She came out into the sunlight, and they went through the little gate
together. She walked quickly, without speaking, over the bridge, past a
little cottage whose hollyhocks leaned fading above its low flint wall.
Skirting a field of stubble, she struck into a wood by a path that ran
steeply up the hillside. And by and by they came to a glen where the
woodmen of a score of years ago had felled the trees, leaving a green
hollow of saplings in the midst of their towering neighbours.
‘There,’ she said, holding out her hand to him, ‘now we are alone. Just
six hours or so—and then the sun will be there,’ she pointed to the
tree-tops to the west, ‘and then you will have to go; for good, for
good—you your way, and I mine. What a tangle—a tangle is this life of
ours. Could I have dreamt we should ever be talking like this, you and
I? Friends of an hour. What will you think of me? Does it matter? Don’t
speak. Say nothing—poor face, poor hands. If only there were something
to look to—to pray to!’ She bent over his hand and pressed it to her
breast. ‘What worlds we’ve seen together, you and I. And then—another
parting.’
They wandered on a little way, and came back and listened to the first
few birds that flew up into the higher branches, noonday being past, to
sing.
They talked, and were silent, and talked again with out question, or
sadness, or regret, or reproach; she mocking even at themselves,
mocking at this ‘change’—‘Why, and yet without it, would you ever even
have dreamed once a poor fool of a Frenchman went to his restless grave
for me—for me? Need we understand? Were we told to pry? Who made us
human must be human too. Why must we take such care, and make such a
fret—this soul? I know it, I know it; it is all we have—“to save,” they
say, poor creatures. No, never to _spend_, and so they daren’t for a
solitary instant lift it on the finger from its cage. Well, we have;
and now, soon, back it must go, back it must go, and try its best to
whistle the day out. And yet, do you know, perhaps the very freedom
does a little shake its—its monotony. It’s true, you see, they have
lived a long time; these Worldly Wisefolk they were wise before they
were swaddled....
‘There, and you are hungry?’ she asked him, laughing in his eyes. ‘Of
course, of course you are—scarcely a mouthful since that first still
wonderful supper. And you haven’t slept a wink, except like a tired-out
child after its first party, on that old garden chair. I sat and
watched, and yes, almost hoped you’d never wake in case—in case. Come
along, see, down there. I can’t go home just yet. There’s a little old
inn—we’ll go and sit down there—as if we were really trying to be
romantic! I know the woman quite well; we can talk there—just the day
out.’
They sat at a little table in the garden of ‘The Cherry Trees,’ its
thick green apple branches burdened with ripened fruit. And Grisel
tried to persuade him to eat and drink, ‘for to-morrow we die,’ she
said, her hands trembling, her face as it were veiled with a faint
mysterious light.
‘There are dozens and dozens of old stories, you know,’ she said,
leaning on her elbows, ‘dozens and dozens, meaning only us. You must,
you must eat; look, just an apple. We’ve got to say good-bye. And
faintness will double the difficulty.’ She lightly touched his hand as
if to compel him to smile with her. ‘There, I’ll peel it; and this is
Eden; and soon it will be the cool of the evening. And then, oh yes,
the voice will come. What nonsense I am talking. Never mind.’
They sat on in the quiet sunshine, and a spider slid softly through the
air and with busy claws set to its nets; and those small ghosts the
robins went whistling restlessly among the heavy boughs.
A child presently came out of the porch of the inn into the garden, and
stood with its battered doll in its arms, softly watching them awhile.
But when Grisel smiled and tried to coax her over, she burst out
laughing and ran in again.
Lawford stooped forward on his chair with a groan. ‘You see,’ he said,
‘the whole world mocks me. You say “this evening”; need it be, must it
be this evening? If you only knew how far they have driven me. If you
only knew what we should only detest each other for saying and for
listening to. The whole thing’s dulled and staled. Who wants a
changeling? Who wants a painted bird? Who does not loathe the
converted?—and I’m converted to Sabathier’s God. Should we be sitting
here talking like this if it were not so? I can’t, I can’t go back.’
She rose and stood with her hand pressed over her mouth, watching him.
‘Won’t you understand?’ he continued. ‘I am an outcast—a felon caught
red-handed, come in the flesh to a hideous and righteous judgment. I
hear myself saying all these things; and yet, Grisel, I do, I do love
you with all the dull best I ever had. Not now, then; I don’t ask new
even. I can, I would begin again. God knows my face has changed enough
even as it is. Think of me as that poor wandering ghost of yours; how
easily I could hide away—in your memory; and just wait, wait for you.
