There's hope left yet.
_The Virgin Martyr_.
At seven o'clock he went to the station, hoping (against his better
judgment) that he might see Ottalie at the train. The train was very
crowded. The travellers wore the pleased, expectant look with which
one leaves an English city. Ottalie was not among them. He went down
the train twice, in opposite directions, without success. She was not
there. She must have started that morning. He had missed her.
He sat down on one of the station benches. His world seemed slipping
from him. He told himself that to-morrow he would have to work, or all
these worries would destroy him. He felt more lonely than he had ever
felt in his life. A week before, he would have had O'Neill, Pollock,
and another friend, now abroad. O'Neill was gone, without a farewell.
Pollock was fighting his own battles, with poor success. Ottalie was
thundering across France, or, perhaps, just drawing into Paris.
A longing to see some one drove him out of the station. He walked to
Soho, to a Spanish restaurant, where some of his friends sometimes
dined.
Here, at night, the curious may visit Spain, and hear the guttural,
lisping speech, and munch upon chuletas, and swallow all manner of
strangeness in cazuelas. Very bold young men cry aloud there for
"Mozo," lisping the z. The less bold signal with the hand. The timid
point, and later, eat that which is set before them, asking no
question, obeying Holy Writ, though without spiritual profit.
On entering the place, he bowed to the Scotch-looking,
heavily-earringed Spanish woman, who sat at the desk reading _Blanco y
Negro_. She gave him a "Buenas tardes," without lifting her eyes.
Then came, from his right, a cry of "Naldrett!"
Two painters, a poet, and proportionable woman-kind, were dining
together there, over the evening papers.
"How are you?" said one of the painters.
"We've just been reading about you," said the other.
"Reading the most terrible things," said the poet.
"Shew him _The Orb_. _The Orb's_ the best."
"No. Shew him _The Planet_. The one who says he ought to be
prosecuted."
Roger, refusing _Orb_ and _Planet_, shook hands with one of the ladies.
She was a little actress, delicate, fragile, almost inhuman, with charm
in all she did. She said that she had been reading his book of _The
Handful_, and had found it very "interesting." She wanted Roger to
come to tea, to talk over a scheme of hers. It dawned on Roger that
she was saving him from his friends.
"You're the man of the moment," said the poet.
"Don't you pay any attention to any of them," said the painter who had
first spoken. "You may be quite sure that when one has to say a thing
in a hurry, as these critics must, one says the easiest thing, and the
thing which comes handiest to say. If I paid attention to all they say
about me I should be in a lunatic asylum. Besides, what does it matter
what they say? Who are they, when all is said?"
The talk drifted into a wit combat, in which the seven set themselves
to define a critic with the greatest possible pungency and precision.
Having done this, to their own satisfaction, they set themselves to the
making of a composite sonnet on the critic, upon the backs of bills of
fare. One of the painters drew an ideal critic, in the manners, now of
Tintoret, now of Velasquez, now of Watteau. The other, who complained
that old masters ought to be ranked with critics, because they spoiled
the market for living painters, drew him in the manner of Rops.
After dinner, Roger walked home by a roundabout road, which took him
past his theatre. A few people hung about outside it, staring idly at
a few others who were entering. His play was still running, it seemed,
in spite of the trouble. Falempin was brave.
He walked back to his rooms, wondering why he had not gone to Ireland
that night. London oppressed and pained him. He thought it an ugly
city, full of ugly life. He was without any desire to be a citizen of
such a city. He disliked the place and her people; but to-night,
being, perhaps, a little humbled by his misfortunes, he found himself
wondering whether all the squalor of the town, its beastly drinking
dens, its mobs of brainless, inquisitive shouters, might not be changed
suddenly to beauty and noble life by some sudden general inspiration,
such as comes to nations at rare times under suffering. He decided
against it. Patience under suffering was hardly one of our traits.
On his sitting-room table was a letter from Ottalie, bearing the London
post-mark across the Greek stamps, and underneath them the legend, "2d.
to pay." By the date on the letter it had been ten days in getting to
him. He opened it eagerly, half expecting to find in it the very
letter of the dream, though something told him that the dream-letters
had contained her essential thoughts, the letter in his hand the
worldly covering of those thoughts, translated into earthly speech with
its reservations and half-heartedness. He learned from this letter
that she had been for a month in Greece, and was now coming home. She
would be for four days, from the 7th to the 11th, at her flat in
London. She hoped to see him there, before she returned to Ireland.
To his amazement the postscript ran: "I have read your last book. It
reads like the diary of a lost soul," the very words seen by him in
dream. For the moment this did not move him so deeply as the thought
that this was the 11th of the month. She had been in London with him
for the last three or four days, and he had never known it. He had
seen her light blown out the night before. If he had had a little
sense he would have called on her early that morning before he had
breakfasted. Had he done so, he would have seen her, he would have
driven with her to the station, he could, perhaps, have travelled with
her to Ireland. The bitterness of his disappointment made him think,
for a moment, meanly of Agatha, who, in his fancy, had kept them apart.
He suspected that Agatha had held back the letter. How else could it
have been posted in London with Greek stamps upon it?
Then came the thought that she had not gone to Ireland that morning.
He had never known her go back to Ireland by the day-boats. She liked
to sleep in the train, and save the daylight for life. His knowledge
of her told him what had happened. She had taken her luggage to the
station, soon after breakfast. Having done this, she had passed the
day in amusement, dined at the station hotel, and now--
He sat down, beaten by this last disappointment. Now she was steaming
north in the night express to Port Patrick. She had only just gone.
She was within a dozen miles of him. The train did not start till
eight. It was now only fourteen minutes past. If he had not been a
fool; if he had only come home instead of going to the station!
"Selina," he cried down to the basement, "when did this letter come?
This letter with the foreign stamp."
"Just after you'd gone out this morning, sir."
Five minutes' patience would have altered his life.
"A lady come to see you, sir."
"What was her name?"
"She didn't leave a name, sir."
"What was she like? When did she come?"
"She came about a few minutes before nine, sir. She seemed very put
out at not finding you."
"Had she been here before?"
"I think she was the lady come here one time with another lady, a dark
lady, when you 'ad the suite upstairs, sir. I think she come in one
evenin' when you read to them."
Ottalie had been there. It must have been Ottalie.
"I told her you was gone awy, sir. You 'adn't said where to."
He thanked Selina. He bit his lips lest he should ask whether the
visitor had worn earrings. He went back into his room and sat down.
He had not realised till then how much Ottalie meant to him. A voice
rang in his brain that he had missed her, missed her by a few minutes,
through his own impatience, through some chance, through some juggling
against him of the powers outside life. All his misery seemed rolled
into a leaden ball, which was smashing through his brain. The play was
a little thing. The loss of John was a little thing. Templeton was
farcical, the critics were little gnats, but to have missed Ottalie, to
have lost Ottalie! He tasted a moment of despair.
Despair does not last long. It kills, or it goads to action. With
Roger it lasted for a few seconds, and then changed to a passion to be
on the way to her. But he would have to wait, he would have to wait.
There were all those interminable hours to wait. All a whole night of
purgatory. What could he do meanwhile? How could he pass that night?
What could he do? Work was impossible. Talk was impossible. He
remembered then, another thing.
He opened his Bradshaw feverishly. Yes. There was another boat-train
to Holyhead. He could be in Dublin a little after dawn the next day;
"8.45 from Euston." He could just do it. He would catch that second
boat-train. It was a bare chance; but it could be done. He could be
with Ottalie by the afternoon of the next day. But money; he had not
enough money. Five minutes to pack. He could spare that; but how
about money? To whom could he go for money? Who would have money to
lend upon the instant? It would have to be some one near at hand.
