IV
He became aware of the cottage again by the red glow of a hidden flame, which penetrated a little way into the white blanket of mist with a promise of warmth and calm companionship and food. Fear had not dispelled his hunger, it had but overlaid it with a more fierce emotion. Now with the slow return of peace he remembered what his belly desired. He was not angry nor frightened now, only a little ill at ease. He advanced cautiously, with one arm of his spirit raised to ward off a blow.
Through the window he peered into a room deprived of daylight. A large fire burnt with a kind of subdued ferocity and its red rays, instead of bearing light, spilt blacker pools of darkness in the room. Only in a small semicircle before it was a space cleared, and the dark pushed back from there formed a more sombre and concentrated wall on the further side. Squatting on the floor in the cleared space Elizabeth knitted with a metallic flash—flash of needles like sparks from a gaseous coal.
Her figure started so distinctly from the shadows, distorted though it was by the glass, that Andrews did not realise that his own face was veiled. He tapped with fingers which he intended to sound gentle and reassuring. She looked up and remained staring at him with a mixture of fear, perplexity and doubt, and let the knitting fall upon her lap. He smiled but was unaware that she could not see his smile, or glimpsed at most a vague grimace from almost invisible lips. He tapped again and saw her lift whatever it was she had been knitting to her breast and tightly press it to her. How slim, he thought, as she rose and stood (a dark Elizabeth, he wondered again) where the flicker of the flames played up and down her body like the dazed, groping fingers of a lover. Her hand pressed so hard on her breast that it appeared to be reaching for the heart to hold it and still its beats. Only then did Andrews realise that she could not see him clearly, and that she was afraid. But at the moment when he prepared to reassure her, the small quiver of fear left her lips and she passed from the zone of the firelight and advanced to the window through the shadows.
He heard her fingers feeling not very certainly for the catch. Then the window swung open and he stepped away. “Is it really you back?” she whispered, and he could not tell from her voice whether she was afraid or glad.
“Yes, yes,” he said, “it’s me.”
She said: “Oh, you,” in a flat, disappointed tone. “What do you want?” He became afraid that she would again shut the window, leaving him in the cold, deprived of the tossing fire.
“Won’t you let me in?” he asked. “You needn’t be afraid,” and when she laughed ironically, he began to speak rapidly. “I did all that you told me,” he said. “I got rid of all those wretched villagers.”
“Was it necessary to come here to tell me that?” she asked.
“I want shelter,” he said with despairing simplicity. He heard her leave the window and unbolt the door. “Come in then if you must,” she called to him.
He came and moved at once to the fire, his momentary sentiment drowned in the mere desire to be warm, to drink heat with every pore of his body. He felt that he could with small encouragement have lifted the burning coals and pressed them to his breast. He twisted his figure into odd distorted shapes, so that every part of him might receive a blessing from gracefully gesticulating hands of flame.
“Have you any food?” he asked. With the cold acquiescence which he had feared she went and fetched a loaf of bread, and would have placed it on the table had he not stretched out his hands for it. Still crouching over the fire he broke off portions with his fingers. Only when his hunger was partly satisfied something uneasily stirring in his mind made him apologise.
“I haven’t had food for fifteen hours,” he said. “I was hungry and cold out there. It’s good of you …”
She came into the circle of firelight. “There’s no reason why I should shut you out,” she said. “I’ve been alone. You are better than no one, even you.”
Warmed by the fire, hunger quenched by bread, he began to grow jocular.
“You oughtn’t to find any difficulty in getting company,” he laughed. “And who was it you expected to find outside the window?”
“We’ve buried him,” she said. “I don’t suppose that he’ll return.”
Andrews looked up in astonishment at a pale, set face, touched with a reluctant grief. “You don’t mean,” he asked in awestruck astonishment, “that you thought …”
“Why shouldn’t I think that?” she asked, not with indignation but with candid questioning. “He’s only a few days dead.”
“But they don’t rise again,” Andrews said in the kind of solemn whisper which he had used as a boy in the school chapel.
“Their spirits do,” she answered, and her white, still face continued to question him.
“Do you believe in all that?” he asked, not in mockery, but in a curiosity tinctured with longing.
“Of course; you can read it in the Bible.”
“Then,” he hesitated a moment, “if men are not quite dead, when we bury them, we can still hurt them, make them suffer, revenge ourselves.”
