IT was a dismally wet afternoon some weeks later, and Evelyn was sitting
in one of the deep window-seats in the drawing-room of Philip's house
above Pangbourne, which looked out on to the terrace, where only six
months ago the nightingale had sat and sung on Tom Merivale's finger.
Below, communicating with the upper terrace by a flight of stone steps,
was the bedless square of grass, below again the rose garden, from which
the ground went steeply down to the river. He had occupied himself with
closing the shutters of this row of windows, one of which, reaching down
to the ground, communicated with the terrace, and, not satisfied with
this, he had drawn the curtains over them, leaving the room in darkness.
The window-seats were well cushioned, and having arrived at the last, he
slipped between the curtains he had drawn and curled himself up in it.
During this last month he had made, so everybody said, extraordinary
progress; he could already read a little, fast enough, that is to say,
to enable him to remember the sentences he spelled out with his fingers
in the raised type; he could remember the cards in his hand sufficiently
to enable him to play a game of bridge, and with a stick to feel his way
he could walk alone. But none, except he, knew the dreadful progress
which despair had made in his mind. He had begun to be able once to look
forward, to frame the future; but now the future was unframeable, he was
only able just to bear the present moment. Soon that might be
unbearable, too.
For a week now this dull weight, starting from a definite moment, had
been gaining on him, for a week ago he had gone with Philip to the
lodge, and the four-year-old child of the lodge-keeper had come out with
his father. Evelyn, sitting down and waiting while Philip spoke to him,
had called the child, who toddled up to him, and then, when he got
close, burst into shrieks of frightened dismay. Evelyn had understood,
and he said nothing about it to anyone. But he put the fact away in his
mind, and when he was alone he took it out and looked at it.
At this moment he was alone in the house. Mrs. Home was spending a few
days in London, Philip would soon be due by the evening train, and Madge
was out, doing some small businesses in Pangbourne. She had been
unwilling to leave him, but he had made it unmistakably and
ill-temperedly clear he would sooner be left. He thought with a dull
wonder at himself of the fact that he could have been cross with her. It
had happened often before, and in spite of its recurrence he never got
used to it. It always seemed strange to him. And with a wonder that was
almost incredulous, he thought how he had behaved to her to-day. For she
had come to him with a word which a man can only hear once, to whisper
which a woman nestles close to him, pouring out her very soul in the joy
of knowing that she will some day put into his arms her first-born
child. That Madge had told him, but he felt nothing; it did not reach
him, neither joy for her nor for himself seemed any longer capable of
being felt, and he had said only, "I shall never see it." He was
thinking about that now, if this leaden contemplation of facts could be
called thought, of that and of the child that had cried when it saw his
face. Over that face he passed his sensitive fingers.
"I'm sure I don't wonder," he said to himself.
* * * * *
The door opened once as he lay in this window-seat, and correctly and
mechanically he pictured what was going on. Only one person entered;
that he could tell by the footfalls, and that one person whistled gently
to himself. He paused by the table, then went to the door again, and
again re-entered and paused by another. Then he poked the fire and swept
up the grate. Clearly the footman making the room ready, and he banged
the door as he went out.
Now if that child had cried at the sight of his face, what must it be to
others? Surely they would cry too if they obeyed their natural impulse,
either cry or turn away, in pity, no doubt, but also in repulsion. It
must be an effort to everybody to look at him, to be with him. And Madge
was with him so much; she kissed him, she let him kiss her; she was his
wife, the wife of this man with the nightmare face at which a child
cried out as if it saw bogey. Philip had been quick and ready on that
occasion, had said the child was teething, and wrung corroboration from
the father. But he had answered, "Yes, it teethes when it sees me," and
Philip was not ready enough for that.
The crying child explained other things too; for Mrs. Home had cried
when she saw him; he could hear from her voice that she was crying,
there were sobs in it. He had thought then that it was from pity merely
and sympathy, but he told himself now that it was not so; she cried from
horror at him. All his life he had hated ugly things, and now it would
be hard to match himself in that abhorred category.
* * * * *
The very kindness, too, and pity which he knew surrounded him were
scarcely more bearable. He did not want to be pitied, he would sooner be
left to drag out a lonely, shunned life than to be surrounded with pity;
while with regard to kindness, the knowledge that he and Madge were
frankly living on Philip became harder every day to swallow. Philip
certainly had done all he could to minimise the burden of that; he had,
soi-disant, bought the unfinished picture of himself, declaring that no
finished picture could possibly be so like him; he had bought, too,
after argument, the picture of Madge. The proceeds he had invested for
Evelyn, promising since he had advised him so ill before to take greater
care this time, and twice during this last month he had reported
substantial profits from the investments he had made for him, so that if
he insisted, as he did insist, on paying the bills for his nurse and
doctor, he still could run up to London whenever he pleased if
Pangbourne bored him. With luck, too, and care his investments would
grow fatter yet.
