Mr. Malakite at Weymouth
Wolf’s inmost soul seemed torn up, like a piece of turf under a sharp ploughshare, as, driven by a power beyond his resistance, he put one foot in front of the other in his obstinate march to the Malakite house.
As he moved on past the shopwindows oblivious of everything but the drama within him, he tried to anticipate the result of what he was projecting. His “mythology” had always implied for him some sort of mystic participation in a deep occult struggle going on in the hidden reservoirs of Nature. Stripped of it, there would be nothing left but a stoical endurance—endurance of his own misery and a few attempts to soften the misery of others! He would be left with a soul that had the power of moving his arms and legs, the power of throwing itself into other people’s tortured nerves—and that would be all! He would be able to deny himself this and that for the sake of these people, paying back what he owed, sharing the burden of the cruelty of the ultimate Power—but that would be all! The old Wolf, the old, obsessed medium for lovely, magical, invisible influences, would be gone forever!
And even now, if he could only stiffen his will to leave Christie early that night, he might save what he was losing. Oh, what cruelty the Power behind life possessed, to transfix him upon such a dilemma! Oh, what cruelty it possessed! Well, he would defy it. That was the word. He would defy it. Whether he chose his “mythology” or whether he chose his satisfaction, this ultimate thing was something so inhuman, that defiance was the only retort! If he chose his “mythology” it would not be in submission to this cause of all suffering. It would be a league with invisible forces that resembled himself—compassionate forces, that were also defying this inhuman thing. Dante had said, “E la sua voluntade è nostra pace.” He would reverse this saying. The will of the power behind life was clearly that human nerves should be confronted by monstrous, hideous dilemmas. To the end of his days he would protest! He would be the champion of human nerves against this ultimate tormentor. If he kept his self-respect and left Christie in peace, he would use his “mythology” to defy this power. If he seduced Christie and lost his life-illusion, he would still defy this power. …
His mechanical advance had brought him now to the turn into the narrower street. In three minutes he would be in Christie’s room! He took off his hat and looked up at the drifting rain-clouds. The gusty rain made it impossible for him to keep his eyes open; but with his eyelids tight shut he cursed the power behind life. “You Mukalog up there!” he muttered. “You scurvy Mukalog up there!”
It was not ten minutes past nine by the small clock upon Christie’s mantelpiece when she and Wolf returned to her sitting-room and closed the door, after washing up the supper-things in the little alcove between that room and the girl’s bedroom.
Wolf sank down in the chair by the fire which faced the window, and leisurely lit a cigarette; while Christie, seated upon a four-legged stool opposite him, a stool embroidered with pale early-Victorian pansies by the hands of her mother, leaned forward towards the bars, and with a thin outstretched bare arm prodded the coals into flame.
This done, she impetuously rose to her feet; and taking a “spill” from one of the blue vases that stood on each side of the clock, she also lit a cigarette. And then, resettling herself upon the stool, one lean arm encircling her knees and the other holding the cigarette, she turned her head round and surveyed the tumbled litter of books, some open and some shut, that covered the lavender-coloured sofa.
“No; I’ve tired of Tristram Shandy,” she said. “In fact, I’ve got at present a reaction against all those old books which are so entirely men’s books—full of masculine prejudices, masculine vices, masculine complacency! You know, Wolf, I think it’s such a pity that the best old books should all be written by men. What I’d like to read would be an Elizabethan Jane Austen, a Jacobean Emily Brontë, an eighteenth-century George Eliot. It’s so annoying to me that the best women writers all belong to the time when the custom had stopped of calling a spade a spade.”
There was something so quaint to his mind in Christie’s fragile identity being stirred by the urge of drastic realism, that he looked at her in amazement.
“They’re not so reticent now, are they?” he said.
But it was difficult for him to give his full attention to this dialogue between them. Another dialogue, far more important, was going on in his own mind. With concentrated interest he had already noticed that she was wearing brown silk stockings under her thin brown skirt. The sight of her bare arms made him shiver at the thought of her slipping off those stockings! It seemed absurd that he dared not even kneel down and unbutton the straps of her little-girl black slippers! The thought, “She’s never had a lover … no one has ever undressed her … she doesn’t know what it is to be idolized from head to foot,” ran like ravishing little drops of quicksilver through his tingling nerves. “Under that brown dress, under all she’s got on, she’s as slim and slippery as a bluebell-stalk pulled up by the root!”
“I wouldn’t call them reticent today,” he repeated aloud. But his mind raced back over the whole course of his life in Dorset as he looked at her now … so virginal … and so free from conscience!