“You must be bad,” she said fearfully, “to think of that. But don’t forget that they can hurt us, too.”
She came up to the fire and stood beside him, and he shifted a little under the clear, courageous gaze of her eyes. “I’m not afraid of you now,” she said, “because you are just a person I know, but when you came last night you were a stranger and I was afraid. But then I thought to myself that he,” and she pointed to the table as though the coffin still lay there, “would not let me be harmed. He was a bad man, but he wanted me, and he’d never let anyone else get me.”
“I never meant any harm to you,” Andrews muttered, and then added with a convulsive pleading, “It was only fear that made me come. You other people never seem to understand fear. You expect everyone to be brave like yourself. It’s not a man’s fault whether he’s brave or cowardly. It’s all in the way he’s born. My father and mother made me. I didn’t make myself.”
“I never blamed you,” she protested. “But you always seem to leave out God.”
“Oh, that,” he said. “That’s all on a par with your spirits. I don’t believe in that stuff. Though I’d like to believe in the spirits, that we could still hurt a man who is dead,” he added with a mixture of passion and wistfulness.
“You can’t if they are in heaven,” she commented.
“There’s no danger of that with the man I hate,” Andrews laughed angrily. “It’s curious, isn’t it, how one can hate the dead. It makes one almost believe your stuff. If they are transparent like the air, perhaps we breathe them in.” He screwed up his mouth as though at a bad taste.
She watched him curiously. “Tell me,” she said, “where have you been since we buried him?”
He began to speak with resentful anger. “I told you it was only fear that drove me to you last night, didn’t I? Well, I don’t want to trouble you any more.”
“And fear brought you back again?”
“Yes—at least, not entirely.” Looking down at her dark hair, pale face and calm eyes seemed to infuriate him. “You women,” he said, “you are all the same. You are always on your guard against us. Always imagine that we are out to get you. You don’t know what a man wants.”
“What do you want?” she asked and added with a practicality which increased his meaningless anger, “Food? I have some more bread in a cupboard.”
He made a despairing motion with his hand, which she interpreted as a refusal. “We get tired of our own kind,” he said, “the coarseness, hairiness—you don’t understand. Sometimes I’ve paid street women simply to talk to them, but they are like the rest of you. They don’t understand that I don’t want their bodies.”
“You’ve taught us what to think,” she interrupted with a faint bitterness breaking the peace of her mind.
He took no notice of what she said. “I’ll tell you,” he said, “a reason why I came back. You can laugh at me. I was homesick for here.”
He turned his back on her. “I’m not making love to you. It wasn’t you. It was just the place. I slept here and I hadn’t slept before for three days.” He waited with shoulders a little hunched for her laughter.
She did not laugh and after a little he turned. She had been gazing at his back. “Aren’t you amused?” he asked ironically. His relations with her seemed necessarily compounded of suspicion. When he first came he had been suspicious of her acts and now he was suspicious of her thoughts.
“I was wondering,” she said, “whom you were frightened of and why I like you.” Her eyes wandered down his body from face to feet and stayed at his right heel. “You’ve worn your stockings out,” she said simply, but the way in which she turned the words on her tongue till they came out with a rounded sweetness gave to their simplicity a hidden significance.
“They are not of silk,” he said, still seeking for disguised mockery.
She held out a hand which she had kept pressed to her side. “Here is a stocking,” she said; “see if it will fit you.”
He took it from her as cautiously as if it had been a strange reptile and turned it over and over. He saw that it had been newly darned and remembered how he had seen her from the window working in the firelit space.
“You were mending this,” he said, “when I came to the window.” She made no answer and he examined it again. “A man’s stocking,” he commented.
“It was his,” she replied.
He laughed. “Do your spirits wear stockings?” he asked.
She clenched and unclenched her hands, as one nervously wrought up by another’s stupidity. “I had to do something,” she murmured rapidly as though her breath had been nearly exhausted by a too long and fatiguing race. “I couldn’t just sit.” She turned her back on him and walked to the window and leant her forehead against it, as though seeking coolness or perhaps support.
