RODDY MOVES
"... But the Red Dwarf, although as malevolent as possible,
found that his ill-temper had no effect against true love,
which always won in the end, even with quite stupid people."
_Grimm's Fairy Tales._
I
It would have been quite impossible for Roddy to have given any clear
description of his experiences since the event of his accident. There,
surely, like a gleaming sword, that cut his life into two pieces, the
fact itself was visible enough, and there floated before him, again and
again, the casual canter, the especial view that was before him just
then, a view of undulating Downs, somewhere to his left white chalk
hollows in grey hills and to his right a blue strip of sea, the wonder
that was in his mind about Rachel, his thoughts chasing back over all
the incidents of their life together, then suddenly the jerk, his
consciousness of falling with the ground rising in a high wall to oppose
him, and then darkness.
After that there was nightmare in which pain and Rachel, Rachel and
pain, mingled and parted, were confused and then separate, and with them
danced shapes and figures, sometimes in a turmoil that was horrible,
sometimes in silence that was the most terrible of all. Clear after that
first period of misty confusion was the day when he was told his fate.
He had come out from the heart of the more terrible pain--No longer had
he to lie, knowing that soon, after another minute's peace, agony would
rise before him like a creature with a wet pale malignant face, and then
after looking upon him for a moment, would bend down and, with its
horrible damp fingers, would twist and turn his bones one against
another until the supreme moment came when nothing mattered and no
agony, however bad, could touch his indifferent soul.
He was now simply weak, weak, weak--nothing mattered. In his dream he
fancied that someone had said that he would never rise from his back
again. For days after that it lingered far away from his actual
consciousness. Really it had not mattered; something, this dream, that
concerned him, but what could concern him except that people should keep
quiet and not fuss?
For instance he loved to have Rachel with him, he was miserable were she
not there, but at the same time he was conscious that she _did_ fuss,
was not quite like Miss Rand.
But of this thing that he had heard he thought nothing. "There's
_something_ that I ought to think about. I don't know _what_ it is--One
day when I'm stronger I'll look into it."
There came a day when he _was_ stronger, a day, late in January, of a
pale wintry sun and watery gleams. They had placed his bed so that he
could see his beloved Downs and the little road that ran from their foot
out into the village.
On this morning he was wonderfully better--he had slept well, breezes
and pleasant scents came through the open window, geese were cackling, a
donkey's braying made him laugh "Silly old donkey," he said aloud to no
one in particular. Then he was aware of Jacob, sitting bunched into a
heap in the middle of the floor, his brown eyes peering anxiously
through his hair. At every sound his ears would rise for a moment, but
his eyes were fixed upon Roddy.
The dog had been in Roddy's room a good deal during these last weeks,
had been wrenched away from it. Roddy found that he was touched by this
devotion; Jacob apparently cared more for him than did the other
dogs--"Not a bad old thing--Often these mongrels are more human--But,
Lord! he _is_ a sight!"
The nurse was sitting sewing by the window. Roddy lay, happily, thinking
that now at last that jolly bad pain really _did_ seem to have been left
behind. He was immensely, wonderfully better; it would not be long,
surely, before he was quite fit again, before he....
Then down it swung, swung like an iron door shutting all the world away
from him, inexorable--"Always on your back ... never get up again!"
His hand gripped the bed-clothes.
"Nurse."
"Yes?"
"Tell me--am I dreaming or did someone say something the other day
about--about my never being able, well, to toddle again, you know?"
"I'm afraid----"
"Thanks."
He closed his eyes and then summoned all the grit and determination that
there was in him to face this fact. He could not face it. It was as
though he were struggling up the side of a high slippery rock--up he
would struggle, up and up, now he was at the top, down he would slip
again--it could not, oh! it could not be true!
It _was_ true. As the days passed grimly in silence, he accepted it. It
had always been his creed that in this world there was no place for the
maimed and the halt. He was sorry for them, of course, but it was better
that they should go; they only occupied room that was intended for
lustier creatures.