Far more—oh, far more than Gerda, who seemed like a recognized, an accepted portion of his destiny—did this evasive little being seem to embody all his hovering, intangible dreams! It was hard to shake off a quivering cloud, beyond the cloud of cigarette-smoke, that dimmed his vision, as he looked at her. How he longed to snatch away that brown dress, wintry-withered as it was, that hid her from him!
“Not reticent, perhaps,” she was saying. “But it’s utterly different in these days, Wolf. They don’t do it for simple, mischievous pleasure. They do it for principle’s sake, for the sake of science, for the sake of a new fashion in art. It’s all premeditated and deliberate.”
He began to feel such an overpowering desire to seize upon her now, that the idea of losing his life-illusion seemed like tearing a mask from his face, a mask that hurt his flesh.
“How does your own writing go, Chris?” he asked in a forced, queer voice.
She reached over to the sofa and piled Tristram Shandy on the top of Humphrey Clinker, and the Anatomy of Melancholy on the top of Tristram Shandy. As she did this she smiled sideways at him, while the smoke from her cigarette rose up as if from a hidden crucible of incense pressed against her knees. He had noticed before, that she never said anything important to him except while making some physical movement to distract attention from her words!
Reaching over still further, in order to balance the Urn-Burial on the top of the Anatomy, “I’ve finished,” she murmured, “my seventh chapter.”
“Is it a real story, then?” he asked, wondering if she would yield to him without a struggle if he took her quickly by the wrists.
Her defensive gesture this time, as she responded to his question, was to flick off a small grey ash upon the cover of Hydriotaphia. He had long ago observed with an amused interest what a dislike to the use of ashtrays she had.
“I hope it’s real!” she murmured, in her most straw-like voice.
“The best thing would be,” he thought to himself, “just to take hold of her by her hands and lift her up!” Aloud he said. “What’s its title, if you don’t mind my asking that?”
“Guess, Wolf!” she said, without a smile. Indeed, she had never looked graver or more concerned than she looked then. “I thought of it when I was out marketing in High Street the other day.”
“The Grey Feather?” he flung out, as he rose with a bound from his chair and groped on the floor. He had caught sight of the feather lying there at his feet. It must have fluttered out when she moved the book. As he picked it up, his contact with Christie’s floor made him think of Gerda’s floor … which had so different a carpet!
There was a moment, as he replaced the feather, when a featherweight decided it. What he fancied made him pause was a sudden memory of the confiding repose of Gerda’s expression as she bent so closely over Theodoric the Icelander; but when he recalled all this later, the conclusion he came to was that the touch of the feather itself had restrained him!
“The Grey Feather … is your title,” he repeated, while Christie managed with fair success to conceal her face in a dense cloud of smoke.
“No,” she said, “I’ve called it Slate.”
The astonishment with which he received this piece of news was quite genuine.
“Because of the view from your window?” he enquired.
“No. Because of—”
But the creaking of his wicker-chair, as he resumed his seat with a helpless groan, drowned her faint words.
“I didn’t hear, Chris,” he said. But he knew by the way she raised her chin that nothing would induce her to repeat what she had just uttered.
“What I’m trying to do, Wolf,” she went on, in a tone that seemed to him to have in it something like a challenge, “is to express a point of view entirely feminine!”
“It will be the view of a feminine Elemental, then,” he said to himself. “Does she think that she’s like the rest of them? God! It’ll be the view of a sylph in the Lunt mists, or of Jason’s Nymph in Lenty Pond!”
“All the clever ones nowadays just copy men,” she remarked, with the same nuance of defiance, holding her chin high and sitting very straight upon her stool. “And none of the men themselves, or hardly any of them, enjoy writing outrageous things. They do it from artistic duty … and that’s why it’s all so different from reality, don’t you think so? And so dull, as well as so disgusting! Just imagine what it would be like, Wolf, to have a Jane Austen ready to write of the most scandalous things! She’d write really mischievously, with zest and satisfaction, not like a solemn scientific journal.”
“Well, I’m sure I wish you luck with your Slate, Chris! Don’t sponge out anything, though, I beg you. I mean, don’t tear anything up, however much you revise!”
Even while he was uttering this harmless encouragement, some devilish analytical self-consciousness in him was noting the fact that he didn’t like the thought of Christie’s appreciation of any sort of Rabelaisianism. “Christ! What a selfish, lecherous demon I am!” he said to himself. “I suppose I want her response to my lovemaking to be her one and only awareness of the amorous element in life!”
He became at this moment intensely anxious to clear up certain things in his own mind.
“What feather is that, Christie, that you keep in your Urn-Burial?”
She looked at him very straight now, with the eager, level stare of an interested child.
“A heron’s,” she answered. And then, as if for the mere pleasure of repeating the word: “A heron’s, Wolf. I found it just exactly a year ago … two months before I first saw you. I was walking by myself in those Lunt meadows that you see from the lower road to King’s Barton. You know where I mean? I was walking by myself along the riverbank.”
