to explain truthfully. It was a very
serious drawback for any young man at the beginning of his ministerial
career to push his sister into the water and then have her drown;
stated in the mildest terms it showed incompetence; and Mr. Trimblerigg
had already begun to pride himself more than most on his efficiency in
an emergency.
Luckily, however, nobody had actually seen him give the push; so, if
the worst came to the worst, the story would be his own to tell. In the
meantime he could but do his best to put matters right. ‘I’m really
awfully sorry!’ he said to himself.
While these or similar thoughts were dividing his swift mind in the
couple of seconds that had ensued, there was no reappearance of
Davidina. Although the fact that he could not swim made direct action
difficult, to attempt her rescue was a debt of honour which did not
brook delay. Fleet-footed he crossed the plank, deposited his parcels,
and began to race down-stream. If he could not actually rescue her, he
must at least keep her in sight and give her all the encouragement in
his power. Sight of the floating parcel bobbing against a willow bough
seemed to suggest her present whereabouts.
Casting off his coat as he stumbled along the bank to outpace the
current, he clutched at an overhanging bough and plunged boldly in. His
feet touched bottom: he came up again and crying, ‘Davidina, where are
you?’ felt about him in all directions with his disengaged hand for the
life which had so unexpectedly become dear to him. He encountered the
parcel, captured it as a small proof of his efficiency and threw it to
land. The stream seemed otherwise quite unoccupied. He called again but
got no answer.
In order to be thorough, he took another plunge higher up and two
others lower down where boughs offered suitable assistance. Each time
his feet touched bottom and his hand found emptiness. Had it then
struck him to venture further and try walking across the stream, it
might have puzzled him how so capable a person as Davidina should have
managed to get drowned. But this he did not do; he continued to call
upon her in loud appealing tones, and to repeat his dip, approximating
to total immersion, at various points up and down stream.
He could not but feel that these scattered attempts were of a somewhat
desultory and speculative character, and that the drowning Davidina,
could she have known of them, would not have been satisfied. But
Davidina’s standard was always an exacting one, and as he had failed
to live up to it in the past, so he must needs fail now. Nevertheless
these repeated immersions in water that was so astonishingly cold did
at least give his conscience the absolution it required. He could say
at the inquest, and afterwards, that he had done his best; what a poor
best that happened to be was nobody’s concern but his own.
And so, here and there, up and down, he probed for the dear departed;
and only when quite convinced that his universe was empty of Davidina
did he quit the scene of the disaster and run off to fetch help.
Poles, ropes, lanterns, and presently a drag-net gave to subsequent
efforts a surface appearance of efficiency which his own had lacked;
but below the surface, where lay all that mattered, they were attended
with no more success. No body was found.
Going home to his bereaved family the gasping youth told a tale which
was readily believed. His exhaustion, his lively distress, his drenched
condition, and his chattering teeth gave evidence of the ordeal he had
passed through, and verification to a story which nobody had any reason
to doubt. He told how Davidina had lost her footing and tumbled in, and
he, plunging after, had twice caught hold of her clothing; and how one
garment had come off in his hand, and another had given way. Only when
she sank from view, after diving for her repeatedly in vain, did he
relinquish his saving efforts.
This was the story in its second telling; others down by the stream, in
the intervals of their search work, had heard it all before; and there
was so little to alter from the facts, so little to leave out, that at
second hearing he had already become convinced of its truth; and only
the sight of Davidina standing at the door, carrying the parcels he
had forgotten, reminded him, with ‘that sinking feeling’ out of which
patent medicines make their fortune, that another version of the story
existed and would probably be told.
In the next few minutes he got the surprise of his life: Davidina did
not tell it. She had, it is true, something of her own to tell which
was a departure from fact; for she said the stream had carried her down
a mile and over the weir, at which point she had got upon her feet
and waded out; whereas having fallen from the bridge on the upstream
side she had become entangled in its central timbers, and after keeping
low for a while and watching her brother safely out of sight along the
further bank, had climbed out again and gone back into the wood. And
there, I regret to say, she had wilfully stayed--warming herself with
sharp exercise the while--listening to Mr. Trimblerigg’s intermittent
cries of distress, watching the flit of lanterns, hearing the harsh
shouts of the search-party, and calculating coolly how long they would
take to give up quest for the body that was not there.
And her motive for all this? Her motive was to give Mr. Trimblerigg his
chance: his chance to tell the truth, or to do otherwise, just as he
chose.
Now was this charitable of her? I do not know. I only know that she
genuinely thought it would do him good: to give him the chance, just
once, of his own accord, to tell something against himself, bad for
his moral credit, bad for his future prospects, and bad for his
self-esteem. And yet, though that may have been her motive, I doubt
whether it was not practically overborne by her sharp appreciative
foresight of the actual shaping of the event.
After waiting for well over an hour to give her brother all the rope he
needed to tie himself up in glory, she crossed the bridge, collected
the parcels, his as well as hers, and went home. And so well had she
timed herself that it was just as the second telling finished that she
entered.
It took the family some moments to get over their surprise; but Mrs.
Trimblerigg, an eminently practical woman, did not let them wait for
questions now. She ran them up to their rooms, got them out of their
wet clothes, then brought them down again, bundled in hot blankets to
sit opposite each other by the fire; and now to be heard once more,
telling their tale more fully each in their own way.
