PART II
THE EVEN KEEL
I
That evening I sat in Ker Annic, alone. Alec and Madge had gone out for an after-dinner walk, taking a silent Jennie with them. Silent too had been our return along the cliff-tops that afternoon. Whether she already regretted having opened her heart to me I could not tell.
I sat at the open window of the salon, looking out over the sea that showed pale milky green against the heavy sunset bank. Inside the room Ganymede and the Eagle had been lighted, and my shadow streamed down the steps and was lost in the darkening garden. It was not a cold evening, and yet I felt a little cold. No fire was laid behind the drawn-down iron shutter where Alec threw his crumpled tobacco packets, and it was hardly worth while troubling a maid. I closed the window, crossed to the shuttered fireplace, and sat down in a striped tapestried chair.
What had become of my illusion that certain things could not exist in this clear atmosphere of Northern France? No man with two memories bathe in that milky green sea I had just shut out? But he had swum it. No man of forty-five masquerade as a quarter of a century younger in this broomy, thymy air? But here he was.... I looked round the little salon, as if its spurious gaiety had misled me. Across the varnished ceiling the lamp-chains threw straggling spider's webs of shadow. In one gilt oval mirror a corner of the lamp was duplicated, in another re-duplicated. Everywhere were bits of inessential decoration, the trophy of Senegalese spears over the door, the fringed and fretted bracket with nothing on it, a bronze fingerplate, a bit of lace or coloured glass, all the rest of the quick artifice with which that great nation diverts attention from its naked purpose in life—to wring from everything the last benefit the occasion will yield. Or so at any rate it seemed to me that night, as my eyes rested on the wriggling gilt ribbons of the mirrors and Ganymede struggling in the Eagle's clutch.
When Alec Aird had greeted me on Dinard Cale he had glanced at the two suit-cases I had thrown ashore and asked me whether that was all the gear I had brought with me. And it is true that one cannot stay many weeks in a place on the resources of two suit-cases. But the length or shortness of my stay was now only part of a wider issue. The question was, not how long I was to stay, but how I was ever going to leave until Derry was ready to come with me. Was he likely to come now? Would anything drag him away? Hardly! Jennie was perfectly right: "He isn't even thinking of leaving, because we both know now—we knew in the shop—and he loves me too!"
A pretty kettle of fish, I reflected, looking at the empty brackets and the spears over the doorway....
For it was all very well to talk about only seeing one another, only speaking to one another. How long was that likely to last? How long had it lasted Julia Oliphant? Just as long as it had taken her to help herself to more. True, Julia was not a sleeping, but a particularly wide-awake beauty. Julia was not Jennie. For the glimmers of starlight that Julia had formerly brought into his life Jennie had now given him the sun itself. Both had known it in that long exchange of eyes in the Dinard Bazaar that morning.
Therefore I feared that, while Julia had produced in him an aberration grave enough but still only of the second magnitude, Jennie might now unwittingly bring about a cataclysm indeed. For he himself had said that his chances of stability lay in an even and unexciting tenor of life. He must sail, so to speak, on an even keel. Calmly and equably he must pick his way through this beautiful and passionate wonder. He must lash the wheel of his will lest the lightest of her sighs should drive him rail-under. A glance might mean the loss of years to him, a kiss death.... Others than I have told of loves between two normal creatures, if such in love there be. I am the first, since a mortal fell in love with a god, to tell of lovers whose lives met as they approached each other from opposite directions.
Yet—only to see one another, only to speak to one another! Who with a heart could refuse them that? Who, only looking at them, he serious and radiant, she as I had seen her among the marguerites that afternoon? Love was first invented for such as they. Could he but have slept, like Endymion, in his loveliness for ever!... You see what had already become of my momentary anger against him. It was quite, quite gone. He was once more my son, outside whose door I had paused with a sick dread that very morning.
And as love of him re-possessed me the marvel grew that he should so have survived that shock of beauty and emotion that had been his where the cars had stood parked in the transparent gloom. "Who was that with you in the garden, George?" his ardent whisper seemed to sound again. Was it possible that there were two loves, the one shattering, ruinous, destructive of the few years of his life, but the other full of security, healing and rest? Was there indeed a Love Sacred and a Love Profane? (Yet who would call Julia Oliphant's love for him profane? He himself, since he had always refused it? Surely none other.) And I remembered his own halting surmises as to the origin of his singular fate. He had known heaven and hell—had "been too close to the balm or the other thing." God (he had said) was more than a gland; not a knock on the head in the war, but the contending angels themselves of Good and Evil had brought him to this. The one principle had fetched down his years all clattering about him on that moonlit night when the cracking of a cone on my balcony had brought me out of my bed. Was the opposite principle now about to expunge that other ill, to restore him, and to make him a whole and forward-living man again? He believed that there was a chance of it. Was it too utterly beyond belief after all?
Did it prove to be true, then all was heavenly clear. His new life would be what we all sigh that our lives were not—no blind groping in the night of ignorance and doubt, but the angelic victory over the hosts of darkness. He was nineteen and unburdened of his sin, she seventeen and sinless. They would marry. One marriage such as theirs might at the last be enough to rehabilitate the despairing world. Instead of being in his own person a public peril he might be society's hope and stay.
And—I found my excitement quickening—so far all was well. "Entrez!" the bright voice that might have been silent for ever had called, and I had entered to find him humming over a paint-box.
Surely he knew about himself if anybody did——
And he thought he could keep on an even keel—-
There broke in on my musing the sudden sound of voices. The Airds were returning from their walk. Madge tapped at the window, the catch of which I had turned, and she and Alec entered. Jennie walked straight past, and I heard her step in the hall, then on the stairs. Apparently she was going straight to bed.
"Then if he's English what the devil does he wear those clothes for?" Alec demanded as he closed the window again.
"Mon ami, as he hasn't consulted me about his clothes I don't know."
"Where did Jennie pick him up?"
"Don't speak as if he was a germ. And do make a tee-ny effort to be a little less insular, my dear. 'When the Lord said all men He included me.'"
"We aren't in heaven. We're in Dinard."
"Among the world, the flesh and the French," said Madge cheerfully. "Why shouldn't he speak good French instead of your eternal 'Donnez-moi' and 'Combien'? Why shouldn't a thing mean something simply because it isn't in English? You'd better go home and go to Lords'.... George, you've been asleep!"
If I had I was very far from being asleep now. If my ears told me truly, since leaving Ker Annic the Airds had met, and had spoken to, Derwent Rose. Alec crossed to the fireplace, lifted the shutter, knocked out his pipe, and took up the running again.
"And what on earth made Jennie speak to him in French?"
"Jennie's quite right to practise her French."
"You don't practise French on a fellow who says he's an Englishman—porter's blouse or no porter's blouse. I can hardly imagine she spoke to him without knowing something about him."
"As you and I were there, very likely not," said Madge dryly.
"Anyway I marched Jennie on ahead," Alec growled. "Confounded mixed foreign company—wish we'd never come here——"
"I," said Madge serenely, "found him entirely and altogether charming, as well as being one of the handsomest boys I've ever seen. And he's coming to have tea with me.... This, George," she turned to me, "is a friend of Jennie's we met while we were out. He'd been making a sketch of the sunset and was just packing up, so we walked along together. Oh yes, I know—I ought to be ashamed at my time of life—but he's the most adorable creature! A good deal like your Derwent Rose to look at—very like him, in fact—though of course the Bear's old enough to be his father. And listen to Alec, just because he was dressed as half the English and American students in Paris are dressed! I don't know whether Jennie's fallen in love with him, but I have!"
"And if he's English what's he called Arnaud for?" Alec demanded with renewed suspicion.
"Dear but simple husband, possibly he had a French father. Such things have been heard of, even in that Rough Island's Story of yours. If you'll make me out a list of the questions you want asked I'll get it all out of him when he comes to tea. In the meantime:—unless George would like to take me on the Casino for an hour—I think I shall go to bed. Feel like a modest flutter, George?"
"Then bed. I'll dream I won a lot of money. Unless I dream of young Arnaud. Don't let Alec fall asleep in his chair. Dors bien——"
She tripped out under the trophy of assegais.
I was hardly five minutes behind her. Slowly I ascended to my room, crossed to the window, and leaned out over the balcony.
So that was that. Simply, and without any fuss at all, his foot was in the door of Ker Annic. The whole thing had taken almost exactly twenty-four hours. In the space of two revolutions of the clock, he, from the lurking-place of his roadside hotel at St Briac, had contrived to get himself asked to the house to tea. I wondered what he would do about myself. Would he blandly bow, as if our acquaintance began at that moment, or would he advance with outstretched hand, own up to it, and act on the square? If he admitted his acquaintance with me, what questions of Alec's should I not have to answer? How answer them, how explain my concealment? How accept any responsibility whatever for him? Yet how avoid complete responsibility? Apparently only Jennie and the maid who had announced him knew of his furtive visit to myself the evening before; but Jennie knew, and what more she might learn when they put their heads together I could not guess. Perhaps little or nothing. Perhaps all....
My thoughts flew to Jennie again and the miracle of the past twenty-four hours for her. The first awakening look of that moment by the cars, the lovely and irreparable surrender in the Dinard Bazaar, her sobs against my shoulder that afternoon, the radiant burst in which she had realised that he too loved her—and then that evening's encounter whatever it had been, when apparently she had taken matters into her own hands, bowed to him, and spoken her first words to him in French, to be answered in English.... No wonder she could not yet realise it. The day before had found her a child, moody, wilful, not knowing what ailed her, but crying to Life to take her, use her and not spare her; now she was a woman, with a strange sweet turmoil in her bosom, and a quite matter-of-fact resolution in the brain beneath that red-gold hair. No need to ask whether she slept! Sleep, with that ache and bliss at war in her breast? She must be awake at that moment, wondering whether he was awake, knowing that he was awake, lying in her innocent bed with her face turned towards St Briac. His miniature was painted on the curtains of her closed but unsleeping eyes, the echo of his voice was in her ears as she had spoken to him in French, and he had answered—in English.
And by the way, why had he answered her in English? Only that morning he had cajoled me into talking French, at any rate among French people. Had he too, stupefied with bliss, answered her instinctively in her own native tongue and his? Or had he deliberately resolved that here at any rate should be no trick or stratagem to be subsequently explained, but a perfectly clean beginning? If so, how would he contrive to maintain it? How could he be secure that the contretemps of any single moment of the day would not catch him out? I remembered the masterfulness and skill with which he had managed me; had he his plans for the handling of the Airds also? Were they to be founded on the appearance of complete honesty, with only the trifling fact suppressed that he had lived a whole life before?
If that was the idea, I could only catch my breath at the impudence and daring and pure cheek of it. Look at its comic beauties! Months before, Madge had begged me to bring the author of The Hands of Esau to see her; well, here was that author coming—as a corduroyed young landscape-painter about whose nationality there seemed to be some ambiguity! That afternoon at the Lyonnesse Club she had admired him for the beauty of the prime of his manhood; and as a stripling youth his beauty had again engaged her eye! Suppose one of the books of Derwent Rose should happen to be mentioned; would he say "Ah yes, I've read that," and quote a page of it? Suppose she should say that he was rather like a man she had met in Queen's Gate who was rather like Derwent Rose; would he say "Naturally, Mrs Aird, since I am the same man"? Or would he suppress even the twinkle of his eye and continue his leg-pulling? The thing began to teem with quite fascinating possibilities, and in a couple of days, in his French clothes or his English ones, he would be upon us. Within a week he might be painting Jennie's portrait, as Julia Oliphant was supposed to be painting my own.
And where were young Rugby, young Charterhouse, now that he had appeared on the scene?
Suddenly, on the little balcony at Ker Annic that night, with the Plough over the sea and the lamplight from the salon below yellowing the garden, I found myself one tingle of hope that he might pull it off.