On this occasion Evelyn had broken out.
"Ah, I can't stand it," he cried. "I can't go on living here, Madge and
I, indefinitely. Yes, I know how kind you are, both you and your mother,
and how you would be pleased--really pleased--for us to stop forever,
but can't you see how impossible it is for me to accept your hospitality
like that? I must, I simply must, pay my way, earn something, work and
get tired, if only for the distraction of it. A barrel-organ, now.
'Totally blind. Ky-ind Gentleman!' That would be more self-respecting
than to sit here and do nothing. It's better to beg in the streets than
to accept alms without begging for them. That's why the poor have such a
horror of the workhouse. They would sooner be cold and hungry, and so
would I."
He was silent a moment after this.
"I suppose I needn't have said all that," he observed drearily.
"However, it doesn't much matter what I say."
Philip had a horror of improving the occasion, but he could hardly let
such a chance of a word in season slip. He was, too, keenly wounded by
this.
"You don't recollect, my dear fellow," he said, "that we are all doing
our best, and that it is hard not to be hurt by words like those."
"Oh, for God's sake don't preach," cried Evelyn.
Philip flushed for a moment rather angrily, but re-collected himself.
"Indeed, I hope not," he said with a laugh. "Now are you ready to give
me my revenge at picquet?"
* * * * *
It was quite dark behind the curtains, though to Evelyn, who lay there,
whatever the light was, it would have been dark in any case, and in a
grosser darkness than that, a darkness of despair unilluminable by any
sun, he pondered these things, his own helplessness, his blindness, the
horror of his own face, and the dead weight of his indebtedness to
Philip, the one man in all the world whose charity, from the very nature
of things, was most unbearable. Together, poor fellow they formed a
blank wall which it seemed hopeless to try to scale; indeed, he no
longer really wanted to scale it, he only wanted to be allowed to sit
down and have not only sight, but hearing and feeling and taste and
smell closed forever, for death was surely a thing far less bitter than
this living death in life. He could no longer now look forward to the
future at all; it required all his energies to get through the hour that
was present, without some breakdown; decent behaviour for the moment,
when he was with any of the others, was the utmost he was capable of,
and even of that he often felt incapable. And his energies, such as they
were, were gradually failing before the hourly task. He was in no sense
beginning ever so slightly to get used to it all, and the trials of
each day, so far from making the trials of the next more easy to
contemplate or to bear, only weakened his powers of bearing them. It was
all so hopeless; for him hope was dead, and the last chord of her lyre
had snapped.
But he did not feel this dully and vaguely; the very vividness and
alertness of his nature which had made life so passionately sweet to him
before made his hopelessness just as passionately felt now. He, too,
like Tom Merivale, but with less of set purpose and more of instinct in
his choice, had been in love with life, and that fire which had gone out
had left not mere grey ash, but something burningly cold, and life was
now as actively terrible to him as it had once been lovely.
* * * * *
There was the muffled sound of talking in the hall, and next moment the
steps of two people entered, and Madge spoke. The other step went on
towards the fireplace.
"Evelyn not here?" she said. "I suppose he's gone to the library for
tea."
Then Philip's voice spoke.
"How has he been to-day?"
"Ah, so bad, poor darling!" she said. "Sometimes I almost despair,
Philip; if it wasn't for you I know I should. Of course he tries all he
can, but it seems almost as if his powers of trying were failing. It
makes me utterly miserable to think of him."
Evelyn did not move nor reveal his presence in any way. He felt as if
the speaker was but being the echo of his own thoughts. Philip said
something sympathetic in tone, but he did not catch that; he wanted only
to hear how far Madge agreed with himself.
"And I dread his suspecting more," she went on. "I so often see him
feeling his face, as if trying to picture it to himself more clearly.
And if for a moment I should break down and let him know--ah, I can't
talk of it. Let us go to the library and see if he is there."
Her voice choked a little over this; then without more words they passed
out of the drawing-room again, and Evelyn felt as if something had
snapped in his brain. He almost wondered that they had not heard it.
As soon as the door had closed behind them he got swiftly and quietly
up from his seat and felt his way to the centre window, which opened on
to the terrace. He undid the shutters of it, stepped out, and closed it
behind him. He was hardly conscious of any motive in his action--he
certainly had no plan as to what he should do next. One overwhelming
fact had become a certainty to him, the fact contained in Madge's last
sentence, and he knew nothing more than that he must go away somewhere,
lose himself somehow, do anything rather than go back to her, to be
pitied, to be secretly shuddered at, to be a daily, hourly fear to her.
Indeed, he would never look upon their child.
