Lenty Pond
“Don’t you ever say ‘it’s too late’ again, Missy!” were his parting words, as he kissed Gerda, a few days later, across their iron gate.
It was Thursday now, only two days before the King’s Barton wedding, and events had moved rapidly since that agitating Sunday. He had cajoled his Pond Cottage friends into allowing Olwen to pay a surreptitious visit to what after all was her paternal home; and the child had fallen in love with Christie to such an extent that the visit had been repeated within forty-eight hours. And this very day Darnley was driving her in, as he came to School, with the idea that she should stay a couple of days under the Malakite roof.
“No one will interfere; it’s all blown over,” Wolf had said. “It would have to be some enemy if any fuss were made. But there won’t be any fuss. A little gossip, when Christie goes out with her in the street … nothing more … and perhaps not even that!”
The only opposition to these proceedings came from Jason, who, though he would not confess himself jealous of this new passion in the child, brought forward the darkest suggestions as to the dangerousness of Blacksod as a place for little girls. “These large towns,” he had said to them all, speaking as if Blacksod were a second Birmingham, “these large towns are full of disgusting goings-on. These tradesmen think of nothing but their merry little ways. And, of course, if you want Olwen to have her meals with Mr. Malakite—” But to Wolf’s delighted surprise he had received emphatic support in this enterprise from Mrs. Otter. He had, indeed, been quite as astonished at the insight displayed by that timid lady as by her defiance of the protests of her eldest son. “Olwen will only do them good, Jason,” she had said. “There’s a special providence over a child like that. She’ll turn that sad little Christie into a different girl.”
It was just after eight o’clock when Wolf swung round to wave a final farewell to Gerda. He had begged her to let him have a very early breakfast that morning; for Mrs. Solent wanted him to see her teashop with what she called “clear decks.” Everything had always been in confusion, near closing-time, when he came in at the end of the day; but this morning, full of pride that her son should see her shop before her waitresses appeared, Mrs. Solent had unlocked and cleaned up the place herself at an incredibly early hour, and was waiting for him there now.
The new teashop was not far from the Grammar School, but it was in a side-street that branched off towards the meadows where the Lunt encircled the town. The town, in fact, melted into the country here even more quickly than it did on the Babylon Hill side or in the direction of Preston Lane. It was a more umbrageous country, at any rate, into which that little side-street led.
Into this quarter of Blacksod, cutting its way through heavy clay hills, diving between tall ferny banks covered with beeches and Scotch firs, following swifter streams than the Lunt, ran the great Exeter Highroad; and it was the tourists from that direction that were now to be waylaid and entertained.
This process had apparently already begun; for when Wolf approached the neat little square building, lying back from the road, with a garden in front of it yellow with daffodils, his feeling was unmistakable that prosperity was in the air. The wind was keen and invigorating this morning, the sky clear; and as he strode up the path between the swaying daffodils, he had a sharp, prophetic sense of his mother’s future. He saw this little shop moved to one of the main streets of the town. He saw still more of the savings of that enamoured farmer swept into the business! He saw his mother’s grasp upon life growing more drastic, more daring, more debonair. He saw her power over material things increasing, her strange pride and exultant loneliness keeping pace with her power. “She’ll leave me far behind,” he thought. And there swept over him a wave of bitter shame at his own incompetence.
“She’ll be doling out bonuses to Gerda and me,” he thought. “We shall be hanging on to her skirts! We shall be a dead weight upon her.”
Vividly he recalled the discussion that had taken place in the last few days between himself and Gerda on the subject of how to spend Mr. Urquhart’s two hundred pounds. How childish Gerda was, and how reckless he was! The whole thing was ridiculous … with their tiny income to think of spending all this on just smartening up their house!
He knocked lightly now at the teashop door and entered without waiting for a response. He was amazed at the neatness and elegance of what he saw.
His mother greeted him in the highest feather. Laughing and jesting, she showed him the kitchen, the scullery, the sanitary arrangements, the furniture. “The rooms are empty upstairs,” she said; “but do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to leave Herbert-land, with its dust and its smells, and move over here! I’m going to use one of my waitresses—I’ve got two, you know—as a maid. She and I will both sleep up there. There are three rooms. And I’ll have a regular drawing-room. I’ll have the kind of drawing-room I’ve always wanted—different altogether from that old place in town.”
Mother and son were now seated on two immaculate wicker-chairs. Wolf had not yet dared to light a cigarette; but Mrs. Solent, with a quick, radiant gesture, offered him one of her own.
“You won’t get enough exercise, mother, if you live where you work; and your precious drawing-room will always be full of the smell of cooking.”
“Oh, we won’t think of that!” she cried, making a stroke in the air with her cigarette as if condemning to annihilation every trick of hostile chance; and as he watched her, he realized for the first time what a power she had of forcing external events into line with her wishes. Never had he seen her so full of zest for labour and trouble and tension as she was that morning. Wolf himself felt sick with dismay when he thought of this place filled with tourists from Exeter, and the rooms upstairs reeking of culinary odours!
“What are you making that face about?” his mother asked.
“Am I making a face? I was wondering how much spirit you’ll have left for those evening walks you’re so fond of.”
Mrs. Solent laughed gaily. “I had one, last night,” she said, “towards Pendomer. There are lovely fields over there”—she nodded her head towards the west—“and delicious woods. I couldn’t want anything nicer. I went out there last night … up the hill and over the hill … I half-thought of waylaying you at the Grammar School and taking you with me. But you know what I am! I love my Wolf.” Here she extinguished her cigarette and rose from her seat. “But I have to be alone for these walks. I tell myself stories; I let myself be as romantic and excited as I can. That time of twilight stirs me up … like a nightjar, I suppose … and I have lovely sensations!”
She moved past him; and as she passed she bent down, took his head between her two hands, and kissed it. Then she went to the door, and, flinging it wide open, inhaled the cool, strong northeast wind. As she stood thus, with her straight, sturdy back turned to him, he seemed to get a supernatural glimpse of the whole power of her personality. This teashop and that hill “towards Pendomer” were only little, material symbols of a Napoleonic campaign that she was working out … not necessarily in this world at all, but in some world, some level of psychic conflict, parallel with his “mythology.”
“Well, I’ve got to be off, Mother!” he cried. And as he extinguished his cigarette by the edge of hers, in one of her new ashtrays, he instinctively squeezed it into an identical perpendicular position. Then, jumping up from the creaking wicker-chair, “I’m late as it is,” he murmured. “I suppose Mr. ‘Willum’s Mill’ comes here for his tea every day?” He strode to the door and stood there by her side. Mrs. Solent laughed, with the rich, careless, high-pitched laugh of a Ninon or a Thais.
“Only on market-days, my son. But I’m going to tea with him, next Sunday.”
Wolf disregarded this confession altogether. “I say, Mother! You’re coming to the wedding on Saturday, aren’t you? The day after tomorrow. You haven’t forgotten that?”
She turned towards him her radiant cheeks and glowing eyes. “Will the monster be there, to see Lorna’s child married to your respectable friend? If she’s there, I must come. What sport it’ll be! The monster and I in the same pew, and your sister landing her patient fish!”
Across Wolf’s mind flitted the image of that unwieldy figure stumbling over the milk-bottle at the grave.
“I haven’t the least idea whether Miss Gault means to come,” he said. “But you must come, Mother! You must leave your work to your two girls. I’ll call for you at Mrs. Herbert’s … about half-past nine … and we’ll walk over. Well, I must run. Goodbye, Mother.”