II
You will appreciate my growing excitement when I tell you of a resolve I took. It would have been perfectly simple for me to take the first tram out to St Briac, to see him at his hotel, to tell him I was aware of the turn events had been made to take, and to ask him to be good enough to tell me where I came in among it all. But I found myself vowing that I would be hanged first. It was his show, and for the present at any rate he should run it without any interference from me. If when he came to tea at Ker Annic he chose to call me George, well, we would see what happened; if he solemnly stood waiting to be introduced to me, that was his affair. At the least it would be interesting. It might prove enthralling.
Therefore I did not seek him the next day, but crossed to St Malo with Alec and went for a potter about the quays of St Servan.
I learned later that I should not have found him at St Briac even had I sought him there. He, who had so lately avoided the eyes of men, now coolly came forth and took his place in the world. His bicycle, instead of taking him and his painting-gear to Pleudihen or Ploubalay or the war-ravaged woods of Pontual, brought him into Dinard early in the forenoon. In the afternoon it brought him in again. It would probably have brought him in again in the evening had there been the faintest chance of a glimpse of Jennie Aird. It was on the afternoon trip that Madge met him, and when we returned from St Servan Alec and I were told that Monsieur Arnaud was asked to tea the next day.
"Are you deliberately throwing him at that child's head?" Alec asked crossly.
"I'm adding him to my collection of nice people. I should be so much obliged if you happened to go to the Club, dear. Not that you're in the least like a wet blanket, darling. Only the thermometer drops just the least little bit."
"It'll go up again all right if I see any reason for it," Alec promised. "You know nothing about the fellow. He may be all right for all I know, but as a matter of principle——"
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Alec on matters of principle takes time to run down. At the end he turned his head to find that Madge had left the room. And that is enough to annoy anybody.
Something that I overheard on my way to my room the following afternoon caused me to smile. The door of Madge's room stood ajar, and as I passed it Jennie's imploring voice came from within.
"Oh, mother, not that old thing! Do wear the putty colour!"
"What!" in a faint shriek. "My very newest new one!"
"Please, mother!"
"But I was keeping that specially for——"
"Ple-e-ease! And the little darling hat!"
"But——"
"Please, please!"
I passed on. Evidently the best there was was none too good for Monsieur Arnaud, alias Arnold, alias Derwent Rose.
Tea was set out inside the pergola; Jennie herself placed little leaves round the sandwiches, begonia petals about the dishes of chocolate and nougat. Critically she paraded her mother's putty-coloured frock for inspection, touched the little darling hat deftly. She herself wore her pale gold silk jumper; her proud throat and small head issued from it like the little porcelain busts in the shop in the Rue Levavasseur—the Watteaus and Chardins and Fragonards that are made up into pincushions and cosies. She was a tremulous tender pout of anticipation and anxiety. A dozen times she moved the objects on the table, a dozen times moved them back again. Alec had dissociated himself from all this absurd fuss about a chance-met English youth with a French name, but he sat not far away, in the shade of the auracaria, behind the Paris Daily Mail.
Then, at four o'clock, there was the short soft slide of somebody alighting from a bicycle, and Derry stood by the wrought-iron gate, looking about him.
"This way—come straight down!" Madge called. "The bicycle will be all right there."
Rapidly as I knew Jennie's heart to be beating, I was hardly less excited myself. Now what was he going to do?
What he did was the simplest thing imaginable. As he advanced among the montbretias and begonias I noticed that he wore his English clothes. He took Madge's hand; he smiled simply at Jennie; and then, as Madge was about to present him to myself, he smiled and shook hands with me too.
"That's all right—we do know one another," he said. "Quite a long time. In London, eh, sir? And, as a matter of fact, I came here to see him the other night, but you were all so busy with the party——"
Beautifully, calmly disarming. He said it, too, just as Alec came up—for Alec may growl before his guests come, and growl again when they have gone, but he is their host as long as they are there. If Monsieur Arnaud had known Sir George Coverham in London the situation was more or less regularised. The growling might continue, but in a diminuendo. Growling is sometimes a man's duty to his own face.
"Well, let's have tea anyway," Alec said. "Tell them, Jennie."
The dark blue clothes—that had crossed the Channel in a motor-launch while their owner, thickly greased, had swum alongside in the night—fitted him quite passably well; I remembered the very suit. His boots and collar, however, were French, and apparently he had no English hat, for his head was uncovered. I remember a foolish fleeting wonder that the light chequer of shadow should pattern his clear and self-possessed face exactly as it did our own—and he the lusus naturæ he was! He stood there, modest and at ease, waiting for his seniors to seat themselves. I saw Alec's expert glance at his perfect build. I mentally gave the subject of athletics about ten minutes in which to crop up.
"Do sit down," said Madge; and she added to me, "George, you never told me you knew Mr Arnaud in London!"
"I think this is the first time we've all been together," I parried.
Derry gave me a demure glance. "Oh yes. And I stayed a week-end in Sir George's place not so long ago—had a jolly swim in his pond—isn't that so, sir?"
He should at any rate have a tweak in return. "When there's a prep school in the neighbourhood a good many young people use a man's pond," I observed; and at that moment Jennie and a maid arrived with tea.
Already I fancied I had what is called a "line" on him. The only word I can apply to his modest impudence is "neck"—charming, bashful, but quite deliberate "neck." He had not merely met me before in London; oh dear no; he went a good deal beyond that. He was a young man I had to stay in my house, allowed to swim in my pond. I saw the way already paved for as many visits to Ker Annic as he pleased. I saw in anticipation Alec coming round to his English clothes, his grace and strength of build. Madge he already had in his pocket. He even admitted having sought me at this very house a night or two before! My position was as neatly turned as heart could wish. I could not even imitate his own mendacious candour lest I should give him and myself completely away. Yes, I think "neck" is the word.
He talked quietly, charmingly, not too much. Jennie hardly ventured to look at him, nor he at her. To Madge he was the most perfect of squires. Alec, like myself, was "sir" to him.
"Yes, sir," he said, "that's quite right. I did do a bit of a sprint at Ambleteuse. I'm that Arnaud. But I've had to knock it off. You wouldn't think it to look at me, but I've got to go awfully steady. I used to be quite fast, but that's some time ago. And of course I shall be all right again in a little time. That's one of the reasons I took up painting. It keeps me in the air practically all the time."
"Chest?" said Alec.
"Something of the sort, sir. No thank you, I don't smoke."
But for one significant trifle I think Alec might have been more or less satisfied. This was the fact that, in his own hearing, his daughter had spoken to this charming stranger in French, and had been answered in English. It might mean little or nothing, but I saw that it stuck in his mind. In his different way Alec is no less quick than his wife. Let him down once and you are likely to have to take the consequences for all time. A trifle ceases to be a trifle when it is all there is. Alec knew nothing of his visitor, but he did know that Jennie never addressed the blazered tennis-playing English youths in French. He also knew that for three days Jennie, who up to then had soaked herself in tennis, had not been near the nets at all. The intensely insular father of a beautiful girl of seventeen is not blind to these things.
"I suppose your people were French at one time?" Alec said presently, not too pointedly.
"Yes, sir," said Derry, for all I knew with perfect truth. "My mother was a Treherne, a Somerset woman. I believe she and my father ran away. I don't remember him."
"And you went to a French school?"
"No, sir. Shrewsbury." This, too, was perfectly true.
"You've got an uncommonly good French accent, that's all," remarked Alec; and relapsed into silence.
After all, the last question he would have thought of asking his young guest was whether he might have a look at his birth certificate.
Up to this point our gathering had had its distinctly amusing side. With consummate dissembling he had turned us round his finger, and it would have taken a conjurer to guess that he was softly laughing at all of us except Jennie. But the more I considered the "line" I had on his subtle machinations the less a laughing matter it all became. Behind the gentle deference of his manner I felt the grimmest determination. His charm was the charm of a charming youth, but it rested on the hard experience and resolution of a man. And behind that again in the last resort menace would lie. This man, actually older than Madge, not much younger than Alec and myself, and a full quarter of a century older than Jennie, had toiled for fame and had missed the fruits of it; he had chased the will-o'-the-wisp pleasure and had floundered in the bog; but now he had seen the shining thing beside which fame and pleasure are nothing at all. To seize that was now the whole intention of his marvellous twice-lived life. Let him keep his eyes as he would from looking directly at Jennie, Jennie was there, the prize for which he strove. And I knew in my soul that were I or another to try to frustrate him we had better look to ourselves. It was a thing none the less to beware of that his brow was smooth, his eyes bright, his skin clear as the skin of a boy.
And all in a moment I found myself looking at him with—I don't know how else to express it—a sort of induced unfamiliarity. All the strangeness of it came over me again like a wave. I knew that I didn't know him in the least. Behind that mask he knew infinitely more about me than I knew about him. He sat with his back to the sea, and the tartan of tricky shadow laced his brow, was lost again as his face dipped, reappeared on the navy-blue sleeve and his brown hand on the table. Yes, completely a stranger to me. I his father? He was his own father. What else did all that turgid stuff in The Times about "maximum faculties" mean? New words for old things! "The boy is father of the man." They of old time knew it all before us. We only think it is truer to-day because more people talk about it. Here, incipient and scarcely veiled, was the real parent of the Derwent Rose of The Vicarage of Bray, An Ape in Hell, and all else he had ever done. Here, implicitly and in embryo, were the wit of the Vicarage, the patient purpose of Esau, and the deadly suppressed anger of the Ape. Possibly you have never seen, brightly and sunnily displayed with a light and laughing lazy-tongs of rippling shadow, the authentic beginning of a man you have known twenty-five years farther on in time. Perhaps it is as well that they who have seen it are few. You may take my word for it that that family tree of which the roots are Arnaud and the blossoms Rose can be a rather terrifying thing.
Therefore I and I alone was able to pierce through his blandness, and to see the tremendousness of the effort behind it all; and I wondered whether that was his idea of an easy and unexciting life! Whatever it was to him, I can only say that I did not find it so. I almost sweated to see his composure. Yet to all outward appearance he never turned a hair. His keel was still even, the rudder of his will under perfect control. Jennie with the downcast eyes was the mark on which he steered. And his own eyes sought the rest of us in turn with crafty innocence and infernal candour.
"I beg your pardon, sir?" he was saying to Alec. "Oh"—he gave a little laugh of confusion—"in a place like this it's sometimes difficult to say! Where was it, Miss Aird?" (But he gave her no chance to reply.) "One hardly knows how one meets anybody else; it seems to be in the air; you can hardly help knowing people. But these holiday acquaintances can be easily dropped afterwards."
("Steady, Derry!" I found myself commenting. "Don't overdo it—that's rather experienced—don't be too wise for the age you look.")
"Anyway," he went on, "I shall probably be the last one here. I like the place, and the rate of exchange is all to the good when you know your way about—not in a villa," he twinkled modestly. "They say Italy's the place, but I can't quite manage that, and England doesn't suit me, so I shall just stick on here and paint."
"I've only seen the sketch you were doing the other night," remarked Madge—dangerously invitingly, I thought.
"Oh, they aren't anything." He waved them aside. "I hope to do something one day. But it's a funny thing," he explained, "words and books and all that sort of thing never interested me in the least. I couldn't write if my life depended on it; can't imagine how Mrs Aird and Sir George do it. But everybody understands what they see with their eyes. Paint's the stuff."
"Then when are you going to show us?" said Madge.
"If you'd care to, of course. George—Sir George Coverham knows where I hang out. Perhaps you'd bring Mrs Aird round, sir?... Ah——"
The last little exclamation accompanied as wonderful a feat of its kind as I ever saw. As she had turned to him Madge's elbow had caught a teaspoon, which slipped over the table's edge. But it never reached the ground. He did not even shake the table. The position of his shoulder altered, his hand shot out. He put the spoon back on the table. With such instantaneous smoothness had he done it that it seemed simple. But I tell you I caught my breath....
"Near thing," he smiled. "Oh, come any time. You won't have to mind a few stairs. But I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. I'm only a beginner really."
And so not one door, but two were opened, the second one at his lodging at St Briac.
But Alec as well as I had seen that marvellous piece of fielding with the teaspoon. Suddenly he got up, stretched himself, and walked away.
The moment his back was turned Jennie spoke for the first time.
"Perhaps Mr Arnaud would like to see the rest of the garden, mother?"
