It was a quiet supper the three friends sat down to. Herbert sat
narrowing his eyes over his thoughts, which, when the fancy took him,
he scattered out upon the others’ silence. Lawford apparently had not
yet shaken himself free from the sorcery of the moonlight. His eyes
shone dark and full like those of a child who has trespassed beyond its
hour for bed, and sits marvelling at reality in a waking dream.
Long after they had bidden each other good-night, long after Herbert
had trodden on tiptoe with his candle past his closed door, Lawford sat
leaning on his arms at the open window, staring out across the
motionless moonlit trees that seemed to stand like draped and dreaming
pilgrims, come to the peace of their Nirvana at last beside the
crashing music of the waters. And he himself, the self that never
sleeps beneath the tides and waves of consciousness, was listening,
too, almost as unmovedly and unheedingly to the thoughts that clashed
in conflict through his brain.
Why, in a strange transitory life was one the slave of these small
cares? What if even in that dark pit beneath, which seemed to whisper
Lethe to the tumultuous, swirling waters—what if there, too, were
merely a beginning again, and to seek a slumbering refuge there merely
a blind and reiterated plunge into the heat and tumult of another day?
Who was that poor, dark, homeless ghoul, Sabathier? Who was this Helen
of an impossible dream? Her face with its strange smile, her eyes with
their still pity and rapt courage had taken hope away. ‘Here’s not your
rest,’ cried one insistent voice; ‘she is the mystery that haunts day
and night, past all the changing of the restless hours. Chance has
given you back eyes to see, a heart that can be broken. Chance and the
stirrings of a long-gone life have torn down the veil age spins so
thick and fast. Pride and ambition; what dull fools men are! Effort and
duty, what dull fools men are!’ He listened on and on to these phantom
pleadings and to the rather coarse old Lawford conscience grunting them
mercilessly down, too weary even to try to rest.
Rooks at dawn came sweeping beneath the turquoise of the sky. He saw
their sharp-beaked heads turn this way, that way, as they floated on
outspread wings across the misty world. Except for the hoarse roar of
the water under the huge thin-leafed trees, not a sound was stirring.
‘One thing,’ he seemed to hear himself mutter as he turned with a
shiver from the morning air, ‘it won’t be for long. You can, at least,
poor devil, wait the last act out.’ If in this foolish hustling mob of
the world, hired anywhere and anywhen for the one poor dubious wage of
a penny—if it was only his own small dull part to carry a mock spear,
and shout huzza with the rest—there was nothing for it, he grunted
obstinately to himself, shout he would with the loudest.
He threw himself on to the bed with eyes so wearied with want of sleep
it seemed they had lost their livelong skill in finding it. Not the
echo of triumph nor even a sigh of relief stirred the torpor of his
mind. He knew vaguely that what had been the misery and madness of the
last few days was gone. But the thought had no power to move him now.
Sheila’s good sense, and Mr Bethany’s stubborn loyalty were alike old
stories that had lost their savour and meaning. Gone, too, was the need
for that portentous family gathering that had sat so often in his fancy
during these last few days around his dining-room table, discussing
with futile decorum the problem of how to hush him up, to muffle him
down. Half dreaming, half awake, he saw the familiar door slowly open
and, like the timely hero in a melodrama, his own figure appear before
the stricken and astonished company. His eyes opened half-fearfully,
and glanced up in the morning twilight. Their perplexity gave place to
a quiet, almost vacant smile; the lids slowly closed again, and at last
the lean hands twitched awhile in sleep.
Next morning he spent rummaging among the old books, dipping listlessly
here and there as the tasteless fancy took him, while Herbert sat
writing with serene face and lifted eyebrows at his open window. But
the unfamiliar long S’s, the close type, and the spelling of the musty
old books wearied eye and mind. What he read, too, however far-fetched,
or lively, or sententious, or gross, seemed either to be of the same
texture as what had become his everyday experience, and so baffled him
with its nearness, or else was only the meaningless ramblings of an
idle pen. And this, he thought to himself, looking covertly up at the
spruce clear-cut profile at the window, this is what Herbert had called
Life.
‘Am I interrupting you, Herbert; are you very busy?’ he asked at last,
taking refuge on a chair in a far corner of the room.
