CHAPTER XII
"Do you know what I think, Cyprian?" asked John, lost in admiration for the ingenuity which had lined the channel leading from his sand-castle with practically watertight slates and stones, "I think you've got a Brain."
"So that's what your mother tells Miss Trefusis of you," deduced Cyprian. "By the way, I have an uneasy suspicion that she intended you to address me as 'Uncle.'"
"What for?"
"As a mark of well-deserved respect, I fancy, and in token of my thinning locks."
"You don't look like 'uncle.'"
"Oh, I don't know. Considering I had reached a man's estate when your mother was not much higher than you——"
"Did Mother call you 'Uncle' then?"
"Just you ask her if not why not," advised Cyprian.
John mused awhile.
"Anyhow, I won't," he decided.
"Won't ask her?"
"Will call you by your real name."
"That's what she said," Cyprian admitted. "But, as man to man, John, I must warn you that she will probably have the last word in the matter, even if it is an inconsistent one. I have known her longer than you have."
"But I have known her most," returned John in some agitation. "She was my mother first."
Cyprian took warning.
"God bless you, yes. She would be the first to admit it. Go your rebel way, then, and get the better of the woman. I shan't interfere. I have my own troubles."
The conversation took place on a sunny portion of the Brittany coast where Ferlie had, for some weeks, been trustfully waiting for John and Cyprian to decide that they liked one another. Neither of them possessing gaily expansive natures the discovery took time.
A neutrality pact had been sealed earlier on this particular afternoon when Cyprian, armed with an offering of peppermint rock, having fallen unawares into the well of sea-water outside John's castle, had aroused in himself a throng of dimly ecstatic recollections and intimations of the Immortality of Childhood, as the poet simply puts it, and so flung himself whole-heartedly into the business of constructing an aqueduct, a smouldering ambition of his childhood, ever frustrated by the inopportune interference of the old and wise....
"You," said John presently, touched by his conscientious absorption, "may have the 'nother stick of peppermint rock when you've done."
"If it's to save your life I will accept it but I feel it only honest to confess that I am not allowed to eat sweets between meals."
"Neither am I when Mother comes out with us.... I want Mother."
"So do I want her. But I am man enough to put the aqueduct before the yearnings of my softer nature."
"Well, but you don't want to be sick."
Cyprian dropped the spade to look at him.
"What on earth are we going to do about it?" he asked at length. John showed him.
"And now," said Cyprian bitterly, "as, prompted by a kind and noble heart, I bought you the beastly stuff, I suppose she'll blame me!"
"I won't tell," John assured him faintly. And didn't.
* * * * * *
Almost immediately after this incident sealing his position in John's world, Cyprian received news of his Company's affiliation to a branch of mines in another district, and of his own transfer to a station more or less populated.
It meant a fresher beginning for himself and Ferlie in Burma than if he had remained under the eye of old acquaintances. He would be now, practically, in a managing position with much sedentary office-work in head-quarters and only a limited amount of inspecting.
But Ferlie and he would find it difficult to isolate themselves from their neighbours, even if Cyprian's reputation as a recluse preceded him and Ferlie's advertised one as a widow.
Fortunate for her now that the Burma Season had never materialized before her father's enforced retirement; for, though Burma is not the size of a London suburb, news there travels in more persistent circles.
As things were, the few remaining officials who had known her father well enough to remember he had a daughter would hardly connect the knowledge with the advent of "Mrs. Clifford" to keep house for a brother, up-country, who was not a Member of the Services. Cyprian felt that the change might result in a more normal and wholesome life for Ferlie, at her age, than he could originally have offered her, and she owned to rejoicing in the prospect of medical aid should John get ill.
The first time she saw their bungalow of dark crimson wood, with its shingled roof and white painted verandah, the porch trembled beneath the red tubes of blossoming kuskwalis, the subtle velvet scent of which mingled with the thick creamy sweetness pouring from the waxen stars of two leafless frangipani trees in the garden.
"Cyprian, how beautiful!" as the loose crowns showered over her with every gust of breeze. "I wonder why there is something sorrowful in the message their scent holds for me."