She met his embrace with a swift, almost greedy kiss, but immediately afterwards whispered with airy mockery: “Mattie Smith must be very grateful to you for giving her her darling! That pointed beard would never have been caught if my Wolf hadn’t played matchmaker.”
“What the devil are you talking about, Mother? They knew each other years before we came down here.”
There shone in her brown eyes such a wellspring of satirical mischief, he found it hard to tear himself away. A spasm of vicious sympathy with this dark-spurting jet of malice produced the sensation within him of a nervous twinge that was half a tickling delight to him and half an adder’s bite.
His mind reverted in a lightning-flash to his father’s skull. Oh, how gentle, oh, how kindly that grin of death seemed, compared with this inhuman glee in the presence of perverse fate! A malign voluptuousness rose up within him, like an intoxicating bubble out of the very abyss, spilling black bile through veins. Ferociously he offered up that poor skull to this radiant sorceress. “You look just as you did, Mother, when you teased Mr. Smith so much, that Horse-Fair day. I hope his ghost won’t be there on Saturday!” His words were innocent enough; but he knew too well what passed, under their cover, between himself and this woman. For good and evil he had made his choice between the living and the dead.
“I could not feel like this,” he thought, “if I were the Wolf Solent I used to be. Goodbye!” he repeated. “I must run.” …
All that morning, as he faced the Grammar School boys, his mind squeezed out the essence of this scene with his mother. He had gone over to her altogether! He had deserted the “fellow i’ the cellarage.” He had betrayed his “old Truepenny.” All that long morning, while those boys’ faces scattered themselves into his mind like grey ashes into a pail, he struggled to make clear what had happened to him.
He had no longer any definite personality, no longer any banked-up integral self. Submission to Urquhart had killed more than self-respect. He could never have gone over to his mother like this if his “mythology” had survived. He could feel now that greedy kiss of hers upon his lips! He had come to Dorset … he knew it well enough now … to escape from her, to mix with the spirit of his father in his own land. But Fate was hunting him “back to London,” and he began to have an inkling as to what the alternative to London was. The alternative to London was the bottom of Lenty Pond!
Wilder and wilder grew his thoughts as he rounded off the destiny of the House of Stuart to those furtive listeners. Rows upon rows of dwarf-men … that is how he saw them now, these boys of his … embryo-men, with a kind of distorted, atrophied intelligence, full of a jeering, idiotic cunning! Oh, how he hated them and the task of teaching them!
Suddenly in the very middle of his lesson he felt his voice changing and becoming strangely vibrant. Good God! What things were on the tip of his tongue to say to them! Was he going to “dance his malice-dance” before them, as he had danced it before that London audience? Life upon this earth began to show itself to him in a most evil light.
This killing of his “mythology,” how could he survive it? His “mythology” had been his escape from life, his escape into a world where machinery could not reach him, his escape into a deep, green, lovely world, where thoughts unfolded themselves like large, beautiful leaves, growing out of fathoms of blue-green water!
What were his sensations to him now? What was the air of a morning like this, without those mysterious emanations from the glimmering depths?
He had comforted Gerda; and the way she was happy now in her childish delight over that two hundred ought to have given a fresh glow to his days. But it didn’t. That startling alliance between Christie and Olwen, which he had plotted in the face of so many difficulties, and which was apparently absorbing both of them in its excitement, ought to have satisfied him. But it only made his thoughts gloomier. The last time he had seen Christie, her mind was so full of Olwen and Olwen’s future, that she scarcely listened to what he was telling her!
Through the dizzy foreground of these boys’ heads, white collars, sharp elbows, and scratching pens, through the patient “notes” he himself was dictating to them, floated in long procession all the people of his life.
Urquhart was sending his book in instalments to Bristol to be printed. He appeared to be thinking of nothing else. Jason was revising another volume of poetry, which promised to raise him into the innermost circle of modern literature. Darnley, Mattie, Mrs. Otter—they were all happy just then. He found himself sheering off any thought of Miss Gault. But apart from Miss Gault, all his friends were in calm waters. Even T. E. Valley, so Darnley had informed him, was in a state of comparative peace of mind.
He found himself and Miss Gault to be the only unhappy ones. Yes, and they were the only consciousnesses in the whole circle who gave a thought to that cemetery! When he and Miss Gault were dead, not a living soul would remember William Solent. Why, Mattie, the man’s own daughter—not even once had Wolf been able to persuade her to visit that grave!
Oh, how he hated his work in that classroom! He did not only know in pitiless detail every map upon the wall … and feel toward it as something removed from every tincture of happiness … he also knew every ink-stain and fly-stain upon the wall. Those dirty marks were of equal importance with the maps. Both the marks and the maps represented a world that was totally bleak … a world of doleful invention, of disconsolate fancy … and yet a world in which he had to spend by far the larger part of his life.
He had just managed to cope with this desolate world by giving himself up to his secret vice the very second he left the school-gate. But those ecstatic sensations were now gone forever! He might tear his nerves to pieces with his effort to get those feelings back. They would never come back! They were lost. How did human beings go on living, when their life-illusion was destroyed? What did they tinker up and patch up inside of them to rub along with, to shuffle through life with, when they lacked that one grand resource? …
He hurried back to Preston Lane for lunch, and was more than successful in hoodwinking Gerda as to his secret desolation. The girl chatted all the time about the spending of the two-hundred! So far she had bought nothing but one small pair of silver sugar-tongs. The cheque had been deposited in Gerda’s name, and the girl was touchingly proud of possessing her first “fortune,” as she kept calling it. She apparently intended spending every penny in the next few weeks! At least that was the implication of her excited chatter; and Wolf was quite prepared to submit.
He derived a sardonic amusement from noting the fact that this “spiritual blood-money,” which had cost him his secretest happiness, was apparently smoothing away altogether the moral bruise left by the Weevil incident. That “brown coat” might return to his mind now and then. Hers it seemingly troubled no more. As for the luckless water-rat, he did not show his face again. Wolf’s private inkling was that he had been indignantly dismissed, once for all, in some brief scene to which the girl never alluded. But it may easily have been that the lad himself was frightened by the length to which he had gone. Wolf certainly found, in his own weary introspection into the feelings of a cuckold, that he had a tendency to avoid that part of the town where the sausage-shop was! …
His lunch over, Wolf strode back more dispirited than ever to the scene of his pillory.
He had come to loathe every aspect of that chair and desk which made up his spiritual scaffold. There he talked and fidgeted while those rows of cropped heads and protruding ears nodded and swayed like shocks of ruffled wheat under the conscientious, pitiless repetition of a recurrent winnowing. And this was destined to be his life indefinitely, sans the remotest chance of a change for the better, unless his mother, as a successful businesswoman, gave him a pension!
What a mess he had made of his life! As he surveyed those spots and blurs and marks on these odious walls, he began to recognize the fact that until the last two or three days he had never faced reality at all. His heavenly vice, hugged to himself like a fairy bride, had protected him from reality. Here he was, thirty-six years old, and as far as real reality was concerned—the reality his mother lived in, the reality Darnley lived in—he was as innocent and preoccupied as a hermit who reads nothing but his breviary.
He had lost his breviary now, his Mass-book, his Mass! He had lost his whole inner world; and the outer world—what was it but rows of puzzled, protruding ears, into which, for an eternity, he had to pump tedious, questionable information?
When he left the classroom that evening, he waited for Darnley outside the building.
“I must see Christie first!” he kept repeating, as he watched the boys file out.
