Whether Mrs. Clarke had put “The Kasidah” in a conspicuous place in the
pavilion with a definite object, or whether she had been reading it and
by chance had laid it down, Dion could not tell. He believed, however,
that she had intended that this book should be read by him at this
crisis in his life. She had frankly acknowledged that she wished to
rouse him out of his inertia; she was a very mental woman; a book was a
weapon that such a woman would be likely to employ.
At any rate, Dion felt her influence in “The Kasidah.”
The book took possession of him; it burnt him like a flame; even it made
him for a short time forget. That was incredible, yet it was the fact.
It was an antichristian book. A woman’s love of God had made Dion in his
bitterness antichristian. It was an enormously vital book, and called to
the vitality which misery had not killed within him. There were passages
in it which seemed to have been written specially for him--passages that
went into him like a sword and drew blood from out of the very depths of
him.
“Better the worm of Izrail than Death that walks in form of life”--that
was for him. He had substituted for death, swift, easy, a mere nothing,
the long, slow terrific something. Death that walks in form of life.
Deliberately he had chosen that.
“On thought itself feed not thy thought; nor turn
From Sun and Light to gaze
At darkling cloisters paved with tombs where rot
The bones of bygone days----”
What else had he done since he had wandered in the wilderness?
“There is no Good, there is no Bad, these be
The whims of mortal will:
What works me weal that call I ‘good,’ what harms
And hurts I hold as ‘ill.’”
These words drove out the pale Fantasy he had fallen down and worshiped.
It had harmed and hurt him. Haji Abdu El-Yezdi bade him henceforth hold
it as “ill.” If he could only do that, would not gates open before him,
would not, perhaps, the power to live again in a new way arise within
him?
“Do what thy Manhood bids thee do, from
None but self expect applause;
He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes
And keeps his self-made laws.
All other Life is living Death, a world where
None but Phantoms dwell,
A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice, a tinkling
Of the Camel bell.”
He had lived the other life, for he had lived for another; he had lived
to earn the applause of affection from Rosamund; he had striven always
to fit his life into her pattern; now he was alone with the result.
“Pluck the old woman from thy breast: be
Stout in woe, be stark in weal-- . . . . . . . spurn
Bribe of Heav’n and threat of Hell.”
He had chosen the death that walks in the form of life; now something
powerful, stirred from sleep by the influence of one not dead, rose up
in him to reject that death. And it was the same thing that long ago
had enabled him to be pure before his marriage, the same thing which had
enabled him to put England before even Rosamund, the same thing which
had held him up in many difficult days in South Africa, and had kept him
cheerful and bravely gay through the long separation from all he cared
for, the same thing which had begun to dominate Rosamund during those
few short days at Welsley, the brief period of reunion in happiness
which had preceded the crash into the abyss; it was the fiery spark
of Dion’s strength which not all his weakness had succeeded in
extinguishing, a strength which had made for good in the past, a
strength which might make for evil in the future.
Did Mrs. Clarke know of this strength, and was she subtly appealing to
it?
“Pluck the old woman from thy breast.”
Again and again Dion repeated those words to himself, and he saw
himself, an ineffably tragic, because a weak figure, feebly drifting
with his black misery through cities which knew him not, wandering
alone, sitting alone, peering at the lives of others, watching their
vices without interest, without either approval or condemnation, staring
with dull eyes at their fetes and their funerals, their affections,
their cruelties, their passions, their crimes. He saw himself in a
garden at Pera staring at painted women, neither desiring them nor
turning from them with any disgust. He saw himself--as an old woman. A
smoldering defiance within him sent out a spurt of scorching flame.
* * * * *
Sitting alone by the stream in the Valley of Roses Dion heard the
sound of steps, and presently saw a slight, very refined-looking man
in riding-breeches, with a hunting-crop in his hand, coming down to the
bank. He sat down on a rough wooden bench under a willow tree, lit a
cigar and gazed into the water. He had large, imaginative gray eyes.
There was something military and something poetic in his manner and
bearing and in his whole appearance. Almost directly from a little
rustic cafe close by a Greek lad came, carrying a wooden stool. On it he
placed a steaming brass coffee pot, a cup and saucer, sugar, a stick of
burning incense in a tiny vase, and a rose with a long stalk. Then he
went swiftly away, looking very intelligent. The stranger--obviously
an Englishman--picked up the rose, held it, smelt it, laid it down and
began to sip his coffee. Then in a very casual, easy-going way, like a
man who was naturally sociable, and who enjoyed having a word with any
one whom he came across, he began to speak to Dion.