But he remembered that the lilies sentinelling the church for Ferlie's wedding had been numerous enough to saturate the air with a similar sickly-sweet fragrance.
Since they were seeking forgetfulness in these surroundings he said nothing.
The radiance of their life together during the next few months was an amazement to his unintrospective soul.
He had sometimes wondered on what foundation rested Ferlie's invincible faith that, in this purely spiritual companionship, they would not be tempted beyond their strength to trample the Code.
He did not know that, since John's birth and her husband's development in a direction which made normal married life with him impossible, Ferlie, with her passion for complete understanding unclouded by merciful ignorance, had delved into strange formidably-backed volumes in her efforts to tear out by the roots the tragedy which had shattered her innocence. She had shrunk at first towards asceticism as an answer to the racking question "What shall we do to be saved?"—from Self; a mankind weak and bewildered but sub-conscious, nevertheless, of an attainable state of grace synonymous with Immortality.
But, with Cyprian dwelling still in her heart, and refusing to be ejected even during this complete reaction, she had been forced to seek a more modified code than that of the professed nun.
Quite by chance, she discovered it in Chrysostom's outcry against the anti-pagan, but, as he considered it, also the anti-Christian, custom, which had become known among some of his contemporary ascetics; who lived at the side of virgins in uplifting and intimate companionship, the chastity of which was never called in question. More than one Father of the Church, cast in sterner mould, had felt it his duty to reprove and deplore this method of cheating the devil. Among them, and the fact had caused Ferlie some amusement, leavened with a queer aching, there was Cyprian's own namesake insistent on the "weakness" of her sex and the "wanton" tendencies of youth.
But it was significant that even Chrysostom acknowledged that in such seemingly unnatural friendships there was room for a love deeper and more lasting than any found in the fulfilment of legitimate bodily passion.
Upon such an admission Ferlie had built her temple to Love, and in the lonely turret at Black Towers learnt something of the power of concentrated thought.
Of her studies Cyprian remained unaware.
Sex-psychology had never obsessed him as it has so many modern minds. He knew that Tolstoy, for whom he retained a very real admiration, had developed into a married ascetic, but had been inclined to smile at the humour presented in the situation of a man, married and with his own quiver quite literally full, advocating a higher life, rooted in celibacy, to his fellows.
The apple eaten, where the merit of flinging away the core and informing the world that the fruit was sour?
But for that abnormally sensitive streak in him, which forced him to respond to the suggestion of an idealistic love as naturally as the sunflower to the sun, Cyprian might have degenerated into the egotistical scholar, thick-visioned as to the needs of Humanity, and justly derided by ribald undergraduates as "the product of a long line of maiden aunts."
This, supposing Muriel Vane had not wounded him in time and sent him fleeing into the desert to hide his hurt.
The same streak, unsatisfied and hungry, had enabled him to close his eyes, temporarily, to the tenets of the rigid creed natural to this type, when Hla Byu smiled up at him in the pitiless sunlight; the same streak, legacy perhaps of some long-dead Tristrannic ancestor—hardening at the sight of Ferlie's suffering, had inspired the courage preparing him to set at defiance every other normally narrow instinct of his senses which shrank from the abnormal, and had led him to accept a position at her side, for which, once, more bitterly than the severe Cyprian of bygone centuries, he would have condemned a fellow-man.
The fact remained that he and Ferlie, and Ferlie's son by the rival he had every reason to consider better dead, had entered into a kingdom so glad with light and deep with peace; its ways so rich with psychological exploration; its gates so strengthened with spiritual discipline, that they became nearly oblivious to the world of non-mystics, who would neither have understood these strangers in their midst, nor have desired to understand.
And the eye of the materialist is critical and his tongue, unsheathed, a two-edged sword.
* * * * * *
The first intimation either of them had that other mortal inhabitants of the earth were interested in them, as fellow-pilgrims to the goal of pensioned and idle security, occurred after a period of nearly six months, when Sterne's good-looking little widowed sister might reasonably be expected to have started advertising her weeds in the exchange and barter column of the Pioneer.
