“Then in that hour rejoice, since only thus
Can thy proud heart grow wholly piteous.
Thus only to the world thy speech can flow
Charged with the sad authority of woe.
Since no man nurtured in the shade can sing
To a true note one psalm of conquering;
Warriors must chant it whom our own eyes see
Red from the battle and more bruised than we,
Men who have borne the worst, have known the whole,
Have felt the last abeyance of the soul.”
F. W. H. Myers.
About the beginning of August, I rejoined him at Ben Rhydding. The place
suited the Major admirably, and his various baths took up so great a
part of each day, that Derrick had more time to himself than usual, and
‘At Strife’ got on rapidly. He much enjoyed, too, the beautiful country
round, while the hotel itself, with its huge gathering of all sorts and
conditions of people, afforded him endless studies of character. The
Major breakfasted in his own room, and, being so much engrossed with his
baths, did not generally appear till twelve. Derrick and I breakfasted
in the great dining-hall; and one morning, when the meal was over,
we, as usual, strolled into the drawing-room to see if there were any
letters awaiting us.
“One for you,” I remarked, handing him a thick envelope.
“From Lawrence!” he exclaimed.
“Well, don’t read it in here; the Doctor will be coming to read prayers.
Come out in the garden,” I said.
We went out into the beautiful grounds, and he tore open the envelope
and began to read his letter as we walked. All at once I felt the
arm which was linked in mine give a quick, involuntary movement, and,
looking up, saw that Derrick had turned deadly pale.
“What’s up?” I said. But he read on without replying; and, when I paused
and sat down on a sheltered rustic seat, he unconsciously followed my
example, looking more like a sleep-walker than a man in the possession
of all his faculties. At last he finished the letter, and looked up in a
dazed, miserable way, letting his eyes wander over the fir-trees and the
fragrant shrubs and the flowers by the path.
“Dear old fellow, what is the matter?” I asked.
The words seemed to rouse him.
A dreadful look passed over his face--the look of one stricken to
the heart. But his voice was perfectly calm, and full of a ghastly
self-control.
“Freda will be my sister-in-law,” he said, rather as if stating the fact
to himself than answering my question.
“Impossible!” I said. “What do you mean? How could--”
As if to silence me he thrust the letter into my hand. It ran as
follows:
“Dear Derrick,--For the last few days I have been down in the Flemings’
place in Derbyshire, and fortune has favoured me, for the Merrifields
are here too. Now prepare yourself for a surprise. Break the news to the
governor, and send me your heartiest congratulations by return of post.
I am engaged to Freda Merrifield, and am the happiest fellow in the
world. They are awfully fastidious sort of people, and I do not believe
Sir Richard would have consented to such a match had it not been for
that lucky impulse which made me rescue Dick Fleming. It has all been
arranged very quickly, as these things should be, but we have seen a
good deal of each other--first at Aldershot the year before last, and
just lately in town, and now these four days down here--and days in a
country house are equal to weeks elsewhere. I enclose a letter to my
father--give it to him at a suitable moment--but, after all, he’s sure
to approve of a daughter-in-law with such a dowry as Miss Merrifield is
likely to have.
“Yours affly.,
“Lawrence Vaughan.”
I gave him back the letter without a word. In dead silence we moved on,
took a turning which led to a little narrow gate, and passed out of the
grounds to the wild moorland country beyond.
After all, Freda was in no way to blame. As a mere girl she had allowed
Derrick to see that she cared for him; then circumstances had entirely
separated them; she saw more of the world, met Lawrence, was perhaps
first attracted to him by his very likeness to Derrick, and finally fell
in love with the hero of the season, whom every one delighted to honour.
Nor could one blame Lawrence, who had no notion that he had supplanted
his brother. All the blame lay with the Major’s slavery to drink, for
if only he had remained out in India I feel sure that matters would have
gone quite differently.
We tramped on over heather and ling and springy turf till we reached the
old ruin known as the Hunting Tower; then Derrick seemed to awake to the
recollection of present things. He looked at his watch.
“I must go back to my father,” he said, for the first time breaking the
silence.
“You shall do no such thing!” I cried. “Stay out here and I will see to
the Major, and give him the letter too if you like.”
