While Barbara was swimming to meet the dawn, Miltoun was bathing in
those waters of mansuetude and truth which roll from wall to wall in the
British House of Commons.
In that long debate on the Land question, for which he had waited to
make his first speech, he had already risen nine times without catching
the Speaker's eye, and slowly a sense of unreality was creeping over
him. Surely this great Chamber, where without end rose the small sound
of a single human voice, and queer mechanical bursts of approbation and
resentment, did not exist at all but as a gigantic fancy of his own! And
all these figures were figments of his brain! And when he at last spoke,
it would be himself alone that he addressed! The torpid air tainted with
human breath, the unwinking stare of the countless lights, the long rows
of seats, the queer distant rounds of pale listening flesh perched up so
high, they were all emanations of himself! Even the coming and going in
the gangway was but the coming and going of little wilful parts of him!
And rustling deep down in this Titanic creature of his fancy was 'the
murmuration' of his own unspoken speech, sweeping away the puff balls of
words flung up by that far-away, small, varying voice.
Then, suddenly all that dream creature had vanished; he was on his feet,
with a thumping heart, speaking.
Soon he had no tremors, only a dim consciousness that his words sounded
strange, and a queer icy pleasure in flinging them out into the silence.
Round him there seemed no longer men, only mouths and eyes. And he had
enjoyment in the feeling that with these words of his he was holding
those hungry mouths and eyes dumb and unmoving. Then he knew that he
had reached the end of what he had to say, and sat down, remaining
motionless in the centre of a various sound; staring at the back of the
head in front of him, with his hands clasped round his knee. And soon,
when that little faraway voice was once more speaking, he took his hat,
and glancing neither to right nor left, went out.
Instead of the sensation of relief and wild elation which fills the
heart of those who have taken the first plunge, Miltoun had nothing
in his deep dark well but the waters of bitterness. In truth, with the
delivery of that speech he had but parted with what had been a sort of
anodyne to suffering. He had only put the fine point on his conviction,
of how vain was his career now that he could not share it with Audrey
Noel. He walked slowly towards the Temple, along the riverside, where
the lamps were paling into nothingness before that daily celebration of
Divinity, the meeting of dark and light.
For Miltoun was not one of those who take things lying down; he took
things desperately, deeply, and with revolt. He took them like a rider
riding himself, plunging at the dig of his own spurs, chafing and
wincing at the cruel tugs of his own bitt; bearing in his friendless,
proud heart all the burden of struggles which shallower or more genial
natures shared with others.
He looked hardly less haggard, walking home, than some of those homeless
ones who slept nightly by the river, as though they knew that to lie
near one who could so readily grant oblivion, alone could save them
from seeking that consolation. He was perhaps unhappier than they, whose
spirits, at all events, had long ceased to worry them, having oozed out
from their bodies under the foot of Life:
Now that Audrey Noel was lost to him, her loveliness and that
indescribable quality which made her lovable, floated before him, the
very torture-flowers of a beauty never to be grasped—yet, that he
could grasp, 'if he only would! That was the heart and fervour of
his suffering. To be grasped if he only would! He was suffering, too,
physically from a kind of slow fever, the result of his wetting on the
day when he last saw her. And through that latent fever, things and
feelings, like his sensations in the House before his speech, were all
as it were muffled in a horrible way, as if they all came to him wrapped
in a sort of flannel coating, through which he could not cut. And all
the time there seemed to be within him two men at mortal grips with one
another; the man of faith in divine sanction and authority, on which
all his beliefs had hitherto hinged, and a desperate warm-blooded hungry
creature. He was very miserable, craving strangely for the society of
someone who could understand what he was feeling, and, from long habit
of making no confidants, not knowing how to satisfy that craving.
It was dawn when he reached his rooms; and, sure that he would not
sleep, he did not even go to bed, but changed his clothes, made himself
some coffee, and sat down at the window which overlooked the flowered
courtyard.
In Middle Temple Hall a Ball was still in progress, though the glamour
from its Chinese lanterns was already darkened and gone. Miltoun saw
a man and a girl, sheltered by an old fountain, sitting out their last
dance. Her head had sunk on her partner's shoulder; their lips were
joined. And there floated up to the window the scent of heliotrope,
with the tune of the waltz that those two should have been dancing. This
couple so stealthily enlaced, the gleam of their furtively turned eyes,
the whispering of their lips, that stony niche below the twittering
sparrows, so cunningly sought out—it was the world he had abjured! When
he looked again, they—like a vision seen—had stolen away and gone; the
music too had ceased, there was no scent of heliotrope. In the stony
niche crouched a stray cat watching the twittering sparrows.
Miltoun went out, and, turning into the empty Strand, walked on—without
heeding where, till towards five o'clock he found himself on Putney
Bridge.
