Chapter 18

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_ CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A quiet knocking aroused him in the long, tranquil bedroom; and Herbert's head was poked into the room. 'There's a bath behind that door over there,' he whispered, 'or if you like I'm off for a bathe in the Widder. It's a luscious day. Shall I wait? All right,' and the head was withdrawn. 'Don't put much on,' came the voice at the panel; 'we'll be home again in twenty minutes.'

The green and brightness of the morning must have been prepared for overnight by spiders and the dew. Everywhere the gleaming nets were hung, and everywhere there rose a tiny splendour from the waterdrops, so clear and pure and changeable it seemed with their fire and colour they shook a tiny crystal music in the air. Herbert led the way along a clayey downward path beneath hazels tossing softly together their twigs of nuts, until they came out into a rounded hollow that, mounded with thyme, sloped gently down to the green banks of the Widder. The water poured like clearest glass beneath a rain of misty sunbeams.

'My sister always says that this is the very dell Boccaccio had in his mind's eye when he wrote the "Decameron." There really is something almost classic in those pines. And I'd sometimes swear with my eyes just out of the water I've seen Dryads half in hiding peeping between those beeches. Good Lord, Lawford, what a world we wretched moderns have made, and missed!'

The water was violently cold. It seemed to Lawford, as it swept up over his body, and as he plunged his night-distorted eyes beneath its blazing surface, that it was charged with some strange, powerful enchantment to wash away in its icy clearness even the memory of the dull and tarnished days behind him. If one could but tie up anyhow that stained bundle of inconsequent memories called life, and fling it into a cupboard remoter even than Bluebeard's, and lock the door, and drop the quickly-rusting key into these living waters!

He dressed himself with window thrown open to the blackbirds and thrushes, and the occasional shrill solitary whistling of a robin. But, like the sour-sweet fragrance of the brier, its wandering desolate burst of music had power to wake memory, and carried him instantly back to that first aimless descent into the evening gloom of Widderstone from which it was in vain to hope ever to climb again. Surely never a more ghoulish face looked out on its man before than that which confronted him as with borrowed razor he stood shaving those sunken chaps, that angular chin.

And even now, beneath the lantern of broad daylight, just as within that other face had lurked the undeniable ghost and presence of himself, so beneath the sunken features seemed to float, tenuous as smoke, scarcely less elusive than a dream, between eye and object, the sinister darkness of the face that in those two bouts with fear he had by some strange miracle managed to repel.

'Work in,' the chance phrase came back. It had worked in in sober earnest; and so far as the living of the next few weeks went, surely it might prove an ally without which he simply could not conceive himself as struggling on at all.

But as dexterous minds as even restless Sabathier's had him just now in safe and kindly keeping. All the quiet October morning Herbert kept him talking and stooping over his extraordinary collection of books.

'The point is,' he explained to Lawford, standing amid a positive archipelago of precious 'finds,' with his foot hoisted onto a chair and a patched-up, sea-stained folio on his knee, 'I honestly detest the mere give and take of what we are fools enough to call life. I don't deny Life's there,' he swept his hand towards the open window--'in that frantic Tophet we call London; but there's no focus, no point of vantage. Even a scribbler only gets it piecemeal and through a dulled medium. We learn to read before we know how to see; we swallow our tastes, convictions, and emotions whole; so that nine-tenths of the world's nectar is merely honeydew.' He smiled pleasantly into the fixed vacancy of his visitor's face. 'That's why I've just gone on,' he continued amiably, 'collecting this particular kind of stuff--what you might call riff-raff. There's not a book here, Lawford, that hasn't at least a glimmer of the real thing in it--just Life, seen through a living eye, and felt. As for literature, and style, and all that gallimaufry, don't fear for them if your author has the ghost of a hint of genius in his making.'

'But surely,' said Lawford, trying for the twentieth time to pretend to himself that these endless books carried the faintest savour of the delight to him which they must, he rather forlornly supposed, shower upon Herbert, 'surely genius is a very rare thing!'

