Ripeness Is All
“You’ll be sure to be back for tea!”
These words were uttered by Gerda as she stood in their doorway, with Lobbie Torp at her side.
“Make it fairly late, then,” said Wolf. “I don’t want to cut short our walk.”
“The best part of our walk will be looking forward to our return,” remarked Wolf’s companion, with a smile that Wolf saw reflected, as if it were a bunch of honeysuckle, in Gerda’s delighted face.
“Well, I’ll have tea ready for you, whether Wolf’s home or not!” cried the excited girl.
“And I’ll get back from my walk as soon as you do,” threw in Lobbie Torp. “I’m going down by the Lunt to cut a new walking-stick. … Bob’s going with me. He likes the other kind … proper shop-sticks … but he’s coming all the same. Shall I cut you a stick too, Lord Carfax?”
The visitor turned to the boy with the gravest attention.
“An ash-stick, Lobbie? Could you grub up an ash root? No! I suppose it wants a spade for that! But an ash-stick, with its own root for handle, is just what I am on the lookout for.” He turned round to Gerda with sly, screwed-up eyelids. “You’re sure you won’t change your mind, Mrs. Solent, and come with us? … and Lobbie too?” he added, with an afterthought that brought wrinkles of roguery into his face.
Wolf had already caught the amorous glances with which their visitor had enwrapped Gerda. It was just as if some drooping “Gloire de Dijon” rose in a deserted garden were enwrapped by a rich slant of August sunshine, full of the heavy poppy-scents of all the yellow cornfields it has crossed, negligent, careless, and yet massively intent! “Why don’t you and Lobbie come with us?” Wolf feebly muttered; but as he spoke, there surged up within him a flood of black bile. Oh, how he hated just then, as he stood with his fingers on the iron rail of his gate, every one of the people of his life, except Christie! The maliciousness he felt at that moment amounted to a deadly distaste. He hated his mother, he hated Gerda, he hated Carfax, he hated Urquhart, Miss Gault, Jason! He hated them all, except Christie … and, perhaps, old Darnley with his yellow beard.
“We’d help you get tea, Gerda?” he murmured obstinately. “Or we could get it in Ramsgard!”
How queer this malice within him was! It made his pulses literally thud with its crazy violence. It gave him a savage, animal-like desire to dig his chin, in a tumbling, tossing wrestle of hate, into the flesh of Lord Carfax.
“Do come, Gerda!” he repeated, in a stubborn refrain. The girl shook her head; but the radiant expression she had been wearing in the last two hours did not pass from her face. It was evident to Wolf that Lord Carfax had completely won her heart during the short time he had spent under her roof.
“Do you really want to see where he’s buried?” he asked, as he conducted his visitor through that grassy lane he had recently discovered, which made it possible to reach Poll’s Camp without passing through the town.
“I like all graveyards,” replied Lord Carfax, “and I’ve always been interested in your father.”
“It’s a cemetery,” remarked Wolf sulkily. “He’s been there a long time,” he added.
The weather-beaten countenance of “the lord from London” wrinkled itself into many genial wrinkles as it glanced indulgently at Wolf’s surly profile.
“I was a good deal more interested in him than she thought quite decent,” he went on. “I used always to tell him I’d visit his grave when he was dead. It was assumed between us, you know, that he would die. He always talked of being dead. It seemed to please him in some way. It certainly never gave me any great pleasure, that particular thought!” As his visitor said this he fixed upon Wolf a look of such humorous whimsicality that it was almost impossible to see it and remain morose and truculent. It was a look of penetrating sweetness, and yet it was shamelessly cynical. Wolf found himself softening; but this in itself was a thing that increased his secret irritation!
“I’d like to show you his grave,” he said bluntly, feeling as if he would be glad to strike that kindly visage, and then to kiss it and ask its pardon for the blow!
He tried to transfer his attention, as they left the lane and entered the first of the orchards, to the beauty of that particular afternoon, the last Saturday in May. It was warm and windless; but a screen of thin, opaque clouds obscured the sunlight, filtering the hot rays, as in some old picture, into a mellow spaciousness of watery gold. In fact, the atmosphere resembled nothing so much, to Wolf’s mind, as the look of a great glass jug of cowslip-wine, which about a month ago his mother, in her drastic, picturesque manner—quite shameless about the number of flowers she sacrificed for such a thing—had held up to his lips.
He had plenty of time, as they drifted through the long grass of those three hedged-in orchards that led to the foot of the hill, to note every feature of his visitor’s appearance. Lord Carfax was to all intents and purposes an old man; but he held himself so erect, and he walked with so resolute a step, that Wolf would have taken him for a man of fifty. He was in reality rather short—not much taller than Lobbie; but the massiveness of his great square head, combined with the solid sturdiness of his frame, produced the constant illusion that he was of normal height.
He was certainly eccentric in his clothes. His attire on this occasion gave Wolf the impression of a seafaring man. He might have been the elderly skipper of an old-fashioned packet-boat, bound from Weymouth for the Channel Islands! Wolf had been fascinated by many things in him from the very start. Partly owing to his mother’s sardonic predilection, but much more owing to the man’s own unique personality, he felt completely at ease with him. The fact that it was due to this man’s initial intervention—as a relative of both Mr. Urquhart and Mrs. Solent—that he had come to Dorset at all, combined with the part the fellow’s shameless opinions had played in his own secret thoughts, gave to this rugged and leathery countenance, now that he saw it at close quarters, an almost legendary glamour.
A flicker of snobbishness entered into his feelings too. But he salved his conscience over this by assuring himself that he would have been in any case attracted to a person of this original character. He smiled grimly to himself, however, as he assisted “Cousin Carfax” in pushing his way through the hedge-gaps, to discover that he was already hoping that Jason would never learn of this prolonged visit! Carfax, he knew, was generally supposed to have left for London on the previous day. His remaining at the Three Peewits last night was a sudden caprice, of which even Mrs. Solent was unaware. Wolf suspected that Gerda’s beauty had more to do with it than anything else!
They had hardly got through the last hedge, and were just about to ascend the southern slope of Poll’s Camp, when they came upon a shabby-looking man—something between a tramp and a poor workman—who was resting himself on a turf-covered molehill.
To Wolf’s surprise this man turned out to be none other than Mr. Stalbridge, the ex-waiter of the Lovelace Hotel!
The man rose at their approach; and Wolf, ashamed of his behaviour at their last encounter, greeted him with exaggerated deference, shaking hands with him and introducing him to his companion. The ex-waiter professed a vivid memory of their meeting in the Lovelace Hotel more than a year ago, and explained that he had got a temporary job in Blacksod and was now returning to spend the Sunday in Ramsgard.
Mr. Stalbridge’s ceremonious manner offered such a contrast to his shabby attire, that Lord Carfax, who seemed to collect human curiosities as boys collect butterflies, entered into a lively conversation with him, and finally appeared prepared to receive him into their company as a fellow traveller. Wolf felt a little piqued by this; for though he had allowed for Gerda’s attractiveness as an element in their visitor’s interest, he had assumed that this excursion to the father’s grave implied a certain desire on his guest’s part to exchange ideas with the son! Apparently he was mistaken; Carfax’s attention promised to be totally absorbed by Mr. Stalbridge, whose humorous anecdotes about the Lovelace family and other local magnates continued with small abatement until they reached the summit of Poll’s Camp.
Wolf’s original sensation of pique at this encounter had increased to a pitch that needed the control of some quite serious effort of mind, when they stood at length on the top of the grassy eminence.
Gerda’s radiance under Carfax’s admiration returned to him now as an integral portion of the slight he was enduring. “If she sees much more of these sophisticated people,” he thought, “she will lose all the simplicity of her nature!”
He flung his gaze round the immense expanse revealed to them, while Lord Carfax drew heavy breaths, leaning on his stick; and Mr. Stalbridge continued the sly process of his courtly seduction. Without being obtrusive in any particular detail, the lavish waves of the season’s fertility, feathery grasses, green wheat, new budding honeysuckle, buttercups in their prime, red and white hawthorn, seemed to flow over every field and every hedgerow, between where he stood now on Poll’s Camp and the mount of Glastonbury.