Andrews turned and turned the stocking in his hand. Once at the window Elizabeth’s figure was motionless. He could not even catch the sound of her breathing. A gap of shadow separated them, and the flickering of the flames made useless but persistent attempts to cross it. He was shamed by the patient obstinacy of their compassion, and was temporarily rapt from his own fear, hatred and self-abasement, touched for a lightning instant with a disinterested longing for self-sacrifice. He would not cross that bridge of shadows, for he feared that if he touched her he would lose the sense of something unapproachably beautiful, and his own momentary chivalry would vanish before the coward, the bully and the lustful sentimentalist to whom he was accustomed. For that instant his second criticising self was silent; indeed he was that self.
He was on the point of making some stumbling gesture of contrition, when the coward in him leaped up and closed his mouth. Be careful, it cautioned him. You are a fugitive; you must not tie yourself. Even as he surrendered to that prompting he regretted the surrender. He knew that for a few seconds he had been happy, with the same happiness, but a stronger, as he had gained momentarily in the past from music, from Carlyon’s voice, from a sudden sense of companionship with other men.
The mist which had been white was turning grey. The real dark was approaching, but it made no apparent difference to the room. Andrews, feeling the comfortable warmth of the fire behind him, wondered how Carlyon was faring in a colder and surely more alien world. And yet was it more alien? Carlyon had the friendship and the trust of his two fellow fugitives. He was not alone. The old self-pity began to crawl back into Andrews’s heart, as he watched the girl’s motionless back.
“Can we light some candles,” he asked, “and make this room more cheerful?”
“There are two candlesticks on the table,” she said, keeping her forehead pressed to the window, “and two on the dresser. You can light them if you like.”
Andrews made a spill from a playbill, which he found in his pocket, and lit it at the fire. Then he passed, from candle to candle making little aspiring peaks of flame pierce the shadows. Slowly they rose higher and small haloes formed round their summits, a powdery glow like motes in sunlight. Cloaked from all draughts by the surrounding mist they burnt straight upwards, tapering to a point as fine as a needle. The shadows were driven back into the corners of the room where they crouched darkly like sulking dogs rebuked.
When Andrews had lit the last candle he turned and saw that Elizabeth was watching him. Joy and grief were both moods able to pass lightly across her face without disturbing the permanent thoughtfulness of her eyes, which seemed to regard life with a gaze devoid of emotion. The candles now tipped her face with gaiety. She made no reference to her short surrender to grief, but clapped her hands, so that he stared at her amazed by this rapid change of mood.
“I like this,” she said, “we’ll have tea. I’m glad to have someone to talk to—even you,” and she moved to the dresser and began to take out plates, cups, a loaf of bread, some butter, a kettle which she filled and put upon the fire. With proud and reverent fingers she drew a caddy from the dresser, handling it as reverently as a gold casket.
“I haven’t had tea,” he said slowly, “like this since I left home … I’ve wanted it though.” He hesitated. “It’s queer that you should be treating me like this, like a friend.”
Having pulled the only two chairs which the room held up to the fire, she regarded him with sombre amusement. “Am I treating you like a friend?” she asked. “I can’t tell. I’ve never had one.”
He had a sudden wish to tell her everything, from what he was fleeing and for what cause, but caution and a feeling of peace restrained him. He wished to forget it himself and cling only to this growing sense of intimacy, of two minds moving side by side, and watch the firelight gleam downwards into the dark amber of the tea.
“It’s strange,” he said, “how often I’ve longed for a tea like this. In a rough, hurrying sort of life with men, one longs sometimes for refinement—and tea seems to me a symbol of that—peace, security, women, idle talk—and the night outside.”
“A loaf of bread,” she said, “no jam, no cakes.”
“That’s nothing,” he brooded over the thick china cup, which he held awkwardly with an unaccustomed hand.
“Why are you here?” she asked. “You don’t belong. You should be a student, I think. You look like a man who daydreams.”
“Doesn’t even a student need courage?” he questioned bitterly. “And I’m not a dreamer. I hate dreams.”
“Is there anything you care for or want?” She watched him as though he were a new and curious animal.
“To be null and void,” he said without hesitation.
“Dead?”
The sound of the word seemed to draw his eyes to the window, which stared now on complete darkness.
“No, no,” he said, “not that.” He gave a small shiver and spoke again. “When music plays, one does not see or think; one hardly hears. A bowl—and the music is poured in until there is no ‘I,’ I am the music.”
“But why, why,” she asked, “did you ever come to live like this?” and with a small gesture of her hand she seemed to enclose his fear, his misery, his fugitive body and mind.