Wolf continued to listen intently to every word, as the girl went on with her story; but even as he listened, his mind was still struggling with the shock of finding himself so shamefully possessive as to dislike the idea of her encountering any sort of amorousness where it was disassociated from himself. “I really am scandalous,” he thought. “I’d like her to be virginal in mind, body, soul, spirit, intellect, nerves, humour!”
His thoughts, before she had finished her story, had wandered a second time from what she was saying. “Is this interest of hers in these shameless books inherited from the old man?” he thought. “Is it a vice in her, like my own?” And his mind recalled the trembling, drunken ecstasy with which he had read that appalling book in the library-window.
“And so I picked up the feather out of the mud and brought it home,” she concluded; “but whether the heron caught another minnow, or whether the hawk frightened it away for the rest of the day, I shall never know.”
“I wish you’d let me see a page … just a single page of Slate,” he said presently. “Somehow I cannot imagine the manuscript of a real story of yours. I cannot see you writing it, Chris, nor how you would hold your pen.”
The colour went to Christie’s cheeks. “Oh, Wolf,” she cried, “don’t … don’t ever ask me to let you see what I write! I love to tell you about it; but I think I’d die if you ever saw it.”
“Oh, all right … all right, sweetheart,” he said soothingly. “You talk as if I asked to see your shift! By the way, Chris, I suppose you don’t realize that I never have seen that room in there where you spend your nights?”
Christie smiled with intense amusement at this. She rose lightly, without a trace of embarrassment, took a candle from the mantelpiece, threw her cigarette into the fire, and opened the door into the alcove. A second door on the further side of this recess she opened with the same docile unconcern, standing aside to let him enter, while the flame of her candle flickered in the draught.
Her apparent complete freedom from any self-consciousness as she did all this had a complicated effect upon Wolf’s mood. It made it possible for him to sit down upon her bed, and to stare in silence at the darkness between the white curtains of her window. It made it possible for him to ponder as to what her feelings and thoughts were, night by night, left to herself in this oblong little room. It made it possible for him to ask her whether she used the green lamp he saw standing on the chest of drawers on one side of the mirror, or contented herself with a couple of candles which, in old-fashioned Dresden candlesticks, stood on a little table by the bed’s head. But it also seemed to make any attempt at lovemaking curiously difficult!
Christie slid down into a chair between the little table and the window; and as she did so she explained to him that she used the lamp till she was actually in bed, and then lit the candles to read by.
“I’ve often wondered,” she said to him, “whether you can see my light as you come home from King’s Barton.”
“And I’ve often wondered,” he answered, “which of the lights I’ve seen from the top of Babylon Hill was yours.”
“We neither of us know,” she said sadly.
“Neither of us,” he echoed.
The flame of the candle she had picked up from the parlour-mantelpiece was now blowing sideways, and the grease guttering down. “I’ll light the lamp and then you’ll see how it looks,” she said eagerly. “It’s not an ordinary green. It’s a peculiar kind of green. I wish we did know whether it could be seen from Babylon Hill!”
Wolf turned half-round on her bed and let his shoulders rest against the woodwork above the pillow. There he watched her as she stood with her back to him at the chest of drawers, busied with the lamp. As the green light slowly awakened into being, there came over him an overpowering sense of this fleeting moment. Christie’s small head, dark and dainty in that emerald-coloured glow, the shadowy nape of her little neck, the dusky fall of her straight sepia-brown dress, hovered before him at the end of that white bed, like things seen in a magic crystal. He dared not breathe lest he should break the spell! It may have been that unusual greenish light, glimpsed across the old-fashioned counterpane stretched before him like an expanse of shining water, or it may have been a hovering emanation from some old forgotten dream, unfolding, like an invisible nocturnal flower, from the girl’s pillow. He could not explain it. But whatever it was, the sight of her there, bent down over that lamp’s wick, enthralled him with a feeling he had never anticipated, with a sense of the possibilities of new feelings beyond anything he had known! When his normal consciousness came back to him, it came back with a heavy sigh; and with it came the thought, like the galloping of a black horse against the horizon, that when this girl was dead and he was dead, that was the absolute end! Dreams of anything but of such an end were fancies—pitiful human fancies! Moments as perfect as this required death as their inevitable counterpoise.
With a furtive movement of his shoulders he suddenly found himself meeting the girl’s steady gaze, as her face looked out at him from the little square looking-glass. With her hand still regulating the newly-lit wick of the green lamp, she was staring directly at him out of this looking-glass, staring with a fixed, calm, dreamy stare, like that of one whose mind is full of the end of some exciting book, just laid down.
