On the day after the return of the “Leyla” from Mudania, Mrs. Clarke
asked Dion if he would dine with her at the Villa Hafiz. She asked him
by word of mouth. They had met on the quay. It was morning, and Dion was
about to embark in the Albanian’s boat for a row on the Bosporus when
he saw Mrs. Clarke’s thin figure approaching him under a white umbrella
lined with delicate green. She was wearing smoked spectacles, which
made her white face look strange and almost forbidding in the strong
sunlight.
“I can’t come,” he said.
And there was a sound almost of desperation in his voice.
“I can’t.”
She said nothing, but she stood there beside him looking very
inflexible. Apparently she was waiting for an explanation of his
refusal, though she did not ask for it.
“I can’t be with people. It’s no use. I’ve tried it. You didn’t know--”
“Yes, I did,” she interrupted him.
“You did know?”
He stood staring blankly at her.
“Surely I--I tried my best. I did my utmost to hide it.”
“You couldn’t hide it from me.”
“I must go away,” he said.
“Come to-night. Nobody will be there.”
“It isn’t a party?”
“We shall be alone.”
“You meant to ask people?”
“I won’t. I’ll ask nobody. Half-past eight?”
“I’ll come,” he said.
She turned away without another word.
Just after half-past eight he rang at the door of the villa.
As he went into the hall and smelt the strong perfume of flowers he
wondered that he had dared to come. But he had been with Mrs. Clarke
when she was in horrible circumstances; he had sat and watched her when
she was under the knife; he had helped her to pass through a crowd of
people fighting to stare at her and making hideous comments upon her.
Then why, even to-night, should he dread her eyes? His remembrance of
her tragedy made him feel that hers was the one house into which he
could enter that night.
As he walked into the drawing-room he recollected walking into Mrs.
Chetwinde’s drawing-room, full of interest in the woman who was in
sanctuary, but who was soon to be delivered up, stripped by a man of
the law’s horrible allegations, to the gaping crowd. Now she was living
peacefully among her friends, the custodian of her boy, a woman who had
won through; and he was a wanderer, a childless father, the slayer of
his son.
Mrs. Clarke kept him waiting for a few minutes. He stood at the French
window and listened to the fountain. In the fall of the water there
was surely an undertune. He seemed to know that it was there and yet he
could not hear it; and he felt baffled as if by a thin mystery.
Then Mrs. Clarke came in and they went at once to dinner.
During dinner they talked very little. She spoke when the Greek butler
was in the room, and Dion did his best in reply; nevertheless the
conversation languished. Although Dion had so few words to give to his
hostess he felt abnormally alive. The whole of him was like a quivering
nerve.
When dinner was over Mrs. Clarke said to the butler:
“Osman will make the coffee for us. He knows about it. We shall have it
in the pavilion.”
The butler, who, although a Greek, looked at that moment almost
incredibly stolid, moved his rather pouting lips, no doubt in assent,
and was gone. They saw him no more that night.
They walked slowly from terrace to terrace of the climbing garden till
they came to the height on which the pavilion stood guarded by the
two mighty cypresses. There was no moon, and the night was a very dark
purple night, with stars that looked dim and remote, like lost stars in
the wilderness of infinity. From the terraces came the scent of flowers.
In the pavilion one hanging lamp gave a faint light which emphasized the
obscurity. It shone through colored panes and drew thick shadows on
the floor and on sections of the divans. The heaps of cushions were
colorless, and had a strange look of unyielding massiveness, as if
they were blocks of some hard material. Osman stood beside one of the
coffee-tables.
As soon as his mistress appeared he began to make the coffee. Dion
stayed upon the terrace, and Mrs. Clarke went into the pavilion and sat
down.
The cypresses were like dark towers in the night. Dion looked up
at them. Their summits were lost in the brooding purple darkness.