"Then show him, child," said Madge. "We'll be with you in a minute."
Their eyes met. He rose. They went off together. Madge swung round on me.
"Why didn't you say you knew him before?" she demanded.
"The question never arose."
"The question always arises if Alec's anywhere about. You know he's like a bear with a sore head about young men."
"It's the duty of a father's head to be sore. I quite agree with Alec."
"But if you'd only said 'He's quite all right, he stays with me in Haslemere——'"
"Quite a number of people stay with me in Haslemere, if that's a social guarantee——"
"You know what I mean. Alec's simply a troglodyte. He doesn't belong to to-day. It's all very flattering, of course, but he simply can't forget what things were like when I was a girl. They never dreamed of letting us travel without a maid; why, we actually had to sit still in the carriage till the footman had opened our own front door. Alec doesn't realise that the world's moved on since then. And you could have put it all on a proper footing with three words!"
"'It?'"
"Yes, his coming here. All that fuss! I think he's perfectly delightful. And I know those Somerset Trehernes if they're the Edward Trehernes of Witton Regis. And I expect his painting's clever too. He looks as if he had all the gifts.... Now I make you answerable for Alec, George. That he's not simply stupid and unreasonable, I mean. I don't mean that he's not perfectly right to ask the usual questions, but Jennie's got to be considered too. She's quite old enough to know her own mind. Now I'm going to them. Are you coming?"
"I'll come along in a few minutes," I replied.
III
My intelligence with regard to painting is simply that of the ordinary man. I seldom speculate on the relation between one art and another. True, I have read my Browning, and have wondered whether he really knew what he was talking about when he spoke of a man "finding himself" in one medium, and starting again all unprejudiced and anew in another. It sounds rather of a piece with much more art talk we heard when we were young.
But Derwent Rose was only fallaciously young. He had time at his disposal in a sense that neither Browning nor you nor I ever had. And it seemed to me significant of the state of his memory that he should have turned his back on words and taken up paint instead. For the burden of his age was lifted from him, and he was advancing on his youth with a high and exhilarating sense of adventure. Now words had been the greatest concern of his "A," or Age Memory, and words, it must be admitted, have arrogated to themselves the lion's share of this strange faculty that we call remembering. Had he now found a means of expression more closely in correspondence with the untrodden ground ahead? In other words, was he a kind of alembical meeting-ground where the arts interpenetrated and became transmuted?... I hazard it merely as a conjecture in passing, and leave you to judge. Let us pass to that visit we paid to St Briac to see his sketches.
Alec was not with us. The Kings, Queens and Knaves of the bridge-table were pictures enough for him. So I accompanied Madge and Jennie. Jennie's bosom lifted as we approached the wide spaces of the links—but then the St Briac air is admittedly fresher than the tepid medium that is canalised, so to speak, in the streets and lanes of Dinard. It was afternoon, and the shed at the terminus was a bustle of moving luggage, friends meeting friends, parties going into Dinard to return by the seven o'clock tram. We crossed the road to his glass-fronted hotel. There was no need to ask for him. Evidently he had been watching from his window. He stood at the gate, once more in blouse and corduroys.
"Tea first, I think, and the works of art afterwards," he greeted us cheerfully. "Where's Mr Aird? Oh, what a pity! This way—straight through the kitchen—I thought it would be nicer outside——"
He led the way through the black and cavernous kitchen towards the sunny green doorway and the back garden.
Tea was set under an apple tree. The garden was some fifteen yards square, but only close under the tree was there room for the table and the four chairs. Even then we had to be careful how we moved, lest we should crush a growing plant. There were no paths—you could hardly call those single-file, six-inches-wide threads paths. Unless you put one foot fairly in line with the other pop went a radish, a strawberry, a flower. Not one single hand's-breadth anywhere was uncultivated. Behind Madge as she sat a row of scarlet runners made a bright straggle of coral, and dwarf beans filled the interstices. Over the runners tall nodding onion-heads showed, and behind them again bushes heavy with white currant. Along a knee-high latticed fence huge red-coated apples were espaliered, and the ochre flowers of a marrow sprawled over a manure-heap. Bees droned and butterflies flitted in the sun, glints of glass cloches pierced the screens of warm grey-green. And, where a tree of yellow genet covered half the wall, a large green and red parrot in a cage had suddenly become silent on hearing voices.
"That's Coco," Derry said. "Coco! Ck!—'Quand je bois mon vin clairet——'"
The parrot cocked his head on one side and regarded us with an upside-down eye.
"Chants, Coco!—'Quand je bois'—You'll hear him all right in a minute, Mrs Aird.... Ma mè-r-r-r-e! Nous voici à table!"
"Tout est prêt—on va servir!" came the shrill reassurance from somewhere inside the house; and an immensely fat old patronne in a blue check apron brought out tea, followed by one of the reserved young Amazons with strawberries, cream, and little crocks of jam with wasps struggling on the top.
As for Jennie and myself, I think she had completely forgotten that I had ever tried to keep her and Derry apart. I was now the person through whose good offices she sat, with at least semi-parental approval, here in his garden. I do not want to pretend to more knowledge than I have about these secretive young goddesses, but, as she sat there, her eyes still bashfully avoiding Derry's, I was prepared to take a reasonable bet that I guessed what was passing through her mind. Derry had stayed in my house in England. Her too I had asked to visit me there. What an Uncle George indeed I should be if at some time or other I were to ask them together! Only as thanks in advance, after which I could not find it in my heart to withhold the benefit, could I explain the soft and grateful looks I received from time to time. I had one of these glances quite unmistakably before I had as much as touched the cup of tea Madge poured out for me. "You see, mother's all right," it said as plainly as if she had uttered the words; "you'll make it all right with father, won't you? I know you can if you will! And thank you so much, dear Uncle George, for the perfectly lovely time we're going to have when we come to see you!" At any rate, that was my interpretation of it, while Derry, no less charming as a host than he had been as a guest, made himself honey-sweet to Madge and politely attentive to her daughter.
Nevertheless, I presently asked a direct question about the hours of departure of the trams. I saw the faintest flicker of demure fun cross his face; and I too remembered, too late, how I had once countered him about the Sunday trains from Haslemere.
"There's a four-thirty-five and a five-forty-eight," he said. "It's four-twenty now. We can cut out the pictures, of course, but it seems a pity not to have tea."
So we had nearly an hour and a half.
I don't really think that he had the least desire to show us his pictures. The pictures had served their turn handsomely enough already. He wanted to remain under the apple tree, with Madge and myself there since we must be there, but anyway with Jennie opposite to him, eating his strawberries and jam, occasionally not knowing which way to look, the possession on which his twofold heart was set, the lovely and precious godsend he had missed once but would see us all with our throats cut rather than not clasp her to his bosom in the end.
So we sat there over our empty cups, with the wasps struggling in the jam and Coco harping on the wires of his cage, but still obstinately refusing to sing "Quand je bois." Jennie got up to give him a piece of sugar, and he cocked his yellow upside-down eye at her and showed the ribbed black tongue inside his hook of a beak. Were I a painter I should paint the picture she made against the shrill yellow of the broom, with the sun full on her white summer frock, her gleaming hair, and the sun-loving bird with his head on one side watching her. "Mind his beak," Derry called; and she smiled over her shoulder, as if his mere voice were so much that she must turn her eyes whatever it said. Then she returned to the table, but not before she had plucked a sprig of genet and put it in her breast. It lay at the pit of her stately throat like a dropped blossom at the plinth of a column.
"But what about the pictures?" Madge suddenly said. "We came here to see pictures, didn't we?"
"Then that means a trail upstairs," said Derry, springing up. "Carefully through the kitchen, Mrs Aird; it's always as dark as the pit after you've been sitting out here. Perhaps I'd better go first."
He led the way through the kitchen, up the bare polished stairs, and into his room.
He cannot have had any great wish to show them; otherwise they would have been set out, or at least ready to hand. As it was he had to rummage for them in his single cupboard, selecting some, rejecting others. He showed a dozen or more of them, mostly canvas on the stretchers, but a few watercolours among them; and I fancy, if the truth must be told, that Madge was just a shade disappointed. I think she had hoped for jazz and lightning and something to go with her drawing-room cushions. Nor did I myself quite know what to make of those pictures. The first impression of them I had was a kind of—let me say datelessness; I can't think of a better word. All were landscapes, the largest of them not more than a couple of feet by eighteen inches; and at first he set them up one after another rather negligently. But as Madge began to question him his manner rather curiously changed. That preternatural skill that he had shown for two whole afternoons seemed to drop from him. He seemed to halt a little, to take risks, to advance warily into deeper water. If Mrs Aird really wished to know, then he was sincerely ready to explain. And he began to take me, for one, through the unsuspected intricacies of what at a first glance appeared to be a few casual brush-marks on the flat.
"I dare say I'm all wrong—I feel rather an ass talking about it," he said diffidently, "but I'll try to tell you. I mean I came across a fellow one day just outside Pleudihen, and he was painting what he called a Romantic Landscape. I asked him what a Romantic Landscape was, and he was just a bit stuffy about it. 'This that I'm painting,' he said. 'But why can't you paint just a landscape?' I said. 'Because I'm doing a Romantic one and I can't do two things at once,' he said. 'What are you doing it for?' I asked him. 'The Salon,' he said. 'No, but I mean why are you doing it?' I said. 'I suppose because I belong to the Romantic School,' says he.... Well, there you are, Mrs Aird. What I mean is that he was painting it because he belonged to a school that did paint that sort of thing. If he'd belonged to another school he'd have painted something different, I suppose. So of course that set me thinking a bit."
"I suppose so," said Madge, quite out of her depth.
"So I said to him, 'What do you want to belong to a school at all for?' 'Everybody does,' says he. 'I should have thought that was all the more reason why you shouldn't,' says I. 'Oh, if you're a blooming genius!' he said ... a bit rotten of him, I thought, but he was years older than I. So I rather let myself go, I'm afraid. I picked up the nearest leaf. 'Look here,' I said to him, 'this thing's a leaf, just a leaf. It's a certain colour and a certain shape and certain other things; the point is it's itself and nothing else; and neither you nor I can alter it, sir' (I told you he was years older than I). 'The light hits it there, and only one possible thing can happen; it hits it there, where the direction alters, and only another thing can happen. In another minute the light will have changed, and a quite different set of things will have happened. Everything there is happens to that leaf in the course of a day, and if you know all about that leaf you know all about everything. And if you can paint it you can paint all the leaves in the world.' I hope I didn't seem too rude, but that's what I said to him."
I had moved to the window. He was talking with a mixture of diffidence and warmth, on a subject I had never heard him on before, and yet it seemed to me that I had heard something strangely like it all before.
"And what did he say?" Madge asked.
"Oh, he said something, but he was years older than I, so I just said good afternoon. I suppose he went back to school," said Derwent Rose.
Once more I was disturbed. Was this a new phase, or an old one all over again? If he was going to abolish schools and precedents and all the accepted apparatus by which the world's thought is carried on, it seemed to me to matter very little whether he dealt in words, as before, or in paint, as now. True, this parallelism might exist largely in my own imagination; he had said nothing that another man might not have said without arousing anxiety; but again he was trying to see something, though only a leaf, as if it had never been seen before, and I noted it carefully as I looked out over the sunny northward water.
"So that's more or less what I'm after," he was saying. "I know they're pretty bad, but I think they start right. That sky's as clumsy as it can be, but it is horizontal. That tree's got a back you don't see as well as a front you do. So I simply don't go to look at other people's stuff.... Ah, this branch will explain what I mean."
It did when he pointed it out, but I should never have seen for myself. As completely as a worshipping pagan he sought to subdue himself to one given thing in one given moment. As I say, I know nothing about painting. That may be a valid theory of painting landscape or it may not. But it was his, there was no ear-say or eye-say about it, and it is of him and not of his pictures that I am speaking.