He felt at this moment as though humiliation were dripping into his heart, drop by drop, like carefully poured medicine into a tumbler of water. So this “lord from London” took really not the slightest interest in him! Anxious to help his mother, to help Jason, to help Mr. Stalbridge, the great man had evidently found Wolf himself tedious and uninspiring!
“Damn the fellow! What do I care what he thinks of me?” he said to himself; but as Mr. Stalbridge became more and more voluble, and the leathery creases of my Lord’s hewn and quarried physiognomy wrinkled themselves in increasing appreciation, he found that his humiliation grew unbearable. That luminous look upon Gerda’s face! Why, he had not been able to summon up that look for the last six months! She had become a grown-up woman with him these latter days, tender and considerate; but this man’s admiration transformed her back again into an irresponsible little girl!
As soon as the visitor had got his breath, they all moved on, following the outer circle of the camp and heading for Babylon Hill.
Wolf was the last to climb across the stile into the highroad. How rich with the season’s over-brimming vegetation that hedge-side was! What intoxicating earth-smells hung about that well-known stile! Trailing dog-roses that carried frail green buds, whose sweetness resembled the fragrance of apples and sunburnt hay, mingled there, as he climbed that stile, with the white blossoms of tangled umbelliferous growths, their stalks full of warm, moist sap.
He glanced at the two men’s faces, as they stood, quite oblivious of him, conversing there in the road. Yes! There was a scooped-out misery in the ex-waiter’s eyes that reminded him of the man of the Waterloo steps! He was evidently making some personal appeal to Carfax now. Perhaps he hoped to get employment from him. Perhaps he would get employment from him! What a thing it was to be possessed of the power that Carfax had! Carfax was now succouring the Waterloo-steps man!
He remained for a minute balanced on the top of the stile, hugging his knees. He would give this poor devil every second he could snatch for him of this lucky chance! Slowly he turned his head and looked down upon the roofs of the town. “Christie! Christie!” And there flowed over him the memory of the day, just three weeks ago, when he had gone down to Weymouth. There he had seen her—seen her with Olwen in their new home by the backwater. Till the last minute of his departure, he and she had sat together on the dry sand under the Jubilee Clock, while Olwen paddled among the other children in a sea that danced and glittered in the jocund sunshine. He could smell the sharp sea-smells now. He could taste the salt. He could feel the living slipperiness of a broad brown ribbon of seaweed that Olwen had picked up, and that both he and Christie had pressed against their mouths. He could see the name “Katie” painted in green on a boat-stern, and the faraway look of the sailor who leaned against it, thinking God knows what!
It was owing to Carfax—owing to his unstinted purchase of all those ambiguous books—that these two had enough to live on. He remembered the night when Christie had yielded to the little girl’s mania for the seaside. “It’s our fate, Wolf dear,” she had said, as he touched her cold cheek. He remembered those last minutes under the seawall; how they had sat so stiff and straight, letting the loose grains of sand run through their fingers, staring into each other’s eyes!
There was no bookshop any longer under that roof down there! Someone else, some overworked greengrocer’s woman, was at this moment washing her dishes in Christie’s little alcove, between that parlour and that bedroom. …
“Are you ready, Solent? I promised your wife to keep you alive-o!”
Carfax’s voice was friendly. “I’m a fool to feel so touchy,” he thought, as he jumped down into the road and joined them.
“He’s won his fling,” he thought, glancing sideways at the ex-waiter’s face, as they moved on together. It was queer to see that film of unspeakable relief forming itself, like “cat-ice” over a pool, above those sockets of despair. Ailinon! but the chap was like that Waterloo-steps man. He was at least that man’s representative! He had denied him half-a-crown that day outside the Abbey; and now Carfax had stepped in. Everything he would like to have done Carfax had done. And now he was dragging along at Carfax’s heels to visit “old Truepenny!” What a humorous fiasco his whole life down here in Dorset had been! He had been defeated by Urquhart … paid off, fixed up, bribed, squared! He had betrayed that skull in the cemetery. He had let his truelove slip through his hands. His “lord in London” had recognized Jason’s genius, discovered Gerda’s beauty, poured oil and wine into the wounds of Mr. Stalbridge, added a new glory to the teashop. Why the devil should he find anything worth bothering about in Mr. Wolf Solent, teacher of history in the Blacksod Grammar School?
As the three men approached a certain group of larches where Wolf had once wondered what it would be like to live with Darnley, it became clear to him that Mr. Stalbridge was to leave his present miserable job. Apparently he was to be transformed into some sort of leisurely factotum, or assistant majordomo, in my Lord’s London house. What incredible luck for the ex-waiter! Wolf at this point did feel a certain glow of admiration for this rugged collector of human butterflies. “How the devil does he keep that seafaring air,” he thought, “among his servants in London? Anyway, the hiring of Mr. Stalbridge is just the kind of thing I’d like to do myself.”
The ex-waiter’s affair being settled, Wolf began to assume a more prominent place in the attention of the great man.
“How’s my crazy cousin Urquhart?” he enquired. “I gave his house a wide berth this time! He’s become ‘heavy weather’ these days, with his fixed ideas. Don’t you feel the same?”
“What ideas do you mean?” murmured Wolf.
His companion gave him a slow, quizzical smile. “That book of yours, for one thing! And his absurd idea that he killed that boy Redfern. I met Doctor Percy at your mother’s last night, and he told me the boy had died of double pneumonia. Percy attended him … saw him die, in fact … had to turn out that precious Vicar of theirs, who was howling like a poisoned jackal. Urquhart himself’s going to die, Solent. By Jove! I felt death in his hand a year ago. I like the fellow; but when he idealizes his confounded peculiarities to quite such a tune, you get dead sick of him! I’m all in favour of honest bawdry myself; but why sing such a song about it? Natural or unnatural, it’s nature. It’s mortal man’s one great solace before he’s annihilated! But all this bladder-headed fuss about it—about such a simple thing—one way or the other—I don’t like it. It’s not in my style.” Wolf was astonished at the massive foursquare tone in which the man uttered these last words … as if he’d been a great admiral-of-the-fleet criticizing some popinjay captain for a frivolous manoeuvre.
“What do you think?” he enquired of the ex-waiter. “Do you agree with Lord Carfax that annihilation is not to be gainsaid?”
The old man appeared to hesitate for a moment. Then he bent his head and took off his hat. “I believe in the Resurrection of the Body and the Life Everlasting,” he said gravely, “if it’s no offence to his lordship.”
“Put on your hat, Stalbridge; put on your hat,” said the other. “What do you think, Solent? You don’t seem to enjoy expressing your views. You’re like Ann. She covers everything with such malicious sarcasm that she makes everything equally unimportant. Do you believe in a future life, Solent?”
They were now passing one of the numerous cattle-droves that led into that maze of grassy paths, bordered by high hedges, which Wolf had come to know as the Gwent Lanes. Wolf himself was walking on the right of Lord Carfax, the ex-waiter on the left; so that as he turned to answer this historic question, he caught the profiles of both these old men silhouetted against the rich vegetation of this avenue of grass and greenery.
“Sometimes I agree with Mr. Stalbridge,” he said, “and sometimes with you. At this moment I think I agree with you; but that is probably due to the fact that I’ve been rather hard-worked at the school lately.”
Carfax made no comment upon this; and presently Wolf heard him begin to give a humorous account to the new servant of what he described as his “open house.”
That glimpse of the Gwent lane behind those two faces had brought to Wolf a sickening sense of what he had lost in the disappearance of his “mythology.” A year ago, how little would it have mattered that he should have replied so lamely to the great question Carfax had put to him! He would have let it go. He would have fallen back on that sense of huge invisible cosmic transactions, in the midst of which he played his part, a part totally unaffected by any casual mental lapse.
As they walked on, and he listened with a negligent ear to the discourse between this master and this servant, he recognized that the corpse of his life-illusion had received two fresh spadefuls of earth.
The resemblance, faint though it was, of Stalbridge to the Waterloo waif, considered in the light of that unbestowed half-a-crown, gave to this generous caprice of Carfax the quality of something that stepped in “between the election and his hopes.”