Cypresses! Why had he thought of cypresses in England in connexion with
Mrs. Clarke? Why had he seen her standing among cypresses, seen himself
coming to her and with her in the midst of the immense shadows they
cast? No doubt simply because he knew she lived much in Turkey, the land
of the cypress. That must have been the reason. Nevertheless now he was
oppressed by a weight of mystery somehow connected with those dark and
gigantic trees; and he remembered the theory that the past, the present
and the future are simultaneously in being, and that those who are said
to read the future in reality possess only the power of seeing what
already is on another plane. Had he in England, however vaguely, however
dimly, seen as through a crack some blurred vision of what was already
in existence? He felt almost afraid of the cypresses. Nevertheless, as
he stood looking up at them, his sense almost of fear tempted him
to make an experiment. He remained absolutely still, and strove to
concentrate all his faculties. After a long pause he shut his eyes.
“If the far future is even now in being,” he said mentally, “let me look
upon it now.”
He saw nothing; but immediately he heard the sound of wind among pine
trees, as he had heard it with Rosamund in the green valley of Elis. It
rose in the silent night, that long murmur of eternity, and presently
faded away.
He shuddered and turned sharply towards the pavilion.
Osman had gone, and Mrs. Clarke was pouring the coffee into the tiny
cups.
“There’s no wind, is there--is there?” he asked her.
She looked up at him.
“But not a breath!” she said.
After a pause she added:
“Why do you ask such a thing?”
“I heard wind in--in the tops of trees,” he almost stammered.
“That’s impossible.”
“But I say I did!” he exclaimed, with violence. “In pine trees.”
“There are no pine trees here,” she said, in her husky voice. “Sit down
and have your coffee.”
He obeyed her and sat down quickly, and quickly he took the coffee-cup
from her.
“Have a little _mastika_ with it,” she said.
And she pushed a tall liqueur-glass full of the colorless liquid towards
him.
“Yes,” he said.
As he drank he looked out sideways through the wide opening in the
pavilion. There was not a breath of wind.
“I can’t understand why I heard the noise of wind in pine trees,” he
forced himself to say.
“Seemed to hear it,” she corrected him. “Perhaps you were thinking of
it.”
“But I wasn’t!”
A jeweled gleam from the lamp fell upon one side of her face. She moved,
and the light dropped away from her.
“What were you thinking of?” she asked.
“Of the future.”
“Ah!”
“That’s why it is inexplicable.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t let us talk about it any more,” he said, in an almost terrible
voice. “I must have had an hallucination.”
“Have you ever before thought you were the victim of an hallucination?”
she asked.
“Yes. Several times I have seen the eyes of my little boy. I saw them
a few nights ago in the stream that flows through the Valley of Roses,
just after Sir Carey had left me.”
“Don’t look into water again except in daylight. It is the night that
brings fancies with it. If you gaze very long at anything in a dim light
you are sure to see something strange or horrible.”
“But an hallucination of sound! I must go away from here! Perhaps in
some other place--”
But she interrupted him inflexibly.
“Going away would be absolutely useless. A man can’t travel away from
himself.”
“But I can’t lead a normal life. It’s impossible. Those horrible nights
on the ‘Leyla’----”
He stopped. The effort he had made during the trip to Brusa seemed
to have exhausted the last remnants of any moral force he had still
possessed when he started on that journey.
“I had made up my mind to begin again, to lay hold on some sort of real
life,” he continued, after a pause. “I was determined to face things. I
called at Therapia. I accepted Lady Ingleton’s invitation. I’ve done
all I can to make a new start. But it’s no use. I can’t keep it up. I
haven’t the force for it. It was hell--being with happy people.”
“You mean the Ingletons. Yes, they are very happy.”
“And Vane, who’s just engaged to be married. I saw her photograph in
his cabin. They were all--all very kind. Lady Ingleton did everything to
make me feel at ease. He’s a delightful fellow--the Ambassador, I mean.
But I simply can’t stand mingling my life with lives that are happy. So
I had better go away and be alone again.”