He rested there, leaning over the parapet, looking down at the grey
water. The sun was just breaking through the heat haze; early waggons
were passing, and already men were coming in to work. To what end did
the river wander up and down; and a human river flow across it twice
every day? To what end were men and women suffering? Of the full
current of this life Miltoun could no more see the aim, than that of the
wheeling gulls in the early sunlight.
Leaving the bridge he made towards Barnes Common. The night was
still ensnared there on the gorse bushes grey with cobwebs and starry
dewdrops. He passed a tramp family still sleeping, huddled all together.
Even the homeless lay in each other's arms!
From the Common he emerged on the road near the gates of Ravensham;
turning in there, he found his way to the kitchen garden, and sat down
on a bench close to the raspberry bushes. They were protected from
thieves, but at Miltoun's approach two blackbirds flustered out through
the netting and flew away.
His long figure resting so motionless impressed itself on the eyes of a
gardener, who caused a report to be circulated that his young lordship
was in the fruit garden. It reached the ears of Clifton, who himself
came out to see what this might mean. The old man took his stand in
front of Miltoun very quietly.
“You have come to breakfast, my lord?”
“If my grandmother will have me, Clifton.”
“I understood your lordship was speaking last night.”
“I was.”
“You find the House of Commons satisfactory, I hope.”
“Fairly, thank you, Clifton.”
“They are not what they were in the great days of your grandfather, I
believe. He had a very good opinion of them. They vary, no doubt.”
“Tempora mutantur.”
“That is so. I find quite anew spirit towards public affairs. The
ha'penny Press; one takes it in, but one hardly approves. I shall be
anxious to read your speech. They say a first speech is a great strain.”
“It is rather.”
“But you had no reason to be anxious. I'm sure it was beautiful.”
Miltoun saw that the old man's thin sallow cheeks had flushed to a deep
orange between his snow-white whiskers.
“I have looked forward to this day,” he stammered, “ever since I knew
your lordship—twenty-eight years. It is the beginning.”
“Or the end, Clifton.”
The old man's face fell in a look of deep and concerned astonishment.
“No, no,” he said; “with your antecedents, never.”
Miltoun took his hand.
“Sorry, Clifton—didn't mean to shock you.”
And for a minute neither spoke, looking at their clasped hands as if
surprised.
“Would your lordship like a bath—breakfast is still at eight. I can
procure you a razor.”
When Miltoun entered the breakfast room, his grandmother, with a copy of
the Times in her hands, was seated before a grape fruit, which, with
a shredded wheat biscuit, constituted her first meal. Her appearance
hardly warranted Barbara's description of 'terribly well'; in truth she
looked a little white, as if she had been feeling the heat. But there
was no lack of animation in her little steel-grey eyes, nor of decision
in her manner.
“I see,” she said, “that you've taken a line of your own, Eustace. I've
nothing to say against that; in fact, quite the contrary. But remember
this, my dear, however you may change you mustn't wobble. Only one thing
counts in that place, hitting the same nail on the head with the same
hammer all the time. You aren't looking at all well.”
Miltoun, bending to kiss her, murmured:
“Thanks, I'm all right.”
“Nonsense,” replied Lady Casterley. “They don't look after you. Was your
mother in the House?”
“I don't think so.”
“Exactly. And what is Barbara about? She ought to be seeing to you.”
“Barbara is down with Uncle Dennis.”
Lady Casterley set her jaw; then looking her grandson through and
through, said:
“I shall take you down there this very day. I shall have the sea to you.
What do you say, Clifton?”
“His lordship does look pale.”
“Have the carriage, and we'll go from Clapham Junction. Thomas can go
in and fetch you some clothes. Or, better, though I dislike them, we can
telephone to your mother for a car. It's very hot for trains. Arrange
that, please, Clifton!”
To this project Miltoun raised no objection. And all through the
drive he remained sunk in an indifference and lassitude which to Lady
Casterley seemed in the highest degree ominous. For lassitude, to her,
was the strange, the unpardonable, state. The little great lady—casket
of the aristocratic principle—was permeated to the very backbone with
the instinct of artificial energy, of that alert vigour which those
who have nothing socially to hope for are forced to develop, lest they
should decay and be again obliged to hope. To speak honest truth, she
could not forbear an itch to run some sharp and foreign substance into
her grandson, to rouse him somehow, for she knew the reason of his
state, and was temperamentally out of patience with such a cause for
backsliding. Had it been any other of her grandchildren she would not
have hesitated, but there was that in Miltoun which held even Lady
Casterley in check, and only once during the four hours of travel did
she attempt to break down his reserve. She did it in a manner very soft
for her—was he not of all living things the hope and pride of her heart?
Tucking her little thin sharp hand under his arm, she said quietly:
“My dear, don't brood over it. That will never do.”
But Miltoun removed her hand gently, and laid it back on the dust rug,
nor did he answer, or show other sign of having heard.
And Lady Casterley, deeply wounded, pressed her faded lips together, and
said sharply:
“Slower, please, Frith!”