Every second made his task harder. Where would there be a cab? Which
of his friends lived on the way to Euston? Who lives between
Westminster and Euston? It is all park, and slum, and boarding-house.
Big Ben, lifting his voice, intoned the quarter.
He caught a cab outside Dean's Yard. He drove to a friend in Thames
Chambers. The friend lent him a sovereign and some loose silver. He
had enough now to take him to Ireland. He bade the cabman to hurry.
The newsboys were busy in the Strand. They were calling out something
about winner, and disaster. He saw one newsbill flutter out from a
man's hand. "British Liner Lost," ran the heading. He felt relieved
that the monkey-mind had now something new to occupy it. The changing
of the newsbill heading made him feel cleaner.
Up to the crossing of Holborn, he felt that he would catch the train.
At Holborn the way was barred by traffic. The Euston Road was also
barred to him. He missed the train by rather more than a minute. He
was too tired to feel more disappointment. The best thing for him to
do, he thought, would be to sleep at home, catch the boat-train in the
morning and travel all day. That plan would land him in Ireland within
twenty-four hours. He could then either stay a night in port, or post
the forty miles to his cottage. In any case he would be with Ottalie,
actually in her very presence, within forty hours. By posting the
forty miles he might watch the next night outside her window, in the
deep peace of the Irish country, almost within sound of the sea. The
thought of the great stars sweeping over Ottalie's home, and of the
moon coming up, filling the valley, and of the little wind which
trembled the leaves, giving, as it were, speech to the beauty of the
night, moved him intensely. In his overwrought mood, these things were
the only real things. The rest was all nightmare.
Driving back from Euston, he noticed another affiche, bearing the
words, "Steamer Sunk. Lives Lost." He paid no attention to it. He
wondered vaguely, as he had often wondered in the past, what kind of a
mind browsed upon these things. A disaster, an attack upon the
Government, and a column of betting news. That was what God's image
brooded upon, night after night. That was what God's image wrote about
nightly, after an expensive education.
He was very tired; but there could be no rest for him till he had
enquired after Mrs. Pollock. She had given birth to a little girl, who
was likely to live. She herself was very weak, but not in serious
danger. Pollock was making good resolutions in a mist of cigarette
smoke. Roger was not wanted there. He went home, to bed, tired out.
He slept heavily.
He was fresh and merry the next morning. He packed at leisure,
breakfasted at ease, and drove away to the station, feeling like a boy
upon a holiday. He was leaving this grimy, gritty wilderness. He was
going to forget all about it. In a few hours he would be over the
border, in a new land. That night he would be over the sea, so
changed, and in a land so different, that all this would seem like a
horrid, far-away dream, indescribably squalid and useless. London was
a strong, poisonous drug, to be taken in minute doses. He was going to
take a strong corrective.
The train journey was long and slow; but after Carlisle was passed, his
mind began to feel the excitement of it. In a couple of hours he would
be in a steamer, standing well forward, watching for the double lights
to flash, and the third light, farther to the south, to blink and
gleam. The dull, low, Scottish landscape, where Burns lived and Keats
tramped, gave way to irregular low hills, indescribably lonely, with
boggy lowland beneath them and forlorn pools. He looked out for one
such pool. He had often noticed it before, on his journeys that way.
It was a familiar landmark to him. Like all the rest of that Scottish
land, it was associated in his mind with Ottalie. All the journey was
associated with her. He had travelled past those hills and pools so
often, only to see her, that they had become a sort of ritual to him, a
part of seeing her, something which inevitably led to her. After the
hill with the cairn, he saw his landmark. There glittered the pool
under the last of the sun. The little lonely island, not big enough
for a peel, but big enough, years ago, for a lake-dwelling, shone out
in a glimmer of withered grass. A few bents, bristling the shallows,
bowed and bowed and bowed as the wind blew. A reef of black rocks
glided out at the pool's end, like an eel swimming. Roger again had
the fancy, which had risen in his mind before a dozen times, when
passing the pool, that he would like to be a boy there, with a toy
boat. Another landmark tenderly looked for, was a little white house
rather far from the line, high up on the moor. He had once thought (in
passing) that that would be a pleasant place for a week's stay when he
and Ottalie were married. The tenderness of the original fancy
lingered still. It had become an inevitable part of the journey.
After a few minutes of looking, it came into view, newly whitewashed,
or, it may be, merely very bright in the sunset. A woman stood at a
little garden gate. He had seen her there once before. Perhaps she
looked out for this evening train. It might be an event in her life.
She must be very lonely there, so many miles from anywhere. After
this, he saw only one more landmark, a copse of spruce-fir by the line.
A faint mist was gathering. There was going to be a fog. The boat
would make a slow passage.
The mist was dim over everything when the train stopped. He got out on
to a platform which was wet with mist. Wet milk-cans gleamed. Rails
shone below his feet. A bulk of a mail-train rose up, vacant and dim.
People shouted and passed. There was a hot whiff of ship's engine. A
man passed, with nervous hurry, carrying two teacups from the
refreshment-room. Somebody cried out to come along with the mails. An
Irish voice answered excitedly, with a witty bitterness which defined
the owner to Roger, in vivid outline. Mist came driving down under the
shed. A few moist steps took him to a rail of chains, beyond which was
motionless sea, a dim, grey-brown under the mist, with a gull or two
drifting and falling. A row of lights dimly dying away beyond, shewed
him the steamer. The gangway slanted down, dripping wet from the
handrail. A man was saying that "Indeed, it was," in the curt,
charming accent of the hills.
He did not recognise the steamer. Her name, seen upon a life-belt, was
new to him. He did not remember a _Lady of Lyons_ on this line. He
laid his bag in a corner of the saloon, where already timid ladies were
preparing for the worst, by lying down, under rugs, with bottles of
salts at hand. The smell of the saloon, the smells of disinfectant,
oil, rubber, and food, mixed with the sickliness of a place half aired
and overheated, drove him on deck again. An elderly man was telling
his wife that it had been a terrible business. The lady answered with
the hope that nothing would happen to them, for what would poor Eddie
do?
Somebody near the gangway, a hills-man by his speech, probably the
ticket-collector, or mate, was speaking in the intervals of work. He
was checking the slinging-in of crates, and talking to an acquaintance.
Roger had no wish to hear him. He was impatient for the ship to start.
But sitting down there, wrapped in his mackintosh, he could not help
overhearing odds and ends of a story among the clack of the winches.
Something terrible had happened, and Tom would know about it, and,
indeed, it was a sad thing for the widow O'Hara; but it was a quick
death, anyway, and might come on any man, for the matter of that.
Indeed, it was a quick death, and the fault lay in these fogs, which
never gave a man a chance till she was right on top of you. What use
were sidelights, when a fog might make a headlight as red as blood?
She had come right into her, just abaft the bridge, and cut her clean
down. They never saw a stim of her. She wasn't even sounding her
horn. Yes. One of these big five-masted Yankee schooners. The _John
P. Graves_. Just out of Glasgow. They hadn't even a look-out set.
Taking her chance. Her crowd was drunk. And one of the dead was an
English wumman only married that morning. No. The man was saved.
Like a stunned man. The most of the bodies was ashore to the wast of
the light. There was a fierce jobble wast of the light.
There had been a collision somewhere. There were always being
collisions. Roger listened, and ceased to listen, thinking of that
"Steamer Sunk, Lives Lost" on the London placard. He thought that
these vivid, picturesque talkers, professional men; but full of
feeling, gave such an event a kind of poetry, and made it a part of
their lives, while the paper-reader, very far away in the city, glanced
at it, among a dozen similar events, none of them closely brought home
to him, or, indeed, to be understood by him, and dismissed the matter
with an indifferent "Really. How ghastly!" He reproved himself for
thinking thus. This collision had affected the men near him in their
daily business. Londoners were affected by disasters which touched
themselves. This disaster, whatever it was, did not touch him. He was
in a contrary, bitter mood, too much occupied with himself to feel for
others. He was thinking that the men who did most were self-centred
men, shut away from the world without. A snail, suddenly stung on the
tender horn, may think similarly.