Well, now he was himself of the halt and maimed--that was ironical,
wasn't it? Indeed he would much rather that he had pegged out
altogether--better for everybody--but, as things were, he would square
things out and see what he could make of it all. Then he saw as, every
day, he grew stronger, that he had no resources; everything in his other
life, as he now had come to think of it, had depended upon his physical
strength, every pleasure, every desire, every ambition had had to do
with his body--everything except Rachel.
In his other life half his happiness arose simply from the sense of his
physical movement, his consciousness that, as the rivers flowed and the
winds blew and the sun blazed, so did he also live and have his
being--And with all this, most intimately was his house mingled. That
grey building and he grew and moved and developed together; life could
never be very terrible for him so long as he had his place to come back
to, his place to care for, his fields and his gardens, his horses and
his dogs to look after. Now he could do nothing more for it--perhaps one
day he would be wheeled about its courts and paths, but oh! with what
pitying eyes would it look down upon him, how sorrowfully his gryphons
would greet him, with what memories they would confront him!
He could not bear now to look out upon the Downs on the little village
path--His bed was moved. A day arrived when he felt that it was all,
really, more than he could endure. He was in wild, furious rebellion,
surly, sometimes in raging tempers, sometimes sulking from day to day.
He cursed all the world. Even Christopher could do nothing with him--
Then upon this there followed a period of silence. He lay there and
beyond "Yes" and "No" would answer no one. His eyes stared at the wall.
Christopher feared at this time for his sanity.
Suddenly the silence was broken. He must go to London because he could
not endure the memories that this place thronged upon him--At the
beginning of March he was moved to the house in York Terrace.
II
The little house by the park helped him to construct his new life. The
normality that there was in Roddy, the same balance of common sense,
fostered his recovery. He was not going to die--Life would be an
infernal trouble were he always to be in rebellion against it--he must
simply make the best of the conditions. And then, after all, he had
Rachel. Rachel had been a heroine during this time, and to his love for
her he now clung, passionately, tenaciously, the one thing left to him
out of his great catastrophe.
She seemed, during these months, to have thought for nothing else in all
the world. She was not so useful in a sick room as Miss Rand--Miss Rand
was wonderful--but there were certain moments when she would bend down
and kiss him or would look at him or would take his hand, when he
wondered whether love for him had not crept into her heart after all.
Funny when he had gone out for his ride on that eventful morning
expecting that he had offended her for ever! Well, if his accident had
won Rachel for him, it had been worth while!
But there were other days when he knew for a certainty that it was not
so, knew that it was pity that moved her; affection too perhaps, but
nothing more than affection....
Nevertheless he hoped that this might be the beginning of something
else; he would lie for hours looking out at the park and creating
visions.
He made now something tolerable of his life. People showed a wonderful
kindness and there was always someone to entertain him, some new present
that someone had sent him; people could not be kind enough. He was
grateful for all of this, but he spent many, many hours in thinking. He
found that he had never thought before; he found that he would have gone
to his grave without thinking had not the great catastrophe occurred. He
thought of a great many things, but especially of what other people's
lives were like. There were, he supposed, a great number of people who
had had misfortunes as overwhelming at his--How had they behaved? And
what, after all, were all the other people, in all their different
circumstances, doing? Before this it had only occurred to him to be
interested in the people who were leading lives like his, now he
wondered about everybody.
Little things became of the greatest importance. Every day he read the
paper with absorbed care from the first line to the last. The
arrangement of the room interested him and he would give its details,
minutely, his consideration.
He was greatly interested in gossip and he would chatter, happily, all
the afternoon did someone come and visit him. To everyone it was an
amazing thing that he should take it all so easily. No one had ever
given Roddy credit for the strength of character that was in him and
they did not perhaps recognize that his earlier impatient condemnation
of other people--"Why the devil don't the feller stand up to it like a
man?"--made him now conscious that he was himself at last faced with a
similar test to which he himself must stand up.
But, beyond question, he could not have held the position as he did had
it not been for Rachel; he seemed to see that here was a chance of
seizing her and making her really his own, a chance that would never be
his again. He was making an appeal to her--she was closer to him, he
thought, with every day.
