It is not easy to convey in a few words the turmoil of Jim’s mind
during the following days. One cannot say that he was the prey of his
conscience, for he believed from the bottom of his heart that he was
doing the best thing for Dolly, as well as for himself, in thus allowing
the story of his murder to stand. His uncle had lived a double life, and
thus had maintained a reputation for virtue. In Jim’s case, he could not
long have hidden from the eyes of his neighbours the wretchedness of
his marriage, and there was no likelihood that he would have ever set a
shining example of nobility to the village; and therefore his supposed
extinction could be regarded as one of those pretences which are the
basis of society.
Had there been any likelihood of his deception being found out, the case
would have been different; but his death had been accepted absolutely,
and he did not suppose that there would be any penetrating inquiries or
investigations by the police now that the innkeeper had made his lying
confession. He was completely “dead,” nor would he ever have to come back
to earth again, thereby upsetting any future arrangement of her life
which his “widow” might make; for even if he were one day recognized by
some English acquaintances he could always put any inquirer in the wrong
by showing that he had been none other than “Jim Easton” these many
years.
Yet the fear of detection, and the indefinite sense that he was acting
in a manner violently opposed to those legalities which he did not
understand, but whose existence he realized, kept him in a state of
nervous tension and temporarily banished all peace from his mind. He was
convinced that Dolly would not grieve for him; yet the manner of his
death would be a shock to her, and there were two other persons—Mrs.
Darling and Smiley-face—who would feel his loss. They would soon forget
him, however.
He recalled Mrs. Spooner’s angry words to him after that day when he had
inadvertently interrupted her bicycle-ride: “You haven’t much idea of
obligation, have you?” This irresponsibility, of which people complained,
was evidently growing upon him, he thought to himself; yet, viewing the
matter from another angle, was he not now deliberately acting for the
good of everybody concerned, in ending his unfortunate marriage and
abandoning his inheritance?
His equanimity, however, gradually returned to him in some measure;
and when at length he went back to Rome, and there settled himself
comfortably in the obscure little hotel in the Trastevere quarter, he was
already beginning at moments to feel a tremendous joy in his recovered
liberty.
He knew that he was a deserter, and he was well aware that so he would
be called by all nice-minded people. Yet that thought in itself did
not trouble him; for the mental standpoint of the wanderer commands an
outlook very different from that of the stout citizen. He saw clearly
that he had not in him the stuff of which a constitutional state or
a model household is made. He could not be a party to so many of the
hypocrisies of social life. He was not a good disciple of the Great Sham,
and was so often inclined to “give the show away” when most the illusion
ought to have been maintained. He was not a respectable member of the
community, nor was he gifted with those methodical and enduring qualities
which shape wedlock into a salubrious routine. Perhaps it was that he
had too much imagination to be a good citizen, too much finesse to be a
good husband. In any case he knew that he would never have been of use
to his country, except, perhaps, as a pioneer in a small way (for the
world-power of the Anglo-Saxon has been established by the rover and the
free lance); or possibly as a sort of intellectual bagman, unconsciously
exhibiting the lighter side of the race to foreign and critical eyes.
As the days passed he gave ever less consideration to his attitude, and
soon his thoughts of Dolly and his English life had become sporadic and
fleeting. Once, as he loitered in the sunny Piazza di Spagna upon a
certain Sunday morning, and watched the good folk mounting the hot steps
to the church of the Trinita de’ Monti, he irritably argued the matter
to himself as though anxious to exorcise it by arriving at some sort of
finality. “Dolly will be far happier without me,” he mused. “If I had
left her, and was known to be alive, I should harm her by placing upon
her the stigma most hateful to her sex—that of the unsuccessful wife.
But since I am supposed to be dead, she will benefit trebly: she is rid
of a bad husband; she will have the pleasure, very real to her, of
wearing mourning and nursing a fictitious sorrow; and she may set about
the management of her life with a house and a comfortable fortune to add
to her attractions. And then, again, from a public point of view, I have
avoided the inevitable scandal of my married life by dying before I was
driven to drink and debauchery. My memorial tablet in the church will be
worth reading!”
His cogitations did not carry him further than this on the present
occasion; for a number of white pigeons rose suddenly from the ground
near his feet, and circled round the Egyptian obelisk which stands in
front of the church, thereby directing his thoughts to the land of the
Nile and to the life which he had led before he inherited Eversfield.