It was dark night, but clear enough, when they reached Ireland. The
lights in the bay shone as before. The lights on the island had not
changed. One, high up, which he had often noticed, was as like a star
as ever. Little glimmers of light danced before him, as he dined in
the hotel, attended by a grave old waiter. The hotel was fuller than
usual at that time of year. It was full of restless, anxious,
sad-looking people, some of whom had been with him in the boat. They
gave him the fancy that they had all come over for a funeral. After
supping, he went hurriedly to bed.
In the morning, at breakfast, there were the same sad-looking people.
They sat at the next table, talking in subdued voices, drinking tea.
They were breakfasting on tea. An old woman with that hard, commercial
face, assumed by predatory natures without energy, mothered the party.
Her red eyes, swollen by weeping, emphasised the vulpine in her. A
late-comer rustled up. "Alice won't come down," she said. "She'll
have some tea upstairs."
The old woman, calling a maid, sent tea to Alice. A pale girl,
daughter to the matron in all but spirit, snuffled on the perilous
brink, worn out by grief and weariness. The old woman rebuked her.
"We shall have to be starting in a minute." She had that cast-iron
nature limited to itself. Roger wondered whether in old Rome, or
Puritan England, that kind of character had been consciously bred in
the race. He changed his table.
The waiter brought him a newspaper. He fingered it, and left it
untouched. He was not going to open a paper till he could be sure that
the uproar about him had been forgotten. He was a timorous, hunted
hart. The hounds should not follow him into this retreat. He debated
as he ate, whether he should bicycle, take the "long car," a forty-mile
drive, or take train. Finally, seeing that the roads were dry, and the
wind not bad, he decided to ride, sending his baggage by the car. He
liked riding to Ottalie. It was a difficult ride, he thought, owing to
the blasts which beat down from the hills, but there came a moment, as
he well remembered, rather near to the end of the journey, when the
hills gave place to mountains. Here the road, topping a crest, fell
away, shewing a valley and a stretch of sea. Hills and headlands
rolled north in ranks to a bluish haze. The crag beyond all rose erect
from the surf, an upright, defined line in the blueness. From
Ottalie's home, high up, he could see that great crag. With an
opera-glass he could see the surf bursting below it. It was now eight
o'clock. The morning boat was coming in. He would start. By
lunch-time he would be in his little cottage above the sea. He would
swim before lunch. After lunch he would climb through the long grey
avenue of beeches to Ottalie's home. The old excitement came over him
to give to his ardour the memory of many other rides to her.
Riding through the squalid town he found himself reckoning up little
curious particular details of things seen by him on similar journeys in
the past. The clatter of the "long car" behind him made him spurt
ahead. It was a point of vanity with him to beat the car over the
forty-mile course. The last thing noticed by him as he cleared the
town was a yellow affiche, bearing the legend:
"LOSS OF THE 'LORD ULLIN'
"CORONER'S VERDICT."
V
One news straight came huddling on another
Of death, and death, and death.
_The Broken Heart_.
The sun was golden over all the marvel of Ireland. The sea came in
sight from time to time. Beyond a cliff castle a gannet dropped, white
and swift, with a splash which faintly came to him a quarter of a mile
away. Turning inland, he rode into the hills. Little low rolling
green hills, wooded and sunny, lay ahead. On each side of him were
pastures unspeakably green, sleepily cropped by cattle. He set himself
to ride hard through this bright land. He spurted up the little hills,
dipped down, and again climbed. He was eager to reach a gate on a
hilltop, from which he could see the headland which shut him from the
land of his desire. As he rode, he thought burningly of what that
afternoon would be to him. Ottalie might not be there. She might be
away. She might be out; but something told him she would be there.
With Ottalie in the world, the world did not matter greatly. The
thought of Ottalie gave him a fine sense, only properly enjoyed in
youth, of his own superiority to the world. With a thumping heart, due
not to emotion, but to riding uphill, he climbed the gate, and looked
out over the beautiful fields to the distant headland. There it lay,
gleaming, fifteen miles away. Beyond it was Ottalie. Protesters, in
old, unhappy far-off times, had painted a skull and cross-bones on the
gate, as, in other parts, they dug graves at front doors, or fired with
lucky slugs from cover. The bones were covered with lichen, now; but
the skull grinned at Roger friendly, as it had often grinned. Riding
on, and glancing back over his shoulder, at risk of going into the
ditch, he saw the skull's eyes fixed upon him.
The last part of the ride was downhill. He lifted his bicycle over a
low stone wall, and vaulted over after it. The sea was within fifty
yards of him, in brimming flood. Norah Kennedy, the old woman who kept
house for him, was there at the door, looking out.
"Indeed, Mr. Naldrett," she began; "the blessing of God on you. I was
feared the boat was gone down on you. It's a sad time this for you to
be coming here. Indeed, I never saw you looking better. You're liker
your mother than your da. He was a grand man, your da, of all the
folks ever I remember. Indeed, your dinner is just ready for you.
Will I wet the tea, sir?"
The old woman rambled on from subject to subject, glancing at each, so
lightly, that one less used to her ways would not have suspected the
very shrewd and bitter critic hidden beneath the charm of the
superficial nature. Roger felt somehow that the critic was alert in
her, that she resented something in his manner or dress. He concluded
that he was late, or that she, perhaps in her zeal for him, had put on
the joint too early. As usual, when she was not pleased, she served
the dinner muttering personal remarks, not knowing (as is the way with
lonely old people, who talk to themselves) that they were sometimes
audible. "I'll do you no peas for your supper, my man," was one of her
asides, when he helped himself sparingly to peas. "It's easy seen
you're only an Englishman," was another, at his national diffidence
towards a potato. Roger wondered what was wrong, and how soon he would
become again "the finest young man ever I remember, except perhaps it
was your da. Indeed, Mr. Roger, to see your da, and him riding wast in
a red coat, you would think it was the Queen's man,* or one of the
Saints of God. There was no one I ever seen had the glory on him your
da had, unless it was yourself stepping." Roger's da had died of drink
there, after a life passed in the preservation of the game laws.
* The late Prince Consort.
When his baggage arrived, he dressed carefully, and set out up the hill
to Ottalie's house, which he could see, even from his cottage, as a
white, indeterminate mass, screened by trees from sea-winds. The road
branched off into a loaning, hedged with tumbled stone on each side.
As he climbed the loaning, the roguish Irish bulls, coming in a gallop,
at the sound of his feet, peered down at him, through hedges held
together by Providence, or left to the bulls' imagination. A lusty
white bull followed him for some time, restrained only by a foot-high
wire.
"Indeed," said an old labourer, who, resting by the way, expressed
sympathy both for Roger and the bull, "he's only a young bull. He wad
do no one anny hurrt, except maybe he felt that way. Let you not
trouble, sir."
Up above Ottalie's house was the garden. The garden wall backed upon
the loaning. A little blue door with peeling, blistered paint, let him
into the garden, into a long, straight rose-walk, in which the roses
had not yet begun to bloom. A sweet-smelling herb grew by the door.
He crumpled a leaf of it between his fingers, thinking how wonderful
the earth was, which could grow this fragrance, out of mould and rain.
