X
It was an old house. The long hall was panelled and hung with the heads of animals. A torn banner of faded red and yellow with long tassels of gold hung above the stone fireplace. The floor was of stone, and some dim rugs of uncertain colour lay like splashes of damp here and there. The first thing of which he was aware was that a strong cold draught blew through the hall. It seemed to come from a wide oak staircase on his right. There were no portraits on the panelled walls. The house gave a deep sense of emptiness. Two Japanese servants, short, slim, immobile, their hair gleaming black, their faces impassive, waited. The outer door closed. The banner fluttered, the only movement in the house.
"Come in here, Mr. Harkness," Crispin said. "It is more comfortable."
His little figure moved forward. Harkness followed him, but he had had one moment with the girl as he entered the hall. The two Crispins had been for an instant back by the car. He had said, his lips scarcely moving:
"I gave him the message. He is coming," and she had answered without turning her head or looking at him: "Thank you."
Only as he walked after Crispin he wondered whether the Japanese could have understood. No. He was sure that no one could have heard those words, but he turned before leaving the hall, and he had a strange impression of the bare, empty, faded place, the staircase running darkly up into mystery, and the four figures, the two servants, Hesther and the younger Crispin, at that moment immobile, waiting as though they were listening—and for what?
The room into which Crispin led him was even shabbier than the hall. It was a large ugly place with dim cherry-coloured paper, and a great glass candelabrum suspended from the ceiling. The walls had, it seemed, once been covered with pictures of all shapes and sizes, because the wall-paper showed everywhere pale yellow squares and ovals and lozenges of colour where the frames had been. The wall-paper had indeed leprosy, and although there were still some pictures—a large Landseer, an engraving of a Millais, a shabby oil painting of a green and windy sea—it was these strange sea-sick evidences of a vanished hand that invaded the air.
There was very little furniture in the place, two shabby armchairs, a round shining table, a green sofa. The draught that had swept the hall crept here, now come now gone, stealing on hands and feet from corner to corner.
"You see," said Crispin, standing beside the empty fireplace, "I am here but little. I have pulled down the pictures from the walls and then left it all shabby. I enjoy the contrast." At the far end of the room were long oak cupboards. Crispin went to them and pulled back the heavy doors, and instantly in the shabby place there were blazing such treasures as Harkness had never set eyes on before.
Not very many as numbers went—some dozen shelves in all—but gleaming, glittering, shining, flinging out their flashes of purple and amber and gold, here crystalline, now deeply wine-coloured, pink with the petals of the rose, white with the purity of the rising moon. There was jewelry here that seemed to move with its own independent life before Harkness's eyes—Jaipur enamel of transparent red and green, lovely patterns with thick long strips of enamel on a ground of bright gold, over which, while still soft from the furnace, an open-work pattern of gold had been pressed; large rough turquoises set in silver; Chinese work of carved ivory and jade, cap ornaments exquisitely worked, a cap of a Chinese emperor with its embroidered gold dragon and its crown of pearls. Then the inlaid Chinese feather work, and at the sight of these tears of pleasure came into Harkness's eyes, cells made as though for cloisonné enamel, and into these are daintily affixed tiny fragments of king-fisher feather. Colours of blue, green and mauve here blend and tone one into another miraculously, and the effect of all is a glittering sheen of gold and blue. There was one tiny fish, barely half an inch long, and here there were thirty cells on the body, each with its separate piece of feather. Chinese enamel buttons and clasps, nail-guards beautifully ornamented, Japanese hair combs marvellously wrought in lacquer, horn, gold lac on wood, wood with ivory appliqués, and stained ivory.
Then the Netsukes! Had any one in the world such lovely things! With the ivory and its colour richly toned with age, the metal ones showing a glorious patina. The sword guards—made of various metals and alloys and gold and silver, the metal so beautifully finished that it had the rich texture of old lace.
There was then the Renaissance jewelry, pieces lying like fragments of sky, of peach tree in bloom, of cherry and apple, a lovely pendant parrot enamelled in natural colours, a beautiful ship pendant of Venetian workmanship, an Italian earring formed of a large irregular pear-shaped pearl, in a gold setting a Cinquecento jewel—an emerald lizard set with a baroque pearl holding an emerald in its mouth.
