THE HOME STRETCH
I
The next day we were five at the Hotel de la Poste. We sat long after
luncheon, on the creeper-awninged terrace that overhangs the Petits
Fosses. The other tables had long since been cleared, but the waiters,
smelling thunder in the air, kept well away from ours.
My heart was sore for Alec too. Officially he had been driven to accept
the sworn but unbelievable statement; in his heart he neither understood
nor believed one single word of it. It was so unlike the engineering and
Rugby football that he did understand. That to which his mind always
returned was the plain meaning of these words: Treachery, Seduction and
Falsehood.
Madge's reception of the incredible thing had been one of the most
extraordinary experiences I ever had in my life. She and Alec had
arrived in Dinan at nine o'clock and had come straight to my hotel. At a
quarter past nine I had locked my bedroom door against the interrupting
bootboys and chambermaids who busied themselves on staircases and
landings. The morning stir also filled the courtyard below. Jennie and
Derry I had told to keep out of the way until lunch-time. I had hastily
covered my bed, and Madge had sat down on the edge of it. During the
whole of the time I had talked, half a dozen Alecs in the various
mirrors had met and re-met one another as he had paced the room.
First of all she had drawn an extraordinarily deep breath. Then slowly
she had pressed her fingertips over her eyelids. Her lips had moved
under the little eaves made by her hands. She had had the air of trying
to see something anew, to see a succession of things anew, and to name
them as they came. She had sat there for quite two minutes, eyes hidden,
lips moving, seeing, repeating....
Then, "The Club----" she had breathed.
And then, "Queen's Gate----"
I had found myself nodding.
"His brother--Arnaud--sketching----"
She was well away now.
Then suddenly her hands had dropped, she had stared at me, and a shrill
cry had broken explosively from her.
"The Beautiful Bear! Derwent Rose! I knew it, I knew it, I knew it!...
George Coverham, tell me--is it? _Is_ it?"
"It is."
"That afternoon--looking at himself in the picture--his brother in
Queen's Gate--Arnaud--Derwent Rose--I knew it, I knew it all the
time----"
And she had slid with my coverlet gently to the floor.
And she did in fact recognise him--did pick out, as it were through some
bright reversed telescope of time, that still-sealed but identical
beauty of the grown man she had found so superb. He was like, as a son
is like a father, as for a fleeting instant a newly-born babe may
resemble a grandparent. She had wished to meet Derwent Rose. She had now
met him, at this far end of a corridor of years.
And I had had to pick her up from where she crouched, on a coverlet on
my bedroom floor.
But give her a little time--the time to pull herself together--and you
could no more have persuaded Madge that it was not so than you could
have got Alec to believe it was.
"But why wasn't I told all this at once?" he had demanded, not twice or
thrice, but twenty times. "Are you telling me now, or am I wrong in my
head? Why didn't you? Why didn't you? Then he could have been put where
he belongs--in the asylum yonder----"
And again, and yet again: "You brought him to my house, you brought him
to my house! You practically introduced him under a French name--you
didn't contradict it anyway--you knew all about him--and I wasn't
told--I'm only told after he's stolen my girl! Why didn't you tell me,
Coverham?"
But I considered that I had less to reproach myself with than he
thought. I had done everything in my power to isolate him, to keep her
out of his path. Madge, not I, had asked him to Ker Annic. Madge had
invited herself to his hotel in St Briac. He had given me his word, I
had trusted to it, and he had broken it. And had I at any time told Alec
the truth he would no more have comprehended it than he did now.
So he had railed bitterly on, turning the nightmare over and over again,
meeting and re-meeting himself in the mirrors, very much as Derwent Rose
had met and re-met himself in the windings of his marvellous life.
"Oh, we're mad! We're all mad! Any chance of our waking up? And you talk
to me about somebody called Derwent Rose as if I ought to know all about
the fellow the moment you mention his name! I never heard of a Derwent
Rose in my life! Who the devil is Derwent Rose anyway?"
This at any rate Madge had been able to tell him.
"But he says he's never written a book in his life! Who should know if
he doesn't?"
I made another attempt.
"The idea, Alec, is that that is a corroboration of the whole thing. He
doesn't remember that he ever wrote a book, and I've a notion it would
be safer not to try to make him remember. Another thing, Alec. You say
I'm mad. But you can have absolutely independent evidence any time you
like. Julia Oliphant's in Dinard. She knows nothing of what's happening
in this room. Go to her and tell her, from me, that she's to tell you
all she knows about a man called Derwent Rose. Then see what she says."
"And you say you're going to make a legal adoption of something that's
shaped like a man but ought to be kept in a padded room?"
"I am if it's possible. The letter's written and in the box. All we can
do is to wait till I've had a reply to it."
"Oh, we're all daft, we're all daft!" he had cried, his head in his
hands.
And that was still his burden--that we were all daft. I will not deny
that there seemed something to be said for it.
My letter to my solicitors had taken me the best part of the night to
write. I wanted to be sure of the position without divulging too much.
Derwent Rose existed; the record of his birth was to be found in
Somerset House among the files for the year 1875, and nowhere was there
a certificate of his death. If Derwent Rose as he now in fact was ought
properly to have been born in the year 1902 or thereabouts, the thought
had come to me that this difference might be bridged by my own legal
adoption of him. Discreetly I had asked for information on this point.
If the thing was feasible, Derry would then be George Coverham's son,
and his marriage to Alec Aird's daughter would follow immediately. I had
not seen what fairer offer I could make, and even Alec had grudgingly
agreed--until the whole thing had once more overwhelmed him, and he had
cried out that we were all daft and ought to be locked up.
That creeper-hung terrace at the back of the Hotel de la Poste will
probably never crash with its diners and waiters down into the moat
below, but it always looks as if it might. A few slender iron struts
stepped on to the old corbels of the wall below support it; for the rest
it is suspended in the air, high as the nests in the great elms
opposite, part of the ivy of the outer wall on which the hotel is built.
Save for its screen of creeper it is open to the sky, and its dozen or
so tables stand behind the great letters you read from the Fosse far
below--HOTEL DE LA POSTE.
And if from the ramparts by St Sauveur you see the shirley poppies of
the sunset in the east, here you see the sun himself, burning
intolerable holes through the elms, and turning the creeper into a
crewelwork of flame and the valerian of the walls to dark blood.