‘Bless me, no; not a bit—not a bit,’ said Herbert amiably, laying down
his pen. ‘I’m afraid the old leatherjackets have been boring you. It’s
a habit this beastly reading; this gorge and glint and fever all at
second-hand—purely a bad habit, like morphia, like laudanum. But once
in, you know there’s no recovery. Anyhow, I’m neck-deep, and to
struggle would be simply to drown.’
‘I was only going to say how sorry I am for having left Sabathier at
home.’
‘My dear fellow—’ began Herbert reassuringly.
‘It was only because I wanted so very much to have your translation. I
get muddled up with other things groping through the dictionary.’
Herbert surveyed him critically. ‘What exactly is your interest now,
Lawford? You don’t mean that my old “theory” has left any sting now?’
‘No sting; oh no. I was only curious. But you yourself still think it
really, don’t you?’
Herbert turned for a moment to the open window.
‘I was simply trying then to find something to fit the facts as you
experienced them. But now that the facts have gone—and they have,
haven’t they?—exit, of course, my theory!’
‘I see,’ was the cryptic answer. ‘And yet, Herbert,’ Lawford solemnly
began again, ‘it has changed me; even in my way of thinking. When I
shut my eyes now—I only discovered it by chance—I see immediately faces
quite strange to me; or places, sometimes thronged with people; and
once an old well with some one sitting in the shadow. I can’t tell you
how clearly, and yet it is all altogether different from a dream. Even
when I sit with my eyes open, I am conscious, as it were, of a kind of
faint, colourless mirage. In the old days—I mean before Widderstone,
what I saw was only what I’d seen already. Nothing came uncalled for,
unexplained. This makes the old life seem so blank; I did not know what
extraordinarily _real_ things I was doing without. And whether for that
reason or another, I can’t quite make out what in fact I did want then,
and was always fretting and striving for. I can see no wisdom or
purpose in anything now but to get to one’s journey’s end as quickly
and bravely as one can. And even then, even if we do call life a
journey, and death the inn we shall reach at last in the evening when
it’s over; that, too, I feel will be only as brief a stopping-place as
any other inn would be. Our experience here is so scanty and
shallow—nothing more than the moment of the continual present. Surely
that must go on, even if one does call it eternity. And so we shall all
have to begin again. Probably Sabathier himself.... But there, what on
earth _are_ we, Herbert, when all is said? Who is it has—has done all
this for us—what kind of self? And to what possible end? Is it that the
clockwork has been wound up and must still jolt on a while with jarring
wheels? Will it never run down, do you think?’
Herbert smiled faintly, but made no answer.
‘You see,’ continued Lawford, in the same quiet, dispassionate
undertone, ‘I wouldn’t mind if it was only myself. But there are so
many of us, so many selves, I mean; and they all seem to have a voice
in the matter. What is the reality to this infernal dream?’
‘The reality is, Lawford, that you are fretting your life out over this
rotten illusion. Be guided by me just this once. We’ll go, all three of
us, a good ten-mile walk to-day, and thoroughly tire you out. And
to-night you shall sleep here—a really sound, refreshing sleep. Then
to-morrow, whole and hale, back you shall go; honestly. It’s only
professional strong men should ask questions. Babes like you and me
must keep to slops.’
So, though Lawford made no answer, it was agreed. Before noon the three
of them had set out on their walk across the fields. And after rambling
on just as caprice took them, past reddening blackberry bushes and
copses of hazel, and flaming beech, they sat down to spread out their
meal on the slope of a hill, overlooking quiet ploughed fields and
grazing cattle. Herbert stretched himself with his back to the earth,
and his placid face to the pale vacant sky, while Lawford, even more
dispirited after his walk, wandered up to the crest of the hill.
At the foot of the hill, upon the other side, lay a farm and its
out-buildings, and a pool of water beneath a group of elms. It was
vacant in the sunlight, and the water vividly green with a scum of
weed. And about half a mile beyond stood a cluster of cottages and an
old towered church. He gazed idly down, listening vaguely to the
wailing of a curlew flitting anxiously to and fro above the broken
solitude of its green hill. And it seemed as if a thin and dark cloud
began to be quietly withdrawn from over his eyes. Hill and wailing cry
and barn and water faded out. And he was staring as if in an endless
stillness at an open window against which the sun was beating in a
bristling torrent of gold, while out of the garden beyond came the
voice of some evening bird singing with such an unspeakable ecstasy of
grief it seemed it must be perched upon the confines of another world.