Eighteenth-century glory. Gold studs with little skeletons on silk, covered with glass and set in gold. Initials of fine gold with a ground of plaited hair, this edged with blue and covered with faceted glass on crystal and the border of garnets. A pair of earrings, paintings in gouache mounted in gold. A brooch set with garnets. A French vinaigrette enamelled in panels of green on a gold and white ground.
Loveliest of anything yet seen, a sixteenth-century cameo portrait of Lucius Verius cut in a dark onyx. The enamel was green with little white "peas" and small diamonds were set in each pod.
"Ah this!" said Harkness, holding it in his hand. "This is exquisite!"
But Crispin was restless. The eyes closed, the short body moved to another part of the room leaving all the treasures carelessly exposed behind him. "That is enough," he said—"enough of those, I bore you. And now," turning aside with a deprecatory child-like smile, as though he had been exhibiting his doll's house, "you must see the prints."
Harkness turning back to the room saw it as even shabbier than before. It was lit by candle-light, and in the centre of the round shining table there were four tall amber-coloured candlesticks that threw around them a flickering colour as the draught ruffled their power. To this table Crispin drew two chairs. Then he went to a handsome old oak cabinet carved stiffly with flowers and fruit. He stayed looking with a long lingering glance at the drawers, then sharply up at Harkness. Seen there in the mellow light, with the coloured glory of the open cabinets dimly shining in the far room, with the pleasant timid smile that a collector wears when he is approaching his beloved friends, he might have stood to Rembrandt for another "Jan Six," short and stumpy though he be.
"Now what will you have? Dürer, Whistlers, Little Masters, Meryons, Dutch seventeenth century, Callot, Hollar? What you will. . . . No, you shall have only a few, and those not the most celebrated but perhaps the best loved. Now, here's for your pleasure. . . ."
He came to the table bearing carefully, reverentially, his treasures. He set them down. From one after another he withdrew the paper, there gleaming between the stiff white shining mats they breathed, they lived, they smiled. There was the Rembrandt "Landscape with a flock of sheep," there the Muirhead Bone "Orvieto," the Hollar "Seasons," Callot's "Passion," Meryon's "College Henri Quatre," Paul Potter's "Two Horses," a seascape of Zeeman, Cotman's "Windmill," Bracquemond's "Teal Alighting," a seascape of Moreau, and Aldegrever's "Labour of Hercules" to close the list. Not more than thirty in all, but living there on the table with their personal glow spontaneity. He bent over them caressing them, fondling them, smiling at them. Harkness drew near and, looking at the tender wistfulness of the two old Potter's horses, bravely living out there the last days of their broken forgotten lives, he felt a sudden friendliness to all the world, a reassurance, a comfort.
Those glittering jewelled things had had at their heart a warning, an alarm; but no one, he was suddenly aware, who cared for these prints could be bad. There are no things in the world so kindly, so simple, so warm in their humanity. . . .
The little man was near to him. He put his hand on his knee.
"They are fine, eh? They know you, recognise you. They are alive, eh?"
"Yes," said Harkness, smiling. "They are the most friendly things in art."
The door opened and one of the Japanese servants came in with liqueurs. They were put on the table close to Harkness, and soon he was drinking the most wonderful brandy that it had ever been his happy fortune to encounter.
He was warm, cosy, quite unalarmed. The prints smiled at him, the dim room received him as a friend.
Crispin was talking, leaning back now from the table, his fat body hugged up like a cushion into his chair.
His red hair stood, flaming, on end. Harkness was, at first, only vaguely conscious that Crispin was speaking, then the words began to gather about him, to force their way in upon his brain; then, as the monologue continued, his comfort, his cosiness, his sense of security slowly slipped from him. His eyes passed from the "Two Horses" to the high sharp cliffs of the "Orvieto," to the thick naked Hercules of the Aldegrever. Then, he was aware that he was frightened, as he had been on the road, in the hotel, in the car. Then, with a flash of awareness, like the sharp contact with unexpected steel, he was on his guard as though he were standing alone with his back to the wall against an army of terrors.
". . . And so as I like you so much, dear Mr. Harkness, I feel that I can talk to you freely about these things and that you will understand. That has always been my trouble—that I have not been understood sufficiently, and if now I go my own way and have my own fashion of dealing with life I am sure that it is comprehensible enough.
