Portrait of a Man with Red Hair: A Romantic Macabre

by Hugh Walpole

VI

She was so happy to see him. His face was close to hers and for the first time he could really see her, her large, grave, questioning eyes, her child's face, half developed, nothing very beautiful in her features, but to him something inexpressibly lovely for which all his life he had been waiting.

She was damp with the fog, and the first thing he did was to take off his coat and try to put it around her. But she stood up resisting him.

"Oh no, I'm not cold. I'm not really. And do you think I'll let you? Why, you! What have you done? Your hands are all torn and your face!"

She was very close to him. She put up her hand and touched his face. It needed to muster everything that he had in him not to put his arms around her. He conquered himself. "That's nothing," he said; "I had some trouble climbing up from the cliff. I was just half-way up when the fog came on. It wasn't much of a path in any case."

She stood with her hand on his arm. "Oh, what shall we do? We shall never find the boat now. The fog will clear and we will be caught. We can't move from here while it lasts."

"No," he said firmly, "we can't move. This is the place where Dunbar will expect us. He'll turn up here at any moment. Meanwhile, we must just wait for him. Is the pony all right?"

"I don't know what I'd have done without the pony," she said. "When the fog came up I was terrified. I didn't know what I'd better do. I called your names, but, of course, you didn't hear. And then it got colder and colder and I kept thinking that I was seeing Them. His red hair. . . ."

She suddenly, shivering, put her hand on his arm. "Oh, don't let them find us," she said; "I couldn't go back to that. I would rather kill myself. I would kill myself if I went back. What they are—oh! you don't know!"

He took her hand and held it firmly. "Now see here, we don't know how long Dunbar will be, or how long the fog will last, or anything. We can't do anything but stay here, and it's no good if we stay here and think of all the terrible things that may happen. The fog can't last for ever. Dunbar may come any minute. What we have to do is to sit down on this stone here and imagine we are sitting in front of our fire at home talking like old friends about—oh well, anything you like—whatever old friends do talk about. Can your imagination help you that far?"

He saw that she was at the very edge of her nerves; a step further and she would topple over into wild hysteria; he knew enough already about her character to be sure that nothing would cause her such self-scorn and regret as that loss of self-control. He was not very sure of his own control; everything had piled up upon him pretty heavily during the last hour; but she was such a child that he had an immense sense of responsibility as though he had been fifteen years older at least.

"I haven't very much imagination," she said, in a voice hovering between laughter and tears. "Father always used to tell me that was my chief lack. And we are old friends, as we said a while ago, even though we have just met."

"That's right," he said. "Now we will have to sit rather close together. There's only one stone and the grass is most awfully wet. Every three minutes or so I'll get up and shout Dunbar's name in case he is wandering about quite close to us."

He stood up and, putting his hands to his mouth, shouted with all his might: "Dunbar! Dunbar! Dunbar!"

He waited. There was no answer. Only the fog seemed to grow closer. He turned to her and said:

"Don't you think the fog's clearing a little?"

She shook her head. There was still a little quaver in her voice: "I'm afraid not. You're saying that to cheer me up. You needn't. I'm not frightened. Think how lucky I am to have you with me. You mightn't have come back. You might have missed your way for hours."

When he thought of how nearly he had missed his way for ever and ever he trembled. He mustn't let his thoughts wander in those paths; he was here to make her feel happy and safe until Dunbar came. They sat down on the stone together, and he put his arm around her to hold her there and to keep her warm.

"Now what shall we talk about?" she asked him.

"Ourselves," he answered her. "We have a splendid opportunity. Here we are, cut off by the fog, away from every one in the world. We know nothing about one another, or almost nothing. We can scarcely see one another's faces. It is a wonderful opportunity."

"Well, you tell me about yourself first."

"Ah! there's the trouble. I'm so terribly dull. I've never been or thought or said anything interesting. I'm like thousands and thousands of people in this world who are simply shadows to everybody else."

"Remember we're to tell the truth," she said. "No one ever honestly thinks that about themselves—that they are just shadows of somebody else. Every one has their own secret importance for themselves—at least, every one in our village had. People you would have supposed had nothing in them, yet if you talked to them you soon saw that they fancied that the world would end if they weren't in it to make it go round."

