CHAPTER VIII
Cyprian did not return to the flat. He went out into the restless London streets. Block after block he passed, from the more fashionable quarters to the outskirts of the park, walking swiftly to escape pursuing Memory, until at last the damp darkness of the river divided the myriad scintillating eyes of the city.
Further along the Embankment dead forms lay huddled where the shadows lay deepest, every now and again to start erect, galvanized into life by the angry flash of a police-lantern.
As he paused to strike a match against a stone bench, shaped like an incompleted coffin, one of these corpses twitched itself upright.
"Fit ter drop!" it muttered, still in the throes of uneasy slumber; "Gawd! fer one bloody night to fergit meself in."
Cyprian replaced his pipe in his pocket and fumbled.
"Here," he said, "I don't know who you are, and you don't know who I am, but if you, too, are in need of sleep and a little forgetting, go and buy it with this, which will not buy it for me."
With the astonished gratitude of a "Gawd bless yer bleedin' eyes, Gov'ner" (even here it was God, God, God, thought Cyprian, who refused to be shut out of Man's tortured intellect even while it anathematized His works) this invisible wreck of Humanity, made in His image, slouched away to drink itself blind to sorrow for a short time in some starless rat-hole known only to its kind.
And Cyprian sat and smoked on the deserted seat, still redolent with the effluvia of rotting rags, until a suspicious arc of light searched him out in his sins and a voice, hoarse with hectorings, commanded him to move on.
Morning found him so far from home that a sleepy taxi-driver whom he hailed rolled a jaundiced eye on receiving the directions of this individual whose damp, crumpled clothes and unclean collar showed unmistakable evidence of an unusual brand of night-on-the-tiles, and Cyprian was obliged to disburse half the fare in advance.
His physical exhaustion stood him now in good stead and he slept deeply on the shabby leather cushions the whole way back to the flat. Slept again on his undisturbed bed, afterwards, till the scandalized valet roused him for tea; his first meal in twenty-four hours.
Before he set sail for the East, he made one attempt, and only one, to renew correspondence with Ferlie.
The letter conveyed nothing to her of the true state of his mind. In despair he had closed it on a pathetic admission, "I fear I have no gift of expression." She answered him, but her own methods of expression were, as usual, fantastic. In the letter she enclosed a small gold key. "A gift for a gift, Cyprian. I suppose it was inevitable that you should shut the gates upon me. I send the sign that only you can unlock them."
He placed the key upon his watch-chain, and, with Herculean efforts of self-control, refrained from any attempts to discover her meaning.
She had always been such a rebel; she had always been so sure of the light within her and, alas, she had always been so sure of the light within him.
A few weeks later, when, the honeymoon accomplished, Ferlie and her husband had returned to town, Mr. Carmichael died.
The operation proved successful enough but, somehow, he never really rallied. Perhaps the predominant feeling that his day's work was now ended lessened the incentive to live.
He smiled with grim satisfaction the afternoon Peter came to see him; a Peter who had already begun to regard the Human Form Divine in the same light as the Butcher regards the liver and kidneys which he slaps down upon the marble slab to dissect for purchasing housewives; a Peter who would be decidedly happier using the knife than saving the unwary limb that might stray his way.
Peter's hair was untidy, his eyes bloodshot, his collar unhygienic, and his finger-nails in half-mourning. His appearance was altogether unsterilized and self-assured. He cried, with a loud voice. His opinions on certain experimental operations, his criticisms on those neighbouring embryo surgeons at work on the same yellow preserved leg as himself, his versions, punctuated with spasms of hearty merriment, of the latest hospital yarn, portraying his fellow-students as a set of inquisitive young ghouls more triumphant over an eminent physician's sponge forgotten in a victim's intestines than troubled with sympathy for the latter's bereaved relatives.
"And I'll tell you exactly what they did to you, Father; it's old Gumboil's favourite amusement. First he cuts open the..."
"Peter, I am surprised at you!" broke in his horrified mother.
Thus had the path of Peter been made smooth and his way plain by Ferlie's brilliant marriage.
"I staked little enough on her," said Mr. Carmichael, relishing the jest of Martha and Mary's antiquated establishment. "Your mother was mistrustful of education for her own sex; she did quite well for herself without it, didn't she? Ferlie seems to have justified the conviction that the old-fashioned girl gets the matrimonial plums. At any rate, you will owe your sister a good deal. See that she stays happy."
Of his son-in-law, whom he only saw once, he said very little.
"Impossible to judge them by the young men of my day. This type did well enough in the War crisis."
He did not leave his wife badly off. With Peter on the way to being floated, and Ferlie secure, she had her widow's pension to herself, besides a little private means and the sum the big town-house eventually fetched when Ferlie bought it, pandering to a dream of her mother's that Peter might one day practise there and retain the Carmichael traditions in the old setting. Till that satisfactory day it could nearly always be sub-let.
Somewhat doubtful of the Christian aspect of her husband's expressed desire for cremation Mrs. Carmichael, while respecting his wishes, determined that the rest of the funeral obsequies should be sufficiently orthodox to disarm his Creator.
"No proper tombstone, you see," she complained damply to Ferlie. "The design should, so obviously, have been a severe cross, quite plain, with perhaps a weeping angel praying. Then a dove of peace hovering, and maybe a few lilies. The simpler the better, you know. And a scroll at the foot, or an open book with one of those grand old texts—Isaiah, is it, or Ecclesiasticus?—anyway, one of the Prophets—'Fear not for I have redeemed thee.' So comforting. Or else the one about panting for living waters that always makes me feel thirsty myself. Your dear father was so fond of rhetoric."
Ferlie, not quite sure whether the weeping angel was destined to wear a delicate semblance to the bereaved wife, nor convinced that the cross could be considered suitably symbolic of the faith of one who had ever regarded it as the undeserved gibbet, brought upon him by himself, of a well-meaning Eastern agitator nearly two thousand years ago, was inclined to demur.
