The two friends were left alone, face to face with a rather difficult silence, only the least degree of nervousness apparent, so far as Herbert was concerned, in that odd aloof sustained air of impersonality that had so baffled his companion in their first queer talk together.
‘Your sister said just now, Herbert,’ blurted Lawford at last. ‘“Here’s Nicholas Sabathier come to say good-bye” well, I—what I want you to understand is that it is Sabathier, the worst he ever was; but also that it is “good-bye.”’
Herbert slowly turned. ‘I don’t quite see why “goodbye,” Lawford. And—frankly, there is nothing to explain. We have chosen to live such a very out-of-the-way life,’ he went on, as if following up a train of thought.... ‘The truth is if one wants to live at all—one’s own life, I mean—there’s no time for many friends. And just steadfastly regarding your neighbour’s tail as you follow it down into the Nowhere—it’s that that seems to me the deadliest form of hypnotism. One must simply go one’s own way, doing one’s best to free one’s mind of cant—and I dare say clearing some excellent stuff out with the rubbish. One consequence is that I don’t think, however foolhardy it may be to say so, I don’t think I care a groat for any opinion as human as my own, good or bad. My sister’s a million times a better woman than I am a man. What possibly could there be, then, for me to say?’ He turned with a nervous smile. ‘Why should it be good-bye?’
Lawford glanced involuntarily towards the door that stood in shadow duskily ajar. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we have talked, and we think it must be that, until, at least,’ he smiled faintly, ‘I can come as quietly as your old ghost you told me of; and in that case it may not be so very long to wait.’
Their eyes met fleetingly across the still, listening room. ‘The more I think of it,’ Lawford pushed slowly on, ‘the less I understand the frantic purposelessness of all that has happened to me. Until I went down, as you said, “a godsend of a little Miss Muffet,” and the inconceivable farce came off, I was fairly happy, fairly contented to dance my little wooden dance and wait till the showman should put me down into his box again. And now—well, here I am. The whole thing has gone by and scarcely left a trace of its visit. Here I am for all my friends to swear to; and yet, Herbert, if you’ll forgive me troubling you with this stuff about myself, not a single belief, or thought, or desire remains unchanged. You will remember all that, I hope. It’s not, of course, the ghost of an apology, only the mere facts.’
Herbert rose and paced slowly across to the window. ‘The longer I live, Lawford, the more I curse this futile gift of speech. Here am I, wanting to tell you, to say out frankly what, if mind could appeal direct to mind, would be merely as the wind passing through the leaves of a tree with just one—one multitudinous rustle, but which, if I tried to put into words—well, daybreak would find us still groping on....’ He turned; a peculiar wry smile on his face. ‘It’s a dumb world: but there we are. And some day you’ll come again.’
‘Well,’ said Lawford, as if with an almost hopeless effort to turn thought into such primitive speech, ‘that’s where we stand, then.’ He got up suddenly like a man awakened in the midst of unforeseen danger, ‘Where is your sister?’ he cried, looking into the shadow. And as if in actual answer to his entreaty, they heard the clinking of the cups on the little, old, green lacquer tray she was at that moment carrying into the room. She sat down on the window seat and put the tray down beside her. ‘It will be before dark even now,’ she said, glancing out at the faintly burning skies.
They had trudged on together with almost as deep a sense of physical exhaustion as peasants have who have been labouring in the fields since daybreak. And a little beyond the village, before the last, long road began that led in presently to the housed and scrupulous suburb, she stopped with a sob beside an old scarred milestone by the wayside. ‘This—is as far as I can go,’ she said. She stooped, and laid her hand on the cold moss-grown surface of the stone. ‘Even now it’s wet with dew.’ She rose again and looked strangely into his face. ‘Yes, yes, here it is,’ she said, ‘oh, and worse, worse than any fear. But nothing now can trouble you again of that. We’re both at least past that.’
‘Grisel,’ he said, ‘forgive me, but I can’t—I can’t go on.’
‘Don’t think, don’t think,’ she said, taking his hands, and lifting them to her bosom. ‘It’s only how the day goes; and it has all, my one dear, happened scores and scores of times before—mother and child and friend—and lovers that are all these too, like us. We mustn’t cry out. Perhaps it was all before even we could speak—this sorrow came. Take all the hope and all the future: and then may come our chance.’