JOCELYN
_All Rights Reserved_
JOCELYN
BY
JOHN SINJOHN
AUTHOR OF
“FROM THE FOUR WINDS”
[Illustration: colophon]
LONDON
DUCKWORTH & CO.
3, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN
1898
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
At the Ballantyne Press
TO
JOSEPH CONRAD
THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
BY
THE AUTHOR.
“_Isolation is surely the everyday condition, Union that for which we
strive so wildly and never perfectly attain; and do not these two
between them contrive all the ups and downs of life?_”
JOCELYN
_PART I_
CHAPTER I
A light laugh came floating into the sunshine through the green shutters
of a room in the Hôtel Milano. It grated on Giles Legard, who sat on the
stone terrace outside, face to face with a naked fact for, perhaps, the
first time in ten years. He uncrossed his legs, finished his coffee, and
rose listlessly, looking down the dried river bed towards the smooth
sea. He was alone with the sunlight, and it laid bare his face with a
convincing stare. The indifferent, gentle egotism of the man had
recoiled before the meaning of things for so long, that the reality
painted itself upon him harshly.
His long, sun-browned face had taken back momentarily its original
pallor, his grey eyes were contracted, his square chin and jaw thrust
forward doggedly; the thin curve of his dark moustache seemed to droop
more than usual, and the lines of weariness round his mouth and eyes
were deepened, till ridge and furrow were stamped as on a coin. His
figure, tall and well knit, looked very lean and listless.
Yet, he had awakened to the dominating fact that he had blood in his
veins--an overwhelming torrent of blood that sang in his head and
throbbed in his hands, at a touch, that mastered his reason and his
will, at a look. He was changed, absolutely changed, so that he felt he
did not know himself any longer, that his outward manner alone remained
to him--the merest superficial manner, standing as the only bar to
revelations the depth of which he was now attempting to sound.
The more effectually to cast the lead in the uncertain waters of
reality, he crossed the terrace abruptly and leant against the
half-opened French window of a large room, in the screened corner of
which a woman, dressed in white, was lying in a long invalid chair,
reading, and making pencil notes. She looked up as his shadow fell
across the light.
“Ah! Giles, I have not had the fortune to see you greatly to-day. Will
you perhaps have the goodness to give me the little green book lying on
that table? Do not stay, _je n’ suis pas bon compagnon_. It does not go
well, so that I just lie and read my Tolstoi.”
Her pale, sallow face lighted up with a smile of thanks as he put the
book within her reach.
“Have you been amusing yourself to-day, _mon cher_? Presently you shall
tell the little English friend I should like to see her.”
“Jocelyn is in the next room,” said Giles slowly.
“Ah! but not now, I have so much pain just now. Give her my love, and
tell her--later.” Her black eyes from out of their hollows glanced half
pitifully, half maliciously, at her husband, and then drooped resignedly
with a quiver of bodily pain under brows that fell obliquely away from
the furrow in the centre of her low Slav forehead.
“I’m very sorry that you’re so ill to-day. Can I do anything for you?”
said Legard. It was all he found to say, and his face in the maze of his
emotions expressed no one of them.
“Amuse yourself, _mon cher_, I have no want of anything, except to be
alone, this is one of my bad days, you know.”
Again she looked at him, and, but for the pain of the whitened lips, one
would have said she laughed. Giles turned away, but stopped at the
window irresolutely; he had found no help. Irma Legard dropped her book
with a slightly impatient gesture. A gleam of sun stealing round the
screen fell on her face--she sat up, drew the screen forward, and sank
back on her cushions with a sigh. The sound of a piano came from the
next room.
“I beg your pardon,” said Giles, “I am going,” and stepped into the
sunshine.
Through the green shutters of the adjoining room came a little petulant
tune; Giles stopped, and his face quivered; the little tune gripped some
string in his heart, it was as if the player had put her finger upon it,
and pulled it towards her. He stood there leaning against the wall, with
his hands in his pockets, and half-closed eyes. He had found the depth
of those uncertain waters; they were just of that depth, whatever it
might be, that mattered nothing. The reality of circumstance, of social
relations and duties, no longer existed, _they_ had become shadows to
him; that which was real, the only thing which had substance, was the
girl playing that tune in the shuttered room. Nothing else mattered. He
had a momentary feeling of relief, the feeling which comes to the man
whose life has been a compromise with circumstance, who has always been
afraid of stretching out his hand too far, when, for the first time, he
is conscious that his power of temporising has been taken from him--that
in his life, it is to be all, or nothing. Shikari, the great brindled
greyhound lying against the wall, paused in his occupation of lazily
snapping at flies, and stretched himself to lick his master’s hand.
“Amuse yourself, _mon cher_!” His wife’s words came into Legard’s mind,
and he laughed. He did not find things amusing.
The green shutters were opened gently, and a man stepped on to the
terrace.
“How do you do, my dear Legard?” he said in slow, suave, purring tones,
putting on a soft, grey hat; “how very fortunate to see you. I am just
off, you know.”
Scrupulously dressed after the manner of the English, Gustavus Nielsen
was unmistakably a foreigner. He was by birth a Swede, by education and
adoption a Cosmopolitan. About forty years old, of medium height and
substantial build, he carried a flaxen head stiffly upon his broad
shoulders. His pale, sandy face, of a square moulding, was marked with
innumerable little lines; one of two unfathomable eyes of a warm,
reddish brown, was protected by a gold-rimmed eye-glass; and his tawny
moustache curled walrus-like downwards to the level of his jaws. He
carried under his arm a white, green-lined umbrella.
The two men shook hands; in the looks they exchanged was all the
antagonism of an unconfessed rivalry.