"Father never evinced either the slightest fear of his condemnation hereafter, nor any faith in an ultimate redemption," she protested, "and I think it would have been rather hypocritical to parade a thirst for living waters after death in anyone who can hardly be described as having gasped for them during life."
Then, responding to her mother's grievously shocked demeanour, she relented into explanation.
"I think I never admired Father so much in his life as I did at his death. He closed his eyes, restfully and unfearingly, upon the consciousness of work well done and principles truly upheld. What business is it of ours if they were mistaken principles? So many people, who profess to cling to the creeds supported by the Churches, live as if they had none, and then drift out on a tide of terrified remorse and shame. But, personally, I would not feel fit to intercede for Father's 'forgiveness,' if he really requires to be forgiven for being true to his lights."
Ferlie's mother was too religious to see it, and, since it seems to follow that the brighter the hope of Eternal Life, the blacker the garb in which it must be approached, there was much melodious moaning at the bar when her husband's ashes were interred upon the shores of that Eternal Sea which brought us hither and upon which, in imagination, she had safely launched his sceptical soul.
A week later she was still sewing bands of crepe on to Peter's various coats and seeking consolation in those little details of mournful respect she was able to accord her Dead.
* * * * * *
In due course, Aunt Brillianna, returning from the uttermost ends of Italy, was overwhelmed by the volume of water which had poured under the Family Bridge during her inexcusable retirement.
As the younger relatives, who had expectations at her hands, remarked: "Anything might have happened to her at her time of life." Why, Death had happened to her nephew!
To Ferlie at the Black Towers she went: that historical country residence of long-ago Greville-Mainwarings.
The place bored Clifford, Ferlie informed her, and just now he was obliged to be in town.
Clifford let her do what she liked at Black Towers, so long as she did not offend old Jardine, the retainer who acted as head seneschal and cherished insurmountable objections to innovation of any kind.
"It's a grim-looking pile," said Aunt Brillianna, sniffing the odour of musty armour in the subdued hall. "You look as if you had been living among ghosts, child."
"It's quite natural that I should not look very well just now," said Ferlie.
And Aunt B. scolded herself for not having foreseen that it would be so. Family Name to carry on and all the rest of it.
But where was this Clifford? A flattering portrait of him—life-size, in oils—blocked one end of the dining-room. She studied it for a long time; made a few non-committal noises; reserved her opinion until she had scrutinized his Father and Grandfather in the long Gallery above. And when she had made up her mind she still reserved her opinion for the benefit of her own reflection in the bedroom mirror.
"Presentably aristocratic. On the downward grade. Will Ferlie act as a strong enough brake, even with a child in her arms? Lord! What a mouth! A few more years shall roll and then if degeneracy does not set in I'll—anyway, I'll leave Ferlie all my emeralds," resolved the old lady.
She would hardly have been reassured could she have seen the original of the portrait at that instant in Ruth Levine's flat.
"And Peter?" inquired Aunt B.
"Peter, when he is not classifying the internal machinery of some antiquated corpse, is examining Roman Catholicism."
"Whatever for?" asked Aunt B. interested.
"For the fun of listening to Mother arguing against it, I think," said Ferlie, unenthusiastically. "I told Mother that, if her views were really so strong, she had better tell him that she had no objection to his conversion."
Aunt B. chuckled. "You have become very wise in your generation, Ferlie. And did she?"
"She could not resist correcting the term to 'perversion'," said Ferlie, "and it would have been so easy to have kept it at 'vert'."
"Her father, the bishop, must often have shown himself impressively sarcastic upon the query, 'Can there any good come out of the Vatican?'" mused Aunt B. "And your mother always had an indefensible memory for things best forgotten."
"What on earth does it matter to anybody but Peter? His argument is that, as he has no time to go into the matter of a Personal God's existence thoroughly himself and is by no means convinced that the same Deity has ceased to exist at the bidding of admirable rationalists like Father, it is best for him to join a cocksure religion, wherein he knows what he has got to believe and he knows what he has got to do. I think Peter could only be held by a religion that was cocksure. And he is, also, a little mistrustful of his own judgment these days, and certainly all for strengthening the matrimonial chain."
"And your own views, Ferlie?"
"To give according as one receives," said Ferlie wearily.
Far from satisfied was Brillianna Trefusis on her way back to town. She had been told that Cyprian Sterne had shown little or no interest in Ferlie's affairs and her shrewd brain was being interrogative. What had he thought of this marriage who knew the Ferlie-nature so well?
"Perhaps—Another Woman," reasoned Aunt B., "though, somehow, the idea does not fit. I used to consider the situation dangerous because the child got such little understanding at home. But, apart from the difference in ages, those two 'belonged'."
Then she warned herself that her imagination was getting out of hand. Ferlie, at present, would have been more unnatural without moods than with them.
* * * * * *
Who could tell that, on opposite sides of the Equator, Ferlie and Cyprian were both battling against that apathy which descends, like a canopy of darkness, upon ultra-sensitive spirits who have reached their limit of controlled mental suffering, blinding a vision ordinarily (since the high gods are just) unusually clear to distinguish between immortal and merely mortal beauty, and affecting them with that terror, however diffidently one may approach the Example, which wrung a cry of agony from the Leader of all Christs, whose lips were silent in the utmost extremities of bodily pain?
And these, as yet devoid of the Christ-Power assured to every struggling heart that responds to its stirring, whose sun is withdrawn and who possesses no artificial light to relieve the paralysing blackness of the Shadowy Valleys of Self-mistrust, may well lose their way in strange unexplored by-paths before they win through into the open country to find the dawn-star shining still above the distant hills.