He caught at the suggestion, and as he thanked me I think there were
tears in his eyes. So I took the letter and set off for Ben Rhydding,
leaving him to get what relief he could from solitude, space, and
absolute quiet. Once I just glanced back, and somehow the scene has
always lingered in my memory--the great stretch of desolate moor, the
dull crimson of the heather, the lowering grey clouds, the Hunting Tower
a patch of deeper gloom against the gloomy sky, and Derrick’s figure
prostrate, on the turf, the face hidden, the hands grasping at the
sprigs of heather growing near.
The Major was just ready to be helped into the garden when I reached
the hotel. We sat down in the very same place where Derrick had read
the news, and, when I judged it politic, I suddenly remembered with
apologies the letter that had been entrusted to me. The old man received
it with satisfaction, for he was fond of Lawrence and proud of him, and
the news of the engagement pleased him greatly. He was still discussing
it when, two hours later, Derrick returned.
“Here’s good news!” said the Major, glancing up as his son approached.
“Trust Lawrence to fall on his feet! He tells me the girl will have a
thousand a year. You know her, don’t you? What’s she like?”
“I have met her,” replied Derrick, with forced composure. “She is very
charming.”
“Lawrence has all his wits about him,” growled the Major. “Whereas
you--” (several oaths interjected). “It will be a long while before any
girl with a dowry will look at you! What women like is a bold man of
action; what they despise, mere dabblers in pen and ink, writers
of poisonous sensational tales such as yours! I’m quoting your own
reviewers, so you needn’t contradict me!”
Of course no one had dreamt of contradicting; it would have been the
worst possible policy.
“Shall I help you in?” said Derrick. “It is just dinner time.”
And as I walked beside them to the hotel, listening to the Major’s
flood of irritating words, and glancing now and then at Derrick’s
grave, resolute face, which successfully masked such bitter suffering, I
couldn’t help reflecting that here was courage infinitely more deserving
of the Victoria Cross than Lawrence’s impulsive rescue. Very patiently
he sat through the long dinner. I doubt if any but an acute observer
could have told that he was in trouble; and, luckily, the world in
general observes hardly at all. He endured the Major till it was time
for him to take a Turkish bath, and then having two hours’ freedom,
climbed with me up the rock-covered hill at the back of the hotel. He
was very silent. But I remember that, as we watched the sun go down--a
glowing crimson ball, half veiled in grey mist--he said abruptly, “If
Lawrence makes her happy I can bear it. And of course I always knew that
I was not worthy of her.”
Derrick’s room was a large, gaunt, ghostly place in one of the towers
of the hotel, and in one corner of it was a winding stair leading to the
roof. When I went in next morning I found him writing away at his novel
just as usual, but when I looked at him it seemed to me that the night
had aged him fearfully. As a rule, he took interruptions as a matter
of course, and with perfect sweetness of temper; but to-day he seemed
unable to drag himself back to the outer world. He was writing at a
desperate pace too, and frowned when I spoke to him. I took up the sheet
of foolscap which he had just finished and glanced at the number of the
page--evidently he had written an immense quantity since the previous
day.
“You will knock yourself up if you go on at this rate!” I exclaimed.
“Nonsense!” he said sharply. “You know it never tires me.”
Yet, all the same, he passed his hand very wearily over his forehead,
and stretched himself with the air of one who had been in a cramping
position for many hours.
“You have broken your vow!” I cried. “You have been writing at night.”
“No,” he said; “it was morning when I began--three o’clock. And it pays
better to get up and write than to lie awake thinking.”
Judging by the speed with which the novel grew in the next few weeks, I
could tell that Derrick’s nights were of the worst.
He began, too, to look very thin and haggard, and I more than once
noticed that curious ‘sleep-walking’ expression in his eyes; he seemed
to me just like a man who has received his death-blow, yet still
lingers--half alive, half dead. I had an odd feeling that it was his
novel which kept him going, and I began to wonder what would happen when
it was finished.
A month later, when I met him again at Bath, he had written the last
chapter of ‘At Strife,’ and we read it over the sitting-room fire on
Saturday evening. I was very much struck with the book; it seemed to
me a great advance on ‘Lynwood’s Heritage,’ and the part which he had
written since that day at Ben Rhydding was full of an indescribable
power, as if the life of which he had been robbed had flowed into his
work. When he had done, he tied up the MS. in his usual prosaic fashion,
just as if it had been a bundle of clothes, and put it on a side table.
It was arranged that I should take it to Davison--the publisher of
‘Lynwood’s Heritage’--on Monday, and see what offer he would make for
it. Just at that time I felt so sorry for Derrick that if he had asked
me to hawk round fifty novels I would have done it.