The bees were busy among the flowers. The laurustine was giving out
sweetness. In the sun of that windless afternoon, the smell thickened
the air above the path, making it a warm clot of perfume, to breathe
which was to breathe beginning life. Butterflies wavered, keeping low
down, in the manner of butterflies near the coast. Birds made musical
calls, sudden delightful exclamations, startling laughter, as though
the god Pan laughed to himself among the laurustine bushes.
He felt the beauty of the late Irish season as he had never before felt
it. It stirred him to the excitement which is beyond poetry, to that
delighted sensitiveness, in which the mind, tremulously open,
tremulously alive, can neither select nor combine. He longed to be
writing poetry; but in the open air the imagination is subordinated to
the senses. The lines which formed in his mind were meaningless
exclamations. Nature is a setting, merely. The soul of man, which
alone, of created things, regards her, is the important thing.
The blinds of the sunny southern front were drawn down; but the marks
of carriage wheels upon the drive shewed him that she had returned.
After ringing, he listened for the crackled tinkle far away in the
kitchen, and turning, saw a squirrel leap from one beech to another,
followed by three or four sparrows. Footsteps shuffled near.
Somewhere outside, at the back, an old woman's voice asked whiningly
for a bit of bread, for the love of the Almighty God, since she was
perished with walking and had a cough on her that would raise pity in a
martial man. A younger voice, high, clear, and hard, bidding her
whisht, and let her get out of it, ceased suddenly, in her prohibition.
The door opened. There was old Mary Laverty, the housekeeper.
"How are you, Mary? Are you quite well?"
"I am, sir. I thank you."
"Is Miss Fawcett in?"
"Have you not heard, sir?"
"Heard what?"
"Miss Ottalah's dead, sir."
"What?"
"She was drowned in the boat that was run into, crossing the sea, two
days ago. There was a fog, sir. Did no one tell you, sir?"
"No."
"There was eleven of them drowned, sir."
"Was she ... Is she lying here?"
"Yes, sir. She's within. The burying will no be till Saturday. She
is no chested yet."
"Was Miss Agatha with her?"
"Miss Agatha was not in the cabbon. She was not wetted, indeed. She
had not so much as her skirrt wetted, sir. She is within, sir."
"Do you think she would see me?"
"Come in, sir. I will ask."
He stepped in, feeling stunned. His mind gave him an image of
something hauled ashore. There was an image of a dripping thing being
carried by men up the drive, the gravel crunched under their
boots--crunch--crunch in slow time, then a rest at the door, and then,
slowly, into the hall, and drip, drip, up the stairs to the darkened
bedroom. Then out again, reverently, fumbling their hats, to talk
about it with the cook. He did not realise what had happened. Here he
was in the room. There was his photograph. There was the Oriental
bowl full of potpourri. Ottalie had been drowned. Ottalie was lying
upstairs, a dead thing, with neither voice nor movement. Ottalie was
dead. She had sat with him in that very room. The old precise sofa
was her favourite seat. How could she be dead? She had been in
London, asking for him, only two days before. Her letter was in his
pocket. There was her music. There was her violin. Why did she not
come in, as of old, with her smiling daintiness, and with her hands in
great gardening gauntlets clasping tulips for the jars? That beauty
was over for the world.
He was stunned by it. He did not know what was happening; but there
was Agatha, motioning to him not to get up. He said something about
pity. "I pity you." After a minute, he added, "My God!" He was
trying to say something to comfort her. The change in her told him
that it was all true. It branded it into him. Ottalie was dead, and
this was what it meant to the world. This was death, this horror.
His mind groped about like a fainting man for something to clutch.
Baudelaire's lines rose up before him. The sentiment of French
decadence, with its fancy of ingratitude, made him shudder. A turmoil
of quotations seethed and died down in him, "And is old Double dead?"
"Come away, death," with a phrase of Arne's setting. A wandering
strange phrase of Grieg.
He went up to Agatha and took her hands.
"You poor thing; you poor thing," he repeated. "My God, you poor women
suffer!" The clock was ticking all the time. Some one was bringing
tea to the next room. The lines in the Persian rug had a horrible
regularity. "Agatha," he said. Afterwards he believed that he kissed
her, and that she thanked him.
"I don't know. I don't know," she said. "Oh, I'm so very wretched.
So wretched. So wretched. And I can't die." She shook in a passion
of tears.
"She was wonderful," he said, choking. "She was so beautiful. All she
did."
"She was with me a minute before," said Agatha. "We were on deck. She
went down to get a wrap. It was so cold in the fog. I had left her
wraps in the dining-room. It was my fault."
"Don't say that, Agatha. That's nonsense."
"I never saw her again. It all happened at once. The next instant we
were run into. I couldn't see anything. There was a crash, which made
us heel right over, and then there was a panic. I didn't know what had
happened. I tried to get down to her; but a lot of half-drunk tourists
came raving and fighting to get to the boats. I couldn't get to the
doors past them. One of them hit me with his fist and swore at me.
The ship was sinking. I nearly got to the door, and then a stewardess
cried out that everybody was up from below, and then a great brute of a
man flung me into a boat. I hit my head. When I came to, I distinctly
felt some one pulling off my rings, and there was a sort of weltering
noise where the ship had sunk. One of the tourists cried out: 'Wot-ow!
A shipwreck; oh, Polly.' Everybody was shouting all round us, and
there was a poor little child crying. I caught at the hand which was
taking my rings." Here she stopped. There had been some final
humiliation here. She went on after a moment: "The men said that every
one had been saved. I didn't know till we all landed. Nor till after
that even. It was so foggy. Then I knew.
"There was a very kind Scotch lady who took me to the hotel. She was
very kind. I don't know who she was. The divers came from Belfast
during the night. Ottalie was in the saloon. She was wearing her
wraps. She must have just put them on. There were five others in the
saloon. The inquest was ghastly. One of the witnesses was drunk, and
the jury were laughing. The waiter at the hotel knew me. He wired to
Leslie, and Leslie hired a motor and came over. Colonel Fawcett is in
bed with sciatica. Leslie is arranging everything."
"Is Leslie here?"
"No. Maggie has bronchitis. He had to go back. He'll be here late
to-night."
"I might have been with you, Agatha. If I'd stayed in another minute
on Tuesday morning, I should have seen her. I should have travelled
with you. It wouldn't have happened. I should have gone for the
wraps."
"We saw you at your play, on Monday."
"I didn't know you were in town. Oh, if I had only known!"
"It was my fault that you did not know. I kept back her letter to you.
I was jealous. I was wicked. I think the devil was in me."
"Don't think of that now," said Roger gently. He had known it from the
first. "Is there anything which I can do, Agatha? Letters to write?"
"There are stacks of letters. They all say the same thing. Oh, I am
so wretched, so very wretched!" The shuddering took hold of her. She
wept in a shaking tremble which seemed to tear her in pieces.
"Agatha," said Roger, "will you come to Belfast with me? I will hire
the motor in the village. I must get some flowers. It would do you
good to come."
"No. I must stay. I shall only have her two days more."
He would have asked to look upon Ottalie; but he refrained, in the
presence of that passion. Agatha had enough to bear. He would not
flick her jealousies. Ottalie was lying just overhead, within a dozen
feet of him. Ten minutes ago he had been thinking of her as a lover
thinks of his beloved. His heart had been leaping with the thought of
her. There she was, in that quiet room, behind the blinds, lying on
the bed, still and blank. And where was what had made her so
wonderful? Where was the spirit who had used her as a lodging? She
had been all that makes woman wonderful. Beautiful with beauty of
mind; a perfect, perfect spirit. And she was dead. She was lying
upstairs dead. And here were her two lovers, listening to the clock,
listening to the spade-strokes in the garden, where old John was at
work. The smell of the potpourri, which she had made the summer
before, seemed as strong as incense. The portrait by Raeburn, of her
great-grandfather, looked down dispassionately, with eyes that were
very like her eyes. The clock had told the time to that old soldier
when he went to be painted. It had gone on ticking ever since. It had
been ticking when the old soldier died, when his son died, when his
grandson died. Now she was dead, and it was ticking still, a solemn
old clock, by Frodsham, of Sackville Street, Dublin, 1797, the year
before the rising. It would be ticking still, perhaps, when all the
hearts then alive would have ceased to tick. There was something
pitiless in that steady beat. Three or four generations of Fawcetts
had had their lives measured by it, all those beautiful women and noble
soldiers. All the "issue" mentioned in Burke.
