Home for Bastards
The next day proved to be, as far as the weather was concerned, even more pleasant than its predecessor.
Event followed event in harmonious and easy sequence. Gerda’s morning crossness was tempered by an enchanting aftermath of petulant willingness to be caressed. His boys at the Grammar School, whom he had laboriously anchored in the reign of the first Tudor, were too occupied with thoughts of examinations and the approaching summer holidays to be as troublesome as usual. His afternoon at King’s Barton was devoted to a concentrated perusal of the history of the unfortunate Lady Wyke of Abbotsbury; and Mr. Urquhart, crouching at his elbow like a great silky Angora tomcat, was too absorbed in their researches to indulge in more than a very few of his sidelong malignities.
So well-pleased with their progress was the Squire, that while he and his secretary drank their tea at the library-window he asked Wolf if it would be any help to his mother if Roger Monk were to drive her to Ramsgard and back before dinner.
“Roger declares he wants to go over there,” he said. “What he’s up to I don’t know. He never tells me anything. But if your mother or you care for the drive, you can tell him to call for you.”
Wolf knew that Mrs. Solent had in her mind the notion of paying a formal call upon Miss Gault as a sign of their reconciliation; so he hurriedly accepted this offer and went off at once.
“I think I’ll go too,” he announced to the big darkbrowed servant; “so, if it won’t weigh down your gig, you might put in the backseat for me.”
He found his mother lingering over her tea in the parlour of the trim cottage. He caught a glimpse of her unobserved as he approached the window, and it was rather a shock to him to observe a look in her face which he had never seen before. She was sitting motionless, with her outstretched hands pressed against the edge of the table and her gaze fixed upon emptiness. Her brown eyes, from the angle at which he caught her, had a defeated, weary, helpless expression, and even the contours of her formidable chin were relaxed, crumpled, desolate.
He had a queer feeling of shame for having caught her thus, as though in the indecent exposure of some secret deformity; and he hurriedly and noisily entered the little house.
At his appearance her whole manner changed. She seemed delighted to have the chance of driving to Ramsgard with him, and they chatted gaily till she went upstairs to get ready.
Roger Monk did not keep them waiting; and while he was at the garden-gate, holding the horse till the lady came down, Wolf had a word or two with him.
“Mr. Urquhart didn’t seem to know what you were up to in Ramsgard,” he remarked, indiscreetly enough, but with no ulterior motive.
“He knew right and fine, Mr. Solent! Don’t you make no mistake. There isn’t much that goes on up at House—or out of House either, for that matter—that he doesn’t know!”
“That must be rather uncomfortable sometimes, eh? What?”
This rather ungentlemanly imitation of the Squire’s favourite phrase tickled the swarthy giant’s fancy, and he smiled broadly. But a minute later his face grew grave and worried.
“ ’Tis a good place with Squire,” he whispered, bending down towards Wolf. “But I tell ’ee straight, Mr. Solent, Sir, if I knew for sure he wouldn’t play some dog’s trick on me I’d do a bunk tomorrow!”
Wolf stared at him blankly.
“I would,” he repeated. And then, with the scowl of a righteous executioner, “I’ll tap the top of his black head for him one of these days if God Almighty doesn’t do it first!”
In spite of this somewhat ominous beginning, their drive into Ramsgard was a great success. Roger Monk quickly recovered his good-humour under Mrs. Solent’s blandishments; and by the time they reached the school-gate they were all three in the best of spirits.
Here they separated, the servant driving Mrs. Solent towards Miss Gault’s house, while Wolf turned up the street with the intention of paying a visit to the Smiths.
The door was opened for him by Mattie herself; and the brother and sister embraced affectionately, as soon as they were alone in the cool, dark, musty hall.
“Dad is out,” she whispered, “and we’ve only one servant now.”
“One servant?” he echoed, as she led him, with her finger on her lip, into the empty dining-room.
“Olwen’s upstairs playing,” she said in a low voice.
It was clear to him that she was anxious that the child should not hear his voice; so he shut the door very quietly and they sat down together on two red leather chairs.