'Rare! the world simply swarms with it. But before you can bottle it up in a book it's got to be articulate. Just for a single instant imagine yourself Falstaff, and if there weren't hundreds of Falstaffs in every generation, to be examples of his ungodly life, he'd be as dead as a doornail to-morrow--imagine yourself Falstaff, and being so, sitting down to write "Henry IV," or "The Merry Wives." It's simply preposterous. You wouldn't be such a fool as to waste the time. A mere Elizabethan scribbler comes along with a gift of expression and an observant eye, lifts the bloated old tippler clean out of life, and swims down the ages as the greatest genius the world has ever seen. Whereas, surely, though you mustn't let me bore you with all this piffle, it's Falstaff is the genius, and W. S. merely a talented reporter.

'Lear, Macbeth, Mercutio--they live on their own, as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever WATCHED tradesmen behind their counters? My soul, the secrets walking in the streets! You jostle them at every corner. There's a Polonius in every first-class railway carriage, and as many Juliets as there are boarding-schools. What the devil are you, my dear chap, but genius itself, with all the world brand new upon your shoulders? And who'd have thought it of you ten days ago?

'It's simply and solely because we're all, poor wretches, dumb--dumb as butts of Malmsez; dumb as drummerless drums. Here am I, ass that I am, trickling out this--this whey that no more expresses me than Tupper does Sappho. But that's what I want to mean. How inexhaustibly rich everything is, if you only stick to life. Here it is packed away behind these rotting covers, just the real thing, no respectable stodge; no mere parasitic stuff; not more than a dozen poets; scores of outcasts and vagabonds--and the real thing in vagabonds is pretty rare in print, I can tell you. We're all, every one of us, sodden with facts, drugged with the second-hand, and barnacled with respectability until--until the touch comes. Goodness knows where from; but there's no mistaking it; oh no!'

'But what,' said Lawford uneasily, 'what on earth do you mean by the touch?'

'I mean when you cease to be a puppet only and sit up in the gallery too. When you squeeze through to the other side. When you suffer a kind of conversion of the mind; become aware of your senses. When you get a living inkling. When you become articulate to yourself. When you SEE.'

'I am awfully stupid,' Lawford murmured, 'but even now I don't really follow you a bit. But when, as you say, you do become articulate to yourself, what happens then?'

'Why, then,' said Herbert with a shrug almost of despair, 'then begins the weary tramp back. One by one drop off the truisms, and the Grundyisms, and the pedantries, and all the stillborn claptrap of the marketplace sloughs off. Then one can seriously begin to think about saving one's soul.'

'Saving one's soul,' groaned Lawford; 'why, I am not even sure of my own body yet.' He walked slowly over to the window and with every thought in his head as quiet as doves on a sunny wall, stared out into the garden of green things growing, leaves fading and falling water. 'I tell you what,' he said, turning irresolutely, 'I wonder if you could possibly find time to write me out a translation of Sabathier. My French is much too hazy to let me really get at the chap. He's gone now; but I really should like to know what kind of stuff exactly he has left behind.'

'Oh, Sabathier!' said Herbert, laughing. 'What do you think of that, Grisel?' he asked, turning to his sister, who at that moment had looked in at the door. 'Here's Mr Lawford asking me to make a translation of Sabathier. Lunch, Lawford.'

Lawford sighed. And not until he had slowly descended half the narrow uneven stairs that led down to the dining-room did he fully realise the guile of a sister that could induce a hopeless bookworm to waste a whole morning over the stupidest of companions, simply to keep his tired-out mind from rankling, and give his Sabathier a chance to go to roost.

'I think, do you know,' he managed to blurt out at last 'I think I ought to be getting home again. The house is empty--and--'

'You shall go this evening,' said Herbert, 'if you really must insist on it. But honestly, Lawford, we both think that after what the last few days must have been, it is merely common sense to take a rest. How can you possibly rest with a dozen empty rooms echoing every thought you think? There's nothing more to worry about; you agree to that. Send your people a note saying that you are here, safe and sound. Give them a chance of lighting a fire, and driving in the fatted calf. Stay on with us just the week out.'

Lawford turned from one to the other of the two friendly faces. But what was dimly in his mind refused to express itself. 'I think, you know, I--' he began falteringly.

'But it's just this thinking that's the deuce--this preposterous habit of having continually to make up one's mind. Off with his head, Grisel! My sister's going to take you for a picnic; we go every other fine afternoon; and you can argue it out with her.'

Once alone again with Grisel, however, Lawford found talking unnecessary. Silences seemed to fall between them as quietly and restfully as evening flows into night. They walked on slowly through the fading woods, and when they had reached the top of the hill that sloped down to the dark and foamless Widder they sat down in the honey-scented sunshine on a knoll of heather and bracken, and Grisel lighted the little spirit-kettle she had brought with her, and busied herself very methodically over making tea.

