CHAPTER XX
The day came, at last, when she was able to approach the subject with Cyprian, lying in a hammock beside her under the trees.
He had, up to now, avoided all reference to his unsatisfactory departure, armed with fishing tackle, into hostile territory.
As she sat making tea, late in the whispering afternoon, preparatory to hailing the padre from his drudging attempts in the Mission school to explain the evil of coveting your neighbour's pig, likewise his pandanus grove and his coco-nuts and anything that is his, including his wife, she looked up to catch Cyprian's whimsical expression.
"Which of us apologizes this time, Ferlie? Me?"
"I'll let you off," she replied shakily, "If you'll make adequate restitution by getting well."
"I am well."
She took his cup of tea to him and placed it within reach of the uninjured arm. His stiffened shoulder still prevented free use of the other.
"The monsoon will be breaking soon," dreamily twisting a floating curl round his finger as she stooped, "Shall we remain on here and beset the even tenor of Jelly's existence with a similar problem to his bigmatical ones?"
"Cyprian. He is a little saint!"
"I know it. You are both saints, and I eye the haloes with envy, but not much hope. I want you, as well as your halo."
"Take!" said Ferlie. But she went back to her chair and sat looking at John chasing Thu Daw across the clearing.
He followed their flight and then said, "We can't stay. 'Unto each his mother beach, bloom and bird and land.'"
"That's true," agreed Ferlie, and rolled Thu Daw's ball back to him from under her chair.
"What will we do about it, Cyprian?"
"What indeed? John's future is clear. Winchester, I suppose, and Oxford, and so to Black Towers, finally. You are right to remind me where the greater responsibility lies. At an English school, would he find himself out of it? Would they take him?"
"If we could circumvent the first question he could live the other down."
"Why should he be forced to live down my—sins?"
"The alternative is Burma, and, there, you and I have much to live down, whatever course we take."
"Ferlie! For God's sake reassure me on one point."
To that stifled passion she instinctively reached out comforting hands.
"You—you are not thinking of separation?"
She said, "I hardly know. It seems to me we cannot go back now on what we have done. As we might tell Peter, 'there must be pioneers!' ... But I do think our pioneering is going to lie along a very rough road and I am afraid—for you."
The sight of Jellybrand on his way from the school checked Cyprian's reply. The padre beamed joyously as Ferlie waved him to the second straw chair.
"W-would you believe it? My choir can now sing the w-whole of 'There's a Friend for little children,' by heart. W-we are going to have it at Benediction to-night. The Bishop is not quite certain w-whether I ought to be allowed Benediction, as an extra service, but I hope to be able to persuade him to my point of view when he visits us. He's not a very Protestant Bishop, and most w-wide minded."
"Does it make any difference to Friend-of-England and Co. which you have?" asked Cyprian.
"Nothing makes any difference to them, but it makes a very great difference to me to be allowed to teach and practise w-what I believe to be necessary."
"If I were the Bishop," said Ferlie, "I shouldn't be able to help feeling that you must know best and that you mattered more than he did. He has so much to encourage him. Does your brain never bother you into believing the work useless and the source of all your inspiration a dream?"
He crossed his knees, displaying a badly cobbled rent in the trailing uniform he loved too proudly to lay aside more often than was absolutely essential. "Even my poor intellect questions sometimes. Doubts come and go, but nothing can take away one's past spiritual experiences."
"I don't know that a single unlooked-for spiritual experience can influence a mind which leans naturally towards agnosticism," put in Cyprian suddenly. "There is a work-a-day agnosticism which satisfies most men, supported by certain ethics, coloured with what for nearly the last two thousand years has been regarded as Christianity.... It is not my fault if I have not a temperament which can rest content on Faith. I did not make my brain."
"That is just the point," said Ferlie. "You are incapable of making a single thing about yourself. But you are able, if you wish, to insist that your brain, and all the attributes of your particular temperament shall serve instead of rule you. Faith is within the reach of all who reach out towards it. The Christ, whose ethics you adopt, explained that whenever He met educated doubting men."
"But sometimes," said Jellybrand, "one fears to presume."
