There was no one in the room, and no light, when they entered. For a
moment Grisel stood by the open window, looking out. Then she turned
impulsively. ‘My brother, of course, will ask you too,’ she said; ‘we
had made up our minds to do so if you came again; but I want you to
promise me now that you won’t dream of going back to-night. That surely
would be tempting—well, not Providence. I couldn’t rest if I thought
you might be alone; like that again.’ Her voice died away into the
calling of the waters. A light moved across the dingy old rows of books
and as his sister turned to go out Herbert appeared in the doorway,
carrying a green-shaded lamp, with an old leather quarto under his arm.
‘Ah, here you are,’ he said. ‘I guessed you had probably met.’ He drew
up, burdened, before his visitor. But his clear black glance, instead
of wandering off at his first greeting, had intensified. And it was
almost with an air of absorption that he turned away. He dumped his
book on to a chair and it turned over with scattered leaves on to the
floor. He put the lamp down and stooped after it, so that his next
words came up muffled, and as if the remark had been forced out of him.
‘You don’t feel worse, I hope?’ He got up and faced his visitor for the
answer. And for the moment Lawford stood considering his symptoms.
‘No,’ he said almost gaily; ‘I feel enormously better.’ But Herbert’s
long, oval, questioning eyes beneath the sleek black hair were still
fixed on his face. ‘I am afraid, my dear fellow,’ he said, with
something more than his usual curiously indifferent courtesy, ‘the
struggle has frightfully pulled you to pieces.’
‘The question is,’ answered Lawford, with a kind of tired yet whimsical
melancholy in his voice, ‘though I am not sure that the answer very
much matters—what’s going to put me together again? It’s the old story
of Humpty Dumpty, Herbert. Besides, one thing you said has stuck out in
a quite curious way in my memory. I wonder if you will remember?’
‘What was that?’ said Herbert with unfeigned curiosity.
‘Why, you said even though Sabathier had failed, though I was still my
own old stodgy self, that you thought the face—the face, you know,
might work in. Somehow, sometimes I think it has. It does really rather
haunt me. In that case—well, what then?’ Lawford had himself listened
to this involved explanation much as one watches the accomplishment of
a difficult trick, marvelling more at its completion at all than at the
difficulty involved in the doing of it.
‘“Work in,”’ repeated Herbert, like a rather blasé child confronted
with a new mechanical toy; ‘did I really say that? well, honestly, it
wasn’t bad; it’s what one would expect on that hypothesis. You see, we
are only different, as it were, in our differences. Once the foot’s
over the threshold, it’s nine points of the law! But I don’t remember
saying it.’ He shamefacedly and naively confessed it: ‘I say such an
awful lot of things. And I’m always changing my mind. It’s a standing
joke against me with my sister. She says the recording angel will have
two sides to my account: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and
Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays—diametrically opposite convictions,
and both kinds wrong. On Sundays I am all things to all men. As for
Sabathier, by the way, I do want particularly to have another go at
him. I’ve been thinking him over, and I’m afraid in some ways he won’t
quite wash. And that reminds me, did you read the poor chap?’
‘I just grubbed through a page or two; but most of my French was left
at school. What I did do, though, was to show the book to an old friend
of ours—my wife’s and mine—just to skim—a Mr Bethany. He’s an old
clergyman—our vicar, in fact.’
Herbert had sat down, and with eyes slightly narrowed was listening
with peculiar attention. He smiled a little magnanimously. ‘His
verdict, I should think, must have been a perfect joy.’
‘He said,’ said Lawford, in his rather low, monotonous voice, ‘he said
it was precious poor stuff, that it reminded him of patchouli; and that
Sabathier—the print I mean—looked like a foxy old roué. They were, I
think, his exact words. We were alone together, last night.’
‘You don’t mean that he simply didn’t see the faintest resemblance?’
Lawford nodded. ‘But then,’ he added simply, ‘whenever he comes to see
me now he leaves his spectacles at home.’
And at that, as if at some preconcerted signal, they both went off into
a simple shout of laughter, unanimous and sustained.
But this first wild bout of laughter over, the first real bursting of
the dam, perhaps, for years, Lawford found himself at a lower ebb than
ever.