But worse than this were my Lord’s words about Urquhart.
Ailinon! Ailinon! Was all the agitation, all the turmoil, all his consciousness of a supernatural struggle with some abysmal form of evil, reduced now to the paltry level of a feeble old bachelor’s fantastic self-deception?
If his imagination had been so moonstruck as to make so much of a pure fantasy, was it any wonder that this sagacious man-of-the-world turned away from him with indifference—turned to his wife’s beauty, turned to the ex-waiter’s idiosyncrasy, found in him nothing more than a pedantic usher in a provincial school? He had been living in a vain dream all these years of his life—living in it ever since he sat in the sunshine in his grandmother’s bow-window, watching those painted boats rock and toss on the glittering Weymouth waves.
“Christie! Christie! O my lost darling, O my truelove!”
They had now arrived at the point where it was necessary to follow a field-path across the pastures in order to reach the cemetery. Mr. Stalbridge proceeded with elaborate ceremony to bid them both farewell, touching his uncovered forehead to his new master and extending his hand to Wolf.
“The seven-o’clock train, at Ramsgard, then,” were Carfax’s last words to him; “and don’t bother about a ticket. Look out for me in a third-class smoking-carriage!”
As they crossed the fields towards the cemetery, Wolf visualized the journey of those two old men that night. In some queer way he felt as if Carfax were a competent actor, naturally assuming the precise role in which he himself had failed! Carfax would hear that imbecile youth cry out “Sandbourne Port!” and rattle the milk-cans on that little, deserted platform! Carfax would see the tower of Basingstoke Church. Carfax would see that placid-grazing cow. Carfax would observe, crossing the same coloured picture of Weymouth Bay, the same bluebottle fly … or his exact representative … in the whirligig of chance!
His companion’s feet seemed to drag a little now, as they made their way between a flowering hawthorn-hedge and a field of green barley.
“I expect we’d better take a carriage back,” Wolf remarked.
“It’s not my boots,” growled Carfax. “I always have them made at the same place. It’s my socks. A person knits them for me who was my nurse in former days. She’s getting old, and her stitches gather into knots that seem dedicated to gall my kibe.”
“I wonder if we shall find Miss Gault at the grave,” Wolf said, as he lifted up a barbed-wire rail with the handle of his stick for Lord Carfax to crawl under. “I hope we shall. The last time I saw her was when she tripped over a milk-bottle and I got angry with her attitude to my mother.”
The deep-set eyes of his companion had a whimsical gleam in them as he struggled to his feet.
“It was your father’s affair with Miss Gault,” he gasped, “that gave me my chance with Ann. God! how Urquhart used to gird at me for my mania for that sweet creature! I suppose you have no more idea than a leopard’s cub, Solent, how enchanting she was in those days!”
Wolf stopped short as they picked their way between the graves. “What was it you said made you want to see where he’s buried?” he enquired in a high-pitched voice.
The ancient mariner’s visage before him contracted itself into what almost amounted to a gamin’s grimace.
“I detect,” he said, “a tone in your voice, Solent, and a quiver in your lips, that suggest I’m on dangerous ground. But the truth is I swore to him once that if he caved in before me I’d come and make a signal to his old cadaver. That’s twenty-five years ago, Wolf Solent; and I’ve never done it till this moment.”
“One minute!” interrupted Wolf, as the visitor made a motion to advance. His voice certainly had a vibration in it that was a surprise to himself. It was apparently no surprise to Lord Carfax; but the man gave him a quick, penetrating, suspicious glance. Wolf flung a hurried look sideways. It was impossible to see William Solent’s headstone from where they stood. No stranger could possibly find the spot unless led to it by an habitué of that place.
“Did you have an exciting love-affair with my mother?”
The remark sounded quite as childish, quite as insolent, to his own ears, as doubtless it did to those of his interlocutor. But he followed it up with a further challenge.
“My mother treated my father abominably!”
His lip was trembling now. Violent pulses throbbed in both his wrists, like lilliputian engines. He knitted his eyebrows and glared at the rugged folds of tanned skin that surrounded this man’s eyes, giving them the guarded alertness of a kindly, but very wary, deerstalker.
Carfax squared his shoulders; and then, without removing his gaze from Wolf’s face, he proceeded to button his overcoat tightly about his neck. The next thing he did was to fold both his hands—one of them holding his ash-stick—massively behind his back. The measured gravity of this gesture, as Wolf recalled it afterwards, resembled that of some seventeenth-century cavalier accosted by a highwayman!
His compact, sturdy figure, his formidable, level stare, presented themselves to Wolf like the embodiment of every banked-up and buttressed tradition in English social life.
“You were very young at that time, Solent,” he remarked in a guarded tone.
“You must have got enormous satisfaction,” Wolf went on, “in punishing my father for his rascality. You and my mother must have felt like avenging angels!”
The weather-beaten creases about the man’s eyes thickened so shrewdly that no more than two gleaming little slits of menacing roguery confronted Wolf’s vibrant nerves.
“I don’t think we felt exactly angelic,” chuckled Lord Carfax.
The curious thing about what happened then was the ferocious lucidity with which Wolf ransacked his own emotional state.
He recognized that one part of his nature was stirred in an affectionate response toward the rugged face before him. What he felt was that the skull under that mound in the pauper’s plot must be championed at this crisis, or it would be betrayed beyond recovery.
“You think all scruples are uncivilized bigotry where sex is concerned; isn’t that it?”
Carfax merely bowed.
Wolf knew perfectly well that what he was yielding to now was an insane desire to make this man responsible—as if he had been fate itself—for all the convoluted bitterness of his dilemma between Gerda and Christie! Those imaginary dialogues with the fellow, over the kitchen-stove, seethed in his mind like steam under a lid. He knew, too, that he was revenging himself now for Carfax’s attraction towards Gerda, for his indifference to himself.
“Come!” he cried in a trembling voice, “Come! There isn’t time to hunt about here for the place they used to bury workhouse inmates in, twenty-five years ago!”
Carfax took off his hat and rubbed his corrugated forehead with the palm of one of his hands. When he removed his fingers, Wolf caught a glimpse of a pair of agitated eyes roving in troubled scrutiny over the headstones to his left. The man’s eyes had indeed become so much like those of a nervous hunter, that his whole face assumed a disarming and boyish anxiety, as if he were watching for the head of an otter or the fin of a pike in a disturbed stream!
“Come!” repeated Wolf. “I’ll put you on the road to the Lovelace, and you can get a carriage or something to take you back to Blacksod. I’m going to walk back; but Gerda won’t forgive me if you’re late, and if you get a cab you’ll be with her long before I am! I’m sure she’s buying cakes for you at Pimpernel’s this very moment!”
Before he had reached the word “Pimpernel” in this speech, at which point the lips of Lord Carfax broke into a smile of roguish gusto, he was aware of a very stern, straight look from the man’s grey eyes.
“I’ve annoyed you forever now, I suppose,” Wolf murmured in a low voice. Lord Carfax surveyed him sternly.
“I don’t like it when people’s nerves get out of control,” he said. “My instinct is to beat them down, as a menace to civilized behaviour! But after all, Solent, here I am, at your father’s request! If you’d rather not show me his grave”—it was at this point that Wolf caught that disarming glint again, like the baffled innocence of a fisherman, emanating from beneath the old man’s eyelids—“I don’t want to annoy you. But don’t be too leisurely over your stroll back, my lad. If you are, there won’t be many of those Pimpernel cakes left!”
“This is your nearest way out,” said Wolf laconically. Stepping carefully, in advance, between the rows of green mounds, upon many of which grew little patches of yellow buttercups and white clover, he guided his mother’s and his wife’s admirer to the main cemetery-entrance. He managed to cast a quick glance in the direction of the grave. No! Miss Gault was not there.
Once in the road, he began giving his companion careful directions how to reach the Lovelace.
As he repeated those directions, he was aware of the man’s attentive countenance, bent a little sideways towards him, wearing something of the expression with which an experienced ostler would attend to the inarticulate language of an erratic horse!