“What’s the trouble, Mattie dear?” he murmured, holding her hand tightly.
“It’s Dad,” she said. “He’s been queer the last few days.”
It was difficult for Wolf to repress a smile; for the idea of Mr. Albert Smith, the great Hatter of Ramsgard School, the sedate Churchwarden of the Abbey, being in any kind of way “queer” struck him as grotesque.
“What’s up with him? Business bad?”
Mattie sighed, and, releasing her hand from his clasp, folded her fingers tightly together.
“It’s worse than bad,” she said slowly. “Do you know, Wolf, I believe Dad’s ruined.”
“Good Lord, child!” he cried. “He can’t be! I can’t believe it. Mr. Smith? Why, he’s been at this job here for as long as I can remember. He must have made a lot! He may have got some mania, my dear, about money. You ought to make him sell out and retire!”
“I tell you, Wolf,” she said emphatically, and with a certain irritation, “it’s true! Can’t you believe I know what I’m talking about? He’s been investing in some silly way. He’s never been as sensible as people think; and now he’s hit, knocked over. I believe he’s already taken the first step, whatever that is, to being bankrupt.”
“Bankrupt?” repeated Wolf helplessly.
“So that’s the state of our affairs!” she cried in a lighter tone. “And now tell me about yourself and your pretty Gerda.”
As she spoke she rose to her feet and flung her hands behind her head, straightening her frame to its full height.
“She’s got a fine figure,” thought Wolf. “What a shame that her nose is so large!”
Mattie’s countenance did indeed seem, as he looked at her staring steadily down at him out of her deep-set grey eyes, even less presentable than when he had seen her a few weeks ago.
“She’s been having a bad time, poor girl!” he thought. “How damnable that the gods didn’t mould her face just a little more carefully!”
He looked at her as she fixed her eyes on the floor, frowning; and then he glanced away at the mahogany sideboard, where Mr. Smith’s heavy pieces of polished silver met his gaze, with the peculiar detached phlegm of old, worn possessions that have seen so many family-troubles that they have grown professionally callous, after the manner of undertakers and sextons.
Something about that silver on the sideboard, combined with his sister’s news, threw a grey shadow over his own life. His mind sank down into a desolate acceptance of long years of stark endurance, the sort of endurance that windblown trees have to acquire when their branches become at last permanently bent, from bowing sideways, away from the north or the east.
“Well, now you know the worst!” his sister murmured at last.
“It might be worse still,” he said lamely.
Her eyes unexpectedly flashed and she gave vent to a queer little laugh.
“I don’t care! I don’t care! I don’t care!” she cried. “In fact, if it weren’t for Olwen, I believe I’d be almost glad!”
Wolf screwed up his eyes and regarded her closely. He suddenly became aware that this daughter of his father had something in her nature that he understood well enough.
“Listen, Mattie,” he said quietly. “I have an idea that things are going to work out all right—work out better for you, in fact, than they’ve been doing for a long time.”
She looked straight into his face and smiled, while one of her eyebrows rose humorously and twitched a little.
“You and I are a funny pair, Wolf,” she said. “I believe we actually like to be driven and hunted.”
They exchanged a long, confused look. Then he protruded his underlip and drew down the corners of his mouth.
“If so, we know where we get it,” he said. And then, in a sudden afterthought: “Look here, we must slip off one day together and visit his grave. I don’t see why Madame Selena should have a monopoly of that spot!”
She made a somewhat brusque and ungracious movement.
“I don’t like graves,” she said. “But come on, Wolf, we mustn’t stay down here any more. Let’s go up and see Olwen. She’ll never forgive me even now for keeping you.”
He opened the door for her and they went up softly together. As he followed her form up the dim staircase, the thought came shamelessly into his head that had she been as lovely in face as she was flexible in figure she would have had a sensual attraction for him.
“But I understand her well,” he said to himself. “And I’ll do what I can to make her life happier.”
Mattie paused, when she reached the first landing, till he was at her side. Then she called out: “Olwen! Olwen! Here’s a visitor for you!”
“Olwen! Olwen!” echoed Wolf.