"I was a very lonely child, Mr. Harkness, and mocked at by every one who saw me. No, I have not been understood sufficiently. The colour of my hair has been a barrier. I realise that I am, and always have been, absurd in appearance, and from the very earliest age I was aware that I was different from other human beings and must pursue another course from theirs. I make no complaint about that, but it justifies, I think, my later conduct."
Here, as though some wire had sprung taut inside him he sat forward upright in his chair, staring with his little pale eyes at Harkness, and it was now that Harkness was abruptly aware of his conversation.
"I am not boring you, I trust, but I have taken a sympathetic liking to you, and it may interest you to understand my somewhat unusual philosophy of life.
"My mother died when I was very young. My father was a surgeon, a very wealthy man, money inherited from an uncle. He was a strange man, peculiar, odd. Cruel to me. Very cruel to me. He hated the sight of me, and told me once that it was a continual temptation to him to lay hands on me and cut my heart out—to see, in fact, whether I had a heart. He liked to torment and tease me, as indeed did every one else. I am not telling you these things, Mr. Harkness, to rouse your pity, but rather that you should understand exactly the point at which I have arrived."
"Yes," said Harkness, dragging his eyes with strange difficulty from the pursed white face, the red hair, and glancing about the dim faded room and the farther spaces where the jewels flashed in the candle-light.
"Many people would have called my father insane, did not hesitate to do so. He was a large, extremely powerful man, given to violent tempers. But, after all, what is insanity? There are cases—many I suppose—where the brain breaks down and is unable to perform any longer its ordinary functions, but in most cases insanity is only the name given by envious persons to those who have strength of character enough to realise their own ideas regardless of public opinion. Such was my father. He cared nothing for public opinion. We led a strange life, he and I, in a big black house in Bloomsbury. Yes, black, that's how it was. I went to Westminster School, and they all mocked me, my hair, my body, my difference. Yes, my difference. I was different from them all, different from my father, different from all the world. And I was glad that I was different. I hugged my difference. Different. . . ."
He lent forward, tapped Harkness's knee with his hand, staring into his face.
"Different, Mr. Harkness, different. Different. . . ."
And the long draughty room echoed "Different . . . different . . . different."
"My father beat me one night terribly, beat me so that I could not move for pain. For no reason, simply because, he said, he wished that I should understand life, and first to understand life one must learn to suffer pain, and that then, if one could suffer pain enough, one could be as God—perhaps greater than God.
"It was to that night in the Bloomsbury house that I owe everything. I was fifteen years of age. He stripped me naked and made me bleed. It was terribly cold, and I came in that bare room right into the very heart of life, into the heart of the heart, where the true meaning is at last revealed—and the true meaning——"
He broke off suddenly, then whispered:
"Do you believe in God, Mr. Harkness?" and the draught went whispering on hands and feet round the room, "Do you believe in God, Mr. Harkness?"
"Yes," said Harkness.
"Yes," said Crispin, in his lovely melodious voice; "but in a good God, a sweet God, a kind beneficent God. That is no God. God is first cruel, terrible, lashing, punishing. Then when He has punished enough, and the victim is in His power, bleeding at His feet, owning Him as Lord and Master, then He bends down and lifts the wounded brow and kisses the torn mouth, and in His heart there is a great and mighty triumph. . . . Even so will I do, even so will I be . . . and greater than God Himself!"
There was silence in the room. Then he curled up in his chair as he had done before, and went on with his friendly air:
"Dear Mr. Harkness, it is good indeed of you to listen to me so patiently. Tell me at once when I bore you. My father died when I was seventeen and left me all his wealth. He died in a Turkish bath very suddenly—ill-temper with some casual masseur, I fancy.
"I realised that I had a power. The realisation was very satisfactory to me. I married and during the three years of my married life I collected most of the things that I have shown you this evening. I married a woman whom I was unfortunately unable to make happy. She could have been happy, I am sure, could she have only understood, a little, the philosophy that my father had taught me. My father was a very remarkable man, Mr. Harkness, as perhaps you have perceived, and he had, as I have told you, shown me the real meaning of this strange life in which we are forced, against our wills, to take part. It was foolish of my wife not to benefit by this knowledge. But she did not, and died sooner than I had anticipated, leaving me one child.
"A widower's life is not a happy one, and you will have undoubtedly perceived how many widowers marry again."
He paused as though he expected some comment, so Harkness said yes, that he had perceived it. Crispin sat forward looking at him inquisitively, and making, with his fingers, a kind of pattern in the air as though he were tracing there a bar of music.