The effort of formulating those practical instructions in that silent spot, while the invisible magnetism of so much death-nourished vegetation permeated his senses, threw Wolf’s brain into a confused stupor. He found, while he was slowly explaining to Carfax how to take the shortcut under the Preparatory School wall, past the Headmaster’s garden and the entrance to the Abbey, that he was surprised at having seen nothing of Miss Gault. He kept glancing at the deserted roadway before them, so warm, so opalescent, in the diffused light. He had an obstinate feeling that Miss Gault must be upon that road, either coming or going—a feeling that resembled some kind of chemical clairvoyance in the very marrow of his bones.
His mind, preoccupied with Miss Gault, became now most vividly conscious of the slaughterhouse. The slaughterhouse looked especially harmless at that moment; but he regarded it with sick aversion.
“These deeds must not be thought after these ways; so, it will make us mad.”
Of course, even while he saw her standing there, he knew he was imagining it, and that she had no palpable reality. This phenomenon, this visualizing of a bodily image that was known by his reason to be unreal, was one that he had suffered from before.
“You’ll find her,” he was speaking of the sedate lady in the hotel-office, “very stiff but very polite.” But while he was uttering these words, he saw Miss Gault’s figure quite palpably before him. He saw her bony shoulders turned to him, black in the roadway. And there was her arm, with clenched hand, lifted up in prophetic malediction!
“They’re killing something in there,” he thought. And then, for the infinitesimal part of a second, there arose within him an awareness of blinding pain, followed by thick darkness smeared with out-rushing blood. As this sank away, there ensued a murky dizziness in his brain, accompanied by a shocking sense that both his father’s skull and this woman’s arm were appealing to him to do something that he lacked the courage to do. His legs had turned into immovable lead, as happens in nightmares.
“Very stiff … very polite,” he repeated mechanically, perfectly conscious that he was smiling into the man’s face with a forced repulsive smile.
But Carfax had suddenly become an alert, compact man of action. His expression was more mariner-like than ever. Wolf’s eccentric maliciousness might have been a troublesome wave risen from an unexpected reef. Carfax looked curiously at him, his heavy eyelids screwed up, his mouth a little open, his chin set square in his muffler.
“Off with you, lad!” he said in a pleasant voice. “It’ll do you good to have that walk back alone! Off with you; and look alive-o now! … if you’re going to get home before I finish up those cakes!”
Not Mr. Stalbridge himself could have obeyed his new master more submissively than Wolf obeyed this command. He was well inside the cemetery before Carfax had gone half-a-dozen steps. From behind the hedge he followed his measured and resolute advance up the road, up the warm clover-scented road, past the slaughterhouse.
It was through the tangled greenery of a clustered tuft of budding honeysuckle that he watched Lord Carfax. The faint sweetness of that leafiness remained with him, like a covering of ointment round the bloody stump of an amputated limb, when finally he left his vantage-ground and strode over to the pauper’s plot.
The first thing he noticed was a pair of white butterflies flying awkwardly together, linked in an ecstasy of love. They seemed to float upon the warm clover-scented air as if their four wings belonged to one single life … an insect-angel of an Apocalypse of the Minute!
“I should not have had the courage to interfere,” he thought, “even if an animal was being killed. But Miss Gault would. She’d have rushed straight to the place!”
He dug the end of his stick into the turf by the side of the mound and leaned on the handle, frowning down upon what he visioned six feet below.
“O Christie! O my truelove!”
Stubbornly he set himself to analyze how it was that with the loss of his life-illusion he could yet feel as he did about Christie!
There hung about the idea of her still … yes! still, still, still! … and it was this that he must explain to that skull down there … a sweetness as exciting as the wildest fancies of his youth, as those dark, secret fancies where the syllables “a girl” carried with them so yielding an essence that breasts and hips and thighs lost themselves in an unutterable mystery!
“Do you hear me, old Truepenny?” and it seemed to him, as he stared at the grass, that his soul became a sharp-snouted mole, refusing to cease from its burrowing till it had crouched down close beside those empty eyeholes, and had fumbled and ferreted at that impious, unconquerable grin!
His father must hear him! Surely, between those bones that had set themselves against his mother’s bones, so that he might be born, and his present living body, there must be something … some sort of link!
That was what he wanted, some ear into which he could pour the whole weight of his seething distress. Where else could he go?
Back once more across the grave floated those interlaced, fluttering wings. The contrast between the clover-scents that his nostrils inhaled and the desperation of his mood seemed to him like a well-aimed shaft of derision.
“If there is some monstrous consciousness behind all life,” he thought angrily, “it’s responsible for all the horrors! Come on, old Truepenny; let father and son celebrate this meeting with a private little curse at God. Let the worm in your mouth be the tongue shot out at Him! Let the look in the eyes of that Waterloo-steps man be His eternal peace!”
No sooner had Wolf articulated this catapult of malice against the unknown First Cause, than, without any apparent reason, he suddenly bethought himself of the boy Barge.
“Barge would never curse God,” he thought. “Under the worst extremity of suffering he never would! Barge would forgive God instinctively, without an effort.” Barge did, no doubt, forgive Him every day! If Barge had the power of causing God to be tortured for all the torture God had caused, Barge would refrain, as naturally as the wind blows. Barge would let the great evil Spirit completely off!
As he meditated upon this forgiveness of God by Barge, Wolf found himself pulling his stick out of the earth and wiping the end of it, even as a duellist might wipe a sword, with his bare hand.
“But to forgive for oneself is one thing,” he thought. “To forgive for others … for innocents … for animals … is another thing! Barge is an innocent; so it may be permitted to him to forgive. I am not an innocent. I know more than Barge. I know too much.”
He remained in deep, fixed, wordless thought, after that, for several minutes. Then he opened and shut the fingers of his left hand with a convulsive movement. Had his father’s skull been able to cast a conscious eye upon him, through the intervening mould, it would have supposed he was freeing his fingers from the clay which, a moment ago, he had wiped from the stick; but what he really was doing was getting rid of the contamination, not of clay, but of thought.
He had told himself a story in that brief while! He had imagined himself meeting Jesus Christ in the shape of the man of the Waterloo steps. He had imagined the man stopping him—it was by the stile on Babylon Hill—and asking him what he was doing. His answer had been given with a wild, crazy laugh. “Can’t you see I’m living my secret life?” he had said.
“What secret life?” the man had asked.
“Running away from the horrors!” he had cried, in a great screaming voice, that had rung over the roofs of Blacksod. But immediately afterwards he had imagined himself as becoming very calm and very sly. “It’s all right. It’s absolutely all right,” he had whispered furtively in the man’s ears. “You needn’t suffer. I let you off. You are allowed to forget. It doesn’t matter what your secret life is. I’ve told you what mine is; and I now tell you that it can be borne. So you can stop looking like that! Any secret life can be borne when once you’ve been told that you have the right to forget. And that’s what I’ve told you now.”
It was when he was imagining the man’s answer that he had been compelled to practise his own doctrine with violent rapidity; and the next thing he did was to stoop down and dig his fingers into the roots of the grass, where he supposed his father’s head would be. “Goodbye, Father!” he muttered; and straightening his back, with a sigh he turned sharp round, and without further parley moved from the spot.
He began by directing his steps towards the main highroad by which they had come; but he hadn’t gone far when he suddenly swung about and made for the King’s Barton lane.
“I don’t want him to pick me up,” he thought. “They’re sure to take him that way.” As he followed the familiar road to King’s Barton, he recalled his first drive along it, by Darnley’s side, fourteen months ago.
How he had stared into the future then … that future which was now the past! How he had hugged his “mythology” to his soul, during that drive, feeling so confident that nothing in that fertile land could arise to destroy it!
As he went along now, trailing his stick behind him, he became aware that with the approach of the end of the pearl-soft afternoon the voices of countless hidden blackbirds were mounting up, rich and sweet, from the green depths of the hedges.
“She’s lost the power to whistle,” he said to himself, “just as I’ve lost my mythology!” And the identity of Gerda, her excitement about their new silver, their new curtains, their new clock, her radiance in being attractive to Lord Carfax, melted into the sad-gay music poured forth from those invisible yellow beaks, until he felt as if he were walking along a road that passed through her heart, a road the very atmosphere of which was the breath of her young soul!