On another day, while he was seated in the shade of the trees in the
Pincian Gardens, the passing carriages, in which the polite families of
Rome were taking the air, led his thoughts back once more to these fading
arguments and memories. “Now that I am dead,” he reflected, “Dolly will
at last be able to have the carriage-and-pair I had always refused to
give her. She will be able to play the part of the little widow in the
big carriage: yes!—that will please her far more than the presence of an
untidy-looking husband.”
It is to be understood, and perhaps it is to his credit, that he had
given the loss of his inheritance never a thought, nor had cared how
his money would be spent. He had nearly two thousand pounds in the
bank, which was sufficient to provide for his modest needs for three or
four years, and further than that he had no power to look. He did not
grudge Dolly the estate; and, indeed, so heartily had he come to dislike
Eversfield and all it meant, that he could have wished his worst enemy no
greater punishment than to be established there at the manor.
He gazed out through the arch of the trees to the dome of St. Peter’s,
rising above the distant houses on the far side of an open space of
blazing sunlight; and he breathed a sigh of profound relief that a means
of escape had been found from the cage of matrimony and domesticity
in which he had been confined. “I used to think,” he mused, “that it
would be a wonderful thing to have a wife who would be my refuge and my
sanctuary; but I see now that that was a delusion and a weakness. It is
far better for a man to stand on his own two legs, and to make his own
heart his place of comfort, and what he looks out on through its windows
his entertainment.” Yet even so, he was aware that this statement of the
case did not cover the whole ground; for there certainly were times when
he suffered from a sense of tremendous loneliness.
Then came the trial of the innkeeper, and for a short time he was
obliged to return to the past; yet now he viewed matters with complete
detachment: it was as though he were in no way identical with James
Tundering-West, nor ever had been. He read in the papers, without a
tremor, how his wife had identified the walking-stick, handkerchief,
and postcard, which had been sent to England for the purpose of that
formality. He was mildly relieved to find that his dealings with the
diamonds had not been traced, and that his movements in France, and
his subsequent visit to Genoa and Pisa, were but roughly sketched in as
having no bearing upon the actual crime. The innkeeper’s declarations
quite amused him, and he was hardly indignant to find that the man had
become a popular figure, and that his sentence was wholly inadequate.
The close of the trial marked Jim’s complete emancipation. With a wide
mental gesture, which was very inadequately expressed by his twisted
smile and the shrug of his shoulders, he dismissed the tale of his
marriage from the history of his life, and turned his attention wholly
to that all-embracing present, which is the true wanderer’s domain. The
“I was” and the “I shall be” of the citizen’s domestic life was lost in
the great “I am” of the vagabond. He was no longer the lord of a compact
little estate, bounded by grey stone walls and green hedges. He was the
squire vagrant; he was enfeoffed of the whole wide world.
In the first exultation of his final freedom he decided to leave Rome.
The true vagrant does not move from place to place in conscious search of
knowledge or experience: he has no purpose in his movements. He travels
onwards merely to satisfy an undefined appetite for life. The difference
between the real nomad and the ordinary traveller is this, that the
latter passes with definite intent from one stopping-place to the next,
and the intervening road is but the means of approach to a desired goal;
but the nomad has no goal, or it might be said that the road itself is
his goal.
In Jim’s case—to use an illustrative exaggeration—if he were moving
south, and the dust were to blow in his face, he would turn and travel
north. Thus, when he made his departure from Rome he took his direction
almost at random. He had no ties, no duties, no cares. A knapsack upon
his shoulders, and some loose change jingling in his pocket, a roll of
notes stuffed into his wallet, and at least three languages ready to his
tongue, he set out to range over his new estate, the world, having the
feeling in his heart that he had come back to the freedom of youth from
a misty prison of premature age which was already fast fading from his
memory.
His route would be difficult to record and puzzling to follow. For days
together he lingered at little inns where a few francs procured him
excellent fare; now he passed on by road or rail, by river or lake, to
new districts, and new settings for the comedy of his life; and now he
came to rest under the awnings of some small hotel in the heart of a
sun-bathed city.