There was a scream and a scramble, and a door was flung wide. The little girl ran out with her hair flying and rushed into her friend’s arms.
When at last he disentangled himself from her clinging hands, he held her at a distance from him, pushing her into the stream of light that had come with her through the open door. Holding her in this way he searched her face with a stern scrutiny. “After all,” he thought, “she’s more nearly related to Christie than I am to Mattie. We might all be in Mr. Urquhart’s book!”
But the child pulled him into her room, and, disregarding Mattie completely, began hurriedly displaying before him every one of her treasures.
The summer night was already chilly, and over the half-opened window the muslin curtains swelled and receded, receded and swelled, as if they were sails on an invisible sea. Crouching upon a low straight-backed nursery-chair—the very chair, in fact, upon which her mother had sat to suckle her in her infancy—Mattie sat with her hands clasped round her knees, watching the shadows of their three forms, thrown by the candlelight, waver and hover against the old-fashioned wallpaper.
Wolf began to detach himself, as the three of them sat there, from the pressure of the actual situation, from the awareness even of his own personality. He seemed to slip away, out of his human skin, out of that old Ramsgard house, out of the very confines of life itself. He had the sensation that he was outside life—that he was outside death too; that he was floating in some airy region, where forms and shapes and sounds had been left behind—had changed into something else.
Attenuated by the influence of these bodiless fancies, the palpable shapes of Mattie and Olwen seemed to thin themselves out into something more filmy than the stuff of dreams. Mechanically he responded to Olwen’s intense preoccupations, mechanically he smiled at his sister across the little girl’s flushed face. But he felt that his senses were no longer available, no longer to be trusted. He had slid away somehow into some level of existence where human vision and human contact meant nothing at all. It was as if these two girls had become as unreal as his own intangible thoughts—those thoughts like tiny twilight insects—which passed without leaving a trace!
“No! Didn’t you hear me telling you? That’s not Gipsy … that’s Antoinette!” scolded the little girl, as she snatched a miniature pillow from under one waxen head to insert it violently beneath another.
“Dolls—dolls—dolls!” thought Wolf. “If we can slip out of reality, why can’t they slip into it?” He began automatically swinging both Gipsy and Antoinette from one hand to the other, a proceeding which delighted their little mistress.
“What,” he thought, as he contemplated Mattie’s heavy, clouded, patient features, her corrugated brow, her thick nose, “what am I aiming at, meddling with these people’s lives? I do it with the same voracity with which I eat honey or trample over grass. I’m driven to it as if I were an omophagous demon! Is this the sort of thing my father did—that scoundrel with his ‘happy life’?”
He was interrupted in his thoughts by the sound of a bell downstairs, followed by the opening of a door and by unsteady steps in the hall.
Mattie jumped to her feet and stood listening, intent and anxious.
“I believe that’s Father!” she cried. “But why did he ring? He never rings. Excuse me, Wolf, I must run down.”
She opened the door, but remained still listening, as also did Olwen, with wide-open startled eyes, a thin arm thrown round Wolf’s neck.
There was a muttering and a shuffling downstairs, followed by the clang of a heavy stick falling on a tiled floor. Then a chair creaked ominously and there was a sort of groan. Then all was silent.
Mattie, with her hand on the door, turned round to them; and in spite of the flickering of the candles he could see that her face had gone white.
“It’s Father!” she whispered. “He’s ill. I must go down.”
Still hesitating, however, and evidently struck by some sort of panic, she continued to waver in the doorway. Wolf remembered afterwards every smallest incident of that occasion. Olwen’s little arm had a pulse in it that beat against his cheek like a tiny clock as she held him tighter and tighter. He replaced Gipsy and Antoinette on a chair by his side, half-consciously smoothing down their ruffled dresses. Both dolls’ eyes, one pair blue and one black, stared up at him. Antoinette’s arm stuck out awkwardly, absurdly. He pushed it down by her side with one of his fingers and it creaked as he did so.
“Stay where you are, both of you! I must go!” cried Mattie; and she ran hastily down the stairs.