Those blackbird-notes in the hedges seemed to allay the tension of his nerves as if they had been the touch of the girl’s flesh. His outraged mind, with its grievance against the First Cause, seemed actually to float away from his body as it moved quietly along. Between his body, thus freed from his tormented spirit, and the increasing loveliness of that perfect day, there began to establish itself a strange chemical fusion.
He came upon a certain gate now where he had once wondered what it would be like to live with Darnley. Once more he rested there, leaning his arms on its grey top-bar and staring over the expanse of greenness separating him from Melbury Bub.
Yes, without any conscious motion of his will something was softening within him towards the long future stretch of the days of his life!
He began to grow conscious of how separate his assuaged senses were from that tormented spirit of his that had just cursed God. What was it that had worked this change in him? Those blackbird-notes? Was it merely that his body, hearing those sounds, plunged into the sweetness of Gerda’s body? But now, from the thought of Gerda his mind reverted to Christie. After all, it was the same First Cause which tortured him that had made it possible that such a being as Christie should exist. God must be something that all conscious lives are doomed to curse and to bless in eternal alternation!
After all, Christie did belong to him, as she had never belonged, and never would belong, to anyone else. So easily might he never have met her—never met the one person he could love with all the worst and all the best in his contradictory nature! Many would be the Saturdays, many the Sundays, he would walk with her now, along the backwater, along that familiar esplanade! In an upwelling of sad, sweet tenderness, he saw himself as an old grey-headed schoolmaster … still at his job in that ink-stained room … walking, with Christie on one arm and Olwen, grown tall and disdainful, on the other, past the bow-windows of Brunswick Terrace!
Certain little physical tricks Christie had, separating her from everyone else, came back to him now. The way she would turn her face sideways to speak to him when she was poking the fire, the way she swayed her wrists as if over an old-fashioned harpsichord, when she was arranging her teacups, the way she would hitch up her skirt when it hung too loose over her straight hips, the way she would stretch her head out of the window, drinking up the air with a kind of thirsty fury after struggling to express some subtle metaphysical idea that had baffled her power of words—all these things hit him now with no empty finality of loss, but with a sort of mystic consummation. It was as if, utterly beyond his effort—as it was beyond his merit—chance itself had caused the earth to whisper some clue-word into the ears of his flesh, a word that his body understood, though his mind was too humiliated to focus itself upon it.
Pondering upon what was happening to him, he turned from that gate and continued his way; but his stick was held firmly by the handle now, and his feet were no longer dragging as they moved.
He began obscurely to feel that he might get some happiness out of his life after all … even if he had to work at that school till he died … even if he never were allowed so much as to kiss Christie again!
He became more and more aware that it was just the simple chemistry of his body that, under the beauty of this hour, was coming to its own conclusions! It was as if his flesh were drinking in and soaking up this beauty, while his soul, cut into pieces by his recent humiliation like a worm by a bird’s beak, wriggled and squirmed somewhere above his head!
His outward skin luxuriated in all this loveliness. It drenched itself in the pearl-soft air, like a naked swimmer in a glimmering sea. But his mind was still malcontent. It kept wincing under its own recent twinges. But it was divided from him in some way, so that it was no longer able to turn a torturous screw in his living brain! It was just as if some heavenly music were pouring into an entranced ear, while the brain behind the ear was beating about in chaotic misery.
Chaotic indeed! The core of his mind felt as though it were a multiple thing and lacked a centre. It felt as though its disintegrated consciousness resembled that of an amoeba, of a zoophyte. It felt envious of the human happiness that had begun to penetrate its attendant body. Wolf knew that the man holding that oak-stick was himself; he knew it was Wolf Solent, on his way home to eat Pimpernel’s cakes and to watch his wife flirt with Lord Carfax. But he felt that the identity of his soul and his body was broken. His soul had received such crushing disgraces that like a thousand globules of quicksilver it no longer dwelt where normal souls ought to dwell!
It was out of all this chaos within him, that he now set himself, as he strode along, to concentrate his will upon Christie and upon her life by that Weymouth backwater. “Oh, may she be happy!” he cried blindly to the grass and the trees. And then a queer psychic inkling came upon him, an inkling that it would be possible for him, now that he no longer had anything left but certain bodily sensations, now that he had become a depersonalized inhuman force, without hope or aim, to exercise a genuine power, an almost supernatural power, over the future of the entity he loved. The more he pondered on this, the more possible did the thing appear to him! As he surveyed the blossoms of a great lilac-bush in the first King’s Barton garden he reached, he seemed to visualize the demiurge of the universe as so much diffused subconscious magnetism submissive to nothing but commands … commands rather than prayers!
The luminous enchantment which this perfect afternoon threw upon those blossoms caused him to stop dead-still in front of them.
“I command,” he uttered in a grave, loud tone, “I command that she shall be happy!” And then, with a grotesque solemnity, as if for a second of time he had been given the power to destroy all ordinary sense of proportion, he repeated, as though addressing a slow-witted interlocutor, “It’s Christie Malakite I mean, who lives by the Backwater at Weymouth.”
He concluded this fantastic ceremony by an audible chuckle; but his steps, as he strode through the village of King’s Barton at a swinging pace, were freer and stronger than they had been for a very long time.
Still, however, he could not shake off the feeling that his soul had become a drifting multiplicity without any nucleus. There had occurred an actual “resurrection” of his body, which was now giving to his behaviour the aspect, the motions, the gestures of exultant well-being, while his inner nature remained a blur of disgusting confusion.
“Walking is my cure,” he thought. “As long as I can walk I can get my soul into shape! It must have been an instinct of self-preservation that has always driven me to walk!”
He had reached the churchyard-wall now; and he couldn’t resist the temptation of stopping for a minute to visit Redfern’s grave. As he was scrambling over the low rampart of crumbling yellowish stone, he heard the droning of an aeroplane somewhere above his head.
“Mine enemy hath found me out,” he said to himself. “I suppose walking up and down upon the earth will cease altogether soon. Well, I’m going to walk till I die!” And to avoid giving his airy antagonist even the honour of one inquisitive glance, he proceeded to keep his eyes in religious malice rigorously fixed upon the grass beneath his feet.
His method of advance was more conducive to cerebral revenge than to alert vision; and when he did reach his destination he found a wheelbarrow full of grass by the side of the grave, and beyond the wheelbarrow, bending low and armed with a pair of gleaming shears, the figure of Roger Monk.
The peculiarly subtle smell of the green grass in the wheelbarrow gave him a thrill of such strange contentment that his greeting of his old acquaintance was cordial in the extreme.
“How’s the squire?” he enquired after a minute or two’s discussion of the weather. Roger Monk chuckled grimly.
“There was a time, sir,” he replied—and Wolf noticed that the gardener’s accent still wavered between the intonation of the Shires and the intonation of Dorset, “when, as you know, sir, I could have given that man his queetus. But he’s not what he was, Mr. Solent, and that’s the long and short of it.”
The word “queetus,” in place of “quietus,” so tickled Wolf’s fancy that he could only make an amiable grimace in response, a grimace that implied that the world had long been aware that Mr. Monk’s bark was worse than his bite.
“How does he sleep these days?” he enquired.
“Much better, sir, thank ’ee. In fact, he’s slept wonderful sound ever since Master Round and me dug this ’ere grave as ’twere right it should be dug. Old Jack Torp, if I may say so, made a poor job of this burying! Squire was worriting himself over it fearsome. That beer-barrel of a Torp, if you’ll excuse such speaking, Mr. Solent, of a party a gentleman like yourself be allied to, ain’t no more a sexton than he be an undertaker! Them stonecutters should leave the spade alone. They should leave burying alone, and stick to their own job.”
This plausible and innocent explanation of what he and Valley had witnessed did not by any means convince Wolf. But neither did it lessen his humiliation. He began to feel as if the perversity of Mr. Urquhart, the incest of Mr. Malakite, the lechery of Bob Weevil, the morbidity of Jason, were all of such slight importance, compared with the difference between being alive and being dead, that he had made a fool of himself in making so much of them. Such, at any rate, seemed to be the opinion of his body; and it was his body now that had taken the rudder in its hand! His body? No! It was more than his body! Behind the pulse-beat of his body stirred the unutterable … stirred something that was connected with the strange blueness he had seen long ago over the Lunt meadows and more recently at the window of Pond Cottage … something to that was connected with that heathen goodness that came so naturally to Gaffer Barge.
