The Tower of Oblivion Part 43

Poor, poor lad! He winced as if I had cut at him with a lash. He turned over on the bank so that I could not see his face. He made no response when I placed my hand on his shoulder. My heart ached for him ... but he had to be shown that any question of love between himself and Jennie Aird was impossible.

I shook him. "_Do_ you remember that, Derry?"

Slowly he sat up on the bank. He turned a set face on me.

"Let me say, Coverham," he said tremulously, "that I went through a whole war without seeing as cowardly a thing as that done. I will not forgive you."

And with barely a moment's pause he broke out:

"Oh, what am I to do, sir, what am I to do? You're older and wiser than I am--I want help--advice----"

That is why I have called this portion of his history "The Long Splice."

Extremes as wide apart as those met there and interwove their strands.

Fortunate it was for me that they did, for had not that last helpless cry been wrung from him I should have been dumb before the bitterness of his reproach. Whether memories of sweetness and light were failing him or not, those of bitterness and gall remained, and it was on this quivering complexity of exposed nerves that I had laid the lash.

And yet simultaneously he was innocent, a.s.soiled, acquitted. Only the man he had been had groaned under the stroke; the other had turned to me for comfort and guidance and help. And what is a remembered self that we should weep for it? What is memory that we should writhe? No philosopher has yet ventured to write "I remember, therefore I am." Nor does a man remember entirely and wholly of his own will. He is his memory's lord when he sets himself to repeat a pa.s.sage from a book; but who is the master when something leaps upon him without warning from the past, tears open an old wound, and leaves him quivering and bleeding?...

Derry's "A" Memory now seemed to me to be beside the mark, and it was with a sudden joy that I recognised it to be a boon that his "B" Memory was dissolving into a golden haze. "An absolutely unknown adventure," he had said; and what better, more merciful, more beautiful? As the Great Pity hides other men's ends from them, so his beginning was to be hidden from him. No remembrance of disillusion would mar for him the bloom of his fair discoveries. What though seas were sailed before if you know it not? Are the garden's scents less fragrant that you wonder, for a fleeting instant, when you have smelt them before? And what of the kiss of your mouth when that kiss is both an undoing and a re-beginning, the end of one dream but the beginning of a lovelier still? What Julia had done once Jennie would do again, and I had only to think of his innocence, his beauty and his doom to know, more surely than I ever knew anything in my life, that this would a thousandfold transcend the other.

And--supposing that it had already happened, implicit in that single revealing look--_he had still to sleep that night_.

I forget in what words he began to plead his cause. His idea was this:

He conceived himself to be now stationary, or, if moving at all, to be doing so hardly perceptibly. Ignorant of the connection between Julia's attack and his putting-off of the years, he knew as little that similar results might follow what had happened in the garden of Ker Annic that evening. He would "hang on" by gentle and equable living, and to that extent, and if all went well, time might presently become to him something more nearly approaching what it was to anybody else. He even hazarded a suggestion wild enough to make the hair stand up on your head.

"And if I got as far as that," he mused, his eyes straight before him in the night, "I might even--it's no madder than anything else--I might even start living forward again; but I suppose that's too much to expect," he sighed.

On this I simply refused to make any comment at all.

I had told him that Jennie was the daughter of my host. He was for making plain sailing of it. His outbreak about my cowardice, by the way, had been disregarded by both of us.

"But don't you see, Derry, you're so unimaginably different from anybody and everybody else," I repeated for the tenth time.

"Not if I can stop decently still," was his dogged reply.

"But you don't know yet that you can."

"You don't know that I can't, sir."

I couldn't enter into that. If I had ever intended to do so the time for it would have been on that Sunday afternoon behind the rugosa roses.

"You actually mean that you want me to take you to the house, and introduce you to Mrs Aird, and open up the way to--G.o.d knows what?" I demanded incredulously.

"You offered to introduce me to Mrs Aird once before."

"I offered to introduce the man I then knew."

"Am I any worse now?"

"There's no question of better or worse. A thing can be done or it can't, and this can't."

"Do you mean because of my clothes and my being a Frenchman and all that?"

"I mean, simply, your being Derwent Rose. And I don't know that the other things are quite as simple as they look either."

"But I'm English really. And I've got a decent suit of English clothes."

"Do they fit you--or did they merely do so once?"

At this he became almost cross. "Look here, sir," he said, "when everything's said I _am_ me, and I feel pretty sure I can stop as I am.

Dash it, I _am_ on the blessed map! I'm quite a pa.s.sable nineteen as fellows go, and the rest's all rubbishy detail." Then his manner changed. His voice suddenly shook. "You see, I'm--I'm--I'm in it, George. Regularly for it. Just as deep as--oh, deep and lovely! I didn't know there was such a thing. There wasn't, not before.... Not just to speak to her? Not just to see her? Not if I promise faithfully not to say a single word about it, not even touch her finger? Not if I promise to cut and run at the very first sign of a change? Can't you manage that, sir? Am I such a rotten outcast as all that? It would be quite safe--I wouldn't say a word anybody couldn't hear--I'd promise--on my soul I'd promise----"

I had got up and begun to pace agitatedly back and forth. How could I have him at the Airds'--and yet how resist his supplication? How refuse what would have been my very heart's desire for him--yet how grant it to the ruin of her young life as well as of his? I felt his eyes on my face. He knew, the rascal, that he had moved me, and was greedily looking for the faintest hint of my yielding. Yet the impossibility!...

I stopped before him.

"There's one thing that settles it if nothing else did," I said gently.

"Miss Aird's probably off in a couple of days."

It was, of course, a flagrant invention. I had thought of it on the spur of the moment. But it could be made true if necessary, I thought. He stared at me blankly.

"Off! Did you say off?"

"Right away. And it's now nearly two o'clock, and I want you to make me a promise before I leave you."

"Off!" he repeated stupidly, as if he had imagined her fixed for all eternity as he had seen her in that moment by the car.

"I'll bring your money round to-morrow at ten o'clock. I want you to promise to wait in your room for me till then."

"Where is she going?"

"Will you wait in your room till I come?"

"Back to England?"

"I don't know. Will you wait for me in your room?"

"Tell me one other thing, sir," he pleaded; "just her name----"

"Her name's Jennie."

He received it as if it had been a costly gift. "Jennie, Jennie----" he breathed softly.

"You'll wait for me?"

"Of course, sir. Thank you, George."

"Then I'll say----"