§ 1
In the summer of 1911 immediately after the coronation of King George
there came one of those storms of international suspicion that ever and
again threaten Europe with war. It seems to have been brewed by some
German adepts at Welt-Politik, those privileged makers of giant bombs
who sit at the ears of foreign ministers suggesting idiotic wickedness,
and it was brewed with a sublime ignorance of nearly every reality in
the case. A German warship without a word of notice seized Agadir on the
Atlantic coast of Morocco, within the regions reserved to French
influence; an English demand for explanations was uncivilly disregarded
and England and France and presently Germany began vigorous preparations
for war. All over the world it was supposed that Germany had at last
flung down the gauntlet. In England the war party was only too eager to
grasp what it considered to be a magnificent opportunity. Heaven knows
what the Germans had hoped or intended by their remarkable coup; the
amazing thing to note is that they were not prepared to fight, they had
not even the necessary money ready and they could not get it; they had
perhaps never intended to fight, and the autumn saw the danger disperse
again into diplomatic bickerings and insincerely pacific professions.
But in the high summer the danger had not dispersed, and in common with
every reasonable man I found myself under the shadow of an impending
catastrophe that would have been none the less gigantic and tragic
because it was an imbecility. It was an occasion when everyone needs
must act, however trivially disproportionate his action may be to the
danger. I cabled Gidding who was in America to get together whatever
influences were available there upon the side of pacific intervention,
and I set such British organs as I could control or approach in the same
direction. It seemed probable that Italy would be drawn into any
conflict that might ensue; it happened that there was to be a Conference
of Peace Societies in Milan early in September, and thither I decided to
go in the not very certain hope that out of that assemblage some form of
European protest might be evolved.
That August I was very much run down. I had been staying in London
through almost intolerably hot weather to attend a Races Congress that
had greatly disappointed me. I don't know particularly now why I had
been disappointed nor how far the feeling was due to my being generally
run down by the pressure of detailed work and the stress of thinking
about large subjects in little scraps of time. But I know that a kind of
despair came over me as I sat and looked at that multicolored assembly
and heard in succession the heavy platitudes of white men, the slick,
thin cleverness of Hindoos, the rich-toned florid rhetoric of negroes. I
lost sight of any germ of splendid possibility in all those people, and
saw all too plainly the vanity, the jealousy, the self-interests that
show up so harshly against the professions of every altruistic movement.
It seemed all such a windy business against the firm prejudices, the
vast accumulated interests that grind race against race. We had no
common purpose at all at that conference, no proposal to hold us
together. So much of it was like bleating on a hillside....
I wanted a holiday badly, and then came this war crisis and I felt
unable to go away for any length of time. Even bleating it seemed to me
was better than acquiescence in a crime against humanity. So to get
heart to bleat at Milan I snatched at ten days in the Swiss mountains en
route. A tour with some taciturn guide involving a few middling climbs
and glacier excursions seemed the best way of recuperating. I had never
had any time for Switzerland since my first exile there years ago. I
took the advice of a man in the club whose name I now forget--if ever I
knew it, a dark man with a scar--and went up to the Schwarzegg Hut above
Grindelwald, and over the Strahlegg to the Grimsel. I had never been up
into the central mass of the Bernese Oberland before, and I was amazed
and extraordinarily delighted by the vast lonely beauty of those
interminable uplands of ice. I wished I could have lingered up there.
But that is the tragedy of those sunlit desolations; one may not stay;
one sees and exclaims and then looks at a watch. I wonder no one has
ever taken an arctic equipment up into that wilderness, and had a good
healing spell of lonely exaltation. I found the descent from the
Strahlegg as much of a climb as I was disposed to undertake; for an hour
we were coming down frozen snow that wasn't so much a slope as a
slightly inclined precipice....
From the Grimsel I went over the Rhone glacier to the inn on the Furka
Pass, and then, paying off my guide and becoming frankly a pedestrian, I
made my way round by the Schöllenen gorge to Goeschenen, and over the
Susten Joch to the Susten Pass and Stein, meaning to descend to
Meiringen.
But I still had four days before I went on to Italy, and so I decided to
take one more mountain. I slept at the Stein inn, and started in the
morning to do that agreeable first mountain of all, the Titlis, whose
shining genial head attracted me. I did not think a guide necessary, but
a boy took me up by a track near Gadmen, and left me to my Siegfried map
some way up the great ridge of rocks that overlooks the Engstlen Alp. I
a little overestimated my mountaineering, and it came about that I was
benighted while I was still high above the Joch Pass on my descent. Some
of this was steep and needed caution. I had to come down slowly with my
folding lantern, in which a reluctant candle went out at regular
intervals, and I did not reach the little inn at Engstlen Alp until long
after eleven at night. By that time I was very tired and hungry.
They told me I was lucky to get a room, only one stood vacant; I should
certainly not have enjoyed sleeping on a billiard table after my day's
work, and I ate a hearty supper, smoked for a time, meditated emptily,
and went wearily to bed.