He went out into the light. All the world seemed melted into emotion,
and poured upon him. He was beaten. It poured upon him. He drew it
in with his breath. Everything within sight was an agony with memories
of her. "I must be doing something," he said aloud. "I must get
flowers. I shall wake up presently." He turned at the gate, his mind
surging. "Could Agatha be sure that she is dead? Perhaps I am dead.
Or it may be a dream." It was not a dream.
At the bottom of the loaning he met a red-haired man from whom in old
time he had bought a boat.
"It's a fine day, sir," said the man.
"John," said Roger, "tell Pat Deloney I want the car, to go to Belfast
at once. I shall want him to drive. Tell him to come for me here."
"Indeed, sir," said John, looking at him narrowly. "There's many
feeling that way. There was a light on her you'd think it was a saint,
and her coming east with brightness."
After John had gone down to the village, there limped up an old, old,
half-witted drunken poet, who fiddled at regattas. He saluted Roger,
who leaned on a gate, staring uphill towards the house.
"Indeed, Mr. Roger," said the old man; "there's a strong sorrow on the
place this day. There was a light burning beyant. I seen the same for
her da, and for her da's da. There was them beyant wanted her." He
waited for Roger to speak, but getting no answer began to ramble in
Irish, and then craved for maybe a sixpence, because "indeed, I knew
your da, Mr. Roger. Ah, your da was a grand man, would turn the heads
of all the women, and they great queens itself, having the pick of
professors and prime ministers and any one they'd a mind to."
After a time, singing to himself in Irish, he limped on up the loaning
to the house, to beg maybe a bit of bread, in exchange for the fact
that he had seen a light burning for her, just as he had seen it for
her da, her da's da, and (when the kitchen brandy had arisen in him)
her da's da's da years ago.
The car came snorting up the hill, and turned in the broad expanse
where the loaning joined the highway. John opened the door for Roger.
"If I was a young gentleman and had the right to do it," he said, "I
would go in a cyar the like of that cyar down all the craggy precipices
of the world." The car shook, spat, and darted. "Will ye go by
Torneymoney?" said Pat. "There's no rossers that way."
"By Torneymoney," said Roger. "Drive hard."
"Indeed," said Pat; "we will do great deeds this day. We will make a
strong story by the blessing of God. Let you hold tight, your honour.
There's holes in this road would give a queer twist to a sea-admiral."
The funeral was on Saturday. About a dozen men came. There were five
or six Fawcetts and old Mr. Laramie, who had married Maisie Fawcett,
Ottalie's aunt, one of the beauties of her time. The rest were friends
from the countryside, Englishmen in faith, education, and feeling.
They stood with bared heads in the little lonely Protestant graveyard,
as Roman soldiers may have stood by the pyres of their mates in
Britain. They were aliens there. They were part of the garrison.
They were hiding under the ground something too good and beautiful to
belong to that outcast country. Roger had the fancy that God would
have to be very strong to hold that outpost. He had not slept for two
nights. Sentiments and fancies were overwhelming him. It was one of
those Irish days in which a quality or rarity in the air gives a magic,
either alluring or terrible, to every bush and brook and hillock. He
had often thought that Ireland was a haunted country. He thought so
now, standing by Ottalie's grave. Just beyond the graveyard was the
river, which was "bad," and beyond that again a hill. The hill was so
"bad," that the beggarwomen, passing in the road, muttering at "the
mouldy old Prots, playing at their religion, God save us," crossed
themselves as they went by it. Roger prayed that that fair spirit
might be at peace, among all this invisible evil. His hand went into
his breast pocket from time to time to touch her letter to him. He
watched Leslie Fawcett, whose face was so like hers, and old Mr.
Laramie, who had won the beauty of her time, and an old uncle Fawcett,
who had fought in Africa, sixty years before. The graves of other
Fawcetts lay in that corner of the graveyard. He read their names,
remembering them from Burke. He read the texts upon the stones. The
texts had been put there in agonies of remorse and love and memory by
the men and women who played croquet in an old daguerreotype in
Ottalie's sitting-room. "He giveth His beloved sleep," and "It is well
with the child," and one, a strange one, "Lord, have patience with me,
and I will pay Thee all." They had been beautiful and noble, these
Fawcetts. Not strong, not clever, but wonderful. They had had a
spirit, a spiritual quality, as though for many, many centuries their
women had kept themselves unspotted by anything not noble. An instinct
for style running in the race of the Fawcetts for centuries had made
them what they were.
A hope burned up in Roger like inspiration. All that instinct for
fineness, that fastidious selection of the right and good which had
worked to make Ottalie, from long before her birth, and had flowered in
her, was surely eternal. She had used life to make her character
beautiful and gentle, just as he had used life to discipline his mind
to the expression of his imagination. "What's to come" was still
unsure; but he felt sure, even as the trembling old incumbent reminded
them that St. Paul had bidden them not to sorrow, that that devotion
was stronger than death. Her spirit might be out in the night, he
thought, as in time his would be; but what could assail that devotion?
It was a strong thing, it was a holy thing. He was very sure that
nothing would overcome it. Like many young men, ignorant of death, he
had believed in metempsychosis. This blow of death had brought down
that fancy with all the other card-houses of his mind. His nature was
now, as it were, humbled to its knees, wondering, stricken, and
appalled by possibilities of death undreamed of. He could not feel
that Ottalie would live again, in a new body, starting afresh, in a new
life-machine, with all the acquired character of the past life as a
reserve of strength. He could only feel that somewhere in that great
empty air, outside the precise definition of living forms, Ottalie, the
little, conquered kingdom of beauty and goodness, existed still. It
was something. Newman's hymn, with its lovely closing couplet, moved
him and comforted him. One of the Fawcetts was crying, snuffling, with
a firm mouth, as men usually cry. He himself was near to tears. He
was being torn by the thought that Ottalie was lonely, very lonely and
frightened, out there beyond life, beyond the order of defined live
things.
He walked back with Leslie Fawcett. Agatha's mother was at the house;
Leslie was stopping in the cottage with him.
"Poor little Ollie," said Leslie gently.
"She was very beautiful," said Roger. He thought, as he said it, that
it was a strange thing for an Englishman to say to a dead woman's
brother. "She was very beautiful. It must be terrible to you. You
knew her in an intimate relation."
"Yes," said Leslie, looking hard at Roger, out of grave level eyes.
"She was a very perfect character."
They were climbing the cliff road to the cottage. The sea was just
below them. The water was ruffled to whiteness. Sullivan's jobble
stretched in breakers across the bay from Cam Point. Gannets, plunging
in the jobble, flung aloft white founts, as though shot were striking.
"You were very great friends," said Roger. "I mean, even for brother
and sister."
"Johnny was her favourite brother, as a child," said Leslie. "You did
not see much of Johnny. He was killed in the war. And then he was in
India a long time. It was after Johnny's death that Ottalie and I
began to be so much to each other. You see, Agatha was only with her
about five months in the year. She was with us nearly that each year.
She was wonderful with children."
"Yes," said Roger, holding open the gate of the little garden so that
his guest might pass, "I know." He was not likely to forget how
wonderful she had been with children. They went into the little
sitting-room where Norah, in one of her black moods, gave them tea.