‘You see,’ he said presently, and while still his companion’s face was
smiling around the remembrance of his laughter like ripples after the
splash of a stone, ‘Bethany has been absolutely my sheet-anchor right
through. And I was—it was—you can’t possibly realise what a ghastly
change it really was. I don’t think any one ever will.’
Herbert opened his hand and looked reflectively into its palm before
allowing himself to reply. ‘I wonder, you know; I have been wondering a
good deal; simply taking the other point of view for a moment; _was_
it? I don’t mean “ghastly” exactly (like, say, smallpox, G.P.I.,
elephantiasis), but was it quite so complete, so radical, as in the
first sheer gust of astonishment you fancied?’
Lawford thought on a little further. ‘You know how one sees oneself in
a passion—why, how a child looks—the whole face darkened and drawn and
possessed? That was the change. That’s how it seems to come back to me.
And something, somebody, dodging behind the eyes. Yes; more that than
even any excessive change of feature, except, of course, that I also
seemed—Shall I ever forget that first cold, stifling stare into the
looking-glass! I certainly was much darker, even my hair. But I’ve told
you all this before,’ he added wearily, ‘and the scores and scores of
times I’ve thought it. I used to sit up there in the big spare bedroom
my wife put me up in, simply gloating. My flesh seemed nothing more
than an hallucination: there I was, haunting my body, an old grinning
tenement, and all that I thought I wanted, and couldn’t do without, all
I valued and prided myself on—stacked up in the drizzling street below.
Why, Herbert, our bodies _are_ only glass or cloud. They melt, don’t
they, like wax in the sun once we’re out. But those first few days
don’t make very pleasant thinking. Friday night was the first, when I
sat there like a twitching waxwork, soberly debating between Bedlam
here and Bedlam hereafter. I even sometimes wonder whether its very
repetition has not dulled the memory or distorted it. My wife,’ he
added ingenuously, ‘seems to think there are signs of a slight
improvement—a going back, I mean. But I’m not sure whether she meant
it.’
Herbert surveyed his visitor critically. ‘You say “dark,” he said; ‘but
surely, Lawford, your hair now is nearly grey; well-flecked at least.’
Although the remark carried nothing comparatively of a shock with it,
yet it seemed to Lawford as if an electric current had passed over his
scalp, coldly stirring every hair upon his head. But somehow or other
it was easier to sit quietly on, to express no surprise, to let them do
or say what they liked. ‘Well’ he retorted with an odd, crooked smile,
‘you must remember I am a good deal older than I was last Saturday. I
grew grey in the grave, Herbert.’
‘But it’s like this, you know,’ said Herbert, rising excitedly, and at
the next moment, on reflection, composedly reseating himself. ‘How many
of your people actually _saw_ it? How many owned to its being as bad,
as complete, as you made out? I don’t want for a moment to cut right
across what you said last night—our talk—but there are two million
sides to every question, and as often as not the less conspicuous have
sounder—well—roots. That’s all.’
‘I think really, do you know, I would rather not go over the detestable
thing again. Not many; my wife, though, and a man I know called Danton,
who—who’s prejudiced. After all, I have myself to think about too. And
right through, right through—there wasn’t the least doubt of that—they
all in their hearts knew it was me. They knew I was behind. I could
feel that absolutely always; it’s not just eyes and ears we use,
there’s us ourselves to consider, though God alone knows what that
means. But the password was there, as you might say; and they all knew
I knew it, all—except’—he looked up as if in bewilderment—‘except just
one, a poor old lady, a very old friend of my mother’s, whom I—I
Sabathiered!’
‘Whom—you—Sabathiered!’ repeated Herbert carefully, with infinite
relish, looking sidelong at his visitor. ‘And it is just precisely
that....’
But at that moment his sister appeared in the doorway to say that
supper was ready. And it was not until Herbert was actually engaged in
carving a cold chicken that he followed up his advantage. ‘Mr. Lawford,
Grisel,’ he said, ‘has just enriched our jaded language with a new
verb—to Sabathier. And if I may venture to define it in the presence of
the distinguished neologist himself, it means, “To deal with
histrionically”; or, rather, that’s what it will mean a couple of
hundred years hence. For the moment it means, “To act under the
influence of subliminalization; To perplex, or bemuse, or estrange with
_otherness_.” Do tell us, Lawford, more about the little old lady.’ He
passed with her plate a little meaningful glance at his sister, and
repeated, ‘Do!’