"Well, honestly, that isn't my opinion of myself," Harkness answered. "I don't think that I help the world to go round at all. Of course, I think that there have to be all the ordinary people in it like myself to appreciate all the doings and sayings of the others, the geniuses—to make the audience. There are so many things I don't care for."

"What do you care for?"

"Oh, different things at different times—not permanently for much. Pictures—especially etchings—music, travel. But never very deeply or urgently, except for the etchings. . . . Until to-night," he suddenly added, lowering his voice.

"Until to-night?"

"Yes, ever since I left Paddington—let me see—how many hours ago? It's now about two o'clock, I suppose." He looked at his watch. "Ten minutes to two. Nearly nine hours. Ever since nine hours ago. I've felt a new kind of energy, a new spirit, the thrill, the excitement that all my life I've wanted to have but that never came until now. Being really in life instead of just watching it like a spectator."

She put her hand on his. "I am so glad you're here. Do you know I used to boast that I never could be frightened by anything? But these last weeks—all my courage has gone. Oh, why has this fog come? We were getting on so well, everything was all right—and now I know they'll find us, I know they'll find us. I'm sure he's just behind there, somewhere, hiding in the fog, listening to us. And perhaps David is killed. I can't bear it. I can't bear it!"

She suddenly clung to him, hiding her face in his coat. He soothed her just as he would his own child, as though she had been his child all her life. "Hesther! Hesther! You mustn't. You mustn't break down. Think how brave you've been all this time. The fog can clear in a moment and then we'll still have time to catch the train. Anyway the fog's a protection. If Crispin were after us he'd never find us in this. Don't cry, Hesther. Don't be unhappy. Let's just go on talking as though we were at home. You're quite safe here. No one can touch you."

"Yes, I'm safe," she whispered, "so long as you're here." His heart leapt up. He forced himself to speak very quietly:

"Now I'll tell you about myself. It will be soon over. I grew up in a place called Baker in Oregon in the United States. It is a long way from anywhere, but all the big trains go through it on the way out to the Pacific coast. I grew up there with my two sisters and my father. I lost my mother when I was very young. We had a funny ramshackle old house under the mountains, full of books. We had very long winters and very hot summers. I went to a place called Andover to school. Then my father died and left me some money, and since then—oh! since then I dare not tell you what a waste I have made of my life, never settling anywhere, longing for Europe and the old beautiful things when I was in America and longing for the energy and vitality of America when I was in Europe. That's what it is to be really cosmopolitan—to have no home anywhere.

"The only intimate friends I have are the etchings, and I sometimes think that they also despise me for the idle life I lead."

He could see that she was interested. She was quietly sitting, her head against his shoulder, her hand in his just as a little girl might listen to her elder brother.

"And that's all?" she asked.

"Yes. Absolutely all. I'm ashamed to let you look at so miserable a picture. I have been like so many people in the world, especially since the war. Modern cleverness has taken one's beliefs away, modern stupidity has deprived one of the possibility of hero-worship. No God, no heroes any more. Only one's disappointing self. What is left to make life worth while? So you think while you are on the bank watching the stream of life pass by. It is different if some one or something pushes you in. Then you must fight for existence for your own self or, better still, for some one else. They who care for something or some one more than themselves—some cause, some idea, some prophecy, some beauty, some person—they are the happy ones." He laughed. "Here I am sitting in the middle of this fog, a useless selfish creature who has suddenly discovered the meaning of life. Congratulate me."

He felt that she was looking up at him. He looked down at her. Their eyes stared at one another. His heart beat riotously, and behind the beating there was a strange pain, a poignant longing, a deep, deep tenderness.

"I don't understand everything you say," she replied at last. "Except that I am sure you are doing an injustice to yourself when you give such an account. But what you say about unselfishness I don't agree with. How is one unselfish if one is doing things for people one loves? I wasn't unselfish because I worked for the boys. I had to. They needed it."

"Tell me about your home," he said.

She sighed, then drew herself a little away from him, as though she were suddenly determined to be independent, to owe no man anything.

"Mother died when I was very young," she said. "I only remember her as some one who was always tired, but very, very kind. But she liked the boys better. I remember I used to be silly and feel hurt because she liked them better. But the day before she died she told me to look after them, and I was so proud, and promised. And I have tried."

"Were they younger than you?"

"Yes. One was three years younger and the other five. I think they cared for me, but never as much as I did for them."

