Widdershins Part 25

Something dropped and tinkled against the fender. It was one of her hairpins. One side of her hair was in a loose tumble; she threw up the small head on the superb thick neck.

"Louder!--I cannot hear! Once more--"

The throwing up of her head that had brought down the rest of her hair had given her a glimpse of herself in the gla.s.s over the mantelpiece. For the last time that formidable "Beware!" sounded like thunder in her ears; the next moment she had snapped with her fingers the ribbon that was cutting into her throbbing throat. He with the torso and those shoulders was seeking her ... how should he know her in that dreary garret, in those joyless habiliments? He would as soon known his Own in that crimson-bodiced, wire-framed dummy by the window yonder!...

Her fingers clutched at the tawdry mercerised silk of her blouse. There was a rip, and her arms and throat were free. She panted as she tugged at something that gave with a short "click-click," as of steel fastenings; something fell against the fender.... These also.... She tore at them, and kicked them as they lay about her feet as leaves lie about the trunk of a tree in autumn....

"Ah!"

And as she stood there, as if within the screen of a spectrum that deepened to the band of red, her eyes fell on the leopard-skin at her feet. She caught it up, and in doing so saw purple grapes--purple grapes that issued from the mouth of a paper bag on the table. With the dappled pelt about her she sprang forward. The juice spurted through them into the ma.s.s of her loosened hair. Down her body there was a spilth of seeds and pulp. She cried hoa.r.s.ely aloud.

"Once more--oh, answer me! Tell me my name!"

Ed's steps were heard on the oilclothed portion of the staircase.

"My name--oh, my name!" she cried in an agony of suspense.... "Oh, they will not wait for me! They have lighted the torches--they run up and down the sh.o.r.e with torches--oh, cannot you see me?..."

Suddenly she dashed to the chair on which the litter of linings and tissue-paper lay. She caught up a double handful and crammed them on the fire. They caught and flared. There was a call upon the stairs, and the sound of somebody mounting in haste.

"Once--once only--my name!"

The soul of the Bacchante rioted, struggled to escape from her eyes. Then as the door was flung open, she heard, and gave a terrifying shout of recognition.

"I hear--I almost hear--but once more.... IO! _Io, Io, Io!_"

Ed, in the doorway, stood for one moment agape; the next, ignorant of the full purport of his own words--ignorant that though man may come westwards he may yet bring his wors.h.i.+p with him--ignorant that to make the Dream the Reality and the Reality the Dream is Heaven's dreadfullest favour--and ignorant that, that Edge once crossed, there is no return to the sanity and sweetness and light that are only seen clearly in the moment when they are lost for ever--he had dashed down the stairs crying in a voice hoa.r.s.e and high with terror:

"She's mad! She's mad!"

THE ACCIDENT

I

The street had not changed so much but that, little by little, its influence had come over Romarin again; and as the clock a street or two away had struck seven he had stood, his hands folded on his stick, first curious, then expectant, and finally, as the sound had died away, oddly satisfied in his memory. The clock had a peculiar chime, a rather elaborate one, ending inconclusively on the dominant and followed after an unusually long interval by the stroke of the hour itself. Not until its last vibration had become too subtle for his ear had Romarin resumed the occupation that the pealing of the hour had interrupted.

It was an occupation that especially tended to abstraction of mind--the noting in detail of the little things of the street that he had forgotten with such completeness that they awakened only tardy responses in his memory now that his eyes rested on them again. The shape of a doorknocker, the grouping of an old chimney-stack, the crack, still there, in a flagstone--somewhere deep in the past these things had a.s.sociations; but they lay very deep, and the disturbing of them gave Romarin a curious, desolate feeling, as of returning to things he had long out-grown.

But, as he continued to stare at the objects, the sluggish memories roused more and more; and for each bit of the old that rea.s.serted itself scores of yards of the new seemed to disappear. New shop-frontages went; a wall, brought up flush where formerly a recess had been, became the recess once more; the intermittent electric sign at the street's end, that wrote in green and crimson the name of a whiskey across a lamp-lit facade, ceased to worry his eyes; and the unfamiliar new front of the little restaurant he was pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing took on its old and well-known aspect again.

Seven o'clock. He had thought, in dismissing his hansom, that it had been later. His appointment was not until a quarter past. But he decided against entering the restaurant and waiting inside; seeing who his guest was, it would be better to wait at the door. By the light of the restaurant window he corrected his watch, and then sauntered a few yards along the street, to where men were moving flats of scenery from a back door of the new theatre into a sort of tumbril. The theatre was twenty years old, but to Romarin it was "the new theatre." There had been no theatre there in his day.

In his day!... His day had been twice twenty years before. Forty years before, that street, that quarter, had been bound up in his life. He had not, forty years ago, been the famous painter, honoured, decorated, taken by the arm by monarchs; he had been a student, wild and raw as any, with that tranquil and urbane philosophy that had made his success still in abeyance within him. As his eyes had rested on the doorknocker next to the restaurant a smile had crossed his face. How had _that_ door-knocker come to be left by the old crowd that had wrenched off so many others? By what accident had _that_ survived, to bring back all the old life now so oddly? He stood, again smiling, his hands folded on his stick. A Crown Prince had given him that stick, and had had it engraved, "To my Friend, Romarin."

"You oughtn't to be here, you know," he said to the door-knocker. "If I didn't get you, Marsden ought to have done so...."