In time even this wild futile madness too would fade away. Then I could
come back. May I try?’
‘I can’t answer you. I can’t reason. Only, still, I do know, talk, put
off, forget as I may, must is must. Right and wrong, who knows what
_they_ mean, except that one’s to be done and one’s to be forsworn;
or—forgive, my friend, the truest thing I ever said—or else we lose the
savour of both. Oh, then, and I know, too, you’d weary of me. I know
you, Monsieur Nicholas, better than you can ever know yourself, though
you have risen from your grave. You follow a dream, no voice or face or
flesh and blood; and not to do what the one old raven within you cries
you _must,_ would be in time to hate the very sound of my footsteps.
You shall go back, poor turncoat, and face the clearness, the utterly
more difficult, bald, and heartless clearness, as together we faced the
dark. Life is a little while. And though I have no words to tell what
always are and must be foolish reasons because they are not reasons at
all but ghosts of memory, I know in my heart that to face the worst is
your only hope of peace. Should I have staked so much on your finding
that, and now throw up the game? Don’t let us talk any more. I’ll walk
half the way, perhaps. Perhaps I will walk _all_ the way. I think my
brother guesses—at least _my_ madness. I’ve talked and talked him
nearly past his patience. And then, when you are quite safely, oh yes,
quite safely and soundly gone, then I shall go away for a little, so
that we can’t even hear each other speak, except in dreams. Life!—well,
I always thought it was much too plain a tale to have as dull an
ending. And with us the powers beyond have played a newer trick, that’s
all. Another hour, and we will go. Till then there’s just the solitary
walk home and only the dull old haunted house that hoards as many
ghosts as we ourselves to watch our coming.’
Evening began to shine between the trees; they seemed to stand aflame,
with a melancholy rapture in their uplifted boughs above their fading
coats. The fields of the garnered harvest shone with a golden
stillness, awhir with shimmering flocks of starlings. And the old birds
that had sung in the spring sang now amid the same leaves, grown older
too to give them harbourage.
Herbert was sitting in his room when they returned, nursing his teacup
on his knee while he pretended to be reading, with elbow propped on the
table.
‘Here’s Nicholas Sabathier, my dear, come to say goodbye awhile,’ said
Grisel. She stood for a moment in her white gown, her face turned
towards the clear green twilight of the open window. ‘I have promised
to walk part of the way with him. But I think first we must have some
tea. No; he flatly refuses to be driven. We are going to walk.’
The two friends were left alone, face to face with a rather difficult
silence, only the least degree of nervousness apparent, so far as
Herbert was concerned, in that odd aloof sustained air of impersonality
that had so baffled his companion in their first queer talk together.
‘Your sister said just now, Herbert,’ blurted Lawford at last. ‘“Here’s
Nicholas Sabathier come to say good-bye” well, I—what I want you to
understand is that it _is_ Sabathier, the worst he ever was; but also
that it _is_ “good-bye.”’
Herbert slowly turned. ‘I don’t quite see why “goodbye,” Lawford.
And—frankly, there is nothing to explain. We have chosen to live such a
very out-of-the-way life,’ he went on, as if following up a train of
thought.... ‘The truth is if one wants to live at all—one’s own life, I
mean—there’s no time for many friends. And just steadfastly regarding
your neighbour’s tail as you follow it down into the Nowhere—it’s that
that seems to me the deadliest form of hypnotism. One must simply go
one’s own way, doing one’s best to free one’s mind of cant—and I dare
say clearing some excellent stuff out with the rubbish. One consequence
is that I don’t think, however foolhardy it may be to say so, I don’t
think I care a groat for any opinion as human as my own, good or bad.
My sister’s a million times a better woman than I am a man. What
possibly could there be, then, for me to say?’ He turned with a nervous
smile. ‘Why should it be good-bye?’
Lawford glanced involuntarily towards the door that stood in shadow
duskily ajar. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we have talked, and we think it must be
that, until, at least,’ he smiled faintly, ‘I can come as quietly as
your old ghost you told me of; and in that case it may not be so very
long to wait.’