“And lives that are unhappy?”
“What do you mean?”
“Can’t you mingle your life with them, or with one of them?”
He was silent, looking towards her. She was wearing a very dark blue
tea-gown of some thin material in which her thin body seemed lost.
He saw the dark folds of it flowing over the divan on which she was
leaning, and trailing to the rug at her feet. Her face was a faint
whiteness under her colorless hair. Her eyes were two darknesses in it.
He could not see them distinctly, but he knew they were looking intent
and distressed.
“Haven’t you told me I look punished?” said the husky voice.
“Are you unhappy?” he asked.
“Do you think I have much reason to be happy?”
“You have your boy.”
“For a few weeks in the year. I have lost my husband in a horrible way,
worse than if he had died. I live entirely alone. I can’t marry again.
And yet I’m not at all old, and not at all finished. But perhaps you
have never really thought about my situation seriously. After all, why
should you? Why should any one? I won my case, and so of course it’s all
right.”
“Are _you_ unhappy, then?”
“What do you suppose about me?”
“I know you’ve gone through a great deal. But you have your boy.”
There was a sound almost of dull obstinacy in his voice.
“Some women are not merely mothers, or potential mothers!” said an
almost fierce voice. “Some women are just women first and mothers
second. There are women who love men for themselves, not merely because
men are possible child-bringers. To a real and complete woman no child
can ever be the perfect substitute for a husband or a lover. Even nature
has put the lover first and the child second. I forbid you to say that
I have my boy, as if that settled the question of my happiness. I forbid
you.”
He heard her breathing quickly. Then she added:
“But how could you be expected to understand women like me?”
The intensity of her sudden outburst startled him as the strength of the
current in the Bosporus had startled him when he plunged into the sea
from the Albanian’s boat.
“You have been brought up in another school,” she continued slowly, and
with a sort of icy bitterness. “I forgive you.”
She got up from the divan and went out upon the terrace, leaving him
alone in the pavilion, which seemed suddenly colder when she had left
it.
He did not follow her. A breath from a human furnace had scorched
him--had scorched the nerve, and the nerve quivered.
“You have been brought up in a different school.” Welsley and
Stamboul--Rosamund and Mrs. Clarke. Once, somewhere, he had made that
comparison. As he sat in the pavilion it seemed to him that for a moment
he heard the cool chiming of bells in a gray cathedral tower, the faint
sound of the Dresden Amen. But he looked out through the opening in the
pavilion, and far down below he saw lights on the Bay of Buyukderer,
the vague outlines of hills; and the perfume that came to him out of the
night was not the damp smell of an English garden.
An English garden! In the darkness of a November night he stood within
the walls of an English garden; he heard a cry, saw the movement of a
woman’s body, and knew that his life was in ruins. The woman fled, but
he followed her blindly; he sought for her in the dark. He wanted to
tell her that he had been but the instrument of Fate, that he was not to
blame, that he needed compassion more than any other man living. But
she eluded him in the darkness, and presently he heard a key grind in a
lock. A friend had locked the door of his home against him in order that
his wife might have time to escape from him.
Then he heard a husky voice say, “My friend, it will have to come.” And,
suddenly it came.
He broke down absolutely, threw himself on his face on the divan with
his arms stretched out beyond his head, grasped the cushions and sobbed.
His body shook and twitched; his face was contorted; his soul writhed.
A storm that came from within him broke upon him. He crashed into
the abyss. Down, down he went, till the last faint ray from above was
utterly blotted out. She whom he had loved so much sent him down, she
who far away had given herself to God. He felt her ruthless hands--the
hands of a good woman, the hands of a loving mother--pressing him
down. Let her have her will. He would go into the last darkness. Then,
perhaps, she would be more at ease; then, perhaps, she would know the
true peace of God. He would pay to the uttermost farthing both for
himself and for her.