The light gathered to a radiance almost intolerable, driving back with
its raining beams some memory, forlorn, remorseless, remote. His body
stood dark and senseless, rocking in the air on the hillside as if
bereft of its spirit. Then his hands were drawn over his eyes. He
turned unsteadily and made his way, as if through a thick, drizzling
haze, slowly back.
‘What is that—there?’ he said almost menacingly, standing with
bloodshot eyes looking down upon Herbert.
‘“That!”—what?’ said Herbert, glancing up startled from his book. ‘Why,
what’s wrong, Lawford?’
‘That,’ said Lawford sullenly, yet with a faintly mournful cadence in
his voice; ‘those fields and that old empty farm—that village over
there? Why did you bring me here?’
Grisel had not stirred. ‘The village...’
‘Ssh!’ she said, catching her brother’s sleeve; ‘that’s Detcham, yes,
Detcham.’
Lawford turned wide vacant eyes on her. He shook his head and
shuddered. ‘No, no; not Detcham. I know it; I know it; but it has gone
out of my mind. Not Detcham; I’ve been there before; don’t look at me.
Horrible, horrible. It takes me back—I can’t think. I stood there,
trying, trying; it’s all in a blur. Don’t ask me—a dream.’
Grisel leaned forward and touched his hand. ‘Don’t think; don’t even
try. Why should you? We can’t; we _mustn’t_ go back.’
Lawford, still gazing fixedly, turned again a darkened face towards the
steep of the hill. ‘I think, you know,’ he said, stooping and
whispering, ‘_he_ would know—the window and the sun and the singing.
And oh, of course it was too late. You understand—too late. And once...
you can’t go back; oh no. You won’t leave me? You see, if you go, it
would only be all. I could not be quite so alone. But Detcham—Detcham?
perhaps you will not trust me—tell me? That was not the name.’ He
shuddered violently and turned dog-like beseeching eyes.
‘To-morrow—yes, to-morrow,’ he said, ‘I will promise anything if you
will not leave me now. Once—’ But again the thread running so faintly
through that inextricable maze of memory eluded him. ‘So long as you
won’t leave me now!’ he implored her.
She was vainly trying to win back her composure, and could not answer
him at once....
In the evening after supper Grisel sat her guest down in front of a big
wood fire in the old book-room, where, staring into the playing flames,
he could fall at peace into the almost motionless reverie which he
seemed merely to harass and weary himself by trying to disperse. She
opened the little piano at the far end of the room and played on and on
as fancy led—Chopin and Beethoven, a fugue from Bach, and lovely
forlorn old English airs, till the music seemed not only a voice
persuading, pondering, and lamenting, but gathered about itself the
hollow surge of the water and the darkness; wistful and clear, as the
thoughts of a solitary child. Ever and again a log burnt through its
strength, and falling amid sparks, stirred, like a restless animal, the
stillness; or Herbert in his corner lifted his head to glance towards
his visitor, and to turn another page. At last the music, too, fell
silent, and Lawford stood up with his candle in his hand and eyed with
a strange fixity brother and sister. His glance wandered slowly round
the quiet flame-lit room.
‘You won’t,’ he said, stooping towards them as if in extreme
confidence, ‘you won’t much notice? They come and go. I try not to—to
speak. It’s the only way through. It is not that I don’t know they’re
only dreams. But if once the—the others thought there had been any
tampering’—he tapped his forehead meaningly—‘here: if once they thought
_that_, it would, you know, be quite over then. How could I prove...?’
He turned cautiously towards the door, and with laborious significance
nodded his head at them.
Herbert bent down and held out his long hands to the fire. ‘Tampering,
my dear chap: That’s what the lump said to the leaven.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Lawford, putting out his hand, ‘but you know what I
mean, Herbert. Anything I tried to do then would be quite, quite
hopeless. That would be poisoning the wells.’
They watched him out of the room, and listened till quite distinctly in
the still night-shaded house they heard his door gently close. Then, as
if by consent, they turned and looked long and questioningly into each
other’s faces.
‘Then you are not afraid?’ Herbert said quietly.
Grisel gazed steadily on, and almost imperceptibly shook her head.