And since Mr. Trimblerigg pleaded exhaustion, his proud mother told
it herself; and Davidina listened gratefully, fixing upon her brother
Jonathan a kind and considerate regard. Her mother told it all
accurately, just as she had heard it from Jonathan; and when it had all
been rehearsed in her ears--our own Mr. Trimblerigg sitting opposite
the while and furtively regarding her, rather like a Skye terrier that
has just been washed and whipped--she said not a word to question the
accuracy of the story. She accepted it; and when her mother said that
she ought to feel most grateful to brother Jonathan for all he had done
in trying to save her at the risk of his own life, she said that she
was. She said also that the last thing she remembered was his voice
calling, ‘Davidina, where are you?’ And as, weary and weak of tone, she
thus corroborated his story, she gave him a friendly look and a faint
smile; and then shut her eyes at him, as if to say, ‘The incident is
now closed.’
And so upon Davidina’s side, as far as words went, it was. But with
the mere shutting of her eyes she gave Mr. Trimblerigg a sleepless
night; and for many nights and days after, she held him in a grip
from which there was no escape. And then some of her answers to
the maternal inquiries would flash into his memory with a horribly
disturbing effect. ‘But Davidina, however did you come to bring the
parcels along?’ ‘I went back for them: I thought Jonathan might have
forgotten them; and so he had.’ And when Mr. Trimblerigg defended such
forgetfulness as being only natural under the circumstances, Davidina
replied, ‘He didn’t forget the other parcel, he saved that.’
‘Which parcel?’
‘The one that fell in. He saw that, and thought it was me, and swam
after it; and it must have been a sort of satisfaction saving that, as
he couldn’t get me.’
Such clairvoyance was horrible; it was as if her eye had flown with him
like a firefly in the night watching every movement not of his body
only but of his mind as well? And what made it so much more terrible
was that he could not understand her motive, or how it was to end.
But day followed day, and no revelation was made; his story stood
uncorrected; neighbours came to call and congratulate and at each
occasion the story was told again. Sometimes Mr. Trimblerigg himself
was made to tell it, in spite of a modest reluctance which grew and
grew; and there always sat Davidina listening with kind eyes and a
friendly smile. Then the eyes would shut suddenly, and the smile would
remain.
When she had done this to him two or three times, Mr. Trimblerigg was
ready to scream; and when she also did it to him the first time they
were alone together, he wanted either to die or to murder her. Then,
finding he could do neither, he gathered up his courage and was about
to speak. But it was no good. Davidina opened her eyes again.
‘I’ve god a horrid gold,’ she said, flattening her consonants in comic
imitation of a stage Jew. ‘Dat cubs of falling indo de warder.’
She blew her nose meticulously (as certain modern writers would
say), creating an atmosphere which made confession impossible. Mr.
Trimblerigg had not a word left that he could utter.
Now, that Mr. Trimblerigg should have been puzzled by Davidina’s
acquiescence in the story he had told--that he should have been
puzzled, that is to say, after perceiving what use she put it
to--reveals the irreflective streak which was always dividing him from
self-knowledge, and was presently to do him so much more mischief.
Holding her tongue had given Davidina a power over him which no
exposure of his face-saving art of tale-telling could have equalled.
The ignominy of that would have blown over; or he could stoutly have
denied the push altogether, declaring it a figment of her imagination;
and had she forced him to denial often enough he would have come to
believe it true. But by saying nothing Davidina stewed him in his own
juice without a bubble to show for it; and the tender mercy of her eyes
made him sensitive where the accusation of her tongue would only have
hardened him.
What Davidina loved was power; and power economically exercised is a
far subtler luxury than power which requires repeated effort to sustain
it. Davidina by doing nothing had acquired power not material but
spiritual; and ‘Thou, Davidina, seest me,’ became more truly the motto
of his life day by day.
But the reason why Mr. Trimblerigg failed to read her motive while
wincing under the results, was partly because power of so static a kind
had no attraction for him whatever, and partly because it contradicted
the fundamental notion of his whole scheme of life--that he was a
man, namely, of virtuous character, one with a destiny of resplendent
goodness lying ahead of him. Across that conception of himself
Davidina’s contrary conception struck like cataract of the eye. The two
views could not co-exist. Without his quite realizing it, Davidina’s
reading of his character threatened to drive his own out.
In the privacy of his own chamber he had more than once sat down to
write his own epitaph--the epitaph which he liked to think would appear
on his entablature in that day when Free Churchmen had got the run of
Westminster Abbey to burrow in. With the art of simplicity after much
trouble he had boiled it down to three words, ‘Little--but good.’ And
if that were to represent finally and truthfully his work on earth,
what place was there for Davidina’s rival epitaph to stand, if, as
he half-suspected, it found its expression in the words, ‘Good--for
nothing.’
If I had made him good (and surely I had done that, he thought) was it
to be ‘for nothing’ after all? Before he could believe that, he must
give up his faith. And when he said ‘faith,’ he never understood that
it meant, and meant only, faith in himself.
So silently, invisible, with imperceptible pace, mind against mind,
Davidina tightened her grip.
One struggle to escape from the blast of her continued silence he made;
but it was no good. New callers had come with their congratulations,
and the story was to be repeated once more. Summoned to a fresh drench
of ignominy under his sister’s calm gaze, Mr. Trimblerigg had a flash
of inspiration. He laughed jovially. ‘Oh, I just pushed her into the
water,’ he said; ‘so of course I had to go after her. I tried to save
her; but Davidina preferred to save herself. And that’s all there was
to it!’
The visitors laughed, thinking what a very charming and modest young
man he was. And Davidina laughed too.