Crooked Smoke
It was with a fairly untroubled mind that Wolf set off the following afternoon for King’s Barton. And it was with a peculiar sense of recovery that he found himself seated side by side with Mr. Urquhart at the littered table in the great library-window.
Incredibly fragrant were the garden-scents that flowed in upon him, past the Squire’s pendulous eye-folds, Napoleonic paunch, and withered pantaloon-legs. The old rogue had discovered a completely new stratum of obscene Dorset legends. He had got on the track now of accounting for certain local cases of misbehaviour, on the grounds of libidinous customs reverting to very remote times. He was, in fact, at this moment gathering all the material he could find about the famous “Cerne Giant,” whose phallic shamelessness seemed by no means confined to its harmless representation upon a chalkhill.
As he looked down, past Mr. Urquhart’s profile, upon the lawn below, and contemplated the rich mingling of asters, lobelias, and salpiglossis in Roger Monk’s favourite flowerbed, it seemed to Wolf that certain prematurely fallen leaves which he caught sight of down there upon the grass had struck his consciousness long ago with a tremendous significance. Those sultry glowing purples … those dead leaves … what was that significance? “This day is going to be a queer day for me,” he thought. For he had become aware that some screen, some casement, at the back of his mind, behind which his most secret impressions lived and moved in their twilight, had swung open a little. …
He kept staring down out of that library-window past his employer’s profile. That purple glow from the flowerbed … those dead leaves … why was there no dew down there? It was autumn dew he was thinking about that August day … silvery mist upon purple flowers. … “The most important things in my life,” he said to himself, “are what come back to me from forgotten walks, when I’ve been alone. … Dark grass with purplish flowers … dead leaves with dew on them. … I wonder,” he thought, “how much room those undertakers left between old Smith’s face and his coffin-lid?”
And then he thought, “I wonder if old Smith ever noticed the look of dew upon dead leaves?” and he shifted his position a little, as a cold shiver went through him.
But Mr. Urquhart now broke silence. Some telepathic wave must have passed from his secretary’s wandering mind into his own.
“What’s this news I hear,” he said, “about Albert Smith? The old chap’s kicked the bucket, eh? Lovelace was over here this morning, and he tells me the fellow died last night and left nothing but debts. A bad lookout for those two girls, what? Lovelace even hints at suicide.”
The Squire paused, and a very curious expression came into his face.
“They talked of suicide when Redfern died,” he went on. “I’d like to know what you think, Solent, about this business of shuffling off without a word to anyone? D’ye think it’s easy for ’em? D’ye think they do it with their brains cool and clear? D’ye think they have some pretty awful moments or not, ha? Come, tell me, tell me! I hate not to know these things. Do they go through the devil of a time before they bring themselves to it, eh? Or do they sneak off like constipated beagles, to eat the long ditch-grass and ha’ done with it?”
Wolf tried in vain to catch his employer’s equivocal eye as he listened to all this. Never in his acquaintance with Mr. Urquhart had he felt so baffled by the drift of the man’s mind. Something in himself, rising up from very hidden depths, gave him a hurried danger-signal; but what possible danger there could be to him from the man’s words he was unable to see.
“Do they mind it or don’t they?” repeated the Squire. “People pity ’em; but what does anyone know? Perhaps the only completely happy moments of a man’s life are when he’s decided on it. Things must look different then—different and much nicer, eh, Solent? But different, anyway; very different. Don’t ’ee think so, Solent? Quite different. … Little things, I mean. Things like the handles of doors, and bits of soap in soap-dishes, and sponges on washing-stands! Wouldn’t you want to squeeze out your sponge, Solent, and pick up the matches off the floor, when you’d decided on it?”
Wolf was spared the necessity of any retort to this by the appearance of Roger Monk. The man came in without knocking and walked straight up to their table.
Wolf peered at him with quizzical screwed-up eyes. He couldn’t help recalling that explosion of homicidal hatred which he had listened to outside Lenty Cottage. But the gardener’s countenance was impassive now as a human-faced rock.
“Eh? What’s that, Monk? Speak up. Mr. Solent will not mind.”
“Weevil and young Torp, Sir, round at the back, Sir; asking for leave to fish in Lenty Pond, Sir.”
Monk uttered the words in a low, discreet, colourless voice.
Mr. Urquhart at once assumed a blustering great man’s tone of genial condescension, as if he were addressing himself to the youths in question.
“Sporting young men, ha? Gay young truants, ha? Well, we mustn’t be too strict. Do ’em good, I daresay, on a fine afternoon. Probably catch nothing but a perch or two! Certainly, Roger. I’ve no objection, Roger.”
But the man still remained where he was.
“They did say, Sir, that you said something the other night to them, Sir, about—”
But Mr. Urquhart interrupted him.
“I’ve no time now. I’m busy with Mr. Solent. Tell ’em to clear off and fish all they like. There’s nothing more, Roger, thank you. Tell ’em to fish the pond from end to end, but not to trample down the rushes. Tell ’em to be careful of the rushes, Roger. That’s all, Roger.”
His last words were uttered in such a final and dismissing tone, that the man, having given him one quick interrogative look, swung round on his heels and left the room.
The Squire turned to Wolf.
“A little sport for the populace, eh, Solent? Do ’em good, what? Doesn’t pay to be too strict these days. Seignorial rights and that sort o’ thing grown a bit old-fashioned, ha?”
The conversation lapsed after this, and they returned to their investigations concerning the Cerne Giant.
It was Mr. Urquhart’s part to select, from the mass of their material, the particular aspects of Dorset history which lent themselves to their work. It was Wolf’s business to purge and winnow and heighten these to the general level of the style which they had adopted.
“Every bibliophile in England’ll have this book on his shelves one day, Solent,” remarked the Squire, after about half-an-hour’s work.
Wolf did not reply. For some reason he lacked the faintest flicker of an author’s pride in what they were doing.
They worked on for nearly a whole hour after this. Then Mr. Urquhart suddenly uttered these strange words.
“It would be wonderful to see one’s sponge and one’s hairbrush as they’d look just then.”
Wolf hurriedly gathered his wits together.
“You mean after you’d decided upon it?” he said.
Mr. Urquhart nodded.
“You’d see ’em in a sort of fairy-story light, I fancy,” he went on, “much as infants see ’em, when they’re so damned well-pleased with themselves that they chirp like grasshoppers. It would be nice to see things like that, Solent, don’t you think so? Stripped clear of the mischief of custom? It … would … be … very … nice … to see … anything … like that!”
His voice assumed a languid and dreamy tone, full of an infinite weariness.
Wolf found it difficult to make any intelligent comment. His own mind was worrying about many teasing details just then, such as what he was to say to his mother with regard to Mattie and Olwen, and whether he should go to Ramsgard between tea and dinner or wait till later in the evening.
Mr. Urquhart suddenly rose to his feet.
“Let’s stroll round to Lenty Pond, Solent, and tell those lads they can bathe if they want to. It’s bathing they really like,” he added emphatically, “much more than fishing. Good for the rabble, too, don’t you think so, Solent, to learn to swim?”
Wolf could only patiently acquiesce. He did, however, snatch a brief glance at his watch.
“It’s nearly four, Sir,” he said. “You won’t mind if I leave you, after we’ve been over there, and run round to my mother’s?”
The man waved his hand with a negligent, indifferent gesture. It was a mere nothing, this gesture; but in some queer way it rather chilled Wolf’s blood. “It must have been,” he thought to himself, “exactly in that way that the high-priest waved his hand when he uttered the memorable expression, ‘What is that to us? See thou to that!’ ”
They went out together, and Wolf was almost irritated by the unnecessary speed with which Mr. Urquhart walked.