But this was only after lunch, with the sun just outlining the wall to
our left with brightness and shining on the fruit and cheese and
coffee-cups which the waiters were itching to clear away. In the
promenade below, absurd little hats put forth little feet, now fore,
now aft, as they went about their affairs. Derry's eyes were musingly on
the walkers. Alec had compelled himself to sit at the same table with
us, though his own meal had consisted of nothing but a bottle of wine. A
few moments before he had uttered a grunt, that had been understood to
mean that, since there was nothing for it but to wait for letters from
London, we might as well wait at Ker Annic as here.
Suddenly Derry removed his eyes from the hats below and looked at Alec,
deferentially but obstinately.
"Speaking for myself, sir----"
Though he had nothing of Alec but his profile, he went on.
"If you don't mind I shall not come. Sir George has tried to explain to
you, and I've tried to explain to you, that there was nothing for it but
the way I took. We've agreed it's no good going into all that again.
Call it my pigheadedness if you like; I can't very well object to
anything you call me; but I won't come. I'll come, if I'm still asked,
when everything's settled up. And that should be a week at the outside."
Alec turned. It was plain that he would loathe his son-in-law, when he
became that, to the end of his days.
"It will or it won't," he growled.
"It can't be much longer than that, sir."
"Can't it? Let me tell you how it can. I may have to swallow that insane
yarn for the moment; you've left me very little choice--took dashed good
care of that. But you've got to find somebody else crazy enough to get
it down yet."
"What do you mean, Alec?" I interposed.
"Any English parson," Alec flung over his shoulder as he rose and walked
away.
Derry sighed as his broad back disappeared into the hotel. When you have
cut a knot it is difficult to tie it again. The straightforward course
of his choice seemed little less crooked than the other. Almost it
seemed a mistake after all.
II
I perfectly well understood Derry's scruple about going to Ker Annic. It
was the kind of scruple I should have liked a son of mine to have.
Except as a husband he had no footing in that house, and except as a
husband he refused to enter it. I think he would have given much to have
been able to say that he never had set foot in it, but that milk was
spilt.
But Jennie would never be torn from his side, and the chances were that
Madge would not now be torn from Jennie's. So it looked as if either
Alec must return to Dinard alone or else stay with us at the Poste and
make the best of it.
Half an hour before lunch Madge had done an odd thing. She had called me
away for a moment from Alec's side, and had asked me in which house in
the Rue de la Cordonnerie I had found them. She had also wanted to know
Madame Carguet's name. Then she had gone off.... I had seen her embrace
of Jennie on her return. Her hand now once more stole to Jennie's as,
with Alec's departure, we continued to sit at the table.
Again Derry sighed, but I think it was a little wilfully that he dwelt
on the gloomier side, and that it was not altogether unmixed despair. We
do allow ourselves these little luxuries at eighteen or thereabouts.
"Well, I've made a lot of bother," he sighed.
Madge was half cross, half consoling. "Oh, I expect it will come out all
right in the end," she said impatiently. "He'll come round presently."
It began to look as if she herself had already come more than half-way
round. And, now that Alec and his thundercloud had gone, a waiter
ventured to advance.
"Si on peut desservir, Madame----"
Madge rose abruptly.
"Yes, let's go out. It's no good sitting here getting morbid. Which way
has my husband gone? Because just for an hour I'm going in the opposite
direction. Come along, let's all go for a walk."
We left the creepered terrace, crossed the courtyard of the hotel, and
came out into the Place Duguesclin.
I think I have discovered what it is that gives certain French facades
their air at once luminous and austere. It is the roofs above them. Our
flat-pitched English roofs thanklessly send back heaven's light where it
comes from; but these, steeply mansarded, dormered, and hog's-backed
again above that--it is these that flash it into our eyes like mirrors,
these across which the shadows of the chimneys lie, blots of black in
the glitter. The facades themselves may be flatly lighted or gloomed
over with pastel-like shade; it is above that everything happens, above
that the sun, the brick and the shining slate play out the drama of the
altering day.
And the sun was Lord of Dinan that afternoon. He turned the arcades of
the fishmarket to barrels of blackness, but crowned the roofs beyond
with flashing silver. The dark limes of the Place Duguesclin might drink
up his rays like green blotting-paper, but the east side of the Square
gave them out again as if the pale paint and chalk and plaster had been
self-luminous--faint greens of peeling ironwork, flaky blues of closed
shutters, the dazzle of the roof, the chimneys like tall dominoes on
end, patched with bricks of rose. And what a town for him to play with!
The towers, the gates, the ivied encircling walls, are but the outer
shell of the immemorial place; within it, what pranks and gaieties of
light and under-light and hide-and-seek of shadows does not his Lordship
play! Derry began to cheer up. Eighteen is never downcast for long. This
father-in-law-elect of his might sit morosely at the same table with
them or take his bottle of wine to whatever table he pleased; the sun
would shine on carved stone and old painted wood just the same. Yes,
Derry bucked up, and in a bright voice began to take command.
"I say, let's have a peep into the Cordeliers," he said. "It was shut
the last time I tried to get in."
Under the legs of the Porches, across the street and in at the half-open
portail we passed.
Oh, yes, Derry was decidedly better. He had treated Alec with grave
deference, if not with entire submission; but now less and less did he
seem to consider himself a culprit. As we passed along the cloisters he
paused to show Madge a "Ci-gist" or a bit of old woodwork let into a
wall; and from these he turned to the _affiches_ and class-lists of the
wall on the other side. His head was high. He was Derwent Rose, fixed
and indivisibly. If lately he had not been so, so much the better these
times than those. He was going ahead; he was going to marry; a year
hence might find him looking exactly a year older than he looked at this
moment; and though for the moment a certain modesty and humility might
be due from him, abjectness and shame--no. He trod the cobbles and
_dalles_ lightly by Madge's side. And I think that already the rogue
knew that he could turn her round his finger as he pleased.