“Will you do something for me, old friend?” he said, as soon as his colleague appeared. Darnley fixed his mackerel-coloured eyes upon him in patient surprise.
“Even unto the third part of my kingdom, Solent!”
“Well, keep Mattie waiting for once, and go to tea with Gerda. Will you do that? Tell her I’ve got one of my walking-fits upon me and have to have some air. Tell her not to be worried, even if I’m late for supper. Of course, I don’t mean you to stay all that time. But just tell her I shall be late; and she’s not to worry.”
“But what on earth’s up, Wolf? Where, if a person may ask, are you going to run off to?”
“Oh, it’s all right,” Wolf said quietly. “I’m not sure yet where I shall go. Possibly I’ll pay a visit to Mattie and tell her to expect you! Don’t bother me with any details, my dear! Only, if you love me, go over to Preston Lane and make yourself amusing to Gerda and enjoy her tea. And make her understand that it’s all right. That’s the great thing … that it’s all right!”
Wolf fancied there was a dim expression of disquietude in his friend’s face as he nodded to him and hurried off; but he felt as if he would have run a worse risk just then than to disquiet Darnley. Hurriedly he made his way to the Malakite shop. “She’s got Olwen in there now,” he said to himself. “She won’t want to see me.”
But while he still kept repeating the words, “She won’t want to see me,” he rang the bell in the little side-alley.
To his surprise the door was opened immediately, and Christie herself, in cloak and hat, stood before him. “You!” the girl cried. “Well, you’d better come with me! Olwen has begun murmuring something about cake; and I’ve got none in the house. I’ve left her with Father, over their tea. They’re both slow eaters; so we needn’t rush too madly. Let’s go this way!”
She led him up the quiet incline leading to the King’s Barton road. He could guess now which was the actual confectioner’s to which she was hurrying him … a little shop he had often passed on his way in and out of the town.
The horizontal sun was shooting its rays through great dark banks of western clouds as they approached this shop; and from its windows the fiery reflections fell upon the road like the reflections of barge-lanterns into an estuary.
“Wolf! I never knew how exciting she was, how intelligent she was! Oh, Wolf, it’s wonderful! We suit each other down to the ground.”
He snatched at her hand and pressed it hard. Never in all his relations with her had he caught such a tone in her voice.
When they turned into the Barton road, there was wafted into their faces one of those wandering winds that seem to carry a burden of earth-mysteries from one unknown spot to another.
“What an evening it is!” she cried. “I smelt primroses then!”
“It’s moss, I expect, and dead leaves,” he said, “from the woods over there.”
They soon reached the little shop; and he entered it with her, and helped her to choose the cake.
“Where are you going, Wolf? Over to Barton? Over to Pond Cottage?”
He held open the door for her in silence. There was a bell fixed upon the top of this door, which rang noisily at he closed it behind them. His nerves were so strained that this harsh jangle above their heads seemed ominous to him—seemed to have a sound of warning, like a reef-bell at sea.
“Yes,” he said dreamily. “Over to Barton … over to Lenty Pond.”
The girl missed this slip of the tongue.
“Is your sister happy, Wolf?” she asked. And then, without waiting for an answer: “Do you know what Olwen said just now? She said she’d like to live with me when Mattie was married!”
Wolf prodded the ground with his stick. “Did she really? What a wise little girl! And what did you answer? I don’t see why you shouldn’t have her! I’m sure it would be all right now.”
Christie sighed deeply, a long breath.
“Would they agree to it? Do you think they’d agree to it?”
“I don’t see why not,” he repeated, in a low voice.
“If you see Mattie tonight, Wolf, I wish you’d sound her about it … and Mrs. Otter … just to see how they’d take it.”
He made no reply to this; but drawing under his arm her free hand, and straightening his shoulders, he gazed up the road.
“Do you remember our night in the cornfield, Chris? After that game of bowls?”
She lifted her head and looked sharply at him, and he received the impression that he had struck an unseasonable note.
“I’m not one for forgetting, Wolf. You ought to know that by this time.”
“Urquhart gave me two hundred pounds for finishing his book, Chris. I’ve never told you that, have I?”
But she had turned her face away now and was evidently thinking about Olwen, and getting anxious to return.
“Oh, I’m so glad, my dear!” Her voice was sympathetic, but it was the calm sympathy of a friend, not the vibrant sympathy of a lover.
“What a detached little thing she is,” he thought; and the memory came over him, with a rush of wild self-pity, of all they had whispered together in that cornfield. “I’ve never told her about my ‘mythology’ … but she ought to know, she ought to know what that two hundred means!”
“Well, I must run back. Olwen will have finished her tea.” And she tightened her hold upon the cake and made a little movement to draw her arm away. But Wolf burst out then with a final impulse of desperation:
“It was a vile job. It’s a vile production to be paid all that for! He’s printing it in Bristol now. It’ll just suit your father’s clients! How do you think I’ll appear to myself after this, Christie?”
The girl tossed her head proudly. “Oh, the clients!” she cried. “You’re extremely moral tonight, Wolf! I daresay you thought my book would please the clients!”
“I read just a page,” he said. But he released her arm now and only held her there by the grimness of his mood. “To sell my soul to Urquhart! … to do what young Redfern wouldn’t do!”
She did look up at him now with a flash of penetration.
“But, Wolf—any deviltry he threatened you with, was to make you do it, wasn’t it? Well! You’ve done it. You’ve submitted. He can’t hurt you now, can he?”
“But the book—the book, Chris!”
The girl gave a faint little laugh … the laugh of an air-sprite for whom these human scruples were growing intolerably tedious. … “Well, there are plenty of things Gerda will be glad enough to buy with this money. You’re different from what I thought you were, Wolf, if you let an absurd fancy like this prey on your mind!” She paused a moment and then said gravely, “But Mother would have understood what troubles you.”
She seized the sleeve of his coat with her fingers, and then stood silent, looking fixedly at him. Then she sighed very heavily, and, lifting up his arm to her face, pressed her lips to his wrist. After that she stared at him once more, in intense contemplative scrutiny.
He looked away, across her shoulder, over the scattered Blacksod roofs, over the Lunt meadows. Her sudden gesture of affection and something in the white immobility of her face made him think of the warning he had received in Urquhart’s kitchen from that Farmer’s Rest girl.
“I’ll take a look at that pond tonight,” he thought grimly. “If that’s to be the upshot, I’d better see how it looks of a fine March evening!” …
“Well, give Olwen a kiss for me, Chris; and if I find Mattie at home I’ll certainly try her out about that. I believe myself that she’ll agree to it. She’s so self-absorbed just now that I think she’ll be glad to be left free. Well … God bless you, Chris! Don’t drop the cake. Goodbye … goodbye!”
He did not look back after they separated, but the sound of her light-running footsteps made his heart feel desolately empty.
His last hope of recovering his old self seemed to sink down like a child’s sagging balloon, pricked by a bodkin.
“She doesn’t know. She’s full of Olwen; and she doesn’t know,” he said to himself. But could he have made her know, even if he’d gone back with her? She didn’t ask him to go back. Why should she? But could he have made her know, even if she had? He had never told a living soul about his “mythology.”
He grasped his stick by the middle now; and in place of William of Deloraine, there came into his head the Homeric description of Hector of Troy, when, with his great spear held in just that way, he imposed a truce upon the combatants!
As he caught himself with this thought in his mind he smiled at his own grandiose self-consciousness. Stoicism! That’s what a man needed, made as he was made! Stoical endurance of whatever fate the gods rained down upon his head! No Trojan, no Roman, would blink and whimper at the thought of Lenty Pond.