They did not, for all this hurry, reach Lenty Pond uninterrupted. Just as they were entering the field above the Otters’ house, they came unexpectedly upon Jason. The poet had—as far as Wolf could make out—been sitting in the ditch, both for coolness and for seclusion; but he emerged from his retreat in comparative self-possession, and accepted Mr. Urquhart’s rather curt invitation to join them with quiet acquiescence.
They all proceeded therefore across the field, Wolf forgetting his personal anxieties in his interest in the way his two companions treated each other.
“Your peaches are very fine this year,” said Jason to the Squire. “And it was a very good idea of yours to put netting over them. Thieves are afraid of touching netting. It’s like the Latin words at the beginning of a psalm. It makes fruit seem more than fruit—something sacred, I mean.”
“You must make my gardener pick you some of the sacred fruit when you next explore my garden,” said Mr. Urquhart.
“You’ve put your garden-seats in such a very well-chosen place,” went on the poet, in an eager, propitiatory manner. “None of these country fools understand why your garden-seats are between the yew-hedges and the privet-hedges. They’ve no more idea of how garden-seats should be arranged—I mean, with regard to shadows—than a Sturminster goose has of the taste of Tangerine oranges.”
“I hope,” said Mr. Urquhart drily, “that you will not fail to take advantage of all the shadows in my garden when you happen to be there.”
Wolf glanced at the Squire’s face as he spoke, and was startled by its look of agitated annoyance. But Jason went on rapidly, his cheeks growing more and more flushed, and a queer dark glow showing itself in his eyes.
“There are idiots who can’t enjoy that shrubbery of yours, Mr. Urquhart, just because the bushes aren’t trimmed. Untrimmed shrubberies are by far the best. Children and fairies are safe there. Silly old women can’t walk about in them and God can’t get into them.”
“I hope you’ll never hurt yourself, Otter, when you happen to be walking about in my shrubberies.”
The tone in which his employer uttered these words did not altogether surprise Wolf. In his earlier conclusions about these two men he had taken for granted that Jason was helpless in Mr. Urquhart’s hands. He had already begun to waver a little in this view.
They now arrived at the edge of Lenty Pond, and Wolf was amused by the sight of two naked figures, splashing, gesticulating, and clinging to the branches of a submerged willow. It was clear that Mr. Urquhart’s “populace” had not waited for any formal permission to substitute bathing for fishing.
“Hullo, lads! You’ve done very wisely, I see,” said the lord of the manor, approaching the edge of the water and leaning on his cane.
“Take care of the leeches, you two!” cried Jason with benevolent unction.
If Wolf had been previously struck by the unrestrained manner in which the poet had rallied the great man, he was still more arrested by the change that now came over Mr. Otter’s expressive face. It had been stonily self-centred when he came out of the ditch. It had been twitching with mischief as he talked. It now became suddenly suffused with a kind of abandoned sentimentality. Every trace of nervousness passed out of it and every shadow of misery. It seemed to be illuminated by some soft inner light, not a radiant light, but a pallid, phosphorescent nebulosity, such as might have accompanied the religious ecstasy of a worshipper of will-o’-the-wisps.
Lobbie Torp, his thin white figure streaked with green pondweed, staggered out of the water and sat down by the side of Jason on the bank, beating the flies away from his legs with a muddy willow-branch.
Wolf noticed that the poet’s expression assumed a look of almost beatific contentment as he proceeded to enter upon a whispered conversation with the small boy, who himself, as far as Wolf could see, was too occupied in casting awestruck glances at the Squire to give the least attention to what was being said to him.
“It’s not too warm, gentlemen,” called out Bob Weevil, with a forced shiver, pulling himself up, rather foolishly and self-consciously, by the tree-trunk in front of him.
“Why don’t you take a swim, Weevil?” enquired Mr. Urquhart blandly.
“He dursn’t, Sir. He’s afeared of they girt water-snakes,” cried Lobbie Torp.
Bob Weevil’s reply to this taunt was to drop his hold upon the tree, swing himself round, and strike out boldly for the centre of the pond.
“Well done, Weevil! Well done!” cried out the Squire in high delight, watching the flexible muscles and slim back of the swimmer, as the muddy ripples eddied round him.
“Float now, Weevil!” he went on. “Let’s see you float!”
The youthful dealer in sausages turned upon his back and beat the surface of the pond with arms and heels, causing a solitary moorhen, that hitherto had remained in terrified concealment, to rise and flap away through the thick reeds.
There passed rapidly through Wolf’s mind, while all this went on, a hurried mental estimate of his own feelings. He felt—and he frankly confessed it to himself—in some queer way definitely uncomfortable and embarrassed. The air of excited well-being around him jarred upon his nerves as if there were actually present, hovering with the gnats and midges above that pond, some species of electricity to which he was completely insensitive. He felt awkward, ill at ease, and even something of a fool.
What puzzled him, too, profoundly and annoyingly, was the fact that the psychic “aura” of the situation seemed entirely natural and harmless. The presence of those two lads seemed to have drawn out of both his equivocal companions every ounce of black bile or complicated evil.
The Squire had the air of an innocent, energetic schoolmaster, superintending some species of athletic sports. Jason had the look of an enraptured saint, liberated from earthly persecution and awakening to the pure ecstasies of Paradise.
He himself began vaguely wondering, as Bob Weevil reversed his position and with vigorous strokes approached the willow-tree, whether the numerous intimations of peril he had been receiving lately had any reality in them.
He had been, he knew well, taking for granted for many months, that between himself and Mr. Urquhart there existed some sort of subterranean struggle that ultimately would articulate itself in some volcanic explosion. But at this moment, half-hypnotized by the heavy sunshine, by the disturbed waters of Lenty Pond, by the classic nakedness of the two youths, he found himself beginning to wonder if the whole idea of this psychic struggle were not a fancy of his brain.
The sense that this might be the case had an extremely disconcerting effect upon him, and seemed to menace with doubt and confusion one of the dominant motive-powers of his identity.
He knew very well why it had this effect. His whole philosophy had been for years and years a deliberately subjective thing. It was one of the fatalities of his temperament that he completely distrusted what is called “objective truth.” He had come more and more to regard “reality” as a mere name given to the most lasting and most vivid among all the various impressions of life which each individual experiences. It might seem an insubstantial view of so solid a thing as what is called “truth”; but such was the way he felt, and he thought he would never cease to feel like that. At any rate, one of his own most permanent impressions had always been of the nature of an extreme dualism, a dualism descending to the profoundest gulfs of being, a dualism in which every living thing was compelled to take part. The essence of this invisible struggle he was content to leave vague and obscure. He was not rigid in his definitions. But it was profoundly necessary to his life-illusion to feel the impact of this mysterious struggle and to feel that he was taking part in it. What had come over him now as he watched the shining body of Mr. Weevil, surmounted by his impudent water-rat face, as the self-conscious youth once more began his gymnastics with the willow-tree, was a sort of moral atrophy. Sitting on the bank, hugging his knees, at a little distance from Jason and Lobbie, he had time to watch the Squire, and he was struck by the purged and almost hieratic look which the man now wore, as he stood leaning upon his cane, encouraging the silly manoeuvres of the sausage-seller. “He looks like a medieval bishop watching a tournament,” Wolf said to himself. And the placid sunburnt sympathy he felt for the man’s amiable passivity seemed seeping in upon him like a warm salt-tide—a tide that was outside any “dualism”—a tide that was threatening the banked-up discriminations of his whole life.
Then all in a moment he asked himself a very searching question.