Sunday morning proved wet and dismal; as a rule the Major, who was fond
of music, attended service at the Abbey, but the weather forced him now
to stay at home. I myself was at that time no church-goer, but Derrick
would, I verily believe, as soon have fasted a week as have given up
a Sunday morning service; and having no mind to be left to the Major’s
company, and a sort of wish to be near my friend, I went with him. I
believe it is not correct to admire Bath Abbey, but for all that ‘the
lantern of the west’ has always seemed to me a grand place; as for
Derrick, he had a horror of a ‘dim religious light,’ and always stuck
up for his huge windows, and I believe he loved the Abbey with all his
heart. Indeed, taking it only from a sensuous point of view, I could
quite imagine what a relief he found his weekly attendance here; by
contrast with his home the place was Heaven itself.
As we walked back, I asked a question that had long been in my mind:
“Have you seen anything of Lawrence?”
“He saw us across London on our way from Ben Rhydding,” said Derrick,
steadily. “Freda came with him, and my father was delighted with her.”
I wondered how they had got through the meeting, but of course my
curiosity had to go unsatisfied. Of one thing I might be certain,
namely, that Derrick had gone through with it like a Trojan, that he
had smiled and congratulated in his quiet way, and had done the best to
efface himself and think only of Freda. But as everyone knows:
“Face joy’s a costly mask to wear,
‘Tis bought with pangs long nourished
And rounded to despair;”
and he looked now even more worn and old than he had done at Ben
Rhydding in the first days of his trouble.
However, he turned resolutely away from the subject I had introduced and
began to discuss titles for his novel.
“It’s impossible to find anything new,” he said, “absolutely impossible.
I declare I shall take to numbers.”
I laughed at this prosaic notion, and we were still discussing the title
when we reached home.
“Don’t say anything about it at lunch,” he said as we entered. “My
father detests my writing.”
I nodded assent and opened the sitting-room door--a strong smell of
brandy instantly became apparent; the Major sat in the green velvet
chair, which had been wheeled close to the hearth. He was drunk.
Derrick gave an ejaculation of utter hopelessness.
“This will undo all the good of Ben Rhydding!” he said. “How on earth
has he managed to get it?”
The Major, however, was not so far gone as he looked; he caught up the
remark and turned towards us with a hideous laugh.
“Ah, yes,” he said, “that’s the question. But the old man has still some
brains, you see. I’ll be even with you yet, Derrick. You needn’t think
you’re to have it all your own way. It’s my turn now. You’ve deprived me
all this time of the only thing I care for in life, and now I turn the
tables on you. Tit for tat. Oh! yes, I’ve turned your d----d scribblings
to a useful purpose, so you needn’t complain!”
All this had been shouted out at the top of his voice and freely
interlarded with expressions which I will not repeat; at the end he
broke again into a laugh, and with a look, half idiotic, half devilish,
pointed towards the grate.
“Good Heavens!” I said, “what have you done?”
By the side of the chair I saw a piece of brown paper, and, catching
it up, read the address--“Messrs. Davison, Paternoster Row”; in the
fireplace was a huge charred mass. Derrick caught his breath; he stooped
down and snatched from the fender a fragment of paper slightly burned,
but still not charred beyond recognition like the rest. The writing was
quite legible--it was his own writing--the description of the Royalists’
attack and Paul Wharncliffe’s defence of the bridge. I looked from the
half-burnt scrap of paper to the side table where, only the previous
night, we had placed the novel, and then, realising as far as any but an
author could realise the frightful thing that had happened, I looked in
Derrick’s face. Its white fury appalled me. What he had borne hitherto
from the Major, God only knows, but this was the last drop in the cup.
Daily insults, ceaseless provocation, even the humiliations of personal
violence he had borne with superhuman patience; but this last injury,
this wantonly cruel outrage, this deliberate destruction of an amount of
thought, and labour, and suffering which only the writer himself could
fully estimate--this was intolerable.
What might have happened had the Major been sober and in the possession
of ordinary physical strength I hardly care to think. As it was, his
weakness protected him. Derrick’s wrath was speechless; with one look
of loathing and contempt at the drunken man, he strode out of the room,
caught up his hat, and hurried from the house.