For while Alec might never have heard of a novelist called Derwent Rose,
and might secretly be rather proud of the fact, she had read every word
he had ever written. She knew more about it than he knew about himself,
since he now knew nothing. Perhaps, walking silently by his side, she
realised the power and passion at present folded up in him, but soon
again to be declared. And perhaps she saw even further than his own
re-creation. There is a passion of grandmotherhood, different, but even
more unrelenting than that tender rage that brings us all into the
world. That Jennie should never have married was inconceivable; Jennie
was to have married whom she chose; and what, for beauty and gentleness
and knowledge and strength, could she have chosen better than this? Were
there whispers in Dinard? Madge was capable of dealing with them. If
there was talk, then there should be more talk, till all was talked
down. By and by Madge would start her own, the authentic version of the
affair. And with this young man presently settled as George Coverham's
adopted son, and Jennie blushing and brooding on the other side of her,
it would be a strange thing indeed if Madge Aird, who knew as much about
intimate histories as anybody, could not put some sort of a face upon
it.
Authoritatively Derry led us through the cloisters and under a low
tunnel-like arch. We came out into a bright courtyard with plane trees
and doors at intervals round it.
"This is what I wanted to see," he said smilingly, but a little as if
what he wanted to see overruled everything else. "Especially that bit
over there."
It was a lime-white old court, with tourelles to the west and north. In
its south-eastern corner rose a slated ogival turret with a gilded
ornamental fleche. An old woman in a lace cap was filling a bucket at a
tap, and from one of the dark upper windows came a girl's light laugh.
Through one of the doorways a glimpse could be seen of school-desks,
grey and cracked and dry as the legs of the Porches themselves. The
tourelle in front of us carried a little side-belfry, and its inch-thick
plaster had flaked off in great maps, showing the rubble beneath. And
again the sunlight was absorbed by the plane trees, but blazed on the
roof, made the fleche a vivid sparkle against the blue, and seemed to
penetrate into the very substance of the soft decaying white.
"Now just come and have a look at this," said Derry, striding across the
court.
The thing that he had brought us to see might almost have passed
unnoticed in Dinan, where at every corner something that man's fine wit
has carved has been uncarved again by stupid and obliterating Time. It
was no more than a bit of moulding, the upper edge of which caught the
sun, directly, making the cavetto underneath it a soft yellowing glow.
But into that rounded plaster tourelle with the belfry a flat door had
at one time been placed without interruption to the moulding, and in the
result the sun had a frolic indeed. For no man had designed that
miraculous accident where curve and flat met and deliciously quarrelled,
to be reconciled again by the sun's laughing kiss. Never did light and
its opposite more sweetly interchange and compose.... I don't want you
to think this is my own observation. But for Derry I should probably not
have given it a glance. But for him it was a thing to come specially to
see. He stood before it, moving his hand a little this way and a little
that, as in a sparkling room one will place one's hand over glass or
water to see whether it is indeed that which makes the little
fairy-ribbon on the wall. He peered underneath, he stood off, he glanced
up at the sun. With his hand throwing the shadow, the sun and he were
partners.
"What is it, Derry?" I asked him.
He laughed. "What is it? I should say it was everything," he replied.
"Everything there is, and if there's any more, that too."
"Are you going to paint it, dearest?" Jennie asked.
He turned. "Eh?" he said.
And there, in that sun-flooded court, I had a swift premonition.
Something seemed to tell me that he was not going to paint it. Neither
was he going to write about it, nor even to speak of it again. He had no
wish to communicate it to any other person, by any means whatever. That
he himself possessed the pure understanding of it was enough; he would
not even care that any should know that he knew, so he might but have
the bliss of knowing. His painting was over, as his writing was over.
Contemplation, withdrawal, solitude, the infinite soft ecstasy of being
at one with that which is not one self, though it were but the sunlight
on a bit of fifteenth-century plaster--that, it now flashed suddenly on
me, was what we might henceforward expect.
And though he understood all mysteries, and had all knowledge, yet he
now had something even richer to profit him. He had his Love.
"I should very much like a cup of tea," said Madge.
Instantly he was all graceful attention. The human desire for a cup of
tea was equally a thing to be understood.
"This glare does get in your eyes a bit," he smiled. "There's a nice
shady place not five minutes away."
As he led us back through the cloisters he all but took her arm.
His place was gratefully shady. Through a small teashop one passed into
a sort of leafy cage that, I learned, had at one time been an aviary. It
was empty, and at a little rustic table against the trellis we sat
down.
"Would you mind ordering, Sir George?" he said. "This is one of my
off-days for French, I'm afraid."
I ordered tea.
My new premonition proceeded to take still further possession of me. As
he chatted with modest freedom to Madge I fell more and more into
abstraction. I suppose that in all the circumstances it was my part to
have taken charge of the conversation, to have guided it through the
rocks and shoals of the difficult position, but I couldn't. Anyway he
seemed quite capable of doing so.
Capable? There was nothing of which he was not capable. And yet at the
same time he was capable of nothing! For, supposing that my foreboding
was right, what was his future? Isolation and Oblivion indeed! What man
can live, sufficient unto himself, excommunicated from the world,
wrapped in the vanity that he is not as others? Who dare dwell alone
with Truth? Is it not our anchorage and our joy to run with our little
half-truths in our hands and to thrust them upon our neighbour, that he
may admire and share them with us? Who so great that some such
littleness is not the very leaven of his life? Derwent Rose had written;
Derwent Rose had painted; and now Derwent Rose would withdraw himself to
some Tower, shut the door behind him, and be forgotten of men because
their affairs were too small for him.... It was just as well that I was
going to adopt him. What otherwise would his living be? In what corner
of earth would he plant his cabbages and cherish his perfect and
unprofitable knowledge?
And would he retain his simplicity of heart, or would he harden into
arrogance, sour into contempt, and--yes, it had to be faced--once more
ask of God that One Question Too Many?...
And she, his meek and sweet Semele? How long would she endure this
partnership of his Oblivion? How long would it be before she prayed that
that Tower might fall and crush her into the earth? She was only Jennie
Aird, seventeen years old, with the nape under her red-gold hair hardly
yet browned by its exposure to the sun. Happier--I cannot say; but
better perhaps for her had she never seen this lovely lad who was so
soon to be my son. She had married an angel, had endured his caress. But
she could not follow him to his skies.
It was half-past five when we reached the hotel, and Alec was there
waiting for us. He asked Madge where we had been, and when she said to
the Convent of the Cordeliers I am pretty sure that I heard him mutter
under his breath that that was exactly where "he" would spend his spare
time--hanging about a girls' school.