“What would I feel at this moment,” he said to himself, “if Weevil were a girl and Lobbie a little girl? Should I in that case be quite untroubled by this Giorgione-like fête-champêtre? No!”—so he answered his own question—“I should feel just as uncomfortable even then at my complicity. It isn’t a question of the sex … it’s a question of something else … it’s a question of—” A noisy splash made by Lob as he darted into the water, and a still louder splash made by Mr. Weevil as he plunged to meet him, interrupted Wolf’s train of ideas.
He glanced at his watch. It was a quarter to five. He scrambled to his feet and picked up his stick. “I must rush off,” he cried. “You’ll excuse me, Sir? We’ll meet again soon, Otter. Goodbye, Weevil! Goodbye, Lobbie! Don’t stay in too long or you’ll catch a chill, and I shall get into trouble with the family.”
Mr. Urquhart and Jason seemed as indifferent to his departure as if he had been an inquisitive Guernsey cow who had approached them and then gone off with a flick of her tail. As he walked across the field he had an uneasy sense that he was retreating from some occult arena where he had suffered an irreversible defeat. The stirring of the waters of Lenty was evidently perilous to him!
He found his mother sitting over the tea-table in Roger Monk’s trim house, sewing artificial poppies round her hat.
During their tea together he related all he chose to relate of the hatter’s death. His mother, however, with her accustomed airy directness, like the swoop of a kestrel, pounced at once on the main issue.
“That’s what I wanted to discuss with you,” she said. “What’s going to happen to those Smith girls?”
She gave him one of her sharp, quick looks, full of worldly sagacity and yet full of a kind of humorous recklessness.
“No one has the least idea,” he responded. “I wish I could do something for them. But I don’t see how I can.”
His mother looked mischievously and affectionately at him.
Suddenly, coming round the table, she kissed him with a series of little birdlike pecks. “There’s no one like my Lambkin,” she said lightly, “for being too good to live!”
Having thus given him the feeling—how well he knew it!—that the very deepest stretch of his spirit only appeared as a pretty little pet-dog trick to her cynical maternal eroticism, she went back again, round the table, to her seat.
She drank more tea after that and ate more bread-and-butter, and Wolf received the impression that his obvious concern over Mattie and Olwen had for some reason given her a deep sense of satisfaction.
It was certainly a relief to him that this was so; and yet, as he met her warm, ironical, half-mischievous glance, a glance full of a sort of gloating tenderness that laughed at both itself and its object, he felt obscurely uneasy.
“I hope,” he said at last, “that I shan’t inflict my philanthropies on Gerda. Fortunately she’s got a very sweet nature.”
A somewhat grim look passed over Mrs. Solent’s face. Her adamantine chin was pushed forward; and her underlip, like the underlip of a carnivore, protruded itself in an extremely formidable manner.
“I don’t see your pretty Gerda putting herself out for anybody,” she said.
Wolf began instantaneously to grow angry—far more angry than he could himself account for.
“She’s as anxious about them as I am,” he retorted hotly.
“She knows you too well, Wolf, to dare to thwart you,” remarked Mrs. Solent.
“It’s her generous nature!” he cried, with a trembling lip. “It’s pure-and-simple magnanimity, such as not another girl in the world would show!”
His mother’s massive face, under her weight of silver hair, darkened to a dull red.
“I’m afraid you spoil us all, Lambkin,” she said, with a wicked, airy little laugh. “But your Gerda knows how to play her cards.”
She had never spoken to him in this tone before. The magnetic current of his anger had touched an evil chord in her own nature, and her laugh was sardonic.
“Play her cards!” he cried in high indignation. “She’s utterly incapable of such a thing! I wish you’d learn the same sweet generosity, Mother! It’s you who ‘play your cards,’ as you call it.”
Mrs. Solent rose to her feet, her face pale now and hard-set as flint.
“You’d have done better to have gone back to Blacksod this afternoon, Wolf,” she said, “if that’s how you feel about me!”
“Mother, you are absolutely unfair!” he cried. “And you’ve always been unfair about Gerda. You hate her for some unknown absurd reason. Pure snobbishness most likely! And you’d like to hurt her, to make her suffer, to spoil her life. That’s why—oh, I see it now!—you’re so glad I’m fussed up about Mattie. You think that will spoil everything for Gerda; and you are glad that it should!”
She came again round the table now, but with a very different purpose from her previous gesture; and yet, as Wolf knew well, it was the same savage eroticism that dominated both these movements.
“I care nothing, not one crow’s-feather, for your pretty, brainless Gerda!” she cried, standing quite close to him, her left hand on the handle of the silver cake-basket which formed the centre of the tea-table, and her right hand opening and shutting as if it were galvanized. “I’ve been good to her, to please you; and I’ve been made a fool of for my trouble. Don’t you think I don’t know how little I count any more in your life, Wolf? Nothing … nothing … nothing! You just come and see me. You flatter me and cajole me. But you never stay! Do you realize you haven’t stayed one night under the same roof with me, since you married? Oh, it’s all right! I don’t complain. I’m growing an old woman; and old women aren’t such pleasant companions as brainless little girls! Oh, it’s all right! But it’s a funny experience, this being shelved and superannuated while your feelings are just as young as anyone’s!”
Her voice, as she let herself be overwhelmed by a blind rush of accumulated self-pity, began to break and choke; and then, all in a moment, it rose to a terrible, ringing intensity, like the sound of a great sea-bell in a violent storm. …
“It’s all right! I can stand it!” she cried. “I had plenty of practice with your father, and now I’m going to have the same thing with you. … Oh, it’s a cruel thing to be a woman!”
She pushed back her grey hair from her forehead with one hand, while the other twitched frantically at her waistband. Never had her handsome features looked more noble; never had her whole personality projected such magnificent, such primeval passion.
Wolf, as he watched her, felt weak, despicable, faltering. He felt like a finical attendant watching the splendid fury of some Sophoclean heroine. He became aware that her anger leaped up from some incalculable crevasse in the rock-crust of the universe, such as he himself had never approached. The nature of her feeling, its directness, its primordial simplicity, reduced his own emotion to something ridiculous. She towered above him there with that grand convulsed face and those expanded breasts; while her fine hands, clutching at her belt, seemed to display a wild desire to strip herself naked before him, to overwhelm him with the wrath of her naked maternal body, bare to the outrage of his impiety.
In the storm of her abandonment, the light irony that was her personal armour against life seemed to drop from her, piece by glittering piece, and fall tinkling upon the floor. Something impersonal rose up in its place, an image of all the stricken maternal nerves that had vibrated and endured through long centuries; so that it became no longer just a struggle between Wolf Solent and Ann Solent—it became a struggle between the body of Maternity itself and the bone of its bone!
She broke now into desperate sobs and flung herself face-down upon the sofa. But the demon that tore at her vitals was not yet content. Turning half-round towards Wolf, and lifting herself up by her arms, she raised a long, pitiful howl like a trapped leopard in the jungle. “Women … women … women!” she cried aloud; and then, to Wolf’s consternation, propping herself upon one of her arms, she held out the other with her first-finger extended, menacing, prophetic, straight towards him.
“It’s he who’s doing all this to me! You needn’t think that you could do it alone! It’s both of you. It’s both! But, oh, you great, heavy, stupid, clumsy lumps of selfishness. … Something, some day, will make you … I don’t know what. … Something, one day … will make you. … Something will do it … one day … and I shall be glad. … Don’t expect anything else. I shall be glad!”
She drew in her arm and buried her face in the sofa, her body heaving with long, dry, husky sobs.
Wolf surveyed her form as she lay there, one strong leg exposed as high as the knee, and one disarranged tress of wavy grey hair hanging across her cheek. And it came over him with a wave of remorseful shame that this formidable being, so grotesquely reduced, was the actual human animal out of whose entrails he had been dragged into light and air.
