EPILOGUE--PROLOGUE
"Third Apparition--A Child Crowned ..."
_Macbeth_.
I
Late on the evening of May 17th Christopher heard of the relief of
Mafeking. It was too advanced an hour, he understood, for the town to
display its triumph that evening. Let Christopher wait.
The following night Brun, whom he had not seen for many months,
appeared. The clocks had struck nine and Christopher was finishing his
dinner, when the little man, shining and dapper, pleased and impersonal,
was shown in.
"Hullo!" cried Christopher; "thought you were abroad somewhere."
"I saw you at the Duchess's funeral. Of course I was there. What do you
suppose? Meanwhile come out now and see your fine people make
manifestations."
"Is there a noise?"
"A noise! _Mon Dieu!_ But come and look!"
They went out together. Harley Street was silent and deserted and above
it a night sky, scattered with stars, was serenely still. But, beyond
the further roofs and chimneys, golden light hovered and a confused
murmur, like the buzzing of bees, hummed upon space.
Through Oxford Street a great crowd of people was passing, but it was a
crowd hurrying to find some other crowd. Oxford Street was plainly not
the meeting-place. There was a good deal of shouting and singing; young
men, five abreast, passed, girls with "ticklers" and whistles screamed
and laughed and sang; merry bells were ringing, lights flared in the
windows and now and again a rocket with a whiz and a shriek flashed
into the sky and broke with a little angry splutter into coloured stars.
They crossed into Bond Street, down which other people were hurrying;
sometimes a roaring echo of a multitude of discordant voices would be
carried to them and then would be hidden again as though some huge door
in front of them were swinging to and fro.
At the end of Bond Street, suddenly, as they might turn the corner of
some sea road and, instantly, be confronted with the crash of a plunging
surf, they met the crowd.
"Look out!" cried Brun, clutching hold of Christopher's arm. "We don't
want to get drawn into this!"
Although they had apparently been walking quietly down Bond Street with
no crowd about them, they now were pursued, upon all sides, by people.
They raised themselves on to a doorstep, hanging there, bending their
feet forward, and feeling that if the crowd in front of them were for a
moment to give way down they would go!
Meanwhile, along Piccadilly, towards the clubs and Hyde Park Corner, a
thick mass of human beings was pressing. This gathering seemed, of
itself, to lack all human quality.
A face, a voice, a hand, a cry----these things might now and again, as
fish flash in a stream, detach themselves; sometimes a light from a
flaring window or an illumination would fling into pale, unreal relief a
bundle of faces that represented, at that instant, a piece of human
history, but sank instantly back again into chaos.
One might fancy that this was no crowd of human beings, but some new,
unknown creature, dragging its coils from the sluggish bed of some
hidden river, stamping to destruction as it went.
Then as though one were watching a show, with a click, the human element
was back again. There two girls, their hats pushed aside, their hair
half uncoiled, their cheeks flushed, their eyes partly bold and partly
frightened, were screaming:
"Oo're yer 'itting? Don't again then. Good old England! Gawd save----"
It was not on the whole a crowd stirred only by national joy and pride.
It may, in its units, when it first left its many homes, have announced
its intention of giving "a jolly 'ooray" for our splendid country and
our Beloved Queen, but, once in a position from which there was no
returning, once in the hands of a force that was stronger than any felt
before, it had forgotten the country and its defeats and successes. Only
two courses open. Either admit fear, feel that the breath of you is
slowly but quite surely in process of being crushed out of you, feel
that your arms and legs are being torn from you, that your ribs are
being smashed into powder and that your heart is being pressed as flat
as a pancake, let then panic overwhelm you, fight and scream to get out
and away from it, see yourself finally falling, trampled, kicked, your
face squashed to pulp, your eyes torn out, your breath strangled in your
body ... so much for Fear. Or, on the other hand arouse Frenzy!
Be above and beyond your body, scream and shout, rattle rattles and blow
whistles, trample upon everything that is near you, smack faces with
your hand, pull off clothing and scatter hats and bonnets, scream aloud,
no matter what it is that you are screaming, let your voice exclaim that
at length, at length, you, a miserable clerk on nothing a week, in the
City, are, for the first time in your existence, the Captain of your
soul, the ruthless master of a wretched, law-making tyrannous world....
So much for Frenzy!
Either way, be it Frenzy or Fear, the Country has not much to say to it
at all. With every moment it seems that from the Circus more bodies,
more arms and legs are being pressed and crushed and packed; with every
moment the clanging of the bells is louder, the fire in the sky higher
and wilder, the singing, the screaming, the oaths and the curses are
nearer, the defiance that loss of individuality gives.