"Well, I suppose you're staying here to-night," he said gruffly to his
wife. "I'm going back. I may come again to-morrow. Better put a stop to
those inquiries--unless they take it into their heads to bolt again. I
shall probably be here by the nearest train to midday. I'm off now. Good
night."
Poor fellow! I suppose it was the nearest approach to a kiss he could
bring himself to give his wife and only child.
Something, I forget what, happened about our table on the terrace that
night, and we had to dine in the room of which it was an extension. The
sun was having his last and most magnificent fling for that day. He
turned the room in which we sat to ebony-black. The eye could hardly
distinguish in the corners the neo-Greek furnishings of key-pattern and
fretted valances, of amphorae on pedestals, of frieze and dentel and sham
black marble. But everywhere through the ebony ran like wildfire a gold
that the eye could hardly bear. A waiter would be lost in blackness save
for a spot of burning gold on brow or nose-bridge or knuckle; a glass, a
knife-blade or the edge of a plate would flash like a diamond. The
creeper outside flamed like the Burning Bush itself; you would not have
thought that the head of a woman dining under it could have flamed more,
yet it did. And the glass of water she lifted pierced like a heliograph
into the room.
And it was as we dined, not talking much, that Madge capitulated
completely. The sun played "I spy" with the white hand she suddenly put
on Derry's brown one. She was not speaking to me, but I heard.
"Oh, my dear, dear boy--you'll see it will be all right--be a little
patient--his bark's ever so much worse than his bite--and come and say
good night to your mother presently."
III
Derry now wore the English suit he had worn on the day when he had come
to tea at Ker Annic, Jennie the white frock and the little white cap in
which she had stolen out of the house that night. I never knew what
became of their French clothes. To all appearances we were now four
English sight-seers in a place where English sight-seers are bumped into
at every turn. And I must mention a curious little incident that
occurred when, the next morning, after breakfast, we left the hotel and
strolled into the Church of St Sauveur to see how the little girls were
getting on with their decoration for the approaching fete.
There is only one decent piece of glass in St Sauveur. That is the
window of the north transept that looks down on the burial-place of Du
Guesclin's heart. As we passed among the gay and lightsome shrines
Jennie happened to pause under this window. I saw his sudden dead stop.
It is a remarkable thing when a man does the same thing twice in his
life, each time for the first time. He looked at Jennie in St Sauveur
just as, all those years before, he had looked at somebody else in a
village church in Sussex; and he had no knowledge of the repetition. She
stood there, all low-toned pearls of frock and cool dark apricot of face
and neck; her hair peeped forth beneath the little hat; and there, under
the mellow ambers and ruby-dust and bits of green that might have been
dyed in Dinard's sea, for a minute she was aureoled.... She moved on,
and we followed.
But in that moment it was not he who had been haled back into that
earlier time. That was all over for him. He did all anew. It was I
myself who had come close to the ghost of my own youth.
The nearest train to twelve o'clock, by which Alec had said he would
arrive, was the one reaching Dinard at twelve-fifteen. The one before
that, leaving Dinard at ten-twelve, ran on certain days only, and
moreover would hardly have allowed Alec the necessary time in which to
stop the various inquiries he had set afoot. Therefore we had a long
morning to ourselves, and it mattered little how we spent it. Indeed it
mattered very little now what we did with our time until my letters
should arrive from London.
So once more that morning, watching Derry, I seemed to be watching, not
the Derry actually by my side, but a Derry who had been a stripling when
I had been in my middle twenties. For example, a troop of dragoons
clattered past, in blue steel hats, dark blue tunics, red breeches,
black boots; and I saw the sparkle of his eyes at the four red pennons
they carried. Just so, for all I knew, his eyes had sparkled when he had
first seen the sentries at the Horse Guards. We strolled on to the Porte
St Louis, and under its arch he paused. He examined the
portcullis-grooves, the remnants of hinges, the steep couloirs down
which the stones had been rolled and the boiling water poured from the
guard-room above. I don't know whether in his other boyhood he had known
York or Sandwich, but I saw by his face that his memory reduplicated
those old echoings, the clanging of iron, the hurtling of stones, the
shouting of men within the ringing arch. Outside in the Petits Fosses it
was the same. He peered into slits, glanced at the machicolations aloft,
measured salients and re-entrants and dead-ground with his eyes. I think
he saw that "belier a griffes" again in use, the staggering storied sow
pushed up to the walls by the horses and oxen in the hide-hung penthouse
behind.... And this same man had seen modern war! He had flung the Mills
and the "hairbrush," had worn a box-respirator, seen wire-netted gunpits
and flame-throwing and the white puff-balls following the aeroplanes
through the sky. Extraordinary, extraordinary! I could not get used to
it....
At twelve o'clock I walked on to the station to meet Alec. His train was
a few minutes late. It drew up on the farther set of rails. At Dinan one
walks across on the level, and as I advanced to meet him I saw him
appear round the engine.
But not until a moment later did I see that he was followed by Julia
Oliphant.
She was dressed in travelling-tweeds, but it was not the tweeds that
filled me with the instant conviction that she was departing and had
come to say good-bye to Madge. It was rather something indefinable in
her face. Nor had she come to corroborate my story. She and Alec had
doubtless already got that over, if ever it could be got over. She
greeted me with a faint smile, but without speaking. In fact I don't
think that one of the three of us spoke during the seven or eight
minutes it took us to reach the Poste.
Once more something had happened about our terrace-table. Perhaps
because of the slight lateness of Alec's train, added to the quarter of
an hour we had already delayed our meal (for dejeuner at the Poste is at
twelve), the only table capable of seating six had been made over to a
party of visitors who would depart in little more than an hour by the
vedette.
This, however, seemed to suit Alec rather than otherwise. He took Madge
by the arm.
"Then you come over here," he said to her. "You've got till six o'clock
to talk to Julia. I want a word with you first."
"And I want a word with you too," I heard her reply as she turned to
follow him.
So Madge and Alec lunched some tables away, out of earshot, while Julia
and Jennie, Derry and myself, sat down behind the iron "O" of the sign
HOTEL DE LA POSTE.