After tea they sat in the garden, looking out over the low hedge at the
bay. At sunset they walked along the coast to a place which they had
called "the cove." They had used to bathe there. A little brook
tumbled over a rock in a forty-foot fall. Below the fall was a pool,
overgrown later in the year with meadow-sweet and honeysuckle, but
clear now, save for the rushes and brambles. The brook slid out from
the basin over a reddish rock worn smooth, even in its veins and
knuckles, by many centuries of trickling. Storms had piled shingle
below this side of water. The brook dribbled to the sea unseen, making
a gurgling, tinkling noise. Up above, at the place where the fall
first leapt, among some ash-trees, windy and grey, stood what was left
of a nunnery, of reddish stone, fire-blackened, among a company of
tumbled gravestones.
Of all the places sacred to Ottalie in Roger's mind, that was the most
sacred. They had been happy there. They had talked intimately there,
moved by the place's beauty. His most vivid memories of her had that
beautiful place for their setting.
"Roger," said Leslie, "did you see her in town, before this happened?"
"No."
"You did not see her?"
"No. Not this time."
"She was going to see you."
"I believe she came just before she started. I had just gone out. We
missed each other."
Leslie lifted his pince-nez. He was looking at Roger, with the grave,
steady look by which people remembered him. Roger thought afterwards
that his putting on of the pince-nez had been done tenderly, as though
he had said, "I see that you are suffering. With these glasses I shall
see how to help you."
"You were in love with her?" he asked, in a low voice.
"Yes. Who was not?"
"I have something to say to you about that. Have you ever thought of
what marriage means? I am not talking of the passionate side. That is
nothing. I am talking of the everyday aspect of married life. Have
you thought of that at all?"
"All men have thought of it."
"Yes; I grant you. All men have thought of it. But do many of them
think it home? Have you? I imagine that most men never follow the
thought home; but leave it in day-dreams, and images of selfishness. I
don't think that many men realise how infinitely much finer in quality
the woman's mind is. Nor how much more delicately quick it is. Nor
what the clash of that quickness and fineness, with something duller
and grosser, may entail, in ordinary everyday life, to the woman."
"I think that I realise it."
"Yes, perhaps. Perhaps you do realise it, as an intellectual question.
But would you, do most men, realise it as life realises it? It is one
thing to imagine one's duty to one's wife, when, as a bachelor, used to
all manner of self-indulgence, one sits smoking over the fire. But to
carry out that duty in life taxes the character. Swiftness of
responsion, tact, is rarer than genius. I imagine that with you,
temporary sensation counts for more than an ordered, and possibly
rigid, attitude, towards life as a whole."
"Both count for very much; or did. Nothing seems very much at this
moment."
"Ottalie loved you," said Leslie simply. "But she felt that there was
this want in you, of so thinking things home that they become
character. She thought you too ready to surrender to immediate and,
perhaps, wayward emotions. She was not sure that you could help her to
be the finest thing possible to her, nor that she could so help you."
"How do you know this?"
"She discussed it with me. She wanted my help. I said that I ought
not to interfere, but that, on the whole, I thought that she was right.
That, in fact, your love was not in the depths of your nature. I said
this; but I added that you were too sensitive to impressions not to
grow, and that (rightly influenced) there is hardly anything which you
might not become. The danger which threatens you seems to me to
threaten all artists. Art is a great strain. It compels selfishness.
I have wondered whether, if things had been different, if you had
married Ottalie, you could have come from creating heroines to tend a
wife's headache; or, with a headache yourself, have seen the heroine in
her. We have life before us. You are all tenderness and nobleness
now. It is sad that we have not this always in our minds."
"Yes," said Roger. "We have life; and all my old life is a house of
cards. Before this it seemed a noble thing to strive with my whole
strength to express certain principles, and to give reality and beauty
to imagined character. I worked to please her. And often I did not
understand her, and did not know her. I have walked in her mind, and
the houses were all shut up. I could only knock at the doors and
listen. And now I never shall know. I only know that she was a very
beautiful thing, and that I loved her, and tried to make my work worthy
of her."
"She loved you, too," said Leslie. "Whatever death may be, we ought to
look upon it as a part of life. Try to be all that you might have been
with her. Never mind about your work. You have been too fond of
emotional self-indulgence. Set that aside, and go on. She would have
married you. Try to realise that. Her nature would have been a part
of yours. All your character would have been sifted and tested and
refined by her. Now let us go in, Roger. Tell me what you are going
to do."
"There is not much to do. I must try to rearrange my life. But I see
one thing, I think, that art is very frightful when it has not the
seriousness of life and death in it."
"Yes," said Leslie. "Maggie and I went into that together. We built
up a theory that the art life is strangely like the life of the
religious contemplative. Both attract men by the gratification of
emotion as well as by the possibility of perfection. One of the great
Spanish saints, I think it is St. John of Avila, says that many novices
deliberately indulge themselves in religious emotion, for the sake of
the emotion, instead of for the love of God; but that the knowledge of
God is only revealed to those who get beyond that stage, and can endure
stages of 'stypticities and drynesses,' with the same fervour. It
seems to us (of course we are both Philistines) that modern art does
not take enough out of those who produce it. The world flatters them
too much. I suspect that flattery of the world is going on in return."
"Not from the best."
Leslie shook his head unconvinced. "You are not producing martyrs," he
said. "You do not attack bad things. You laugh at them, or photograph
them, and call it satire. You belong to the world, my friend Roger.
You are a part of the vanity of the world, the flesh, and the devil.
You have not even made the idea of woman glorious in men's minds.
Otherwise they would have votes and power in the Houses. Not one of
you has even been imprisoned for maiming a censor of plays. All the
generations have a certain amount of truth revealed to them. It is
very dangerous to discover truth. You can learn what kind of truth is
being revealed to an age by noting what kind of people give their lives
for ideas. It used at one time to be bishops. Think of it."
Leslie talked on, shaping the talk as he had planned it beforehand, but
pointing it so gently that it was not till afterwards that Roger,
realising his motives, gave him thanks for his unselfishness. They
stopped on the rushy hill below Ottalie's home, just as the sun, now
sinking, flamed out upon her window, till it burned like the sun
itself. To Roger it seemed like a flaming door. She had looked out
there, from that window. Her little writing-table, with its jar of
sweet peas, and that other jar, of autumn berries and the silvery
parchment of honesty, stood just below it, on each side of the blotter,
bound in mottled chintz. Leslie's talk came home to him fiercely. The
clawings of remorse came. He knew the room. He had never known the
inmate. She was gone. He had wasted his chance. He might have known
her; but he had preferred to indulge in those emotions and sentiments
which keep the soul from knowledge. Now she was gone. All the agony
of remorse cried out in him for one little moment in the room with her,
to tell her that he loved her, for one little word of farewell, one
sight of the beloved face, so that he might remember it forever.
Memories rose up, choking him. She was gone. There was only the
flaming door.
"Roger," said Leslie, in his even, gentle voice, which had such a
quality of attraction in it, "Maggie asked me to bring you back with me
to stay a couple of weeks."
In his confused sleep that night he dreamed that Ottalie was lying ill
in her room, behind a bolted copper door which gleamed. The passage
without the room was lighted. People came to the door to knock. A
long procession of people came. He saw them listening intently there,
with their ears bent to the keyhole. They were all the people who had
been in love with her. Some were relatives, some were men who had seen
her at dances, some were women, some were old friends like himself.
Last of all came an elderly lady carrying a light. She was dressed in
a robe of dim purple. She, too, knocked sharply on the door. She
lingered there, long enough for him to study her fine, intellectual
face. It was the face of Ottalie grown old. The woman was the
completed Ottalie.