It was not long before he reached the very spot where on the night of the bowling-match he had climbed over the hedge with Christie, into the cornfield. …
Moved to what he did by an obscure sense that this might be “the last time,” he hurriedly scrambled through the thickset hedge. The field was evidently destined to lie fallow that season. He found a rusty barrow, with its wooden shafts protruding into the air like the horns of a buried monster; and upon this he sat down. The sun had disappeared now, and he felt disposed to let the twilight fall about him in that place of memory.
Slowly, as he waited, did the earth swing into greyness, into dusk, into darkness. Cramped and chilly, he felt as if it needed more energy than he possessed to clamber down again into the road! A sort of waking-trance fell upon him as he crouched there, growing more and more cold and numb; and it was almost quite dark when he resumed his walk.
“I am like a ghost that’s been damned,” he thought, as he moved on. And indeed it was just as such a ghost would have felt that he had the sense of being cut off from all the magnetic reservoirs of the planet! He experienced a physical sensation of lightness, of hollowness, as he walked—as if he had been a husk, blown by the faintest of all winds!
When he reached the path that crossed the fields to the main highway, “I suppose,” he thought, “the whole business has been inevitable since the beginning; the sort of thing that had to happen, if a nature like mine lost its pride?”
As he began to approach King’s Barton he noticed that the night was going to be one of those clear, vapourless nights, when the sky is velvety dark and the stars exceptionally large and bright. He was walking with his head turned towards a specially luminous constellation, just above the arable uplands, a little to his left. Suddenly he became conscious, as an absolute certainty, that just above the horizon behind him, somewhere between Melbury Bub and Blacksod, there was a crescent moon. He swung round on his heel. Yes! There it was … the thinnest, most disembodied new moon that he had ever seen!
He surveyed that fragile-floating illuminated curve, comparable to nothing above or beneath the earth, and there came over him an inexplicable desire to do reverence to this immortal visitant. How had he known with such certainty that there was a new moon behind him? He was not yet enough of a countryman to keep any account of these things. Well! whatever perch were left in Lenty Pond would know about this new moon!
When he reached the wall of the churchyard, he noticed that there was a light in one of the lower windows of that great Perpendicular Tower. He paused and contemplated this light. In that vapourless darkness its effect in the middle of a great mass of masonry was singular and arresting. While he leaned upon the low, crumbling wall and surveyed this light, he became aware of the sound of men’s voices—voices whispering … whispering furtively and suspiciously. Suddenly, by means of a light much less clear than the light in the window … “It’s a lantern!” he thought … he detected the forms of three men, one of them much taller than the others, grouped around the boy’s grave. He had no sooner caught sight of this group of noctambulists than the light in the tower went out.
Never had he felt less inquisitive, less concerned. He was tempted to walk forward and let the whole thing go. However, where all motives were equally futile, let a straw turn the scale! He climbed stealthily over the wall and advanced to the church-door.
The door was wide open, and he entered the central aisle, moving as cautiously as he could. Past the christening-font he moved; past the back of the rear pews. All was pitch-dark, and the peculiar smell of the church, suggestive of mildew and worm-eaten woodwork, was like a second darkness within the darkness. He was arrested in his advance by the sudden appearance of a flickering light, which proceeded from the space under the tower where were the stone steps that led up to the belfry.
“Tilly-Valley!” he muttered to himself, as once more—as had been happening to him so often these last few days—he knew without question who this light-bearer was.
Yes! He was right! Descending the belfry-steps, with a flickering candle in his hand, came the figure of the little priest, his thin legs first, then his cassocked body, then his agitated white face, then his bare black scalp!
The expression of the man’s face, when he caught sight of Wolf, was an epitome of consternation and relief, the latter emotion rapidly overspreading the former, like a kindly shadow crossing a distorted gargoyle.
“What’s up, Valley?” whispered Wolf, taking the vicar’s cold, limp fingers in his own. “What are they doing out there? Is it Urquhart? There were three of them. They had a lantern. God, man! You’re trembling like a leaf!”
“I was in my garden … I saw them come in … over the hedge. … For a long time I watched them. I ought to have gone down to them … I know I ought … I’ve betrayed the Sacrament by not going down to them. …”
“It’s all right,” whispered Wolf soothingly. “You couldn’t have done anything. They’ve probably been drinking. Monk’s with him out there. I saw him … the great devil! The other one’s that fellow Round, no doubt.”
The priest broke away from him and began hurrying up the aisle towards the altar, Wolf following at his heels.
“There would have been a time,” he said to himself, “when … when …”
Wolf thought the clergyman was going to kneel down or even prostrate himself; but instead of this he placed the candle carefully upon the top of the altar, made a hurried genuflection, and then ran round like a panic-stricken thief to a small window in the side-transept which overlooked the invaded spot.
Here Wolf followed him and peered out too, leaning over his shoulder.
There were only two men to be seen now … and they were both busy filling up the open grave. The lantern was on the ground, and by its light they were seen working hard, stamping down the loose soil with the utmost concentration and scraping away all the telltale rubble from the surface of the grass. Not a word did the men speak to one another; but it was easy enough to recognize Monk. The other was undoubtedly the landlord of “Farmer’s Rest.” Mr. Urquhart had disappeared.
They worked at their job so rapidly that it was not long before the carefully folded rolls of turf-grass were being pressed down upon that oblong heap, concealing the raw clay. Wolf fancied he could even detect a patch of daisies upon this replaced turf. There was a patch of something, at any rate, that showed whitish, as the lantern-rays fell upon it.
Mr. Valley’s cassock, as Wolf bent over the little priest, smelt unpleasantly of gin. The wall against which he himself was pressing the palm of his hand, as he leant forward, felt damp and chilly under the touch, like the flesh of a corpse.
“They can’t see our light, can they?” groaned the vicar, half-turning his head. “I’ll blow it out!” whispered Wolf in reply; and leaving the man’s side, he walked over to the altar-steps, extinguished the flame, and came back with the candlestick swinging from one of his fingers, and a fume of carbonic-acid gas floating round his head.
Shifting his stick to the hand from which the smoking candle was swinging, Wolf peered again through the narrow window. He could feel the body of Mr. Valley shivering; and to give the man some reassurance in the darkness, he placed his free hand upon his shoulder. Then, bending down, he laid both the candle and his oak-stick softly on the flagstones.
The two men at the grave seemed resolved to complete their job with the utmost scrupulosity. “I can’t believe they are drunk,” he thought. “He must have appealed to their superstition. He must have scared them into it.”
What the man had said over the Malmsey returned to his mind. “He must have forced the coffin open!” he thought. And then, as he stared above Mr. Valley’s head at those two figures beating the turf down, he was surprised to find himself completely indifferent and impassive. Whether Mr. Urquhart had been content to press his perturbed face against the cold featurelessness of Redfern’s mortality, or whether, like Isabella in “The Pot of Basil,” he had carried “so dear a head” back to his secret chamber, seemed at that moment a question that left him utterly incurious!
“There would have been a time for such a word,” he said to himself; “but now all is equal!” He saw Roger Monk straddle over the grave with his long legs, move the lantern, and whisper something to Mr. Round. From the road outside there came the sound of children laughing and chattering. “I wonder Urquhart didn’t wait till midnight. Anyone might have drifted in here; but I suppose they’d just take ’em for gravediggers … or be too scared to go near ’em!”