When that day died Dion stood alone looking down into the stream. He
looked till he saw in it the face of night. Broken stars quivered in the
water; among them for a moment he perceived the eyes of a child, of a
child who had been able to love him as a woman had not been able to love
him, and to forgive him as a woman could not forgive him.
When Dion walked back to his hotel the candlelight glimmered over the
dining-table at the Villa Hafiz where Mrs. Clarke sat with her
three guests--the Ambassador, Madame Davroulos, the wife of a Greek
millionaire whose home was at Smyrna, and Ahmed Bey, one of the Sultan’s
adjutants.
Hadi Bey had long ago passed out of her life.
That evening the Ambassador got up to go rather early. His caique was
lying against the quay.
“Come out by the garden gate, won’t you?” said Mrs. Clarke to him, and
she led the way to the tangled rose garden, where sometimes she sat and
read the poems of Hafiz.
Madame Davroulos was smoking a large cigar in a corner of the
drawing-room and talking volubly to Ahmed Bey, who was listening as
only a Turk can listen, with a smiling and immense serenity, twisting a
string of amber beads in his padded fingers.
“He was there?” said Mrs. Clarke, in her quietest and most impersonal
manner.
“Yes--he was there.”
The Ambassador paused by the fountain, and stood with one foot on the
marble edge of the basin, gazing down on the blue lilies whose color
looked dull and almost black in the night.
“He was there. I talked with him for quite half an hour. He seemed glad
to talk; he talked almost fiercely.”
Mrs. Clarke’s white face looked faintly surprised.
“Eventually I told him who I was, and he told his name to me, watching
me narrowly to see how I should take it. My air of complete serenity
over the revelation seemed to reassure him. I said I knew he was a
friend of yours and that my wife and I would be very glad to see him at
Therapia, and at the Embassy in Pera later on. He said he would come to
Therapia to-morrow.”
This time Mrs. Clarke looked almost strongly surprised.
“What did you talk about?” she asked.
“Chiefly about a book he seems to have been reading recently, Richard
Burton’s ‘Kasidah.’ You know it, of course?”
“I remember Omar Khayyam much better.”
“He spoke strangely, almost terribly about it. Perhaps you know
how converts to Roman Catholicism talk in the early days of their
conversion, as if they alone understood the true meaning of being safe
in sunlight, cradled and cherished in the blaze, as it were. Well, he
spoke like one just converted to a belief in the all-sufficiency of
this life if it is thoroughly lived; and, I confess, he gave me the
impression of being cradled and cherished in thick darkness.”
Sir Carey was silent for a moment. Then he said:
“What was this man, Leith?”
“Do you mean----?”
“Before his married life came to an end?”
“The straight, athletic, orthodox young Englishman; very sane and
simple, healthily moral; not perhaps particularly religious, but full
of sentiment and trust in a boyish sort of way. I remember he read
Christian morals into Greek art.”
Sir Carey raised his eyebrows.
“One could sum him up by saying that he absolutely believed in and
exclusively adored a strong religious, beautiful, healthy-minded
and healthy-bodied Englishwoman, who has now, I believe, entered a
sisterhood, or something of the kind. She colored his whole life. He
saw life through her eyes, and believed through her faith. At least, I
should think so.”
“Then he’s an absolutely different man from what he was.”
“The strong religious, beautiful, healthy-minded and bodied Englishwoman
has condemned as a crime a mere terrible mistake. She has taken herself
away from her husband and given herself to God. She cared for the
child.”
Mrs. Clarke laid a curious cold emphasis on the last sentence.
“Horrible!” said Sir Carey slowly. “And so now he turns from the
Protestant’s God to Destiny playing with the pawns upon the great
chessboard. But if he’s a man of sentiment, and not an intellectual,
he’ll never find this life all-sufficient, however he lives it. The
darkness will never be enough for him.”
“It has to be enough for a great many of us,” said Mrs. Clarke.
There was a long pause, which she broke by saying, in a lighter voice:
“As he’s going to visit you, I can go on having him here. You’ll let
people know, won’t you?”
“That he’s a friend of ours? Of course.”
“That will make things all right.”
“You run your unconventionalities always on the public race-course, in
sight of the grand stand packed with the conventionalities.”