“My father did it before me,” he replied.
“Was that all?” she asked.
“No, I was fascinated,” he said. “There’s a man I know with a voice as near to music as any voice I’ve ever heard,” he hesitated and then looked up at her, “except for yours.”
She paid no attention to the compliment, but frowning a little at the fire nipped her lip between small sharp teeth.
“Can’t he help you now that you are in trouble?” she asked. “Can’t you go to him?”
He stared at her in amazement. He had forgotten that she was ignorant of his story and of his flight from Carlyon, and because he had forgotten, her remark came to him with the force of a wise suggestion. “Andrews, Andrews,” an echo of a soft melancholy voice reached him. “Why are you frightened? It’s Carlyon, merely Carlyon.” The voice was tipped always with the cool, pure poetry which it loved. Why, indeed, should he not go to Carlyon and confess the wrong he had done and explain? That voice could not help but understand. He would go as the woman who had sinned to Christ, and the comparison seemed to him to carry no blasphemy, so strong was the impulse to rise and go to the door and go out into the night.
“Is it of him you are frightened?” she asked, watching the changes in his face. He had thought her voice also near to music, and now he sat still, watching with a strange disinterestedness the two musics come in conflict for the mastery of his movements. One was subtle, a thing of suggestions and of memories; the other, plain, clear-cut, ringing. One spoke of a dreamy escape from reality; the other was reality, deliberately sane. If he stayed sooner or later he must face his fear; if he went he left calmness, clarity, instinctive wisdom for a vague and uncertain refuge. How would Carlyon greet his confession? Carlyon was a romantic with his face in the clouds, who hated any who gave him contact with a grubby earth. Andrews remembered suddenly, his mind still drifting between the two differing musics, another Carlyon, a Carlyon who had shot one of his own men in the back, because on a cargo-running night the man had raped a young girl. No trouble followed, for the man had been a coward and unpopular in a crew of men, who with all their faults and villainies, had the one virtue of courage. Andrews remembered Carlyon’s face, as he stepped back from the dark bundle where it lay on a beach silvered by the moon. The thoughtful eyes which peered from the apelike skull had been suffused with disgust and a kind of disillusionment. They had re-embarked with the utmost speed, lest the shot should have aroused the revenue men, but Carlyon was the last to enter the boat. He came with evident reluctance like a man who had left a lover on land, and he had indeed left a lover, whom he did not see again for many weeks, a dear and romantic illusion of adventure.
“Andrews, Andrews,” the voice had lost its charm. That music was spell-less, for Andrews remembered now that it was with the same soft melancholy regret that Carlyon had spoken to the offending smuggler. Pointing out to the sea he had said: “Look here. Can you tell me what that is?” and the man had turned his back to scan a waste of small ridges, which formed, advanced, fell and receded, and continued so to form, advance, fall and recede, as his eyes glazed in death.
“I can’t go to him,” he said aloud.
“But if he came to you? …” she asked, as though she intended to make up a quarrel between two schoolboys on their dignity.
“No, no,” he said, and suddenly rose with a poignant, stabbing sense of fear. “What’s that?” he whispered. Elizabeth leant forward in her chair listening. “You are imagining things,” she said.
With unexpected brutality he struck her hand, as it lay on the table, with his fist, so that she caught her breath with pain. “Can’t you whisper?” he asked. “Do you want to tell the whole world there’s someone here? There, didn’t you hear that?” And this time she thought that she could hear a very faint stir of gravel no louder than a rustle of leaves. She nodded her head slowly. “There’s someone moving on the path,” she murmured. The hand which he had struck stiffened into a small and resolute fist.
“For God’s sake,” Andrews muttered, staring round him. She jerked a finger at the door which led to the shed where he had slept the previous night. He half ran to it on tiptoe, and as he looked back, he saw that she had again taken up the stocking which he had dropped unused upon the floor. The red glow of the fire struck upwards and tinged with colour her serene, pale face. Then he closed the door and stood in the dark of the shed, giving occasional rapid shivers like a man in a fever.
The next sound he heard was Carlyon’s voice. Its suddenness pierced him. He had expected at least to have been given warning, and time to brace his knees and heart, if by no more than a knock or the click of a lifting latch.
It penetrated to him through keyhole and crack, kindly and reassuring. “Forgive me,” it said. “I’m completely lost in this fog.”