“Thud! Thud! Thud!” went the spades of the two men against the sides of the grave. Valley’s shiverings had stopped now. Wolf heard the little man’s lips moving in the darkness. He was muttering a Latin psalm. Wolf now began to feel like a mute sentinel—a sentinel at the grave of everything that had ever enjoyed the sweet sun! Vast tracts of Dorset earth seemed spread out before him. He could hear a low wind in the sycamores of Poll’s Camp. He could hear the wide expanses of Blackmore Vale sighing in their sleep. He recalled what he had felt at his first encounter with Urquhart … that vague awareness of something new and strange to him in the secret of evil. He seemed totally indifferent to all that now! Good? Evil? It all seemed to belong to something unimportant, irrelevant, remote. What did it matter? This grave those two were stamping down so smoothly … it was only one of thousands under that crescent moon! With the heart of life killed, what did it matter what happened to anyone?
The two men were exchanging whispers now. They were gazing with satisfaction at their work. Wolf recognized that his bare hand, whose outspread fingers were pressed against the cold stone, had grown numb as he leant hard upon it, bending forward over Valley’s shoulder. Ay, but what an unpleasant odour … like dissolution itself … emanated from the cold sweat of the little priest! But the man’s shivering had subsided. That was a good sign. No doubt the departing of Mr. Urquhart had relieved the situation for him. As for himself, he felt an obscure regret at the squire’s withdrawal. So deadly callous had his emotions grown, he experienced at that moment nothing but a weary curiosity. Yes, it would have been interesting to see that convulsed white face bending down over the form in the coffin! The old villain must have crouched on the grass, when they got the lid off, undeterred by the smell! Had Valley seen what happened from up there in the belfry? Probably he had; and the shock of it had brought him scrambling down, torn between the outrage of the sacrilege and his fear of the squire.
The two men were standing erect now and staring straight towards him. Of course, they couldn’t see anything, now that the church was dark. They must be feeling the vibration of his and Valley’s intense scrutiny.
How long had his hand been lodged on Valley’s shoulder, and why was he gripping the man so hard?
He raised his arm, so that both his palms were pressing now against the coping of that narrow slit in the wall. One of them was numb, but the other was hot and pulsing feverishly. Ah, the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet! But a time will come when there’ll be no more lanterns!
“Damn that beggar Monk! He’s not satisfied yet. There goes his spade again. Yes, take the lantern away, landlord Round! Yes, nudge the great brute and call him off. Yes, there are steps in the road. You’d better clear off, both of you! God! I believe they’re going to quarrel! But it’s all nothing to me now. What is a quarrel over a boy’s grave when the ‘hard little crystal’ of a person’s inmost self has dissolved?
“It’ll be a quaint moment, though, when that great beggar gets back to the house and has to answer his master’s bell! Will he say, ‘Yes, sir … no, sir,’ in his usual tone? He talked to me once of killing the man. Why does that come into my head at this moment? But no! He’ll never do that. He’ll carry up the hot drink and turn down the bedclothes, just as usual; and Urquhart’ll say, ‘The moon has gone down, eh? what?’ just in his ordinary tone! They have done now … at last. … Oh, that’s right! Don’t forget the crowbar, Mr. Round! A crowbar? So they did intend to open the coffin!”
Wolf watched the two men make their way, slowly and carefully, between the graves, towards the wall that divided the churchyard from the meadow where the school-treat had been held. Once over this wall, only an occasional flicker of the lantern revealed their path; and soon even that vanished.
He turned from the window, pulling his companion after him. It was like touching something that had no feeling with something else that had no feeling, to tug at Valley’s arm with his benumbed fingers.
After three or four futile efforts, he managed, however, to strike a match; and by the aid of this match, moving across to the altar-steps, with his fingers guarding the flame, he relit the priest’s candle. With a cold, weary impassiveness … allowing this impulse to reach Lenty Pond, which was indeed the only definite impulse he retained just then, its fullest sway … he suggested to the silent figure at his side that they might walk over together to Pond Cottage. “It’ll cheer the little beggar up,” he thought, “to have a chat with the bride and bridegroom; and I can drop him at their gate.”
T. E. Valley seemed glad enough to postpone his return to the desolation of his littered study. “But I mustn’t stay long!” he murmured.
During the first part of their walk together some mutual instinct prevented them from referring to the scene they had just witnessed; but at last, when they had reached Pond Lane, Valley burst out:
“I hope you’re right … from a secular point of view … about my not interfering just now, Solent. From my own point of view I shall find it … hard … yes, very hard … no, I don’t mean that … did I say hard? I meant that I shall find it … very … you know, Solent? … very shameful … to … to … forgive myself!”
They were walking now where the hedges were very high and thick. Wolf began to experience a confused exhaustion, that seemed to weigh upon his head as well as upon his arms and legs. It was as though a knot had been tied in the recesses of his being, which interfered with the flow of his blood. A heavy, inert apathy settled down upon him, which he vaguely associated with these high hedges. “It would have been ridiculous to meddle,” he said. “You’d have done no good. Do you know, Valley, I think I’d like to rest for a minute!”
“To rest? Certainly … of course. You mean it would be nice if we sat down? But it’s very dark, isn’t it? There’s usually water in both these ditches; and they are very deep. Hadn’t we better wait till we get to the Otters’?”
“Better wait,” repeated Wolf wearily, feeling as if it would be a heavenly thing to slip gently down now into Lenty Pond and have done with it all; “better wait till we get to the Otters’.”
“You’re not feeling shaky, are you, Solent? I’m rather shaky myself. Take my arm. The air will be better soon. It’s these hedges. I never come here alone, because of these hedges—and—well! you know? because of that pond over there. Don’t mind them, Solent. They’re only high hedges and deep ditches.”
Wolf stopped motionless in the middle of the road. “I really would like to sit down,” he said. “I mean, to lie down! I think I must be, as you say, shaky. I expect it’s from standing so long at that window. Would you mind if I tried, with my stick, to feel if there is water in the ditch?”
“If you feel dizzy, Solent, why don’t you lie down where we are—in the road? I’ve often done that myself. Here; lean on me! I’ll help you. That’s right. It’s quite dry, isn’t it? Here; I’ve got a handkerchief in my pocket, a big red one … it’s as big as a scarf. Here; I’ll put it under your head … so … so … so. Do you feel all right now, Solent? You will soon, anyway. Do you know, I’ve had some of the happiest moments of my life lying down in the road? The road to Blacksod is very good for lying down on, because there’s grass at the side of it and very few carts go that way. How do you feel now, Solent?”
A relaxation of every muscle and fibre in Wolf’s body seemed to have taken place. He gazed up at the obscure form of the priest and at the shivering stars in the blue-black sky.
“It’s—just—what—I—wanted,” he murmured, with a luxurious sigh.
Mr. Valley was delighted. He hovered over him as if he had ensconced him in his own bed. “I thought you’d like it, Solent,” he murmured. “Sometimes when I’ve been like this on the Blacksod road I’ve felt as if, with the round earth beneath me carrying me between the constellations … and the Blessed Sacrament waiting my return … I’ve felt as if—What’s the matter, Solent? Is the road too hard?”
But Wolf had only been fumbling with his hand to make sure he hadn’t lost his stick. He felt extremely unwilling to move or to speak. But he was conscious of a stronger wave of affection for Valley than he had ever known before.
“Does your forehead feel feverish?” his companion enquired now, touching Wolf’s head in the darkness with the tips of his fingers. “Don’t think I’m inquisitive, Solent; but I’m a priest of God, and I … I notice people that are … people that are … disturbed.”