Then there was a sudden scream that echoed sharply through the whole silent house. “Wolf! Wolf!” came her voice.
“Stay here, sweetheart!” he cried, freeing himself and rushing to the door. “Stay where you are!” But the little girl followed him like a shadow and was there by his side when he reached the hall.
They had left the door of the dining-room open, and by the light thus flung into the passage he saw Mattie on her knees before one of the hall-chairs, on which sprawled the stiff, collapsed form of Mr. Smith. His eyes were open and conscious under his black felt hat, which, tilted sideways, gave him a grotesque, drunken appearance. Mattie was chafing his hands with her own and murmuring wild endearments.
Wolf hurriedly closed the front-door, which had been left ajar, and then, with Olwen still clinging to him, proceeded to strike a match, so as to light the hall-lamp.
“What are you doing, Wolf? Go away, Olwen. He’ll be better in a minute. Father! Darling Father, what’s the matter? What is it, Father? You’re safe at home. You’re all right now. Father dearest, what is it?” Mattie kept crying out in this way all manner of contradictory commands and appeals, as she went on rubbing Mr. Smith’s impassive hands.
Wolf removed the man’s hat and hung it carefully on a peg. He remembered afterwards the look of this hat, hanging side by side with his own, calm and a little supercilious, as hats in that position always are.
“Mattie,” he said, “do you want me to go and find a doctor?”
But at the word “doctor” the man in the chair found his voice.
“No—no—no! No doctor. I won’t have one. I won’t! Off! Off! Off!”
“What is it, Father dear?” cried Mattie, rising to her feet and pressing her hand against his forehead. “No, you don’t want a doctor. I’m here—your Mattie. You’re better now, Father, aren’t you?”
Mr. Smith stared at her with a heavy confused stare.
“All thieves,” he muttered.
Wolf tried to catch his sister’s eye for permission to disobey the sick man, but the girl seemed to have forgotten his existence. It was clear to him that Mr. Smith had had some kind of stroke. His face wore now an unnatural reddish tint, and his head kept drooping sideways, as if the muscles of his neck no longer responded to his will.
Suddenly he astonished them by calling out “Lorna! Lorna!” in a loud voice.
“Oh, he’s dying!” sobbed Mattie. “That’s Mother he wants. It’s your Mattie. It’s your dear Mattie,” she repeated, bending over him. But Mr. Smith had begun mumbling now, incoherently, but not inarticulately.
“Home … home for bastards. …” Wolf was sure those were the words he used; and he was relieved that Mattie, fallen on her knees again now, was sobbing so violently as to make it unlikely that she could catch what he said.
“Hats … hats for bastards. …” Mr. Smith went on. “No, no, Lorna! It was to Longburton he took you. But never mind. … Albert Smith, home for bastards. Albert Smith, Ramsgard, Dorset, Draper and Hat-Dealer. To the school, I tell ’ee! No—no—no! She’ll never, never, never confess. … Longburton barn … hay and straw … hay and straw in your hair, my dear … and long past eleven. … What? You pricked your finger? A very pretty hat! Hats for bastards. … Home. My home. Albert Smith of Ramsgard come home.”
His head had sunk so low now as to be almost resting on Mattie’s shoulder, as she sobbed against his knees. Suddenly he lifted it with a spasmodic jerk.
“I’ll pay for the child! I’ve got the money. I’ll pay for them all and say nothing. Albert Smith, Draper and Hatter. … To the school, I tell ’ee! … Pay … pay all … pay. …”
This was really the end now. His body fell forward over the stooping girl, and Wolf was hard put to it to pull her away from between the prone forehead and the stiff, protruding knees. For the moment he feared she would collapse; but he saw the quick, protective glance she cast at Olwen, who stood motionless, staring at the dead man like a fairy in a pantomime at the chief clown, and he knew then that she was mistress of herself. She helped him, without shrinking and without any more tears, to carry the body of Mr. Smith up the staircase and into his bedroom. …
It was about two hours after this that Wolf entered the room again with Mattie. Here, lying on his own high pillow, the head of the dead man had already assumed an expression of exhausted indifference. Close by his side, on a little table by the bed, as Wolf cast a final glance at him, was a picture of a young woman in the chaste costume of the mid-Victorian epoch. “Madam Lorna, I suppose,” he thought; and he would have looked more closely at his father’s sweetheart, but the presence of Mattie restrained him.