So his natural humour and spirits returned--At present life was
tolerable; he suffered very little pain and he was aware that a number
of people to whom he had never meant anything whatever now cared for him
very much indeed.
He was ashamed when he heard of the men who were dying and suffering for
their country--"He would have had to have gone to Africa," he told
himself, "if he'd not had his accident. Then enteric or a bullet and
good-bye to Rachel altogether!"
III
He had often, during those long hours, thought of the Duchess. He had,
always, in his heart, considered her affection for him strange; he knew
that it was difficult for her to be patient with fools and he knew that
his own intellectual gifts were on no very high level. He based her
friendship for him on the naive transparency with which he displayed his
frankly pagan indulgences. His love for Rachel and this accident had
changed all that. He was still pagan enough at heart, but there were
other things in his world. Principally it occurred to him now that one
couldn't judge about the way things looked to other people, and the
Duchess, of course, always _did_ judge; if they didn't look her way, why
then wipe them out!
He had, in fact, much less now to say to the Duchess; he was afraid that
he would no longer agree with her about things--"Of course she knows the
world and is a damn clever woman, but she's jolly well too hard on
people who aren't quite her style--She'd put my back up, I believe, if
she talked." He had, indeed, always been uncomfortable at the old lady's
approaches to sentiment. She was never sentimental with other people--He
_hated_ sentiment in anyone except, of course, Rachel and she never
_was_ sentimental.
He looked out now upon the road that ran through the park beyond his
window, watched the nursemaids and the children, the old gentlemen, the
girls, the smart women and the pale young men with books and the smart
young men with shiny hats, and he wondered about them all.
Sometimes when the grass, was very green, when high white clouds piled
one upon another hung above the pond whose corner he could just see,
thoughts of his little grey house, his gardens, the Downs, his horses
and dogs would come to him--
"Come out! Come out!" a sparrow would dance on his window ledge--
"Damn you, I can't!" he would cry and then his eyes would fly to
Rachel's photograph--"If I get her it will be worth it, won't it, Jacob,
my son?"
He talked continually to Jacob and found great comfort in the stolid
assurance with which the dog would wag his stump of a tail--"He's more
than human, that dog," he would tell Rachel; "funny how I never used to
see anything in him."
Of course there were many days when life was utterly impossible; then he
would snap at everyone, lie scowling at the park, curse his impotence,
his miserable degraded infirmities. "Curse it, to die in a ditch like
this--to be broken up, to be smashed...."
His majestic butler--now the tenderest and most devoted of
attendants--stood these evil days with great equanimity.
"Bless you, of course he's bound to be wild now and again--wonder is it
don't happen more often--It does him good to curse a bit."
So things were with him until the day of the Duchess's visit. His
surprise at seeing her was confused with an assurance that "she had come
for something." After her departure what she had come for was plain
enough to see.
He had not taken her words about Breton at first with any credulity. His
principal emotion at the time had been anger with the old woman, a great
desire that she should go before he should forget himself and be
disgraced by showing temper to anyone so old and feeble--But when she
had gone, he found that peace had left him now once and for all.
He knew that the Duchess hated Rachel and he was ready to allow for the
bias and exaggeration that spite would lend, but, when that was taken
away, much remained.
Rachel knew Breton, that was certain; she had never told him. Breton's
name had occurred sometimes in conversation and she had always spoken of
him as though he were a complete stranger. Rachel knew Breton and she
had never told him....
He might tell himself that she had not told him because she knew that he
would instantly stop the acquaintance--It was, of course, simply a
friendship that had sprung up because Rachel was sorry for his
ostracism. Roddy thought that that was just like Rachel, part of her
warm-hearted interest in anyone who seemed to be unfairly
treated--yet--she had never told him.
Then, lying there all alone with no one in whom he could confide, there
sprang before him suspicions. If she had known this scoundrel of a
cousin of hers, if she had been so careful to keep from her husband all
cognizance of her friendship, did not that very silence and deceit imply
more than friendship? Was Breton the kind of man to abstain from
snatching every advantage that was open to him? Did not this explain
Rachel's avoidance of Roddy during the last year, her moods of
restraint, repentance, her sudden silences?