"I believe I shall pull it off one day; in fact I know I shall.... And now that's quite enough about me. That's my view, Mrs Aird, and this is where I live. My old landlady's a perfect dear, and Madeleine and Hortense are all right. But sometimes that brute Coco simply won't sing——"
I saw Jennie drinking in every detail of his room. There was not to be one inch of it that she could not reproduce when she went to bed that night and turned her face in the direction of St Briac. Her eyes took in his moulded ceiling-beams, the glass knob of his door, his neat bed, the herring-boned parquet of the floor. It was a little bare, perhaps, but then he spent all his days out of doors, painting those wonderful paintings, and, of course, this was not his real home. She hated that older painter—a hundred at least—who had been rude to him about the Romantic Landscapes; instantly and passionately she had taken sides with her hero. She loved the fat old Frenchwoman who looked after him and was nearly seventy; she did not so much love the two Breton women who looked after him and were not nearly seventy. Coco was a naughty bird not to sing "Quand je bois" when he was told, and if his window did not face towards Dinard, at any rate he had the tram opposite, and could watch it every time it started, and know that it was going almost past the gates of Ker Annic. She stood with puckered brows before his canvases. She loved trees. They would always be different to her now that he had shown her about them. She had no doubt whatever about his theory of landscape; how could it be wrong if it was his? Her fingers touched the blossom of broom at her throat that had grown on his tree.
Then she came over to the window to make sure that Dinard really did not lie that way. Most stupidly it did not. Actually it lay miles away past the glass door-knob, and the Garde Guérin to the right was invisible from Dinard. But she pressed my arm lightly. "September, Uncle George?" the pleading pressure silently said. "You'll ask us both down in September, the moment we get back from here?"
I looked at my watch.
Then I heard Madge's voice across the room, and my heart almost stopped at the swift peril.
"Then your mother was Cicely Treherne, and she married an Arnaud?"
But he weathered it. He did it with his rascally eyes. He smiled down on her.
"Well ... I shouldn't be allowed to swear it in a court of law, because it was before I was born, you see."
The smile conquered. She laughed. I cut quickly in, my watch half out of my pocket. Gunpowder was safer than family history with Madge Aird about.
"Time?" I said.
"Ought we to be going?"
"The tram has a way of filling up."
"Then don't let's miss it," said Madge, drawing on her gloves. "Thank you for a most delightful afternoon, Mr Arnaud (all my friends are 'Mr' for at least a week, you know). I think the pictures are fascinating; they make our books look very dull. Good-bye."
"Oh, I'm coming to see you off," he said.
Something in his last words, I really can't tell you what, made me take a swift resolve. If he was going to see us off, I was going to see him off also. I had a superstitious idea that it might be necessary. He had bamboozled Alec about his delicate chest, had only just evaded that question of Madge's that simply meant, if you like to do a little sum about it, that his mother had borne him at two different dates with a quarter of a century between them. Blandly as he might cover it up, I now expected nothing but tricks from him—tricks coolly and resolutely planned and carried out without a moment's compunction or hesitation. Very well. He was going to be watched if I had eyes in my head.
And so was Miss Jennie. With a guile so innocent and transparent that I had nothing for it but the tenderest and most smiling love, she too was quite capable of duplicity. More than once her tell-tale hand had fluttered about the flower at the pit of her throat. As I have said, I don't pretend to deep knowledge of the hearts of these superb and recently-awakened young creatures, but I do know when things are in the wind.
Nothing happened as we passed down the stairs and out into the street. I could have taken my oath of that. And, devoted as always, he walked with Madge across to the terminus, leaving Jennie to me. But I felt it coming....
It came as he took the tickets at the guichet; and it was not of his doing, but of hers. I had silver in my hand, ready to repay him, and there was no reason why she also should have pressed so close to him. Again there was the little flurry about the flower at her throat; her bent nape was towards me; the thing was movingly clumsily done.
But it was done for all that. A note passed from her hand to his, and the fingers that passed it were held for a moment.
Don't tell me that that note had not been in readiness probably since the evening before. Don't tell me that it had not lain under her pillow for a whole night before being transferred to that tenderer post-bag that was sealed with the yellow flower. Don't tell me that it had not been even more sweetly sealed. For I saw her face when she turned again. I saw its struggle of soft emotion and the will to be calm. With a quick little impulse that I did not understand she flew to her mother's arm.
"There are three seats there if we're quick," she said in a broken little voice....
Only to see one another—only to speak to one another—and to pass a secret note at the first opportunity——
IV
"You know that we can't quarrel, Derry," I said.
"In that case——" he said quietly, but did not finish.
"We can't quarrel for the reason there's always been—that we aren't in the same ring and can't possibly get there."
"I wish——" he began, but once more suddenly stopped.
From the obscurity of the next table where the four young Frenchmen sat another soft unaccompanied song broke out.
"Listen," whispered Derry.
"En mon coeur, tendre réliquaire,
J'avais gardé ton souvenir;
Par lui le long de mon calvaire
En espérant, j'ai pu souffrir!"
"Hush!" his voice came huskily from the dusk by my side.
"J'ai vécu des heures cruelles
Loin de toi, que j'aimais toujours;
Les revoici, pour moi plus belles
Puisqu'elles sonnent ton rétour."
The song was finished without further interruption from him.
"Ne parlons plus de nos alarmes,
Effaçons l'horrible passé;
Reviens, je veux sécher tes larmes
Et revivre pour t'adorer:
"Rien n'est fini, tout recommence,
Puisque nous voilà réunis
Au chaud soleil de l'espérance—
A tout jamais, soyons unis!"
It was nine o'clock of the same evening, and we were sitting outside the hotel of St Briac's tiny triangular Square. I had broken away from dinner at Ker Annic in order that I might see him without a moment's loss of time. What did it matter that I had had to hire a special car, and that that car was waiting for me in the darkness of a side-street now? As it had happened, I had met him on the road. Had I not done so I should have scoured the neighbourhood until I had found him.
Our backs were to the lighted windows of the hotel, but he had blotted himself into the shadow by the door. The Square might have been a set-piece on a stage. Yellow strips of light streamed from open doorways, illuminated window-squares showed the movement of dark heads within. Children playing their last ten minutes before going to bed flitted like moths in and out of the beams, and the comers and goers across the square seemed actors in spite of themselves. The four young Frenchmen sat in the shadows beyond the lighted doorway, and they had sung three or four songs before singing that one.
There was a long silence between Derwent Rose and myself. Then suddenly he got up and crossed to the group of Frenchmen. In a minute or so he came back again, and thrust himself more deeply still into the shadow.
Then I felt rather than heard his soft shaky mutter.
"Le long de mon calvaire ... mon calvaire, mon Dieu! ... effaçons l'horrible passé ... rien n'est fini, tout recommence ... tout recommence...."
That wretched, wretched song! It had suddenly made it impossible for me to go on.
"I suppose you went over to ask the name of it?" I said sullenly; I almost said "The name of the beastly thing."
"It's called 'Il est venu le Jour."
"Coincidences are stupid things."
"I dare say."
And another long silence fell between us.
Nevertheless I had not taken a special journey to St Briac merely to listen to his disturbed breathing. What I had seen that afternoon had taken matters far beyond that. If he, in his situation, thought he could do thus and thus, I was there to see, to the limit of my power, that he did not. I had already told him so, in those words. He had made a stiff reply. Then had come that calamitous song, and our present silence.
"Well ... you can't, and there's an end of it, Derry," I said, quietly but flatly.
"So I understood you to say."
"It's what I came specially to tell you."
"I gathered that too. By the way, if you want to send your car away there's a Casino bus going in at ten o'clock. No need to waste money."
"We may not have finished our talk by then."
"Then we can finish it in the bus. I'd thought of going in myself."
"To hang about that house?"
"You and the gendarmerie can stop that easily enough."
We were back at the same point—that we, between whom a quarrel was impossible, must apparently nevertheless quarrel.
"Look here," I said at last, "can't you see my position?"
"I can. It's a rotten one."
"If I saw the faintest glimmer of hope——"
"Espérance," he muttered.
"——even from their point of view. Aird isn't a fool. He heard Jennie speak in French to you, evidently the very first time she had spoken to you—regular monkeys'-parade business from his point of view—and he draws his own conclusions. And Mrs Aird isn't a fool either. She won't be in London two days before she's found out all about your mother."
"I see all that."
"Your mother didn't marry an Arnaud."
"Quite right. She'll know that too."
"And Aird's athlete enough to know you're no more poitrinaire than he is."
"I once saw him score a ripping try on the Rectory Ground. I was about twenty."
"You haven't a paper to your name."
"Not one."
"You can't even get back to England."
"Oh, I wouldn't go so far as to say that."
"And you're no better off if you do."
"That remains to be seen too."
"Then Mrs Aird's a writer herself. She knows every word Derwent Rose ever wrote."
"Oh, I had a reader here and there," he replied nonchalantly.
"And she wants to meet you—not Arnaud, but Derwent Rose. I'm to take you round there."
I felt his smile. "That would be the deuce of a hole for you to be in, George. You'd simply have to say you couldn't find me."
"But Derwent Rose is supposed to be alive somewhere. Nobody's heard of his death."
"One man extra, one man missing, so it's as-you-were. Anyway nobody'll worry much about that. I never had a tenth of your readers."
"And you're bound to be caught out here sooner or later on the question of domicile."
"Not if I see them first," he replied grimly.
"Derry, you're my despair."
"Oh, don't despair, George. Never despair. It will be all right. What about sending that car away? No good wasting good francs. You see, we've finished our talk."
"We haven't begun it yet."
"Then for goodness sake let's begin and get it over."
"Very well. Get ready.... I stood by you at the tramway office this afternoon. I saw what was given you there. I know what you have tucked away somewhere about you at this moment."
He had asked for it, and had got it. Hitherto I had stuck to generalities; that this was particular enough I knew by his quick movement. His foot knocked against the flimsy table, and a coffee-cup all but fell. He spoke in a low but harsh voice.
"That's not on the agenda, Coverham."
"Pardon me."
"It's not, and it's not going to be."
"If you prefer it in French, it's a fait accompli."
"You mean you'll bring matters to a head by telling them over there?" He jerked his head in the direction of Ker Annic.
"That rests with you, here and now."
He muttered. At first I could not distinguish the words. Then I heard, "No, not here ... now if you like ... it's got to come, I suppose...."
He rose. "Very well," he said. "I'm ready."
"Wait a moment till I've paid for the coffee."
"Oh, I'll wait all right."
I entered the hotel and paid. When I came out again I looked right and left for him; then I saw his black smock and corduroys by a lighted door half-way across the Square. I joined him, and together we took the dark street to the right that leads to where the Calvary stretches out its arms across the harbour to Lancieux.
Past the Post Office, past the Mairie we walked without speaking—that Mairie that either as an Englishman or a Frenchman knew him not. We ascended the short lane to the promontory. It was a whispering half-tide, but all was darkness save for a low remnant in the west, a twinkle or two over the shallows, and once more Fréhel, this time directly visible and giving us distinct shadows. The last gossip had disappeared from the point. I don't think even a couple of lovers lingered on the steep below. It was him and myself for it, with the Calvary above us and that twelve-miles-distant Giant as timekeeper of our encounter.
But he did an unexpected thing before he spoke. Under Fréhel's sweeping finger the Calvary started forth for a moment from the shadows. He advanced to it, dipped his knee, and crossed himself.
Then he turned to me.
"Well——" he said quietly.
I waited. It was he who began.
"Don't think I don't see the force of everything you've said. Every word of it's true, and a child could see it. For one hole you can pick in the position I can pick five hundred. But picking holes doesn't help. What you aren't allowing for is the force of circumstances."
"It's the force of circumstances I've been trying to point out," I said, as quietly as he had spoken.
"I'm speaking of the circumstances I find myself in, the pressure that drives me to do what I am doing. You don't think I'm deceiving these decent people as a matter of choice, do you?"
"You say what you've got to say. I'll tell you what I think by and by."
"I've no choice. I'm driven to it, can't escape it; it's my handicap. I want you to look at it for a moment from my end. What's the very first thing I've got to do? To lie about my name. I must lie, knowing perfectly well that a day, a week or a month or two at the outside will see me caught out and shown the door. Never mind other instances; let's stick to that one; the rest are just the same, only a good deal worse, some of 'em. Now here's the point. Do you suppose I should put my head into a noose like that unless I was perfectly sure that I'd finished sliding, was well dug in, and had a fairly reasonable prospect of presently going straight ahead like anybody else?"