Had it not been for Derry I think our lunch would have been as silent as
our walk from the station had been. Jennie rolled bread-pellets and
fiddled with salt. I moodily wondered whether Julia would not have done
better to have taken her farewells with Madge as said and have stayed
away. But it frequently happens that a happy mood at the beginning of
an acquaintance sets the key for the meetings that follow. Derry had
come off gaily best with Miss Oliphant when, instead of questioning her
about that bicycle she had fetched from St Briac, he had anticipated her
and had taken the wind out of her sails with smiling acquiescence; and
he now was wreathed in ease and charm. There was a dash of the
gentlemanly devil about that son-elect of mine. His grey-blue eyes were
frequently downcast, but when he did lift them that imp of fun and
mischief peeped unmistakably out.
"I'd no idea when I showed you my sketches that morning that you were a
painter yourself, Miss Oliphant," he said demurely over his soup.
"Jennie only told me afterwards. I don't think that was quite fair of
you.... What do you paint?" asked the man who had stood before her,
stripped to the waist, with her sewing-machine held aloft.
"Very little lately," said Julia composedly.
"Now you're putting me off. But of course I ought to have known. You can
always tell by the way a person looks at a thing whether they know
anything about it or not. Do tell me what you paint!"
"I'm supposed to be painting Sir George's portrait one of these days."
"Ah!" A polite little inclination of the head made you forget the
mischief for a moment. "I'm no good at portraits. Never dared try, in
fact, except for that sketch of Jennie, and you can hardly call that a
portrait. It would take more experience than I've got. You'd have to
know a good deal about a person before you risked painting their
portrait I should think, wouldn't you?"
And that of course was pure mischief again, for he was virtually telling
her, though without words, that she knew very little about him if she
had expected him to give his intentions away by making a fuss about that
bicycle. And similarly unspoken was his daring little invitation to
her--to her who had drawn him from memory as King Arthur, in armour and
a golden beard--"Won't you learn a little about me and paint me one of
these days?"
So I watched her as she saw, for the second time in her life, what I saw
for the first time in mine--the father of the man he had been and was to
be again, his acts and gestures varying with a thousand accidents of
circumstance, but himself essentially and unchangeably the same. You may
charge me if you will with laying claim to knowledge after the event,
but there radiated from every particle of him his own yet-folded
potentialities. His gentle mischief towards her was the germ of that
masterful wit that had made the Barnacles of _The Vicarage of Bray_ skip
at his pleasure. His good-humour and urbanity and willingness to talk
while we sat oppressed and silent were, in little, the qualities that
had bloomed in his mature work, _The Hands of Esau_. Only the fierce
passion of _An Ape in Hell_ was to seek, and none could have said that
it did not lurk there, inappropriate to the occasion, therefore uncalled
on, but deep-slumbering under all.
And if I was able to make a dim guess or two at these involutions, what
of this woman to whom it was not guessing, but open knowledge? In her
mind was a parallelism indeed! I had seen one trifle for myself that
very morning--his sudden stop when Jennie had paused under the window of
St Sauveur; but of just such bright threaded beads of memories her whole
life, all of it that was worth anything to her, had been composed. Her
unwavering love had been the string that had held all together. And not
only did she sit there now telling, as it were, these beads over, to the
last one drowned at the bottom of the pools of her deep eyes; she had
them uniquely and desolately to herself. He, who had provided them, had
no part whatever in them. She could no longer say "Do you remember this
or that." He remembered only from the moment of his setting eyes on
Jennie. As unconsciously as when he had stripped to the waist for her,
as unknowingly as when he had swum before her, he now seared her in his
very innocence and ignorance. A village church--Sussex fields and
lanes--a day at Chalfont--another day somewhere else--and a week-end at
my house ... oh, the jewels were quickly counted. Perhaps she had
others of which I did not know. If so, they were the secret of the eyes
that looked away past the elms, down on to the walking hats in the Fosse
below.
And he would grow up again, but she could only continue her life. In
another twenty years he would be as old as she was now; but she, I
myself ... only Jennie, only Jennie would be by his side on that distant
day. At some still unknown fireside, in some unguessed house or garden,
they would speak of "poor old Miss Oliphant, poor old Coverham," long
since out of the way. Different generations, different generations!
And--I cannot be sure of this, and I shall never know--but I do not
think that by this time he, who had started the whole mystic thing, had
the least recollection of anything whatever he had been and done.
"But look here, Miss Oliphant," he was saying. "Jennie's going to lie
down this afternoon; won't you let me take you for a walk? Let's go to
Lehon or somewhere. You don't mind, do you, Jennie? And"--he laughed,
perfectly conscious of his charming and irresistible impudence--"it
seems awfully stiff to go on calling you Miss Oliphant! Sounds so
fearfully high-and-dry! Oh, I know! Shocking scandal! But if you'll come
for a walk with me----" He twinkled.
Jennie had not uttered a word. Nor had she eaten more than a few crumbs.
Suddenly she got up.
"I'm going to lie down now," she said. Then, turning timidly to Julia,
"Can you come with me for just a minute--Julia?"
Julia got instantly up, passed round the table, and preceded her into
the hotel.
Other lunchers also were astir. The party of visitors who had usurped
our table were settling up with the waiter. Derry and I sat awaiting
Julia's return. Alec and Madge, at the neighbouring table, seemed to
have finished their talk. I did not know what Alec's announcement to her
had been. What she had said to him I thought I could guess.
Suddenly, after an absence of barely five minutes, Julia reappeared. She
walked straight up to Madge and held out her hand.
"What?" I heard Madge's surprised exclamation. "But I thought----"
"----by the boat, I think ... ever so much ... delightful...."
She shook hands with them and crossed over to us. She looked straight
into Derry's face. We were all standing. The five or six words she spoke
were as if she was telling those beads again. Each one was isolated,
bright, lingering yet relentlessly passing, a thank-offering, a
prayer----
"So--long--Derry--dear ... all--the--best," she said, her hand in his.
"Good-bye--Julia," he said, smiling.
She walked away.
I caught her up in front of the hotel. Little groups of people moved
across the lime-shaded Square, all in one direction, seeking the Porches
and the Lainerie, leaving themselves comfortable time for the vedette.
We followed them. She did not take my arm, neither did any word pass
between us.
Under the Porches, past the Convent we went. The groups of people became
more frequent as they concentrated from various luncheon-places. We
dropped down the steep astounding street that is called Jerzual. We were
nearly at the Porte, of which the twelfth-century portion is the modern
part, before she opened her lips.