Then upon this came the thought, how much of all this did the world
know? Perhaps it was true once again that the husband was the last to be
informed, perhaps during the last year all London Society had mocked at
Roddy's blindness.
The Duchess, he might be sure, had not spared her tongue--The
Duchess ... he cursed her as he lay there and then wondered whether he
should not rather thank her for opening his eyes, then cursed himself for
daring to allow such suspicions of Rachel to gain their hold upon him.
In Roddy there was, strong beyond almost any other principle, a sturdy
hereditary pride. He was proud of his stock, proud of his ancestors and
all their doings, worthy and unworthy, proud of his own pluck and
standing--"Different from all these half-baked fellers with only their
own grandmothers to go back to." It had been this arrogance, with other
things somewhat closely allied, that had endeared him to the Duchess.
Now it was that same pride that suffered most terribly. Here was some
disaster hanging over his head that threatened most nearly the honour of
his family--Let Breton touch that....
He was alone on that evening after the Duchess's visit; Rachel had gone
out to a party; she went, he had noticed, reluctantly, protested again
and again that she wished she could stay with him, seemed to hang about
him as though she would speak to him, looked, oh! too adorably, too
adorably beautiful!
Whilst she was with him he saw behind her the dark shadow of Breton,
that fellow kicked out of the country for cheating at cards or
something as bad, disowned by his family, and she, she, Rachel so
proudly apart, could have gone to him--He was glad when, at last, she
had left him.
Then, lying there, he endured three of the most awful hours of agony
that he was ever, in, all his life, to know. Nothing that had come to
him through his accident was so bad as this. At one moment it was
fury--wild, raging, unreasoning fury--that wished that Rachel and Breton
and the Duchess, all of them together might suffer the torments of
hell--And then swiftly following it came his love of Rachel, nearer now
to burning heights, so that he swore that, whatever she had done, he did
not care, he would forgive her everything, but all that mattered was
that she should be spared, that her honour should be vindicated. Then,
more quietly, he reflected that he was uncertain of everything as yet,
he had only that malicious old woman's word, and until he had something
more solid than that he must trust Rachel.
Oh! if only she would, of her own accord, speak! If she would only sit
there by his sofa and, with her hand in his, tell him, quite simply, in
what exactly her friendship with Breton consisted--Ah! then how he would
forgive her! How together they would be revenged upon the Duchess!
If she did not speak he did not know what he would do. That old woman's
mouth must be stopped; he must find out exactly how far the danger had
spread--he must deal with Breton--Now indeed he cursed so that he should
be tied to this sofa; there had swept down upon him the hardest trial of
his life.
Rachel returned from her party--she sat by his sofa and he lay there
looking at her.
Had it been a nice party? Not very--One of those war parties that
everyone had now. That silly Lady Meikleham recited "The Absent-minded
Beggar," and they had that French tenor from Covent Garden to sing
patriotic songs, and of course they got money out of everybody.
There'd been nothing for supper--She'd seen nobody amusing--
She broke out: "Roddy dear, what have you been doing with yourself? You
look as white and tired as anything--Has that pain in your back----?"
"No, dear,--thank you."
"I _wish_ I hadn't gone, and the dinner at Lady Massiter's was so
stupid--Monty Carfax whom I loathe and Lord Massiter so dull and
stupid--says he's coming to see you to-morrow afternoon."
"Well, he can, I'm at anybody's mercy!"
She got up, stood over him for a moment looking so tall and slender, so
dark with diamonds in her black hair, so lovely to-night!
She looked down upon him, then suddenly bent and kissed him.
"Roddy----"
"What is it, dear?" He caught her hand so fiercely that she cried:
"Roddy dear, I----"
"Yes."
"Oh, nothing, only you look so tired, I wish _I_ could take some of the
pain----"
"There isn't any, dear, I'm wonderfully lucky."
Peters came in to take him to bed.
She kissed him again and left him.
"Looking done up to-night, sir," said Peters.
"I am," said Roddy.