“Take down your hair, Christie,” he said in a low voice, as he met this strange gaze. “I’ve never seen you with your hair down.”
She gave him the most whimsical smile at this; but it flickered away as quickly as it came, and a frown appeared between her arched eyebrows.
“I don’t mind,” she murmured, with a sigh, “if you really want me to. But what’s the use of it, Wolf? My hair’s not pretty. It’ll probably spoil your illusion of me.”
But Wolf’s heart had begun to beat now with the old unconquerable beating, the beat of the rise and fall of the sea, drawing close to its destined shore. “Take it down, Christie. I must see you with it down!”
Calmly and quietly, having given the shiny little knob of the lamp its final adjustment, she lifted her thin bare arms to her head and began to take out her hairpins. Her movements as she did this had the obedient docility, humble and submissive, of an Arabian slave.
Wolf’s position, as he sat on the edge of the bed, with his back against the woodwork, had grown extremely uncomfortable. Nothing would have induced him to rest his dirty boots upon that glimmering counterpane; but his body was twisted askew in consequence of this self-denial, and the woodwork hurt his head. This physical discomfort had the effect of destroying what remained of that moment of vision, and of once more rousing in his nerves a spasm of the old tyrannous lust.
From that little oval head by the green lamp the waves of dusky hair slipped down now to the girl’s slim waist.
“Oh, Chris, it’s beautiful! You look perfectly beautiful!” he cried hoarsely, sitting up straight on the edge of the bed and stretching out one of his hands towards her with a fumbling movement. “Come here, Chris, and let me see you closer!”
Moving calmly, and with perfect self-possession, she came towards him till only a yard of floor divided them. Then she stopped, fixing him with the same dreamy stare as if she had been walking in her sleep.
He got up upon his feet now; and between the light of the candle in the silver candlestick, which she had put down upon the little table at the bed’s head, and the light of the green lamp upon the chest of drawers, they stood looking at each other, like two ensorcerized automatons under the power of an invisible magician.
She had pulled the green lamp, after lighting it, to the edge of the chest of drawers, so that its globe was now reflected in the looking-glass, a reflection that seemed to push backwards in some mysterious way everything else reflected there. The whole contents, indeed, of the illuminated mirror seemed to fall into a long, dwindling perspective, like the outlet from a shadowy cave, a tunnel-like outlet, full of mosses and ferns and tree-roots, which were all silhouetted against the round little circle of empty sky at the end.
Contrary to his own will, which would fain have hypnotized her to approach him, he found himself glancing aside from Christie’s steady look, very much as a wild animal, hesitating whether to leap or not, might turn aside from the conscious expectancy of its prey.
This avoidance of her eyes gave him a moment’s respite, during which his glance plunged into the receding depths of that looking-glass, depths lit up by the lamp as if by the swollen green bud of a luminous water-lily.
Round that green globe little phosphorescent rays flickered and darted. “If I meet her eyes again,” he thought, “she will come to me. She will let me undress her.”
A strange fear came upon him; and he felt as if he couldn’t take his eyes away from the looking-glass. Those darting radiations became like the transparent moons, surrounded by dim haloes, that move along at the bottom of ponds under the sticky feet of skimming water-flies. In the turmoil of his agitation, with the sense upon him that this was the crisis towards which his life had been moving for weeks and months, that mirror seemed no longer to reflect Christie’s bedroom. It seemed to him to be reflecting the mysterious depths of Lenty Pond!
His mind felt as if it were being torn asunder, so terrible was the swaying of his tightrope of indecision! On the one hand he knew that in a moment he must draw down upon the bed this hushed, submissive figure, standing thus patient and docile before him. On the other hand, a mounting fear—a fear that had unspeakable awe in it, that had a supernatural shudder in it—held him back. Beat by beat of his heart it held him back. It tugged at him like a chain fixed to a post.
“Slip off that sad-looking dress, I beg you, Chris! Let me see you all in white!”
Had he whispered those words aloud? Had he only thought them?
The form he loved best of all was here by his side … pliant … soft … submissive. This bed was her bed. They two were alone, without the faintest risk of interruption. Long ago had the last train from Weymouth come in!
It was Christie herself who made the next move. Naturally and easily she slid down by his side on the edge of the bed … and then … what was this? Had those thin bare arms been raised to her shoulders to untie the fastenings of her dress?
But still he was staring, obstinately, almost rudely—staring past her drooping profile into that devilish mirror!
The thought hit him with a kind of mockery how he had played with that lovely Shakespearean phrase about a white peeled willow-wand on his journey down to Dorset. Well, he was in a world of whiteness now. Phantasmal was the glimmer of her white counterpane … phantasmal the whiteness of her profile against the silky fall of loosened hair. There were white reflections in that mirror too! It was as if a supernatural musician had suddenly begun playing a “White Mass”!