Countering the deceptive music with its own clear tone, Elizabeth’s voice struck against Carlyon’s like sword against sword. “Why didn’t you knock?” it said.
Had she realised, Andrews wondered, listening intently in the dark, that this was the man he feared. He searched a frightened mind in vain for some way of warning her. He could imagine Carlyon’s apelike face gazing at her with a disarming frankness. “One can’t be too careful around here,” he said. His voice sounded a little nearer as though he had come over to the fire. “You are not alone?” he asked.
Andrews put his hand to his throat. Something had betrayed him. Perhaps as he stood like a blind man in the dark she was giving away his hiding place soundlessly with a wink, a lift of the eyebrow. He had a momentary impulse to fling open the door and rush at Carlyon. It would at least be man against man with no odds, he thought, until the unsleeping inner critic taunted him: “You are not a man.” At least a coward can have cunning, he protested, and kneeling down on the floor, he put his eye to the keyhole. It was a moment before he could find the position of the speakers. Elizabeth was sitting in her chair, hand thrust in the stocking, calmly looking for holes. She is overacting her calmness, he thought fearfully. Carlyon stood over her watching her with an apparent mixture of reverence and regret. He made a small motion towards the two cups, which stood with brazen effrontery upon the table.
She finished her search of the stocking and laid it on her lap. “I am alone,” she said. “My brother has just gone out. He is not far,” she added. “I can easily call to him, if you don’t go.”
Carlyon smiled. “You must not be afraid of me,” he said. “Perhaps I know your brother. Is he a little over the middle height, slightly built, dark, with frightened obstinate eyes?”
“That’s not my brother,” Elizabeth said. “He is short and squat—and very strong.”
“Then I am not looking for your brother.” He picked up one of the cups. “He must have been here very lately,” he said. “The tea is hot. And he left in a hurry with his tea unfinished. Curious that we did not meet.” He gazed round the room with no attempt to hide his curiosity.
“That is my cup you have,” Elizabeth said. “Will you allow me to finish it?”
Andrews kneeling by the keyhole put up his hand to ease his collar as Elizabeth’s lips touched the cup and drained what he had left. A strange loving cup, he thought bitterly, but his bitterness vanished before a wave of humility which for one moment even cleared his mind of its consciousness of fear. He had been kneeling to gain a view of the room beyond, but now in heart he knelt to her. She is a saint, he thought. The charity and courage with which she hid him from his enemy he had taken for granted; but to his muddled unstraight mind the act of drinking from the same cup came with a surprising nobility. It touched him where he was most open to impression; it struck straight at his own awareness of cowardice. Kneeling in the dark not only of the room but of his spirit he imagined that with unhesitating intimacy she had touched his lips and defiled her own.
“I didn’t meet your brother,” Carlyon repeated, still with a touch of regretful tenderness.
“There is another door,” she said without hesitation. Carlyon turned, and to Andrews watching through the keyhole their eyes seemed to meet. His humility and trust vanished as quickly as they had arisen. Carlyon made a step towards the door. She’s betrayed me, Andrews thought, and with fumbling panic-stricken fingers he sought for his knife. Yet he did not dare to open it, even when he had found it, lest the click should make itself heard through the closed door. Carlyon seemed to be staring straight at him. It was incredible that he could not see the eye which watched him through the keyhole, yet he hesitated, nonplussed perhaps as Andrews had been by the girl’s courage, thinking she must have help somewhere, that there must be a trap laid. Then she spoke again carelessly and without hurry, leaning forward to warm her hands at the fire. “It’s no use going there,” she said. “He locked the door as he went out.”
For the man in the dark there was a moment of suspense, while Carlyon hesitated. He had only to try the door for all to be discovered. Finally, he refrained. In part perhaps it was because he feared a trap, but his chief reason must have been that embarrassing streak of chivalry which would not allow him to show openly his doubt of a woman’s word. He turned away and stood in the middle of the room in almost pathetic perplexity. If he had known beforehand that there was a woman to be dealt with, he would have sent one of his companions to the cottage in his place, the small, cunning cockney Harry, or the elephantine Joe.
She regarded him with faint amusement from his receding forehead and deep sunk eyes to the strange contrast of his small lightly poised feet. “You are very muddy,” she commented and cast a pathetic glance towards the floor, still fresh and clean from Mrs. Butler’s scrubbing.