“I’ll come over tomorrow evening, my dear,” he said, “after my work with the Squire. Don’t commit yourself to any arrangements or any plans till we’ve seen how the land lies. You won’t, will you, Mattie?” he repeated emphatically. “I’ll be really angry if you make any move that we haven’t discussed together.”
They were out on the landing by this time, and the little girl heard them speaking and called out to them from her room.
“Go to sleep, Olwen!” cried Mattie.
“I want him to see Gipsy and Antoinette! I want him to see them!” the child repeated.
“Only for a minute, Wolf, please!” whispered his sister. “She’s so terribly excited I shall never get her to sleep.”
They opened the door and went in. There was a tray, with milk and biscuits upon it, on the chest of drawers by Olwen’s bed and near the tray a small night-light burning. By this faint flicker Wolf could see the little girl’s dark eyes shining with awestruck intensity, though she was immobile as an image.
“Come nearer! Come quite near! They’re as awake as I am.”
He went up to the bed; and there, lying on opposite sides of Olwen’s pillow, were the two dolls, with black ribbons twisted tightly round them and their hair brushed smooth and straight.
“They are going to grandfather’s funeral tomorrow,” she whispered. “Don’t they look sorry and good?”
A minute or two later he bade his sister farewell at the front-door.
“You’re sure you don’t want me to stay the night with you?” he asked.
Mattie shook her head.
“I shall sleep with Olwen,” she replied quietly. “We shall be all right.”
“Well, remember you’ve had no supper. You’ll never get through the night if you don’t eat something.”
“What about you, Wolf? How stupid I am!”
“Oh, I’ll get a drink at the Lovelace on my way,” he said. “But remember—no plans of any kind till I’ve seen you again!”
He was indeed only just in time to get into the Lovelace bar before the Abbey clock struck ten. He enquired about the King’s Barton coachman and found that Mrs. Solent had left a message at the hotel-office earlier in the evening, saying that they could not wait for him, but that they had heard of Mr. Smith’s death and would Mr. Solent come and see her tomorrow.
“I wonder,” he thought, “how the devil she heard? They must have actually come to the door and been told by the maid about it when we were all upstairs. Well, it’ll give her some kind of a shock, I daresay—but not very much!”
He left the Lovelace after drinking a pint of Dorchester ale. The night was cool and fragrant. The sky was covered now by a grey film of feathery clouds, through which neither moon nor stars were visible except as a faint diffused luminosity, which lifted the weight of darkness from the earth, but turned the world into a place of phantoms and shadows.
Wolf decided to follow the shorter and easier way home. This was the highroad to Blacksod that ran along the top of the ridge dividing Dorset from Somerset; and as he strode between the phantasmal wheat-fields of that exposed upland, his thoughts took many a queer turn. So Mattie and Olwen were left penniless! That was evidently going to be the upshot of the hatter’s death. And the question was, what was to become of them? If it had not been for the child’s insane hostility to Christie, the natural course would have been for Olwen to return to her father’s dwelling. The chances were that the local authorities, unless Miss Gault took upon herself to meddle again, would not interfere. Then his mind reverted to his mother.
Would his mother take them in? Roger Monk’s house was certainly big enough, and it seemed unlikely that the Squire would object if no one else did. But—good Lord!—he couldn’t visualize his mother living with another woman, or indeed putting up with the waywardness and excitability of Olwen. Who would educate her? It was impossible to contemplate Olwen at school!
The problem seemed well-nigh insoluble, as he pondered on it. Then, all in a moment, he thought of Selena Gault. There, no doubt, was the obvious solution! Selena was passionately fond of the little girl, and Selena had a servant. He stared at a fantastic thorn-tree, whose largest branch, bare of leaves and apparently quite dead, stretched out a semi-human hand across the tangled foliage of the roadside. As was his wont when confronted by a mental dilemma, he stood stock-still and regarded this silent monitor.
