The Tower of Oblivion Part 64

"And how," she said proudly, "if he had it in my arms?"

III

Whether Madge and Julia were friends because of, or in spite of, the differences in their nature, I will not attempt to say. In the situation now in course of development at Ker Annic, however, they struck me as not so much different as opposite. Madge's bark is always infinitely more terrifying than her bite; but the more mischief Julia meditated the stiller she always became, except for a little dancing play deep-drowned in her eyes. She had risk-taking eyes, and the expression in them, if you looked at her as if you wondered whether she had counted the cost, was one of detached surprise that you should pause to weigh chances with the gorgeous adventure plain before you.

And what a risk she now contemplated, certainly for him, perhaps more for herself! What the penalty of failure--or of success--might be to herself I cannot tell you, since I am not in the habit of speculating about what responsibilities ladies incur who love a man all their lives, grow up alongside him as a "jolly good sort," violently a.s.sail him when he clings as it were to a loop amid the dizzy curves of his life's track, and then, when he comes to rest and again begins slowly to revolve on the turn-table at the terminus, put out their hands to the lever once more. What she had taken from him, what she had given him in return, were mysteries beyond me. I merely realised that, if she undertook this in the spirit of adventure, it was adventure on a well-nigh apocalyptic scale.

But what about him? For him it was not a question, as it was for her, of a few weeks' madness and then a folding of the hands, the Nunc Dimittis and darkness. She would merely be putting the seal on a life that already antic.i.p.ated its close; but he would be asked to cut one off in the very moment of its re-flowering. He saw ahead of him that boon for which humanity has cried out ever since another woman gave her man the Knowledge in the Garden. "Ah, might I live again knowing what I know now!" ... _Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait!..._ He did know, he was able; and Julia Oliphant, discovering that she had done all for Jennie Aird, now sought to take it back again. For should ruin supervene, it would be Jennie, not Julia, who would now be robbed and wronged. I could hardly look at Julia, standing there by the hedge, without re-living those anguished moments in which I had ascended his stairs and knocked at his door, hardly daring to hope for an answer. He knew not that ultimately it was from Julia that he now had this manna and honey, this healing oil and wine. He only knew that he received them at Jennie's hands, and with this soft nourishment he had victualled his Tower.

So what disaster might not befall if Julia were to introduce that yeasty fermenting element of herself all over again?

Slowly we returned together across the cornfields, I and the woman who had hardly deigned to refuse me. Since our final rapid exchange, that had ended with her demand "How if he had it in my arms?" not a word had pa.s.sed between us. In that one insolent sentence she had not merely put my pretensions out of existence: she had made them as if they had never been. That they could never be again I knew only too well. Therefore, in silence we pa.s.sed under the shadow of St Enogat Church, crossed the little s.p.a.ce opposite the Cafe de la Mer, and entered the winding lanes to Ker Annic.

At the gate of the villa Madge met us with a peremptory question.

"Where's Jennie? Isn't she with you?" she demanded. She gave a quick glance behind her as she spoke. Obviously she wasn't. Madge glanced over her shoulder again.

"Then don't for goodness sake say she hasn't been. Alec's stamping up and down the garden--says she's been seen with young Arnaud somewhere at the back of beyond on a bicycle. I sent her to bathe with you, Julia."

"She did," said Julia quickly.

"Then just tell him that and say she must have gone into town or something. I know she has been back, because I looked into her room and saw her half-dried costume. You quieten Alec down, George. Have you had tea?"

But in spite of my efforts to placate Alec, I found the fat badly in the fire at Ker Annic. Alec raged up and down the pergola as if he had been caged within it.

"Exactly what I said would happen! I knew it all along!" he stormed.

"n.o.ble saw 'em--no mistake possible, he says--pedalling all over Brittany with Tom, d.i.c.k and Harry.... Where did she get that bicycle? I haven't seen any bicycle about here! First I've heard of a bicycle!"

