CHAPTER IX
FOR THE LAST TIME
Memory has many merciless weapons, but none keener, crueller than a room which has belonged to our dead. Who amongst us has escaped that moment of return after what seems the culmination of all agonies when the mere position of a chair, a glove thrown down idly and forgotten, a little touch of familiar disorder tears open the freshly closed grave and shows us on our way to a new, seemingly endless road of pain?
Something of that impotent grief laid hands on Tristram as he stood on the threshold of his old home. The barely furnished room was as he had left it that night of Meredith's visit. An instinct had forbidden his return. Shortly afterwards he had gone to Trichinopoly to be married, and since then the place had stood deserted.
The camp-bed had been tidied by Meredith's conscientious hand, and the few breakfast things washed and replaced, but there was cigarette ash on the table and the lamp stood where it had burnt between them. It had a grey, dead look, as though it had burnt itself out. The chair where he had sat in that final hour of reckoning expressed vividly the movement with which he had risen. There were small, regular fragments of torn cardboard beneath the table, and the dust lay thick and white over them like a shroud. The dust was everywhere. It veiled the photograph of his mother so that he could not see her face.
And the dead man whose personality the place expressed so poignantly was himself. He felt towards it as a spirit may do, looking down on the body which it has quitted for ever. Not years, but a deep, narrow gulf of experience separated him from the grown boy who had lived out his joyous, romantic creed between these wooden walls, who had striven and dreamed in their cool solitude, and gone thence day after day to fight the bitterest of all realities, human suffering, himself living in a world of his own imagining.
Looking back, he saw that those had been winged days of inspiration. He saw that in his dreams he had stood close to the inner life of men which is greater than reality and had seen visions and been dimly, gloriously aware of great truths. These things had gone from him. He stood with his feet planted on firm earth and knew nothing but the dust and the turmoil and the darkness.
But because there was stern stuff in him, he went about his work patiently. With the help of the servant who accompanied him, he dusted and tidied like a woman, unpacked his medicine-chest and set out his instruments in their glass cases. The two tabbies which he had set at liberty prowled disconsolately about their old home, seeming to miss something. He called to them and fed them, but they did not respond, and presently they slipped out into the street and vanished. He let them go. He felt that they would not return. They had forgotten him and had grown wild in their captivity.
The brief dusk which precedes the Indian night shrouded the village street, when at last, his work done, he came out and closed the door of the hut behind him. The street was empty. That fact did not as yet appear strange to him, for the murderous heat of the day, far from relaxing, seemed to have become intensified and hung thick and sullen in the tainted air. Overhead the sky threw off its brazen robes and came out in a luminous purple, whose darker brilliancy was no less sinister. As yet there was no sign of the break for which the land waited in gasping agony.
Tristram went on his way towards the cross-roads. He passed a little group of old men returning from the river and would have spoken to them, but they salaamed and there was something in that ceremonious greeting, in their stony, expressionless faces which chilled the blood and forced him to go on wordless.