“Slip off that sad-looking dress, Chris!” Had he really uttered those words aloud? Or had it been no more than his heart speaking to his heart? Was one of her fragile shoulders free now of that dress … and become white, as everything else was white, at that fatal moment?
“You’re looking at my mirror, Wolf?” Ah! She was speaking to him at last! But why did not the sound of her voice relax the tension? “It’s old, that looking-glass. It belonged to my mother.”
His eyes seemed to be dimmed now by a film of gauzy mist, which, as it floated before him, made everything vague and fluctuating. And then—without a second’s warning—there appeared, at the end of the reflected perspective in that mirror on the chest of drawers, the lamentable countenance of the man on the Waterloo steps!
The pitiful face looked straight into his face, and it was in vain that he struggled to turn away from it.
All the sorrows in the world seemed incarnated in that face, all the oppressions that are done under the sun, all the outrages, all the wrongs! They seemed to cry shame upon him, these things; as if the indecision that tore at his vitals were a portion of whatever it was that caused such suffering. He instinctively lifted his hands to his eyes and pressed his knuckles against his eyeballs. “Chris!” he cried hoarsely … “Little Chris! my little Chris!” … just as if her form were being carried down some receding distance like a lost Eurydice.
She moved up closely to his side then, and touched his clenched hands with her own, not trying to pull them away from his eyes, but just laying her own fingers over them. “What is it, Wolf?” she whispered with vibrating alarm. “What is it?”
He reeled awkwardly to one side, and, snatching his hands away from her, sank down against her pillow. For a second or two the struggle within him gave him a sensation as if the very core of his consciousness—that “hard little crystal” within the nucleus of his soul—were breaking into two halves! Then he felt as if his whole being were flowing away in water, whirling away, like a mist of rain, out upon the night, over the roofs, over the darkened hills! There came a moment’s sinking into nothingness, into a grey gulf of nonexistence; and then it was as if a will within him that was beyond thought, gathered itself together in that frozen chaos and rose upwards—rose upwards like a shining-scaled fish, electric, vibrant, taut, and leapt into the greenish-coloured vapour that filled the room!
The part of his consciousness that remained still clouded seemed quivering with a vision of the girl with her hands raised to her shoulders in the act of slipping off her dusky dress; but as his full awareness returned to him he saw that she had left his side and was standing by the green lamp, her eyes fixed reproachfully upon him out of the foreground of that mirror of her mother’s—of that woman’s who believed in spirits—and her fingers occupied in fastening up her hair.
Automatically, and with a hand that shook, like a man’s who has seen a ghost, he took out his packet of cigarettes and lit a match.
His cigarette alight, he got up from the bed; and walking with shaky knees across the room—he felt far more dizzy in the head than under the power of Mr. Urquhart’s Malmsey!—he offered his packet to her. But Christie, with eyes whose pupils were so large that they completely dominated her face, refused his offer with a wordless shake of her head.
The girl’s hands seemed to him to be shaking too, as she thrust in the last hairpins and pressed her two palms against the sides of her small head.
“Come,” she said, “I’ll put out the lamp now, and we’ll go back to the sitting-room.”
When they were back by the fire, they both instinctively drew their chairs close up to the bars and held out their arms towards the warmth. Long-drawn shivers kept running through Wolf’s body, as if he had been drenched in floods of ice-cold rain; and he felt certain that the slender form by his side was experiencing an identical sensation.
At the moment of seating herself there—it was in a chair this time, and not upon her four-legged stool—she had given Wolf a look that filled him with self-reproach. “I have hurt her feelings,” he said to himself, “in the one unpardonable way.”
Listlessly taking up the silver-knobbed poker from the side of the fender, he broke a great smouldering lump of coal into blazing flame.
“Did I,” he said to himself, “actually beg her to undress, and then, as soon as she began to do it, act like a madman?”
“I can’t have done that,” he repeated. “I can’t have done that to my little Chris.”
“The rain seems to have cleared off, doesn’t it?”
As he made this remark, he felt as if not he at all, but some sardonic Lord Carfax, were making it, in cold-blooded mockery!
“I hadn’t noticed it,” she answered faintly; and then, turning her head towards the window, “Yes,” she said, “it seems to have cleared up.”
“I must be,” thought Wolf, “the most heartless, self-centred brute in Dorsetshire. Mr. Manley must be a considerate man of honour compared with me.”
“The wind’s still blowing,” he said aloud. “Wind without rain,” he said, “is a different thing altogether from wind with rain. Don’t you think so, Chris?”