“You’re very nice to me, Valley. Please don’t kneel in the road! I’ll get up in a minute. It does me good lying here.”
“Don’t think I’m inquisitive, Solent; and don’t answer if you don’t want to. But am I right in thinking that you’ve got something on your mind … something that troubles you till you feel dizzy, like you did just now?”
“I’ll get up in a moment, Valley. I’m only lying like this now because it’s such a nice sensation! Why do you think it’s so dark, when the stars look so large?”
“It’s these hedges, Solent. They keep the light out.”
“The moon’s gone down. Do you mean the light from Pond Cottage?”
“Solent! You won’t mind if I say something?”
“No. I’m listening. Please get up. I don’t like your kneeling.”
“Shall I tell you what’s troubling you, what’s made you so dizzy, Solent? It’s because Darnley is going to be married. I know exactly what you feel. I know well what you and Darnley are to each other. Do you know what I think, Solent? I think it’s a shame you two didn’t have the happiness of living together before you both married. It’s that that’s troubling you; aren’t I right? It’s thinking that your friend’s lost to you?”
“Nonsense, my good man!” cried Wolf, scrambling hastily to his feet. “What has been weighing on my mind has nothing to do with this wedding. Come! Let’s be getting on! I left Darnley at tea with my wife; I mean, I sent him off there.”
His words were casual and careless; but Valley’s suggestion hit him hard. It was the same hint that Miss Gault had made last Sunday. Was it possible that the accursed mood he’d fallen into … this mood of miserable apathy … had as much to do with the wedding as with the loss of his great secret?
His companion had difficulty now in keeping up with him, so fast did he walk. Presently he said: “Tell me this, Valley, if you don’t mind … did you see what Urquhart was doing just now?”
They were close to the Otters’ house when he spoke. He could distinguish the light from the drawing-room shining between the branches of the poplars. Valley laid his hand on his arm and clutched it tightly, compelling him to stop. The man’s face was a patch of wavering greyness against the blanket of the dark, but he could detect its extreme distress.
“I can’t—Solent—you know what I mean?—I can’t tell you anything. It’s all misery. Yes, I saw him. It was a long way from the tower. The belfry’s high up. I think he loved him. That’s what I have to think; but I can only bear it, Solent, by … by a little trick of mine.” He paused; and then, to his companion’s consternation, he uttered a ghastly little laugh.
“What trick, Valley, are you talking about?” Wolf instinctively swung his arm free, for the priest’s fingernails were hurting his flesh. “What trick do you mean?”
His tone was irritable, for he was pondering in his mind how to get rid of the man and slip off. “I must set eyes on that pond before I see Mattie,” he said to himself.
Valley’s reply seemed to come from the darkness that surrounded them, rather than from any localized spot. “If … you … must … know … I have … to pretend … that I was Urquhart … myself!”
Wolf made no comment upon this. He looked up at the poplars in that well-known garden. They were illuminated on one side by a faint glimmer coming from his old window, the window of the room where he spent his first night in Dorset.
“What a man-lover you are, Valley! My trick is to escape from humanity altogether.”
To his dismay the priest’s reply to this was a repetition of the same cackling laugh.
“Yes; to escape from it altogether!” Wolf went on. “I don’t know why that should amuse you, Valley.” As he spoke he became aware of something burning at the back of the house. “Dimity must be burning refuse … some sort of greenery,” he thought. “It’s like the smell of dead flowers. It’s like a bonfire of dead crocuses!”
This aromatic smoke, poignant and penetrating, floating on the air, gave him a very queer twinge. His nerves reached out invisible tendrils to respond to it; but under the disturbed contact between his sensations and his enjoyment of his sensations, this motion of response only caused him tantalizing discomfort. It caused him, indeed, a discomfort of so peculiar a kind, that he prolonged his silence almost rudely, while he gave way to it. It was a sharp, thin, long-drawn-out sensation, like some erotic agitation that is motiveless, meaningless, irritating.
What he felt made it more imperative than ever that he should get rid of his companion and hurry across that field! He turned round, tightened his hold on his stick, and spoke with a tone of quiet authority. “Valley,” he said, “I can’t go in at this moment. I’ve got to think a bit … out here … by myself. You go in and tell them so, will you? I’ll follow you in, in a second or so, when I’ve thought something out … in my mind. Mattie will understand. She knows my ways. Apologize to Mrs. Otter. No! Why should you do that? Just tell them that Darnley’s with Gerda in town and that I’ll be in in a minute. That’s all that’s necessary.”
But the priest’s fingers only tightened upon his arm.
“In town? With your wife? Darnley?”
“Having tea with her, my good man! Those body-snatchers have upset you completely. There! Go in and tell them!” And with a quick movement of his wrist he released himself from Valley’s clutch and rushed off.
He found it an incredible relief to scramble over the familiar gap in that high hedge and run with long, swift strides across the field. It was as if all the rumours in the village about that pond had gathered to themselves invisible arms and were pushing him towards it. What he felt in his own consciousness was not a simple, nor was it a very complicated feeling. It was exactly as if the loss of his spiritual vice had left him inordinately thirsty, and he had an inkling that just to stare at the waters of Lenty Pond would give him some inexplicable satisfaction.
He blundered over the dark expanse of that great field as if Jason’s water-nymph herself had been calling to him. Blindly, recklessly, he ran across it, stumbling over the molehills, not once glancing up at the starry sky, his stick clutched in his right hand as if it had really been the spear of William of Deloraine, and his panting breath coming in deep gasps. As he ran he did notice one thing, and that was the shadowy leap of a startled hare. The creature rose and dashed away from under his very feet; but instead of disappearing into the darkness, he could see, as he ran, where it had risen erect, a short distance off, and was watching him, motionless and with a frozen intentness.
Ah! There it was—Lenty Pond in the cold starlight!
He moved close up to the edge of the water. He stood with both hands pressed hard upon the handle of his stick. He flung his consciousness, as if it were a heavy stone that all day long he had been carrying in his pocket, down into those silent depths. And then his body—not his mind, but his body—became acquainted with shivering dread. Was his mind going to issue the final mandate now, at this very moment? What was his body doing that it revolted like this? What was his body doing that its foot-soles clung to the mud as if they had been rooted there? It was not only his flesh that now turned sick with fear. The very bones within him began screaming—a low, thin, wire-drawn scream—before what his mind was contemplating. It was not that life—merely to be alive—had suddenly become so precious. It was not fear of Nothingness that made his body quake. It was Lenty Pond itself! Yes, what his flesh and his bones shrank from was not eternity. It was immersion in that localized, particular, cubic expanse of starlit oxygen-hydrogen!
He visualized Mr. Urquhart and Jason surveying his dead face. Would someone … the “automatic young lady,” perhaps … have closed his staring eyes before those two looked at him? A fish hooked out of season! “He ought to have taken my advice,” Jason would say, “and gone back to that lord in London!”
A phosphorescent Redfern began to manifest itself now in that unruffled water … a Redfern with no features left!
“This may be,” he thought, “the exact spot where he stood.”
A spasm of shame oppressed him, that he should be so preoccupied with himself that the weight of all that boy’s sufferings meant so little to him. Well, clean out of it now was Jimmy Redfern! But that did not erase the invisible pattern of misery traced upon the air at this spot.
“I’ll ask Jason how he knew that the boy used to come here. I’ll ask him as soon as I get back.”