She stopped as though she were listening. The fog was now terribly thick and was in their eyes, their nostrils, their mouths. They could see nothing at all, and when he jumped to his feet and called again, "Dunbar! Dunbar! Dunbar!" he knew that he vanished from her sight. He could feel from the way that she caught his hand and held it when he sat down again how, for a moment, she had lost him.

"It's always that way, isn't it?" she went on, and he could tell from an undertone in her voice that this talking was an immense relief to her. She had, he supposed, not talked to any one for weeks.

"Always what way?" he asked.

"That if you love some one very much they don't love you so much. And then the same the other way."

"Very often," he agreed.

"I'm sure that's what I did wrong at home. Showed them that I cared for them too much. The boys were very good, but they were boys, you know, and took everything for granted as men do." She said this with a very old world-wise air. "They were dear boys—they were and are. But it was better before they went to school, when they needed me always. Afterwards when they had been to school they despised girls and thought it silly to let girls do things for them. And then they didn't like being at home—because father drank."

She dropped her voice here and came very close to him.

"Do you know what it is to hate and love the same person? I was like that with father. When he had drunk too much and broke all the things—when we had so few anyway—and hit the boys, and did things—oh, dreadful things that men do when they're drunk, then I hated him. I didn't love him. I didn't want to help him—I just wanted to get away. And before—before he drank so much he was so good and so sweet and so clever. Do you know that my father was one of the cleverest doctors in the whole of England? He was. If he hadn't drunk he might have been anywhere and done anything. But sometimes when he was drunk and the boys were away at school, and the house was in such a mess, and the servant wouldn't stay because of father, I felt I couldn't go on—I couldn't!—and that I'd run down the road leaving everything as it was, into the town and hide so that they'd never find me. . . . And now," she suddenly broke out, "I have run away—and see what I've made of it!"

"It isn't over yet," he said to her quietly. "Life's just beginning for you."

"Well, anyway," she answered, with a sudden resolute calm that made her seem ever so much older and more mature, "I've helped the boys to start in life, and I won't have to go back to all that again—that's something. It's fine to love some one and work for them as you said just now, but if it's always dirty, and there's never enough money, and the servants are always in a bad temper, and you never have enough clothes, and all the people in the village laugh at you because your father drinks, then you want to stop loving for a little while and to escape anywhere, anywhere to anybody where it isn't dirty. Love isn't enough—no, it isn't—if you're so tired with work that you haven't any energy to think whether you love or not."

She hesitated there, looking away from him, and said so softly that he with difficulty caught her words: "I will tell you one thing that you won't believe, but it's true. I wanted to go to Crispin."

He turned to look at her in amazement.

"You wanted to go?"

"Yes. I know you thought that I went for the boys and father. I know that David thinks that too. Of course that was true a little. He promised me that they should have everything. It was a relief to me that I needn't think of them any more. But it wasn't only that. I wanted to go. I wanted to be free."

"To be free!" Harkness cried. "My God! What freedom! I can understand your wanting to escape, but with such men. . . ."

She turned round upon him eagerly. "You don't know what he can be like—the elder Crispin, I mean. And to a girl, an ignorant, conceited girl. Yes, I was conceited, that was the cause of everything. Father had all sorts of books in his room, I used to read everything I could see—French and German in a kind of way, and secretly I was very proud of myself. I thought that I was more learned than any one I knew, and I used to smile to myself secretly when I overheard people saying how good I was to the boys, and how unselfish, and I would think, 'That's not what I am at all. If you only knew how much I know, and the kind of things, you'd be surprised.'

"I was always thinking of the day when I would escape and marry. I fancied I knew everything about marriage from the books that I had read and from the things that father said when he was drunk. I hadn't a nice idea of marriage at all. I thought it was old-fashioned to fall in love, but through marriage I could reach some fine position where I could do great things in the world, and always in my mind I saw myself coming one day back to my village and every one saying: 'Why, I had not an idea she was like that. Fancy all the time she was with us we never knew she was clever like this.'"