His remorse, however, was not a pure or simple emotion. It was complicated by a kind of sulky indignation and by a bitter sense of injustice. The physical shamelessness, too, of her abandonment shocked something in him, some vein of fastidious reverence. But his mother’s cynicism had always shocked this element in his nature; and what he felt now he had felt a thousand times before—felt in the earliest dawn of consciousness. What he would have liked to do at that moment was just to slip out of the room and out of the house. Her paroxysm roused something in him which, had she known it, she would have recognized as more dangerous than any responsive anger. But this feeling did not destroy his pity; so that, as he now sombrely contemplated those grey hairs, and that exposed knee, he felt a more poignant consciousness of what she was, than he had ever felt at the times when he admired her most and loved her most.
He let himself sink down in his chair and covered his mouth with his hand as if to hide a yawn. But he was not yawning. This was an old automatic gesture of his: perhaps originally induced by his consciousness that his mouth was his weakest and most sensitive feature and the one by which the sufferings of his mind were most quickly betrayed.
Then he suddenly became aware that the sobs had ceased; and a second later he received a most queer impression, the impression, namely, that one warm, glowing, ironical brown eye was fixed upon him and was steadily regarding him—regarding him through the disordered tress of ruffled hair that lay across it.
He drew his hand from his mouth, rose to his feet quickly, and, bending down above his mother, pulled her up from a recumbent into a sitting posture.
“Mother, don’t!” he cried. “You’re laughing at me; you’re pretending! And I might have done I don’t know what, because you scared me so. You’ve just been teasing your poor son, and frightening him out of his wits; and now you’re laughing at me!”
He fell on his knees in front of her and she let her tousled forehead sink down till it rested against his; and there they remained for a while, their two skulls in a happy trance of relaxed contact, full of unspoken reciprocities, like the skulls of two animals out at pasture, or the branches of two trees exhausted by a storm.
Wolf was conscious of abandoning himself to a vast undisturbed peace—a peace without thought, aim, or desire—a peace that flowed over him from the dim reservoirs of prenatal life, lulling him, soothing him, hypnotizing him—obliterating everything from his consciousness except a faint delicious feeling that everything had been obliterated.
It was his mother herself who broke the spell. She raised her hands to his head and held it back by his stubbly straw-coloured hair, pressing, as she did so, her own glowing tear-stained cheeks against his chin, and finally kissing him with a hot, intense, tyrannous kiss.
He rose to his feet after that and so did she; and, moved by a simultaneous impulse, they both sat down again at the deserted tea-table, emptied the teapot into their cups, and began spreading for themselves large mouthfuls of bread-and-butter with overflowing spoonfuls of red-currant jam.
Wolf felt as if this were in some way a kind of sacramental feast; and he even received a queer sensation, as though their mutual enjoyment of the sweet morsels they swallowed so greedily were an obscure reversion to those forgotten diurnal nourishments which he must have shared with her long before his flesh was separated from hers.
Half-an-hour later he was walking leisurely towards Ramsgard along that now so familiar road. He recalled his first acquaintance with this road, that day he drove over by the side of Darnley Otter; and as he began to approach the town, he found himself glancing across the fields to his right, toward the lane that led to the cemetery, and then across the fields to the left, toward the broader highway which he had followed on the preceding night, his head full of Mr. Smith’s death.
Roads and lanes! Lanes and roads! What a part these tracks for the feet of men and beasts, dusty in Summer, muddy in Winter, had played in his mental consciousness! The thrill that this idea of roadways gave him was a proof to him that his mind was returning to its independent orbit, after its plunge into that maternal hypnosis. His spirit felt indeed deliciously free just then, and expanded its wings to its heart’s content, like a great flapping rook. Every object of the way took on an especial glamour; and never had he enjoyed so deeply one peculiar trick of his mind. This was a certain queer, sensuous sympathy he could feel sometimes for completely unknown people’s lives, as he passed by their dwellings. He enjoyed it now with especial satisfaction, thinking of the people in each cottage he came to, and gathering their experiences together as one might gather a bunch of ragwort or hemp-agrimony out of the dusty hedges.
Well enough did he know how many of these experiences were bitter and grotesque; but what he enjoyed now, along with all these unknown people, was their moments of simple, sensuous well-being.
Such a moment he himself felt presently, as he leaned over a gate to rest, just before the road he traversed entered the outskirts of Ramsgard. Through the warm, misty evening, full of what seemed to him a veritable diffused essence of gold-dust, there came some quick wandering breaths of cooler air; and these breaths of air, brushing against his face and passing swiftly upon their way, carried a peculiar fragrance with them, a fragrance that made him think of a certain little garden of old-fashioned pinks that he used to pass, on his way to the place where he gave his lectures, down a narrow West London alley. If in Mr. Urquhart’s library he had been stirred by Roger Monk’s flowerbeds, he was more stirred now by this far-off impression. The pinks were meagre enough in themselves. But the thought of them in their sunbaked little garden, so close to the hot pavement, touched some chord of seminal memory that gave him just then a transporting thrill.
Where did it come from, this emotion? Was it an inherited feeling, reverting to days when some remote ancestor of his, in cloister or marketplace, used to inhale day by day that particular sweetness? Or was it something larger and more general than this? Certainly what he felt just now, as these cool-wafted airs came over the yellow stubble, was not confined to the pinks in that hot little garden behind iron railings. It was much more as if he were enabled to enter, by a lucky psychic sensitiveness, into some continuous stream of human awareness—awareness of a beauty in the world that travelled lightly from place to place, stopping here and stopping there, like a bird of passage, but never valued at its true worth until it had vanished away.
“There must be,” he thought, “some deep race-memory in which these things are stored up, to be drawn upon by those who seek for them through the world—a memory that has the power of obliterating infinite debris, while it retains all these frail essences, these emanations from plants and trees, roadsides and gardens, as if such things actually possessed immortal souls!” He turned from the gate and pursued his road, swinging his stick from side to side like a madman, and repeating aloud, as he strode along, the words “immortal souls.”
Certain human expressions, meaning one thing to the philosopher and quite another thing to the populace, were always fascinating to Wolf. His mind began to dwell now upon the actual syllables of this phrase, “immortal souls,” until by a familiar transformation those formidable sounds took on a shadowy personality of their own—took on the shape, in fact, of Christie Malakite—and in that shape went wavering away over the fields like a thin spiral cloud! “These quaint words, used by the men of old time,” he said to himself, “to describe what we all feel, have more in them than people have any idea of. I must tell Christie that!” And then it occurred to him how impossible it would be to explain to any living intelligence the faltering thoughts that had ended by his invocation of the “soul” of a tiny London garden and his embodying it in the wraith of the daughter of Mr. Malakite!
It still kept hovering in front of his mind, however—this phrase, “immortal souls”—even after it had slipped like a boat from its moorings. There seemed a noble and defiant challenge in it to all that petered out, to all that flagged, that wilted, that scattered, that became nothing, in the melancholy drift of the world!
With the cool airs of that summer evening wafted about him, he felt, as he passed now under the vast shadow of the Abbey-church, that there were immense resources of renewal, of restoration, spread abroad over the face of the earth, such as had hardly been drawn upon at all by the sons and daughters of men. “Why is it,” he thought, “that this particular expression, ‘immortal souls,’ should act upon my mind in this way?” And as he moved slowly along now between the sculptured entrance to the Schoolhouse and the little low-roofed shop where the straw-hatted boys of the School bought their confectionery, it occurred to him as curiously significant that the syllable “God,” so talismanic to most people, had never, from his childhood, possessed the faintest magic for him! “It must be,” he thought, as, passing under a carved archway, he came bolt upon the old monastic conduit, “that anything suggestive of metaphysical unity is distasteful to me. It must be that my world is essentially a manifold world, and my religion, if I have any, essentially polytheistic! And yet, in matters of good and evil”—and he recalled his sensations at Lenty Pond—“I’m what they’d call a dualist, I suppose. Ay! It’s funny. Directly one comes to putting feelings into words, one is compelled to accept hopeless contradictions in the very depths of one’s being!”