"Let's get back," said Brun. He turned, but, at that moment, someone
from behind him cried, "Oo are yer shoving there?" He was pushed, with
Christopher, half falling, half clutching at arms and shoulders, forward
into the street.
They righted themselves, Brun fastened upon Christopher's arm, shouting
into his ear, "We'd better go along with the crowd for a bit. We'll get
a chance of cutting up Half Moon Street. Can't do anything else."
They were pressed forward. Now, received into the bosom of the crowd,
they were conscious both of the human element and of the stronger
composite spirit that was mightier than anything human, a creation of
the City against whose walls they were now so riotously shouting.
Next to Christopher was a young man in evening dress; his hat had
disappeared, his collar was torn, sweat was pouring down his forehead
and at the top of his voice he screamed again and again:
"Good old England! Good old England! Good old Bobs! Good old Bobs!"
Squeezed up against Christopher's arm was a stout body that looked as
though it had once belonged to some elderly gentleman who liked white
waistcoats and brass buttons. From somewhere, in obvious connection with
these buttons, came a weak, breathless voice: "You'll excuse me hanging
on so, sir. It's familiar--not my way--but this crowd ..."
A girl, with crimson face, leant against Christopher, put her arm round
his neck, tickled his face with a feather; she screamed with laughter:
"Oo-ray! Oo-ray--Oo-bloody-ray!"
"Look out, you swine!" somebody shouted.
"And 'e shouted out, did Bobs
Come along, you stinking nobs,
We will show you--"
Around them, above them, below them there tossed a whirlpool of noise,
something outside and beyond the immediate sounds that they were making.
Bells, voices, shouts that seemed to have no human origin, the very
walls and stones of the City crying aloud.
Then, opposite the entrance to Half Moon Street another crowd seemed to
meet them. There was pause. "Get out of it!" "Go the other way." "Damn
yer eyes, step off it." "Go back, carn't yer?"
It was then that for the briefest moment and for the first time in his
life Christopher was afraid. Someone was pressing into his back until
surely it would break, some other was leaning, and driving his chest in,
driving it so that the breath flooded his face, his eyes, his nose.
Colours rose and fell; someone's evil breath burnt upon his cheeks.
Light flashed before him in broad, steady flares.
"Brun, Brun," he cried.
"All right," a voice from many miles away answered him.
He was seized with the determination to survive. They thought that they
could "down" him, but they should see that they were mistaken; his rage
rising, he was no longer Dr. Christopher of Harley Street, but something
savage, lawless beyond even his own control. He drove with his arms;
curses met him and someone drove back into him and a ridiculous face
with staring eyes that stupidly pleaded and a nose that was white and
trembling and a mouth that dribbled at the corners came up against his.
"Keep back, can't you?" someone shouted.
"Brun, Brun," he called again, and then was conscious that bodies were
giving way before him. His hand met a stomach covered with cloth and
little hard buttons, and then coming against a woman's arm soft and
warm, Christopher had instantly gained possession of his soul once more.
"Hope I didn't hurt you," he heard himself saying, then, some barrier of
legs and bodies yielding, found that he was flung out, away, stumbling,
in spite of himself, on to his knee.
He caught someone by the arm, and it was Brun.
"Good Lord!" said Christopher.
"It's all right," answered Brun. "We're in Half Moon Street. We're out
of it."
II
Somewhere in the peaceful retirement behind the clubs they surveyed one
another and then laughed. Brun--the dapper perfect Brun--had a bleeding
cheek, a torn waistcoat, and a large and very unbecoming tear in his
trousers. He was half angry and half amused--finally a survey of
Christopher, with mud on his nose and his collar hanging from one button
and revealing a fat red neck, restored his good temper.
"You'd better come back with me," said Christopher, "and be cleaned up."
They went back to Harley Street and half an hour later were sitting
quietly in easy chairs, with the house as though it were made of
cotton-wool, so silent and hidden was it, about them.
Both men were excited; Christopher had been changed by the events of the
last few weeks, and Brun, if he had not been so personally involved, had
seen enough to excite his most eager curiosity and speculation.
Brun's sharp little eyes, flashing across the tip of his cigar, sought
Christopher's large comfortable face, fell from there over his large
comfortable body, down at last to his large comfortable boots.
"Well ... First time I've seen a Continental crowd in England."
"Continental?"