“Very different,” murmured the girl, almost inaudibly.
“If I’d made love to her, in there, on her bed,” he thought, “would it have meant everything? And if it had … would we have been miserable like this, or happy?” He turned his chair round and reached over to the sofa, picking up the volume of Sir Thomas Browne.
“Let me read to you a little, Chris dear,” he said gently.
“As you like, Wolf,” came the faint response, as she propped her chin on the palms of her two hands and stared into the fire.
He turned the pages of the book, sadly and slowly, carefully moving the grey heron’s-feather to the middle of the “Religio,” where it would not be disturbed.
When he came to one of those majestic, far-echoing passages—passages that had always struck him as superior, after their fashion, to anything else in literature, except certain single lines in Milton—he set himself to intone the familiar cadences in a low, monotonous singsong.
He dared not give more than a furtive glance now and then at the delicate profile beside him; but his impression was—whether a true or a false one he could not be sure—that Christie was not unaffected by those plangent, cosmogonic litanies.
As for himself, as he read on, it seemed to him that the bitterness of their fate did soften a little. These human contrarities, were they not, after all, so much sandalwood, so much cinnamon, burned in the bonfires of chance, but liberating a sweet, strange smoke, purged of the worst misery of despair? “But the iniquity of oblivion,” he read, “blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it. Time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian’s horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we compute our felicities by the advantage of our good names, since bad have equal durations, and Thersites is like to live as long as Agamemnon. Who knows whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time? … The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the equinox? … In vain do individuals hope for immortality, or any patent from oblivion, in preservations below the moon; men have been deceived even in their flatteries above the sun, and studied conceits to perpetuate their names in heaven. The various cosmography of that part hath already varied the names of contrived constellations; Nimrod is lost in Orion, and Osyris in the Dog-star.”
As he murmured these rhythmical dirges with his lips and got a kind of comfort from them and a doubtful hope that Christie did too, his own mind—like hers no doubt—went circling the bruised ground of their trouble, of this wretched dilemma of his, like a dragonfly hovering over a stagnant pool.
“I must have,” he kept thinking, “the most selfish and heartless soul in Dorsetshire. Mr. Manley of Willum’s Mill must be far more aware of other people’s feelings than I am! Oh, God, what would Carfax say now? He’d say, ‘So this is your delicacy—this is your precious consideration—to hurt a girl’s feelings by your bloody equivocations far worse than by all the ravishings in the world!’ ” As little by little the opiate of Sir Thomas’s rhythms soothed his remorse, he shook away the thought of Carfax. But Jason’s “Lord in London” had no sooner vanished than his father’s skull took up the tale. “Your metaphysical virtue, my most moral son, has caused more unhappiness this night to this Love of yours than all my sensuality ever caused to any woman! And what’s all the fuss about? Nature can right herself. Nature can justify herself. It’s these withdrawings and shirkings that do the harm!”
As he went on intoning the sonorous sentences with half his attention, Wolf seemed to see himself, under those imaginary strictures, reduced to the meanness of a cowardly hypocrite. His mother’s hard, gallant voice joined in the chorus. “I have only one word for you, Wolf,” he heard her say, “and that is contempt!”
But underneath all these fanciful upbraidings, underneath the real comfort of his chanting of Hydriotaphia, there steadily went on gathering itself together, in the subsoil of Wolf’s being, a certain obstinate recovery of his secret soul.
“It was my snatching at you like that,” he whispered to Christie, in an unspoken dialogue, “that was the wicked thing! I should have made you far more unhappy if I hadn’t seen that face. That face saved us both, and Gerda too!”
What kept hitting him to the heart as he glanced sideways at Christie’s profile was its innocence. “She doesn’t look like a grown woman whose deepest self-respect has been outraged,” he said to himself. “She looks like a proud little girl whose hidden fairytale has been violated by some heavy-footed elder.”
Wolf was honest enough with himself, in the midst of all these crisscross communings, to recognize that there was, somewhere within him, a furtive upwelling of profound gratitude to the gods. His life-illusion had been given back to him! He was still the same Wolf Solent who had seen that face on the steps, who had seen that animal feeding in the paddock at Basingstoke, who had heard the milk-cans clattering on the platform at Sandbourne Port. He would not have to return to Preston Lane, to take up his burden, with his soul a shapeless lump of whale’s blubber! He was still himself. He was still the old Wolf, whose philosophy—such as it was—kept its hand on the rudder.
“O Christie, O Christie!” he cried to her in his heart, “I couldn’t have been any good to you, I couldn’t have been myself with you any more, if that face in your glass hadn’t stopped me! It would have changed everything, Chris! It would have ruined everything.”