But I could not sleep. Usually, I am a good sleeper, but ever and again
when I have been working too closely or over-exerting myself I have
spells of wakefulness, and that night after perhaps an hour's heavy
slumber I became thinly alert and very weary in body and spirit, and I
do not think I slept again. The pain in my leg that the panther had torn
had been revived by the day's exertion. For the greater part of my life
insomnia has not been disagreeable to me. In the night, in the
stillness, one has a kind of detachment from reality, one floats there
without light, without weight, feeling very little of one's body. One
has a certain disembodiment and one can achieve a magnanimity of
thought, forgiveness and self-forgetfulness that are impossible while
the body clamors upon one's senses. But that night, because, I suppose,
I was so profoundly fatigued, I was melancholy and despondent. I could
feel again the weight of the great beast upon me as he clawed me down
and I clung--desperately, in that interminable instant before he lost
his hold....
Yes, I was extraordinarily wretched that night. I was filled with
self-contempt and self-disgust. I felt that I was utterly weak and vain,
and all the pretensions and effort of my life mere florid, fruitless
pretensions and nothing more. I had lost all control over my mind.
Things that had seemed secondary before became primary, difficult things
became impossible things. I had been greatly impeded and irritated in
London by the manoeuvres of a number of people who were anxious to make
capital out of the crisis, self-advertising people who wanted at any
cost to be lifted into a position of unique protest.... You see, that
unfortunate Nobel prize has turned the advocacy of peace into a highly
speculative profession; the qualification for the winner is so vaguely
defined that a vast multitude of voluntary idealists has been created
and a still greater number diverted from the unendowed pursuit of human
welfare in other directions. Such a man as myself who is known to
command a considerable publicity is necessarily a prey to those moral
_entrepreneurs_. All sorts of ridiculous and petty incidents had forced
this side of public effort upon me, but hitherto I had been able to say,
with a laugh or sigh as the case warranted, "So much is dear old
humanity and all of us"; and to remember the great residuum of nobility
that remained. Now that last saving consideration refused to be
credible. I lay with my body and my mind in pain thinking these people
over, thinking myself over too with the rest of my associates, thinking
drearily and weakly, recalling spites, dishonesties and vanities, feuds
and absurdities, until I was near persuaded that all my dreams of wider
human understandings, of great ends beyond the immediate aims and
passions of common everyday lives, could be at best no more than the
refuge of shy and weak and ineffective people from the failure of their
personal lives....
We idealists are not jolly people, not honest simple people; the strain
tells upon us; even to ourselves we are unappetizing. Aren't the burly,
bellowing fellows after all righter, with their simple natural hostility
to everything foreign, their valiant hatred of everything unlike
themselves, their contempt for aspiring weakness, their beer and lush
sentiment, their here-to-day-and-gone-tomorrow conviviality and
fellowship? Good fellows! While we others, lost in filmy speculations,
in moon-and-star snaring and the chase of dreams, stumble where even
they walk upright....
You know I have never quite believed in myself, never quite believed in
my work or my religion. So it has always been with me and always, I
suppose, will be. I know I am purblind, I know I do not see my way
clearly nor very far; I have to do with things imperfectly apprehended.
I cannot cheat my mind away from these convictions. I have a sort of
hesitation of the soul as other men have a limp in their gait. God, I
suppose, has a need for lame men. God, I suppose, has a need for blind
men and fearful and doubting men, and does not intend life to be
altogether swallowed up in staring sight. Some things are to be reached
best by a hearing that is not distracted by any clearer senses. But so
it is with me, and this is the innermost secret I have to tell you.
I go valiantly for the most part I know, but despair is always near to
me. In the common hours of my life it is as near as a shark may be near
a sleeper in a ship; the thin effectual plank of my deliberate faith
keeps me secure, but in these rare distresses of the darkness the plank
seems to become transparent, to be on the verge of dissolution, a sense
of life as of an abyssmal flood, full of cruelty, densely futile,
blackly aimless, penetrates my defences....
I don't think I can call these stumblings from conviction unbelief; the
limping man walks for all his limping, and I go on in spite of my falls.
"Though he slay me yet will I trust in him...."
I fell into an inconsecutive review of my life under this light that
touched every endeavor with the pale tints of failure. And as that flow
of melancholy reflection went on, it was shot more and more frequently
with thoughts of Mary. It was not a discursive thinking about Mary but a
definite fixed direction of thought towards her. I had not so thought of
her for many years. I wanted her, I felt, to come to me and help me out
of this distressful pit into which my spirit had fallen. I believed she
could. I perceived our separation as an irreparable loss. She had a
harder, clearer quality than I, a more assured courage, a readier, surer
movement of the mind. Always she had "lift" for me. And then I had a
curious impression that I had heard her voice calling my name, as one
might call out in one's sleep. I dismissed it as an illusion, and then I
heard it again. So clearly that I sat up and listened--breathless....
Mixed up with all this was the intolerable uproar and talking of a
little cascade not fifty yards from the hotel. It is curious how
distressing that clamor of running water, which is so characteristic of
the Alpine night, can become. At last those sounds can take the likeness
of any voice whatever. The water, I decided, had called to me, and now
it mocked and laughed at me....