But I had no intention of going over that ground again. My foolish excited hope that he might "pull it off" had been scattered to the winds by the events of that afternoon. As far as he himself was concerned I wished him all the best that could happen to him, but it was not a chance that the happiness and safety of the daughter of my friends could be risked upon. Let him start to go forward first; let us have some assurance that the ghastly business was all over; then would be time enough to talk about the rest.
"We've had all that," I interrupted him.
"We haven't, George," he said earnestly. "You don't know. You can't possibly know. You've no idea of the care—the tests——"
"If it comes off all right nobody will rejoice more than I shall, Derry. What's between us at the moment is what happened this afternoon."
Instantly I was conscious of his hardening. But he did not become granite all at once.
"That can't be dragged in."
"'Dragged in'!"
"Can't you accept the situation, George?"
"No."
"Not if I solemnly assure you that I have a good chance?"
"When it's a proved certainty we'll talk about it."
"Not if I tell you my mind's perfectly made up?"
"That's the point."
"Not if it meant a breach between you and me?"
"It looks as if I had to have a breach with somebody."
"Your friends. I know. I've admitted all that. It's beastly. But I'm afraid it can't be allowed to make any difference."
"Suppose I denounce you?"
"I'm sure you'll act perfectly conscientiously whatever you do."
"That would mean your complete exposure."
"I'm prepared for that."
"You said the other night that you only wanted to see and talk to her. You said you'd go no further than that. Do you call what happened this afternoon keeping your word?"
"I meant what I said at the time. You know that I honestly hadn't a thought of deceiving you. I'm afraid that word can't be kept. Perhaps I hadn't quite realised."
"Have you realised yet?"
"Oh!"
"You haven't. Let me help you. And I'll put it as much in your favour as I can. I'll assume you're standing still for the present. I'll even assume the other possibility, or impossibility, whichever it is—that you might actually turn round again. Even then what would it mean? It would mean that I, a guest of my old friends, was lending my countenance to something against every conception of mental—decency let us say. I think I know your dates and figures pretty well by this time. You were born in '75. Now, in 1920, we'll say you're eighteen. It's taken you forty-five years to live to eighteen, and if you're to live to forty-five again it will have taken you—how long?—seventy-two years. It will then be getting on for 1950. Jennie was born in 1903. You're now forty-five to her seventeen. If this thing comes off you'll be in the early forties together. But at the same time you'll be over seventy. Look at it, Derry—look at it."
"Look at it? I have looked at it. I'll look at it again if you like.... Now I've looked at it again. Only you and I know it. And anyway there's nothing in it."
"Julia Oliphant knows it."
"Then only you and I and Julia Oliphant know it, and there's nothing in it."
"Then tell me if there's anything in this. What guarantee have you that exactly the same thing won't happen to you again? Take the maddest view of all—that you actually might go forward. If indications are anything you're repeating your experiences already."
"How so?" he demanded.
"In this painting of yours. I heard your explanations to Mrs Aird this afternoon. You're starting with exactly the same ideas as before—complete dissociation from everything else that's ever been done. You're going to be the First Man again instead of the Millionth Man. How do you know it won't land you in the same mess? It used to be words; now it's paint, and that's all the difference I see."
There was a long pause; then I heard his soft, almost indulgent laugh.
"Look here, George," he said slowly. "I'll make you a fair offer. Can't you and I come to terms if I swear to you that I'll never touch another canvas or brush or pen or sheet of paper as long as I live? Will that satisfy you?"
"I'm afraid not."
"But doesn't that meet your objection, old fellow?"
"No. Because you'd be the same man whether you wrote or painted or not!"
"But how on earth can I alter that?"
I seized on his words. "Exactly. That's my whole meaning. You can't alter it. Whether you do the same or not, you are the same. For all I know you'll go on being it till the crack of doom. It's yourself that's been visited, not your books. And that's why things can't go on between you and Jennie Aird."
"Then you're going to stand between us as long as I am I?"
"That's about the size of it."
"Doesn't it strike you as a little—hard, George?" he asked slowly.
"Yes," I admitted doggedly. "But you'll be bearing it, not she."
By the swinging beam of Fréhel I saw that his head was bowed. Without my noticing it the riding-lights in the little harbour below had disappeared; as no boat could now put in till dawn the pécheurs had waded across the shallows and extinguished them. The tall Crucifix seemed to advance and to retire again into the gloom with the next revolution of the Light.
Then he raised his head and asked about the last question I expected.
"About my money, George. You don't know exactly how much I've got?"
"No, not at this moment."
"Who bought the stuff?"
"I sold it in the best market I could find."
Ironically came his reply. "Hasn't it got a name? Are there two of us?... Anyway, without worrying you too much about it, I'd like an account soon. I want that matter cleared up."
"Well, never mind furniture at present. That's a detail."
"Oh no it isn't!" he answered quickly. "We seem to have different ideas as to what's detail. You've given me quite a lot of what I call detail. This is important.—You really don't remember the name of the man who bought that furniture of mine?" he mocked me.
"I've already told you you can draw to any reasonable amount."
"I see.... Is this it, that my furniture isn't sold at all, and you're advancing me money on the security of it?"
"Security, Derry!"
"And I still have my furniture and I owe you five hundred francs?"
"Must we talk about this now?"
There was no mistake about the granite this time.
"Yes, we'd better," he said curtly. "We've wasted time enough about things that don't matter that"—he snapped his fingers. "I've listened to what you've got to say, and now I'm going to ask you to listen to me. I owe you five hundred francs, for which I'm most sincerely obliged. But I don't think I should have asked you if I'd known. And I want you to understand that it's all I do owe you."
"Derry, old fellow——"
"Tut-tut! One tale's always good till you hear the other side. It doesn't seem to strike you that you've made pretty free with me. I'm a subject for sums and mental arithmetic exercises—you're better at that than at accounts. I'm some kind of an oddity, that's got to be shoo-ed with an apron this way and that, and told where he's to go and not to go, and who he shall speak to and who he shan't. You'd be best pleased of all if you could shut your eyes and tell yourself that I didn't exist. But I do exist, and I'm not on sale for five hundred francs. I'm here on earth, and I don't see what you're going to do about it. I'm not less alive than anybody else; I'm more alive—a hundred times more alive. You can call me any age you please—but who'd be locked up, you or I, if you showed me to any reasonable being and told them I was forty-five? Care to try it on the Airds? I'll give you the chance if you like."
Bitterly as he spoke, he grew bitterer as he proceeded.
"This is not the first time you've interfered. You've made free with my latchkey before this. Julia Oliphant knows about me; who told her, and who gave you permission? It seems to me I've been pretty patient. I'm not saying you've not been decent about some things, that time when I was slipping about all over the scale, but I'm warning you now. I've listened to all you had to say. I've met you at every point. I've even offered—I'm hanged if I know why—not to write or paint again if that will please you. But beyond that——"
Then came an outburst the contempt of which I cannot reproduce.
"Writing! Painting! Books! Pictures! As if they had any more to do with life than a baby playing with its doll! They're to help fools to think they're thinking. They're to make 'em believe that but for some slight accident they could do the same themselves—as they could, and do! They call a thing like that a 'gift'; but what's the Gift that Life still has to give when they've said their very last word—they and their schools? What's been there all the time, waiting for us to get the dust out of our eyes?... George Coverham, try to come between me and that and as sure as God will bring to-morrow morning I'll put a stop to your arithmetic for ever! What do I care if I have to take a new name every day? What do I care if your friends the Airds bundle you out of the house? Do you think it matters to me whose father and mother and family history and papers I steal? That's all life seems to mean to some of you. 'Where did he come from? Who knows him? Is he French or English? What does he do for his living? Has he paid his Income Tax? Is he respectable? What did he do in the war? Where does he bank? What's his club? Where does he live and how much is his rateable value?' You can't see a man for all that! You can't even see me now for Derwent Rose and his tombstones of books! By Jove, I said I was a ghost once! But that was when I was on the slide! I'm no ghost now! It's you others who are the ghosts! It's you who'd better get off the map! J'y suis, j'y reste; I'm here—here!"
And again Fréhel showed him there—young, beautiful, indomitable and ruthless.
Yet what did he utter but his own deeper and deeper condemnation? Simple, heart-full, innocent Jennie Aird be mated with his piercing and impossible view of the world! She herself, yes, even in her body's beauty, to be what his books had formerly been, what his painting was to be again—the very medium of his transcendental transgression! Why, one peep at that awful sleeping dynamo of his mind would be enough to drive her mad, one glimpse of the experience that had been his suffice to shrivel her opening heart for ever! Did he think to put off his flames and clouds and lightnings every time he whispered a love-word into her ear? What fate would be hers, poor Semele, did he forget, as he had forgotten before now, and put forth the enormousness of his power by her side? With every word he spoke it was less and less to be thought of. As far as my own carcass was concerned he might do what he pleased. I would not stand by and see it done. His vision and will might exceed mine a thousandfold, but even in my humble heart glimmered the small flame of what I considered to be my duty. I faced him, waiting for the Light again.
"Very well," I said as it came over his face. "Am I to take that as your last word?"
"Then hear mine. I have a car waiting just off the Square. You may knock me on the head, as you've already threatened. At least I shall have no further responsibility for you then. But unless you do that I'm going to get straight into that car, drive to Ker Annic, and tell the Airds the whole thing before I go to bed. You'll then have the satisfaction that it's a straight fight in the open, and that you aren't creeping like a blight into a happy house under a name that isn't even your own."
He spoke very, very slowly. "You mean that, George?"
"Enough. I'm going to stand here without moving till the next time that Light shows your face. Then I shall do what I've said."
And I stood, still as the rocks at the foot of the Crucifix, giving him his chance.
V
The darkness seemed an omnipresent thing, positive rather than an absence, that invaded and became part of me, of him, of the place, of the hour. Not a star was to be seen, not one speck in the immensity of the night. I did not even look where I knew his black-bloused figure to be; his hand might have been uplifted for all I knew. Or for all I cared. Once more I was weary to death of him and his domination. There was not room for both of us. He might have the field henceforward to himself. I had done what I could.
It was an eleven-seconds interval. The Light came. Still I did not look at him. The Light passed away again.
Four seconds, and once more the Light.
Eleven seconds, the Light, four seconds, the Light....
Then only did I look up.
I had not heard him move, but he had done so. He had sunk to the rocks at the foot of the Calvary, the rocks worn smooth with the sitting of generations of evening gossips. I heard a faint choke.
Then his voice came.
"Isn't it—isn't it a little rough on a fellow, sir?"
In a moment I was on my knees by his side. "Derry! Derry! Derry!" I repeated over and over again. It was all the speech I could find.
"Isn't it rough on a fellow, sir? Isn't it? Isn't it?"
"Derry my boy, my boy!"
"I feel you're right in a way, sir—you're bound to be wiser than I am—but when I heard them singing that song this evening ... le long de mon calvaire ... en espérant j'ai pu souffrir ... rien n'est fini, tout recommence ... it seemed so like it all, sir—you don't know—you've no idea——"
I rocked him gently in my arms.
"You don't know—you can't possibly know—nobody knows who hasn't been through it. Mon calvaire—mon Dieu! And to have it hurt you like that just because you are able to hope! Not the end after all, but the beginning of everything! Oh, can't you see it, sir—not even a little bit of it?"
"Yes, talk, my boy—get it over——"
"I shall be all right in a minute. It simply got me by the throat. That song, I mean. I suppose it's just an ordinary song really—the French are like that—but it got me by the throat, it was so like me. So like the way things have been with me. What did they say it was called? I've forgotten."
"'Il est venu le Jour.'"
"Yes, that's it. The day's come. After all that. It came that night—I'm not making a joke, sir—that night in the garden. It's been day ever since. Night's been day, like a soft sun shining all night. And I wouldn't ask you to lift a finger to help me if I didn't know it was quite all right. I do know. It's she who's made everything all right. That's the funny thing about her—that she's made everything perfectly all right again. I wonder why that is?"