Nature was always prolific of signs and omens to his mind; and it had become a custom with him to keep a region of his intelligence alert and passive for a thousand whispers, hints, obscure intimations that came to him in this way. Why was it that a deep, obstinate resistance somewhere in his consciousness opposed itself to such a solution? He tried to analyze what he felt. Selena was a good woman, a passionately protective woman; but there it was! That interference in the case of the Malakites had lodged a deep distaste in his mind. She might love Olwen; but she probably hated Mattie as much as she did Christie.
Damn! Why had Mr. Smith fooled away his money and shuffled himself off in this awkward manner? “Home for bastards”—what gross outbursting of the literal truth that was! Well, it was his business now to take the hatter’s place and find just such a home! That incorrigibly complacent and grinning skull in the cemetery had certainly managed to bequeath burdens to its legitimate offspring which were not easy to fulfill!
Wolf stuck out his underlip at the oracular thorn-tree and strode on. What he asked now, of that grey luminosity above him and of those diaphanous wraithlike corn-shocks, was why there should be, between his deepest desire and his complicated activity, such an unbridged gulf?
He had only one life. That was a basic and relentless fact. An eternity of “something or other” lay behind him, and an equally obscure eternity of “something or other” lay in front of him. Meanwhile, here he was, with only one single, simple, and world-deep craving—the craving to spend his days and his nights with that other mysterious and mortal consciousness, entitled Christie Malakite! And yet, for reasons comparatively superficial, reasons comparatively external to his secret life-current, he was steadily, day by day, month by month, building up barriers between himself and Christie, struggling to build them up, moving men and women like bricks and mortar to build them up!
A villainously evil thought assailed him as he walked along. Were all his better actions only so many Pharisaic sops thrown one by one into the mouth of a Cerberus of selfishness, monstrous and insane? Was his “mythology” itself only a projection of such selfishness? He carried this sardonic thought like a demon-fox pressed against the pit of his stomach, for nearly a mile; and it was just as if the hard, opaque crystal-circle of his inmost identity were, under that fox’s black saliva, turning into something shapeless and nauseating, something that resembled a mass of floating frog-spawn.
“Come, you demon,” he said to himself at last, “my soul is going to remain intact, or it’s going to dissolve into air!”
He had reached the summit of Babylon Hill now; and precisely where he had first crossed that stile with Gerda, he stood at this moment, rending his nature in a desperate inward struggle.
When, in the middle of the night, lying in his bed by Gerda’s side, he recalled this evil experience, he found the explanation of it in a sort of dissolution-hypnosis, or corruption-sympathy, linking him with the actual dead body of Albert Smith!
What he experienced was strange enough. He found himself very soon clutching with his fingers one of the posts of that stile, while with his other hand he dug his stick savagely into the sunbaked earth. And it seemed to him that every revolting or secretive instinct he had ever had took on a material shape and became as an actual portion of his physical body.
He became, in fact, a living human head, emerging from a monstrous agglomeration of all repulsiveness. And this gross mass was not only foul and excremental; it was in some mysterious way comic. He, the head of this unspeakable body, was the joke of the abyss; the smug charlatan-prig at which the devils shrieked with laughter.
The queer thing was that his brain moved at this moment with incredible rapidity. His brain debated, for example, as it had never done before, the insoluble problem of free will, the problem of the very existence of the mystery called “will.” And then, all in a moment, with a crouching-wild-animal movement of his consciousness, he flung a savage defiance to all these doubts. He laid hold of his will as if it had been a lightning-conductor, and, shaking it clear of his body, thrust it forth into space, into a space that was below and yet above, within and yet beyond Poll’s Camp and Babylon Hill. And then, in a second, in less than a second, so it seemed, as he recalled it afterwards, there came flowing in upon him, out of those secret depths of which he was always more or less conscious, a greater flood of liberating peace than he had ever known before!