It was Marsden whom Romarin had come to meet--Marsden, of whom he had thought with such odd persistency lately. Marsden was the only man in the world between whom and himself lay as much as the shadow of an enmity; and even that faint shadow was now pa.s.sing. One does not guard, for forty years, animosities that take their rise in quick outbreaks of the young blood; and, now that Romarin came to think of it, he hadn't really hated Marsden for more than a few months. It had been within those very doors (Romarin was pa.s.sing the restaurant again) that there had been that quick blow, about a girl, and the tables had been pushed hastily back, and he and Marsden had fought, while the other fellows had kept the waiters away.... And Romarin was now sixty-four, and Marsden must be a year older, and the girl--who knew?--probably dead long ago ... Yes, time heals these things, thank G.o.d; and Romarin had felt a genuine flush of pleasure when Marsden had accepted his invitation to dinner.

But--Romarin looked at his watch again--it was rather like Marsden to be late. Marsden had always been like that--had come and gone pretty much as he had pleased, regardless of inconvenience to others. But, doubtless, he had had to walk. If all reports were true, Marsden had not made very much of his life in the way of worldly success, and Romarin, sorry to hear it, had wished he could give him a leg-up. Even a good man cannot do much when the current of his life sets against him in a tide of persistent ill-luck, and Romarin, honoured and successful, yet knew that he had been one of the lucky ones....

But it was just like Marsden to be late, for all that.

At first Romarin did not recognise him when he turned the corner of the street and walked towards him. He hadn't made up his mind beforehand exactly how he had expected Marsden to look, but he was conscious that he didn't look it. It was not the short stubble of grey beard, so short that it seemed to hesitate between beard and unshavenness; it was not the figure nor carriage--clothes alter that, and the clothes of the man who was advancing to meet Romarin were, to put it bluntly, shabby; nor was it... but Romarin did not know what it was in the advancing figure that for the moment found no response in his memory. He was already within half a dozen yards of the men who were moving the scenery from the theatre into the tumbril, and one of the workmen put up his hand as the edge of a fresh "wing" appeared....

But at the sound of his voice the same thing happened that had happened when the clock had struck seven. Romarin found himself suddenly expectant, attentive, and then again curiously satisfied in his memory.

Marsden's voice at least had not changed; it was as in the old days--a little envious, sarcastic, accepting lower interpretations somewhat willingly, somewhat grudging of better ones. It completed the taking back of Romarin that the chiming of the clock, the doorknocker, the grouping of the chimney-stack and the crack in the flagstone had begun.

"Well, my distinguished Academician, my--"

Marsden's voice sounded across the group of scene-s.h.i.+fters...

"_'Alf_ a mo, _if_ you please, guv'nor," said another voice...

For a moment the painted "wing" shut them off from one another.

In that moment Romarin's accident befell him. If its essential nature is related in arbitrary terms, it is that there are no other terms to relate it in. It is a decoded cipher, which can be restored to its cryptic form as Romarin subsequently restored it.

As the painter took Marsden's arm and entered the restaurant, he noticed that while the outside of the place still retained traces of the old, its inside was entirely new. Its cheap glittering wall-mirrors, that gave a false impression of the actual size of the place, its Loves and Shepherdesses painted in the style of the carts of the vendors of ice-cream, its hat-racks and its four-bladed propeller that set the air slowly in motion at the farther end of the room, might all have been matched in a dozen similar establishments within hail of a cab-whistle.

Its gelatine-written menu-cards announced that one might dine there _a la carte_ or _table d'hote_ for two s.h.i.+llings. Neither the cooking nor the service had influenced Romarin in his choice of a place to dine at.

He made a gesture to the waiter who advanced to help him on with his coat that Marsden was to be a.s.sisted first; but Marsden, with a grunted "All right," had already helped himself. A glimpse of the interior of the coat told Romarin why Marsden kept waiters at arm's-length. A little twinge of compunction took him that his own overcoat should be fur-collared and lined with silk.

They sat down at a corner table not far from the slowly moving four-bladed propeller.

"Now we can talk," Romarin said. "I'm glad, glad to see you again, Marsden."

It was a peculiarly vicious face that he saw, corrugated about the brows, and with stiff iron-grey hair untrimmed about the ears. It shocked Romarin a little; he had hardly looked to see certain things so accentuated by the pa.s.sage of time. Romarin's own brow was high and bald and benign, and his beard was like a broad s.h.i.+eld of silver.

"You're glad, are you?" said Marsden, as they sat down facing one another. "Well, I'm glad--to be seen with you. It'll revive my credit a bit. There's a fellow across there has recognised you already by your photographs in the papers.... I a.s.sume I may...?"

He made a little upward movement of his hand. It was a gin and bitters Marsden a.s.sumed he might have. Romarin ordered it; he himself did not take one. Marsden tossed down the _aperitif_ at one gulp; then he reached for his roll, pulled it to pieces, and--Romarin remembered how in the old days Marsden had always eaten bread like that--began to throw bullets of bread into his mouth. Formerly this habit had irritated Romarin intensely; now ... well, well, Life uses some of us better than others. Small blame to these if they throw up the struggle. Marsden, poor devil ... but the arrival of the soup interrupted Romarin's meditation.

He consulted the violet-written card, ordered the succeeding courses, and the two men ate for some minutes in silence.

"Well," said Romarin presently, pus.h.i.+ng away his plate and wiping his white moustache, "are you still a Romanticist, Marsden?"

Marsden, who had tucked his napkin between two of the b.u.t.tons of his frayed waistcoat, looked suspiciously across the gla.s.s with the dregs of the gin and bitters that he had half raised to his lips.

"Eh?" he said. "I say, Romarin, don't let's go grave-digging among memories merely for the sake of making conversation. Yours may be pleasant, but I'm not in the habit of wasting much time over mine.

Might as well be making new ones ... I'll drink whiskey and soda."

It was brought, a large one; and Marsden, nodding, took a deep gulp.