Ferlie saw that he was thinking of that night in the forest when she had defied him to test his own faith for her sake, and she replied,
"Perhaps that should be considered an experience especially given to me."
Unexpectedly, he chuckled.
"W-would you like to spend a happy hour now torturing our prisoner? It might entertain the invalid. I have often w-wondered w-what I should have done if he had not confessed and you had proceeded to carry out your intention of making a second St. Sebastian of him w-with revolver bullets."
"Did she intend doing that?" asked Cyprian. "Ferlie, what a joke!"
"It was no joke, I assure you," contradicted Jellybrand, "She stood there—w-would you believe it?—w-with that horrid little w-weapon pointing in all directions at once, and rank murder in her face."
Then Ferlie said a horrible thing. So horrible for her that the padre dropped his tea-cup and Cyprian raised himself upright to meet her blazing eyes.
"I'd have re-crucified Christ!" said Ferlie.
In the petrified silence which followed Cyprian extended his one arm. She went to him, startled into comprehension of her own words, and hid her face in his sleeve.
"It's all right," muffled tones assured them. "Do you suppose that, because you don't understand, all Heaven doesn't?"
Neither answered, till Cyprian said uncertainly,
"You might make me terribly conceited, Ferlie."
"Or terribly humble," she answered, still in the dark.
Jellybrand mopped up, with his handkerchief, the mess he had made, and poured himself out some more tea. His wrist was unsteady and he slopped the milk afresh over the table.
"I meant to tell you both"—they heard his words stumbling towards them through a clogging mist—"I have thought a good deal about you—and prayed. But, somehow—I suppose because I am not quite sure of my right to advise—light has not come to me yet. The solution slowly dawning may be a mirage. I must leave you to judge of that. It is not for me to follow the w-wise across the desert. My place is in the fields w-with the blind flocks. Still, since you must go back and live practical lives in a practical w-world, there is such a thing as rendering unto Cæsar. In this case—to a custom, if an unlawful custom, as many considered Cæsar's tribute. Yet, the disciples were permitted to pay that, to give their enemies no handle. You could pay it—this tribute to our so-called Civilization—by obtaining your divorce and contracting, according to the law of the land, to live together as it permits you. A marriage in a registry office counts as no marriage to a Catholic; but this you know. Your lives together after it w-would be a matter for yourselves and your own consciences, supposing you can continue to live together under the same conditions you have observed up to now. If you find you cannot, then I, honestly, see no w-way out but the one w-which seems to spell living death to both of you—separation.
"There is another consideration. The Roman Communion and its rules are outside my scope. You know best w-whether it w-will permit a w-wife separated from her husband, in such special circumstances, to remain under the innocent protection of another man, in a state fulfilling the demands of both Civil and the Ecclesiastical Law. In my own very humble opinion—and I speak after much consideration—the thing is permissible. But I live so far beyond the reach of those dogmatic burdens w-with which Man impedes his progress to bear as offerings along the steep road to God. Clever theologians w-would, doubtless, frustrate my arguments, in one sentence. I can only say that I do not think they could alter my feeling in the matter.
"The views of any Church are immaterial to one of you, who has been, hitherto, a law unto himself. They are not immaterial to me; but my heart is ready to let the situation rest between you and the Greatest of all Lovers, who sees further than His disciples in the Church."
The speaker pushed his untasted tea aside with a little clinking jerk of china, and moved swiftly away from the two under the restless palms.
In the distance they watched him climb the steps of the toy ark and, a moment later, the cracked bell clanged.
* * * * * *
Cyprian spoke first, when the cadences of the concertina would have been inciting to hilarity most listeners superior to the Nicobarese and inferior to the angels.
"Did you ever hear of Er, the son of Armenius? No. You never trod the mill of the ordinary Greek classics. Er was a brave man who was killed in battle, and the story goes that, ten days later, his body was discovered quite fresh. The twelfth day they laid him on a funeral pyre, when he wisely came to life again. He brought news that he had been permitted to see the other world and return, and described a long and complicated vision—Socrates' idea of the justice meted out to Man after death.
"While I was ill my brain was troubling itself with an account of the method by which the sky's vault was held together, in the vision, at either end, by a belt of light."
