THE LITTLE WINGED GOD
The closing of the door behind his landlady was unheard by Masters. He
did not move from the position in which the woman had left him for many,
very many minutes.
When at last he rose, lifting his head, he caught sight of his own
reflection in the mirror. Started back, almost cried out: there was such
a deathly pallor covering his face.
His mouth felt as parched as Sahara. Mechanically he mixed a whisky and
soda: drank it off. Then laughed. Not a pleasant mirth; one of those
built up on a sob.
Then self-raillery: the old, old, ever sought useless salve. What a
fool! What a fool he was to care! A woman! Just as he had always
pictured them--always till the book he was now engaged on. When he
thought how chaste and good and pure his last heroine was, on paper, he
laughed again. The same laugh; with the same choking painful little
catch-in-the-throat in it too.
He thought he had lost his ideals long ago; we are apt to flatter
ourselves so. But their death is hard; they live on--unknown even to
ourselves--to appear before us like some new star of whose existence we
know nothing. Make it our guiding star, and we are--when it sinks below
the horizon of fate--as children crying in the night.
The mantel clock chimed seven times. Masters' attention was thereby
drawn to the fact that it was half-past that hour. Lodging-house clocks
are not without their peculiarities; the fulfilled ambition of this
particular one was to be half-an-hour behind time.
Masters started, too, at the sound. Memory of his neglected work came to
him. Lying on his desk was a bundle of corrected galley proofs, which
should have been posted to his publisher. Now it was too late: the post
bag would be made up.
He was annoyed that he had allowed the incident--he was miserably
failing in trying to label it so to himself--to interrupt the routine of
his work. Another glance at the clock and he kicked off his slippers and
horned on his shoes.
Putting on a cap, fastening his greatcoat as he went, he hurried railway
stationwards. For all the thickness of his coat he was not warm. There
was a coldness around his heart as if it were icebound.
The last up-train left at eight o'clock. In October the passengers made
no great demand on the guard's attention; in the season he might have
been, with justness, likened to a sardine packer. Entrustment of the
bundle of proofs, to be posted by the railway man on arrival in London,
was an easily arranged matter.
Crossing the hand with a piece of silver is as effective with the
average guard as it is with a gipsy: the oracle is worked thereby. The
proofs would reach the publisher by first post in the morning.
Masters had effected this arrangement by five minutes to eight; five
minutes before the scheduled time for the train's departure for London.
Having lighted a cigar in the shelter of the waiting-room doorway, he
buttoned up his coat, prepared for his return walk home.
As--buttoned up, cigar in mouth--he emerged from the station's
precincts, he could not fail to observe the lights in the back windows
of Ivy Cottage. The bungalow stood not three minutes' walk away.
That he should have avoided, he knew; but the night was dark; he would
not be seen. Moreover, he was in no way different from other moths who
ever flutter round candles.
So, more or less unconsciously, he was attracted; slowly walked in the
direction of the light. The little god with wings is as experienced in
the use of the magnet as the dart.
The corner of the road, which the rear of the house faced, was reached.
Suddenly the back door of the house was opened. By the light in the
passage behind he saw a man and a woman silhouetted in the door-frame,
evidently engaged in actions of a farewell.
The woman had her arms lovingly round the man's neck. She fervently
kissed him--his lips--again and again. Her sorrow at the parting was
apparently of the deepest kind; at times she applied her handkerchief to
her eyes. Not a detail of the incident escaped the attention of the man
in the road.
Masters stood quite still watching them. Not an act due to ill-breeding:
he was for the moment simply incapable of movement. Had his existence
depended on a forward step, Death would have added another name to his
list.
The couple came out in the garden; walked towards the gate. The path led
straight from the door; the hall lamp still showed him the positions:
the woman's arms clinging around the man.
It was well he stood in the shadow on that road; well that they were so
occupied as to prevent their noticing him. Perhaps the iron that had
entered into his soul travelled viâ his face. That would account for the
seared look on it. It was as the face of the dead.
So different. Ah! So different had he thought her. Had linked up, in his
mind, the purity of the snow in connexion with her. This was the woman
he had pictured; who was ever so before him that his pen seemed animated
when he handled it to describe her.
His thoughts--edged with keen bitterness and self-contempt--went back to
the pure, guileless heroine in his book. Had he been capable of laughter
at himself, for being a fool, his mirth would have been of the greatest
heartiness just then.
The couple at the gate parted; the watcher was not very clear how. What
followed being--by reason of a sort of indescribable veil or mist which
enveloped him--blurred, almost hidden from him. Dazed as was his
condition, he was cognizant that the man crossed the road, ran past up
the pathway to the station. Then came the sound of a whistle, followed
by the rumbling of the departing train.
Footsteps! He knew them--short as had been his acquaintance with
them--along the gravel path; then the door of Ivy Cottage was shut. The
blackness of the night could not have been heavier than the thoughts he
was alone with. Ideas of things seemed to grow more entangled and
confused every instant.
From the moment that he had despatched his parcel, he had been mentally
accusing himself of folly of the highest class. Did so whilst lighting
his cigar and on the way from the booking office--with the back of Ivy
Cottage fronting him. Why had he believed those wretched over-the-wall
gossips, when there was the face--those soulful eyes--of the woman
herself to look into?
That he had listened to and questioned his landlady was an insult to the
woman of whom his mind was so full. He knew how those glorious,
plumbless blue eyes of hers would flash contempt for him did she but
know: she must never know! Standing there--near the house which
enshrined what he thought the dearest and best in the world--he almost
cursed himself. For his folly in doubting her. His future faith should
obliterate the memory of that moment.
Then--then the back door had opened! It was a shock; a horrible shock.
But there was confirmation of what he had been told. The scales fell
from his eyes.
Minutes--they seemed to him centuries--passed. The mist before his eyes
cleared away; the veiling disappeared. But he felt that it would not be
a display of wisdom to turn homewards, just yet.
Masters was a sensitive--hyper-sensitive is perhaps a better word--man.
To rub up against inquiries from a garrulous landlady as to his health
would prove more irritating than sand paper. He knew that his appearance
would provoke comment; felt how he looked; determined to try and walk
the look off.
By setting his face eastward, continuing on the station road for a mile
or so, he would come out on the shore at what was known as The Gap. By
walking along the sands therefrom, past the private owner's wall, he
would be able to mount to the parade by the steps which faced his seat.
Lips tightened and his fingers clenched when he remembered the reference
to this as "our" seat. The walk would do him good; he laughed a little
at that last idea. As if, he thought, anything in the whole world would
ever do him any good again!
Shaken faith is a wound that smarts acutely; the only surgeon able to
apply a salve is Time.