‘You mean?’ he questioned her; but still he had again to read her
answer in her eyes.
‘Oh, very well, Grisel,’ he said quietly, ‘you know best,’ and returned
once more to his writing.
For an hour or two Lawford slept heavily, so heavily that when a little
after midnight he awoke, with his face towards the uncurtained window,
though for many minutes he lay brightly confronting all Orion, that
from blazing helm to flaming dog at heel filled high the glimmering
square, he could not lift or stir his cold and leaden limbs. He rose at
last and threw off the burden of his bedclothes, and rested awhile, as
if freed from the heaviness of an unrememberable nightmare. But so
clear was his mind and so extraordinarily refreshed he seemed in body
that sleep for many hours would not return again. And he spent almost
all the remainder of the lagging darkness pacing softly to and fro; one
face only before his eyes, the one sure thing, the one thing
unattainable in a world of phantoms.
Herbert waited on in vain for his guest next morning, and after
wandering up and down the mossy lawn at the back of the house, went off
cheerfully at last alone for his dip. When he returned Lawford was in
his place at the breakfast-table. He sat on, moody and constrained,
until even Herbert’s haphazard talk trickled low.
‘I fancy my sister is nursing a headache,’ he said at last, ‘but she’ll
be down soon. And I’m afraid from the looks of you, Lawford, your night
was not particularly restful.’ He felt his way very heedfully. ‘Perhaps
we walked you a little too far yesterday. We are so used to tramping
that—’ Lawford kept thoughtful eyes fixed on the deprecating face.
‘I see what it is, Herbert—you are humouring me again. I have been
wracking my brains in vain to remember what exactly _did_ happen
yesterday. I feel as if it was all sunk oceans deep in sleep. I get so
far—and then I’m done. It won’t give up a hint. But you really mustn’t
think I’m an invalid, or—or in my second childhood. The truth is,’ he
added, ‘it’s only my _first_, come back again. But now that I’ve got so
far, now that I’m really better, I—’ He broke off rather vacantly, as
if afraid of his own confidence. ‘I must be getting on,’ he summed up
with an effort, ‘and that’s the solemn fact. I keep on forgetting
I’m—I’m a ratepayer!’
Herbert sat round in his chair. ‘You see, Lawford, the very term is
little else than Double-Dutch to me. As a matter of fact Grisel sends
all my hush-money to the horrible people that do the cleaning up, as it
were. I can’t catch their drift. Government to me is merely the
spectacle of the clever, or the specious, managing the dull. It deals
merely with the physical, and just the fringe of consciousness. I am
not joking. I think I follow you. All I mean is that the
obligations—mainly tepid, I take it—that are luring you back to the
fold would be the very ones that would scare me quickest off. The
imagination, the appeal faded: we’re dead.’
Lawford opened his mouth; ‘_Temporarily_ tepid,’ he at last all but
coughed out.
‘Oh yes, of course,’ said Herbert intelligently. ‘Only temporarily.
It’s this beastly gregariousness that’s the devil. The very thought of
it undoes me—with an absolute shock of sheepishness. I suddenly realise
my human nakedness: that here we are, little better than naked animals,
bleating behind our illusory wattles on the slopes of—of infinity. And
nakedness, after all, is a wholesome thing to realize only when one
thinks too much of one’s clothes. I peer sometimes, feebly enough, out
of my wool, and it seems to me that all these busybodies, all these
fact-devourers, all this news-reading rabble, are nothing brighter than
very dull-witted children trying to play an imaginative game, much too
deep for their poor reasons. I don’t mean that _your_ wanting to go
home is anything gregarious, but I do think _their_ insisting on your
coming back at once might be. And I know you won’t visit this stuff on
me as anything more than just my “scum,” as Grisel calls the fine
flower of my maiden meditations. All that I really _want_ to say is
that we should both be more than delighted if you’d stay just as long
as it will not be a bore for you to stay. Stay till you’re heartily
tired of us. Go back now, if you _must_; tell them how much better you
are. Bolt off to a nerve specialist. He’ll say complete rest—change of
scene, and all that. They all do. Instinct via intellect. And why not
take your rest here? We are such miserably dull company to one another
it would be a greater pleasure to have you with us than I can say. I
mean it from the very bottom of my heart. Do!’