‘But I’ve been plaguing your sister enough already. You’ll wish...’
Lawford began, and turned his tired-out eyes towards those others
awaiting them so frankly they seemed in their perfect friendliness a
rest from all his troubles. ‘You see,’ he went on, ‘what I kept on
thinking and thinking of was to get a quite unbiased and unprejudiced
view. She had known me for years, though we had not actually met more
than once or twice since my mother’s death. And there she was sitting
with me at the other end of just such another little seat as’—he
turned—to Herbert ‘as ours, at Widderstone. It was on Bewley Common: I
can see it all now; it was sunset. And I simply turned and asked her in
a kind of a whining affected manner if she remembered me; and when
after a long time she came round to owning that to all intents and
purposes she did not—I professed to have made a mistake in recognising
_her_. I think,’ he added, glancing up from one to the other of his two
strange friends, ‘I think it was the meanest trick I can remember.’
‘H’m,’ said Herbert solemnly: ‘I wish I had as sensitive a conscience.
But as your old friend didn’t recognise you, who’s the worse? As for
her not doing so, just think of the difference a few years makes to a
man, and _any_ severe shock. Life wears so infernally badly. Who, for
that matter, does not change, even in character and yet who professes
to see it? Mind, I don’t say in essence! But then how many of the human
ghosts one meets does one know in essence? One doesn’t want to. It
would be positively cataclysmic. And that’s what brings me around to
feel, Lawford, if I may venture to say so, that you may have brooded a
little too keenly on—on your own case. Tell any one you feel ill; he
will commiserate with you to positive nausea. Tell any priest your soul
is in danger; will he wait for proof? It’s misereres and penances world
without end. Tell any woman you love her; will she, can she, should
she, gainsay you? There you are. The cat’s out of the bag, you see. My
sister and I sat up half the night talking the thing over. I said I’d
take the plunge. I said I’d risk appearing the crassest,
contradictoriest wretch that ever drew breath. I don’t deny that what I
hinted at the other night must seem in part directly contrary to what
I’m going to say now.’
He wheeled his black eyes as if for inspiration, and helped himself to
salad. ‘It’s this,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it possible, isn’t it even probable
that being ill, and overstrung, moping a little over things more or
less out of the common ruck, and sitting there in a kind of
trance—isn’t it possible that you may have very largely _imagined_ the
change? Hypnotised yourself into believing it much worse—more profound,
radical, acute—and simply absolutely hypnotizing others into thinking
so, too. Christendom is just beginning to rediscover that there is such
a thing as faith, that it is just possible that, say, megrims or
melancholia may be removed at least as easily as mountains. The
converse, of course, is obvious on the face of it. A man fails because
he thinks himself a failure. It’s the men that run away that lose the
battle. Suppose then, Lawford’—he leaned forward, keen and
suave—‘suppose you have been and “Sabathiered” yourself!’
Lawford had grown accustomed during the last few days to finding
himself gazing out like a child into reality, as if from the windows of
a dream. He had in a sense followed this long, loosely stitched,
preliminary argument; he had at least in part realised that he sat
there between two clear friendly minds acting in the friendliest and
most obvious collusion. But he was incapable of fixing his attention
very closely on any single fragment of Herbert’s apology, or of rousing
himself into being much more than a dispassionate and not very
interested spectator of the little melodrama that Fate, it appeared,
had at the last moment decided rather capriciously to twist into a
farce. He turned with a smile to the face so keenly fixed and
enthusiastic with the question it had so laboriously led up to: ‘But
surely, I don’t quite see...’
Herbert lifted his glass as if to his visitor’s acumen and set it down
again without tasting it. ‘Why, my dear fellow,’ he said triumphantly,
‘even a dream must have a peg. Yours was this unforgettable old
suicide. Candidly now, how much of Sabathier was actually yours? In
spite of all that that fantastical fellow, Herbert, said last night,
dead men _don’t_ tell tales. The last place in the world to look for a
ghost is where his traitorous bones lie crumbling. Good heavens, think
what irrefutable masses of evidence there would be at our finger-tips
if every tombstone hid its ghost! No; the fellow just arrested you with
his creepy epitaph: an epitaph, mind you, that is in a literary sense
distinctly fertilizing. It catches one’s fancy in its own crude way, as
pages and pages of infinitely more complicated stuff take possession
of, germinate, and sprout in one’s imagination in another way. We are
all psychical parasites. Why, given his epitaph, given the
surroundings, I wager any sensitive consciousness could have guessed at
his face; and guessing, as it were, would have feigned it. What do you
think, Grisel?’
