A TAXICAB took him in dreary rain through the squalor of Tyneside, now
following the dismal tram lines, now cutting through mean streets, until
they reached a row of low, bow-windows agglutinated little villas with
handkerchief of garden separating them from the road. At No. 17 he
dismissed the cab and swung wide the flimsy gate. Before he could enter,
the house door opened and a woman appeared, worn and elderly, in a
cheap, soiled wrapper.
“I suppose that’s you, John. I shouldn’t have recognized you.”
She spoke with a harsh, northern accent, and her face betrayed little
emotion.
“You’re Ellen,” said he.
“Aye. I’m Ellen. You didn’t think I was Jane?”
She led the way into a narrow passage and then into the diminutive
parlour.
“Of course not,” said he. “Jane died three years ago. But you I haven’t
seen since I was a child.”
She looked him up and down: “Quite the gentleman.”
“I hope so. How’s mother?”
She gave the news dully. The sick woman had passed through the night
safely and was now asleep.
“She had made up her mind to see you before she died—she always was
strong willed—and that has kept her alive. Until I read your telegram I
didn’t think you would come.”
He flashed one of his quick glances. “Why not? This isn’t the first time
I’ve come to see her since my return. If I’ve made my way in the world,
that’s no reason for you to call me undutiful.”
“I don’t want to quarrel, John,” she said wearily. “Yes. I know about
your visits and the bit of money you send her. And she’s grateful, poor
soul.” She paused. Then: “You’ll be wanting breakfast.”
“Also a wash.”
“Are you too grand for the sink, or must you have hot water in your
room?”
“The sink will do. It will be less trouble for you.”
Alexis Triona followed her down the passage, and having washed himself
with a bit of yellow soap and dried himself on the coarse towel hung on
a stretch of string, went into the tidy kitchen, hung with cheap prints
and faded photographs of departed Briggses, his coat over his arm, and
conversed with his sister in his shirt sleeves while she fried the eggs
and bacon for his meal. His readiness to fall into the household ways
somewhat mollified her. Her mother had been full of pride in the great
man John had become, and she had expected the airs and graces of the
upstart. Living at Sunderland with her husband, a foreman riveter, and
her children, and going filially to Newcastle only once a year, she had
not met him on his previous visits. Now her mother’s illness had
summoned her three or four days before, when the neighbour’s daughter
who “did for” Mrs. Briggs, ordinarily a strong and active woman, found
the sudden situation beyond her powers and responsibility. So, until the
ailing lady discoursed to her of the paragon, she had scarcely given him
a thought for the sixteen years they had been separated. Her memories of
him as a child who alternated exasperating mischief with bone-idle fits
of reading had not endeared him to her practical mind; and when the
impish dreamer disappeared into the vast inane of foreign parts, and
when she herself was driven by she knew not what idiot romanticalism
into the grey worries of wifehood and motherhood, her consciousness
recorded the memory of a brother John, but whether he was alive or dead
or happy or miserable was a matter of illimitable unconcern. Now,
however, he had come to life, very vivid, impressing her with a certain
masterfulness in his manner which had nothing to do with the airs and
graces she despised. Yet she still regarded him with suspicion; even
when, seating himself at the roughly laid end of the kitchen table and
devouring bacon and eggs with healthy appetite, he enthusiastically
praised her cookery.
“What I can’t understand is,” she said, standing at the other end of the
table and watching him eat, “why the name of John Briggs isn’t good
enough for you.”
“It’s difficult to explain,” said he. “You see, I’ve written a book.
Have you read it?”
She regarded him scornfully. “Do you suppose, with a husband and seven
children I’ve time to waste on books? I’ve seen it,” she admitted.
“Mother has it bound in brown paper, by the side of her bed.”
“You must read it,” replied Triona, somewhat relieved. “Then you’ll see
why I’ve changed my name.” He laughed at her uncomprehending face. “I’ve
done nothing criminal, you know, and I’m not hiding from justice.”