During a spell of particularly hot weather he went north to Lake
Maggiore, where, on the cool slopes of Mergozzolo, he spent a number of
dreamy days at a little whitewashed inn, from whose terrace he could look
down upon the lake and beyond it to the blue and hazy plains of Lombardy
and Piedmont. He worked here on the polishing of his verses, writing
also a longish poem upon the subject of freedom; and in the evenings he
sat for hours under the stars, talking to the proprietor and his wife,
or playing his guitar, and smoking the little cigarettes in which the
Italian Government so wisely specializes.
One incident which occurred at this time may be recorded. He was
making a journey by train one piping-hot day, and was seated alone
in a smoking compartment, which was connected by a door with another
compartment where smoking was not permitted. During a long run between
two stations this door was opened and another traveller entered, carrying
a small portmanteau and a bundle of rugs. He was a stout, florid,
prosperous-looking business man, whose English nationality was entirely
obvious, and when he explained in very bad Italian that he was changing
his seat in order to smoke a pipe, Jim answered him in his mother tongue,
and soon they passed into casual conversation.
“People on these Italian railways,” the stranger said, “seem to smoke
in any carriage; but I, personally, feel that one ought to stick to the
rules, and only do so in the compartments specially provided for the
purpose.”
“Quite right, I’m sure,” Jim replied, having no pronounced views on the
subject, but wishing to be polite.
“That is what these foreigners lack—a sense of neighborly duty,” the man
went on. “Don’t you think so? I always feel that England is what she is
because our people always consider the other fellow. We pull together and
help each other.”
He enlarged upon this subject, and was still citing instances in support
of his argument, when the train pulled up at a small station, where a
halt of ten minutes or so was announced by an official upon the platform.
Thereupon a number of passengers alighted from the train and made their
way through the blazing sunlight to a refreshment stall which stood
in the cool shade of a dusty tree in the station yard, just beyond the
barriers.
Jim was in lazy mood, and did not join this throng of thirsty humanity;
but his companion, who was feeling the heat, left his seat and followed
the hurrying crowd.
At length the bell rang, and the guard blew his horn; and Jim, suddenly
awakening from a reverie, became aware that his fellow traveller had not
returned, and hastily leaned out of the window to see what had become of
him. The driver sounded his whistle, and set the engine in motion; and at
the same moment Jim saw a fat and frantic figure struggling to pass the
barrier, and being held back by excited officials, who, it seemed, were
refusing to allow him to attempt to board the moving train.
Jim waved his arm and received some sort of answering signal of distress.
Instantly the thought flashed into his mind that here was an opportunity
to display that sense of obligation of which they had spoken, and to aid
a fellow creature in trouble. The man’s baggage! He must throw it out of
the train, so that, at any rate, the owner in his dilemma should not be
separated from his belongings.
Snatching the portmanteau and the rugs from the seat where they rested,
he pushed them through the window, and had the satisfaction of seeing
them roll to safety upon the platform at the feet of a bewildered porter.
Again he waved to the struggling man, and pointed repeatedly to the
baggage with downward jabbing finger; then, having thus performed what he
considered to be a most neighbourly act of quick-witted succour, he sank
back into his corner seat and laughed to himself at the incident.
A smile still suffused his face when, several minutes later, the door
from the next compartment opened and the portly Englishman made his
appearance.
“Warm lemonade,” he remarked; “but it was better than nothing. A dam’
pretty woman in the next carriage. I’ve been trying to talk to her, but
it was no good: we can’t understand each other.”
Jim stared at him in horror, as at a ghost. “Then it wasn’t you at the
barrier?” he gasped in awe.
“What d’you mean?” the other asked. “Hullo, where’s my baggage?”
Jim blanched. “I threw it out of the window,” he said, swallowing
convulsively.
“You did _what_?” the man exclaimed, staring at him in amazement.
“I thought,” Jim stammered, “it was the most neighbourly thing to do; you
see, I....” But the remainder of the sentence failed upon his dry lips,
as the corpulent stranger rose up before him in the crimson fullness of
his fury.
Never had Jim, in all his vicissitudes, been subjected to so overwhelming
a bombardment of abuse; and though he managed at length to explain
the mistake he had made, he failed thereby to check the passionate
maledictions which spluttered and burst about his devoted head like
fireworks. At last he could stand it no longer, and, rising slowly to his
feet, he smote the stranger a blow upon the jaw which sent him reeling
across the compartment, as the train came to a standstill at another
station.