Their eyes met fleetingly across the still, listening room. ‘The more I
think of it,’ Lawford pushed slowly on, ‘the less I understand the
frantic purposelessness of all that has happened to me. Until I went
down, as you said, “a godsend of a little Miss Muffet,” and the
inconceivable farce came off, I was fairly happy, fairly contented to
dance my little wooden dance and wait till the showman should put me
down into his box again. And now—well, here I am. The whole thing has
gone by and scarcely left a trace of its visit. Here I am for all my
friends to swear to; and yet, Herbert, if you’ll forgive me troubling
you with this stuff about myself, not a single belief, or thought, or
desire remains unchanged. You will remember all that, I hope. It’s not,
of course, the ghost of an apology, only the mere facts.’
Herbert rose and paced slowly across to the window. ‘The longer I live,
Lawford, the more I curse this futile gift of speech. Here am I,
wanting to tell you, to say out frankly what, if mind could appeal
direct to mind, would be merely as the wind passing through the leaves
of a tree with just one—one multitudinous rustle, but which, if I tried
to put into words—well, daybreak would find us still groping on....’ He
turned; a peculiar wry smile on his face. ‘It’s a dumb world: but there
we are. And some day you’ll come again.’
‘Well,’ said Lawford, as if with an almost hopeless effort to turn
thought into such primitive speech, ‘that’s where we stand, then.’ He
got up suddenly like a man awakened in the midst of unforeseen danger,
‘Where is your sister?’ he cried, looking into the shadow. And as if in
actual answer to his entreaty, they heard the clinking of the cups on
the little, old, green lacquer tray she was at that moment carrying
into the room. She sat down on the window seat and put the tray down
beside her. ‘It will be before dark even now,’ she said, glancing out
at the faintly burning skies.
They had trudged on together with almost as deep a sense of physical
exhaustion as peasants have who have been labouring in the fields since
daybreak. And a little beyond the village, before the last, long road
began that led in presently to the housed and scrupulous suburb, she
stopped with a sob beside an old scarred milestone by the wayside.
‘This—is as far as I can go,’ she said. She stooped, and laid her hand
on the cold moss-grown surface of the stone. ‘Even now it’s wet with
dew.’ She rose again and looked strangely into his face. ‘Yes, yes,
here it is,’ she said, ‘oh, and worse, worse than any fear. But nothing
now can trouble you again of that. We’re both at least past that.’
‘Grisel,’ he said, ‘forgive me, but I can’t—I can’t go on.’
‘Don’t think, don’t think,’ she said, taking his hands, and lifting
them to her bosom. ‘It’s only how the day goes; and it has all, my one
dear, happened scores and scores of times before—mother and child and
friend—and lovers that are all these too, like us. We mustn’t cry out.
Perhaps it was all before even we could speak—this sorrow came. Take
all the hope and all the future: and then may come our chance.’
‘What’s life to me now. You said the desire would come back; that I
should shake myself free. I could if you would help me. I don’t know
what you are or what your meaning is, only that I love you; care for
nothing, wish for nothing but to see you and think of you. A flat, dull
voice keeps saying that I have no right to be telling you all this. You
will know best. I know I am nothing. I ask nothing. If we love one
another, what is there else to say?’
‘Nothing, nothing to say, except only good-bye. What could you tell me
that I have not told myself over and over again? Reason’s gone.
Thinking’s gone. Now I am only sure.’ She smiled shadowily. ‘What peace
did _he_ find who couldn’t, perhaps, like you, face the last good-bye?’
They stood in utter solitude awhile in the evening gloom. The air was
as still and cold as some grey unfathomable untraversed sea. Above them
uncountable clouds drifted slowly across space.
‘Why do they all keep whispering together?’ he said in a low voice,
with cowering face. ‘Oh if you knew, Grisel, how they have hemmed me
in; how they have come pressing in through the narrow gate I left ajar.
Only to mock and mislead. It’s all dark and unintelligible.’
He touched her hand, peering out of the shadows that seemed to him to
be gathering between their faces. He drew her closer and touched her
lips with his fingers. Her beauty seemed to his distorted senses to
fill earth and sky. This, then, was the presence, the grave and lovely
overshadowing dream whose surrender made life a torment, and death the
near fold of an immortal, starry veil. She broke from him with a faint
cry. And he found himself running and running, just as he had run that
other night, with death instead of life for inspiration, towards his
earthly home.