‘I think, dear, you are talking absolute nonsense; what do they call
it—“darkening counsel”? It’s “the hair of the dog,” Mr Lawford.’
‘Well, then, you see,’ said Herbert over a hasty mouthful, and turning
again to his victim—‘then you see, when you were just in the pink of
condition to credit any idle tale you heard, then I came in. What, with
the least impetus, can one _not_ see by moonlight? The howl of a dog
turns the midnight into a Brocken; the branch of a tree stoops out at
you like a Beelzebub crusted with gadflies. I’d, mind you, sipped of
the deadly old Huguenot too. I’d listened to your innocent prattle
about the child kicking his toes out on death’s cupboard door; what
more likely thing in the world, then, than that with that moon, in that
packed air, I should have swallowed the bait whole, and seen Sabathier
in every crevice of your skin? I don’t say there wasn’t any
resemblance; it was for the moment extraordinary; it was even when you
were here the other night distinctly arresting. But now (poor old
Grisel, I’m nearly done) all I want to say is this: that if we had the
“foxy old roué” here now, and Grisel played Paris between the three of
us, she’d hand over the apple not to you but to me.’
‘I don’t quite see where poor Paris comes in,’ suggested Grisel meekly.
‘No, nor do I,’ said Herbert. ‘All that I mean, sagacious child, is,
that Mr Lawford no more resembles the poor wretch now than I resemble
the Apollo Belvedere. If you had only heard my sister scolding me,
railing at me for putting such ideas into your jangled head! They don’t
affect _me_ one iota. I have, I suppose, what is usually called
imagination; which merely means that I can sup with the devil, spoon
for spoon, and could sleep in Bluebeard’s linen-closet without turning
a hair. You, if I am not very much mistaken, are not much troubled with
that very unprofitable quality, and so, I suppose, when a crooked and
bizarre fancy does edge into your mind it roots there.’
And that said, not without some little confusion, and covert glance of
inquiry at his sister, Herbert made all the haste he could to catch up
the course that his companions had already finished.
If only, Lawford thought, this insufferable weariness would lift awhile
he could enjoy the quiet, absurd, heedless talk, and this very friendly
topsy-turvy effort to ease his mind and soothe his nerves. He might
even take an interest again in his ‘case.’
‘You see,’ he said, turning to Grisel, ‘I don’t think it really very
much matters how it all came about. I never could believe it would
last. It may perhaps—some of it at least may be fancy. But then, what
isn’t? What _is_ trustworthy? And now your brother tells me my hair’s
turning grey. I suppose I have been living too slowly, too sluggishly,
and they thought it was high time to stir me up.’
He saw with extraordinary vividness the low panelled room; the still
listening face; the white muslin shoulders and dark hair; and the eyes
that seemed to recall some far-off desolate longing for home and
childhood. It was all a dream. That was the end of the matter. Even
now, perhaps, his tired old stupid body was lying hunched up, drenched
with dew upon the little old seat under the mist-wreathed branches.
Soon it would bestir itself and wake up and go off home—home to Sheila,
to the old deadly round that once had seemed so natural and inevitable,
to the old dull Lawford—eyes and brain and heart.
They returned up the dark shallow staircase to Herbert’s book-room, and
he talked on to very quiet and passive listeners in his own fantastic
endless fashion. And ever and again Lawford would find himself
intercepting fleeting and anxious glances at his face, glances almost
of remorse and pity; and thought he detected beneath this irresponsible
contradictory babble an unceasing effort to clear the sky, to lure away
too pressing memories, to put his doubts and fears completely to rest.