The man staggered to the door, and, tumbling out on to the platform,
shouted for help in a frenzied admixture of English, French, and Italian;
but while a crowd of uncomprehending passengers and officials gathered
around him, Jim opened the door at the opposite end of the carriage, and
descended on to the deserted track. A moment later he had disappeared
behind the wall of an adjacent shed, and soon was out on the high road,
heading for his destination, which was yet some ten miles distant.
“That’s enough of neighbourly duty for one day,” he muttered, as he lit a
cigarette.
A great part of August he spent amidst the woods of Monte Adamello, and
in the Val Camonica; but, suddenly feeling a little bored, and having a
desire for the sea, he made the long train-journey to Venice, and crossed
the water to the Lido, where he bought himself a mad red-and-white
bathing suit, and went daily into the sea with a crowd of merry Venetians.
The delights of the Stabilimento dei Bagni, however, did not long hold
him in thrall. There was too much splashing and spitting; and, when the
bathing hours were over for the day, the concert-hall and the open-air
theatre offered a kind of entertainment which, owing to an unaccountable
mood of discontent, soon began to pall. He therefore took ship across the
Gulf of Venice to Trieste, and stayed for some days at a small hotel on
the hillside towards Boschetto.
Here, one evening at dinner, he made the acquaintance of a ship’s
officer, who told him that on the morrow the steamer on which he was
employed was sailing for Cyprus; and, without a moment’s hesitation,
Jim decided to take passage by it to that island of romance. It was
September, and the weather was cooling fast. He had had some vague idea
of crossing the sea to the Levant; but now this new suggestion came to
him with a surprisingly definite appeal.
“Of Course, Cyprus!” he exclaimed. “The very place I have always wanted
to visit. I had forgotten all about it.”
He had read books, and had heard travellers’ tales, about this wonderful
land which rises from the blue waters of the eastern Mediterranean like
a phantom isle of enchantment. Here the remains of temples dedicated to
the old gods of Greece are to be seen: the mountain streams still resound
at noon with the pipes of Pan; at sunset upon the seashore one may
picture Aphrodite rising in her glory from the waves; and at midnight the
barking of the dogs of Diana may be heard over the hills. The Crusaders
endeavoured to establish a kingdom here on Frankish lines, and the
place is full of the ruins of their efforts. The headlands are crested
with crumbling baronial castles, and in the towns there still stand the
walls of Gothic churches, wherein, at dead of night, they say that the
ghostly chanting of hymns to the Blessed Virgin may be heard. Then came
the Moslems; and to this day the call to prayer in the name of Allah
synchronizes with the tolling of convent bells summoning the worshippers
in the name of the Mother of Jesus, while the peasants, inwardly heedless
of both, still make their little offerings at the traditional holy places
of the gods of Olympus.
It is a land in which the movement of Time is forgotten, and in part
it is a living remnant of the dead ages; and as such it had for long
appealed to Jim’s imagination. Straightway, therefore, he wrote a letter
to his bankers in Rome telling them to forward him some money to the
Post Office at Nicosia, the capital city; and twenty hours later he was
standing on the deck of the small coasting steamer, watching the land
receding from sight in a haze of afternoon heat.
On the sixth morning, as the sun was rising, the anchor rattled into the
blue waters of the roadstead before Larnaca, the chief port of Cyprus;
and, after an early breakfast, Jim was rowed in a small boat, manned
by a Greek and a negro, towards the little town which stood white and
resplendent in the sunshine, its cupolas, minarets, and flat-roofed
houses backed by the vivid green of the palms and the saffron of the
hills. He knew a few words of Greek, and a considerable amount of Arabic;
and, with the aid of his friend the ship’s officer, he had soon chartered
the two-horse carriage in which he was to make the thirty-mile journey to
Nicosia, the inland capital of the island.
The road passed across the bare, sunburnt uplands, and was flanked by
scattered rocks, from which the basking lizards scampered as the carriage
approached. Occasionally they passed a cart drawn by two long-horned
bullocks, led by a scarlet-capped peasant; or a solitary shepherd driving
his flock; or some cloaked and bearded rider upon a mule, jingling down
to the coast. The glare of the road was great; but under the shelter of
the dusty awning of the carriage Jim was cool enough, and there was a
refreshing following-wind blowing up from the sea, which tempered the
autumn heat.