The next morning I descended at some late hour by Swiss reckoning, and
discovered two ladies in the morning sunlight awaiting breakfast at a
little green table. One rose slowly at the sight of me, and stood and
surveyed me with a glad amazement.
§ 2
There she stood real and solid, a little unfamiliar in her tweeds and
with her shining eyes intimate and unforgettable, as though I had never
ceased to see them for all those intervening years. And bracing us both
and holding back our emotion was, quite unmistakably, Miss Summersley
Satchel, a blonde business-like young woman with a stumpy nose very
cruelly corrugated and inflamed by a pince-nez that savagely did much
more than its duty by its name. She remained seated, tilting her chair
a little, pushing herself back from the table and regarding
me--intelligently.
It was one of those moments in life when one is taken unawares. I think
our common realization of the need of masking the reality of our
encounter, the hasty search in our minds for some plausible face upon
this meeting, must have been very obvious to the lady who observed us.
Mary's first thought was for a pseudonym. Mine was to make it plain we
met by accident.
"It's Mr.--Stephen!" said Mary.
"It's you!"
"Dropped out of the sky!"
"From over there. I was benighted and go there late."
"Very late?"
"One gleam of light--and a yawning waiter. Or I should have had to break
windows.... And then I meet you!"
Then for a moment or so we were silent, with our sense of the immense
gravity of this position growing upon us. A little tow-headed waiter-boy
appeared with their coffee and rolls on a tray poised high on his hand.
"You'll have your coffee out here with us?" said Mary.
"Where else?" said I, as though there was no conceivable alternative,
and told the tow-headed waiter.
Belatedly Mary turned to introduce me to her secretary: "My friend Miss
Summersley Satchel. Mr.--Stephen." Miss Satchel and I bowed to each
other and agreed that the lake was very beautiful in the morning light.
"Mr. Stephen," said Mary, in entirely unnecessary explanation, "is an
old friend of my mother's. And I haven't seen him for years. How is
Mrs. Stephen--and the children?"
I answered briefly and began to tell of my climb down the Titlis. I
addressed myself with unnecessary explicitness to Miss Satchel. I did
perhaps over-accentuate the extreme fortuitousness of my appearance....
From where I stood, the whole course of the previous day after I had
come over the shoulder was visible. It seemed a soft little shining
pathway to the top, but the dangers of the descent had a romantic
intensification in the morning light. "The rule of the game," said I,
"is that one stops and waits for daylight. I wonder if anyone keeps that
rule."
We talked for a time of mountains, I still standing a little aloof until
my coffee came. Miss Summersley Satchel produced that frequent and most
unpleasant bye-product of a British education, an intelligent interest
in etymology. "I wonder," she said, with a brow of ruffled omniscience
and eyeing me rather severely with a magnified eye, "why it is _called_
Titlis. There must be _some_ reason...."
Presently Miss Satchel was dismissed indoors on a transparent excuse and
Mary and I were alone together. We eyed one another gravely. Perhaps all
the more gravely because of the wild excitement that was quickening our
pulse and breathing, and thrilling through our nerves. She pushed back
the plate before her and put her dear elbows on the table and dropped
her chin between her hands in an attitude that seemed all made of little
memories.
"I suppose," she said, "something of this kind was bound to happen."
She turned her eyes to the mountains shining in the morning light. "I'm
glad it has happened in a beautiful place. It might have
been--anywhere."
"Last night," I said, "I was thinking of you and wanting to hear your
voice again. I thought I did."
"I too. I wonder--if we had some dim perception...."
She scanned my face. "Stephen, you're not much changed. You're looking
well.... But your eyes--they're dog-tired eyes. Have you been working
too hard?"
"A conference--what did you call them once?--a Carnegieish conference in
London. Hot weather and fussing work and endless hours of weak grey
dusty speeches, and perhaps that clamber over there yesterday was too
much. It _was_ too much. In India I damaged a leg.... I had meant to
rest here for a day."
"Well,--rest here."
"With you!"
"Why not? Now you are here."
"But---- After all, we've promised."
"It's none of our planning, Stephen."
"It seems to me I ought to go right on--so soon as breakfast is over."
She weighed that with just the same still pause, the same quiet moment
of lips and eyes that I recalled so well. It was as things had always
been between us that she should make her decision first and bring me to
it.
"It isn't natural," she decided, "with the sun rising and the day still
freshly beginning that you should go or that I should go. I've wanted to
meet you like this and talk about things,--ten thousand times. And as
for me Stephen I _won't_ go. And I won't let you go if I can help it.
Not this morning, anyhow. No. Go later in the day if you will, and let
us two take this one talk that God Himself has given us. We've not
planned it. It's His doing, not ours."
I sat, yielding. "I am not so sure of God's participation," I said. "But
I know I am very tired, and glad to be with you. I can't tell you how
glad. So glad---- I think I should weep if I tried to say it...."