He moved right in, under the carved roof of the old conduit, between the Late Gothic pillars, and laid his hand on the edge of the water-trough. The traffic of the high-street passed him by, and groups of tall straw-hatted schoolboys brushed past him, cold, remote, haughty, discreet, like young Romans in some Ionian marketplace.
A barrel-organ was being played where the pavement widened, under the out-jutting gables of a medieval hostelry; and Wolf couldn’t help noticing how the abstracted, impassive expression of the old man who played it contrasted with a couple of ragged little children, glowing-cheeked and intent, who danced to its jigging tune.
“Polytheism … dualism,” he repeated, trying to retain the philosophical distinctions which he felt crumbling to bits and drifting away. But as he fumbled with his fingers at that conduit-trough and turned automatically a leaden faucet so that water gushed out over his hand, his mind seemed to reject every single one of those traditional human catchwords.
“I just told him it was all bloody rot!” The words fell upon his ears from the lips of a pale-faced, quiet lad, who, with an arm round the neck of another, swung past Wolf’s retreat; and they served to give his thoughts an edge.
“All bloody rot!” he mumbled, turning off the water and throwing a nervous glance round him, lest his proceedings should have attracted attention. “But there’s more in all this, all the same, than any of these words implies. That’s the whole thing. Not less, but more! More; though more of what, I don’t suppose I shall ever discover! But more of something.”
And as he left the conduit and made his way up the street, he had the feeling that his real self was engaged in an exciting maze of transactions, completely different from those which just now occupied his senses and his will.
He found the Smith ménage, when Mattie’s little maid, smiling and radiant at the presence of so much drama, admitted him after a long wait upon the doorstep, burdened by the presence of two portly and extremely loquacious undertakers. Contrary to custom, but due to the nature of his illness and the heat of the weather, it had become advisable to place the Hatter of Ramsgard in his elm-wood coffin without further delay.
Mattie had brought Olwen down into the dining-room, so as to remove her from the sound of the hammering; but the child was nervous and preoccupied, and it was with but a languid interest that she busied herself with the black ribbons of Gipsy and Antoinette, laid side by side on the great mahogany table, with the cushion from Mr. Smith’s chair under their waxen heads. Even Wolf’s arrival did not really distract her; and he would have given much to know what the thoughts actually were that gave to her little oval face that sombre pallor and frowning intensity.
Mattie herself seemed strangely lethargic as she drew up one of the straight-backed leather-covered chairs and sat down by his side; and Wolf found it difficult, as they both stared at the unsympathetic silver on the sideboard, to broach the subject of her future, with which his mind was so full.
“Knock … knock … knock,” went the hammer in the room above, accompanied by the low-toned rumble of conversation from the two intruders.
“Death is a queer thing,” thought Wolf, while the weary indifference of Mr. Smith’s white face dominated the slow passing of the minutes. “Would anyone know by that sound,” he thought, “that those were coffin-nails? There’ll be another sound when they put him into the hole,” so his mind ran on; “there’ll be that peculiar sound of loose, dry mould flung on the top of a wooden lid. All the world over, those same two sounds. Well, not quite all the world over. But how many times had Mr. Smith heard that hammering and that rattle of earth-mould? Did he sit in this very place when they were nailing Lorna in? I must break this uncomfortable silence,” he thought. “There! That must have been the last! But what the devil are they doing now? This silence is worse than the hammering. Are they having a drink?”
There was a sharp ring at the doorbell; and the three strained faces in that dusky dining-room glanced anxiously at one another, while the patter of the maid’s feet on the tiled floor responded to this new sound.
A minute later and they all rose hurriedly, while to their complete surprise Mrs. Otter and Darnley were ushered into the room. The little lady seemed perturbed and embarrassed at the presence of Wolf, but Darnley gave him a quick reassuring nod.
“I heard by chance,” began Mrs. Otter rapidly. “We were so sorry for you. I wanted to come. My son was very good. He got me a carriage. I hope you don’t mind my coming.”
“I am sure it’s very nice of you, Mrs. Otter,” murmured Mattie. “Sit down, won’t you? Sit down, please, Mr. Otter. Thank you, Wolf. No, that’s been broken for years.” Wolf made a fumbling attempt to replace the piece of carved mahogany that had come off in his hand. This mechanical preoccupation enabled him to notice in silence the manner in which Darnley and Mattie had begun to stare at each other.
“What I had in my mind, in coming to you, my poor child,” he heard Mrs. Otter say, “was to ask a great and really rather a difficult favour. What I came to say was this … oh, I don’t know whether I ought to worry you now about it! … but my son … I mean Jason … told me I might do just as I liked. … My house is my own, you know!” This last rather unexpected phrase was uttered with such a winning and whimsical smile that Wolf looked hastily at Mattie, very anxious that she should say nothing to hurt this visitor’s feelings. He was surprised to observe that Mattie had only in the vaguest manner caught the drift of this speech.
“Yes, Mrs. Otter, you’ve always been most kind to me,” was all she said in reply.
“My son left everything completely in my hands. Didn’t he, Darnley?” Mrs. Otter went on. There was a perplexed frown on her face now; and she made a feeble little movement of one of her hands towards Darnley, as if appealing to him for help.
“Didn’t he, Darnley?” she repeated.
But Darnley also seemed to have lost the drift of her remarks.
“You were quite right, Mother,” he replied at random. “You’re awfully wise when things are getting serious. … She’s wonderful in a crisis.” He addressed this last remark to no one in particular, and it did little to help forward the general air of cloudiness into which the conversation had fallen.
“She really is … wonderful in a crisis,” he repeated absentmindedly; and Wolf, as he looked at the lethargic silver on the sideboard, seemed to hear the voice of the cake-basket addressing the biscuit-bowl, “She’s wonderful in a crisis,” in the tone of an ancient playgoer commenting on an oft-repeated play.
“Mattie doesn’t know what ever we shall do.” The words came from Olwen, who now stood close to Wolf’s chair; and the words served to bring matters to a head.
“That’s just what I’m talking about,” said Mrs. Otter, in such an eager tone that everyone turned towards her with full attention.
“What I came to ask you was this,” she said firmly, addressing herself to Mattie. “Our Dimity is getting feeble and old, and I’m not as strong as I was. My son—Jason, I mean—is very particular. You know what he is, my dear? What a poet he is. Mr. Solent thinks he’s a great poet, don’t you, Mr. Solent? … Well, what I came to say is this. It would be such a pleasure to us all, my dear”—here she laid her grey-gloved hand lightly on Mattie’s wrist—“if you’d come and live with us and help me—you know?—help me with everything. Now don’t shake your head like that! I know what you mean. Of course, this little one must come, too, and of course we’ve got to think of her lessons.” The little lady drew a long breath, but hurried on before Mattie could utter a word. “It’s her lessons I was thinking about. I’m very fond of teaching children, children that I like, I mean; and I’ve got all the fairy-stories. I’ve got the one they wouldn’t let me even see the pictures of, when I was little.”
Wolf had already screwed his head round so as to snatch a glimpse of Olwen’s face, and he was surprised at the grave glow of unrestrained delight that was now slowly beginning to spread over it. But Mattie still shook her head.