Get back? Get back where? So he wasn’t going to utter that mandate to his panic-stricken body. …
How queer that he had nothing now left to decide! His future was already there, mapped out before him. It was only a matter of following the track. Yes! The track was already there … leading back again! All he had to do was to accept it and follow it from moment to moment, like a moving hand that threw a shadow over an unfolded map!
But where did that map, that track, that diagram come from, across which, like a sneaking shadow, he saw himself returning to Pond Cottage?
His consciousness, hauled up, as if by a string, from the bottom of the pond, began beating now against the dark wall that separated him from the portion of his being which was unrolling that map! Without his life-illusion he was at that moment completely devoid of pride. Afraid to jump in? Afraid of that cold water down there? It was nothing to him if he were afraid! There was no “I am I” to worry about; no Wolf Solent, with a mystical philosophy, to look like a cowardly fool! But whose hand was it that was unrolling the map? His own hand? Was he, then, a furtive, secretive, desperate life-lover? Or was it the hand of Chance? But how could Chance unroll a map?
What was left of consciousness within him flapped like a tired bird against the whole dark rondure of the material universe. If only he could find a crack, a cranny in that thick rotundity. But the thickness was his very self! He was no longer Wolf Solent. He was just earth, water, and little, glittering specks of fire!
For the tenth-part of a second there seemed to be a faint cracking in this huge material envelope. But no! All was sealed-up. The monstrous cube of black immensity remained intact … darkness upon darkness. Drawing a heavy breath, he jerked himself upright. He had been leaning forward eagerly, preposterously, over the handle of his stick. But now, with a peevish effort, he tugged the thing out of the mud into which he had been pressing it. His mind had suddenly grown cloudy, lumpish, cloddish. He sighed deeply and let his stick swing loosely in his limp fingers. Then bending down with slack knees over Lenty Pond, he set himself to splash the water, foolishly, aimlessly, with his stick’s end. This way and that he splashed it, in the immense stillness, under the flicker of those countless stars. And as he splashed it he began wondering to himself in a heavy logger-headed way why it was, that when all was pitch-dark except for those pinpricks in the firmament, he could distinguish so clearly between the liquid darkness of the water and the solid darkness of the surrounding earth.
He swung round at last, like a man who turns away from the extinguished footlights of an empty theatre, and began retracing his steps across the field. His dominant sensation, as he performed this retreat, was a singular one. He felt as if his consciousness were already ensconced like Banquo’s ghost at the Otters’ table, while some quite alien force was dragging across the field a numb, inert, apathetic human body, that raised one leaden foot after the other.
There was such a hubbub of voices issuing from the drawing-room of Pond Cottage, that with a sulky motion of the muscles of his chin, repeated several times as he stumbled over the flowerbeds, he went round the house to the backdoor. There, at his petulant tap, Dimity Stone let him in. “Mis‑ter So‑lent!” the old crone exclaimed, in her most quavering voice. “And where, for Lawky’s sake, be Master Darnley? Sit ’ee down, Mister Solent, while I gets me breath. These goings-on do daunt a body terrible. ’Tis first one thing, ’sknow; and then be another! First there be talk of a cold bite o’ summat to save I trouble. Then what do Master Jason do but come wambling in about hotting up they wedding-pasties what I’ve hid all day from they since a week agone, ’cept what Miss Olwen coaxed out of I.”
The old woman kept shuffling her utensils about, as she spoke, from one orifice to another of her vast kitchen-stove. A most fragrant steam emerged from more than one lid; and Wolf, as he sat on a hard chair, with one limp hand dangling his stick and the other dangling his hat, was aware of a pang of extreme hunger.
“And then,” she went on, “must Parson come whiffling in, white as a lassie’s petsycut, and Mistress must uncork a sip o’ Scotch for he; and Miss Mattie, all of a tremble with her bride’s-night dependin’, must start crying about Master Darnley, where ’a be and what’s keeping o’ he.”
“I told Mr. Valley to tell them,” threw in Wolf, in a low voice. “I told him to tell them.” The heat of the kitchen, after the chill night-air, and the stress of his recent experiences were beginning to make him feel dizzy again. “I told him to tell them,” he repeated, trying to concentrate his wits upon the confused voices from the drawing-room.
Dimity looked shrewdly at him. “Why, ye be dodderin’ yourself, Mister Solent! Here”—and she hurried to a cupboard and poured something into a glass—“here … drink this. ’Tis me wone cordial.” And she watched him intently, with a hand on his shoulder, as he drained it off. “That’s better, eh? Why, you be near as white as thik parson! ’Tis beyond I, what be coming to this house, these turnover days.”
“What is it?” he murmured, spluttering and gasping, while the blood surged back to his head; “what is it, Dimity?”
“Nought but a drop o’ elder-wine,” she said, soothingly, patting him on the head.
The hubbub of voices from the drawing-room of Pond Cottage began to grow more relevant and natural. A moment ago they had sounded in his ears as if he had been a spirit—a spirit whose body was left far behind, under the water with Jason’s nymph.
“I told Mr. Valley to tell them,” he repeated firmly.
“Missus said thik parson brought such a word,” muttered the old woman, returning to her steaming saucepans. At that moment there reached them both the sound of an opening door and a man’s steps in the front-hall. “He’ve a-come! Master Darnley be come!” cried Dimity, hurrying out of the kitchen.
Wolf rose from his chair, hat in one hand, stick in the other, and followed her out.
The sight of his friend’s yellow beard against the lamp on the hall-table completed his restoration to normal intelligence.
“Oh, there you are!” cried the bridegroom cheerfully. “I told Gerda I knew you’d be here all right. She was a bit nervous about you.” He paused to hang up his coat. The sound of their voices brought the drawing-room door open with a fling; and Mattie rushed out, flushed and excited. Even at the moment this occurred, however, Darnley had time to turn a quick sideways glance towards Wolf across the uplifted overcoat. “She’s a darling, your wife!” he whispered emphatically.
Mattie’s arms were round Darnley’s neck before his hands were free. Wolf had never seen the two of them embrace; and when he awoke that night by Gerda’s side, before a window pallid with dawn, he recalled the expression of his friend’s mackerel-coloured eyes. They were like those of a man who pulls himself together, naked, tense, exultant, on the brink of a rapid torrent.
It was Mrs. Otter herself who took Wolf’s hat and stick away from him now; and as he shook hands with the little lady, he was driven by an unexpected impulse to bend down and give her a hurried kiss.
“It seems the fashion,” he muttered awkwardly, as he turned to greet Jason and T. E. Valley.
“I mustn’t stay for more than this,” he found himself saying presently, as he emptied his soup-plate and lifted his wineglass to his lips. “Darnley says Gerda won’t touch her supper till I get home.”
“You don’t know, of course, how our little girl is behaving?” said Mrs. Otter. “Miss Malakite isn’t spoiling her too much, I hope?”
Wolf felt very grateful for all the easy implications of this little speech.
“Yes, I do, indeed,” he said, rising to his feet. “I met Christie as I passed the shop … when was it? … oh, about half-past five, I think! … and she said Olwen was perfect.”
He felt himself blushing as he caught Jason’s sardonic eye. Why had he said “perfect”? But Mrs. Otter continued quite naturally:
“It’s rather a test for the little thing. But Miss Malakite, I know, will make it easy for her.” She paused and sighed rather sadly. “It’s strange not to have her here,” she added. “I feel as if she’d been here all her life.”
“Your friend Miss Gault,” said Jason, “would like to send the police after her.”
His words produced an uncomfortable silence. Darnley rose to his feet and began sprinkling salt with his finger and thumb upon a wine-stain he had made on the tablecloth.
