The Return Part 23

'H'm,' said Herbert solemnly: 'I wish I had as sensitive a conscience.

But as your old friend didn't recognise you, who's the worse? As for her not doing so, just think of the difference a few years makes to a man, and any severe shock. Life wears so infernally badly. Who, for that matter, does not change, even in character and yet who professes to see it? Mind, I don't say in essence! But then how many of the human ghosts one meets does one know in essence? One doesn't want to. It would be positively cataclysmic. And that's what brings me around to feel, Lawford, if I may venture to say so, that you may have brooded a little too keenly on--on your own case. Tell any one you feel ill; he will commiserate with you to positive nausea. Tell any priest your soul is in danger; will he wait for proof? It's misereres and penances world without end. Tell any woman you love her; will she, can she, should she, gainsay you? There you are. The cat's out of the bag, you see. My sister and I sat up half the night talking the thing over. I said I'd take the plunge. I said I'd risk appearing the cra.s.sest, contradictoriest wretch that ever drew breath. I don't deny that what I hinted at the other night must seem in part directly contrary to what I'm going to say now.'

He wheeled his black eyes as if for inspiration, and helped himself to salad. 'It's this,' he said. 'Isn't it possible, isn't it even probable that being ill, and overstrung, moping a little over things more or less out of the common ruck, and sitting there in a kind of trance--isn't it possible that you may have very largely IMAGINED the change? Hypnotised yourself into believing it much worse--more profound, radical, acute--and simply absolutely hypnotizing others into thinking so, too.

Christendom is just beginning to rediscover that there is such a thing as faith, that it is just possible that, say, megrims or melancholia may be removed at least as easily as mountains. The converse, of course, is obvious on the face of it. A man fails because he thinks himself a failure. It's the men that run away that lose the battle. Suppose then, Lawford'--he leaned forward, keen and suave--'suppose you have been and "Sabathiered" yourself!'

Lawford had grown accustomed during the last few days to finding himself gazing out like a child into reality, as if from the windows of a dream.

He had in a sense followed this long, loosely st.i.tched, preliminary argument; he had at least in part realised that he sat there between two clear friendly minds acting in the friendliest and most obvious collusion. But he was incapable of fixing his attention very closely on any single fragment of Herbert's apology, or of rousing himself into being much more than a dispa.s.sionate and not very interested spectator of the little melodrama that Fate, it appeared, had at the last moment decided rather capriciously to twist into a farce. He turned with a smile to the face so keenly fixed and enthusiastic with the question it had so laboriously led up to: 'But surely, I don't quite see...'

Herbert lifted his gla.s.s as if to his visitor's ac.u.men and set it down again without tasting it. 'Why, my dear fellow,' he said triumphantly, 'even a dream must have a peg. Yours was this unforgettable old suicide.

Candidly now, how much of Sabathier was actually yours? In spite of all that that fantastical fellow, Herbert, said last night, dead men DON'T tell tales. The last place in the world to look for a ghost is where his traitorous bones lie crumbling. Good heavens, think what irrefutable ma.s.ses of evidence there would be at our finger-tips if every tombstone hid its ghost! No; the fellow just arrested you with his creepy epitaph: an epitaph, mind you, that is in a literary sense distinctly fertilizing. It catches one's fancy in its own crude way, as pages and pages of infinitely more complicated stuff take possession of, germinate, and sprout in one's imagination in another way. We are all psychical parasites. Why, given his epitaph, given the surroundings, I wager any sensitive consciousness could have guessed at his face; and guessing, as it were, would have feigned it. What do you think, Grisel?'

'I think, dear, you are talking absolute nonsense; what do they call it--"darkening counsel"? It's "the hair of the dog," Mr Lawford.'

'Well, then, you see,' said Herbert over a hasty mouthful, and turning again to his victim--'then you see, when you were just in the pink of condition to credit any idle tale you heard, then I came in. What, with the least impetus, can one NOT see by moonlight? The howl of a dog turns the midnight into a Brocken; the branch of a tree stoops out at you like a Beelzebub crusted with gadflies. I'd, mind you, sipped of the deadly old Huguenot too. I'd listened to your innocent prattle about the child kicking his toes out on death's cupboard door; what more likely thing in the world, then, than that with that moon, in that packed air, I should have swallowed the bait whole, and seen Sabathier in every crevice of your skin? I don't say there wasn't any resemblance; it was for the moment extraordinary; it was even when you were here the other night distinctly arresting. But now (poor old Grisel, I'm nearly done) all I want to say is this: that if we had the "foxy old roue" here now, and Grisel played Paris between the three of us, she'd hand over the apple not to you but to me.'

'I don't quite see where poor Paris comes in,' suggested Grisel meekly.

'No, nor do I,' said Herbert. 'All that I mean, sagacious child, is, that Mr Lawford no more resembles the poor wretch now than I resemble the Apollo Belvedere. If you had only heard my sister scolding me, railing at me for putting such ideas into your jangled head! They don't affect ME one iota. I have, I suppose, what is usually called imagination; which merely means that I can sup with the devil, spoon for spoon, and could sleep in Bluebeard's linen-closet without turning a hair. You, if I am not very much mistaken, are not much troubled with that very unprofitable quality, and so, I suppose, when a crooked and bizarre fancy does edge into your mind it roots there.'

And that said, not without some little confusion, and covert glance of inquiry at his sister, Herbert made all the haste he could to catch up the course that his companions had already finished.

If only, Lawford thought, this insufferable weariness would lift awhile he could enjoy the quiet, absurd, heedless talk, and this very friendly topsy-turvy effort to ease his mind and soothe his nerves. He might even take an interest again in his 'case.'