"Don't wonder. Just stay quiet a while."
"But a fellow can't help wondering a bit. Why should it have made everything all right the moment I set eyes on her? But she did. I told you about something happening before, sir, something I can't quite remember about. That seemed like some sort of an emptying—leaving me all empty and aching, if you understand. But this filled it all up again, with happiness and I don't know what—lovely things—all since that night. That's what makes me so sure. I wouldn't say it if it wasn't true. It isn't the kind of thing one cares to be untruthful about, is it? You're in the same house with her—you see her—you know what I mean——"
Between this simplicity and his late menace, what could I say for his comfort, what do for my own? I was torn in two. I was a weary, elderly man, careworn and disillusioned; but he, through unimaginable tribulation, had mysteriously found this place of stillness and peace and hope. What his intimidation had not done, that his utter reliance and trust now began to do. He sat up on the rocks and began to talk.
"You know something about my life, sir. Miss Oliphant knows most, of course, but you know quite a lot. If it doesn't sound most awfully conceited, I was rather a nice sort of fellow at eighteen. All the same I always felt there was something not quite right. I don't mean anything I did; I mean there always seemed to be a sheet of thick glass between me and the things I wanted to get close to. I could see through it all right, all the brightness and the colours, but somehow I couldn't get any nearer. There wasn't any feel of warmth somehow. It may sound silly to you, but I used to press up against that glass like a kid at a shop window full of things he wanted. It wasn't that I wasn't fond of things and people and so on. I was frightfully fond of them. But I couldn't manage to let them know it. Even my mother. When she wasn't there I was tremendously fond of her, but when she came—I don't know—of course I was fond then—I suppose it was my imagination. But when she wasn't there she meant an enormous lot to me, and when she came she was just a nice little mother I was very fond of but never managed to let her know—just as if I was ashamed. And it was so with everything else. I used to get excited over Shakespeare and Juliet and Hamlet and Falstaff and all those people, but they made other people seem rather shadowy. Then, when I was about twenty-one, it worried me fearfully sometimes. Other people didn't seem to be like that. I wanted to be like other people. They hadn't blocks of glass in front of them all the time. Somehow they seemed so nice and happy and warm all the time. I had a dog I was really fonder of than I was of anybody! And I wanted to be fond. I'm afraid this sounds absolute rot, sir, but I can't explain it any better."
"I'm very much interested. Go on."
"Well, that's lasted more or less all through my life. I'd get all in a glow about things—just things, and of course people too in a way: somebody's hair under a stained-glass window in a church, or the organ or the Psalms. But always something in between, I don't know what. It worried me because I knew I was all glow inside if I could only get it out. I was awfully fond of Miss Oliphant, for instance, but I simply couldn't let her know it. I used to go and see her sometimes and sit there wondering about it. 'Now here's a jolly sort of girl,' I used to think, 'as good as they make 'em—good-looking, sometimes nearly beautiful—and awfully fond of you. Now why can't you get on with her? Why is there always something you don't say, don't really want to say perhaps, but it would make such a difference if you could say it?' I used to ask myself that, but there was never any answer. There never has been. There it always was, that sheet of glass, as polished as you please, but shutting me right out from everything everybody else seemed to have."
"But your books, Derry? You weren't shut out from everybody there!"
"Perhaps that was where it went. You can give things to other people in a book you can't when you're sitting next to them. That's why I don't care if I never do anything of that sort again. I want to get near.... And now"—his voice fell to a happy hush—"it's all right. That was what she did, all in a moment, all in one look. That glass went. That's why I know that as long as she's near to me no harm will happen to me. Oh, I know it."
Then, without the slightest warning, he broke into a heartrending appeal. It was as if he had suddenly remembered that I was not yet won over.
"Tout recommence! Mon calvaire, mon calvaire!... Have I to lose it the moment I see it? Must I go back the same way? Can't I go the other? Haven't I carried my poor little bit of a cross too, sir? Haven't I? Haven't I? J'ai vécu des heures cruelles.... And hasn't it sometimes been so heavy that I've prayed it would crush me and get it over? And even when I've done the rottenest things haven't I always wanted to do something better—always? Thank God for the glass those times anyway! Sometimes I've stood off and looked at myself and said: 'Poor devil, it isn't you really—if you must do this get it over as quick as you can and start afresh!' I've always started afresh. I never give up hope.... And do I get nothing at all at the end of it, sir? Are you going to scrape up all those bits of glass she broke, and put them together again, and send me back the same way? Not even a chance, now that everything really is beginning again? Now that the day's come? Now that for a week every night's been like a soft warm sun shining? Are you going to turn me back?"
Oh, had he but knocked me on the head a quarter of an hour ago it would have been easier! Then had I been at rest, with those who had built desolate palaces for themselves before me. Or could I but have believed what he so firmly believed! Yet must I not almost believe it? Had he not now almost compelled me? What I had feared to find that morning at St Briac, the morning after the first meeting of their eyes over the car, had not happened, but something no less profound had. That hard clear obstruction that had stood immutably between him and life all his days had been taken away. I remembered my speculation as to whether there were not two loves, Jennie's and Julia's, a sacred and a profane. Two? How if he were right, and there were not two loves, but one love only, which is simply—Love? What then became of all my arithmetic, my rectitude, my conventions, even my duty to my friends? What, by comparison with that love, that law-annihilating love that breaks the invisible adamant fetters that bind the old Adam and bids the new man stand forth, were any or all of these things? They were no more than those social rates and taxes, registrations, commitments, undertakings, contracts, all the rest of the paper business of our lease of life on which he had lately poured his scorn. The infinitude of passion and suffering of a single human soul seemed to me to dwarf them all. And if a man must sin, let him sin at the fringe and circumference of things, not at their centre.
Could he give me any assurance whatever of these things he ached no more to enter his heaven than I ached to thrust him in.
Every four seconds, every eleven seconds, Fréhel opened the furnace of his white and blazing eye. Tremulously in and out of the gloom the Calvary seemed to advance and to recede again. Dimly I distinguished Derry's face—young, faithful, agonised, interceding for his lovelier self....
It is a fearful responsibility a man past his prime assumes when he bids such a creature to hope no more, but to veil his face and to return to the pit whence he was digged....
And how had he offended me? He had merely received a note—had not even given it, but had simply accepted it and held for a moment the fingers that had passed it....
Had I, in my own insignificant youth, never done such a thing?
"Derry," I said gently, "I can't go over old ground again. At present—I say at present—I'm staying in the house. I must now decide how much longer I can stay there. But first tell me exactly what it is you propose to do."
"I haven't any intentions at all, sir."
"At present you haven't. You hadn't before, but that didn't last. What is it you want?"
"Only that you shouldn't thrust me back into—that other."
"I can't think beyond that, sir."
"But there will be something beyond that."
He was silent while the Light revolved twice, thrice, then:
"Et revivre pour t'adorer ... like a soft warm sun even in the night," he breathed scarcely audibly. "You can't call it sleeping. Something blessed that you can't see is going on behind it all the time. Something seems to be breathing. That's what happens in the night now. It isn't sleeping; you're too happy to want to go to sleep. Then she smiles. Not like in the toyshop. She didn't smile in the toyshop; that was a different kind of look altogether. She smiled yesterday when we were having tea, but you weren't looking. And twice to-day—twice.... At first I was afraid my painting was going to excite me a bit, upset me. Once or twice it did a little. I didn't want to talk about it much this afternoon for fear of it upsetting me. But everything calms down when she looks and smiles. It's just her being there. There isn't any glass at all; the glass is between us two and everybody else in the world. Painting's perfectly safe with her by me—perfectly safe.... But nothing's safe without. I shall slip again without her now. I felt myself even begin to slip that time you said she was going away. It was frightening.... Don't ask me to try the experiment, sir; it's so horribly risky; but if they were to spring it on me that she was going away I know quite well what would happen. It would be like before; I should have to pack up my traps and disappear again. And that time it would be the end.... But as long as I'm with her it's all clear ahead—the new way—the way I always tried to find and always missed—il est venu le jour——"
He was hardly speaking to me. Little as I could see of his face, I could divine what passed there. After that recent violence, this almost dumb meekness and awaiting my judgment. And because he was not speaking to me, but was communing with his own solitary soul as gravely as he had bent his knee before That which rose above us into the night, I knew that I must end by believing him. At a word I could have sent her away. He had offered to put himself to the test of her departure. That he might be believed he had even offered to risk once more that hideous hiatus in his life.
But it was not demonstration that swayed me to my irrevocable act. It was rather that transcending love that he himself had invoked. Love and pity lest this my son should once more be cast to the wolves of pain welled up like a sudden fountain in my heart. Nay, not from my own poor heart did it well, but from That above us that showed its dim crowned head and outspread arms every four seconds, every eleven seconds, four times a minute, cloaked itself in the night again, and again softly reappeared with the sweep of the occulted Light—from That I think my pity descended. No thought for the morrow had that Original taken, no care of father or mother or friend, but only for the weak and the outcasts of the world. Who was outcast if this grave and destiny-ridden young figure before me was not? I had stood before him waiting for him to strike me down; now in his patience and submission he struck me down.
I could leave the Airds. I could turn my back on them for ever. This dark-bloused lad was my loved son, who mutely implored me to be given his chance. Were the Airds to die I should have to part from them. Death, that comes unannounced at any moment, parts us from all our friends. My portrait need never hang in the Lyonnesse Club to remind Madge Aird that she had once had a friend who had betrayed her. I need not even return to England. So Derry might but establish himself, what did it matter though I wandered? I had no love, nobody had a love for me, such as that that made his days and nights softly radiant. In a few years I should be gone. But he would be once more in the glory of his prime, living a life of my giving. In him would be my resurrection. To help him over this dead point the rest of my life was at his service.
His prayer should be answered.
But not without a stipulation. When all is said one has to be practical. Should she after all fail to lead him by the hand forward again into those fair and untrodden fields of life, all was rescinded. He must report progress. No step must be taken without my knowledge. One does not meditate a treason against one's friends quite so light-heartedly as all that. Nor need he yet be told what I had in my mind. I turned to him.
"I shall go back now," I said.
He did not speak.
"But I shall do nothing to-night. In fact I won't do anything till I've seen you again."
He did not thank me in words.
"But the understanding is that you do nothing either. Is that agreed?"
"I promise that, sir."
"Then that's all. I'm very tired. I think I want to sleep."
"Won't you lean on my shoulder, sir?"
"Perhaps I will——"
Only to touch her willing hand—only to carry her letter in his breast—only to feel that in the unison of their two hearts the rest of the world might be lost in oblivion——
VI
My reason for not telling him of my decision was that I did not wish him to have the uneasiness of knowing that he was responsible for it. Nor am I apologising for the mood in which I had made my choice. I had done so, however, without very much regard for necessary and practical details. These it was that I began to turn over in my mind as, racked and restless, I lay in my bed that night.
And first of all I began to realise that my choice involved me straight away in that very web of sophistry and dissimulation that I had wished to avoid. I had imagined on the spur of the moment that by walking out of the Airds' house with the most plausible explanation I could find, or for that matter none at all, I should be observing some sort of a decency to the roof that had so hospitably sheltered me. But when I came to look at it again!... Good God, what sort of decency was that? To begin with, when you walk away from somewhere you walk to somewhere, and where was I to walk to? Away from Dinard altogether? That would be to walk away from Derry. Take him away with me? That would be to take him away from Jennie and all hope. Move to an hotel? I should be running into my late friends every hour, at every turn.
In a word, what I was contemplating was not war on the Airds, nor even a hypocritical neutrality. It was a vile assassination. And suddenly I saw, and with a most singular clearness, that my only way out, the only possible and honourable course, was not to leave the Airds and Dinard at all, but to leave the earth altogether. Believe me, who know, that that in the end is what contact with such a man as Derwent Rose amounts to.
