"_Exotics and Retrospectives," pages 83, 84._
_The Gateless Barrier_
I
Laurence leaned his arms upon the broad wooden hand-rail of the
bulwarks. The water hissed away from the side. Immediately below it was
laced by shifting patterns of white foam, and stained pale green,
violet, and amber, by the light shining out through the rounds of the
port-poles. Further away it showed blue black, but for a glistening on
the hither side of the vast ridge and furrow. The smoke from the funnels
streamed afar, and was upturned by a following wind. The great ship
swung in the trough, and then lifted--as a horse lifts at a fence--while
the seas slid away from under her keel. As she lifted, her masts raked
the blue-black night sky, and the stars danced in the rigging.
This was the first time since his marriage, nearly two years before,
that Laurence found himself alone and altogether his own master. His
marriage was a notable success--every one said so, and he himself had
never doubted the fact so far. Yet this solitary voyage, this temporary
return to bachelorhood, possessed compensations. He reproached himself,
as in duty bound, for being sensible of those compensations. He excused
himself to himself. He gave reasons. Doubtless his present sense of
freedom and content took its rise not in his enforced absence from
Virginia, from her bright continuous talk, her innumerable and perfectly
constructed dresses, her perpetual and skilful activities; but in his
escape from the highly artificial and materialised society in which she
lived and moved and had her being. Laurence had certainly no ostensible
cause of complaint against that society. Its members had recited his
verses, given a charming performance of his little comedy--in the
interests of a deserving charity--quoted his opinions on literature and
politics, and waxed enthusiastic over his strokes at golf and his style
at rackets and polo. He had, in fact, been the spoilt child of two New
York winters and two Newport summers. No Englishman, he was repeatedly
assured, had ever been so popular among the "smart set" of the great
republic. It had petted and _feted_ him, and finally given him one of
its fairest daughters to wife. And for all this Laurence Rivers was
sincerely grateful. His vanity was most agreeably flattered. His natural
love both of pleasing and of pleasure was well satisfied. Yet--such is
the perversity of human nature--the very completeness of his success
tended to lessen the worth of it. He even questioned, at moments,
whether that success did not offer the measure of surrounding immaturity
of taste and judgment, rather than of the greatness of his personal
talent and merit. He was haunted by the conviction that he had never yet
given his best, the highest and strongest of his nature, either in
thought, or art, or adventure, or even--perhaps--he feared it--in love.
The demand had been for a thoroughly presentable and immediately
marketable article; and the Best is usually far from marketable, often
but doubtfully presentable either. It followed that Laurence had, almost
of necessity, kept the best of himself to himself--kept it to himself so
effectually that he had come uncommonly near forgetting its existence
altogether, and letting it perish for lack of air and exercise.
Now leaning his arms upon the hand-rail of the bulwarks, while the stars
danced in the rigging, and the great ship ploughed her way eastward
across the mighty ridge and furrow of the Atlantic, gratified vanity
ceased to obtain in him. His thoughts travelled back to periods of his
career at once more obscure and more ambitious--to the few vital
raptures, the few fine failures, the few illuminating aspirations which
he had known. The bottom dropped out of the social side of things, so to
speak. He looked below superficial appearances into the heart of it all.
Life put off its cheap frippery of fancy dress, Death its cunningly
devised concealments and evasions. Backed by the immensities of sea and
sky, both stood before him naked and unashamed, in all their primitive
and eternal vigour, their uncompromising actuality, their inviolable
mystery; while, with a sudden and searching apprehension of the profound
import of the question, Rivers asked himself--
"What shall it profit a man--what in good truth--if he gain the whole
world and lose his own soul?"
He had been summoned to England by the illness of an uncle whose estates
and considerable wealth he would inherit. That illness had been
pronounced incurable; but the approaching death of this near relation
made small demand upon his intimate feelings. A decent seriousness of
thought and speech, concerning the impending event, were all that could
reasonably be required of him; for the elder Mr. Rivers was both morose
and eccentric, and had given his nephew a handsome allowance on the
express understanding that he saw as little of him as possible. A
declared misogynist, he had received the announcement of Laurence's
proposed marriage with an exasperating mixture of contempt and approval.
"I am sincerely sorry for you," he had written on this occasion. "The
more so that you appear to labour under the impression that the step you
have in contemplation is calculated to secure your happiness. This, you
must pardon my remarking, is obviously absurd. I grant that you are
under a moral obligation to perpetuate our family and secure the
succession to our estates in the direct line. I cannot, therefore, but
be glad that you should adopt the recognised means to attain the above
ends. I should, however, respect both your motives and your intelligence
more highly had you done this in a rational and scientific spirit,
without indulgence in sentimental illusions which every sane student of
human history has long since perceived to be as pernicious to the moral,
as they are enervating to the mental health. I could say much worthy of
your attention upon this point; but, in your present condition of
emotional inebriation, it would be a waste of energy on my part,--I
might add, a throwing of pearls before swine. Still, justice, my dear
Laurence, compels me to own that, even so, I must ever consider myself
in a measure your debtor, since the fact of your existence, your
remarkably sound physical condition, your normal and slightly
unintelligent outlook on life, have combined to relieve me of the odious
necessity of sacrificing my time and my personal liberty to the
interests of our family, by entering into those domestic relations,
which you appear to regard with as much thoughtless complacency as I
with reasoned repulsion and distrust."
This being the attitude of the elder Mr. Rivers's mind, it followed that
when, by his request, Mr. Wormald, the family solicitor, summoned his
nephew and heir to attend his deathbed, the young man's wife was not
included in that gloomy invitation. And this Laurence could not by any
means honestly regret. Virginia at a disadvantage was an idea almost
inconceivable. Yet so immediate and concrete a being would not, he felt,
shade quite gracefully into the mortuary landscape. She would not suit
it, neither would it suit her. For she was almost amazingly in harmony
with her modern, mundane environment; and, save in the way of costly
mourning costumes, it seemed incredible that death should have any
dominion over her. It struck him, moreover, that if he gauged the
position aright, Virginia, notwithstanding her many charms and much
cleverness, would have to take a back seat in his eccentric uncle's
establishment. And Virginia in a back seat was again an idea almost
inconceivable. So he said--
"It's an awful nuisance to have to leave you like this, but this is
going to be a pretty dismal bit of business anyhow. I'd much better just
worry through it alone. You'll join me later when it's all over, and we
are free to take possession and knock the place in shape. Stoke Rivers
is really rather delightful, though it is not very large. There used to
be some good pictures and books and things in it I remember. I believe
my uncle is a virtuoso in his way, though he is such a cross-grained old
chap. You'll enjoy the place, at all events for a few months every year,
I think, Virginia. And you can have all your own people over in turn,
you know; and show them how the savage English do it in their savage
little island. You'll make the neighbourhood sit up, I fancy. It'll be
amusing."
But as Laurence leaned his arms upon the broad hand-rail of the
bulwarks, in the chill of the March night, while the water hissed away
from the side, and the engines drummed and pounded, and the bows of the
great ship lifted against the far, blue-black horizon, he began to
wonder whether he had not been somewhat over hasty in proposing chronic
invasion of Stoke Rivers by all Virginia's smart friends in turn. They
were well-bred, hospitable, amusing, very much up-to-date. He owed them
thanks for a most uncommonly good time. But they seemed a trifle thin, a
trifle superficial and ephemeral just now, in face of the immensities of
ocean and sky, and of the ancient mysteries of Life and Death.