He had the sensation, as he came down the slope, of having left behind, on the top of Babylon Hill, some actual physical body—a body that had been troubling him, like a great repulsive protuberance, both by its appearance and by its weight. He felt lighter, freer, liberated from the malice of matter. Above all he felt once more that his inmost identity was a hard, round, opaque crystal, which had the power of forcing itself through any substance, organic, inorganic, magnetic, or psychic, that might obstruct its way.
There were a few lights twinkling still among the Blacksod roofs. But he had no notion whether Christie’s was among them; and at this moment it seemed unimportant. A new fragrance filled the air as he descended; which he defined to himself as the actual smell of Somersetshire, as distinct from the smell of Dorsetshire—the far-off fragrance, in fact, full of the exhalations of brackish mosses, amber-coloured peat-tussocks, and arrow-pointed water-plants, of the salt-marshes of Sedgemoor.
Once in the town, he took without any hesitation—though he did not forget that long vigil of the night in June—the particular way that led past the Torp monument-yard. As he approached Preston Lane through the deserted streets, he found himself thinking shamelessly and contentedly of the pleasure of making love to Gerda before he went to sleep.
His mind, after the experience he had gone through, seemed to float lightly and carelessly over every aspect of his existence. The personality of Christie remained the same through everything. It was as if to everything he did, even to making love to Gerda, Christie set her proud and careless seal. This indeed—so he said to himself—was the solution of that dilemma on which he had been impaled. Christie did remain the great aim and purpose of his life; but these innumerable other people were part of the body of that life itself. They were what he was, his ways, his habits, his customs, his manias, his impulses, his instincts; and with all that he was he had now been drawn to Christie as if by a magnet strong enough to move a great slave-galleon of manias and superstitions, en masse across the deep!
Airy and light as it now was, his soul seemed to have been liberated in some secret way from all that clogged and burdened it. The slave-galleon of his manias rocked and tossed on a smooth tide; but his soul, like a careless albatross, rode on the masthead. There was a strange humming and singing from the galleon itself, as if the immense peace of that summer night had turned it into a trireme of deliverance, carrying liberated pilgrims to the harbour where they would be. Something unutterable, some clue, some signal, had touched the dark bulkheads of this night-voyager; so that hereafter all might be different. What was this clue? All he knew about it now was that it meant the acceptance of something monstrously comic in his inmost being, something comic and stupid, together with something as grotesquely nonhuman as the sensations of an ichthyosaurus! But once having accepted all this, everything was magically well. “Christie! Christie!” he cried in his heart, longing to tell her about it.
He stopped when he was opposite the familiar pigsty, and lifted his head, breathing deeply. At that moment Fate seemed so kind to him that its kindness was almost too great. His love for Christie seemed to touch with a kind of transparency everything that he looked at. Rapidly he crossed the road, entered his house, and ran upstairs.
He found the room dark; but when he had lit a candle he saw that the girl was lying wide-awake, her head propped high on the two pillows. He was in such an exalted mood that he was hardly surprised at her first words.
“Oh, Wolf, Wolf,” she said, “I’m almost sorry you’ve come so soon. I’ve been looking through that window for hours and hours. What’s happened to me I don’t know; but I’ve not felt like this since that evening when you first loved me in the river-fields.”
He stooped and kissed her without attempting an answer; and when he held her presently in his arms, and the room was again dark, it was as if they each found an opportunity in their embraces wherein to express an accumulated tide of feelings that spread out wide and far—spread out beyond all that he could feel for her, and beyond—so it seemed to him, as he tasted tears on her cheek—all that she could feel for him.
And now, as their dalliance sank into quiescence, one of Wolf’s final thoughts before he slept was of the vast tracts of unknown country that every human consciousness includes in its scope. Here, to the superficial eye, were two skulls, lying side by side; but, in reality, here were two far-extending continents, each with its own sky, its own land and water, its own strange-blowing winds. And it was only because his own soul had been, so to speak, washed clean of its body that day, that he was able to feel as he felt at this moment. But—even so—what those thoughts of hers had been, that he had interrupted by his return, he knew no better now, than when first he had entered her room and had blown out her candle.