The inner voice of self-dialogue died down, as the outer voice of his monotonous intoning sank into silence; and the only sound in the room was the ticking of the clock and the faint, weird whisper of the wind in the chimney.
“Christie,” he said aloud; and so deep had been the silence, and so drowned had they both been in their separate thoughts, that the syllables of her name seemed to fall into an invisible stretch of water.
She lifted her head from her hands and sat up straight, fixing her gaze upon him in the old, steady, unfaltering manner.
“Yes, Wolf?” she murmured.
“I want to tell you something, Christie.”
As he spoke he couldn’t help recalling the advice he had so often given to Darnley. He had told Darnley to explain everything to Mattie. Ah, it was easier to tell a person to explain everything than to do it oneself!
“I was reckless just now, Chris. I just snatched at the chance! It seemed so wonderful our being alone. But do you know what stopped me? Don’t look like that, my precious! You’ll understand when I tell you.”
“What, Wolf?” she whispered.
“The day I left London from Waterloo Station, I saw a tramp on the steps there.” As he uttered these simple words he experienced a most curious sensation. It was as if he were smashing with his clenched hand one of those glass coverings which on certain express-trains preserve from casual contact the electric bell that has the power of stopping the train. “It was a man,” Wolf went on; “and the look on his face was terrible in its misery. It must have been a look of that kind on the face of someone—though his sufferers were children, weren’t they?—that made Ivan Karamazov ‘return the ticket.’ But all this time down here—that was March the third—ten months of my life, I have remembered that look. It has become to me like a sort of conscience, a sort of test for everything I—” He stopped abruptly; for a spasm of ice-cold integrity in his mind whispered suddenly, “Don’t be dramatic now!”
“A test for everything you—” Christie repeated, showing more spirit in her expression than he had seen there since they returned to her sitting-room.
“Well, a test for tonight, anyway!” he added, with the flicker of a smile.
She pondered for a minute with puckered forehead.
“Enough to make me do up my hair again!” she said, while little wrinkles of amusement began to appear at the corners of her eyes.
He longed to ask her whether she had actually heard him beg her to take off her dress. He felt completely confused about that whole scene in her bedroom—confused as to what he had said and what he had only wished to say. Most of all he felt bewildered as to what her feelings had been between that green lamp and that glimmering counterpane! Had she really lifted those cold bare arms, that he looked at now, so calmly, to unfasten that old-fashioned gown?
He decided, as he glanced at her shoulders at this moment, that it would have been those particular fastenings she would have to unloose to get off the brown dress.
“I wonder whether our time together tonight,” he said bitterly, “will have helped to make your writing more what you want it to be and less of the sort that ‘copies men’?”
Christie gave a faint toss of her head and a faint tilt of her arched eyebrows. She got up from her seat and shook out her wide brown skirt with both hands. The combination of these gestures filled Wolf with discomfort; for it was as if he had said to her something so brutal that she had to shake it from her petticoats, like burdock-seed or cuckoo-spit!
“I really was serious, Wolf,” she said gravely, “when I told you just now that I’d almost sooner be dead than read to you anything I’ve written. I’m not even sure”—here she moved to the window and laid her hand on the sash of the closed pane—“that I shan’t have to change its title now.”
“I’ll forget,” said Wolf grimly. “It’s the one thing I’m good at. I don’t know now whether it was Slate or Slates!”
She turned away and lowered the top sash of the window, letting in a great gust of damp night-air.
The flame of the two candles on the chimneypiece blew wildly to the left; and the third one, in the flat silver candlestick, which she had brought back from the bedroom and had put down on her tea-table, began to gutter so extremely that a solid buttress of white grease formed itself against its side. Many loose pieces of paper were swept off their resting-places and were blown across the floor.
“I should think you’d aired your room enough already,” remarked Wolf, pressing his knuckles against the volume of Sir Thomas so that it should not flutter as some of the books were doing.
“It smells of peat-bogs!” cried Christie excitedly, holding her head out of the window.
“It must be a south wind,” he muttered, rising to his feet and moving one of the flickering candles so as to adjust its guttering. “It must be blowing across from High Stoy; so it can’t be peat you smell. I expect it’s Lunt mud,” he added morosely.
“Whatever it is, it smells delicious to me,” she answered. “I wish we were both on the top of Melbury Bub!”
“I wish we were both at the bottom of Lenty Pond!” cried Wolf fiercely.
She turned at that, startled by his tone, and closed the window with a jerk.
“What is it, Wolf? Why did you say that? I should think I’m the one to say that, not you! Everything that’s happened this evening has been exactly as you wanted it to happen, hasn’t it? Why aren’t you satisfied, then?”
The indignation in her tone was in a way a relief to him. “Let’s have the worst,” he thought. “Better in the open, while I’m here, than after I’m gone.”