“If they want to keep her,” said Jason, “are you going to let them, Mother?”
“It’s for Mattie to decide that,” murmured Mrs. Otter.
“Your friend Miss Gault would soon decide it,” repeated Jason. “She’d like to send her, and Miss Malakite too, to the Ramsgard Workhouse!”
“Things will work themselves out as God sees best, Jason,” remarked Mrs. Otter reproachfully. Wolf noticed that as the lady spoke she surreptitiously laid one of her hands on Mattie’s knee.
It was at this point that Mattie herself turned to Dimity. “You’re tired,” she said. “Do sit down now. And listen! I don’t want you to do anything more tonight in my room.” Wolf had always regarded it as a touching peculiarity of Pond Cottage that the aged servant entered freely into every conversation, as she moved about behind the chairs; but tonight he had a premonition, before the old woman opened her lips to reply, that she would say something unlucky.
“You can’t see no corner of Miss Olwen’s bed, Miss Mattie,” was what she now brought out. “They things what I’ve been ironing be all spread out over’n.”
Her words produced a silence even more disconcerting than Jason’s reference to the police.
“You needn’t … tell me … that … Dimity!” cried Mattie, in a strange, high-pitched tone; and then, snatching her hand away from Mrs. Otter, she suddenly burst out: “You can cover up her bed with all my new things—you can all of you do it … yes, you can all of you do it!”
The girl thrust the back of her hand into her mouth, biting the skin. Her heavy face was distorted, her bosom was heaving. “Oh, I want my mother, I want my mother!” she wailed, clapping both hands over her face and swaying to and fro in her seat.
This unexpected reference to a woman dead so many years—he had no notion even as to where Lorna Smith was buried—gave Wolf a queer shock. Mrs. Otter rose hurriedly and threw her arms round Mattie’s swaying head, pressing it to her breast. “My child! My child!” she kept repeating, while Wolf prayed desperately that the girl wouldn’t thrust her away.
“I’m all right … I’m sorry, Darnley!” came her muffled voice at last.
Mrs. Otter let her go and slid back into her seat.
“I’ll help you with the plates, Dimity,” Mattie murmured, rising and straightening her shoulders. Darnley held the door open for her to pass out. She had snatched up Wolf’s soup-plate and Jason’s, which were the only empty ones.
“I’ll say good night, then,” cried Wolf, looking at Mrs. Otter, “and I won’t be late at the church!”
He gathered together his belongings in the hall, while Darnley, with his arm held tight round Mattie’s shoulder, fixed his eyes gravely on every movement he made.
When Wolf had got his coat on, his friend left Mattie standing there frowningly, with the plates still in her hand, and opened the hall-door.
“Good night, Wolf,” he said quietly. “She’ll be all right now. Give my love to Gerda. By the way”—and he lowered his voice so that Mattie shouldn’t hear him—“Gerda says your mother wants to come; and for that reason she’d rather come independently of you, with her father. I told her it should be exactly as she wished.”
Wolf at that moment found it difficult to concentrate his mind upon this nice point.
“We’ll all be with you anyway, Darnley. As long as we’re all there, it doesn’t matter how we turn up, does it? Well, good luck to you!” But he had no sooner got his friend’s fingers in his own than he impulsively dropped them. Catching the man’s head between his hands, he kissed him rapidly several times on the forehead. “Good luck to you!” he repeated, as he strode off down the garden. “I kissed the mother; why not the son?” he thought, as he reached the gate; but something produced a constriction in his throat that was akin to a sob. “Down, wantons … down!” he murmured audibly, as he fumbled for the latch of the gate.
He had scarcely found it, however, when the house-door behind him opened and a hurly-burly of voices reached him.
“But you’ve not even finished your soup!” … “You’ve only had one glass!” … “You might wait till Dimity has brought—”
His first idea was that these cries were intended for himself; but as he wavered there, in puzzled indecision, there came hurrying down the path, like a stray dog bolting for home, the agitated figure of T. E. Valley. The little priest was struggling into his overcoat as he ran, and repeating, “I’ve had all I want! I’ve had all I want!”
“Good night, Wolf! Take care of him, for heaven’s sake!” rang out Darnley’s voice from the door, as the two men emerged into Pond Lane. They saw the light vanish away. They heard the door close. They were once more alone together.
“Well,” said Wolf, “I suppose we go this way, eh?” and he made a motion to turn to the right.
“Would … you … mind … Solent,” pleaded the man piteously, “if we went the other way? I could go alone … but … you know? … I’m feeling a little upset tonight …”
“Right you are, my friend!” said Wolf, with a sigh. “I daresay Gerda will forgive me. But I’m already a bit late; so let’s walk briskly! Why”—he was already moving in the required direction, with the man’s arm in his own—“do you want to go so far round?”
But Valley’s mind had reverted again to the scene at the grave.
“The belfry-window was a long way off. I was fretting so much, too, thinking I ought to go down and stop it. Perhaps it was natural. … I should feel like that myself if it weren’t for the Sacrament … I mean if … you know? …”
The priest’s mutterings rose and fell like a cloud of weakly-humming gnats, over a twilit towpath. Wolf continued to feel as if he were a wooden puppet galvanized into meaningless activity by a complicated system of wires. “If only they’d let me lie down,” he thought, “just lie down for a hundred years, I’d deal with them all!”
Once more alone and striding homewards, he teased his memory about the name of an especially luminous constellation that hung in the west directly over Blacksod. “The most contemptible people are allowed to enjoy the stars,” he said to himself; and then he thought: “A lump of cowardice without past or future! But this lump has two legs to carry it, and a stick to prod the ground with. Ailinon! Ailinon! But I’ll make Gerda laugh when I tell her about Tilly-Valley.”
It gave him one of the first pleasant feelings he had had that evening, to think of making Gerda laugh. “I won’t tell her till we’re in bed,” he thought. And then he thought: “I wonder if Olwen and Christie will sleep together tonight?”
As he moved between the well-known hedges of that road, along which just a year ago he had been driven by Darnley, he experienced a singular sensation. He felt as though he were beginning a posthumous life—a life that his own cowardice had snatched from the end intended.
It was as if such an end had actually been reached upon some psychic plane; so that now he but “usurped his life.” Never would he know what actually happened at that King’s Barton grave, any more than he would know what Miss Gault did after he left her in the Ramsgard Cemetery. But such things could not altogether pass. Must there not be some imprint of them left upon space itself? If so, such air-pictures might easily remain intact, even after the planet itself was uninhabited and frozen.
In his agitation he began fumbling at the handle of his stick, and he noted how the deep indents cut by Lob Torp on that night of the “Yellow Bracken” had grown smooth and slippery with handling.
“What I really am is dead,” he kept saying to himself. “That’s what I am … dead.” But out of his balanced indifference, like a man astride of a floating log, who by a miracle has escaped a whirlpool, he began to feel conscious of a faint satisfaction in the mere fact of having experienced that rush of the cold air about his ears and that splash of froth upon his cheek.
What he had to do now was to gather his forces together for a daily and nightly dialogue with the Cause of all Life and of all Death! As he came along into the outlying district of Blacksod, he visualized this Cause as an enormous shellfish placidly breathing in and breathing out on the floor of a sea-like infinity.
He was staring at its fixed, idiotic eyes, and at its long, motionless antennae, when he passed the turn to the Malakite shop. Then something in him, beyond all reasoning, loosened, stirred, leapt up. … “Oh, Christie! Oh, my little Christie!”