“I suppose an outlandish name brings in more money,” she suggested
practically.
“That’s so,” said he.
“Fools must be fools.”
He acquiesced gladly, gauging the end of an embarrassing examination,
and turned the conversation to her domestic affairs.
Breakfast over, he lit a cigarette and watched her clear away, viewing
through the smoke the memories of his childhood. Just so, in that very
wooden arm-chair, though in another kitchen, used his father to sit,
pipe in mouth, while the women did the household work. It was all so
familiar, yet so far away. Between then and now stretched a lifetime—so
it seemed—of wide and romantic happenings. There, before him, on the
wall hung, as it did years ago, the haunting coloured print, cut from
some Christmas Number, of young Amyas Leigh listening to Salvation Yeo.
As a child, Salvation Yeo’s long arm and finger pointing out to sea had
been his inspiration. He had followed it, and gone to distant lands and
gone through the promised adventures, and had returned to the picture,
wondering whether all that had been was real and not the figment of a
dream.
A little later, after the doctor’s visit, he was admitted to his
mother’s room. For an hour or so he sat with her and gave a human being
deep happiness. In the afternoon she lost consciousness. For a day or
two she lingered on, and then she died.
During the dreary interval between his interview and the funeral, Alexis
Triona sat for many hours in his father’s chair, for the North was
smitten with a dismal spell of rain and tempest which discouraged
rambling out of doors, reconstructing his life, unweaving fact from
fiction, tearing aside the veils of self-deception wherein he had
enwrapped his soul. Surely there was some basis of fact in the romantic
history of Alexis Triona with which for the past year he had identified
himself. Surely a man could not dwell so intensely in an imaginary life
if none of it were real. Even while tearing open veils and viewing his
soul’s nakedness, he sought justification.
Did he not find it in that eagerness of spirit which had sent him, in
obedience to Salvation Yeo’s pointing finger, away from the dour and
narrow father and the first taste of the Tyneside works, penniless, over
the wild North Sea to Archangel, town of fairy wonders, and thence, so
as not to be caught on the ship again and taken back to Newcastle, to
wanderings he scarce knew whither? Did he not find it in the strange
lure of Russia which impelled him, when, after a few voyages, he landed
in the port of London, to procure a passport which would make him free
for the land of his fascination? Did he not find it in the
resourcefulness of brain which, the mariner’s life forsaken, first
secured him employment in the English racing establishment of a Russian
Prince, and then interested recognition by the Princess herself, so
that, after a strenuous while he found himself no longer as an
inconsiderable stable hand, but as a human being who counted in the
world? Did he not find it in his fond ambitions, when the Princess at
his request transferred him from stables to garage, from garage to
motor-works for higher training; when he set himself to learn Russian as
no Englishman should ever have learned it; when afterwards he steeped
his mind in Russian poetry and folk-lore, sleeping four or five hours a
night, compelled by dreams of greatness in which there figured as his
bride of the golden future the little Princess Tania, whose
governess-taught English was as pure as the church bells on a frosty
night? Did he not find it in those qualities of practical command of
circumstance and of poetic vision which had raised him in a few years
from the ragged, semi-ignorant, sea-faring English lout alone in Russia
to the trusted chief of a Prince’s fleet of a dozen cars, to the
courier-chauffeur, with all the roads and ways and customs and languages
of Russia, from Riga to Tobolsk, and from Tobolsk to Tiflis, and from
Tiflis to St. Petersburg, at his finger tips; to the Master of Russian
Literature, already something of a published poet, admitted into
intellectual companionship by the Prince and thereby given undreamed of
leisure for further intellectual development? What were those qualities
but the qualities of genius differentiating him from the ordinary run of
men and absolving him from such judgments as might be passed upon the
errant of them? Without this absolving genius could he have marched in
and taken his place in the modern world of English letters?