“How goes the ‘system’?” said Legard. It was the most disagreeable thing
he could think of at the moment.
“Thank you,” said the other, his face immovable. “Pretty well, pretty
well, but we ‘other’ gamblers never mention it; we are afraid, don’t you
know. By the way, how is your dear wife? Give her my compliments. I am
so sorry not to see her. I have been calling on Mrs. Travis and Miss
Ley, and now I am afraid there isn’t time.”
Legard winced, he had got the worst of the exchanges.
“My wife is not very well, thank you. Good-bye, don’t let me make you
lose your train.”
“Good-bye, my dear fellow,” murmured Nielsen, putting up his green-lined
umbrella, and disappearing at a slow, square walk in the direction of
the railway station.
Left to himself, Giles returned to his moody, eager contemplation of the
closed, green shutters. The afternoon sun streamed obliquely through the
yellow sprays of a huge mimosa that hung balancing over the terrace
wall, and the scent of roses and heliotrope was heavy on the faint puffs
of air that came from the great tideless sea. Small brown lizards chased
each other up and down the smooth walls of the hotel, and a mazy,
shifting web of humming things and of butterflies wove itself over the
stony waste of the terrace.
The domination of sex veiled all these things from Legard’s senses.
Something different, something unseizably different in the pressure of a
girl’s hand, and the world was changed to him.
Constitutionally lazy, constitutionally and unobtrusively egoist, he had
come slowly to the realisation of the upheaval of foundations. It was
too far, too foreign, too altogether strange. Yet, when it had come, it
seemed to him the most natural thing to exchange a world of sun, of
sweet sounds and scents, of colour, of resigned humdrum, of bored and
gentle pleasure-seeking, for another world of fiercely passionate
longing, of ache, of delight, of absolute absorption in the one idea--a
world from which everything else was barred.
All that spring at Mentone he had accepted the one more beautiful thing
that had come into his life, as for many years he had accepted the sun,
the air, the flowers, the sea, everything that was fair in a very fair
and pleasant land. _They_ had become to him a part of his nature, so
that he no longer wondered at them, and, Englishman though he was,
gazed at the bewildered tourist with the mildly contemptuous surprise of
the Southerner, to whom these things were the merest necessities of
existence.
He had taken this one more beautiful thing as it came, without
reflection, without thought, enjoying it day by day.
He had got into the way of taking things like this. Ten years ago, at
the age of twenty-five, he had married a Polish lady, and had brought
her soon afterwards, a confirmed invalid, to a villa on the Italian
Riviera. They had never again moved far from it, it was too much
trouble. His wife was always ill, she had her writing, her friends, her
flowers. As for himself, he drifted along in an existence pleasant
enough, which slowly and surely sapped his energy, and left him a sense
of waste and of weariness that did not diminish with the passing years.
He had no particular ties with England. His father, a man of some
position in his county, died from a fall out hunting when Giles was only
four years old. The death of his mother, a very beautiful and good
woman, came just as he was leaving Eton, and left a big mark upon his
mind, strengthening the silent reserve of his nature; and yet even with
her, to whom he had been devoted, he had never spoken of things which
affected him deeply; it seemed as if the power of a complete
trustfulness were hidden from him, and reserved for something fuller and
more intimate to reveal.
At Oxford he made many friends, he was silently sympathetic to them, but
when they came to sum him up, they were forced to confess that they did
not know him, even in that ordinary degree in which youths know each
other; they liked him, but they did not know him.
When he left Oxford, he was in the position of a man with no decided
leanings or dislikes in regard to a profession, with more than
sufficient means, and with a nature which required the spur of necessity
or of some vital interest to force it to exertion. He spent some years
in travelling, generally with sport as an object; and then came his
marriage. He had never been quite able afterwards to understand how it
had come about; it had been a matter of friendship, of sentiment, of
compassion; but there it had been for ten years an accomplished fact,
bringing with it a life from which all purpose seemed to be barred.
He had pursuits; for instance, he occasionally went over to Monte Carlo
and gambled mildly, he made annual shooting trips to Algeria or Morocco,
and he was continually yachting round the coast; but of work, nothing;
of love--nothing!
There had never been anything really in common between him and his wife.
Certainly, he was always gentle and courteous to her, but there was in
her a vein of _spirituelle_, expansive _espiéglerie_, which was somehow
beyond him; it did not hit with the grey and reserved temper of his
mind, with his deeply-rooted indolence.
A man of refinement, of no vulgar instincts, of certainly the greater
logical reasoning power, he had yet always found himself _un peu bête_
in her presence, just a little commonplace--it was irritating.
He admitted to himself indeed, almost from the first, that his marriage
had been a mistake, but he did not cease to have a great admiration for
his wife’s personality, for her courage and patience under suffering,
for her wide sympathies, and the wit and charm of her manner. He
regarded her with the eye of a stranger as a very desirable and
delightful woman; he knew her to be the wrong one for himself.
He saw her side of the question also--it was a habit of his to see the
other side--and he pitied her.
He frequently analysed the situation; it did no good, but it was natural
to him.
Irma had never loved him, if she had, he would have given her love in
return, for his nature was responsive and affectionate. As it was, he
accepted the fact with gratitude. She had married him for one or other
of the unnumbered reasons for which women marry men, any one of which is
good enough till after the event.
The friction between their two natures was endless and incurable. It
never found vent. It was never openly present, secretly never absent.
Legard fell into the habit of taking things as they came, and cultivated
the superficial philosophy of indifference....
But now, standing in the sun, watching two closed green shutters, he
found that philosophy an imperfect reed to his hand.