The Major sat chuckling to himself for a minute or two, but soon he grew
drowsy, and before long was snoring like a grampus. The old landlady
brought in lunch, saw the state of things pretty quickly, shook her head
and commiserated Derrick. Then, when she had left the room, seeing no
prospect that either of my companions would be in a fit state for lunch,
I made a solitary meal, and had just finished when a cab stopped at the
door and out sprang Derrick. I went into the passage to meet him.
“The Major is asleep,” I remarked.
He took no more notice than if I had spoken of the cat.
“I’m going to London,” he said, making for the stairs. “Can you get your
bag ready? There’s a train at 2.5.”
Somehow the suddenness and the self-control with which he made this
announcement carried me back to the hotel at Southampton, where, after
listening to the account of the ship’s doctor, he had announced his
intention of living with his father. For more than two years he had
borne this awful life; he had lost pretty nearly all that there was
to be lost and he had gained the Major’s vindictive hatred. Now, half
maddened by pain, and having, as he thought, so hopelessly failed, he
saw nothing for it but to go--and that at once.
I packed my bag, and then went to help him. He was cramming all his
possessions into portmanteaux and boxes; the Hoffman was already packed,
and the wall looked curiously bare without it. Clearly this was no visit
to London--he was leaving Bath for good, and who could wonder at it?
“I have arranged for the attendant from the hospital to come in at night
as well as in the morning,” he said, as he locked a portmanteau that was
stuffed almost to bursting. “What’s the time? We must make haste or we
shall lose the train. Do, like a good fellow, cram that heap of things
into the carpet-bag while I speak to the landlady.”
At last we were off, rattling through the quiet streets of Bath, and
reaching the station barely in time to rush up the long flight of stairs
and spring into an empty carriage. Never shall I forget that journey.
The train stopped at every single station, and sometimes in between; we
were five mortal hours on the road, and more than once I thought Derrick
would have fainted. However, he was not of the fainting order, he only
grew more and more ghastly in colour and rigid in expression.
I felt very anxious about him, for the shock and the sudden anger
following on the trouble about Freda seemed to me enough to unhinge even
a less sensitive nature. ‘At Strife’ was the novel which had, I firmly
believe, kept him alive through that awful time at Ben Rhydding, and
I began to fear that the Major’s fit of drunken malice might prove the
destruction of the author as well as of the book. Everything had, as it
were, come at once on poor Derrick; yet I don’t know that he fared worse
than other people in this respect.
Life, unfortunately, is for most of us no well-arranged story with a
happy termination; it is a chequered affair of shade and sun, and for
one beam of light there come very often wide patches of shadow. Men
seem to have known this so far back as Shakespeare’s time, and to have
observed that one woe trod on another’s heels, to have battled not with
a single wave, but with a ‘sea of troubles,’ and to have remarked that
‘sorrows come not singly, but in battalions.’
However, owing I believe chiefly to his own self-command, and to his
untiring faculty for taking infinite pains over his work, Derrick did
not break down, but pleasantly cheated my expectations. I was not called
on to nurse him through a fever, and consumption did not mark him
for her own. In fact, in the matter of illness, he was always a most
prosaic, unromantic fellow, and never indulged in any of the euphonious
and interesting ailments. In all his life, I believe, he never went
in for anything but the mumps--of all complaints the least
interesting--and, may be, an occasional headache.
However, all this is a digression. We at length reached London,
and Derrick took a room above mine, now and then disturbing me with
nocturnal pacings over the creaking boards, but, on the whole, proving
himself the best of companions.
If I wrote till Doomsday, I could never make you understand how the
burning of his novel affected him--to this day it is a subject I
instinctively avoid with him--though the re-written ‘At Strife’ has been
such a grand success. For he did re-write the story, and that at once.
He said little; but the very next morning, in one of the windows of
our quiet sitting-room, often enough looking despairingly at the grey
monotony of Montague Street, he began at ‘Page I, Chapter I,’ and so
worked patiently on for many months to re-make as far as he could
what his drunken father had maliciously destroyed. Beyond the unburnt
paragraph about the attack on Mondisfield, he had nothing except a
few hastily scribbled ideas in his note-book, and of course the very
elaborate and careful historical notes which he had made on the Civil
War during many years of reading and research--for this period had
always been a favourite study with him.
But, as any author will understand, the effort of re-writing was
immense, and this, combined with all the other troubles, tried Derrick
to the utmost. However, he toiled on, and I have always thought that his
resolute, unyielding conduct with regard to that book proved what a man
he was.