Meanwhile, being of frugal tastes, he had grown rich beyond the dream of
the Tyneside urchin’s avarice. He had visions of great motor-works, the
manufacture of an all-Russian car, built up by his own resources. The
princely family encouraged him. Negotiations had just begun—was his
story so devoid of truth?—when the great world cataclysm brought more
than his schemes for an all-Russian car toppling to the ground. The
Prince’s household was disintegrated; horses and cars were swallowed up
in the great convulsion.
He found himself driving generals around the shell-scarred front as a
volunteer, for being of British nationality he had not been called up
for military service. With them he served in advances and retreats and
saw battles and burnings like many millions of other men, but from the
comparative safety of a headquarters car. It was not until he ran into
the British Armoured Car Column that his patriotism took fire, and he
became a combatant in British uniform. He remained with the Column for
most of the campaign. Badly wounded towards the end, he was left in a
Russian hospital, a British naval rating. He remained there many months;
a bullet through his chest had missed a vital part and the wound had
soon healed, but his foot had gangrened, and only the star in which he
trusted had saved it from amputation. There was no fiction about the
three lost toes whose gap he had shown to Olifant.
So far did Alexis Triona, sitting in the kitchen arm-chair, salve his
conscience. In his story had he done more than remodel the contour of
fact? Beneath it did not the living essence of truth persist? Was he not
a highly educated man? Had he not consorted—before the cataclysm, and
later in the strangely filled hospital—with the young Russian
_intelligentsia_, who talked and talked and talked——? Who could know
better than he how Russia had floundered in their tempestuous ocean of
talk? And, finally, had he not gone, stout-hearted, through the perils
and hardships and exquisite sufferings of the cataclysm?
So far, so good. But what of the rest? For the rest, was not Fate
responsible?
The Revolution came, and Russian organization crumbled like a castle
touched with an enchanter’s wand. He went forth healed from the hospital
into chaos; Petrograd, where his little fortune lay, his objective.
Sometimes he found a foothold on an aimless train. Sometimes he jogged
weary miles in a peasant’s cart. Sometimes he walked. When he learned
that British uniform was no longer held in high esteem he changed to
peasant’s dress. So far his journey through revolutionary Russia was
true. But he had enough money in his pocket to keep him from want.
And then arrived the day which counted most in his life’s history, when
that which he had recounted to Olivia as a fantastic possibility
happened in sober fact.
He had been given to understand that if he walked to a certain junction
he might find a train returning to Petrograd. Tired, he sat by the
wayside, and undoing his wallet ate the black bread and dried fish which
he had procured at the last village. And, while eating, he became aware
of something gleaming in the rank grasses of the ditch—something long
and pallid and horrible. He slid down and found a dead man, stark naked,
lying on his back with the contused mark of a bullet hole in his chest.
A man of fifty, with short-cropped, grizzled hair and moustache, and
clear, refined features. He must have been dead two days. There he lay,
constricted of limb, stripped of everything that could mean warmth or
comfort or money to his murderers. The living man’s short experience
told him that such things were not uncommon in great revolutions. He was
about to leave the corpse—for what could he do?—when his eyes caught
the glint of metal a few feet away. It was a pocket compass. And further
on he found at intervals a toothbrush; a coverless, tattered copy of
Tacitus; a little faded snapshot of a woman mounted on cardboard; a
vulcanite upper plate of half a dozen false teeth; and a little fat book
with curling covers of American cloth. Had he continued his search he
might have found many other objects discarded by the robbers as useless.
But what was the good of pieces of conviction for a judicial enquiry
that would never take place? The little fat book, which on opening he
found to be manuscript in minute handwriting, he thrust in his pocket.
And so he went his way.
But on his way, his curiosity being aroused, he read in the little book
an absorbing diary of amazing adventures, of hardships and prison and
tortures unspeakable; and without a thought of its value, further than
its romantic fascination, he grew to regard it during his wanderings as
his most precious possession.