"Three, four, five hours perhaps--even if people know. Is it so much
worse than thirty minutes? We've broken the rules already; we've been
flung together; it's not our doing, Stephen. A little while longer--adds
so little to the offence and means to us----"
"Yes," I said, "but--if Justin knows?"
"He won't."
"Your companion?"
There was the briefest moment of reflection. "She's discretion itself,"
she said.
"Still----"
"If he's going to know the harm is done. We may as well be hung for a
sheep as a lamb. And he won't know. No one will know."
"The people here."
"Nobody's here. Not a soul who matters. I doubt if they know my name....
No one ever talks to me."
I sat in the bright sunshine, profoundly enervated and quite convinced,
but still maintaining out of mere indolence a show of hesitation....
"You take the good things God sends you, Stephen--as I do. You stay and
talk with me now, before the curtain falls again. We've tired of
letters. You stay and talk to me.
"Here we are, Stephen, and it's the one chance that is ever likely to
come to us in all our lives. We'll keep the point of honor; and you
shall go to-day. But don't let's drive the point of honor into the
quick. Go easy Stephen, old friend.... My dear, my dear! What has
happened to you? Have you forgotten? Of course! Is it possible for you
to go, mute, with so much that we can say.... And these mountains and
this sunlight!..."
I looked up to see her with her elbows on the table and her hands
clasped under her chin; that face close to mine, her dear blue eyes
watching me and her lips a little apart.
No other human being has ever had that effect upon me, so that I seem to
feel the life and stir in that other body more than I feel my own.
§ 3
From the moment when I confessed my decision to stay we gave no further
thought to the rightfulness or wisdom of spending the next few hours
together. We thought only of those hours. Things lent themselves to us.
We stood up and walked out in front of the hotel and there moored to a
stake at the edge of the water was a little leaky punt, the one vessel
on the Engstlen See. We would take food with us as we decided and row
out there to where the vast cliffs came sheer from the water, out of
earshot or interference and talk for all the time we had. And I remember
now how Mary stood and called to Miss Satchel's window to tell her of
this intention, and how I discovered again that exquisite slender grace
I knew so well.
You know the very rowing out from the shore had in it something sweet
and incredible. It was as if we were but dreaming together and might at
any moment awaken again, countless miles and a thousand things apart. I
rowed slowly with those clumsy Swiss oars that one must thrust forward,
breaking the smooth crystal of the lake, and she sat sideways looking
forward, saying very little and with much the same sense I think of
enchantment and unreality. And I saw now for the first time as I watched
her over my oars that her face was changed; she was graver and, I
thought, stronger than the Mary I had known.
Even now I can still doubt if that boat and lake were real. And yet I
remember even minute and irrelevant details of the day's impressions
with an extraordinary and exquisite vividness. Perhaps it is that very
luminous distinctness which distinguishes these events from the common
experiences of life and puts them so above the quality of things that
are ordinarily real.
We rowed slowly past a great headland and into the bay at the upper end
of the water. We had not realized at first that we could row beyond the
range of the hotel windows. The rock that comes out of the lake is a
clear dead white when it is dry, and very faintly tinted, but when it is
wetted it lights warmly with flashes and blotches of color, and is seen
to be full of the most exquisite and delicate veins. It splinters
vertically and goes up in cliffs, very high and sculptured, with a
quality almost of porcelain, that at a certain level suddenly become
more rude and massive and begin to overhang. Under the cliffs the water
is very deep and blue-green, and runs here and there into narrow clefts.
This place where we landed was a kind of beach left by the recession of
the ice, all the rocks immediately about us were ice-worn, and the place
was paved with ice-worn boulders. Two huge bluffs put their foreheads
together above us and hid the glacier from us, but one could feel the
near presence of ice in the air. Out between them boiled a little
torrent, and spread into a hundred intercommunicating channels amidst
the great pebbles. And those pebbles were covered by a network of
marvellously gnarled and twisted stems bearing little leaves and
blossoms, a network at once very ancient and very fresh, giving a
peculiar gentleness and richness to the Alpine severity that had dwarfed
and tangled them. It was astounding that any plant could find
nourishment among those stones. The great headland, with patches of
yellowish old snow still lingering here and there upon its upper masses,
had crept insensibly between us and the remote hotel and now hid it
altogether. There was nothing to remind us of the world that had
separated us, except that old and leaky boat we had drawn up upon the
stones at the limpid water's edge.
"It is as if we had come out of life together," she whispered, giving a
voice to my thought.
She sat down upon a boulder and I sat on a lower slab a yard or so away,
and we looked at one another. "It's still unreal," she said.
I felt awkward and at a loss as I sat there before her, as a man unused
to drawing-rooms might feel in the presence of a strange hostess.
"You are so _you_," I said; "so altogether my nearest thing--and so
strange too, so far off, that I feel--shy....
"I'm shy," I repeated. "I feel that if I speak loudly all this will
vanish...."
I looked about me. "But surely this is the most beautiful place in the
whole world! Is it indeed in the world?"
"Stephen, my dear," she began presently, "what a strange thing life is!