“I couldn’t,” she murmured in a faint voice. “Though it’s very, very kind of you, Mrs. Otter. But I could never think of such a thing. Olwen and I have been talking about it and we’ve made up our minds that I must go to work. Olwen says she’ll be good when I leave her and not fret or be lonely.”
At this moment there was a sound of heavy footsteps descending the stairs, accompanied by a few muffled remarks of a facetious kind. Mrs. Otter glanced at Wolf, who gave her a slight inclination of the head. She turned to Mattie hurriedly.
“Well, my dear,” she said. “I don’t want to rush you against your will into anything. Though I did set my heart upon it and I’ve thought about it from every possible side.”
Mattie’s answer to this was to stretch forth her hand and press lightly the gloved fingers of the little old lady. But the look which she gave her showed no sign of yielding. It was very tender; but it was firm and resolute.
There was another pause then among them all; and once more Wolf was aware of a most vivid sense of Mr. Smith’s white, set face, exhausted, detached, commenting with a kind of desolating equanimity upon the events that were taking place. Those ponderous silver pieces seemed to Wolf now, as he frowned upon them, to be gathering themselves together in that darkening room, to be shaping themselves with shadowy persistence into funereal ornaments heaped up beside the dead hatter.
One of the windows behind Wolf’s head was open, and with the noises of the street there entered and circled round him a deliciously cool air, an air like that which he had been conscious of on his approach to Ramsgard, as he leaned over that gate. Once more the scent of pinks came quivering through his brain and he felt a shameless thrill of pleasure. This time, instead of the wraith of Christie Malakite, it was the body of the hatter that associated itself with that remembered scent—not any repulsive odour of mortality emerging from those nailed-up boards, but rather some spiritual essence from the presence of Death itself. And as he breathed this air, the voices of his companions became a vague humming in his ears, and all manner of queer detached memories floated in upon him. He felt himself to be walking alone along some high white road bordered by waving grasses and patches of yellow rockrose. There was a town far below him, at the bottom of a green valley—a mass of huddled grey roofs among meadows and streams—round which the twilight was darkening. Along with all this he was conscious of the taste of a peculiar kind of baker’s bread, such as used to be sold at a shop in Dorchester, where, as a child, they would take him for tea during summer jaunts from Weymouth. The presence of Death seemed to recreate these things and to touch them with a peculiar intensity.
He was roused from his trance by the clear, shrill voice of Olwen arguing desperately with Mattie.
“I want to do what she says! Why can’t we do what she says? I’ll be bad if you don’t let us! I won’t go to sleep. I’ll be far worse than Gipsy or Antoinette. I’ll tear my hair out! I’ll bite my hand!”
“Hush, Olwen!” he heard Mattie reply. “Mrs. Otter will be only too pleased I can’t accept her offer if you talk like that.”
The little girl gazed at her for a moment with a quaint, solemn scrutiny. Then she laughed, a merry reassured laugh, and, rushing to where Darnley was sitting, slid coaxingly upon his knee.
“You’ll tell her what she must do when everyone’s gone,” she murmured softly; and then, with her eyes fixed upon his face, she stroked his beard with her small, nervous hand.
Mrs. Otter and Wolf smiled at each other; and there came into Wolf’s mind those scenes in Homer where girlish suppliants, mortal as well as immortal, lay their hands upon the chins of those they are cajoling!
“Would you tear my hair out as well as your own,” enquired Darnley, “if she goes on refusing to let you live with us?” Wolf thought he had never seen Darnley’s eyes look so deeply luminous as they did while he uttered those words.
Mattie still shook her head; but although there were tears on her cheek, the whole expression of her face was relaxed and at peace. Indeed, as Wolf kept surreptitiously glancing at her, he got the impression that the girl longed to rush away and burst into a flood of crying, but not into unhappy crying. The kindred blood in his veins made him clairvoyant; and he felt convinced that if the Otters refused to accept her rejection of their scheme, she would eventually be persuaded.
“Well, my dear child,” he heard Mrs. Otter saying, “you must not answer us in a hurry like this. You see what friends Darnley and your little one have already become; and if only—”
She stopped suddenly; for there came a second ring at the street-door, followed by the same impetuous rush of the little maid across the hall. This time Wolf looked with dismay into his sister’s face when he heard a well-known voice asking in a loud, firm tone for Miss Smith. They all got up when Miss Gault was shown into the room. Olwen hastily snatched her dolls from the table and carried them off to Mr. Smith’s big leather chair by the fireplace; and Mrs. Otter, after a hurried bow to the new visitor, followed the child to that retreat and entered into a whispered conversation with her.
The presence of Wolf did not seem to be any surprise to the formidable lady. She nodded at him familiarly, as she embraced Mattie; but her greeting to Darnley was stiff and formal. Darnley himself seemed quite unperturbed by this coldness. His strangely-coloured blue eyes remained fixed upon Mattie; and he stood with his back propped against a bookcase, toying with his watch-chain.
In the darkening twilight of the room—for no one had thought of asking for a lamp—the man’s slim figure, as Wolf glanced sideways at him, had the appearance of some old Van Dyck portrait come to life in a Victorian house. Behind his back the great heavily-bound editions of those Sundays at Home and Leisure Hours, whose illustrations must have solaced many a long evening in the far-off childhood of Albert Smith, gathered the summer darkness about them with that peculiar mystical solemnity which old books, like old trees and old hedges, display at the coming on of night. And Wolf, as he listened with amusement to the discourse of Selena Gault, became aware that, with one of her chance-flung felicities, Nature was arranging a singularly appropriate stage for what at any rate was an exciting encounter between Darnley Otter and Mattie Smith.
“Darnley must have often met Mattie before,” thought Wolf. “But very likely never in her own house and probably never when they could really take in each other’s personality. Besides … what do I know about them? All this may have begun years ago … before I came upon the scene at all. If so, what secretive demons they both have been!”
He turned once more to his sister. Oh, he couldn’t be mistaken! Why, the girl’s heavy countenance, even in that gloom, had a look that he could only describe to himself as transfigured. “There’s certainly something up, there,” he thought. “Well! She’ll be a little fool if she doesn’t take the old lady’s offer. I’d like to know, though, what Jason did say when this scheme was suggested!”
And then, seated a little back from Mattie and Miss Gault, and accepting a cigarette from Darnley, who now took a chair by his side, Wolf began to be conscious of the drift of the amazing discourse which the visitor was directing, like a cannonade of lumbering artillery, across the table into the ears of his sister. Selena’s attire was in good taste enough—indeed, it was superlatively ladylike; but it was the “rich, not gaudy” attire of a person quite oblivious of contemporary fashion, and in some queer way it lent itself so well to the quality of that room, that it seemed to bring the furniture itself to life in support of everything she said.
The gathering darkness assisted at this strange play. It was as if all the ponderous objects in that room—including the silver, the chairs, the dark-green curtains, the grotesque portrait of Mr. Smith’s father, the leather backs of the Sundays at Home and the Leisure Hours, the leather back of a draught-board, with the words “History of the World” printed on it, the bronze horses on either side of the mantelpiece, the enormous empty coal-scuttle—combined together to give weight to the opinions of this aggressive woman, whose own childhood, like that of the silent person upstairs, they had ramparted with their massive solemnities!
And Wolf was astounded at the impertinence of what Miss Gault did say. It was an impertinence covered up with bronze and brocade. But it was an indecent impertinence. It resembled the absurd drapery covering the symbolic figure of Mercy, or Truth, or Righteousness, which dominated the great dining-room clock that stood in the middle of the marble chimneypiece. “I confess I first thought,” Miss Gault was now saying, “of having Olwen to live with Emma and me … but I couldn’t have her teasing the cats … or pining for you … so this Home is better. I have made a lot of enquiries about this Home. I made them last year, for another purpose; and it’s lucky I did, because people don’t hear of these things when they really want them. The beautiful thing about it is that they accept mother and child … and of course Olwen is like your child now. Another great advantage about this plan is that Taunton is so near us all … only a couple of hours by train.” She made a little nod in Wolf’s direction. “Wolf would be able to run over and see you on Sundays,” she added.