"What are 'whorls'?" Ferlie asked him suddenly.
He laughed, his fingers busy with her hair.
"I can well believe that I babbled about them. Er's idea of the eight whorls, inserted in one another was founded on the Greeks' conception of astronomy. Never mind. I'll lend you the translation....
"I am only prefacing my own vision (if you can call it that when you know) with the mention of all this, to show you how my mind has been running on Plato for the sake of one passage in his Republic, portraying Earthly Love as a frantic and savage Master."
Said Ferlie, "He is a Master who can be enslaved."
"Your faith tells you so. I only saw it in my—dream. Do you know that I believe, like Er, I have been dead?"
"You were dead. Your heart had stopped beating. You must have been unconscious for a long time. And now, being you, you are wondering whether knowledge acquired during an experience in Death should be pushed aside by your well-balanced living mind. What did you see?"
"It was not exactly a seeing. It was a knowing. I was dead and I knew I was dead. But I was still alive, most terribly and poignantly. You were the Dead—on this side of the Dark, belted down, like Er's universe, from the light. But I was struggling so passionately to return and be dead with you here, rather than alive with all those other Living, that, like Er, I think I was shown the way to break through....
"One has heard of people in trances waking in the grave. Can you be sure with me, Ferlie, that this was more than a trance?"
"God knows I can!" she said earnestly.
"You need not have been afraid. I would have wrenched the way through to you if you had not come back to me. For that reason I took your revolver."
After a silence he said, "Then I see now why I was allowed to find the way. I was not worth such a sacrifice ... the sacrifice of your unfinished work here. That is quite clear."
"Ah, never! Never till that night did I know the depths of my own weakness. For the memory I must go humbly all my days. Cyprian, believe, rather, that you have been allowed the vision because only through its acceptance can you receive the strength which must make me strong."
"Well, whatever the explanation," said Cyprian, "it is only certain, as it was to another man before me, that, whereas I was blind, now I see. I see the truth of the Resurrection."
Bright with revelation was Ferlie's face.
"Dear, it is enough and more than enough. The rest follows as it is needed, making all things possible for us who can look forward into Eternity. I fear nothing, in whatever shadowy valley our steps may be turned ... now. The light will break some time when our eyes are strong to bear it. We have been united in all things save the one thing that was needful: belief in the Life Everlasting. Without that faith our love must have mastered us. And I knew it. Your Frantic Master drives as his slaves those who see no further than the end of this fragment of life. Cyprian, my lover, do you not understand how it is that I am not afraid to stay beside you now?"
Across the gilded bamboo leaves the children's voices stole to mingle incongruously with the shouts of the returning fishermen, to the drawling melody of——
"A Friend Who never changeth, Whose love will never die.
Our earthly friends may fail us,
And change with changing years ..."
Cyprian slipped out of the hammock and raised Ferlie to her feet.
* * * * * *
Yet, finally, the leadership, even in mystical matters, was to devolve on him.
There were only thin wooden walls to the little forest bungalow.
Ferlie and he had been sleeping indoors since his illness so that she might have all medicines and the paraphernalia for nursing within easy reach.
Therefore, it happened that in turning his head restlessly to escape an intruding beam of moonlight through the curtainless door, he roused himself with sudden completeness, straining to catch the echoes of quiet sobbing.
He only paused an instant.
Ferlie was lying face downwards: her forehead on her arms, which gleamed lily-coloured in the pure light.
He knelt beside her, attempting to raise her head.
"My dear... My dear..."
She grasped thankfully at the steadying sensitive fingers. "Help me, Cyprian! You were always, really, the stronger. Help me to conquer it.... I know you have thought that everything mattered a great deal more to you than to me. That I was satisfied with the knowledge that the end is not yet. But sometimes—at night—Heaven is very far away and earth is most powerfully real, and doubts creep over me, who have laid the great burden of this faith on you, whether I am fit to bear the burden of my own human loving. You see, Cyprian, there is one instinct given to women at Creation; the roots of which are in Creation itself.
"John is mine by duty and Thu Daw is yours by desire, but I want—and, at the moment, I'd sell my soul to eternal death to make it come true—your son in my arms ... through love...."