“How is Mr. Valley, Roger?” he asked. “I haven’t seen him since before the Otter wedding.”
Monk lowered his voice and jerked his thumb in the direction of the vicarage. “Squire’s gone to drink tea with him this very afternoon,” he whispered. “Squire don’t know that I know it. Nor do he know that Mrs. Martin and our maid knows it. He’s a proud old gent, is Squire; and he’s cursed the Reverend so bitter that ’twould be awkward if all were known.”
“Are they friends again, then?” asked Wolf.
Mr. Monk gave a furtive glance at the church and another at Redfern’s grave. He seemed to suspect invisible eavesdroppers from both those directions.
“Squire ain’t, and never has been, what you might call religious,” he said, “but he’s got fixed in his mind, since his sleep returned to him, that our parson have worked a miracle. ’Twould be all my place is worth if he knew I know what he’s up to.” Here the man came extremely close to Wolf and almost touched his face as he whispered in his ear, “He’ve a-been over there three times this week already!”
Wolf drew away as discreetly as he could. Mr. Monk’s breath smelt so strongly of gin that he wondered if the servant hadn’t been drinking with the clergyman in the kitchen prior to the master’s refreshment in the study!
A queer notion seized upon him now, as he looked this man up and down—a fantastic and even obscene notion. He mentally stripped the tall rascal of every rag of clothing! He visualized his heavy chest, his huge knees … he saw them unwashed and dirty. … But suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, he knew for a certainty, beyond all logic, that this astronomical universe, of which the monstrous frame of Mr. Monk occupied the foreground, was merely a filmy, phantasmal screen, separating him from an indrawn reality into which at any moment he might wake—wake despoiled and released. It was the feet of Mr. Monk, or rather the dirty nails of his huge toes, observed with this grotesque maliciousness, that seemed the seal of certainty upon this mystical knowledge!
“Well, I must be emptying this barrow and getting home,” said the innocent Roger.
“Good luck to you!” replied Wolf in a loud, hollow tone, as he recovered from his trance.
When the man had gone off and he was left to himself, he had time to note that not a sign was left now of the grave’s recent disturbance. Redfern’s mound, neatly sheared by the gardener’s shears, looked just the same as all the other graves in the vicinity.
Wolf sighed wearily. That last piece of information about Mr. Urquhart seemed to have landed him on the deepest bedrock of his self-contempt. What? Had he seen himself all this while as a great spiritual antagonist to the squire, only to find at the last that the man was paying surreptitious visits to T. E. Valley?
“Probably,” he thought, “he’s begging Tilly-Valley to let him take the Sacrament!”
He stared at the mound in front of him, wondering, with cynical indifference, whether the body of the boy had been exposed or not. But now, at any rate, he was “free among the dead.”
“Christie! Christie!” He tried to visualize that fragile figure at this very moment coming back to tea from a stroll along the backwater where she had gone with Olwen to see the Abbotsbury swans!
Death and Love! In those two alone lay the ultimate dignity of life. Those were the sacraments, those were the assuagements. Death was the great altar where the candles were never extinguished for such as loathed the commonplace.
And it was just this that these accursed inventions were seeking to destroy! They would dissect love, till it became “an itch of the blood and a permission of the will”; they would kill all calm, all peace, all solitude; they would profane the majesty of death till they vulgarized the very background of existence; they would flout the souls of the lonely upon the earth, until there was not one spot left by land or by water where a human being could escape from the brutality of mechanism, from the hard glitter of steel, from the gaudy insolence of electricity!
“ ‘Jimmy Redfern—he was there!’ ” he hummed savagely as he moved off; and then, as he scrambled back into the road, he wondered to himself what new mood it was that he had detected in Roger Monk. The man seemed to speak of Mr. Urquhart with a completely different intonation. Wolf’s morbid imagination began at once picturing a new Mr. Urquhart, a Mr. Urquhart in an old age of dotage, fallen entirely into the hands of Mr. Monk and of that precious crony of his that he called “Master Round”!
“I’ll call at the Manor House next Saturday,” he thought, “and find out what Tilly-Valley has done to him.”
He glanced at his watch. Oh, he would be hopelessly late for tea! Well, Gerda wouldn’t mind; and Lord Carfax would be thoroughly delighted!
He soon found that the faster he walked through that unequalled atmosphere, the stronger and calmer grew his mind.
The muscles of his body, his skin, his senses, his nerves, his breath, seemed to be gathering up from the soil a new power, a new endurance. The final stamping-down of the earth upon his old life-illusion was the vision, though it may well have been imaginary, of Mr. Urquhart pleading for the Sacrament with Tilly-Valley. He recognized now that his secret motive of all these months … yes, he had felt it by the banks of the Lunt, the day of the “yellow bracken” … had been his faith in some vast earthborn power within him that was stronger than the Christian miracle! Had Tilly-Valley won, then? Had he beaten them all? Had the absurd little fool mesmerized the soul of the great John Urquhart, even as he had mesmerized the soul of Mr. Round?
“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!”
No! He would not yield! The inborn goodness of Barge … a thing natural and inevitable as the rising of the sap in the tree … was stronger than all the “white magic” in the world.
Oh, Christie! Oh, Christie! Would Gerda mind if he went down to Weymouth tomorrow week? He felt a longing to ask Christie what she thought about the difference between the “goodness” of Barge and the “faith” of Tilly-Valley. Perhaps, now it was dead, he would tell her about his “mythology.”
Quicker and quicker circulated the blood through his veins as he entered Blacksod and reached the familiar parting of the ways. There was no hesitation there now. He had never once gone past the bookshop since she had left it!
He found himself dallying with many happier thoughts as he hurried by the Torp yard. Surely he had fallen as low as he could fall! The loveliness of this day … a gift thrown out to him by Chance, the greatest of all the gods … seemed to have touched his body with a kind of blind new birth. He began to feel conscious again, as he had done over the corpse of old Malakite, of himself as a moving animal, full of a vivid, tingling life that extended into the very fingers with which he clasped his stick. And not only as an animal! The immense vegetable efflorescence by which he had been surrounded seemed to have drawn his nerves back and down, soothing them, healing them, calming them, in a flowing reciprocity with that life that was far older than any animal life.
Ah! His body and his soul were coming together again now! Emanating from his lean, striding form, from his spine, from his legs, from his fingertips, his spirit extended outwards, dominating this forked “animal-vegetable” which was himself. And with this new awareness as his background, he set himself to face in stoical resolution all the years of his life, as he saw them before him, dusty milestones along a dusty highway!
He said grimly to himself, “No gestures now!” And it was not a gesture that he made at this moment, as he gathered himself together to be an usher in Blacksod Grammar School for the remainder of his life! He kept his spirits down on purpose, visualizing the innumerable moments of discomfort, of nervous misery, that lay before him. He stretched out his hand to pluck at those wretched future moments, so that he might appropriate them now and grapple with them now. …
“But it isn’t all there is!” he said to himself as he approached Preston Lane. “The whole astronomical world is only a phantasm, compared with the circles within circles, the dreams within dreams, of the unknown reality!”
He passed Mrs. Herbert’s house and came to the pigsty. Ailinon! The memories! Peering furtively up the street to his own threshold … yes, he could see that the parlour-windows were both open. He came to a pause now, hot and breathless from his rapid walking, and leant upon the pigsty-railing. That smell of pigs’ urine, mingled, just as it was a year ago, with the smell of the flowering hedge, gave him a thrill of delicious sadness, and all Dorset seemed gathered up into it! Little wayside cottages, fallen trees, stubble-fields, wellheads, duck-ponds, herds of cattle visioned through the frames of shed-doors—all these things flooded his mind now with a strange sense of occult possession. They were only casual groupings of chance-offered objects; but as they poured pell-mell into his memory, across the reek and the jostling of those uplifted snouts, he felt that something permanent and abiding out of such accidents would give him strength to face the ink-stained classroom—to face the days and days and days—without his “mythology” and without Christie!