Outside, just hidden from him by the pavilion wall, Mrs. Clarke stood
in the shadow of one of the cypresses, and listened. The trip on the
“Leyla” had served two purposes. It was better so. When a thing must
be, the sooner it is over the better. And she had waited for a very long
time. She drew her brows together as she thought of the long time she
had waited. Then she moved and walked away down the terrace. She had
heard enough.
She went to the far end of the terrace. A wooden seat was placed there
in the shadow of a plane tree. She sat down on it, rested her pointed
chin in the palm of her right hand, with her elbow on her knee, and
remained motionless. She was giving him time; time to weep away the past
and the good woman who had ruined his life. Even now she knew how to be
patient. In a way she pitied him. If she had not had to be patient for
such a long time she would have pitied him much more. But he had often
hurt her; and, as Lady Ingleton had said, she was by nature a cruel
woman. Nevertheless she pitied him for being, or for having been, so
exclusive in love. And she wondered at him not a little.
Lit-up caiques glided out on the bay far beneath her. A band was playing
on the quay. She wished it would stop, and she glanced at a little watch
which Aristide Dumeny had given her, and which was pinned among the dark
blue folds of her gown. But she could not see its face clearly, and she
lit a match. A quarter-past ten. The band played till eleven. She lit a
cigarette and stared down the hill at the moving lights in the bay.
She had made many water excursions at night. Some of them--two or three
at least--had been mentioned in the Divorce Court. She had had a narrow
escape that summer in London. It had given her a lesson; but she still
had much to learn before she could be considered a past mistress in the
school of discretion. Almost ever since she could remember she had
been driven by the reckless spirit within her. But she had been given
a compensation for that in the force of her will. That force had done
wonders for her all through her life. It had even captured and retained
for her many women friends. Driven she had been, and no doubt would
always be, but she believed that she would always skirt the precipices
of life, and would never fall into the abysses.
The timorous and overscrupulous women were the women who missed their
footing, because, when they made a false step, they made it in fear and
trembling, with the shadow of regret always dogging their heels. And
yet, now Jimmy was getting a big boy, even she knew moments of fear.
She moved restlessly. The torch was luring her on, and yet now, for
an instant, she was conscious of holding back. August was not far off;
Jimmy was coming out to her for his holidays. Suppose, after all, she
gave it up? A word from her--or merely a silence--and that man in the
pavilion close by would go away from Buyukderer and would probably never
come back. If, for once in her life, she played for safety?
The sound of the band on the quay--there had been a short interval of
silence--came up to her again. Forty minutes more! She would give that
man in the pavilion and herself forty minutes. She could see the
lights which outlined the kiosk. When they went out she would come to
a decision. Till then, sitting alone, she could indulge in a mental
debate. The mere fact that, at this point, she debated the question
which filled her mind proved Jimmy’s power over her. As she thought that
she began to resent her boy’s power. And it would grow; inevitably it
would grow. She moved her thin shoulders. Then she sat very still.
If only she didn’t love Jimmy so much! Suppose she had lost her case in
the Divorce Case and Jimmy had been taken away from her? Even now she
shuddered when she thought of the risk she had run. She remembered again
the period of waiting when the jury could not come to an agreement. What
torture she had endured, though no one knew it, or, perhaps, ever would
know it! Had not that torture been a tremendous warning to her against
the unwise life? Why go into danger again? But perhaps there was no
danger any more. A man who has tried to divorce his wife once, and has
failed, is scarcely likely to try again. Nevertheless she was full of
hesitation to-night.
This fact puzzled and almost alarmed her, for she was not given to
hesitation. She was a woman who thought clearly, who knew what she
wanted and what she did not want, and who acted promptly and decisively.
Perhaps she hesitated now because she had been forced to remain inactive
in this particular case for such a long time; or perhaps she had
received an obscure warning from something within her which knew what
she--the whole of her that was Cynthia Clarke--did not consciously know.