She laughed like a child, a little maliciously, very simply and confidingly. He saw that she had for the moment forgotten her danger, and was sitting there in the middle of a dense fog on a lonely moor at a quarter-past two in the morning with an almost complete stranger as though she were giving him afternoon tea in the placid security of a London suburb. He was glad; he did not wish to bring back her earlier terror, but for himself now, with every moment that passed, he was increasingly anxious. Time was flying; now they could never catch that train. And above all, what could have happened to Dunbar? He must surely have found them by now had some accident not come to him. Perhaps he had slipped as Harkness had done and was now lying smashed to pieces at the bottom of that cliff. But what could he, Harkness, do better than this? While the fog was so dense it was madness to move off in search of any one. And if the fog lasted were they to sit there until morning and be caught like mice in a kitchen?

And beneath his anxiety, as his arm held the child at his side, there was that strange mixture of triumph and pain, of some odd piercing loneliness and a deep burning satisfaction. Meanwhile her hand rested in his, soft and warm like the touch of a bird's breast.

"When Mr. Crispin came—the elder, the father—and talked to me I was flattered. No one before had ever talked to me as he did about his travels and his collections and the grand people he knew, just as though I were as old as he was. And then David—Mr. Dunbar—was always asking me to marry him. I'd known him all my life, and I liked him better than any one else in the whole world; but just because I'd always known him he wasn't exciting. He was the last person I wanted to marry. Then Mr. Crispin made father drink and I hated him for that, and I hated father for letting him do it. I went up to Mr. Crispin's house and told him what I thought of him, and he talked and talked and talked, all about having power over people for their good and hurting them first and loving them all afterwards. I didn't understand most of it, but the end of it was that he said that if I would marry his son he would leave father alone and would give me everything. I should see the world and all life, and that his son loved me and would be kind to me.

"After that it was the strangest thing. I don't say that he hypnotised me. I knew that he was bad. Every one in the place was speaking about him. He had done some cruel thing to a horse, and there was a story, too, about some woman in the village. But I thought that I knew better than all of them, that I would save father and the boys and be grand myself—and then I would show David that he wasn't the only one who cared for me.

"And so—I consented. From the moment I promised I was terrified. I knew that I had done a terrible thing. But it was too late. I was already a prisoner. That is a hysterical thing to say, but it is true. They never let me out of their sight. I was married very quickly after that. I won't say anything about the first week of my marriage except that I didn't need books any more to teach me. I knew the sin I'd committed. But I was proud—I was as proud as I was frightened. I wasn't going to let any one know what a terrible position I was in—and especially David. When we went to Treliss, David came too and waited. In my heart I was so glad he was there.

"You don't know what went on in that house. The younger Crispin wasn't unkind. He was simply indifferent. He thought of nothing and nobody but his father. His father mocked him, despised him, scorned him, but he didn't care. He follows his father like a dog. At first you know I thought I could make a job of it, carrying it through. And then I began to understand.

"First one little thing, then another. The elder Crispin was always talking, floods of it. He was always looking at me and smiling at me. After two days in the house with him I hated him as I hadn't known I could hate any one. When he touched me I trembled all over. It became a kind of duel between us. He was always talking nonsense about making me love him through pain—and his eyes never said what his mouth said. They were like the eyes of another person caught there by mistake.

"Then one day I came into the library upstairs and found him with a dog. A little fox-terrier. He had tied it to the leg of the table and was flicking it with a whip. He would give it a flick, then stand back and look at it, then give it another flick. The awful thing was that the dog was too frightened to howl, too terrified to know that it was being hurt at all. He was smiling, watching the dog very carefully, but his eyes were sad and unhappy. After that there were many signs. I knew then two things, that he was raving crazy mad and that I was a prisoner in that house. They watched me night and day. I had no money. My only hope of escape was through David who was always getting word to me, begging me to let him help me. But I still had my pride, although it was nearly beaten. I wouldn't yield until—until the night before you came, then something happened, something he tried to do; the younger Crispin stopped him that time, but another time—well, there mightn't be any one there. That settled it all. I let David know through you that I would go. I had to go. I couldn't risk another moment. I couldn't risk another moment, I tell you." She suddenly sprang up, caught at Harkness's hands in an agony, crying:

"Don't stay here! Don't stay here! They can find us here! We're going to be caught again. Oh, please come! Please! Please!"

She was suddenly crazy with terror. Had he not held her with all his force she would have rushed off into the fog. She struggled in his arms, pulling and straining, crying, not knowing what she said. Then suddenly she relaxed, would have tumbled had he not held her, and murmuring, "I can't any more—oh, I can't any more!" collapsed, so that he knew she had fainted.