* * * * *
It was a cold, windless evening, and the rain descended in a steady
downpour, hissing on to the shrubs, while the gutters of the house
gurgled and chuckled. But louder than the rain and more sonorous was the
great rush and roar of the river below, as it poured seawards, swollen
to a torrent of flood from these persistent rains. And something in the
strength and glory of that deep voice called to him; he must go down to
the river, for it had something to say to him. Yet it was not the river
that called to him, but in some mysterious way Tom Merivale, whose
jovial, deep voice was shouting to him to come with the authenticity of
actual hallucination. He hardly knew which it was; he knew only that he
could never go back to the house he had just left, and that something
called, with promise in its voice of life, real life, or of death and
deliverance, he knew not which.
He had no stick to guide him, but without hesitation he crossed the
gravel of the terrace, and felt his way along the wall of it to where a
stone vase stood at the top of the steps leading to the lawn below. A
purple clematis twined round it; he had made a study of it for a picture
last summer. Then came the twelve steps, the shuffling across the soaked
grass of the lawn, and a further flight of twelve steps into the rose
garden.
But at the thought of deliverance of some kind so close to him, so that
he need no more now think of "to-morrow and to-morrow," and all the
impossible to-morrows, his poor tired brain cleared, his myriad troubles
and sorrows seemed to roll away from him, for though the bitterness of
death was not past, the bitterness of life, in comparison to which the
other was sweet, was over. So with unclouded mind and soul, which no
longer rebelled and resented, he thought quietly, as he felt his way
across the rose garden, and struck the steep path leading to the river,
of all the past.
How wonderful and beautiful life had been; since his earliest boyish
recollections, how full of surprising joys! Health and vigour had been
his, a clean, wholesome life, the power of loving this exquisite world,
an artistic gift that had made a daily Paradise, and, above all, love
itself, and the fulfilment of love. Then had come a crash, a break, but
how short had been these weeks in comparison of the rest. If this was
the pain with which he had to make payment for all his joy, how cheap,
to look at it fairly, had joy been. Now that he knew that was the full
payment that would be demanded for the joy he had received in such
unstinted abundance, he no longer complained, it was only while the
payment seemed to be going to be charged him indefinitely, every day for
years to come, that he had rebelled and owned himself bankrupt. The one
eternal necessity of life, which, the moment it ceases to brace begins
to paralyse, had passed from him, the necessity of going on always,
every day and hour, having to meet one difficulty after another, and
without hope of getting any respite, so long as life lasts. For now he
knew that some end was very near.
He paused a moment to brush his dripping hair back from his face,
wondering in a sort of vague, uninterested manner whether something had
actually cracked in his brain, whether he had gone mad, or so the world
could call it. But whatever had cracked, it had been the tension of it
which all these weeks had caused his misery, and in this exquisite
moment of peace that had suddenly come to him he almost laughed aloud
for the unspeakable relief which the cessation of pain had brought. He
felt that up till now his mental eyes had been as blind as his physical
ones, that the blows that had been dealt him had been dealt from the
dark, so that he could not guess who wielded the whip. But now they had
ceased, and the clouds of darkness were rolled away, and there sat there
One with a face full of infinite compassion, and since none but He was
there, it must have been He, or some ministering angel of pain, who at
his bidding had chastised him thus. Then Evelyn felt as if he had asked
permission of Him to go on, for the river--or Tom's voice--still hailed
him joyously; and since it was allowed, still without intention, without
definite thought of any kind, he went on his way, with shuffling steps
indeed that stumbled over the gravel of the path, but with a great,
serene light shining on him.
He had by now come close to the edge of the river, and the rain for the
moment had ceased, so that he could hear the suck and gurgle of the
hurrying flood-water, which whispered and chuckled to itself. But this
rapturous noise of swift-flowing water sounded but faintly, for a
hundred yards below was the weir. All the sluices were raised, and tons
of water momently plunged through the openings, bellowing with a great
hoarse laugh of ecstasy as they fell into the pool below. It was to that
place, somewhere in the middle of the narrow pathway of planks that he
was called; it was from there, where he would be surrounded on all sides
with the noise of waters, that the voice of Tom, that faithful lover of
water, called him. That somehow, and he did not question how or why, was
his goal, nor did he know whether life or death awaited him there; only
there was going to be reconcilement in some manner.
He had been there many times before; he had been there, indeed, only
yesterday to listen to the splendid tumult of water. But to-day its
voice was redoubled, and he could feel the mist from the plunging stream
wet on his face as he went slowly and cautiously out over the wet
planks. Louder and more triumphantly every moment the voice of the
river--or was it Tom laughing with open mouth, as he used to laugh when
he swam in the garden pool below his cottage?--called to him. On both
sides, before and behind, he was surrounded by the joyous riot of
waters, that filled and possessed his brain till his whole consciousness
was flooded with it till his voice too had to join in it. So he raised
his arms, spreading them out to the night, and threw back his head with
a great shout of ecstatic rapture. And as he did this his foot slipped
on the wet planks, and he fell into the roaring, rushing pool below. So
the great Mother took him back to herself.
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