But I cannot say that suicide, sentimental, religious or of whatever kind, has ever strongly attracted me. There was a much, much simpler way out. Derry knew nothing of what had passed through my mind while Fréhel's sweeping beam had conjured up that pallid Christ out of the darkness. I had not told him that I was prepared to sacrifice myself for him. All that he had been promised was a respite on terms till to-morrow.
A flood of mean gratitude swept over me that I had told him no more. I have never known a viler or more shameful ease than that that possessed me when it became plain that I could go back on him and he be none the wiser. I am not sure that my recreant lips had not the impudence to thank God that only I knew the depth of my cowardice and indecision.
For my plan was utterly impossible of execution. It was as impossible to give him his chance as I had found it to refuse it. Racked and restless I tossed. I even imagine I had a slight touch of delirium, for fantastic thoughts and images seemed to dance and interweave and pop up and disappear again before me. I saw Derry back in Cambridge Circus again, and his black oak furniture played the most unamusing tricks. Sometimes his table would be a litter of newspapers and clothing and brown paper, with an overturned teacup and the two halves of a torn novel lying on the top; then it would magically clear itself, and Jennie would be standing by it, a sort of mental extension of Jennie, whose face, however, I did not see. His catalogued shelves of books would disappear, and there would be an easel in the middle of the room, and canvases round the walls, and these would change to the rugs and lacquer of Julia Oliphant's little recess.... Then the whole of Cambridge would slide obliquely away, and I would see Jennie's back as she mounted the ladder of a South Kensington Mews. Then he would appear from nowhere and take her in his arms, and he had a golden beard, and the next moment was riding in a hansom with nothing of Jennie visible but her slipper.... Julia Oliphant's slipper in the Piccadilly, Peggy and her garters, lots of slippers, Jennie's dancing slippers, Jennie in the Dinard Bazaar, Jennie at the guichet slipping a note into his hand. The ticking of my watch on the table annoyed me, but I did not get up, and presently I had ceased to hear it. Then it came again, regularly, irregularly, once every four seconds, once every eleven seconds, tick-tick, darkness and the Light, tick-tick, darkness and the Light....
So I tossed, waking every now and then with a start to tell myself that something must be done—where nothing was possible to be done.
And so, like Peter, I was prepared to deny him ere the cock crew.
I had, in fact, a touch of fever. The next morning I managed to dress for déjeuner, but when I entered the salon I must needs choose that moment to give a little lurch and stagger. Alec caught me.
"Here, what's all this about?" he said.
He gave me a quick look. "It isn't all right. You'd better come upstairs to bed again."
So I was undressed, and back into bed I was put, my protests notwithstanding.
The affection with which I was treated certainly helped me very little in my resolution to glide like a snake noiselessly out of this house, leaving my poison behind me. Madge was in and out the whole of the afternoon, a perfect angel of attention and comfort; Alec hunted out an English doctor—I am sure he believed that a French one would subtly and diabolically have made away with me. I was told that I must stay in bed for some days. I demurred, but I really doubt whether I could have got up.
So they turned Ker Annic upside down for me. To leave father and mother and friends is a thing you have to do quickly and with immediate acceptance of the consequences, or not to do at all. You mustn't begin to let people be kind to you.
And no less than in material things were they solicitous to keep from me anything that might worry me. Madge laughed away my apologies for the havoc I made of her engagements, Alec vowed that it was a top-hole way of spending a holiday to sit at my open window, pretending he was smoking outside, while the gentle summer breeze that stirred the curtains blew it all in again. I think his crowning kindness was to get in a barber daily to shave me. Were I to grow a beard I fear it would not be a golden one.
And even Jennie visited me once or twice, which is very much indeed from seventeen who has never known a headache to one who has known more than he cares to think about.
On Jennie's first two visits to me other people were in and out of the room; but on the third occasion I was alone. It was mid-afternoon, and Madge and Alec, I knew, had gone out to pay a call. They had left me everything that I was likely to need until their return, and I had imagined the house to be empty. But Jennie tapped and entered, and asked me how I was. Then she crossed over and stood by the window, where the sun touched the gold of her hair and showed the shadow of her arms within her light sleeves.
"Nothing very amusing to do this afternoon, Jennie?" I asked from my pillow.
"No, only pottering about," she replied.
"Then won't you come and have tea with me presently?"
"I'll order it now if you like."
"Do, and then come back and sit with me unless it bores you."
She went out, and presently returned. She was not particularly good about a sick-room. She gave a superfluous touch to things here and there, and then bent over me and shook my pillow with a gesture that somehow reminded me of that quick little run to her mother's side at the tramway terminus at St Briac.
"Would you like me to read to you?" she asked.
"Thank you—presently perhaps."
"Did they change those flowers this morning?"
I smiled. "There won't be any flowers left in the garden soon, I get so many."
"Then there isn't anything I can do," she said helplessly.
Poor child, I don't think that I myself was entirely the object of her concern—no, not even though I was so blest as to be a link between her and a certain young Englishman who went about in French clothes and was known by a French name. I don't think she quite knew what she wanted, except that it was exquisite to be a little mournful, and to be doing something for somebody. In spite of that impulsive little gesture, I don't think her mother had her confidence. That was rather the compounding of a secrecy than a confidence. It was an atonement, a guilty little reparation that but locked up her secret the more securely. I am aware that young girls are traditionally supposed to fly instantly to their mothers with their troubles of this sort. I can only say that that is not my experience. Far more frequently they will fly to a confidante of their own age, and even once in a while to a person like myself. Her mother would be much, oh, ever so much to her; but she would not be told about that note that had been surreptitiously slipped from hand to hand.
"Well, what have you been doing with yourself for the last three days, Jennie?" I asked.
A Brittany crock of genêts made fragrant the room. Her eyes were fixed on the flowers.
"Yesterday I went for a bicycle ride," she said.
"Oh? I didn't know you had a bicycle here."
"I hadn't. I hired one."
"Where did you go? Anywhere nice?"
Instead of answering my question she said, with her eyes still on the flowers, "I've got something for you, Uncle George."
"And what's that?"
"Here it is."
From some tuck in the region of her waist she drew out a note, which she handed to me. With my elbow on my pillow I read it. It was on a page torn out from a sketch-book, and it ran:
"I hear you're laid up and hope you'll soon be all right again. I didn't thank you properly the other night; I couldn't; you know what I mean. Don't worry about my not keeping my promise; that's all right; everything's as-you-were till you're about again. But then I want to see you as soon as ever you can. You get well and don't worry.
"D. R."
Slowly I folded up the note and put it into the pocket of my pyjama-jacket. She seemed fully to expect my silence. The shadow of a marten fled swiftly across the sill of the window. The house-martens built at Ker Annic.
At last, "I see," I said slowly. "I see."
She did not seem to think it necessary to reply. Neither was it.
"I see," I said again. Then, "Yesterday you went cycling," I said. "What did you do the day before?"
"I went for a walk."
"And the day before that?"
"I went for a walk too."
"Jennie ... were they supposed to know about these walks—you know who I mean?"
"Father and mother? No."
"Where did they think you were?"
"Don't know. I didn't say anything at all."
"They've no idea you went for two walks and a bicycle ride with Monsieur Arnaud?"
No reply.
That is to say, no reply in words; but for anything else her reply was plain enough. In every line of her lovely resolute short-featured little face I read that they did not know, were not to know, and that in the last resort she didn't care a straw whether they knew or not. And I remembered that in the matter of the note it was she who had taken the initiative, not he. A beautiful young woman is the devil from the moment when she gets too old to slap.
But the thing was grave. He had given me an undertaking which, his note now assured me, he was faithfully keeping; but I had no undertaking from her. And bachelor as I am, I am under no delusions as to what happens when mine, the proud, stalking, choosing sex, is marked down by its demure, still and emotional opposite number. Something can be done with us; we give undertakings and abide by them; but what can be done when the Jennie Airds take the bit between those pearls of their teeth? I shook my head. I shake it over the same problem still.
"But look here, Jennie," I said quietly. "This is all very well, but is it quite—playing the game?"
This also she evidently expected. "About father and mother? I've left school. I'm old enough to think for myself. Mother says so. Anyway I'm going to. She always said I should."
"But mother doesn't know about these walks and bicycle rides."
Obstinately she contested every little point, even a casual plural.
"There's only been one bicycle ride."
"One then. She doesn't know about it."
"I can't help that."
"But of course you could——"
"No I couldn't," she rapped out. "I mean I just can't help it. How can anybody help it? How can anybody do anything about it? It's a thing that happens to you, and it happened to them before, and I expect they did just as they liked about it, and didn't care a bit what anybody said! I can just see mother if anybody'd said she wasn't going for a walk with father!"
"You can't see anything of the sort, Jennie. If I remember rightly what your mother said, she had to sit still in her own carriage till her own footman opened the door. That was what happened when your mother was your age."
"Well, they don't do that nowadays, and mother knows it," she retorted.
The heartless logic of youth! It will turn your own words against you as soon as look at you. Because her mother had recognised that the world did not stand still she was to be made an accessory to this deception.
"Then," I said presently, "if they don't know, ought I to know?"
"You knew before," she said. "They didn't."
"But they're bound to find out."
"Oh, I expect everything will be settled by then!" she calmly announced.
The dickens it would! I lay back on my pillow. Fortunately the appearance of tea at that moment gave me a little time in which to collect my thoughts. Jennie removed various objects from the bedside table, took the tray from the maid, and began to pour out.
"Then," I said by and by, "why aren't you bicycling—or walking—this afternoon?" I wanted to have the position quite clear. If she could spend three days with him in succession, why not a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth?
"I had to give that note to you," she said.
"Ah, the note! I forgot that.... Have you any idea what's in it?"
She blushed crimson, flamed with reproach. All the same, I contrasted her shameless deception of her parents with this point of honour about peeping into an unsealed note to myself. These heaven-born young beauties draw the line in such odd places.
"I never thought——", she said, biting her lip; and I hastened to set her right.
"Good heavens, Jennie, you can't think that I meant that! I meant in a general way, what the subject of it is."
"I know what he thinks," she said, the fierce colour slowly retiring again.
"Well, what does he think?"
"He thinks you were perfectly ripping to him the other night, about not doing anything till you saw him again, and when I told him you were ill he was awfully upset, and tore a page out of his sketch-book and wrote the note that very moment."
The devil!... But I went on.
"So he was sketching, and you went with him?"
"Yes. He did a sweet sketch, with me in it," she breathed, her eyes softly shining.
Only to see her and to go for bicycle-rides with her—only to speak to her and to paint her among the glowing sarrasin, the green translucence of the woods, the golden seaweed of the rocks or wherever it was——
"Oh, he did! And where was this?"
It was neither among the sarrasin, nor in the green woods, nor on the shore.
"It was miles and miles away, right past Saint Samson, nearly at Dinan, at a château called La Garaye," she said softly. "I never saw anything so lovely. There's a huge wide avenue of beeches like a tunnel—it's all in the middle of a lovely beechwood—and there's a lovely soft grass-ride right down the middle. Then at the bottom there are two great masses of ivy that used to be the château gates. And past them are the little white bits of the ruins. And there was an enormous loud humming everywhere, like a hundred aeroplanes. That was them thrashing at the farm with four horses that went round and round. We rode our bicycles down the green ride and put them up by some farm-buildings. They don't a bit mind your going anywhere you like, and they said he could paint if he wanted to. So he got out his things and I watched him. He didn't want me for the picture at once, because he had all the other to do first. Then he made me lie down in a frightfully nettley place, but he only laughed and said I'd got to be just there because it was where he wanted me. My hands are all nettled yet, look. So he painted me, Uncle George, and that horse-thing never stopped humming, and oh, it was so hot and blue and drowsy—I nearly went to sleep once. But the loveliest thing of all was afterwards. We climbed about among all those stones and ivy, and then there was a tower. Just like a castle tower, Uncle George, but not a hole or a window anywhere, except a place at the bottom just big enough to creep through. And what it was was an old pigeon-place, where they used to keep pigeons. All honeycombed inside with holes for thousands and thousands of pigeons. But, of course, there weren't any pigeons there, only an old sitting hen among the nettles that scurried round and round and then clucked away. It was like being at the bottom of a kiln or something, with grasses and flowers and things round the top and the sky e-ver so blue! And all those thousands of pigeon-holes, all grown up with birch and ivy and nettles and that silly old hen! I picked a bit of herb-robert. Oh, it was a heavenly place!"