"Always your Englishman, however excited and of whatever rank, knows
there are things a gentleman doesn't do. Those people to-night had not
that knowledge. Very interesting," he added.
Christopher peacefully smoked, his body well spread out in the chair,
his broad rather clumsy-looking fingers clutching devotedly at his
pipe.
"So you were at the funeral the other day?"
"I was. I expect I mourned her more sincerely than any of you. I'd never
seen her, but she meant a lot to me--as a symbol. And I like symbols
better than human beings."
He pulled his body together with a little jerk and leaned forward:
"Christopher, do you remember, a long while ago, going into a gallery in
Bond Street and meeting Lady Adela Beaminster there and Lady Seddon? It
was just after Ross's portrait was first shown."
"I remember," said Christopher, nodding his head. "You were there."
"I was. I was there with Arkwright the African explorer man. I only
mention the day because Arkwright was interested in Lady Seddon, wanted
to know all about her, and I talked a bit, I remember. My point to him
was that there was a situation between that girl and her grandmother
that would be worth anybody's watching. I followed it myself for a while
and then I lost it. But you're a friend of the family--tell me,
Christopher, what happened between those two."
"Nothing," Christopher said, laughing.
"Oh, nonsense," Brun answered. "They were all in it. Something went on.
Then Seddon had that accident ... Breton was in it."
But Christopher only smiled.
"Well, if you won't--_n'importe_--I have my own idea of it all. That
girl was a fine girl, and the old woman was fine too--
"But how they must have hated one another!"
He chuckled; then sitting back in his chair, his little eyes on the
ceiling, he said almost to himself--"Once, years ago, when I was very,
very young and romantic--almost--just for a year or two I loved your
Shelley. He was everything--I could quote him by the page.... He's gone
from me now, or most of him has, but there was one line that seemed to
me then the most romantic thing I had ever read and has remained with
me always. It went--'And we'll have fires out of the Grand Duke's
wood'--It's in the letter to Maria Gisborne, I think--I've quite
forgotten what the context is now--it's all pretty trivial and
unimportant, but those were the days when I made pictures--I saw it!
Lord, Christopher, how it comes back! The wood, very thick, very large,
very black, no sun--very still, and the great house behind it, huge and
white, with long gardens and green lawns and peacocks, and the Grand
Duke, with his powdered wig, and diamond-buckled shoes, his gorgeous
suit, his jewelled sword, his snuff and his wine, his silly little
dried-up yellow face.
"Then the rabble--dirty, smelling, ill-conditioned fellows--breaking
through the silence, tearing up the Wood, knocking down the palace,
hanging the Grand Duke from a tree, last of all, setting the whole thing
into the most splendid blaze!... Oh! of course that wasn't Shelley's
context--_his_ was all about boiling a kettle or something--but that's
the way I saw it--just like that." Nothing stirred Brun like the sound
of his own voice and now he was getting very excited indeed and was
waving his hands.
"Yes," said Christopher placidly. "Very dramatic. What does it all
mean?"
"Well, this. It seems to me that that's just what's been happening over
here. Your Duchess is dead and instead there is to-night's crowd. The
Grand Duke is gone and all that was his--now for the fires!"
Christopher, filling his pipe, paused, and then, his voice grave and
serious: "Romantics aside, Brun, for a minute. Do you remember your
Tiger idea you delivered to me once? I've often thought of it since. You
said then that the reason why the Duchess and her times--the Grand Duke
and his wood--had got to go was because their policy had been to give
the Tigers of the world no liberty--to pretend indeed that they weren't
there, and that now the time had come when every man should declare his
Tiger, should give it liberty and, whether he restrained it or no,
acknowledge its existence.... Well, now--what I want to know is this.
What to your thinking is going to come of it all? I'm old-fashioned. I
like the old settled laws and customs and the rest of it, and yet I'm
not afraid of this new Individualism; but what I expect and what you
expect to come of it all are sure to be mightily different things."
"They are," said Brun, laughing. "You see, Christopher, as I've often
said to you before, you're a sentimentalist--people matter to you;
you're concerned in their individual good or bad luck. Now none of that
is worth anything to me. I observe from the outside--always. What I want
to see is less muddle, more brain, less waste of time, more progress. I
believe the loosing of the Tiger is going to bring that about. That's
why I welcome it--I don't care one little damn about your
individual--let him be sacrificed every time for the general wisdom.