Strange! The disproportions! The things that will not fit together. The
little things that eat us up, and the beautiful things that might save
us and don't save us, don't seem indeed to have any meaning in regard to
ordinary sensible affairs.... This _beauty_....
"Do you remember, Stephen, how long ago in the old park you and I talked
about immortality and you said then you did not want to know anything of
what comes after life. Even now do you want to know? You are too busy
and I am not busy enough. I want to be sure, not only to know, but to
know that it is so, that this life--no, not _this_ life, but that life,
is only the bleak twilight of the morning. I think death--just dead
death--after the life I have had is the most impossible of ends.... You
don't want--particularly? I want to passionately. I _want_ to live
again--out of this body, Stephen, and all that it carves with it, to be
free--as beautiful things are free. To be free as this is free--an
exquisite clean freedom....
"I can't believe that the life of this earth is all that there is for
us--or why should we ever think it strange? Why should we still find the
ordinary matter-of-fact things of everyday strange? We do--because they
aren't--_us_.... Eating. Stuffing into ourselves thin slices of what
were queer little hot and eager beasts.... The perpetual need to do such
things. And all the mad fury of sex, Stephen!... We don't live, we
suffocate in our living bodies. They storm and rage and snatch; it isn't
_us_, Stephen, really. It can't be us. It's all so excessive--if it is
anything more than the first furious rush into existence of beings that
will go on--go on at last to quite beautiful real things. Like this
perhaps. To-day the world is beautiful indeed with the sun shining and
love shining and you, my dear, so near to me.... It's so incredible that
you and I must part to-day. It's as if--someone told me the sun was a
little mad. It's so perfectly natural to be with you again...."
Her voice sank. She leant a little forward towards me. "Stephen, suppose
that you and I were dead to-day. Suppose that when you imagined you were
climbing yesterday, you died. Suppose that yesterday you died and that
you just thought you were still climbing as you made your way to me.
Perhaps you are dead up there on the mountain and I am lying dead in my
room in this hotel, and this is the Great Beginning....
"Stephen, I am talking nonsense because I am so happy to be with you
here...."
§ 4
For a time we said very little. Then irregularly, disconnectedly, we
began to tell each other things about ourselves.
The substance of our lives seemed strangely objective that day; we had
as it were come to one another clean out of our common conditions. She
told me of her troubles and her secret weaknesses; we bared our spirits
and confessed. Both of us had the same tale of mean and angry and hasty
impulses, both of us could find kindred inconsistencies, both had an
exalted assurance that the other would understand completely and forgive
and love. She talked for the most part, she talked much more than I,
with a sort of wonder at the things that had happened to her, and for
long spaces we did not talk at all nor feel the need of talking, and
what seems very strange to me now, seeing that we had been impassioned
lovers, we never kissed; we never kissed at all; I do not even remember
that I thought of kissing her. We had a shyness between us that kept us
a little apart, and I cannot remember that we ever touched one another
except that for a time she took me and led me by the hand towards a
little place of starry flowers that had drawn her eyes and which she
wished me to see. Already for us two our bodies were dead and gone. We
were shy, shy of any contact, we were a little afraid of one another,
there was a kind of awe between us that we had met again.
And in that strange and beautiful place her fancy that we were dead
together had a fitness that I cannot possibly convey to you. I cannot
give you by any writing the light and the sweet freshness of that high
desolation. You would need to go there. What was lovely in our talk,
being said in that setting, would seem but a rambling discourse were I
to write it down,--as I believe that even now I could write it
down--word for word almost, every thought of it, so fresh does it remain
with me....
My dear, some moments are eternal. It seems to me that as I write to
tell you of this I am telling you not of something that happened two
years ago but of a thing immortal. It is as if I and Mary were together
there holding the realities of our lives before us as though they were
little sorry tales written in books upon our knees....
§ 5
It was still in the early afternoon that we came down again across the
meandering ice-water streams to our old boat, and pushed off and rowed
slowly out of that magic corner back to every-day again....
Little we knew to what it was we rowed.
As we glided across the water and rounded the headland and came slowly
into view of the hotel again, Mary was reminded of our parting and for a
little while she was disposed to make me remain. "If you could stay a
little longer," she said,--"Another day? If any harm is done, it's
done."
"It has been beautiful," I said, "this meeting. It's just as if--when I
was so jaded and discouraged that I could have put my work aside and
despaired altogether,--some power had said, 'Have you forgotten the
friendship I gave you?' ... But we shall have had our time. We've
met,--we've seen one another, we've heard one another. We've hurt no
one...."
"You will go?"
"To-day. Before sunset. Isn't it right that I should go?"
"Stay," she whispered, with a light in her eyes.
"No. I dare not."
She did not speak for a long time.
"Of course," she said at last, "you're right. You only said--I would
have said it for you if you had not. You're so right, Stephen.... I
suppose, poor silly little things, that if you stayed we should
certainly begin making love to each other. It would be--necessary. We
should fence about a little and then there it would be. No barrier--to
stop us. And neither of us wants it to happen. It isn't what we want.