Heavenly indeed, I thought grimly. Heaven enough inside that columbarium, with only a small hole to creep in at, and the muffled drone of that horse-gin, shut out by the walls that had once been filled with the cushing of a thousand doves and only God's blue looking down on them from the top!
Heavenly enough to make your heart ache when you remembered that there, in that ruined place of dead doves, he conscientiously sought to keep his promise to me—while she had given never a word to take back. Oh, I saw it all right. No question about that. She took very good care that I should see it....
For I was being as softly cajoled and canvassed and propagandised as ever I was in my life. Derry, piloting me from shop to shop into the Dinard Bazaar, had taken me by the arm; but she wound herself in among my very heartstrings. And her plan was to upheap me with unasked confidences before I could say her nay. After that, if I guessed her thoughts rightly, there would be nothing for me to do but to respect the sacred but unwanted encumbrance. I should then be enlisted against Alec and Madge. Those of us whom the years have perhaps mellowed a little are ever at the mercy of calculated guile of this sort. To tell somebody something they don't want to know—and then to put them upon their honour not to divulge it!
The boy, the father of the man, indeed! Save us from the machinations of the maiden who is mother of the woman!
For she was a woman. In little more than a week or two she had almost visibly altered, shot up into maturity. I had no doubt that he would keep his word to me; but—only to see her, only to speak to her! Only! Though it were but looking, what inch of beauty was there about her of which I could dare to say, "His eyes have not embraced that, his glance has not been as his very lips upon it?" Though it were but hearing, what tone was there in the sweet gamut of her voice of which I could tell myself, "His ears at any rate have not heard that?" Not one. And under the homage of his gazing, under the flattery of his hearing, the last particle of her girlhood had turned and altered. That hair, so recently a ruddy plait to be "put up" on occasion, was now a bride's single garland, its golden strands to be unwound again on an occasion that was not even her parents' concern. Disdain was now all that young Charterhouse, young Rugby had from those pebble-grey eyes. And that tongue of hers, lately so petulant with the world, was now her subtlest weapon, to get under my guard, to seduce me with her confidences about pigeon-towers and what not, and by and by (I had not the slightest doubt) to say with a touching and heartfelt sigh, "Oh, what a comfort it is to have one person one can tell everything to!"
But this was all very well. Quite excellent to pat my pillow, and ask me whether my flowers had been changed, and to fuss about pouring out tea for me. But, while I had more or less got their measure singly, I had no idea what double-dealing they might not be capable of together. So as she still sat with shining eyes, dreaming again of that columbarium, I pressed to the next point.
"So he painted you. All in one sitting?"
She dropped the eyes. "I think he said it might take three or four."
"In fact it might be cheaper in the long run to buy the bicycle instead of hiring it?"
She was demure. "Oh, I don't think so, Uncle George."
"What do they charge for the hire of a bicycle?"
"I don't know, Uncle George. I haven't paid anything yet."
"Then you still have it? Haven't they asked any questions about it?"
She looked quickly and innocently up. "Father?... Oh, it isn't here! You see the tram's almost as quick to St Briac."
"Oh! Then it's at St Briac?"
"Yes. In the kitchen."
"The kitchen where Coco lives?"
"Yes. That one. But, of course, Coco's outside except when it's raining. And he has sung 'Quand je bois mon vin clairet.' He sang it beautifully."
"I'm sure he did," I assented grimly.... "Now tell me a little more of what Monsieur Arnaud said when he was so grateful to me for not doing my plain duty."
Her eyes were full on mine, with an expression I did not understand. Somehow the pretty scatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose seemed to give the look an added directness. Her lips parted, but not in a smile.
"You needn't call him Monsieur Arnaud," she said.
"What then?" I asked quickly. "What do you call him, if I may ask?"
At her reply the teacup almost dropped from my hand.
"That's really what he said I had to tell you this afternoon," she said. "Of course I call him Derry, like you."
VII
I was hardly ill enough to have a temperature-chart over the head of my bed; had there been one heaven knows how high into the hundreds it must have leaped. I had been prepared for progression, development. Swiftly as things seemed to have advanced, from taking a single bicycle ride with him to keeping a bicycle in his kitchen was after all only a matter of degree. But this, of so totally different a piece, positively stunned me.
"Derry!" I echoed stupidly. "Derry what?"
"Rose, of course." Then, rushing almost breathlessly to forestall me, "But of course I know it's the most fr-r-right-ful secret! I know that only the three of us know. And it's splendid of you, darling Uncle George, to have stuck up for him the way you did! I wouldn't breathe a single word, not if they were to stick knives into me!"
Her eyes brimmed with thanks for my loyalty, disloyalty or whatever it was. But what, in God's name, had he been mad enough to tell her? Everything? Had he told her the whole story rather than strangle her on the spot?
"Tell me what he said," I moaned in a weak voice. Better know the worst and get it over.
"Of course I'm going to. But oh, how could I be so horrid to you about that note! As if you would think that I should peep into a note anyway! You do forgive me, don't you?"
"If you're going to tell me tell me quickly," I groaned.
So this, if you please, is what came next:
"It was while we were in that pigeon-place, where the hen was. They look like rows and rows of little square holes, where the pigeons used to live I mean, but when you put your hand in they're quite big inside, all scooped out, lots of room for both pigeons and all their eggs. And one row hooks round inside one way and the other the other. I discovered that when I put my hand in, and I turned round to tell Derry. And do you know, Uncle George, he's got such a funny name for that place. He calls it the Tower of Oblivion. I didn't know what oblivion was, so I didn't know what he meant just at first, but I think it's a splendid name for it now. You see——"
"You were saying that you turned round to tell him something."
"I was just coming to that. So I turned round, and at first I had rather a fright, because I couldn't see him. I thought he'd gone, but I didn't see how he could, because there was only that one little way in and I was standing close to it. Then I saw him behind the bushes and things, all among the nettles, and his head was against the wall. I made a noise, but he didn't seem to hear me. So then I touched him.
"'What's the matter, M'sieur Arnaud?' I said. 'Is something the matter?'
"Well, he didn't move, Uncle George. For ever so long he didn't move. Then he turned round, and oh, his poor eyes! I don't mean he was crying. He didn't cry once all the time. But he made me so anxious I didn't know what to do.
"'What is the matter, M'sieur Arnaud? Do tell me what's the matter!' I said.
"'You mustn't call me that,' he said. 'It isn't my name.'
"'Not your name!' I said. 'But Sir George Coverham calls you that, and mother calls you that, and Sir George wouldn't have told mother so if it wasn't so, and they call you that where you live!'
"'They do, and it isn't my name,' he said. 'I want to tell you my name,' he said.
"Well, I thought it awfully funny everybody calling him something that wasn't his name. So I said, 'Well, what is your name?'
"'Rose,' he said.
"'What besides Rose?' I said.
"'Derwent,' he said. 'Derwent Rose. But George calls me Derry.'
"'George? Do you mean Sir George Coverham?' I said.
"'Yes. I sometimes call him George,' he said.
"And then, Uncle George, he put his head against the wall again and went on saying to himself, 'The Tower of Oblivion, the Tower of Oblivion,' over and over again."
I closed my eyes, but it was like closing them in a swing, so sick and dizzy did I feel. I had never seen that Tower in my life, yet somehow I seemed to be there—walled in, cut off from the rest of mankind, with only that hot deep blue overhead, and the grasses that fringed the circular top minutely bright and intense against it. The loud droning of the threshing-gin at the adjacent farm seemed to be in my ears, but in my heart was a more moving murmur. Gentle and forgotten place! With what croonings, what flutterings, had it not once been astir! Those little cavities into which she had thrust her hand were the cells of a once-throbbing heart. But who had built a Tower of stone to guard the dove's faithfulness? What masonry could make that, the very emblem of love, more secure? Of all birds, the constant dove to be thus immured? Towers are for the defence of the helpless, not of that invulnerable meekness and strength. All the stones in the world could not more fortify those soft immutable hearts. Such humility, yet so stable: such defencelessness, yet so steadfast! It was in this wondrous place, thrice strong without but ten times strong within, that Derwent Rose had sought his atonement. He too, hard without, was all tenderness within. He had no choice but to lie to the rest of the world, but she must be told the truth. Arnaud would do well enough for others, but he had no peace unless to her he was Derwent Rose. It was his comfort to tell her so, and that Tower was in truth his confessional, the Oblivion of his dead years.
"But of course you know all about it, Uncle George," she went on. "I didn't, you see, and that's what made it sound so queer. So I said to him, 'But why do you call yourself Arnaud if your name is Rose?'
"'Because something once happened to me,' he said.
"'What?' I asked him.
"'I don't know,' he said. 'George doesn't know. Nobody knows. A doctor once tried to tell me, but he didn't know either.'
"'But what sort of a thing?' I said. 'What does it do?'
"'It makes me younger,' he said. 'I'm years and years older than I look. I'm not young at all.'
"'But I don't understand,' I said. 'If it makes you young then you are young, aren't you?'
"And then he smiled. I was so glad to see him smile. He'd been fearfully mopey up to then.
"'That's so,' he said. 'And anyway it's all over now. If it wasn't I shouldn't be telling you. If it wasn't over I shouldn't be here, Jennie.'
"He called me Jennie for the first time. He hadn't called me anything up to then, ever.
"'Then if it's all over what are you bothering about it for?' I said. 'Was it your fault?'
"'No,' he said.
"'Then,' I said, 'if a thing isn't a person's fault I think we ought to be sorry for them, and it doesn't matter if it's all over. And,' I said, 'if Uncle George calls you Derry I'm going to call you Derry too. It really is all over, Derry dear?'
"'Look, Jennie,' he said.
"And then, Uncle George, he looked up at the sky out of the top of the Tower, and bent his knee and crossed himself three times, like this."
Over her young breast her hand did what his had done.
"'And you promise it wasn't your fault?' I said.
"'That was my promise, Jennie,' he said.
"'Then,' I said, 'I don't want to hear another word about it. I won't listen. You're not to tell me any more.'
"So I wouldn't listen, and when he opened his mouth I just did this——"
And laughingly, with her hands tight over her ears, she shook her head. She would no more peep behind his word than she would have peeped into his note.
"And all this was yesterday?"
"Yes."
"Where is he to-day?"
"I only saw him just for a minute this morning. He wouldn't let me go with him to-day. He said I must come to you and tell you what I've just told you. So I waited till father and mother had gone out and then I came."
"And when father and mother come back? How do I stand? What am I to do?"
She sat straight up. "To do, Uncle George? But you promised him!"
"I promised him for the moment."
"Well, this is the moment, isn't it? You'll see him as soon as ever you get up again, won't you?"
"Between the two of you I don't seem to have very much choice," I muttered....
Suddenly through the open window came the sound of voices below. Alec and Madge had returned. Jennie flew to my glass, and then, apparently finding all well there, turned, smiled, and put her finger on her lips. She was busily packing up my tray when Madge entered.
"Well, decided to live, George?" the kind creature rallied me. "All sorts of sympathetic messages for you from the Nobles and the Fergusons and the Tank Beverleys—run-after creature that you are! Been to sleep?"
"No."
Jennie passed behind her mother with the tray. She gave me a half-veiled glance as she did so. Then, almost imperceptibly, she brushed her mother's shoulder with her lips.
And well, I thought, she might!
"Jennie been reading to you?" said Madge.
"No, we've just been talking."
"Well, you'll have somebody else to talk to the day after to-morrow. We didn't want to trouble you with the affairs of this world when you were at death's door, but who do you think's coming?"
I made a great effort. "Animal, vegetable or mineral?"
"Angel, whichever that is," said Madge.
"I've angels enough about me."
"Pooh!... Julia Oliphant's coming. So you'd better get your colour back in case she wants to paint that portrait here."
With which comforting words she took up my bowl of quite fresh flowers and marched off to get some more.