The leaves of the plane tree rustled above her head, and she sighed. As
she sat there in the purple darkness she looked like a victim; and for a
moment she thought of herself as a victim.
Even that man in the pavilion who was agonizing had said to her that she
looked “punished.” She had been surprised, almost startled, by his flash
of discernment. But she was sure he thought that matter only a question
of coloring, of emaciation, of the shapes of features, and of the way
eyes were set in the head.
When would the lights far below go out? She hated her indecision. It was
new to her, and she felt it to be a weakness. Whatever she had been till
now, she had certainly never been a weak woman, except perhaps from
the absurd point of view of the Exeter Hall moralist. Scruples had been
strangers to her, a baggage she had not burdened herself with on her
journey.
Jimmy! That night Dion Leith had told her that he had seen the eyes of
his boy in the stream that flowed through the Kesstane Dereh. She looked
out into the purple night, and somewhere in the dim vastness full of
mysteries and of half revelations she saw the frank and merciless eyes
of a young Eton boy.
Should she be governed by them? Could she submit to the ignorant
domination of a child who knew nothing of the complications of human
life, nothing of the ways in which human beings are driven by imperious
desires, or needs, which have perhaps been sown in ground of flesh and
blood by dead parents, or by ancestors laid even with the dust? Could
she immolate herself before the altar of the curious love which grew
within her as Jimmy grew?
She was by nature perverse, and it was partly her love for Jimmy which
pushed her towards the man who killed his son. But she had not told that
even to herself. And she never told her secrets to other people, not
even when they were women friends!
The lights on the kiosk on the quay went out. Mrs. Clarke was startled
by the leaping up of the darkness which seemed to come from the sea.
For her ears had been closed against the band, and she had forgotten the
limit she had mentally put to her indecision. Eleven o’clock already!
She got up from her seat. But still she hesitated. She did not know
what she was going to do. She stood for a moment. Then she walked softly
towards the pavilion. When she was near to it she stopped and listened.
She did not hear any sound from within. There was nothing to prevent her
from descending to the villa, from writing a note to Dion Leith asking
him to leave Buyukderer on the morrow, and from going up to her bedroom.
He would find the note in the hall when he came down; he would go away;
she need never see him again. If she did that it would mean a new life
for her, free from complications, a life dedicated to Jimmy, a life
deliberately controlled.
It would mean, too, the futile close of a long pursuit; the crushing of
an old and hitherto frustrated desire; the return, when Jimmy went back
to England after the holidays, to an empty life which she hated,
more than hated, a life of horrible restlessness, a life in which the
imagination preyed, like a vulture, upon the body. It would mean the
wise, instead of the unwise, life.
She stood there. With one hand she felt the little watch which Dumeny
had given her. It was cold to the touch of her dry, hot hand. She felt
the rough emerald set in the back of it. She and Dumeny had found that
in the bazaars together, in those bazaars which Dumeny changed from
Eastern shops into the Arabian Nights. Dion Leith could never do such a
thing for her. But perhaps she could do it for him. The thought of that
lured her. She stood at the street corner; it was very dark and still;
she knew that the strange ways radiated from the place where she stood,
but there was no one to go with her down them. She waited--waited. And
then she saw far off the gleam of the torch from which spring colored
fires. It flitted through the darkness; it hovered. The gleam of it lit
up, like a goblin light, the beginnings of the strange ways. She saw
shadowy forms slipping away stealthily into their narrow and winding
distances; she saw obscure stairways, leaning balconies full of soft
blackness. She divined the rooms beyond. And whispering voices came to
her ears.
All the time she was feeling the watch with its rough uncut emerald.
Government came upon her. She felt, as often before, a great hand catch
her in a grip of iron. She ceased to resist.
Still holding the watch, she went to the opening in the pavilion.