"I hate people who cry," she said suddenly.
Then she closed her lips again.
I supposed she meant Jennie. I didn't answer.
She only spoke once more. This was at the embarcadere, as she stepped on
to the vedette.
"Don't wait," she said. "I suppose I shall be seeing you in London some
time."
Obediently I turned away.
IV
Alec had had nothing new to say to Madge. Only the variations had been a
little more elaborate. The thing was as lunatic to him as ever, and it
all came of not stopping in one's own country. Things like that never
happened at his office in Victoria Street or on the Rectory Ground at
Blackheath.
"You can stay on here if you like, but I'm off back," he said. "And
the next time you catch me in France or anywhere else foreign you
can tell me about it. And you can let me know when they're married.
Does that three-eighteen run to-day, or is that another of their
Sundays-and-week-days excepted?"
"The waiter will tell you," said Madge.
"Damn the waiter," said Alec.
So there were four of us at the Hotel de la Poste.
I don't know what happened to letters during those early September days
in Dinan. Somebody told me they went on to Paris to be sorted; I only
know that it took an unconscionable time to get an answer from a place I
could have got to and back again in a couple of days. And as three, and
then four days passed, I think I could have written a Guide Book to
Dinan, so familiar with it did I begin to come. And always it was a
laughing, buoyant, affectionate and extraordinarily clever Derry who
conducted us everywhere.
Then, when finally my letter did arrive, it was inexplicit, and I had
either to go to London myself or write again. It was Madge who entreated
me to stay. So I wrote my second letter.
Often we went out into the surrounding country as a change from the
town. Derry never touched a brush, never once mentioned painting.
Occasionally he and Jennie went off together somewhere, but for the most
part we kept together. So far I had to admit that there was no sign of
his young godhead being too much for his simple white-hearted Semele.
She adored him with every particle of herself, from the feet that ran
to meet him to the eyes that continually thanked his face for being what
it was. And never Bayard nor Du Guesclin nor Beaumanoir of them all had
served his lady with a gentler love than young Derwent Rose had for
Jennie Aird.
One morning at a little before ten we went up into the Clock Tower in
the Rue de l'Horloge. This tower, together with the belfry of St
Sauveur, is the highest point of the ancient town that crowns Dinan's
rock. Up and up inside the turret we mounted, through lofts and empty
chambers and timbered garrets, till the stone gave way to slate and wood
and lead, and the soft tock-tocking of the clock itself began to sound.
The clock is in a room with a locked and glass-panelled door, a machine
of brass on an iron table, with a slow escapement, compensated
pendulums, and the white hemp ropes of the weights disappearing through
a hole in the floor to the stories below. On the iron table stood an
oilcan, and the small indicator-clock showed a few minutes to ten. A
circular piercing in the wall gave us light, and light also streamed
down through the opening where the wooden ladder rose to the upper
platform. We peered through the glass door, while "Tock-tock, tock-tock"
spoke the unhurrying clock....
Then on the verge of ten a large vane slipped and dissolved itself into
a mist, to the murmur of moving wheels. Four times on an open third
sounded the warning tenor bell overhead; and then the twin vane slipped
and dissolved. There was a clang that shook the timbers inside their
skin of lead....
"Come along, Jennie!" cried Derry, making a dash for the belfry, while
again the bell thundered out....
It was two short flights up, but Madge and I were after them in time to
hear the last two strokes. The structure still trembled with an enormous
humming. This lasted for minutes, wave succeeding wave, crests and
troughs of lingering sound, diminishing but seeming as if they would
never quite cease. Our eyes sought one another's eyes expectantly as we
waited for the last murmur of the hymning metal....
Then light voices floated up from the street again, and the noises of
the town could be heard once more.
"Just look at the view!" said Derry, hanging half over the rail.
But I wanted a rope round my waist before I approached that rail. A head
for heights is not one of the things of which I boast.
Another day, this time in the afternoon, we pulled in a skiff a mile or
two down the Rance, where men were fishing with the "balance"--the net
on the crossed bough-like arms that made a dripping bag while the rope
ran over the pulley of the pry-pole. Men used the same machine in the
days before Moses, they are using it to-day on the Rance and the
Yang-tse-Kiang. It was this vast antiquity that seemed to strike Derry,
even more than the fortifications had struck him, even more than that
clock that tried to measure with its "tock-tock" something that had no
beginning and can have no end. Several times he seemed on the point of
speaking, but each time desisted. There was nothing to be said, no word
that, like the clock, was more than "tock-tock, tock-tock." And I
fancied that for a day or more past he had talked much less, that he was
ceasing to talk, as he had ceased to write, as he had ceased to paint.
He sat for long spells thinking, as if measuring that which was himself
against all that was not himself and coming to his understanding about
it.... He and Jennie had the oars. Suddenly he gave a little laugh, very
musical, and took the oar again.
"Stroke," he said.
We set off back up the stream.
We landed at the Old Bridge and began the ascent to the town; but near
the Arch of Jerzual, almost on the very spot where Julia had said she
hated people who cried, he stopped again. From a dark interior on our
left had come the knocking of a hand-loom. We entered, and Madge
translated his questions into French.
Once more he seemed to find the same fascination--the spell of the
oldest and of the newest, the first primitive principle of which our
modern inventions are but elaborated conveniences, man measuring his
strength and pitting his wit against all that is not man. So men had
fished, so they did fish. So they had woven, so they did weave. They had
fought in steel caps with hand-grenades in the past, they fought in
steel caps with hand-grenades still. And nothing to be written, painted
or said. As it had been in the beginning it would be until the end. A
momentary life was not meant for the expression of these things. They
were for contemplation, perfect understanding, and--silence.
That was on a Saturday evening. After dinner we strolled to the Jardin
des Anglais again and stood looking over the ramparts. There were no
shirley poppies in the sky now, but a serene unbroken heaven, a tender
blue fading to the still tenderer peaches and greys that merged into the
darkening land. The cypresses below us were inky black, the river where
the fishermen had fished a soft thread of inverted sky. Folk again took
their evening stroll round the walls. None of us spoke. I was wondering
what Julia Oliphant was doing in London.