You would become urgent, I suppose, and I should be--coquettish. In
spite of ourselves that power would make us puppets. As if already we
hadn't made love.... I could find it in my heart now.... Stephen I could
_make_ you stay....
"Oh! Why are we so tormented, Stephen? In the next world we shall meet,
and this will trouble us no longer. The love will be there--oh, the love
will be there, like something that has at last got itself fully born,
got itself free from some queer clinging seed-case....
"We shall be rid of jealousy, Stephen, that inflammation of the mind,
that bitterness, that pitiless sore, so that I shan't be tormented by
the thought of Rachel and she will be able to tolerate me. She was so
sweet and wonderful a girl--with those dark eyes. And I've never done
her justice--never. Nor she me. I snatched you from her. I snatched
you....
"Someday we shall be different.... All this putting oneself round
another person like a fence, against everyone else, almost against
everything else; it's so wicked, so fierce.
"It's so possible to be different. Sometimes now, sometimes for long
parts of a day I have no base passions at all--even in this life. To be
like that always! But I can't see clearly how these things can be; one
dreams of them in a kind of luminous mist, and if one looks directly at
them, they vanish again...."
§ 6
And at last we came to the landing, and moored the little boat and
walked up the winding path to the hotel. The dull pain of separation was
already upon us.
I think we had forgotten Miss Summersley Satchel altogether. But she
appeared as we sat down to tea at that same table at which we had
breakfasted, and joined us as a matter of course. Conceivably she found
the two animated friends of the morning had become rather taciturn.
Indeed there came a lapse of silence so portentous that I roused myself
to effort and told her, all over again, as I realized afterwards, the
difficulties that had benighted me upon Titlis. Then Miss Satchel
regaled Mary with some particulars of the various comings and goings of
the hotel. I became anxious to end this tension and went into the inn to
pay my bill and get my knapsack. When I came out Mary stood up.
"I'll come just a little way with you, Stephen," she said, and I could
have fancied the glasses of the companion flashed to hear the surname of
the morning reappear a Christian name in the afternoon....
"Is that woman behind us safe?" I asked, breaking the silence as we went
up the mountain-side.
Mary looked over her shoulder for a contemplative second.
"She's always been--discretion itself."
We thought no more of Miss Satchel.
"This parting," said Mary, "is the worst of the price we have to
pay.... Now it comes to the end there seem a thousand things one hasn't
said...."
And presently she came back to that. "We shan't remember this so much
perhaps. It was there we met, over there in the sunlight--among those
rocks. I suppose--perhaps--we managed to say something...."
As the ascent grew steeper it became clear that if I was to reach the
Melch See Inn by nightfall, our moment for parting had come. And with a
"Well," and a white-lipped smile and a glance at the Argus-eyed hotel,
she held out her hand to me. "I shall live on this, brother Stephen,"
she said, "for years."
"I too," I answered....
It was wonderful to stand and face her there, and see her real and
living with the warm sunlight on her, and her face one glowing
tenderness. We clasped hands; all the warm life of our hands met and
clung and parted.
I went on alone up the winding path,--it zigzags up the mountain-side in
full sight of the hotel for the better part of an hour--climbing
steadily higher and looking back and looking back until she was just a
little strip of white--that halted and seemed to wave to me. I waved
back and found myself weeping. "You fool!" I said to myself, "Go on";
and it was by an effort that I kept on my way instead of running back to
her again. Presently the curvature of the slope came up between us and
hid her altogether, hid the hotel, hid the lakes and the cliffs....
It seemed to me that I could not possibly see her any more. It was as if
I knew that sun had set for ever.
§ 7
I lay at the Melch See Inn that night, and rose betimes and started down
that wild grey gorge in the early morning light. I walked to Sachseln,
caught an early train to Lucerne and went on in the afternoon to Como.
And there I stayed in the sunshine taking a boat and rowing alone far up
the lake and lying in it, thinking of love and friendship and the
accidents and significance of my life, and for the most part not
thinking at all but feeling, feeling the glow of our meeting and the
finality of our separation, as one feels the clear glow of a sunset when
the wind rises and the cold night draws near. Everything was pervaded by
the sense of her. Just over those mountains, I thought, is Mary. I was
alone in my boat, but her presence filled the sky. It seemed to me that
at any moment I could go to her. And the last vestige of any cloud
between us for anything we had done or failed to do in these crises of
distress and separation, had vanished and gone altogether.
In the afternoon I wrote to Rachel. I had not written to her for three
days, and even now I told her nothing of my meeting with Mary. I had not
written partly because I could not decide whether I should tell her of
that or not; in the end I tried to hide it from her. It seemed a little
thing in regard to her, a thing that could not hurt her, a thing as
detached from her life and as inconsecutive as a dream in my head.