“What else can I do? Besides, secret things are always found out.”
“You never went in for them.”
“And yet my own husband misunderstood me.”
“Poor Beadon! He was an excellent councilor.”
“And an excellent husband.”
“But he made a great fool of himself.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Clarke, without any animus. “And so Mr. Leith made a
sad impression upon you?”
“A few men can be tormented. He is one of them. He has gone down into
the dark places. Perhaps the Furies are with him there, the attendants
of the Goddess of Death.”
He glanced at his companion. She was standing absolutely still, gazing
down into the water. Her white face looked beautiful, but strangely
haggard and implacable in the night. And for a moment his mind dwelt on
the image conjured up by his last words, and he thought of her as the
Goddess of Death.
“Well,” he said, “I must go, or Delia will be wondering. She knows your
power.”
“And knows I am too faithful to her not to resist yours.”
He pressed her hand, then said rather abruptly:
“Are you feverish to-night?”
“No,” said Mrs. Clarke, almost with the hint of a sudden irritation. “I
am never feverish.”
Sir Carey went away to his caique.
When he had gone Mrs. Clarke stood alone by the fountain for a moment,
frowning, and with her thin lips closely compressed, almost, indeed,
pinched together. She gazed down at her hands. They were lovely hands,
small, sensitive, refined; they looked clever, too, not like tapering
fools. She knew very well how lovely they were, yet now she looked at
them with a certain distaste. Betraying hands! Abruptly she extended
them towards the fountain, and let the cool silver of the water spray
over them. And as she watched the spray she thought of the wrinkles
about Dion’s eyes.
“Ah, ma chere, qu’est que vous faites la toute seule? Vous prenez un
bain?”
The powerful contralto of Madame Davroulos flowed out from the
drawing-room, and her alluring mustache appeared at the lighted French
windows.
Mrs. Clarke dried her hands with a minute handkerchief, and, without
troubling about an explanation, turned away from the rose garden. But
when her two guests were gone she told her Greek butler to bring out an
arm-chair and a foot-stool, and the Russian maid, whom Dion had seen, to
bring her a silk wrap. Then she sent them both to bed, lit a cigarette
and sat down by the fountain, smoking cigarette after cigarette quickly.
Not till the freshness of dawn was in the air, and a curious living
grayness made the tangled rose bushes look artificial and the fountain
strangely cold, did she get up to go to bed.
She looked very tired; but she always looked tired, although she
scarcely knew what physical fatigue was. The gray of dawn grew about her
and emphasized her peculiar pallor, the shadows beneath her large eyes,
the haunted look about her cheeks and her temples.
As she went into the house she pulled cruelly at a rose bush. A white
rose came away from its stalk in her hand. She crushed its petals and
flung them away on the sill of the window.
While Mrs. Clarke was sitting by the fountain in the garden of the Villa
Hafiz, Dion was sleepless in his bedroom at the Hotel Belgrad. He was
considering whether he should end his life or whether he should change
the way of his life. He was not conscious of struggle. He did not feel
excited. But he did feel determined. The strength he possessed was
asserting itself. It had slumbered within him; it had not died.
Either he would die now or he would genuinely live, would lay a grip on
life somehow.
If he chose to die how would Mrs. Clarke take the news of his death? He
imagined some one going to the Villa Hafiz from the Hotel Belgrad with
a message: “The English gentleman Mr. Vane took the room for has just
killed himself. What is to be done with the body?” What would Mrs.
Clarke say? What would she look like? What would she do? He remembered
the sign of the cross she had made in the flat in Knightsbridge. With
that sign she had dismissed the soul of Brayfield into the eternities.
Would she dismiss the soul of Dion Leith with the sign of the cross?
If she heard of his death, Rosamund would of course be unmoved, or
would, perhaps, feel a sense of relief. And doubtless she would offer
up to God a prayer in which his name would be mentioned. Women who loved
God were always ready with a prayer. If it came too late, never mind! It
was a prayer, and therefore an act acceptable to God.