"Weeds? My dear fellow, she's never worn 'em. Flits about 'clothed in white'—what-do-you-call-it 'mystic, wonderful,' and flaunts a promising scarlet head."
"Scarlet, did you say? You're colour-blind. I've only seen her from the road, myself, but she'd rank as a 'Beaut' with that hair if she had a face like a mince-pie."
"Fancy old Diogenes possessing a sister like that! I was with him at G. and he never mentioned her."
"Must be a 'half.' She's twenty years younger at least. What's the name?"
"She's a Mrs. Clifford."
This conversation took place in a long low building, flanked by a hard tennis court and dignified by the title, "Club." The speakers were congregated at a kind of counter commonly known as the "Bar." Cyprian did not frequent it and Ferlie was still postponing her public appearance.
The wives had found her difficult of access during the customary calling hours, and mildly resented a reticence which might almost be described as unfriendly.
John mingled with the other children in the so-called "Gardens" of the Station, at first entirely as an onlooker, in charge of the impassive Burmese servant, but, later, in the capacity of a leader, of few words and indomitable energy.
John, at Black Towers, during those short years of his life when his mother, like Cyprian, was hiding from an Argus-eyed Society, had existed as a dreamer of dreams and an inventor of games peopled by imaginary companions. It was not long before the notion struck him to cast the youth of the Station for the various roles hitherto filled by bolsters, chain-armour and stuffed animals.
Ferlie noted with satisfaction that he fitted his own niche in Cyprian's heart, and, while remonstrating, she was secretly entertained when Cyprian discoursed with him in the terms of an equal.
"He simply inspires me with multi-syllabic expressions," pleaded Cyprian, "I think it is his insuperable gravity."
At that she sighed a little.
"One would imagine he had already learnt that, though we may make a game of Life, Life is often more successful in making game of us."
To which he answered, "Nonsense," adding, most inexcusably, the over-worked saw, "I am the Master of my Fate; I am the Captain of my Soul."
"I am delighted to hear you say so," Ferlie told him, "I can remember a time when your soul captained you pretty thoroughly, though, pagan that you are, you could hardly own to such domination."
She sometimes reflected upon that self-sufficiency which induced him to dismiss the Churches as unreliable excrescences upon a useful ethical foundation.
Cyprian was, undoubtedly, one of the characters which cling passionately to the Christian Commandments and let the Christ pass by.
"The woman Thou gavest me," accused Adam, meanly ungrateful, and, "The Brain Thou gavest me," blamed Cyprian and all his calibre.
Man's mentality, thought Ferlie, had not altered much since Eden, though he did not, now, make the Woman the sole excuse for his shortcomings, being obliged to admit that she was more often an inspiration than an obstruction to Faith. But there were other gifts for whose shoddiness and lack of wearing-power he could still taunt their Giver, and among them ranked that Brain which was incapable of surrendering to belief in One who could so love the world.
Ferlie, her own conscience still at rest with that Great Lover, simply because of her trust in a love which, knowing all, forgives, had never attempted to probe the blank agnosticism to which Cyprian speechlessly held. She was sensible of the admiration due to an intellect which, in the face of such pessimism, could stand for Right merely for Right's sake. He had no guide but an instinctive sense of duty and when that failed him he looked to her love. Only hers in all the world, remembered Ferlie, exultantly hugging the realization of his aloofness to her heart.
And then.
* * * * * *
"Mother," said John, "there are a nice little nigger-boy in the verandah, and a grown-up nigger-girl, too. And she's crying," he added as an afterthought.
Ferlie, suspicious of the diseases John might contract from mendicants on the steps of the picturesque but unclean pagodas had, nevertheless, acquired a well-merited reputation for filling the hungry with good things. To John, who knew by heart the exciting nursery epic dealing with a dusky youthful band, whose ranks dwindled in the course of their unforeseen adventures, from ten to one ("So he got married and then there were none!") all members of the Eastern races were descendants of that fortunate survivor.
"You didn't touch the little boy, John darling," asked Ferlie with misgiving.