For a moment she stood there listening, as one listens at the door of a
sick-room. Then she knocked a second time, sharply, calling "Ottalie!"
He saw then that it was not a door but a flame. He heard from within a
strangled answer, as though some one, half dead, had risen to open.
Some one was coming to the door. Even in his dream his blood leaped
with the expectation of his love.
But it was not his love. It was himself, strangling in the flames to
get to her. She reached her hand to him. Though the flames were
stifling, he touched her. It was as though the agony of many years had
been changed suddenly to ecstasy. "Roger," she said. Her hand caught
him, she drew him through the fire to her. He saw her raise the candle
to look at his face. For a moment they were looking at each other,
there in the passage. The agony was over. They were together, looking
into each other's eyes. He felt her life coursing into him from her
touch.
Voices spoke without. Norah, at the door, was haggling. "Is that all
the milk ye've brought, Kitty O'Hara?"
The dream faded away as the life broke in upon him. There was some
word, some song. Some one with a fine voice was singing outside,
singing in the dream, singing about a fever. Ottalie was holding him,
but her touch was fading from his sense, and joy was rushing from him.
Outside, on the top spray of the blackthorn, a yellow-hammer trilled,
"A little bit of bread and no--che-e-e-e-se," telling him that the
world was going on.
The fortnight passed. Roger was going back to London. The day before
he sailed he rode over with Leslie to take a last look at Ottalie's
home. He left Leslie at the cottage, so that he might go there alone.
He walked alone up the loaning. Within the garden he paused, looking
down at the house. The smell of the sweet verbena was very strong, in
that mild damp air, full of the promise of rain. A paper was blowing
about along the walk. A white kitten, romping out from the stable,
pounced on it, worried it with swift gougings of the hind claws, then,
spitting, with ears laid back and tail bristling, raced away for a
swift climb up a pear-tree. Roger picked up the paper. It would be a
relic of the place. He felt inclined to treasure everything there, to
take the house, never to go away from it, or, failing that, to carry
away many of her favourite flowers. He straightened the paper so that
he might read it.
It was a double page from a year-old London paper entitled _Top-Knots_.
It consisted of scraps of gossip, scraps of news, scraps of
information, seasoned with imperial feeling. It had been edited by
some one with a sense of the purity of the home. It was harmless
stuff. The wisdom of the reader was flattered; the wisdom of the
foreigner was not openly condemned. Though some fear of invasion was
implied, its possibility was flouted. "It was a maxim of our Nelson
that one Englishman was worth three foreigners." The jokes were
feeble. The paper catered for a class of poor, half-educated people
without more leisure than the morning ride to business, and the hour of
exhaustion between supper and bed. It was well enough in its way.
Some day, when life is less exhausting, men will demand stuff with more
life. Something caught Roger's eye. He read it through. It was the
first thing read by him since his arrival there.
"SLEEPING SICKNESS.
"It is not generally known that this devastating ailment is caused by
the presence of a minute micro-organism in the human system. The
micro-organism may exist in unsuspected harmlessness for many years in
the victim's blood. It is not until it enters what is known to
scientists as the cerebro-spinal fluid, or as we should call it, the
marrow, that it sets up the peculiar symptoms of the dread disease
which has so far baffled the ingenuity of our _soi-disant_ savants.
This terrible affliction, which is not by any means confined to those
inferior members of the human race, the dusky inhabitants of Uganda,
consists of a lethargy accompanied with great variations of
temperature. So far the dread complaint is without a remedy. Well may
the medico echo the words of the Prince of Denmark:
'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamed of in your philosophy.'"
There was no more about the disease. The page ended with a joke about
a mother-in-law. The paragraph made Roger remember an article which he
had once read about the sudden rise of the sickness in some district in
Africa. He remembered the photograph of a young African, who was
dozing his life away, propped against a tree. The thought passed. In
another instant he was full of his own misery again. But instead of
throwing away the paper, he folded it, and put it in his pocket-case.
It would remind him of that last visit to Ottalie's garden. He would
keep it forever.
His wretchedness gave him a craving to be tender to something. He
tried to attract the kitten, but the kitten, tiring of her romp,
scampered to the garden wall to stalk sparrows. He plucked a leaf or
two from the verbena. He went into the house.
Agatha welcomed him. She was writing replies to letters of condolence.
The death had taken her hardness from her.
"Sit down and talk," she said. "What are you going to do?"
"That is like a woman," he said. "Women are wonderful. They use a
man's vanity to protect themselves from his egotism. I came here to
ask you that. What are you going to do?"
"I shall go on with my work," she said. "I am sure not to marry. I
shall start a little school for poor girls."
"At Great Harley? But you were doing that before."
"Only in a very desultory sort of way. But now it is all different.
Life has become so much bigger."
"Will you tell me about it? I should like to hear about it."
"Oh, it would only bore you. I shall just teach them the simplest
things. How to darn clothes, how to cook, and perhaps a little
singing. It isn't as though I were a learned person."
"How kind of you."
"It isn't kind at all."
"You will be taking girls of from thirteen to sixteen?"
"Yes. I've got no flair for very little children. Besides, there is
nothing which I could teach them. I want to get hold of them at an age
when I can really be of use to them."
She drummed a little with one foot.
"I wish that you would let me help you," he continued.
"Thank you very much. That is very kind of you. But I must do this
quite by myself."
"What are you going to do with the flat in town?" he asked. "I should
like to take it if you are going to give it up."
"Oh, I shall keep it on," she said. "I shall be up for week-ends a
good deal, at any rate until I have got my class in working order."
"You will let me know if you ever want to give it up?"
"Yes. Certainly I will. Will you go back? I suppose you will be
going back to your work. What are your plans? You never answered my
question. You went flying off into apophthegms."
"I loved Ottalie, too," he answered. "I won't say as much as you did,
for you knew her intimately. I never was soul to soul with her as you
were; but I loved her. I want now to make my life worthy of her, as
you do. But it won't be in my work. I don't know what it will be in.
You women are lucky. You can know people like her."
"Yes. I shall always be glad of that," said Agatha. "Even the loss is
bearable when I think that I knew her fully. Perhaps better than any
one."
"Yes," he said. He paused, turning it over in his mind. "Life is a
conspiracy against women," he added. "That is why they are so
wonderful and so strange. I am only groping in the dark about her."
"Roger," said Agatha, speaking slowly, "I think I ought to tell you. I
knew that you were in love with her. I was jealous of you. I did all
that I could to keep you apart. She was in love with you. When she
saw you at the theatre before the disturbance began, she would have
gone to your box if I had not said that I was sure you would prefer to
be alone. In the morning she saw what one of the papers said. She
insisted on going to see you at your rooms. She said that she was sure
you were expecting her, or that something had kept her letters from
you. I told her that it wasn't a very usual thing to do. She said
that she would talk about that afterwards. Afterwards, when she had
gone, and failed to see you, she was horrified at what you might think
of her."
It was very sweet to hear more of her, thus, after all was over. It
was something new about her. He had never seen that side of her. He
wondered how much more Agatha would tell him, or permit him to learn,
in years to come. He saw that she was near tears. He was not going to
keep her longer on the rack.
"Agatha," he said, "we have been at cross-purposes for a long time now.
We have not been just to each other. Let it end now. We both loved
her. Don't let it go on, now that she is dead. I want to feel that
the one who knew her best is my friend. I want you to let me help you,
as a brother might, whenever you want help. Will you?"
She said, "Thank you, Roger." They shook hands. He remembered
afterwards how the lustre of the honesty shewed behind her head. A
worn old panther skin, the relic of a beast which had been shot in
India by Ottalie's father so many years before that the hairless hide
was like parchment beneath the feet, crackled as she left the room.