Herbert even went so far as to plead guilty, when Grisel gave him the
cue, of having a little heightened and overcoloured his story of the
restless phantasmal old creature that haunted their queer wooden
hauntable old house. And when they rose, laughing and yawning to take
up their candles, it was, after all, after a rather animated
discussion, with many a hair-raising ghost story brought in for proof
between brother and sister, as to exactly how many times that
snuff-coloured spectre had made his appearance; and, with less
unanimity still, as to the precise manner in which he was in the habit
of making his precipitant exit.
‘You do at any rate acknowledge, Grisel, that the old creature does
appear, and that you saw him yourself step out into space when you were
sitting down there under the willow shelling peas. I’ve seen him twice
for certain, once rather hazily; Sallie saw him so plainly she asked
his business: that’s five. I resign.’
‘Acknowledge!’ said Grisel; ‘of course I do. I’d acknowledge anything
in the world to save argument. Why, I don’t know what I should do
without him. If only, now Mr Lawford would give him a fair chance to
show himself reading quietly here about ten minutes to one, or shelling
peas even, if he prefers it. If only he’d stay long enough for _that_.
Wouldn’t it be the very thing for them both!’
‘Of course,’ said Herbert cordially, ‘the very thing.’
Lawford looked up at neither of them. He shook his head.
But he needed little persuasion to stay at least one night. The
prospect of that long solitary walk, of that tired stupid stooping
figure dragging itself along the interminable country roads seemed a
sheer impossibility. ‘It is not—it isn’t, I swear it—the other that
keeps me back,’ he had solemnly assured the friend that half smiled her
relief at his acceptance, ‘but—if you only knew how empty it’s all got
now; all reason gone even to go on at all.’
‘But doesn’t it follow? Of course it’s empty. And now life is going to
begin again. I assure you it is, I do indeed. Only, only have
courage—just the will to win on.’
He said good-night; shut-to the latched door of his long low room,
ceilinged with rafters close under the steep roof, its brown walls hung
with quiet, dark, pondering and beautiful faces looking gravely across
at him. And with his candle in his hand he sat down on the bedside. All
speculation was gone. The noisy clock of his brain had run down again.
He turned towards the old oval looking-glass on the dressing-table
without the faintest stirring of interest, suspense, or anxiety. What
did it matter what a man looked like—a now familiar but enfeebled and
deprecating voice seemed to say. He knew that a change had come. Even
Sheila had noticed it. And since then what had he not gone through?
What now was here seemed of little moment, so far at least as this
world was concerned.
At last with an effort he rose, crossed the uneven floor, and looked in
unmovedly on what was his own poor face come back to him: changed
indeed almost beyond belief from the sleek self-satisfied genial yet
languid Arthur Lawford of the past years, and still haunted with some
faint trace of the set and icy sharpness, and challenge, and affront of
the dark Adventurer, but that—how immeasurably dimmed and blunted and
faded. He had expected to find it so. Would it (the thought vanished
across his mind) would it have been as unmistakably there had he come
hot-foot, fearing, expecting to find the other? But—was he
disappointed!
He hardly knew how long he stood there, leaning on his hands, surveying
almost listlessly in the candle-light that lined, bedraggled, grey,
hopeless countenance, those dark-socketed, smouldering eyes, whose
pupils even now were so dilated that a casual glance would have failed
to detect the least hint of any iris. ‘It must have been something
pretty bad you were, you know, or something pretty bad you did,’ they
seemed to be trying to say to him, ‘to drag us down to this.’
He knelt down by force of habit to say his prayers; but no words came.
Well, between earthly friends a betrayal such as this would have caused
a livelong estrangement and hostility. The God the old Lawford used to
pray to would forgive him, he thought wearily, if just for the present
he was a little too sore at heart to play the hypocrite. But if, while
kneeling, he said nothing, he saw a good many things in such
tranquillity and clearness as the mere eyes of the body can share but
rarely with their sisters of the imagination. And now it was Alice who
looked mournfully out of the dark at him; and now the little old
charwoman, Mrs Gull, with her bag hooked over her arm, climbed
painfully up the area steps; and now it was the lean vexed face of a
friend, nursing some restless and anxious grievance against him—Mr
Bethany; and then and ever again it was the face of one who seemed pure
dream and fantasy and yet... He listened intently and fancied even now
he could hear the voices of brother and sister talking quietly and
circumspectly together in the room beneath.