She recalled the burnt-out lepers which crouched at the gilded god's feet, unmolested in sun-soaked apathy.
"They're very clean niggers," evaded John, "And they don't want you; it's Cyprian."
Now Cyprian did not suffer gladly these invasions of his premises by the lame, the halt and the blind.
He had more than once given Ferlie to understand that, in his opinion, charity to the guileless Burman should begin anywhere but at home. Therefore, it struck her that the couple announced by John would, in all likelihood, be connected with the labourers in the mines. Perhaps a dismissed washer whose wife and child had come to effect his reconciliation with Authority.
She found Hla Byu shrinking in the shadow of the riotous creepers, and smiled upon her.
Then turned particular attention to John's "nice little nigger." The first glimpse showed her that he was remarkably fair even for a young high-class Burman child, but after a closer inspection a bewildered and then an inscrutable expression came over her face. She looked from the child back to the tear-stained and apologetic mother.
Ferlie did not yet know much Burmese.
"Who are you?" she inquired haltingly.
The woman replied in clipped English.
"I come to see the Thakin."
The child screwed up his eyes in a way wholly familiar. They were exceeding blue: Cyprian's eyes in a small cream-coloured face.
John, regarding him with unbated interest, reiterated,
"Aren't he a nice little nigger?"
It seemed a very long while to Ferlie before Cyprian came home.
* * * * * *
As luck would have it, he had undertaken to meet a business acquaintance at the Club, demi-officially, to discuss the contract for some new machinery. They concluded the conversation in the now nearly empty bar-room, since it had been prolonged late and club-members were drifting home.
One man lingered; a breezy loud-voiced individual from Cyprian's former district, to whom Life was one long smoking-room yarn. Forrester had shown himself rather perturbed when the news leaked out that Sterne, on departing for his Leave, had provided for his Burmese "keep." Creating these Quixotic precedents! All very well for a blooming bachelor of his amiably inexpensive habits, but how in hell was a man with a missus and kids in England to pension off every little bit of yellow fluff that drifted his way?
Therefore, he was delighted, on this particular evening to run across Sterne in the one place where he could refer to the matters pertaining to men in general.
"Hullo, Sterne!" he roared joyously. "Have one with me. You'll need it. Saw your latest lune-de-mielle toiling up the long, long trail just now in search of your bungalow. She wasn't alone, neither. It's a good-looking kid, I must say. But isn't Mrs. Clifford going to sit up and take notice? You shouldn't have such characteristic eyes, man."
"Did you say you'd have a drink?" asked Cyprian jerkily.
"No, no, it's my shout. And it's no use your trying to change the conversation. Homer has nodded and we all know about it. Where you slipped up was in letting your past know your present address."
Cyprian saw the thing through, his brain working busily. He had been a fool not to gauge the possibility of Hla Byu's reappearance, considering the terms on which they had parted. And he could not excuse himself for having omitted to tell Ferlie. He supposed that his reluctance to do so sprang from the fact that, since their long acquaintance dated from her childhood, it was difficult for him to accept her even now as altogether a woman and, moreover, a woman who had touched pitch without being defiled.
He climbed the hill in the dusk, his face troubled, trying to decide how far Hla Byu would have succeeded in making herself understood. Unfortunately, his own memory convinced him that little Thu Daw's eyes would not take very much understanding of either Ferlie's instinct or her intelligence.
He had not the remotest idea what he was going to say to satisfy her of the strange truth that his very heart-hunger for her was responsible for Thu Daw.
Once more the word leapt out as if written in letters of flame across the blackening hill-side. No explanation could make him anything but "responsible" for his son, as surely as Ferlie was for hers.
He swung back the garden-gate and clashed it behind him, thereupon hastening his footsteps, urged by a nauseating desire to get this scene with Ferlie over.
And saw her in the grey gloom, coming to meet him between the two long borders of flaming lilies with his child in her arms.
When she reached him it was to lift a face glorified with the forgiveness he had not asked.
"My very dear," she said, "Why did you not tell me?"
Even thus far could Ferlie trust her earthly god.