Her voice sank; but the darkened room was full of the echoes of it—the whispering of Mrs. Otter, who was evidently telling Olwen a story, being the only force that resisted it. And the dark-green curtains were delighted. “See you on Sundays … see you on Sundays,” they repeated, while the draught-board “History of the World” echoed the word “Sundays,” making it seem like the very voice of that charitable institution which accepted both mother and child.
“And the little sum required by the authorities,” Miss Gault continued, “I shall be delighted to provide. I do, of course, recognize that it was against my advice that you adopted Olwen. But the child’s naturally fond of you now; and I think it would be wrong to separate her from you, as would have to be done if you got employment here … for the child couldn’t be left alone all day … and no doubt everything here will be sold. Don’t answer me just yet,” the lady went on. “I want you, Wolf, too, to hear all I’ve got to say … for, of course … well! there’s no need for me to enter into that … but what I thought I would ask you now, Mattie dear, is to tell me what particular things in this house you’re especially fond of; and then … well! I hope I should be able to be present at the auction … so that whenever you do have a house of your own they’ll be … well! they’ll be, so to speak, still in the family.” She turned more boldly towards Wolf at this point, as if to ensure his recognition of her old-fashioned tact. But Wolf’s impulse at that moment resembled the impulse of King Claudius in the play. He felt a desire to cry out in thundering tones, “Lights! lights! lights!” So that it was still left to the draught-board and the bronze clock to appreciate such delicacy and to have the last word.
It was not Wolf, but Darnley, however, who broke the spell thrown upon them by Miss Gault. He walked rapidly over to his mother, whispered something in her ear, took her hand, and brought her to Mattie’s side.
“You’ll be a dear girl and do what we want you to do?” said the old lady clearly and firmly, taking no notice of Miss Gault.
Wolf thought he caught an appealing glance in his direction, though it was so dark now that his sister’s face was a mere blur of whiteness. But he rose hurriedly and came up to where they were all grouped. There was just a half-second’s pause, which enabled him to catch an impress of the whole queer scene before he spoke, to catch the bewildered anger on Miss Gault’s face, to observe that Olwen had possessed herself of Darnley’s hand, to remark how Mrs. Otter was so nervous that the chair upon which she had laid her fingers tapped on the floor; and then he himself spoke out with all the weight he could muster.
“I’m sorry, Miss Gault, and I know Mattie’s most grateful for your suggestion; but it had all been settled before you came in. They’re going to stay for the present with our good friends here. They’re going to do what I did when I first came to King’s Barton. There’ll be time enough later for other arrangements; but for the moment Mattie’s going to accept Mrs. Otter’s invitation, and Olwen too. As to the furniture here, we needn’t decide about that in any hurry. It may be that Mattie would be happier to get completely rid of it. I know I should, in her case. But it’s sweet of you to suggest buying back some of it. I’m sure Mattie appreciates that very much. But the chief point just now is what she and Olwen are going to do; and that has been quite decided—hasn’t it, Mattie? They’re going to that hospitable Pond Cottage, where I went for my first night in Dorset!”
Wolf’s voice became more and more decisive as he brought his declaration to a close; but with an instinct for preventing any further protests from Mattie, he hurriedly rushed out into the hall and began calling for the little maid.
“Constantia!” he shouted. “Constantia! Please bring us the lamp!”
What occurred after his departure from that darkened dining-room he never knew. His words seemed to have had the effect of the letting off of a gun in a soundless wood. For from where he waited at the kitchen-door there came to him an incoherent murmur of many confused voices. When at last he returned with the lamp in his hand and placed it in the centre of the table, Olwen was crying in the leather armchair, where Mattie and Mrs. Otter were bending over her; while Miss Gault, standing erect in the centre of the room, was asking Darnley in a strained, husky voice whether it was true that they had recently discovered in the Abbey-church the actual bones of King Aethelwolf, the brother of Alfred.
“Goodbye, then. Goodbye, all of you! I mustn’t be in the way any longer.” With this, Miss Gault bowed to Darnley, nodded in the direction of the weeping child, and walked straight into the hall.
From Wolf she kept her eyes averted as she passed; but the expression of her face shocked him, and he followed her to the street-door. As he bent forward to turn the handle before she set her own hand upon it, he caught sight of that deformed lip of hers; and the look of it appalled him. To see such a thing as that was bad enough; but it became worse when the extraordinary visage, that now was face to face with him, contorted itself, there in the doorway before him, into a puckered mask of outrage. He felt a little ashamed of himself for the brutality of his observation at that moment; but he couldn’t help noticing that Miss Gault made a much more childish contortion of her face when she collapsed than his adamantine mother had done that same afternoon! His mother had “lifted up her voice,” as the Scripture says, “and wept”; but Wolf remembered well how, even when she was howling like a lioness with a spear in her side, her fine clear-cut features had retained their dignity. Big tears had fallen, but they had fallen like rain upon a tragic torso. Very different was it with Miss Gault at this moment! Three times she made an attempt to speak to him, and three times her face grew convulsed.
“Wait a minute!” he blurted out at last, and ran back into the dining-room. There he shouted a loud goodbye to them all. “See you tomorrow, Mattie dear!” he cried. “I leave you in good hands, Olwen. Good night, Mrs. Otter!”
“I’ll come back and have dinner with you, if I may,” he said, as he caught up Miss Gault on the street-pavement. “Listen! What’s that striking now?” He laid his hand on her arm and held her motionless. “Seven o’clock, ay? Well, you don’t dine till eight; so do let’s have a bit of a walk before going to your house.”
“Let’s go to the grave, boy,” she whispered hoarsely. “We can talk there. My Emma won’t mind, even if we are late. But how will you get back to Blacksod?” she added with concern.
“Oh, I’ll take the ten-o’clock train,” he said. “That’ll mean that I shan’t have any more walking and shan’t keep Gerda up. It runs still at that time, doesn’t it? Or have they changed it?”
But Miss Gault had already given to practical concerns all the energy she could spare just then.
“How lovely this place is at night!” she said, as they passed under the Abbey-wall. “I wonder if Mr. Otter is right and it is really the coffin of King Aethelwolf that they’ve found.”
They reached the main entrance to the building, and to their surprise they found it open.
“Let’s go in for a minute,” said Wolf. His companion assented in silence and they entered together.
“I would have liked to have that child to live with me,” murmured Miss Gault; “but it would have been cruel to the cats … she’s grown so rough to them lately … and she’s not always polite to Emma.”
Wolf made no reply to this remark; and as they moved slowly up the central aisle, which was feebly illuminated from somewhere between the choir-stalls, he allowed his mind to wander away from Miss Gault and her thwarted philanthropies. The few lights that were burning hardly reached—and then only with a dim, diffused lustre, like the interior of a sand-blurred mother-of-pearl shell—the high fan-tracery of the roof. Wolf felt strongly upon him once again that feeling of mystic exultation which had been hovering over him all day; and when the presence of the light behind the choir was explained by a sudden burst of organ-notes, he felt such a thrill of happiness that it brought with it a reaction of sheer shame.