So came again to Cyprian the inexorable phantom of that Master of whose subjection he had been made falsely confident by the soothing sympathy of a celibate's idealism and the magic of Ferlie's trust, a few short hours back.
Though he came in the form of an angel of light; though he came in the form of a roaring lion; though now in a more mysterious guise than either, it was the same despotic power which drove and drew.
How to battle now with this image of shadowy radiance? And, after all, why? He summed up the matter afresh. If there was not truth here it was nowhere, and only in following the truth could man be set free of his ills. Thus had taught that same Nazarene, whose spoken word of two thousand years ago was causing all the trouble; since even in the sceptical circles of modern scientific research men were to be found to follow the gleam along His trail. Across which lay Ferlie exhausted; himself hesitating above her in the knowledge that she would yield, inevitably, to the guidance of his groping hands in the dark.
He had said to her, "I see the truth of the Resurrection," and she had replied that all else followed; but she had not then meant to signify the strength for this sacrifice. And he saw, blindingly, that there might be no half-measures. The ghost of an unborn child barred the way of compromise.
Shaken with pain, mental and physical, Cyprian of the once all-satisfying ethical agnosticism called with the impotent despair which is akin to anger upon that Lover who stood between them as lovers, and who was becoming in conception unwaveringly the same as the God who brooded over the disciplined Churches.
"Why should Ferlie let them torture her?" he had asked fiercely again and again of himself in the past, and now that the power lay with him to stay the hated pressure he found himself weakly refraining instead with the question, "why should I let them torture me?"
Even if separation had spelt material death for them both, Ferlie's Church would concentrate only upon the spiritual death their life together must effect.
Had not the time really come to dismiss as out-worn sentimentality this talk of a soul's death?
His own, such as it was, and if he might barter, and gladly, for the fathomable happiness of To-day, despite that secret glimpse of wisdom imparted during his unconscious hours. But what of Ferlie's soul, such as That was, and now in his keeping—a stainless loyal Existent?
He had fought to make it see with material vision and the mastering Force had fought on his side.
Yes, she had indeed fallen, spent, in the fearful starlessness and it was his at last exultingly to lead.
Incoherent shreds of forgotten argument worried him. Magi or shepherds ... the wise with their great responsibilities....
He became contemptuously aware of the aguish shaking of his body. How did one pray? ... How did one pray? ... The opalescent tropical dawn found him still at her side, his hold unrelaxed of hands now at rest, the glory of her hair making a halo about the face of a very tired sleeping child.
Above the dim blue mists still shrouding the patient jungle the sun floated, a scarlet ball, heralding the resurrection of another day.
Resurrection. That whisper continued with its insistence upon horizons beyond the vision of all earthly eyes.
Others, like the legendary Er, had proved that the pulsing of the soul does not cease with the pulsing of the heart; nevertheless it was well-nigh impossible to rest one's faith in this matter upon the experiences of others. Just in this matter. One was prepared to believe the incredible statements of scientists and astronomers without wrestling individually with their proofs. Why not, therefore, the vision of those who had eyes to see and ears to hear beyond the grave? His own past contact with that death-state was failing to inspire now that his body felt, once more, gloriously alive. One had to remember not to forget.
"Nothing," had said that exasperating duplicate of St. Francis in the islands, "can take away one's spiritual experiences."
To that slender link with the future he must trust. Many had not so much and yet walked untroubled.
Was there not some special revelation for those who, not having seen, were yet ready outside Gethsemane's gates with the bitter admission, "Thou has conquered, O pale Galilean"? The wraith of the dying Emperor, forced to accept such defeat, seemed to smile mockingly at him from the distorted patches of light and shade outside.
Cyprian appreciated afresh that Ferlie would hardly prove courageous enough to face her own defeat now without waiting on his decision. His to lead, forward or back.
And with the poignant realization something snapped. He rose stiffly to his feet to stand a moment at the window, drawing the salt sea-breeze into his lungs.
The surrender had become suddenly possible.
He lifted tired eyes to the on-stealing light and his lips moved. They framed the one word which Ferlie, waking, might have recognized as representing the clarion call of her utter triumph.
"Vicisti," said Cyprian.