"Simmer down, Alec. There's no great harm in a bicycle ride after all."

"If she's been for one she's been for a dozen for all I know. She was sent off to bathe."

"Well, she did bathe."

"Were you there? Did you see her?" he challenged me, now suspicious at every point.

"Yes. She bathed with Julia. I waited for them."

"You waited for Julia, you mean. Nipped in and out so as to be able to say she'd been and then dashed off with this fellow, I suppose. Look here, he appears to be a protege of yours, but I want to know more about him before there's any more of this. What does he go about in that rig for? Why does he talk French like that?" (This last headed the list of his offences in Alec's eyes.) "There's something fishy about the whole thing. Jennie sees him sketching, evidently doesn't know any more than the man in the moon who he is, and goes up to him and speaks to him in French and he answers in Englis.h.!.+ Then he says he's a level-time man, but touched in the bellows. He's about as much touched in the bellows as I am!... Who is he? Did he really stay with you? How did you get to know him?"

"He did stay with me. He's perfectly straight. Don't make such a fuss."

"Well, I expect Jennie's as much to blame as he is. They generally are.

If I've told Madge once ... anyway it's got to stop. Of course if he's a friend of yours that's another matter, but gadding about all over the place has got to stop. Is she back yet? I want to see her when she does come in."

And so on. I left him in his cage, angrily knocking out his pipe against the lattice.

The worst of it was that Alec was so very much righter than he knew. I had ventured to a.s.sure him that our young French-speaker was perfectly straight, and you know how far that was true. In the wider sense who was crookeder, whose life more devious? Not one straight step did his circ.u.mstances permit him to take. Why, the only satisfactory way he had been able to hit on to provide himself with money had been his fantastic idea of fighting Georges Carpentier, the simplest way he had found of crossing the Channel had been to swim it! Straight? Too straight altogether. The world is not accustomed to people so straight that they go straight plumb into the heart of things like that.... And, merely as straightness, how was he now to acquire even an ordinary ident.i.ty? Had he _been_ anybody, had he in the past once possessed an ident.i.ty he was able to acknowledge, ways might have been found. He would then have had a starting point. He might have invested himself with a name and place in the world by means of the French equivalent of a deed poll. He might have got himself cited by name in a civil court, have s.n.a.t.c.hed a social existence even out of the formalities of registration attendant on a State Lottery. But not one of these ways was open to him. Nothing short of an act of creation could establish him. Nothing comes out of nothing, nothing can be made out of nothing. Stronger even than that Tower of stone is this other invisible Tower in which we all live, each stone an ego, its mortar the whole complicated everyday nexus of the social fabric. All that he was able to do was to make a.s.sertion that he was Arnaud, and let us take it or leave it at that. How Alec would take it there was very little doubt.

Nor was there much doubt in Madge's case either. She might talk family histories and hidden scandals till the cows came home, but, in the end, the Airds' would be the last household into which any suitor would penetrate without the strictest investigation. Derry might palm off his Somerset Trehernes upon us during a casual tea-hour, but Alec would now dive into the last pigeon-hole in Somerset House but he would know exactly who it was who aspired to become his son-in-law.

Jennie appeared at about half-past six, and Alec's first demand was to be told where that bicycle was.

"What bicycle?" she asked.

"Haven't you come home on a bicycle?"

"No, I came home by the tram, father."

"Where from?"

"From St Briac."

"Haven't you been out with that fellow on a bicycle, or has a mistake been made?"

The game was up. "I did go for a bicycle ride."

"With that fellow Arnaud?"

"Yes, father."

"You went immediately after your bathe?"

"Yes."

"Where's the bicycle now?"

"I left it at St Briac."

"Where in St Briac?"

"At his hotel, where mother and Uncle George and I went that day."

"Where did the bicycle come from?"

"I hired it, father."

"In St Briac?"

"No, in Dinard."

"And you keep it in St Briac?"

"Yes."

"Why there instead of here?"