Your Duchess, she was good for her age. Now she is against progress. She
vanishes. That crowd of to-night has swept her away.... There'll be a
chaos here for a time--people like the Ruddards will mix things up; a
woman like Mrs. Strode will destroy as many good people as she can. But
the time will come; out of that crowd that we got into to-night a world,
ruled by brain, by common sense, by understanding, not by sentiment and
confusion, will arise.... May I not be with the good God!"
"'Sentiment and confusion,'" said Christopher, smiling. "That's me, I
suppose."
"Well, you _are_ sentimental," said Brun. "You're stuffed with it."
"Do you yourself ..." asked Christopher, "is there no one--no one in the
world--who matters to you?"
"Nobody," said Brun. "No one in the world. I think I like you better
than anybody; you're the honestest man I know and yet one of the most
wrong-headed. Yes, I like you very much; but it would not be true to say
that it would leave any great blank in my life if you were to die.
Women! Yes, there have been women! But--thank the good God! for the
moment only. The Heart--no--The Brain--yes----"
"Well, then," said Christopher, "that's all clear enough. It isn't very
wonderful that we differ. People are to me everything. Love the only
power in the world to make change, to work miracles; I don't mean only
sensual love, or even sexual love, but simply the love of one human
being for another, the love that leads to thinking more of your
neighbour than yourself--self-denial.
"Self-denial; the only curb for your Tiger, Brun. I've been watching it
in a piece of private history, all this last year and a half. There
might have been the most horrible mess; self-denial saved it all the
time. You'll say that all this is so vague and loose that it's worth
nothing."
"Not at all," said Brun politely. "Go ahead."
"Well, then, the reason why I, old-fashioned and Philistine as I am,
hail the passing of the Grand Duke with joy--and I cared for the old
woman, mind you--is just this. I see some chance at last for the plain
man--not the clever man, or the especially spiritual man or the wealthy
man--but simply the ordinary man. When I say Brotherhood I don't mean
anything to do with associations or meetings or rules--Simply that I
believe in an age when a man's neighbour will matter to a man more than
himself, when it won't be priggish or weak to help someone in worse
plight than yourself, when it will simply be the obvious thing ... when,
above all, there'll be no jealousy, no getting in a man's way because he
does better than you, no knocking a man down because he sees the
world--this world and the next--differently. That's my Individualism, my
Rising City, and if you had watched the lives of a few friends of mine
during the last year or two as I've watched them you'd know that 'Love
thy neighbour as thyself' is the fire that's going to burn all the
Grand-Ducal woods in the world in time."
Brun laughed. "You'll be taken in horribly one of these days,
Christopher."
"You speak as though I were a chicken," Christopher broke out
indignantly. "Man alive, haven't I lived all these years? Haven't I seen
the poorest and rottenest and feeblest side of human nature time and
time again? But this I know: That it's losing the thing you prize most
that pays, it's the pursuit, the self-denial, the forgetting of self
that scores in the material, practical world as well as the spiritual,
heavenly one. That's where the Millennium's coming from. Brains as well
perhaps, but souls first."
"We'll see," said Brun. "A bit of both, I dare say. Anyhow, it's the
next generation that's going to be interesting. All kinds of people free
who've never been free before, all sorts of creeds and doctrines smashed
that seemed like Eternity. The old woods flaming already. _Apres la
Duchesse!..._ But as for your Love, your Brotherhood, Christopher, I've
a shrewd suspicion that human nature will change very little.
Unselfishness? Very fine to talk about--but who's going to practise it?
Every man for his own hand, now as ever."
"We'll see," answered Christopher. "I'm not clever at putting things
into words. If I were to go along to the man in the street and say,
'Look here, I've made a discovery--I've got something that's going to
make everything straight in the world,' and he were to say, 'What's
that?' and then I were to answer, 'Self-denial. Unselfishness--Love of
your neighbour,' he would, of course, instantly remind me that Someone
greater than myself had made the same remark a few thousand years ago.
He'd be right.... There's nothing new in it. But it's coming new to the
world just because the laws and conventions that covered it are
breaking. The Tiger in Every Man and Self-denial to curb it ... That's
my prophecy, Brun."
Brun gave himself a whisky-and-soda. "No idea you were such a talker,
Christopher.... But I'm right all the same."
He held up his glass.
"Here's to the Tiger in the next generation." He drank, then held it up
again. "And here," he cried, "to the memory of the last Great lady in
England!"
III
When Brim had gone it seemed that he had left that last toast of his in
the air behind him.
Christopher was haunted by the thought of the Duchess, he felt her with
him in the room; she stirred him to restlessness so that at last,
desperately, he took his hat and went out.