The hanging lamp had gone out. For a moment she could only see darkness
in the interior. It looked empty. There was no sound within. Could the
man she had been thinking about, debating about, have slipped away while
she was sitting under the plane tree? She had been thinking so deeply
that she had not heard the noise of the band on the quay; she might not
have heard his footsteps. While she had been considering whether she
should leave him perhaps he had fled from her.
This flashing thought brought her back at once to her true and
irrevocable self, and she was filled instantly with fierce determination
and a cold intense anger. Jimmy was forgotten. He was dead to her at
that moment. She leaned forward, peering into the darkness.
“Dion!” she said. “Dion!”
There was no answer, but she saw something stir within, something low
down. He was there--or something was there, something alive. She went
into the pavilion, and knelt down by it.
“Dion!” she said.
He raised himself on the divan, and turned on his side.
“Why are you kneeling down?” he said. “Don’t kneel. I hate to see a
woman kneeling, and I know _you_ never pray. Get up.”
He spoke in a voice that was new to her. It seemed to her hot and hard.
She obeyed him at once and got up from her knees.
“What did you mean just now when you asked me whether I couldn’t mingle
my life with an unhappy life? Sit here beside me.”
She sat down on the edge of the divan very near to him.
“What do you suppose I meant?”
“Do you mean to say you like me in that way?”
“Yes.”
“That you care about me?”
“Yes.”
“You said you willed me to come out to Constantinople. Was it for that
reason?”
She hesitated. She had an instinctive understanding of men, but she knew
that, in one way, Dion was not an ordinary man; and even if he had been,
the catastrophe in his life might well have put him for the time beyond
the limits of her experience, wide though they were.
“No,” she said, at last. “I didn’t like you in that way till I met you
in the street, and saw what she had done to you.”
“Then it was only pity?”
“Was it? I knew your value in England.”
She paused, then added, in an almost light and much more impersonal
voice:
“I think I may say that I’m a connoisseur of values. And I hate to see a
good thing flung away.”
“I’m not a good thing. Perhaps I might have become one. I believe I was
on the way to becoming worth something. But now I’m nothing, and I wish
to be nothing.”
“I don’t wish you to be anything but what you are.”
“Once you telegraphed to me--‘May Allah have you in His hand.’”
“I remember.”
“It’s turned out differently,” he said, almost with brutality.
“We don’t know that. You came back.”
“Yes. I was kept safe for a very good reason. I had to kill my child.
I’ve accomplished that mission, and now, perhaps, Allah will let me
alone.”
She could not see his face or the expression in his eyes clearly, but
now she saw his body move sharply. It twisted to the right and back
again. She put out her hand and took his listlessly, almost as she had
taken it in Mrs. Chetwinde’s drawing-room when she had met him for the
first time.
“Your hand is like fire,” he whispered.
“Do you think I am ice?” she whispered back, huskily.
“Once I tried to take my hand away from yours.”
“Try to take it away now, if you wish.”
As she spoke she closed her hand tenaciously upon his. Her little
fingers felt almost like steel on his hand, and he thought of the
current of the Bosporus which had pulled at his swimming body.
To be taken and swept away! That at least would be better than
drifting, better than death in the form of life, better than slinking in
loneliness to watch the doings of others.
“I don’t wish to take it away,” he said.
And with the words mentally he bade an eternal farewell to Rosamund and
to all the aspirations of his youth. From her and from them he turned
away to follow the gleam of the torch. It flickered through the
darkness; it wavered; it waited--for him. He had tried the life of
wisdom, and it had cast him out; perhaps there was a place for him in
the unwise life. He felt spiritually exhausted; but there was within
him a physical fever which answered to the fever in the hand which had
closed on his.
“Let the spirit die,” he thought, “that the body may live!”
He put one arm round his companion.
“If you want me----” he whispered, on a deep breath.
His voice died away in the darkness between the giant cypresses, those
trees which watch over the dead in the land of the Turk.
_She_ had said once that the human being can hurt God.
Obscurely he wished to do that.