'You see,' he said, turning to Grisel, 'I don't think it really very much matters how it all came about. I never could believe it would last.

It may perhaps--some of it at least may be fancy. But then, what isn't?

What is trustworthy? And now your brother tells me my hair's turning grey. I suppose I have been living too slowly, too sluggishly, and they thought it was high time to stir me up.'

He saw with extraordinary vividness the low panelled room; the still listening face; the white muslin shoulders and dark hair; and the eyes that seemed to recall some far-off desolate longing for home and childhood. It was all a dream. That was the end of the matter. Even now, perhaps, his tired old stupid body was lying hunched up, drenched with dew upon the little old seat under the mist-wreathed branches. Soon it would bestir itself and wake up and go off home--home to Sheila, to the old deadly round that once had seemed so natural and inevitable, to the old dull Lawford--eyes and brain and heart.

They returned up the dark shallow staircase to Herbert's book-room, and he talked on to very quiet and pa.s.sive listeners in his own fantastic endless fas.h.i.+on. And ever and again Lawford would find himself intercepting fleeting and anxious glances at his face, glances almost of remorse and pity; and thought he detected beneath this irresponsible contradictory babble an unceasing effort to clear the sky, to lure away too pressing memories, to put his doubts and fears completely to rest.

Herbert even went so far as to plead guilty, when Grisel gave him the cue, of having a little heightened and overcoloured his story of the restless phantasmal old creature that haunted their queer wooden hauntable old house. And when they rose, laughing and yawning to take up their candles, it was, after all, after a rather animated discussion, with many a hair-raising ghost story brought in for proof between brother and sister, as to exactly how many times that snuff-coloured spectre had made his appearance; and, with less unanimity still, as to the precise manner in which he was in the habit of making his precipitant exit.

'You do at any rate acknowledge, Grisel, that the old creature does appear, and that you saw him yourself step out into s.p.a.ce when you were sitting down there under the willow sh.e.l.ling peas. I've seen him twice for certain, once rather hazily; Sallie saw him so plainly she asked his business: that's five. I resign.'

'Acknowledge!' said Grisel; 'of course I do. I'd acknowledge anything in the world to save argument. Why, I don't know what I should do without him. If only, now Mr Lawford would give him a fair chance to show himself reading quietly here about ten minutes to one, or sh.e.l.ling peas even, if he prefers it. If only he'd stay long enough for THAT. Wouldn't it be the very thing for them both!'

'Of course,' said Herbert cordially, 'the very thing.'

Lawford looked up at neither of them. He shook his head.

But he needed little persuasion to stay at least one night. The prospect of that long solitary walk, of that tired stupid stooping figure dragging itself along the interminable country roads seemed a sheer impossibility. 'It is not--it isn't, I swear it--the other that beeps me back,' he had solemnly a.s.sured the friend that half smiled her relief at his acceptance, 'but--if you only knew how empty it's all got now; all reason gone even to go on at all.'

'But doesn't it follow? Of course it's empty. And now life is going to begin again. I a.s.sure you it is, I do indeed. Only, only have courage--just the will to win on.'

He said good-night; shut-to the latched door of his long low room, ceilinged with rafters close under the steep roof, its brown walls hung with quiet, dark, pondering and beautiful faces looking gravely across at him. And with his candle in his hand he sat down on the bedside. All speculation was gone. The noisy clock of his brain had run down again.

He turned towards the old oval looking-gla.s.s on the dressing-table without the faintest stirring of interest, suspense, or anxiety. What did it matter what a man looked like--a now familiar but enfeebled and deprecating voice seemed to say. He knew that a change had come. Even Sheila had noticed it. And since then what had he not gone through? What now was here seemed of little moment, so far at least as this world was concerned.

At last with an effort he rose, crossed the uneven floor, and looked in unmovedly on what was his own poor face come back to him: changed indeed almost beyond belief from the sleek self-satisfied genial yet languid Arthur Lawford of the past years, and still haunted with some faint trace of the set and icy sharpness, and challenge, and affront of the dark Adventurer, but that--how immeasurably dimmed and blunted and faded. He had expected to find it so. Would it (the thought vanished across his mind) would it have been as unmistakably there had he come hot-foot, fearing, expecting to find the other? But--was he disappointed!

He hardly knew how long he stood there, leaning on his hands, surveying almost listlessly in the candle-light that lined, bedraggled, grey, hopeless countenance, those dark-socketed, smouldering eyes, whose pupils even now were so dilated that a casual glance would have failed to detect the least hint of any iris. 'It must have been something pretty bad you were, you know, or something pretty bad you did,' they seemed to be trying to say to him, 'to drag us down to this.'

He knelt down by force of habit to say his prayers; but no words came.

Well, between earthly friends a betrayal such as this would have caused a livelong estrangement and hostility. The G.o.d the old Lawford used to pray to would forgive him, he thought wearily, if just for the present he was a little too sore at heart to play the hypocrite. But if, while kneeling, he said nothing, he saw a good many things in such tranquillity and clearness as the mere eyes of the body can share but rarely with their sisters of the imagination. And now it was Alice who looked mournfully out of the dark at him; and now the little old charwoman, Mrs Gull, with her bag hooked over her arm, climbed painfully up the area steps; and now it was the lean vexed face of a friend, nursing some restless and anxious grievance against him--Mr Bethany; and then and ever again it was the face of one who seemed pure dream and fantasy and yet... He listened intently and fancied even now he could hear the voices of brother and sister talking quietly and circ.u.mspectly together in the room beneath.

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 gla.s.s 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 cla.s.sic 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 unG.o.dly 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-cla.s.s 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 b.u.t.ts of Malmsez; dumb as drummerless drums. Here am I, a.s.s 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.'