So far again, until he reached Riga, there was truth in the story of his
Russian traverse. Had he not prowled suspect about revolutionary
Petrograd? Had not the Prince and Princess, the idealized parents of the
story, been murdered and their wealth, together with his own few
thousand roubles, been confiscated? Was he not a fugitive? Indeed, had
he not seen the inside of a horrible prison? It is true that after a day
or two he managed by bribery to escape. But the essence of things was
there—the grain of fact which, under the sunlight of his genius,
expanded into the splendid growth of Truth. And his wit had served him,
too. His guards were for taking away the precious book. Knowing them to
be illiterate, he declared it to be the manuscript of his republican
poem. Challenged to read, he recited from memory verses of Shevchenko,
until they were convinced, not only of the book’s contents, but of his
own revolutionary opinions. This establishment of his orthodoxy,
together with a few roubles, assured his escape. And thence had he not
gone northwards, hungry and footsore?
And had he not been torpedoed? Cast ashore in shirt and trousers,
penniless? Was not the real truth of this adventure even more to his
credit than the fictitious narrative? For, a naval rating, he had
reported to a British man-of-war, and had spent months in a mine sweeper
in the North Sea, until the final catastrophe occurred. Then, after a
short time in hospital a kindly medical board found something wrong with
his heart and sent him out into the English world, a free man.
Yes. His real record was one that no man need be ashamed of. Why, then,
the fiction?
Sitting there in the uncompromising reality of his mother’s kitchen, he
strove for the first time to answer the question. He found an answer in
the obsession of the little book. During the scant leisure of his months
at sea it had been his breviary. More, it had been a talisman, a secret
scroll of enchantment which, wrapped in oilskin, never left his person,
save when, beneath the dim lamp of the fo’c’sle, he pored over it,
hunched up against a bulkhead. The spirit of the writer whom he had seen
dead and naked, seemed to have descended upon him. In the bitter watches
of the North Sea he lived through the dead man’s life with bewildering
intensity. There were times, so he assured himself, when it became a
conscious effort to unravel his own experiences from those of the dead
man. That he had not lived in remoter Kurdistan was unthinkable. And,
surely too, he had been tortured.
And when, in the attic in Cherbury Mews, impelled by irresistible force,
he began to write his fantasia of fact and imagination, the obsession
grew mightier. His pen was winged with flame.
“Why,” said he, half aloud, one day, staring into the kitchen fire, “why
should it not be a case of psychic obsession for which I am not
responsible?”
And that was the most comforting solution he could find.
There was none other. He moved uneasily, changing the crossing of his
legs, and threw a freshly rolled and lighted cigarette into the grate.
It was a case of psychic obsession. Otherwise he was a barefaced liar, a
worm to be despised by his fellow-men. How else to account for the
original lie direct, unreserved, to the publisher? Up to then he had no
thought of sailing through the world under false colours. He had to give
the mysterious dead man some identity. His own unconscious creative self
clamoured for expression. He had woven the dead man and himself into a
personality to which he had given the name of Alexis Triona. Naturally,
for verisimilitude, he had assumed “Alexis Triona” as a pen-name.
Besides, who would read a new book by one John Briggs? The publisher’s
first direct question was a blow between the eyes under which he reeled
for a few seconds. Then the romantic, the psychic, the whatever you will
of the artist’s touch of lunacy asserted itself, and John Briggs was
consumed in ashes and the Phœnix Alexis Triona arose in his stead. And
when the book appeared and the Phœnix leaped into fame, what could the
Phœnix do, for the sake of its ordinary credit, but maintain its
Phœnixdom?
Until now it had been the simplest matter in the world, seeing that he
half believed in it himself, seeing that the identification of the dead
man with himself was so complete, that his lies, even to himself, had
the generous air of conviction. But now, in the uncompromising John
Briggs-dom of his surroundings, things were different. The obsession
which still lingered when he bade Olivia adieu had vanished from his
spirit. He saw himself naked, a mere impostor. If his past found
absolution in the theory of psychic domination, his present was none the
less in a parlous state.