But Mrs. Clarke? Certainly she would not pray about it. Dion had a
feeling that she would be angry. He had never seen her angry, but he
felt sure she could be enraged in a frozen, still, terrible way. If he
died perhaps a thread would snap, the thread of her design. For she had
some purpose in connexion with him. She had willed him to come to this
place; she was willing him to remain in it. Apparently she wished to
raise him out of the dust. He thought of Eyub, of Mrs. Clarke walking
beside him on the dusty road. She had seemed very much at home in the
dust. But she was not like Rosamund; she was not afraid of a speck of
dust falling upon the robe of her ideals. What was Mrs. Clarke’s purpose
in connexion with him? He did not pursue that question, but dismissed
it, incurious still in his misery, which had become more active since
his strength had stirred out of sleep. If he did not die how was he
going to live? He had lived by the affections. Could he live by the
lusts? He had no personal ambitions; he had no avarice to prompt him to
energy; he was not in love with himself. Suddenly he realized the value
of egoism to the egoist, and that he was very poor because he was really
not an egoist by nature. If he had been, if he were, perhaps things
would have gone better for him in the past, would be more endurable now.
But he had lived not to himself but to another.
He told himself that to do that was the rankest folly. At any rate he
would never do that again. But the unselfishness of love had become a
habit with him. Even in his extreme youth he had instinctively saved
up, moved, no doubt, by an inherent desire to have as large a gift as
possible ready when the moment for giving came.
If he lived on he must live for himself; he must reverse all his rules
of conduct; he must fling himself into the life of self-gratification.
He had come to believe that the men who trample are the men who succeed
and who have the happiest lives. Sensitiveness does not pay; loving
consideration of others brings no real reward; men do not get what they
give. It is the hard and the passionate man who is the victor in life,
not the man who is tender, thoughtful, even unselfish in the midst
of his passion. Self-control--what a reward Dion had received for the
self-control of his youth!
If he lived he would cast it away.
He sat at his window till dawn, till the sea woke and the hills of Asia
were visible under a clear and delicate sky. He leaned out and felt the
atmosphere of beginning that is peculiar to the first hour of daylight.
Could he begin again? It seemed impossible. Yet now he felt he could
not deprive himself of life. Suicide is a cowardly act, even though
a certain kind of courage must prompt the pulling of the trigger, the
insertion of the knife, or the pouring between the lips of the poison.
Dion had not the courage of that cowardice, or the cowardice of that
courage. Perhaps, without knowing it, in deciding to live he was only
taking one more step on the road whose beginning he had seen in Elis,
as he waited alone outside of the house where Hermes watched over the
child; was saving the distant Rosamund from a stroke which would pierce
through her armor even though she knelt before the throne of God. But he
was conscious only of the feeling that he could not kill himself, though
he did not know why he could not. The capacity for suicide evidently
was not contained in his nature. He rejected the worm of Izrail; he
rejected, too, the other death. He must, then, live.
He washed and lay down on his bed. And directly he lay down he wondered
why he had been sitting up and mentally debating a great question. For
in the Valley of Roses he had surely decided it before he spoke to Sir
Carey Ingleton. When he said he would visit Lady Ingleton he must have
decided. That visit would mean the return to what is called normal life,
the exit from the existence of a castaway, the entrance into relations
with his kind. He dreaded that visit, but he meant to pay it. In paying
it he would take his first step away from the death that walks in form
of life.
He could not sleep, and soon he got up again and went to the window. A
gust of wind came to him from the sea. It seemed to hint at a land that
was cold, and he thought of Russia, and then again of the distant places
in which he might lose himself, places in which no one would know who he
was, or trouble about the past events of his life. There before him was
Asia rising out of the dawn. He had only to cross a narrow bit of sea
and a continent was ready to receive him and to hide him. So he had
thought of Africa on many a night as he sat in the Hotel des Colonies at
Marseilles. But he had not crossed to Africa.
The wind died away. It had only been a capricious gust, a wandering
guest of the morning. Down below in the Bay of Buyukderer the waters
were quiet; the row boats lay still at the edge of the quay; the small
yachts, with their sails furled, slept at their moorings. The wind had
been like a summons, a sudden tug at him as of a hand saying, with its
bones, its muscles, its nerves, its sinews, “Come with me!”
Once before he had felt something like that in a London Divorce Court,
but it had been fainter, subtler and perhaps warmer. The memory of his
curiosity about the unwise life returned to him, somehow linked with the
wandering wind. In his months of the living death he had often looked on
at it in the cities through which he had drifted, but he had never taken
part in it. He had been emptied of the force to do that by his misery.
Now he was conscious of force though his misery was not lessened, seemed
to him even to have increased. He had often been dulled by grief; now he
felt cruelly alive.