Roger plucked some of the silvery seed vessels for remembrance.
He stood in the hall for a moment trying to fix it in his mind. There
was the barometer, by Dakins, of South Castle Street, in Liverpool, an
old piece, handsome, but long since useless. There were the
well-remembered doors. The dining-room door, the library door, the
door leading into the jolly south room, the room sweet with the vague
perfume, almost the memory of a perfume, as though the ghosts of
flowers strayed there. The door of that room was open. Through its
open windows he could see the blue of the bay, twinkling to the wind.
Near the window was the piano, heaped with music. A waltz lay upon the
piano: the Myosotis Waltz. Let no one despise dance music. It is the
music which breaks the heart. It is full of lights and scents, the
laughter of pretty women and youth's triumph. To the man or woman who
has failed in life the sound of such music is bitter. It is youth
reproaching age. It indicates the anti-climax.
He walked with Leslie through the village. The ragged men on the
bridge, hearing them coming, turned, and touched what had once been
their hats to them. They were not made for death, those old men. They
were the only Irish things which the English tourist had not corrupted.
They leant on the parapet all day. In the forenoons they looked at the
road and at the people passing. In the afternoons, when the sun made
their old eyes blink, they turned and looked into the water, where it
gurgled over rusty cans, a clear brown peat-stream. A quarter of a
mile up the stream was the graveyard, where the earth had by this time
ceased to settle over Ottalie's face. On the grave, loosely tied with
rushes, was a bunch of dog-roses.
They climbed the sharp rise beyond the bridge. Here they began to
ride. They were going to ride thirty miles to the hotel. There they
would sleep. In the morning Roger would take the steamer and return to
London, where he would dree his weird by his lane as best he could.
The men on the quay were loading ore, as of old, into a dirty Glasgow
coaster. One of them asked Roger which team had won at the hurling.
They ploughed through the red mud churned by the ore-carts. The
schooner lay bilged on the sand, as of old, with one forlorn rope
flogging the air. One or two golfers loafed with their attendant
loafers on the links. They rode past them. Then on the long,
straight, eastward bearing road, which rounds Cam Point, they began to
hurry, having the wind from the glens behind them. Soon they were at
the last gloomy angle from which the familiar hills could be seen.
They rounded it. They passed the little turnpike. A cutter yacht,
standing close inshore, bowed slowly under all sail before them. She
lifted, poising, as the helm went down. Her sails trembled into a
great rippling shaking, then steadied suddenly as the sheet checked. A
man aboard her waved his hand to them, calling something. They spun
downhill from the cutter. Now they were passing by a shore where the
water broke on weed-covered boulders. From that point the road became
more ugly at each turn of the wheel. It was the road to England.
They stopped at the posting-house so that a puncture might be mended
while they were at tea. Tea was served in a long, damp, decaying room,
hung with shabby stuff curtains. Vividly coloured portraits of Queen
Victoria and Robert Emmet hung from the walls. On the sideboard were
many metal teapots. On the table, copies of _Commerce_, each
surmounted by a time-table in a hard red cover, surrounded a tray of
pink wineglasses grouped about an aspodesta. On a piano was a pile of
magazines, some of them ten years old, all coverless and dog's-eared.
Roger picked up one of the newest of them, not because he wanted to
read it, but because, like many literary men, he was unable to keep his
hands off printed matter. He answered Leslie at random as he looked
through it. There was not much to interest him there. Towards the end
of it there was a photograph of an African hut, against which a man and
woman huddled, apparently asleep. A white man in tropical clothes
stood beside them, looking at something in a sort of test-tube.
"A COMMON SCENE IN THE SLEEPING SICKNESS BELT," ran the legend.
Underneath, in smaller type, was written, "This photograph represents
two natives in the last stages of the dread disease, which, at present,
is believed to be incurable. The man in white, to l. of the picture
(reader's r.), is Dr. Wanklyn, of the Un. Kgdm. Med. Assn. The
photograph was taken by Mr. A. S. Smallpiece, Dr. Wanklyn's assistant.
Copyright."
"What do you know of sleeping sickness, Leslie?" he asked.
"Sleeping sickness?" said Leslie. "There was an article about it in
_The Fortnightly_, or one of the reviews. There was a theory that it
is caused in some way by the bite of a tsetse fly."
"Yes," said Roger, "I remember that."
"Then when Maggie and I were staying at Drumnalorry we met old Dr.
MacKenzie. He was out in Africa a great deal, fifty or sixty years
ago. He was a great friend of my mother's. He told us at dinner one
night that sleeping sickness is not a new thing at all, but a very old
thing. The natives used to get it even in his day. He said that the
tsetse fly theory was really all nonsense. He called it a pure
invention, based on the discovery that yellow fever is spread by the
white-ribbed mosquito. His own theory was that it was caused by manioc
intoxication."
"That seems to me to be the prejudice of an old man. What is manioc?"
"A kind of a root, like cassava, isn't it?"
"Probably. What is cassava?"
"It's what they make bread of; cassava bread. It's poisonous until you
bake it. Isn't that the stuff? Are you interested in sleeping
sickness?"
"Yes. It has been running in my head all day. Look here. Here's a
picture of two Africans suffering from it. Do they just sleep away
like that?"
"I suppose so. They become more and more lethargic, probably, until at
last they cannot be roused."
"How long are they in that condition?"
"I believe for weeks. Poor fellows; it must be ghastly to watch."
"There is no cure. There's no cure for a lot of things. Tetanus,
leprosy, cancer. I wonder how it begins. You wake up feeling drowsy.
And then to feel it coming on; and to have seen others ill with it.
And to know at the beginning what you will have to go through and
become. It must be ghastly."
"Here is tea," said Leslie. "By the way, sleeping sickness must be
getting worse. It attacks Europeans sometimes. MacKenzie said that in
his time it never did."
"Well," said Roger, "Europeans have given enough diseases to the
Africans. It is only fair that we should take some in return."
They rode on slowly in the bright Irish twilight. When they were near
the end of their journey they came to a villa, the garden of which was
shut from the road by a low hedge. The garden was full of people.
Some of them were still playing croquet. Chinese lanterns, already
lit, made mellow colour in the dusk. A black-haired, moustachioed man
with a banjo sat in a deck-chair singing. The voice was a fine bass
voice, somehow familiar to Roger. It was wailing out the end of a
sentimental ditty:
"O, the moon, the moon, the moon,"
in which the expression had to supply the want of intensity in the
writing. Hardly had the singer whined his last note when he twanged
his banjo thrice in a sprightly fashion. He piped up another ditty
just as the cyclists passed.
"O, I'm so seedy,
So very seedy,
I don't know what to do.
I've consumption of the liver
And a dose of yellow fever
And sleeping sickness, too.
O, my head aches
And my heart..."
The banjo came to ground with a twang: the song stopped.
"Fawcett!" the singer shouted; "Fawcett! Come in here. Where are you
going?"
"I can't stop," cried Leslie, over his shoulder. He turned to Roger.
"Let's get away," he said.
They rode hard for a few minutes. "Who was that?" Roger asked. "I
seemed to know his voice."
"It's a man called Maynwaring," said Leslie. "I don't think you've met
him, have you? He's in the Navy. He met us at a dance. He proposed
to Ottalie about a year ago. Now he has married one of those pretty,
silly doll-women, a regular officer's wife. They are not much liked
here."
"Curious," said Roger; "he was singing about sleeping sickness.
Somehow, I think I must have met him. His voice seems so familiar."
He stopped suddenly, thinking that the voice was the voice of the
singer in his dream. "Yes," he said to himself. "Yes. It was."
A few minutes later they were sliding down the long hill to the hotel.