"Yes. I did not marry again, but rather gave myself up to the continuation of my father's philosophy. The philosophy of pain as related to power one might perhaps term it. God—of whose existence no thinking man can truly permit himself to doubt—have you ever thought, Mr. Harkness, that the whole of His power is derived from the pain that He inflicts upon those less powerful than Himself? We conceive of Him as a beneficent Being, and from that it follows that He must have determined that pain is, from Him, our greatest beneficence. It is plainly for our good that He torments us. Should not then we, in our turn, realising that pain is our greatest happiness, seek, ourselves, for more pain, and also teach our fellow human beings that it is only through pain that we can reach the true heart and meaning of life? Through Pain we reach Power.
"I test you with pain, and as you overcome the pain so do you climb up beside me, who have also overcome it, and we are in time as gods knowing good and evil. . . . A concrete case, Mr. Harkness. I slash your face with a knife. You are so powerful that you take the pain, twist it in your hand and throw it away. You rise up to me, and suddenly I, who have inflicted the pain on you, love you because you have taken my power over you and used it for your soul's advantage."
"And do I love you because you have slashed my face?" asked Harkness.
Crispin's eyes narrowed. He put out his hand and laid it on Harkness's knee.
"We would have to see," Crispin murmured. "We would have to see. I wonder—I wonder...."
They were silent. Harkness's body was cold, but the room was very hot. The candles seemed to throw out a metallic radiant heat. Harkness moved his knee.
"It would not do to prove your theory too frequently," he said at last.
"No, no, of course it would not. It is, you understand, only a theory that I have inherited from my father. Yes. But I will confess that when an individuality comes close to me and remains entirely outside my influence I am tempted to wonder. . . . Well, to speculate. . . . I like to see how far one personality will surrender to another. It is interesting—simply as a speculation. For instance, you have noticed my daughter-in-law?"
"Yes," said Harkness, "I have. A charming girl."
"Charming. Exactly. But independent, refusing to make the most of the advantages that are open to her. Like my poor late wife, for instance. Unfortunate, because she is young and might benefit so much from my older and more experienced brain.
"But she refuses to come under my influence, remains severely outside it. Now, my son is almost too willing to understand my meaning. Were I to plunge a knife into his arm no blood would flow. I am speaking metaphorically of course. After a very slight training in his early youth he was all that I could wish. But too submissive—oh yes, altogether too submissive.
"His wife's independence, however, is quite of another kind. It might almost seem as though during these last weeks she had taken a dislike both to myself and my son. However, she is very young and a little time will alter that, I have no doubt. Especially as we shall be in foreign countries and to some extent alone by ourselves."
Harkness pressed his hands tightly together. A little shiver ran, as though it responded to the draught that blew through the room, up and down his body. He was anxious that Crispin should not notice that he was shivering.
"Have you any idea where you will go?" he asked—and his voice sounded strangely unlike his own, as though some third person were in the room and speaking just behind him.
"We have no idea," said Crispin, smiling. "That will depend on many things. On Mrs. Crispin herself of course amongst others. A young wife must not show too complete an independence. After all, there are others whose feelings must be considered——" He was smiling as it were to himself and as though his thoughts were pleasant ones.
Suddenly he sprang up and began to walk the room. The effect on Harkness was strange—it was as though he were suddenly shut in there with an animal. So often in zoological gardens he had seen that haunting monotonous movement, that encounter with the bars of the cage and the indifferent acceptance of their inevitability, indifferent only because of endless repetition. Crispin, padding now up and down the long room, reminded Harkness of one of the smaller animals, the little jaguars, the half-wolf, half-fox; his head forward, his hands crossed behind his short thick back, his eyes, restless now, moving here, there about the room, his movements soft, almost furtive, every instinct towards escape. As he moved in the room half-clouded with light, the soft resolute step pervaded Harkness's sense, and soon the thick confined scent of a caged animal seemed to creep up to his nostrils and linger there.
Furry—captive—danger hanging behind the plodding step, so that if a sudden release were to come. . . . And he sat there fixed in his seat as though nailed to it while the sweet voice continued: "And so, my dear Mr. Harkness, I have devoted my later years to the solution of this problem.