“Accident!” he muttered to himself. “Pure accident!” he repeated, as they crossed in front of the altar and made their way to the lady-chapel behind it. And he even felt, as he fumbled about in the dim light, looking for some sign of the Saxon king’s coffin, a sense of having feloniously stolen his ecstasy from some treasure-house of the human race! “Why should I,” he thought, “be singled out by pure chance for this? That Waterloo-steps face—no King Aethelwolf for him, no fan-tracery, no scent of pinks—Is my gratitude to the gods, then, a base and scurvy feeling?”
Even as this thought crossed his mind he stumbled against some sort of glass framework upon the southern floor of that lady-chapel.
“Here we are, Miss Gault!” he whispered excitedly. “Only, I suppose we shall get into trouble if that organist hears us. Look here, though, for God’s sake! This is the king’s coffin!”
He went down on his knees and pulled aside in the dim light a piece of carpet that had been carefully spread over the glass frame. The unwieldy form of his companion was promptly now at his side, kneeling too.
“Dare I strike a match, d’ye think?” he whispered.
“No, no, boy! You mustn’t do that. Wolf, you mustn’t, you really mustn’t!” murmured the daughter of the Headmaster of Ramsgard School.
But he disregarded her protest, and, fumbling in his pocket, produced a matchbox and struck a wax vesta.
The little yellow flame illuminated the glass-covered aperture in the floor and threw into such weird relief the lineaments of Miss Gault as to almost divest them of their humanity. Only a dim consciousness of this astounding countenance, so near his own, reached Wolf’s mind just then. He was too excited. But afterwards, when he recalled the whole incident, it came back distinctly upon him as one of those glimpses into something abominable, ghastly, in Nature’s pranks, such as a person were wise to make note of, with the rest, as he went through the world! Here, in the mere possibility of such a vision—for, to say the truth, Miss Gault’s face by that match-flare was rendered nothing less than bestial—was an experience to be set against those chance-heard organ-notes that had mounted up so triumphantly among the torn battle-flags.
Holding the match aloft with his hand, he bent down until his face actually touched the glass. Nothing. Certain interesting chromatic effects … certain flickers and blotches of colour that was no colour, of sparkles that were opaque, of outlines that were no outlines … and then the match burnt his hand and went out. Hurriedly he lit another and held it up, his burnt hand smarting. Down went his face till his hooked nose was pressed against the glass. Sparkles, black, wavering spots, fluctuating blotches of reddish-yellow, little orbs of blackness, rimmed with lunar rings; and then again darkness! Nothing! Angrily he scrambled to his feet, and with childish petulance thrust his smarting fingers into his mouth.
“The bones are there!” he whispered huskily. “The bones are there! Aethelwolf himself! But it’s no use. We must come again by daylight. It’s one of those things that are so damnably annoying. Quick! … while the organ’s still playing! I know what these people are … so touchy about their treasures. Let’s get out of here!”
He hurried his companion down the great silent nave and out of the open doorway. He felt much more vexed and perturbed than the occasion warranted. The meaningless sparkles from that tricky coffin-lid danced like imps across the back of his eye-sockets.
“I suppose it’s too late to go over there now?” he said, turning to her with his hat in one hand and his stick in the other, and a wavering helplessness emanating from his whole figure.
“Not at all, boy—not at all!” pronounced Miss Gault. “Emma must keep supper waiting for us for once. You’ll have time for a bite anyway before you catch that train. Come along! You don’t know how fast I can walk.”
Wolf put on his hat and strode by her side in silence. The air began to smell of rain by the time they reached the slaughterhouse. There was a figure with a lantern moving about in the yard of the shed; and Miss Gault dragged heavily on his arm as they went past, struggling with the rising wind.
“You’ll get no meat with me, boy,” she whispered. “No meat—no meat. It’s the only way to help them. But I’d go and be hanged to help ’em … hanged by the neck”—the wind caught her voice and rendered it scarcely audible—“by the neck, boy!”
Wolf pondered to himself upon the contradictory nature of this woman. She would go to the death to put an end to slaughterhouses; and yet she would pack off Mattie and Olwen to God knows what kind of an institution for paupers!
He felt a secret desire to punish her for this inconsistency, and he suddenly said: “It’s really amazingly good of the Otters to take in our friends. To find such a generous heart in a nervous old lady like that makes you think better of the whole human race!”
A portion of the impulse that led him to this speech as they passed the slaughterhouse was doubtless a throb of his own conscience over this matter of eating meat. The sight of that man with a lantern, like some ghoulish wanderer in a place of execution, impressed itself by no means pleasantly on his mind; and it was the electric vibration of this discomfort that gave his voice, as he uttered these words, a certain quivering pitch of unnecessary emphasis.
The malice in his tone communicated itself like a magnetic current to his companion, and she took her hand from his arm.
“The child has wheedled herself round Darnley. That’s all it is. The mother is willing enough, because she sees what a good unpaid servant Mattie will make. I won’t talk about it any more, and I didn’t mean to refer to it; but I think you’re simply mad to let her accept such a humiliating position. But there it is! The girl can’t have much pride, or nothing you said or they said could have made her accept such charity!”
His remark having brought about this outburst, he was able to exclaim in his heart, “You rude, ill-bred old woman! You rude, ill-bred old woman!” and, having done this, he felt quite friendly toward her again and quite appeased.
He pretended to be sulking, however, for the whole time they remained in the cemetery; though in reality he was thinking to himself, “What a spirited thing it was, after all, to stick by my father like that, when he was a complete social outcast!”
They walked home in even deeper silence and at a rapid pace. It was twenty-five minutes to ten when they reached Aldhelm Street, only to find Emma in such an agitated temper that Selena had to go herself into the kitchen and bring out to him in the sitting-room a plate of curried eggs and a decanter of sherry.
He sat on her sofa and swallowed this hot dish with hungry relish, eating it in unceremonious fashion with a spoon, and tossing off so many glasses of wine that Selena glanced at him rather nervously as she herself nibbled a biscuit.
“Emma does cook well!” he said at last, as he rose to go. “It’s all right, Miss Gault, dear. You needn’t look so anxious. I’ve got a head of iron.” And immediately, as if to prove he had such a head, he felt it to be incumbent upon him to say something affectionate and tender. “I believe,” he burst out, “I must have just the same sort of feeling for you that he had!”
These were his parting words; but it was not until he was sitting in a third-class smoking-carriage of the Southwestern train that he began to wonder why it was that Miss Gault’s face had such a wry smile upon it as he shook hands with her at her door.
He was alone in the carriage, and, windy though it was, he kept the window open and sat facing the engine. The rush of air sobered him, and he observed with interest the scattered lights of King’s Barton as the train jolted along its high embankment between that village and the Evershot meadows. He wondered humorously to himself what Jason would say that evening when he learnt of the new invasion of his privacy.
His mood saddened before the train stopped at Blacksod.
“If I knew I were only going to live five more years,” he thought, “I would give away four of them if I were allowed to spend the other one, day and night, with Christie!” And then, as the cold wind made him shiver a little and turn up his coat-collar, “I wonder,” he thought, “whether I’m just weak and cowardly in not leaving them all and carrying Christie off to London, let happen what may?”
The train was now following an umbrageous embankment parallel with the river Lunt. The muddy smell of that sluggish water, which the Ramsgard boys irreverently named “the Bog-stream,” assailed his nostrils, bringing with it a feeling of obscure misery. A chilliness in his bones, a weariness in his brain, gave now to all the events of the day a sombre colour, like the colour of river-mud.
As the locomotive slowly lessened its speed, he tried in vain to recall those moments of happiness … the vision of the bed of pinks … the sweet emanation from the very body of death. But in place of these things all he could think of was obdurate roots in clinging clay, sparkles and blotches that bore no human meaning, hammering of nails into coffins, men with lanterns in slaughterhouse yards, and the pallid loins of Bob Weevil streaked with the green slime of Lenty Pond.