Suddenly Derry broke the silence. He did so in these words.
"It's all right for Lehon and the Chateau de Beaumanoir to-morrow
morning, I suppose?"
"Yes, dear boy," said Madge.
How was she to have known, how was I to have known, how "all right" it
was for Lehon, the Chateau de Beaumanoir and--to-morrow?
V
The chateau stands a bare mile out of Dinan, and we had been there half
a dozen times before; but Derry loved those crumbling old towers on
their upstanding rock. It rises almost sheer, buttressed round with the
broken works, and from the talus to the plateau on the top is a network
of precipitous paths. You ascend it very much as you can, and the view
that is blocked as you approach it breaks on you from the summit--first
the sickening gulf of air at your feet, then the three or four miles of
the southward plain, and the canalised Rance parting company with its
attendant road to Tressaint, ecluse after ecluse, until it picks it up
again towards Evran. That is when you look south. To the north, peering
down through oak and beech as you might peer over the edge of a nest,
are glimpses of white ribbon--the road along which you have passed. And
on the level plateau in the middle, enclosed by oak and beech and lime,
rubble-built but with dressed stone buttresses, stands the tiny modern
Chapel of St Joseph of Consolation.
Jennie and Derry waited at the top of the last zigzag for Madge and
myself, and then gave us time to recover our breath. It was eleven
o'clock of a Sunday morning, and Dinan's bells sounded lightly in the
distance. They languished almost like human voices as, instead of
quickening for the final summons, they delayed, with longer and longer
intervals until, when you expected just one more sweet note, all was
silence.
I think that what gives that chateau-crowned rock its air of lightsome
space is that you come to it from Dinan, where everything crowds upon
you, the Porches trample you, and the people across the street go to bed
practically on the sill of your window. True, from the ramparts you have
sweep enough, but unless you go there very early you get a mediocre,
unbroken illumination, with every shadow hidden behind the face that is
turned towards you, and two tones paint all, the pale blue of the sky
and the average of the lighted land. So there is little to be seen from
the Chateau de Beaumanoir to the north.
But turn your face south, and--ah! That is where the brightness lies!
That flat average of greens and browns disappears, and you are looking,
not at colour, but at Light itself! And yet every shadow points directly
at you. All the sun that there is is on your own face--there, and
graving as if on a tarnished silver plate a glittering outline round
every object you see. Not a green, not a brown; all is grey; but
twinkles with a silver edge every tree of Rance's valley, and fuming
silver is every thread of house-smoke that ascends. That stretch of lock
that is lost again towards Tressaint is a needle-flash, and you see the
summer clouds only as you see the poplar-sheddings that float over the
gulf in June--as if save for their edges they did not exist.
Then, turning your back on the glitter, you see the heavy browns and
greens and ochres of the ruins once more.
"Do they never open this chapel, I wonder?" said Derry, peering through
the grille of the closed door.
I peeped in after him. It had a tiny altar with four tapers, and a
blue-and-white pennon with a device upon it. The little porcelain Virgin
was blue and white and gold, and under the three lancet windows a dozen
rickety chairs stood. The walls were whitewashed, with a picture here
and there, and there was a rat-hole in the floor. A small and very bad
rose-window reminded me of the window of St Sauveur, and I turned away
again.
We pottered about here and there among the scrub and masonry. Seen from
above, the west tower, that which looks over to Trelivan, is the most
complete; but the one to the south-west can be entered by climbing down
half-effaced steps in the thickness of the wall. I descended. But there
was nothing to see inside but the peep through a single loophole. Its
walls chirped with grasshoppers, and a thin screen of oak gave it a
roof. I was restless, and came out again. I wanted my letters from
London. Then this interminable business would be quickly finished.
But London reminded me once more of Julia Oliphant, of what she was
doing, of what she would do....
Madge was waiting for me when I re-ascended. The others were nowhere to
be seen. And we no longer had the ruins to ourselves. Over by the
_zigzag_ path to the east of the rock I heard voices and the brushing of
branches. But the colline is so overgrown with shrub that it is not
difficult to lose anybody. Derry and Jennie could not be far away.
"I expect they're looking for blackberries," said Madge.
"Then they'll be on the sunny side," I replied; and I led her across the
shady plateau.
Then suddenly Madge saw them, for she called "Be careful there,
children!" They were standing on the brink of the southern tower,
looking away into the brightness. Close to them a mountain-ash overhung
the deep, and about the scabious at the foot of it butterflies hovered,
part of the airy light. Her hand was on his shoulder, her white frock a
luminosity of grey shadow. About one pink glowing ear her loosened hair
was a radiance of coppery gold.
But the newly-come party was close behind us. Through the leaves I heard
a rustle and a woman's voice suddenly raised.
"I'm sure I saw him come this way----"
"I should get rid of the little beast if I were you," a man's voice
growled.
Then the woman's voice uplifted again. "_Puppetty! Puppetty!_ Oh, you
naughty boy!"
The man and the woman appeared.
"Puppetty! Puppetty!... Excuse me, have you seen anything of a
little---- Good heavens alive, if it isn't Sir George Coverham! Of all
the--fancy meeting----"
But I had eyes for her for one fleeting instant only. All at once there
had come a stifled cry from Derry. He stood there, dark against the
morning light, embroidered round with light. His eyes were immovably on
that woman who had called the dog--on that Daphne Bassett who, in years
that were now clean-sponged from his memory, had been Daphne Wade.
Jennie too was staring at her, bewildered that he should stare so. Her
hand was still on his shoulder. She drew a little more closely to him.
The struggle that began on his darkened face was a struggle to remember
something; or perhaps its real beginning was that he seemed to remember
that there was something to remember. But what? Not a book that he had
written? Not a book that she had written? Not two books, of which he had
written one and she the other? He had never written a book--had never
dreamed of writing a book; he left that to clever people like Sir George
Coverham and Mrs. Aird--"Mummie."
A picture, then? No, not a picture. He had dabbled in paint for a
bit--there was a lot of stuffy old canvas in the hotel now--but it
couldn't be that.... He did not look at Jennie. His hands tried to put
her away from him. He muttered hoarsely.
"Let me go, Jennie, let me go."
But she only held him the more closely, both arms now wrapped about him.
Then he cried out sharply, loudly. "Let go--let go, I say--and don't
look--take your eyes away--_don't look at my face_!"