His steps took him, round the corner, to Portland Place; here all was
very quiet, a few cabs in the middle of the street, a few lights in the
windows, the silver field of stars, in the distance the sky golden,
fired now and again into life as a rocket rose shielding beneath its
glow all that stirring multitude. Sounds rose--a cry, a shout,
singing--then died down again.
He was outside No. 104. He thought that he would ring and see whether
Mrs. Newton were in; perhaps she had gone to bed, it was after eleven,
but, if she were there, he would take one last look at the Portrait
before it was packed up and sent down to Beaminster.
Mrs. Newton unbolted the door and smiled when she saw him--"I was just
going to bed--There's only myself and Louisa here--and the watchman."
"I won't keep you, Mrs. Newton," he said. "The fancy just took me to
look at some of the pictures once more before they're packed up. Lady
Seddon told me that a good many of them were to be packed up to-morrow;
they won't look quite the same at Beaminster."
"No, that they won't, sir," said Mrs. Newton. "I shall miss the old
house. Just to think of the years; and now, all of us scattered!"
She lit a lamp for him and he went up the stone staircase, found the
long drawing-room, and there, on the farther wall, the Portrait.
The furniture, shrouded in brown holland, waited like ghostly watchers
on every side of him. The huge house, always a place of strange silences
and vast disturbances, multiplied now in its long mirrors and its air of
cold suspense as though it were waiting for something to happen, showed
its recognition of death and death's consequences.
But the Portrait was alive! As he held the lamp up to it the face leapt
into agitation, the eyes were bent once again sharply upon him, the
mouth curved to speak, the black silk rustled against the chair.
A host of memories crowded the room, he was filled with a regret more
poignant than anything that he had felt since her death.
"She _was_ fine! I miss her more than I had any notion that I would! She
stirred one up, she made one alive!"
He put the lamp upon the floor and sat down for a minute amongst the
shrouded furniture.
His mind passed from Brun's generalizations to the little bundle of
people whom he knew--Rachel, Francis, Roddy, Lizzie Rand. To all of them
the Tiger's moment had come; and out of it all, out of the stress and
suffering and struggle, Rachel's child was to be born--instead of the
Duchess the new generation. Instead of this old house, the hooded
furniture, the anger at all freedom of thought, the jealousy of all
enterprise, the slander and the malice, an age of a universal
Brotherhood, of unselfishness, restraint, charity, tolerance ...
Perhaps after all, he _was_ an old, sentimental fool. There had always
been those at every birth and every death who had had their dreams of
new human nature, new worlds, new virtues and moralities....
He looked his last at the Portrait--
"I'm nearly as old as you. I shall go soon. But I miss you ... you'd be
yourself surprised if you knew how much!"
He took up the lamp and left her.... He said good night to Mrs. Newton
and closed the door behind him.
Standing on the steps of the house he looked about him. Portland Place
was like a broad river running silently into the dark trees at the end
of it. There was a great rest and quiet here.
Southwards the sky flamed, the noise of a great multitude of people came
muffled across space with the rhythm in it of a beating song. Rockets
slashed the sky, broke into golden stars; the bells from all the
churches in the town clashed and, from some great distance, guns
solemnly booming rolled through the air.
Christopher, standing there, smiled as he thought of Brun's little
picture.
Brun springing up, of course, at the right moment, to point his moral.
Brun, who appeared, like some Jack-in-the-box, in city after city, with
his conclusion, his prophecy, neat and prepared.
"And we'll have fires out of the Grand Duke's Wood..."
There was the Wood, there the mob, there the Grand Duke, dead and
buried--
Christopher shrugged his shoulders; whatever Brun might say human beings
were more than summaries, prophecies, conclusions.
As he looked towards the trees and felt a little breeze caress his face
with, he could swear, some salt of the sea, he thought of the human
beings who were his friends--Rachel, Roddy, Lizzie, Francis.
And then it seemed to him that, out of the trees, down the shining
surface of Portland Place, a figure came towards him--the figure of
Rachel's child.
* * * * *
NOVELS BY HUGH WALPOLE
_STUDIES IN PLACE_
THE WOODEN HORSE
MARADICK AT FORTY
THE GODS AND MR. PERRIN
_TWO PROLOGUES_
THE PRELUDE TO ADVENTURE
FORTITUDE
_THE RISING CITY_
1. THE DUCHESS OF WREXE
2. THE GREEN MIRROR
(_In preparation_)