Lawford listened. ‘I wish—,’ he began, and stopped dead again. ‘Anyhow,
I’ll go back. I am afraid, Herbert, I’ve been playing truant. It was
all very well while—To tell you the truth I can’t think _quite_
straight yet. But it won’t last for ever. Besides—well, anyhow, I’ll go
back.’
‘Right you are,’ said Herbert, pretending to be cheerful. ‘You can’t
expect, you really can’t, everything to come right straight away. Just
have patience. And now, let’s go out and sit in the sun. They’ve mixed
September up with May.’
And about half an hour afterwards he glanced up from his book to find
his visitor fast asleep in his garden chair.
Grisel had taken her brother’s place, with a little pile of needlework
beside her on the grass, when Lawford again opened his eyes under the
rosy shade of a parasol. He watched her for a while, without speaking.
‘How long have I been asleep?’ he said at last.
She started and looked up from her needle.
‘That depends on how long you have been awake,’ she said, smiling. ‘My
brother tells me,’ she went on, beginning to stitch, ‘that you have
made up your mind to leave us to-day. Perhaps we are only flattering
ourselves it has been a rest. But if it has—is that, do you think,
quite wise?’
He leant forward and hid his face in his hands. ‘It’s because—it’s
because it’s the only “must” I can see.’
‘But even “musts”—well, we have to be sure even of “musts,” haven’t we?
Are _you_?’ She glanced up and for an instant their eyes met, and the
falling water seemed to be sounding out of a distance so remote it
might be but the echo of a dream. She stooped once more over her work.
‘Supposing,’ he said very slowly, and almost as if speaking to himself,
‘supposing Sabathier—and you know he’s merely like a friend now one
mustn’t be seen talking to—supposing he came back; what then?’
‘Oh, but Sabathier’s gone: he never really came. It was only a fancy—a
mood. It was only you—another you.’
‘Who was that yesterday, then?’
She glanced at him swiftly and knew the question was but a venture.
‘Yesterday?’
‘Oh, very well,’ he said fretfully, ‘you too! But if he did, if he did,
come really back: “prey” and all?’
‘What is the riddle?’ she said, taking a deep breath and facing him
brightly.
‘Would _my_ “must” still be _his_?’ The face he raised to her, as he
leaned forward under the direct light of the sun, was so colourless,
cadaverous and haggard, the thought crossed her mind that it did indeed
seem little more than a shadowy mask that but one hour of darkness
might dispel.
‘You said, you know, we did win through. Why then should we be even
thinking of defeat now?’
‘“We”!’
‘Oh no, you!’ she cried triumphantly.
‘You do not answer my question.’
‘Nor you mine! It _was_ a glorious victory. Is there the ghost of a
reason why you should cast your mind back? Is there, now?’
‘Only,’ said Lawford, looking patiently up into her face, ‘only because
I love you’: and listened in the silence to the words as one may watch
a bird that has escaped for ever and irrevocably out of its cage,
steadily flying on and on till lost to sight.
For an instant the grey eyes faltered. ‘But that, surely,’ she began in
a low voice, still steadily sewing, ‘that was our compact last
night—that you should let me help, that you should trust me just as you
trusted the mother years ago who came in the little cart with the
shaggy dusty pony to the homesick boy watching at the window. Perhaps,’
she added, her fingers trembling, ‘in this odd shuffle of souls and
faces, I _am_ that mother, and most frightfully anxious you should not
give in. Why, even because of the tiredness, even because the cause
seems vain, you must still fight on—wouldn’t she have said it? Surely
there are prizes, a daughter, a career, no end! And even they
gone—still the self undimmed, undaunted, that took its drubbing like a
man.’
‘I know you know I’m all but crazed; you see this wretched mind all
littered and broken down; look at me like that, then. Forget even you
have befriended me and pretended—Why must I blunder on and on like
this? Oh, Grisel, my friend, my friend, if only you loved me!’
Tears clouded her eyes. She turned vaguely as if for a hiding-place.
‘We can’t talk here. How mad the day is. Listen, listen! I do—I do love
you—mother and woman and friend—from the very moment you came. It’s all
so clear, so clear: _that_, and your miserable “must,” my friend. Come,
we will go away by ourselves a little, and talk. That way. I’ll meet
you by the gate.’