He went down to the sea, found the Albanian boatman with whom he had
rowed on his first day at Buyukderer, took his boat out and bathed from
it. The current beyond the bay was strong. He had a longing to let it
take him whither it would. If only he could find an influence to which
he could give himself, an influence which would sweep him away!
If only he could get rid of his long fidelity!
When he climbed dripping, and with his hair plastered down on his
forehead, into the boat, the Albanian stared at him as if in surprise.
“What’s the matter?” said Dion in French, when he was dry and getting
into his clothes.
But the man only replied:
“Monsieur tres fort molto forte, moi aussi tres fort. Monsieur venez
sempre con moi!”
And he smiled with the evident intention of being agreeable to a
valuable client. Dion did not badger him with any more questions. As the
boat touched the quay he told the man to be ready to start for Therapia
that day at any time after three o’clock.
When he reached the summer villa of the Ambassador he was informed by a
tall English footman that Lady Ingleton was at home. She received Dion
in the midst of the little dogs, but after he had been with her for a
very few minutes she rang for a servant and banished them. Secretly she
was deeply interested in this man who had killed his son, but she gave
Dion no reason to suppose that she was concentrating on him. Her lazy,
indifferent manner was perfectly natural, but perhaps now and then she
was more definitely kind than usual; and she managed somehow to show
Dion that she was ready to be his friend.
“If you stay long we must take you over one day on the yacht to Brusa,”
she said presently. “Cynthia loves Brusa, and so does my husband. We
went over there once with Pierre Loti. Cynthia and poor Beadon Clarke
were of the party, I remember. We had a delightful time.”
“Why do you say poor Beadon Clarke?” asked Dion abruptly.
That day he was at a great parting of the ways. He was concentrated upon
himself and his own decision, so concentrated that the conventions
meant little to him. He was totally unaware of the bruskness of such a
question asked of a woman whom he had never seen before.
“One pities a thoroughly good fellow who does a thoroughly foolish
thing. It was a very, very foolish thing to do to attack Cynthia.”
“I was in court during part of the trial.”
“Well, then, you know how foolish it was. Some people can’t be attacked
with impunity.”
The inflexion of Lady Ingleton’s voice at that moment made Dion think of
Mrs. Chetwinde. Once or twice Mrs. Chetwinde’s voice had sounded almost
exactly like that when she had spoken of Mrs. Clarke.
“Especially people who are innocent,” he said.
“Naturally, as Cynthia was. Beadon Clarke made a terrible mistake, poor
fellow.”
When Dion got up to go she again alluded to his staying on at
Buyukderer, with an “if” attached to the allusion, and her dark eyes,
which looked like an Italian’s, rested upon him with a soft, but very
intelligent, scrutiny. He had an odd feeling that she had taken a liking
to him, and yet that she did not wish him to stay on in Buyukderer.
“I don’t quite know what I am going to do,” he said.
As he spoke the hideous freedom of his empty life seemed to gather
itself together, and to flow stealthily upon him like a filthy wave
bearing refuse upon its surface.
“I’m a free agent,” he added, looking hard at Lady Ingleton. “I have no
ties.”
He shook her hand and went away.
That evening she said to her husband:
“I have felt sorry for myself occasionally, and for other people in my
Christian moments, but I have never in the past felt so sorry for any
one as I feel now for Mr. Leith.”
“Because of the tragedy which has marred his life?”
“It isn’t only that. He’s on the edge of so much.”
“You don’t mean----?”
Sir Carey paused.
“No, no,” Lady Ingleton said, almost impatiently. “Life hasn’t done with
that man yet. I could almost find it in my heart to wish it had. Shall
we take him to Brusa on the yacht? That would advertise our acquaintance
with him to all the gossips on the Bosporus. I promised Cynthia I would
throw my mantle over him.”
“I’m always ready for a visit to your only rival,” said Sir Carey.
“La Mosquee Verte! I’ll think about it. We might go for three or four
days.”
Her warm voice sounded rather reluctant; yet her husband knew that she
wished to go.
“It would be an excellent way of showing your mantle to the gossips,” he
remarked. “But you always think of excellent ways.”
Two days later the Embassy yacht, the “Leyla,” having on board Sir Carey
and Lady Ingleton, Mrs. Clarke, Cyril Vane, Dion, and Turkish Jane, the
doyenne of the Pekinese, sailed for Mudania on the sea of Marmora, which
is the Port of Brusa.