"I feel, if I may say so, without too much arrogance, that I am intending to help poor human nature along the road to a better understanding of life. Poor, muddled human nature. Defeated always by Fear. Yes, Fear. And if they have surmounted Pain and stand with their foot on its body, what remains? It is gone, vanished. I myself am increasing my power every day. First one, then another. First through Pain. Then through Love. I love all the world, yes, everything in it, but first it must be taught, and it is so reluctant—so strangely reluctant—to receive its teaching. And I myself suffer because I am too tender-hearted. I should myself be superior to the suffering of others because I know how good it is for them to suffer. But I am not. Alas, no. It is only where my indignation is aroused, and aroused justly, that I can conquer my tenderness, and then—well then . . . I can make my important experiments. My daughter-in-law, for instance. . . ."
He paused, not far from Harkness, and once again his hands made a curious motion in the air as though he were transcribing a bar of music. He stepped close to Harkness. His breath, scented curiously with a faint odour of orange, was in Harkness's face. He leaned forward, his hands were on Harkness's shoulders.
"For instance, I have taken a fancy to you, my friend. A real fancy. I liked you from the first moment that I saw you. I don't know when, so suddenly, I have taken a fancy to any one. But to care for you deeply, first—yes, first—I would show you the meaning of pain. . . ." Here his body suddenly quivered from the feet to the head. ". . . And I could not, liking you so much, do that unless you were seriously to annoy me, interfere in any way with my simple plans"—the hands pressed deeply into the shoulders—"yes, only then could we come really to know one another . . . after such a crisis what friends we might be, sharing our power together! What friends! Dear me! Dear me!"
He moved away, turning to the table, looking down on the prints that were spread out there.
"Yes, yes, I could show you then my power." His voice vibrated with sudden excitement. "You think me absurd. Yes, yes, you do. You do. Don't deny it now. As though I couldn't perceive it. Do you think me so stupid? Absurd, with my ridiculous hair, my ugly body. Oh! I know! You can't hide it from me. You laugh like the rest. Secretly, you laugh. You are smiling behind your hand. Well, smile then, but how foolish of you to be so taken in by physical appearances. Do you know my power? Do you know what I could do to you now by merely clapping my hands?
"If my fingers were at your throat, at your breast, and you could not move but must wait my wish, my plan for you, would you think me then so absurd, my figure, my hair, ridiculous? You would be as though in the hands of a god. I should be as a god to you to do with you what I wished. . . .
"What is there that is so beautiful that I, ugly as I am, cannot do as I wish with it? This——" Suddenly he took up the "Orvieto" and held it forward under the candle-light. "This is one of the most beautiful things of its kind that man has ever made, and I—am I not one of the ugliest human beings at whom men laugh?—well, would you see my power over it? I have it in my hands. It is mine. It is mine. I can destroy it in one instant——"
The beautiful thing shook in his hand. To Harkness it seemed suddenly to be endued with a human vitality. He saw it—the high sharp razor-edged rocks, the town so confidingly resting on that strength, all the daily life at the foot, the oxen, the peasants, the lovely flame-like trees, the shining reaches of valley beyond, all radiating the heat of that Italian summer.
He sprang to his feet. "Don't touch it!" he cried. "Leave it! Leave it!"
Crispin tore it into a thousand pieces, wrenching it, snapping at it with his fingers like an animal. The pieces flaked the air. A white shower circled in the candle-light then scattered about the table, about the floor.
Something died.
A clock somewhere struck half-past twelve.
Crispin moved from the table. Very gently, almost beseechingly, he looked into Harkness's face.
"Forgive me my little game," he said. "It is all part of my theory. To be above these things, you know. What would happen to me if I surrendered to all that beauty?"
The eyes that looked into Harkness's face were pathetic, caged, wistful, longing. And they were mad. Somewhere deep within him his soul, caught in the wreckage of his bodily life like a human being pinned beneath a ruined train, besought—yes, besought Harkness for deliverance.
But he had no thought at that moment of anything but his own escape. To flee from that room—from that room at any cost! He said something. Crispin did not try to keep him. They moved together into the hall.
"And you won't allow my chauffeur to drive you back?"
"No, no thank you, I shall love the walk."
"Well, well. It has been delightful. We shall meet some day again I have no doubt. . . ."
Silence flooded the house. Once more Harkness's hand touched that other soft one. The door was open. The lovely night air brushed his face, and he had stepped into the dim star-drenched garden. The door closed.