That done, she clasped her hands round her knees, and sat now gossiping, now silent, in the pale autumnal beauty. There was a bird wistfully twittering in the branches overhead, and ever and again a withered leaf would slip circling down from the motionless beech boughs arched in their stillness above their heads beneath the thin blue sky.

'Men, you know,' she began again suddenly, starting out of reverie, 'really are absurdly blind; and just a little bit absurdly kindly stupid. How many times have I been at the point of laughing out at my brother's delicious naive subtleties. But you do, you will, understand, Mr Lawford, that he was, that we are both "doing our best"--to make amends?'

'I understand--I do indeed--a tenth part of all your kindness.'

'Yes, but that's just it--that horrible word "kindness"! If ever there were two utterly self-absorbed people, without a trace, with an absolute horror of kindness, it is just my brother and I. It's most of it false and most of it useless. We all surely must take what comes in this topsy-turvy world. I believe in saying out:--that the more one thinks about life the worse it becomes. There are only two kinds of happiness in this world--a wooden post's and Prometheus's. And who ever heard of any one having the impudence to be kind to Prometheus? As for a miserable "medium" like me, not quite a post and leagues and leagues from even envying a Prometheus, she's better for the powder without the jam. But that's all nothing. What I can't help thinking--and it's not a bit giving my brother away, because we both think it--that it was partly our thoughtlessness that added at least something to--to the rest. It was perfectly absurd. He saw you were ill; he saw--he must have seen even in that first Sunday talk--that your nerves were all askew. And who doesn't know what "nerves" means nowadays? And yet he deliberately chattered. He loves it--just at large, you know, like me. I told him before I came out that I intended, if I could, to say all this. And now it's said you'll please forgive me for going back to it.'

'Please don't talk about forgiveness. But when you say he chattered, you mean about Sabathier, of course. And that, you know, I don't care a fig for now. We can settle all that between ourselves--him and me, I mean. And now tell me candidly again--Is there any "prey" in my face now?'

She looked up fleetingly into his eyes, leant back her head and laughed. '"Prey," there never was a glimpse.'

'And "change"?' Their eyes met again in an infinitely brief, infinitely bewildering argument.

'Really, really, scarcely perceptible,' she assured him, 'except, of course, how horribly, horribly ill you look. And that only seems to prove to me you must be hiding something else. No illusion on earth could--could have done that to your face.'

'You think, I know,' he persisted, 'that I must be persuaded and cosseted and humoured. Yes, you do; it's my poor old sanity that's really in both your minds. Perhaps I am--not absolutely sound. Anyhow. I've been watching it in your looks at each other all the time. And I can never, never say, never tell you what you have done for me. But you see, after all, we did win through; I keep on telling myself that. So that now it's purely from the most selfish and practical motives that I want you to be perfectly frank with me. I have to go back, you know; and some of them, one or two of my friends I mean, are not all on my side. Think of me as I was when you came into the room, three centuries ago, and you turned and looked, frowning at me in the candle-light; remember that and look at me now. What is the difference? Does it shock you? Does it make the whole world seem a trick, a sham? Does it simply sour your life to think such a thing possible? Oh, the hours I've spent gloating on Widderstone's miserable mask of skin and bone, as I was saying to your brother only last night, and never knew until they shuffled me that the old self too was nothing better than a stifling suffocating mask.'

'But don't you see,' she argued softly, turning her face away a little, 'you were a stranger then (though I certainly didn't mean to frown). And then a little while after we were, well, just human beings, shoulder to shoulder, and if friendship does not mean that, I don't know what it does mean. And now, you are--well, just you: the you, you know, of three centuries ago! And if you mean to ask me whether at any precise moment I have been conscious that this you I am now speaking to was not the you of last night, or of that dark climb up the hill, why, it is simply frantic to think it could ever be necessary to say over and over again, No. But if you mean, Have you changed else? All I could answer is, Don't we all change as we grow to know one another? What were just features, what just dingily represented one, as it were, is forgotten, or rather gets remembered. Of course, the first glimpse is the landscape under lightning as it were. But afterwards isn't it surely like the alphabet to a child; what was first a queer angular scrawl becomes A, and is always ever after A, undistinguished, half-forgotten, yet standing at last for goodness knows what real wonderful things--or for just the dry bones of soulless words? Is that it?' She stole a sidelong glance into his brooding face, leaning her head on her hand.