“Christie,” he began, “I have, I know, thought only of myself … and yet I do love … you know I do love you!”
She looked at him scornfully.
“What you always do, Wolf, is to get out of things by accusing yourself … but if you really felt what other people feel, you would—” She broke off. “Oh, I don’t know what you’d do! But at least you wouldn’t be having it both ways.”
Almost automatically, in spite of his remorse, something seemed to shut up within him like the shutting of a door that closes inwards.
“You’re unfair—” he murmured.
Her eyes flashed. “Everything that happens,” she cried passionately, “is only something to be fixed up in your own mind. Once you’ve got it arranged there, the whole thing’s settled … all is well. What you never seem to realize, for all your talk about ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ is that events are something outside any one person’s mind. Nothing’s finished … until you take in the feelings of everyone concerned! And what’s more, Wolf,” she went on, “not only do you refuse really to understand other people; but I sometimes think there’s something in you yourself you’re never even aware of, with all your self-accusations. It’s this blindness to what you’re really doing that lets you off, not your gestures, not even your sideway flashes of compassion.”
A certain direct and childish humility in Wolf’s nature came to the surface now under this attack.
“I expect all that you say is true, Christie dear, and that you are ‘letting me off’ yourself, in spite of what you say, lightly enough, if all were known. I’m a strange one, I suppose, and there it is!” He smiled ruefully. “But we’re a fair pair when it comes to that, aren’t we, my dear?” he added. “And all the same, if I hadn’t seen that face—”
All the fire of her indignant arraignment seemed to die out at these words; and as her frail figure sank down on the rose-embroidered sofa, it seemed to be entirely divested of any spirit.
“If that man’s face,” she sighed wearily, “hadn’t appeared to you I should have known tonight—”
He moved a step towards her.
“What’s that, Christie?”
She leaned forward and her eyes narrowed between her eyelids in an expression he had never seen on her face before. Then she continued, with a peculiar solemnity, almost like a young neophyte repeating a fatal ritual, “I should have known … tonight … what … now … I … shall … never … know!”
Staring at that little oval face, with that strange expression of finality upon it, he muttered huskily: “Christie, Christie, I love you. I love you.” His voice had a groaning intensity, like that of a branch creaking in a storm. “I have been thinking only of myself. But I love you, Christie! I love you more than anyone in the world!”
She looked steadily into his face; and thus they waited, listening as before to the weird wailing sound that the wind was still making in the chimney.
This whistling of the wind brought suddenly to his mind that night at the pigsty when he had gathered together his deepest powers of resistance. He burst out with his favourite quotation from King Lear: “The goujeres shall devour them, flesh and fell, ere they shall make us weep! We’ll see ’em starve first!”
He caught her hands and drew her up to her feet with a flashing look that was almost exultant: “He that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven and fire us hence like foxes!”
When he released her, a most whimsical and penetrating smile flickered over her face.
“I believe that something has happened tonight, or has not happened, that has taken some great weight off your mind!” she said. “Is that it? You look relieved and relaxed … different altogether from when we had supper.” … As she spoke she glanced at the clock, and his own eyes followed. Together they realized that it was a quarter to twelve.
“Oh, what will Gerda do?” he cried. “Christ! she’ll be so vexed!” Blankly and irritably he looked at Christie; and in that expression of confused dismay there was—and he knew well enough there was—a faint tinge of reproach. But the girl was apparently too tired to notice this.
He was unable to catch the faintest irony upon her anxious, sympathetic face, as she let him out by the little side-door into the street. It did occur to him, however, as he strode rapidly down the echoing High Street, to wonder a little uneasily what kind of expression her face would wear when, alone in her bedroom, she looked at herself in her mirror. It was not, all the same, till he was opposite Mrs. Herbert’s darkened house that the full poignancy of one of her remarks hit him with its barbed arrowhead. “I wonder if that will be her destiny,” he thought.
“She was perfectly right about my selfishness, though. What a brute I am! Oh, my truelove Christie! What I do make you put up with in one way and another!”
He stopped when he reached the pigsty; for there was the light in Gerda’s bedroom!
How different this homecoming was from all that he had expected! Well, that was the way things worked out! Instead of either of the great clear horns of Fate’s dilemma, a sort of blurred and woolly forehead of the wild goat Chance!
He had managed to keep his life-illusion. His precious “mythology” could live still. But at what expense?
“If you hadn’t seen that face, I should have known tonight what now I shall never know!” O fool … fool … fool!
He crossed the road with dragging steps and opened the little iron gate as quietly as he could.
“I have thought only of myself,” he muttered, as he shut the gate behind him; “and yet I love you, Christie. I love you! I love you!”