Three days later I reached Milan, a day before the formal opening of the
Peace Congress. But I found a telegram had come that morning to the
Poste Restante to banish all thought of my pacific mission from my
mind. It came from Paris and its blue ribbon of text ran:
_"Come back at once to London. Justin has been told of our meeting
and is resolved upon divorce. Will do all in my power to explain
and avert but feel you should know at once."_
There are some things so monstrously destructive to all we hold dear
that for a time it is impossible to believe them. I remember now that as
I read that amazing communication through--at the first reading it was a
little difficult to understand because the Italian operator had guessed
at one or two of the words, no real sense of its meaning came to me.
That followed sluggishly. I felt as one might feel when one opens some
offensive anonymous letter or hears some preposterous threat.
"What _nonsense_!" I said, faint-heartedly. I stood for a time at my
bedroom window trying to shake this fact altogether off my mind. But it
stayed, and became more and more real. Suddenly with a start I perceived
it was real. I had to do things forthwith.
I rang the bell and asked for an _Orario_. "I shan't want these rooms. I
have to go back to England," I said. "Yes,--I have had bad news." ...
§ 8
"We've only got to explain," I told myself a hundred times during that
long sleepless journey. The thundering wheels so close beneath my head
echoed: "Explain. Oh yes! Explain! Explain! Explain!"
And something, a voice to which I would not listen, urged: "Suppose
they do not choose to believe what you explain."
When I sat face to face with Maxwell Hartington, my solicitor, in his
ink-splashed, dirty, yellow-grained room with its rows of black tin
boxes, I could no longer ignore that possibility. Maxwell Hartington sat
back in his chair after his fashion, listening to my story, breathing
noisily through his open mouth, perspiring little beads and looking more
out of condition than ever. I never knew a man so wine-sodden and so
sharp-witted.
"That's all very well, Stratton," he said, "between ourselves. Very
unfortunate and all that sort of thing. But it doesn't satisfy Justin
evidently; and we've got to put a different look on it if we can, before
we go before a jury: You see----" He seemed to be considering and
rejecting unpalatable phrases "They won't understand."
"But," I said, "after all--, a mere chance of the same hotel. There must
be more evidence than that."
"You spent the night in adjacent rooms," he said dryly.
"Adjacent rooms!" I cried.
He regarded me for a moment with something bordering on admiration.
"Didn't you know?" he said.
"No."
"They've routed that out. You were sleeping with your two heads within a
yard of one another anyhow. Thirty-six you had, and she had
thirty-seven."
"But," I said and stopped.
Maxwell Hartington's admiration gave place I think to a slight
resentment at my sustained innocence. "And Lady Mary changed rooms with
her secretary two nights before--to be near the vacant room. The
secretary went into number 12 on the floor below,--a larger room, at
thirteen francs a day, and one not exposed to the early daylight...."
He turned over a paper on his desk. "You didn't know, of course," he
said. "But what I want to have"--and his voice grew wrathful--"is sure
evidence that you didn't know. No jury on earth is going to believe you
didn't know. No jury!---- Why,"--his mask dropped--"no man on earth is
going to believe a yarn like that! If that's all you have, Stratton----"
§ 9
Our London house was not shut up--two servants were there on board-wages
against the possibility of such a temporary return as I was now
making--Rachel was away with you three children at Cromingham. I had not
told her I was returning to London, and I had put up at one of my clubs.
Until I had had a second interview with Maxwell Hartington I still would
not let myself think that it was possible that Mary and I would fail
with our explanations. We had the common confidence of habitually
unchallenged people that our word would be accepted. I had hoped indeed
to get the whole affair settled and abolished without anything of it
coming to Rachel's ears. Then at my leisure I should be able to tell her
exactly how things had come about. But each day made it clearer that
things were not going to be settled, that the monstrous and the
incredible was going to happen and that Justin had set his mind
implacably upon a divorce. My sense of complete innocence had already
been shaken by Maxwell Hartington; I had come to perceive that we had
been amazingly indiscreet, I was beginning to think we had been
criminally indiscreet.
I saw Maxwell Hartington for a second time, and it became clear to me I
must abandon any hope of keeping things further from Rachel. I took my
luggage round to my house, to the great astonishment of the two
servants,--they had supposed of course that I was in Italy--and then
went down on the heels of a telegram to Rachel. I forget the wording of
that telegram, but it was as little alarming as possible; I think I said
something about "back in London for documents; shall try to get down to
you." I did not specify any particular train or indeed state definitely
that I was coming that day.
I had never been to Cromingham before. I went to the house you occupied
on the Esplanade and learnt that you were all upon the beach. I walked
along the sea-wall scrutinizing the various bright groups of children
and nursemaids and holiday people that were scattered over the sands. It
was a day of blazing sunshine, and, between the bright sky and the
silver drabs of the sand stretched the low levels of a sea that had its
customary green-grey touched for once with something of the sapphire
glow of the Mediterranean. Here and there were gay little umbrella tents
or canvas shelters, and a bather or so and pink and white wading
children broke the dazzling edge of foam. And I sought you with a kind
of reluctance as though finding you would bring nearer the black
irrational disaster that hung over us all.