But she would now never let him go. She would look at his face, yes,
even though he commanded her not to, because of what had already begun
to pass there....
And what that was you may see by turning back to the beginning of this
book. Yesterday, in the Tour de l'Horloge, a clock had prepared to
strike the hour. It had begun with the soft fluttering of a vane that
had dissolved into a mist; there had been the murmur of mechanism, those
preparatory notes on an open third.
But this was not hearing. It was seeing. We all saw. Jennie saw.
As the hues of a coloured top alter at a touch of the finger, so change
began to succeed change over that face with its back to the morning
light.
Oh, by no means violent ones at first. Quite gentle ones. We merely saw
the youth who had painted a few pictures, the young man who had swum the
Channel, the athlete who had discussed tides and currents with boatmen
in the Lord Warden at Dover----
Then a certain acceleration (though you must understand that this
fantasia on Time that we watched is but comparative, happened in a few
instants, more quickly than I can write or you read). Against the sun a
glint of golden beard appeared and was gone in a twink. I had once seen
that beard at breakfast-time, in a South Kensington mews.
But oh my heart! Then a terrific leap!... His whole form bulked, loomed.
Eleven years descended on him like a Nasmyth hammer. He seemed to take
the very brain out of my head and to put it, not in France at all, but
into a house in Surrey with a pond in front of it, while he, with a
punt-pole in his hand, brought a piece of water-starwort into Julia
Oliphant's hand----
His arm, both his arms, were over his face as he tried to hide it all
from her. No cry broke from him now. But her arms were locked
desperately about his waist. She would never let him go.
Then somewhere a dog yapped, and at the sound the horrible life-slide
ceased. It ceased because it could not go further. How could it go
further than that side-street off Piccadilly in which the woman who had
written _The Parthian Arrow_ had set a dog upon the author of _An Ape in
Hell_? Already I had started forward, but my foot caught in the scrub,
and I found myself rolling, clutching wildly in the air for something to
hold.
But I swear it was for them and not for myself that I feared.
Then, as they slowly swayed outward together by the mountain-ash, the
beautiful, re-transfiguring thing happened.
A stupid woman with a wretched little pet dog! A rebuff on a pavement
over a miserable literary squabble! Was it for _this_ that the years had
changed on his face as the hues change on a spinning top? Was _that_ all
that this commonplace apparition of a woman had reminded him of? Why, he
had thought it had been something important, something to do with the
peace of churches, the beauty of coloured windows, the glorious
thunder-roll from the organ! He had thought it had something to do with
his boyhood's dreams, aspirations, vows! But only _this_!... It was not
worth the trouble of having sought it. He had better get back to his
deliverance.
He laughed. The vane whirred in the opposite direction. He began to go
back to Jennie----
He swam back to her across the Channel, knowing now that she awaited him
on the other side----
He ran at Ambleteuse--ran swiftly to her.
His eyes met hers in the glow of the headlights at Ker Annic----
Once more he stood with her in that Tower of dead and forgotten
doves--fled on silent wheels with her through the night--in that upper
room in the Rue de la Cordonnerie took her, stainless, into his own
virgin arms----
He was here again, back at the Chateau de Beaumanoir; young, beautiful,
innocent, grave, his arm dropped now, looking into her eyes, calling to
her.
"_Look--look at me--yes, look, Jennie!_"
"Oh, my God, catch them!" Madge screamed.
But I don't think she saw what I think I saw. Let us say that the scrub
was treacherous, that it betrayed his foot; it makes no difference now,
for I have no son. Why, after all, go forward again if going forward
meant no more than that four-seconds pilgrimage from which he had but
that moment returned? Better as it was, neither forward nor back nor
standing still on that edge of masonry or on any other edge. He drew her
close to him. Their lips met....
"_Oh, Lord, Thou hast prevented him with sweetness; he asked life of
Thee and Thou hast given him length of days._"
We heard the parting of the bushes down below....
A yard beyond the mountain-ash the butterflies continued to hover, and
past them the silver-flashing stretch of canal-lock by Tressaint could
be seen once more.
EPILOGUE
I stood before the Tower at the Chateau de la Garaye. No thrashing-gin
sounded, for the day's work was over, and in and out of the empty
windows of the glimmering Renaissance ruin the bats flitted. Madge, Alec
and I were leaving France to-morrow. There was nothing further to do,
there is nothing further to write. I shall never re-visit Dinan.
But I did not enter their Tower. I should hardly have done so even had
not that which showed in the saffron sky seemed to forbid me. For it
seemed to me the perfect symbol of his end. It was the old moon in the
new one's arms.
Just so, just like that curved golden thread, so thin that a few minutes
before it had not been to be seen--just so had that tender crescent of
his youth held that dim and gibbous and ghostly round of his past. Just
so he had been haggardly haunted, but touched with golden innocence in
the end. And he himself seemed to me to be peeping into that Tower which
I did not enter, as for ages other crescents had peeped when the doves
had filled that hollow with their crooning and no other sound had broken
the hush of eve. And thenceforward he would always re-visit it,
embracing with a gilded edge the whole dark content of man.
But they lay elsewhere. They are not together, but side by side. Alec
would not have it otherwise, and Madge did not seem greatly to care.
The parallelism of their fair young bodies is the closing parallelism of
this book. On his stone is a discrepancy that commonly passes as a
carver's error. They lie thus:
JANET AIRD DERWENT ROSE
b. 1903 d. 1920 b. 1875 d. 1920
at the Chateau de Beaumanoir at the same Time and Place
aged 17 years aged 16 years
R.I.P.
* * * * *
TRANSCRIBER NOTES:
Punctuation has been corrected silently.
Alternate spellings have been retained as well as some possible typos
other than those listed below.
page 001, typo "Side-slip" vs "Sidestep" has been retained in the
TOC
page 076, "hansome" changed to "hansom" (and the hansom with)
page 149, "me" changed to "be" (it would be merely a)
page 221, "magazin" changed to "magasin" (The magasin that
enshrined)
page 231, "A" changed to "A" (A demain)
page 249, "magazins" changed to "magasins" (the magasins and the)
page 256, "A" changed to "A" ("A ce soir")
page 262, "forrarder" changed to "forrader" (for the distance
forrader ou get)