He must have been at the cellar-floor of misery when he licked with his mental tongue the filthy toenails of Mr. Monk.
And yet it was from that very beastliness that he discovered the fact that beyond all refutation an actual portion of his mind was outside the whole astronomical spectacle!
More heavily than ever now did he lean on that railing, while the pigs, to whom all human heads were the same, grunted and squealed for their bucket.
Then he straightened his back, waved his hand to the disappointed pigs, and moved on.
He had hardly taken a step when he suddenly thought of Poll’s Camp. What was it? An entrancing bird’s note made him stop again and glance up the road to where the great ash-tree extended its cool, glaucous green branches against the pearl-soft sky.
Another yellow-beak! It had been a thrush last year. Were Gerda and Lord Carfax listening to this liquid music as they ate their Pimpernel cakes?
Fool! Fool! Fool! It was not in the tree at all. Oh, he had known it all the while! In the deepest pit of his stomach he had known. It was the girl herself. The blackbird’s notes were issuing from that open window. It was Gerda’s whistling. That strange power had been given back to her at last!
For a second he just abandoned himself to the beauty of the sound. It was this pearl-soft day itself, consummated, incarnated, in flowing drops of immortal ichor!
Then a queer transformation automatically took place in him. His ripened “soul,” that magnetic cloud about him, drew close to his body like a garment of flexible steel. His muscles contracted, like those of a feline animal stalking its prey. His whole personality became a tense, bent bow of cold, vibrant jealousy, the string pressed taut, the arrow quivering.
Hunching his shoulders, his stick held by the middle—but he had no thought of either Hector of Troy or William of Deloraine!—he ran across the road and advanced stealthily and rapidly along the pavement. His gaze was fixed on the dark aperture of the window through which the whistling came. He intended to see, at least one good second, before he was seen! …
Yes. He had known it. He had known it far down in his consciousness all that long day! His glance, when he reached the window, was swift, decisive, devastating. It lasted less than a third of a second; and then he drew back and shuffled out of sight against their neighbour’s railings.
The teacups had been used, the cakes eaten. And there, seated in the low chair by the side of the littered tray, was Lord Carfax, with a look of the most sun-warmed aplomb that he had ever seen on a human countenance; and there, seated on his knee, with her lips pursed-up and the expression of a radiant infant upon her face, was Gerda … whistling … whistling … whistling! …
“Ripeness is all.” The words seemed to come into his mind from nowhere … to come into his mind from that region, whatever it was, that was not the universe!
They certainly had not their ordinary meaning for him, as he recoiled from what he had seen. They meant that the lords of life had now filled his cup—filled it up to the brim. Little had he known how much this girl’s devotion to him had come to mean. Christie was his horizon; but this girl was the solid ground beneath him. And now the ground had moved!
Like a man who sees his foothold cracking between his feet, and, instead of hurrying forward, looks down, in curious interest, one foot on each side of the crevasse, at a disturbed beetle scrambling up one of the edges of the chasm, Wolf stood on the pavement outside the pig-dealer’s house and stared at the shed across the way.
If only she hadn’t let him take her on his knee! How interested all the people of his life would be that she had let him take her upon his knee! He felt as if Carfax had come into his life for this sole purpose alone—to take Gerda upon his knee! How he could see the nodding heads of all the people of his life, as they glanced at one another displaying their interest in what had happened!
Carfax had saved the man on the Waterloo steps. At least he had saved Stalbridge! Carfax had paid Christie five times their value for the books in the shop. Carfax had condemned Urquhart to a harmless dotage. And now, with the crumbs of Pimpernel’s cakes strewing the tea-table, Carfax had restored to Gerda her unique gift.
Bob Weevil had had to be cajoled into that bedroom before he grew daring. “Lords in London” had none of these Blacksod scruples. To Carfax it was nothing … a trifle, a bagatelle … and yet it was pleasant … to feel the warmth of a girl’s body pressed against him, while by his glowing sympathy he gave her back her youth, gave her back the life that she had lost in her twelve months with a priggish schoolmaster!
Wolf found it necessary at that moment to act in an almost jaunty manner. He balanced his stick under his arm—a thing he had never done before; and he thrust his hands into his trouser-pockets—a gesture that was completely unnatural to him. He began moving along the pavement towards the town; but when he found himself opposite Mrs. Herbert’s door, he remembered … he must have been instinctively turning to her, like an outraged cub to its dam … that his mother lived now above her grand new shop!
It was at this point that he realized that he must find some immediate purpose … something that it was imperative for him to do. As his eyes fixed themselves upon the green hedge opposite him, he became aware, through a small children-made gap, of the amazing gold of the meadow beyond. Why, the field was full to the very brim of golden buttercups! It was literally a floating sea of liquid, shining gold!
He felt drawn towards the meadow by a bodily necessity, as if he had been a sick dog seeking certain particular grass-blades by the side of the road! Nothing at that moment short of physical force could have prevented him from climbing through that gap and entering that field. In the stunned condition of his emotions, his actions were obedient to the crude craving of that bodily necessity. The automatic movements of his muscles necessary to reach those yellow flowers followed one another with the inevitableness of water seeking water.
Once in the field, it was just as if he were wading through golden waves. And then he suddenly remembered that it was into this very field that he had flung Mukalog. What a shining mausoleum for that little demon!
He couldn’t resist the distraction of fumbling about at random with his stick among the buttercup-stalks. What if he should by some crazy chance, just at this juncture, stumble upon the obscene idol? How would those long weeks of exposure to the weather have affected it?
While all these notions were pursuing one another over the surface of his mind, like crisscross ripples over a wharf-brimming tide, something else within him was thinking: “In a few minutes I shall be entering that parlour and shaking hands with Carfax. In a few more minutes Carfax will have gone off to his train, and Gerda and I will have been left alone.” He suddenly ceased fumbling in that golden sea with the end of his stick. There was nothing else for it but to take up, like a camel with the last straw laid upon his hump, the swaying burden of his life! “Carfax will probably stay over Sunday. He’ll be infatuated. Her whistling will hold him like sorcery. But on Monday he’ll take his train … and I shall go back to the School; and everything will be as it was before.” But then he remembered the visitor’s arrangement with Stalbridge—how the ex-waiter was to meet the seven-o’clock train at Ramsgard.
“No! By God, I believe he’ll clear off as he said! He’s not a fellow to play fast and loose with a hired servant.”
He began walking to and fro now, with a firmer step, across that field. Back and forth he walked, while the sun, fallen almost horizontal, made what he walked upon seem unearthly. Buttercup-petals clung to his legs, clung to the sides of his stick; buttercup-dust covered his boots. The plenitude of gold that surrounded him began to invade his mind with strange, far-drawn associations. The golden ornaments, tissue upon tissue, leaf upon leaf, covering the dead in the tomb of Agamemnon, the golden pilasters of the halls of Alcinoüs, the golden shower that ravished Danaë, the golden fleece that ruined Jason, the cloud of gold in which the doomed Titan embraced Hera, the flame of gold in which Zeus embraced Semele, the golden fruit of the Hesperides, the golden sands of the Islands of the Blest—all these things, not in their concrete appearances, but in their Platonic essences, made his mind reel. The thing became a symbol, a mystery, an initiation. It was like that figure of the Absolute seen in the Apocalypse. It became a super-substance, sunlight precipitated and petrified, the magnetic heart of the world rendered visible!
Up and down he went, pacing that field. He felt as if he were an appointed emissary, guarding some fragment of Saturn’s age flung into the midst of Blacksod!
“Enjoying the sweet light of the sun … deprived of the sweet light of the sun,” these phrases from Homer rang in his ears and seemed to express the only thing that was important. Carfax taking Gerda upon his knee, Urquhart begging Tilly-Valley for the Sacrament, his mother borrowing from Mr. Manley, Roger Monk trimming Redfern’s grave—all these human gestures presented themselves to him now through a golden mist, a mist that made them at once harmless and negligible, compared with the difference between being alive and being dead!