“I am sorry,” he said, “very sorry. The fact is …”
“Don’t trouble to invent a lie,” she murmured abstractedly, her attention seeming to wander to the glowing heart of the fire. “You are looking for someone. Anybody can tell that. Unless you are flying from someone like the other man.”
“The other man?” he leant a little forward with excitement, and Andrews once again prepared himself for betrayal. The act of drinking from his cup, which had filled him with such humility, seemed now to underline what he considered the vileness of her treachery.
“The man you described,” she said, “the frightened, obstinate man.”
“He’s here?” Andrews could hardly catch Carlyon’s whisper. Carlyon’s right hand had hidden itself in an inner pocket.
“He slept here last night,” she said.
“And now?”
“He went with the morning, north, I think, but I don’t know.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Carlyon murmured. “He nearly ran into me, but escaped again in this wretched fog. He may return here then.”
She laughed. “I don’t think so,” and pointed to the corner where the unloaded gun stood. “Fear,” she added, “and shame.”
“And your brother?” he asked with a sudden, quick remnant of suspicion.
“He was not here last night, but I warned your friend that he would be here tonight. Shall I warn you?” she added.
“I am not afraid,” Carlyon answered, “nor ashamed.”
She looked again at his muddy clothes. “But you too are flying,” she asked, “from something?”
“From the law,” Carlyon replied with unhesitating frankness, “not from my friends—or from myself,” he added with brooding thoughtfulness.
“Why all this fuss?” she asked, her eyes, kindled in the red reflected glow of the fire, gazing up at him with passionate sincerity and condemning, in an equal judgment, his mud, his flight, his search.
He watched her with fascination and with a kind of difficulty, as though trying to cling with his eyes to some bright object obscurely shining at the bottom of a dark and deep well. “He’s a sort of Judas,” he said softly and reluctantly.
“He didn’t seem to be a man with money,” she said. “Are you certain?”
“No. But if I could meet him, I should know in a moment. He hasn’t the courage to hide anything.” He shivered slightly as a cold draught insinuated itself under the door.
“You are cold,” Elizabeth said. “Come to the fire.” He looked at her for a moment as though amazed at her friendliness and then advanced to the fire and let the heat and flame stain his hands a red gold. “Why can’t you leave him alone?” she asked. “Is he worth the trouble and risk?”
Out of their deep sockets Carlyon’s eyes peered cautiously, as though he wondered how far it was possible to make this serene stranger understand. “I knew him very well,” he said hesitatingly. “We were friends. He must have known me well. Now I hate him. I’m certain that this is hate.”
Her voice touched him like a slow warm flame. “Tell me,” she said.
He looked at her again with that impression of amazement slowly welling up from a dark, deeply hidden source. “You have a lovely voice,” he said. “It is just as though you were ready to play music to any stranger. You know who I am?” he asked.
“One of the Gentlemen,” she said, and waited.
“So was the man who was here last night. We were friends. I told him things I would not tell anyone now—what things I loved and why. And after three years with us he betrayed us to the law.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Someone must have done,” he said. “Six men are in gaol on a charge of murder. There was a fight and a gauger was shot, poor devil. Four of us escaped; the two men who are with me, and Andrews, who has done his best to avoid us. And when did he escape? Before we were surprised. I’m certain of that. Why is he afraid of meeting me? I know he is.” His eyes, having taken a sad, suspicious gaze at the world, seemed to hide themselves yet deeper in his skull. “You will not understand,” he said, “how he has spoilt everything. It was a rough life, but there seemed something fine in it—adventure, courage, high stakes. Now we are a lot of gaol-birds, murderers. Doesn’t it seem mean to you,” he cried suddenly, “that a man should be shot dead over a case of spirits? What a dull, dirty game it makes it all appear.”
She looked at him with pity but not with sympathy. “It must have been that all along,” she said.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Yes, but I didn’t know,” he said. “Should I thank him for my enlightenment?”
She smiled at the tendrils of the fire uncurling themselves and folding again in bud. “Is a man’s death and your dream broken worth all this fuss?” she demanded with voice raised a little as though she would carry her protest against man’s stupidity beyond the room and out into the shrouding mist and night.