The time passed quickly, and it did not seem long before they lurched,
with a great cracking of the driver’s whip, into the half-way village
of Dali. The second stage of the journey was more tedious, for now the
novelty of the rugged scenery was gone, and the jolting of the rickety
carriage was more noticeable. Jim was thankful, therefore, when, in
the late afternoon, Nicosia came suddenly into sight, and the carriage
presently rattled through the tunnelled gateway in the mediæval ramparts,
and passed into the narrow and echoing streets of the city.
Here Greeks and Armenians, Arabs and Turks thronged the intricate
thoroughfares; and as the driver made his way towards the Greek hotel,
to which Jim had been recommended, there was much pulling at the mouths
of the weary horses and much hoarse shouting. Now their passage was
obstructed by an oxen-drawn cart, piled high with earthenware jars; now
they seemed to be about to unseat a turbaned Oriental from his white
steed; and now a group of Greek girls bearing pitchers upon their heads
was scattered to right and left as the carriage lumbered round a corner.
Here was a priest entering a Gothic doorway dating from the days of
Richard Cœur-de-Lion, and upon the wall above him were carved the arms of
some forgotten knight of Normandy; here a sheikh in flowing silks stood
kicking off his shoes before the tiled entrance of a mosque. Here were
noisy Turkish children playing before a building which recalled the age
of the Venetian Republic; and here wild-eyed Cypriot peasants wrangled
and argued as they had argued since those far-off days when Cleopatra’s
sister was queen of the island, and, ages earlier, when Phœnician seamen
and the warriors of ancient Greece had held them in subjection.
At last the carriage pulled up in front of the white archway which led
through a high, blank wall into the hotel; and presently Jim found
himself in a quiet courtyard, where a tinkling fountain played amongst
the orange-trees. The building was erected around the four sides of this
secluded yard, the rooms leading off a red-tiled balcony, supported on a
series of whitewashed arches, and approached by a flight of worn stone
steps.
Up to this covered balcony he was led by the genial proprietor, a man
with a fierce grey moustache which belied a fat and kindly face; and a
room was assigned to him, from the door of which he could look down upon
the fountain and the oranges, while from the window at the opposite end
he commanded a short view across a jumble of flat housetops to a group
of tall dark cypress trees, where the sparrows were chattering as they
gathered to roost.
The walls of the room were whitewashed and were pleasantly devoid of
pictures. It might have been a chamber in an ancient palace, and as Jim
sat himself down upon the wooden bench he had the feeling that he had
passed from the twentieth century into some period of the far past.
For some time there had been a vague kind of discontent in his mind. It
was as though his life were incomplete. He seemed to be seeking for
something, the nature of which he could not define. At times he had
thought that this was due to a desire for romance, a natural urge of sex;
but, on the other hand, his reason told him that he had had enough of
women, and that his present emancipation was in essence very largely a
freedom from them.
Now, however, in the dusk of this quiet room, his heart seemed of a
sudden to be at rest; and when from a distant minaret there came to his
ears the evening call to prayer, a sense of inevitability, a kind of
acknowledgment of _Kismet_, or Fate, passed over him and soothed him into
a hopeful and expectant peacefulness.
He was still in this tranquil mood when the summons to the evening meal
brought him down the stone steps and across the courtyard, where the
ripe oranges hung from the trees, and the fountain splashed. It was with
quiet, dawdling steps, too, that he strolled out, hatless, into the
narrow street after the meal was finished. The night was warm and close,
with the moon at full; and the pale deserted thoroughfare was hushed
as though it were concealing some secret. The barred windows and shut
doors of the houses seemed to hide unspoken things, and the two or three
passers-by, moving like shadows near to the wall, gave the impression
that they were bent upon some mysterious mission.
Here and there between the houses on either side small gardens were
hidden away behind high whitewashed walls, above which the tops of the
trees could be seen. The door of one of these stood open, and Jim,
standing in the middle of the empty street, paused to gaze through the
white archway into the shadows and sprinkled moonlight beyond.
Then, quietly into the frame of the doorway there came the figure of a
woman, peering out into the street, the moon shining upon her face and
upon her white hand, which held the door as though she were about to
shut it for the night. On the instant, and with a leap of his heart, Jim
recognized her.
“Monimé!” he cried out in amazement, running forward to her. He saw her
raise her arm to her forehead and step back into the shadow: he could
hear her gasp of surprise. A moment later he had taken her hand in his,
and her startled eyes had met his own.