With his face turned westward, as he stared in his march at the great orb of the horizontal sun, which by reason of the thin screen of clouds that covered it was no more dazzling to his eyes than the periphery of a full moon, he realized that long ago, at Weymouth, he had had an extraordinary ecstasy from the sight of the dancing ripples of the wide bay turned into liquid gold by the straight sun-path.
“Was it sunrise or sunset?” he wondered; but he could not remember anything beyond that dance of gold and the rapture it caused him.
The deeper the enchantment of the moment sank into his being, the clearer became his conclusion with regard to the whole matter.
In the recesses of his consciousness he was aware that a change had taken place within him, a rearrangement, a readjustment of his ultimate vision, from which he could never again altogether recede.
That sense of a supernatural struggle going on in the abysses, with the Good and the Evil so sharply opposed, had vanished from his mind. To the very core of life, things were more involved, more complicated than that! The supernatural itself had vanished from his mind. His “mythology,” whatever it had been, was dead. What was left to him now was his body. Like the body of a tree or a fish or an animal it was; and his hands and his knees were like branches or paws or fins! And floating around his body, was his thought, the “I am I” against the world. This “I am I” included his new purpose and included his will toward his new purpose. “There is no limit to the power of my will,” he thought, “as long as I use it for two uses only … to forget and to enjoy! Ha, old Truepenny, am I with you at last? Air and earth-mould, clouds and a patch of grass, darkness and the breaking of light … Ay, it is enough! And with this as my background, why can’t I be as heathenly ‘good’ as Gaffer Barge? My will can do anything, when I limit it to ‘forget … enjoy.’ ”
And there suddenly came upon him, as he thought of these things, the memory of another blundering mystic, another solitary walker over hill and dale, who in his time, too, discovered that certain “Intimations of Immortality” had to take a narrower, a simpler form, as the years advanced!
“But there’s a tree, of many one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them spoke of something that is gone.”
Increasingly as he stood there, quite motionless now, did the golden sea around him clarify his thoughts. “I must have the courage of my cowardice,” he thought. “I can never be brave like you, old Truepenny; but I can plough on and I can forget.” He dug the end of his stick resolutely into the roots of the grass, into the grave of Mukalog; and there slid into his mind an incident from a visit he had paid long ago to Weymouth … before Christie had ever gone there. …
He was drinking tea alone, drinking it from a particular china “set” belonging to his grandmother, a “set” called Limoges. Beside him was a book with a little heap of entangled bits of seaweed lying upon it, which he was separating and sorting. There came a moment when he suddenly realized that the book, beside which was his teacup and upon which was the seaweed, was The Poems of Wordsworth. A thrilling ecstasy shot through him then. In a flash he associated the heightening of life that came from his tea-drinking both with the magic of the floating rock-pools where he had found the seaweed and with the magic of Wordsworth’s fluctuating inspiration; and there came upon him a sense of such incredible loveliness, “interfused” through existence, that he jumped up from his chair and began rapidly pacing the floor, hunching his shoulders and rubbing his hands together. …
That experience came back to his mind now. “If I can’t enjoy life,” he thought, “with absolute childish absorption in its simplest elements, I might as well never have been born!”
And then there came over him a feeling that he could never have expressed in definite words. It was as if an intangible residuum of all the emanations from all the places in town and country through which he had passed, hovered about him now, like the sea-smell of those seaweeds about that book!
From this feeling his mind reverted easily enough to the thought of death. “Death, the sweet sleep; death, the heavenly end,” he repeated. And as though the words had been the burden of an old sentimental song, he felt something within him respond to them with a melting nostalgia. …
Then, as he turned eastward, and the yellowness of the buttercups changed from Byzantine gold to Cimmerian gold, he visualized the whole earthly solidity of this fragment of the West Country, this segment of astronomical clay, stretching from Glastonbury to Melbury Bub and from Ramsgard to Blacksod, as if it were itself one of the living personalities of his life. “It is a god!” he cried in his heart; and he felt as if titanic hands, from the horizon of this “field of Saturn,” were being lifted up to salute the mystery of life and the mystery of death!
What he longed to do was to plunge his own hands into this Saturnian gold, and to pour it out, over Mr. Urquhart, over Mattie, over Miss Gault, over Jason, over all the nameless little desolations—broken twigs, tortured branches, wounded reptiles, injured birds, slaughtered beasts—over a lonely stone, on which no moss grew, in the heart of Lovelace park, over a drowned worm, white and flaccid, dropped from the hook of Lobbie Torp into some Lunt pool, over the death-pillow of old Mr. Weevil, deprived now of his last conscious gluttony, over the lechery of the “water-rat” himself, so pitiful in its tantalized frustration! All … all … all would reveal some unspeakable beauty, if only this Saturnian gold were sprinkled upon them!
Reversing the position of his stick in his fingers as if he scrupled to touch this golden sea with anything but its handle, he did his best to turn this new clairvoyance upon the knot of his own identity. Hardly knowing what he was doing, he moved up close to the back of the pigsty; and as he swung his stick by the wrong end, its handle brushed the tall weeds that grew against the shed.
“It’s my body that has saved me,” he thought; and as if to assure these patient senses that his spirit was grateful, he abstractedly pinched his thigh above the knee with his left hand.
Behind the pigsty! It seemed to him odd that he had lived here a whole year and had never seen this familiar shed from the back. It was queer how he always shirked reality, and then suddenly plunged—plunged into its inmost retreat! Behind the pigsty! It was only when he got desperate that he plunged into the nature of human beings—that he got behind them!
Ay! How coldly, how maliciously, he could dive into the people he knew and see their inmost souls … from behind, from behind! Poison and sting … the furtive coil and the sex-clutch; yes, a spasmodically jerking, quivering ego-nerve, pursuing its own end—that was what was behind everyone!
Behind the pigsty! How often had he visualized every single person of his life, in some treachery of meanness! How often had he caught them in some incredible posture of grotesque indecency! Oh, it was his own mind that was diseased … not Nature. Well, diseased or not, it was all he had! Henceforth he was going to take as the talisman of his days the phrase endure or escape. Where had he picked up that phrase? Behind a workhouse? Behind a madhouse?
Between himself and what was “behind” the Universe there should be now a new covenant! The Cause up there could certainly at any minute make him howl like a mad dog. It could make him dance and skip and eat dung. Well, until it did that, he was going to endure … follow his “road,” through the ink-stains, and endure!
His eye happened to catch sight of a large grey snail with its horns extended, ascending the tarred boards of the shed. It had just left a pallid dock-leaf that spread itself out against the boarding, and to which its slime still adhered. His mind rushed off to thousands and thousands of quiet spots, behind outhouses, behind stick-houses, behind old haystacks, behind old barns and sheds, where such grey snails lived and died in peace, covering docks, nettles, and silverweed with their patent slime! How often had he hurried past such places with hardly a glance! And yet their combined memory reconciled him more to life than all Roger Monk’s flowerbeds.
By God! He must be crafty in dealing with these modern inventions! He must slide under them, over them, round them, like air, like vapour, like water. Endure or escape! A good word, wherever it was he had picked it up.
Well, never mind the motors and the aeroplanes! King Aethelwolf was at rest, staring up at that fan-tracery. It only needed an adjustment … and he could be as much at peace in life as that king was in death!
Was Carfax making love to Gerda now, all soft and yielding and relaxed, after her whistling?
Everyone had to feel according to the fatality of his nature; but who was he to make pompous moral scenes?
Alone! That was what he had learnt from the hard woman who had given him birth. That every soul was alone. Alone with that secret bestower of torture and pleasure, the horned snail behind the pigsty!
Endure or escape. He must spread the wisdom of that word over all the miserable moments that were to come.
Oh, Christie! Oh, Christie!
Well, he must go in and face those two now.
He took up his stick firmly and securely by its proper end, and for a few paces moved forward blinking, straight into the circle of the sun, as it aimed itself at him over the rim of the world. Then he swung round, scrambled through the gap, and hurried across the road.
“I wonder if he is still here?” he thought as he laid his hand on the latch of the gate. And then he thought, “Well, I shall have a cup of tea.”