'Yes, yes,' came the rather dissatisfied reply. 'I do agree; perfectly. But then, you see--I told you I was going to talk of nothing but myself--what did at first happen to me was something much worse, and, I suppose, something quite different from that.'

'And yet, didn't you tell us, that of all your friends not one really denied in their hearts your--what they would call, I suppose--your IDENTITY; except that poor little offended old lady. And even she, if my intuition is worth a penny piece, even she when you go soon and talk to her will own that she did know you, and that it was not because you were a stranger that she was offended, but because you so ungenerously pretended to be one. That was a little mad, now, if you like!'

'Oh yes,' said Lawford, 'I am going to ask her forgiveness. I don't know what I didn't vow to take her for a peace-offering if the chance should ever come--and the courage--to make my peace with her. But now that the chance has come, and I think the courage, it is the desire that's gone. I don't seem to care either way. I feel as if I had got past making my peace with any one.'

But this time no answer helped him out.

'After all,' he went plodding on, 'there is more than just the mere day to day to consider. And one doesn't realise that one's face actually IS one's fortune without a shock. And that THAT gone, one is, as your brother said, just like a bee come back to the wrong hive. It undermines,' he smiled rather bitterly, 'one's views rather. And it certainly shifts one's friends. If it hadn't been just for my old'--he stopped dead, and again pushed slowly on--'if it hadn't been for our old friend, Mr Bethany, I doubt if we should now have had a soul on our side. I once read somewhere that wolves always chase the old and weak and maimed out of the pack. And after all, what do we do? Where do we keep the homeless and the insane? And yet, you know,' he added ruminatingly, 'it is not as if mine was ever a particularly lovely or lovable face! While as for the poor wretch behind it, well, I really cannot see what meaning, or life even, he had before--'

'Before?'

Lawford met bravely the clear whimsical eyes. 'Before, I was Sabathiered.'

Grisel laughed outright.

'You think,' he retorted almost bitterly, 'you think I am talking like a child.'

'Yes,' she sighed cheerfully, 'I was quite envying you.'

'Well, there I am,' said Lawford inconsequently. 'And now; well, now, I suppose, the whole thing's to begin again. I can't help beginning to wonder what the meaning of it all is; why one's duty should always seem so very stupid a thing. And then, too, what can there be on earth that even a buried Sabathier could desire?' He glanced up in a really animated perplexity at the still, dark face turned in the evening light towards the darkening valley. And perplexity deepened into a disquieted frown--like that of a child who is roused suddenly from a daydream by the half-forgotten question of a stranger. He turned his eyes almost furtively away as if afraid of disturbing her; and for awhile they sat in silence... At last he turned again almost shyly. 'I hope some day you will let me bring my daughter to see you.'

'Yes, yes,' said Grisel eagerly; 'we should both LOVE it, of course. Isn't it curious?--I simply KNEW you had a daughter. Sheer intuition!'

'I say "some day,"' said Lawford; 'I know, though, that that some day will never come.'

'Wait; just wait,' replied the quiet confident voice, 'that will come too. One thing at a time, Mr Lawford. You've won your old self back again; you'll win your old love of life back again in a little while; never fear. Oh, don't I know that awful Land's End after illness; and that longing, too, that gnawing longing, too, for Ultima Thule. So, it's a bargain between us that you bring your daughter soon.' She busied herself over the tea things. 'And, of course,' she added, as if it were an afterthought, looking across at him in the pale green sunlight as she knelt, 'you simply won't think of going back to-night.... Solitude, I really do think, solitude just now would be absolute madness. You'll write to-day and go, perhaps, to-morrow!'

Lawford looked across in his mind at his square ungainly house, full-fronting the afternoon sun. He tried to repress a shudder. 'I think, do you know, I ought to go to-day.'

'Well, why not? Why not? Just to reassure yourself that all's well. And come back here to sleep. If you'd really promise that I'd drive you in. I'd love it. There's the jolliest little governess-cart we sometimes hire for our picnics. Way I? You've no idea how much easier in our minds my brother and I would be if you would. And then to-morrow, or at any rate the next day, you shall be surrendered, whole and in your right mind. There, that's a bargain too. Now we must hurry.' _

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