And when I found you at last you were all radiantly happy and healthy,
the prettiest of families, and only your mother was touched with any
gravity deeper than the joy of sunshine and sea. You and Mademoiselle
Potin--in those days her ministrations were just beginning--were busy
constructing a great sea-wall that should really and truly stop the
advancing tide. Rachel Two was a little apart, making with infinite
contentment an endless multitude of conical sand pies with her little
tin pail. Margaret, a pink inarticulate lump, scrabbled in the warm sand
under Jessica's care. Your mother sat and watched you--thoughtfully. And
before any of you knew that I was there my shadow fell across you all.
You accepted my appearance when I ought to have been in Italy with the
unquestioning confidence with which you still take all my comings and
goings. For you, Italy, America, any place is just round the corner. I
was kissed with affection but haste, and you got back to your sand-works
as speedily as possible. I inspected Rachel Two's mounds,--she was
giving them the names of her various aunts and uncles--and patted the
crowing Margaret, who ignored me. Rachel had sprung to her feet and
kissed me and now hovered radiant over me as I caressed you youngsters.
It was all so warm, so real, that for an instant the dark threat that
hung over us all vanished from my skies, to return with the force of a
blow.
"And what has brought you back?" said Rachel. "I had expected a month of
widowhood. What can have brought you back?"
The dancing gladness in her eyes vanished swiftly as she waited for an
answer to her question. She caught the note of tragedy from my face.
"Why have you come back from Italy?" she asked in an altered voice.
"Rachel," I said taking her arm, with a desolating sense of the
futility in my gesture of protection; "let us walk along the beach. I
want to tell you something---- Something rather complicated."
"Is there going to be war, Stephen?" she asked abruptly.
It seemed then that this question which merely concerned the welfare of
a hundred million people or so and pain, destruction and disaster beyond
measure, was the most trivial of digressions.
"No," I said. "I haven't thought about the war."
"But I thought--you were thinking of nothing else."
"This has put it out of my head. It's something---- Something disastrous
to us."
"Something has happened to our money?"
"I wish that was all."
"Then what is it?" Her mind flashed out. "It has something to do with
Mary Justin."
"How did you know that?"
"I guessed."
"Well. It is. You see--in Switzerland we met."
"You _met_!"
"By accident. She had been staying at the hotel on Engstlen Alp."
"You slept there!" cried Rachel.
"I didn't know she was in the hotel until the next day."
"And then you came away!"
"That day."
"But you talked together?"
"Yes."
"And for some reason---- You never told me, Stephen! You never told me.
And you met. But---- Why is this, disaster?"
"Because Justin knows and he means to divorce her--and it may be he
will succeed...."
Rachel's face had become white, for some time she said nothing. Then
slowly, "And if he had not known and done that--I should never have
known."
I had no answer to make to that. It was true. Rachel's face was very
still, and her eyes stared at the situation laid bare to her.
"When you began," she choked presently, "when she wrote--I knew--I
felt----"
She ceased for fear she might weep, and for a time we walked in silence.
"I suppose," she said desperately at last, "he will get his divorce."
"I am afraid he will."
"There's no evidence--you didn't...."
"No."
"And I never dreamt----!"
Then her passion tore at her. "Stephen my dear," she wept, "you didn't?
you didn't? Stephen, indeed you didn't, did you? You kept faith with me
as a husband should. It was an accident--a real accident--and there was
no planning for you to meet together. It was as you say? I've never
doubted your word ever--I've never doubted you."
Well, at any rate I could answer that plainly, and I did.
"And you know, Stephen," she said, "I believe you. And I _can't_ believe
you. My heart is tormented. Why did you write to her? Why did you two
write and go on writing? And why did you tell me nothing of that
meeting? I believe you because I can't do anything but believe you. It
would kill me not to believe you in a thing that came so near to us. And
yet, there it is, like a knife being twisted in my heart--that you met.
Should I have known of your meeting, Stephen--ever? I know I'm talking
badly for you.... But this thing strikes me suddenly. Out of this clear
beautiful sky! And the children there--so happy in the sunshine! I was
so happy. So happy. With you coming.... It will mean shames and
law-courts and newspapers, losses of friends, losses of money and
freedom.... My mother and my people!... And you and all the work you
do!... People will never forget it, never forgive it. They will say you
promised.... If she had never written, if she had kept to her
bargain----"
"We should still have met."
"Stephen!... Stephen, you must bear with me...."
"This is a thing," I said, "that falls as you say out of the sky. It
seemed so natural--for her to write.... And the meeting ... it is like
some tremendous disaster of nature. I do not feel I have deserved it. It
is--irrational. But there it is, little Rachel of my heart, and we have
to face it. Whatever happens we have to go on. It doesn't alter the work
we have to do. If it clips our wings--we have to hop along with clipped
wings.... For you--I wish it could spare you. And she--she too is a
victim, Rachel."
"She need not have written," said Rachel. "She need not have written.
And then if you had met----"
She could not go on with that.
"It is so hard," I said, "to ask you to be just to her--and me. I wish I
could have come to you and married you--without all that legacy--of
things remembered.... I was what I was.... One can't shake off a thing
in one's blood. And besides--besides----"