“You are so sane,” he said sadly. “You women are all so sane. A dream is often all there is to a man. I think that you are lovely, good and full of pity, but that is only a dream. You know all about yourself, how you are greedy for this and that, afraid of insects, full of disgusting physical needs. You’ll never find a man who will love you for anything but a bare, unfilled-in outline of yourself. A man will even forget his own details when he can, until he appears an epic hero, and it needs his woman to see that he’s a fool. Only a woman can love a real person.”
“You may be right,” she said, “though I don’t understand most of it. I once knew a man, though, who so forgot his own details as you call them, that he believed himself a coward and nothing else.”
“That’s less common,” Carlyon answered. “Women generally show us up to ourselves and we hate them for it. I suppose that man would love the woman who showed him up.”
She suddenly dropped her seriousness and laughed. “Poor man,” she mocked, “and you hate this friend of yours because he’s shown you up. What a fool you are to waste your time on such a hate.”
He made a small motion with his hands towards the fire, as though he wished to seize its light and heat, and bear them to his brain. “Yes,” he said. “I hate him,” and then waited, with his eyes peeping, as it were beseechingly, from his low skull in a longing to be convinced of his own futility and of his own hate.
“But what, after all, could you do if you met him?” she protested.
“I should make sure that I was right,” he answered, “and then I should kill him.”
“And what would be the use of that?” she asked.
He edged a little away from her and threw back his head, as though he were protecting something infinitely dear. “There would be no use,” he said, “no use, but I have a mission.”
He saw her lift eyes full of a pleading friendship. “You are in danger of something worse than the law,” she said.
He looked at her with suspicion. “Why all these arguments?” he asked. “Did you like the man?” He eyed her with regret and disgust as he would have done a lovely picture soiled with ordure. “Did you get fond of him in a night?”
“No,” she said simply. “But I have lived with hate since I was a child. Why don’t you escape from the country? If you stay you’ll only injure yourself or else something you never intended to harm. That’s always the way.”
He took no notice of her words, but watched her face with curiosity and fascination. “If I could take you with me,” he murmured, “I should have with me peace and charity. Have you noticed,” he said softly, his eyes peering like a dog’s between the bars of a cage, “how in the middle of a storm there’s always a moment of silence?” He half raised his arms as though he were about to protest at the necessity which drove him back into the storm, and then let them drop in a kind of tired despair.
“You are free,” she whispered, her eyes watching him not through bars but through the gold mist which the flames of the fire shed, “you are not bound.”
He shrugged his shoulders and said with a resentful carelessness. “Oh, there’s no peace for me.” He turned on his heel decisively, but he had taken only three steps to the door, when he came back.
He did not look at her but said with a touch of embarrassment:
“You say he went north?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Of course. I know that,” he commented. “We nearly met.” He shifted a little on his feet. “I don’t know your name,” he continued. “I don’t want you to come to any harm. If he should come back, you mustn’t shelter him or warn him.”
“Is that a command?” she asked with gentle mockery.
“Yes,” he said, and then added in stumbling haste, “but I will beg you, too. You cannot be mixed up in this. You don’t belong to our world, noise, hate. Stay with peace.”
“Are the two so separate?” she asked.
He listened with his head a little on one side and eyes half-closed, like a man in the presence of a faint music. Then he covered his eyes for a moment with his hand. “You muddle me,” he said.
“Are they so separate?” she repeated.
“Let them remain separate,” he said vehemently and bitterly, “you can’t come to us, and it’s too easy for us to come to you.”
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“To look for him,” he answered. “I’ll find him. I know him too well to lose him.”
“And he knows you,” she added.
Carlyon came nearer to her again. “Was he laughing at me the whole time,” he asked, “while we were friends? He’s a coward and cowards are cunning. I told him all the things I liked. I read him things, shared what I loved with him. I can only make him forget what I told him by killing him,” he added with an incongruous pathos.
Elizabeth said: “Were they as secret as that?”
He backed away from her suspiciously, as though he feared that she too had designs on his most intimate thoughts. “I’ve warned you,” he said abruptly. “I won’t bother you any longer. You had better not tell your brother that I have been. I don’t wish any harm to him either.” He turned and walked very quickly to the door, as though he were afraid that some word might delay him further. When he opened the door a cold draught filled the room with smoke and mist. He shivered a little. As he closed it he shut away from himself the sight of Elizabeth’s face, its serenity troubled by a faint and obscure pity.