He had no more gone to Helsingfors in the last year’s autumn than he had
gone there now. What should John Briggs, obscure and demobilized able
seaman, have to do in Helsingfors? Why the elaborate falsehood? He
shrugged his shoulders and made a helpless gesture with his elbows. The
obsession again. The quietude of Medlow had got on his nerves. He had to
break away, to seek fresh environment. He had invented Helsingfors; it
was dramatic, in his romantic past; it kept up, in the direct mind of
Blaise Olifant, the mystery of Alexis Triona; and it gave him freedom.
He had spoken truth as to his vagabond humour. He loved the eternal
change of the broad highway. The Salvation Yeo inspiration had persisted
ever since he had run away from home to the El Dorado beyond the seas.
Had he been set down in a torpid household, no matter how princely,
sooner or later he would have revolted and have fled, smitten with the
wander madness. But the Prince, the nomadic Tartar atavism asserting
itself, suffered too much from this unrest; and in their mighty
journeyings through Russia, up and down, north and south, east and west,
and in the manifold adventures and excitements by the way, the young
chief mechanic found the needful satisfaction of his cravings. On
leaving Medlow he had started on a tramp, knapsack on back, to the north
of Scotland, stopping at his mother’s house, _en route_, and had reached
the John o’ Groats whither, on an eventful day, Olivia had professed
herself ready to accompany him. She had little guessed how well he knew
that long, long road. . . . Yet, when he met Blaise Olifant again, and
was forced to vague allusion to his mythical travels, he almost
persuaded himself that he had just arrived from Finland.
But now had come an irreparable shifting of psychological values. He
could not return to Olivia, eating her heart out for news of him, and
persuade himself that he had been to Helsingfors. The lie had been
facile enough. How else to account for his absence? His attendance at
his mother’s death-bed had been imperative: to disregard the summons had
never entered his mind. Yet simple avowal would have been pulling down
the keystone of the elaborate structure which, to her, represented
Alexis Triona. The parting lie had been easy: but the lie on his
return—the inevitable fabrication of imaginary travel—that would be
hatefully difficult. For the first time since he had loved her he was
smitten with remorse for his deception and with terror of her discovery.
He could not sleep of nights aching for her, shivering with dread at the
possibility of loss of her, picturing her alone in the sweet, wind-swept
house, utterly trustful and counting the long hours till he should come
again. Still, thank God, this was the last time they would be parted.
His mother had been the only link to his John Briggs past.
There were no testamentary complications, which he had somewhat feared.
His mother had only a life interest in the tiny estate which went, under
his father’s will, to his sister Ellen. And Ellen did not count.
Absorbed in her family cares, she would pass out of his life for ever
without thought of regret. It would be the final falsehood.
At breakfast, on the morning of the funeral, Ellen said suddenly, in her
dour way:
“I’ve been reading your book. It’s a pack of lies.”
“It would have been if I had signed it John Briggs,” he answered. “But
everything in it is true about Alexis Triona.”
“Your ways don’t seem to be our ways, John,” she remarked coldly.
He felt the words like a slap in the face. He flushed with anger.
“How dare you?”
“I’m sorry,” she answered. “I oughtn’t to have said it with mother lying
cold upstairs.”
He shrugged his shoulders, forced to accept the evasive apology. But her
challenge rankled. They parted stonily after the funeral, with the
perfunctory handshake.
“I don’t suppose I shall ever see you again.”
“It’s rather unlikely,” said he.
“Well, good-bye.”
“Good-bye.”
He threw himself back in the taxi-cab with a great sigh of relief. Thank
God the nightmare of the past few days was over. Now to awaken to the
real and wonderful things of life—the miraculous love of the dark-eyed,
quivering princess of his dreams: the work which since he had loved her
had grown into the sacred aim of their perfect lives.
And just as he had wired her from Newcastle announcing his sailing, so
did he wire her when he reached the railway station.
“Arrived. All well. Speeding straight to you with love and longing.”
Olivia smiled as she kissed the telegram. No one but her Alexis would
have used the word “speeding.”