You will admit, I think, that the quotation is singularly apposite. Or, as with Ruth I had climbed the hills above the Weald, I would climb alone the heights of Mount Coressus, where the golden angelica surged about me, or the heights of Prion, which showed me, across the plain of Ephesus, the flatter plain of deep blue sea, broken by the summits of Samos—the very sea, the very Samos, where Polycrates flung forth his ring in defiance of the gods.
“A certain number of travellers came to Ephesus, whom MacPherson regarded with a patient disdain, but whom I welcomed as messengers of the outside world. I wanted to question them, but they were always so eager to question me, making me into a sort of guide, and inveigling me into doing them the honours of the place. This used to annoy MacPherson, though he never said anything; I think he felt it as a sort of desecration. I could see him watching me with disapproval, standing there among the columns in his dust-coloured shirt and trousers and sombrero hat, leaning his hands on the handle of his pick-axe, a hard, muscular man, thin and wiry as an Australian bush-settler. The tourists questioned me about him and about our life, but I noticed they rarely approached him, or, if they did so once, they did not do so twice. After talking to me, they would move away, decide—thankfully—among themselves that I could not be offered a tip, and finally would stroll off in the direction of our little house. Here I had dug a little garden in imitation of the Kentish cottages I knew so well; just a few narrow beds in front of the house, where I had collected the many wild flowers that grew on the neighbouring hills. MacPherson took an odd, unexpected interest in my garden. He brought me contributions, rare orchids and cyclamen which my eyes had missed, brought them to me gravely, carrying them cupped in his hands with as much tenderness as a child carries a nest full of eggs. He stood by me silently watching when I put them in with my trowel in the cool of the evening. Of course we got terribly burnt up in the summer, but in the spring my garden was always merry, and, if it added to my homesickness, it also helped to palliate it.
“MacPherson had evidently never thought of making the place less dreary than it naturally was; I have no great idea of comfort myself, but I can’t live without flowers, and so my instinct, which began in a garden, produced itself into other improvements; I bought a mongrel puppy off a shepherd, and its jolly little bark of welcome used to cheer our home-coming in the evening; then I made MacPherson bring back some chickens from Smyrna, a suggestion which seemed to horrify him, but to which he made no objection; finally I grew some flowers in pots and stood them in the windows. Oh, I won’t disguise my real purpose from you: I was trying to make that rickety Turkish house as like a Kentish cottage as possible. I even paved a garden path—MacPherson examined every stone with the minutest care before I was allowed to lay it down—and finished it off with a swing-gate. Then it struck me that a swing-gate in mid-hill-side looked merely absurd, so I contrived a square of wooden fencing all round our little property. Lastly, I hung a horse-shoe, which was a mule-shoe really, over the door.
“I tell you, the more the resemblance grew, the more and the less homesick I got. It was at once a pain and a consolation. There were times when I almost regretted my enterprise, and wanted to tear up the path, destroy the garden, strangle the puppy, and throw away the flowers, letting the whole place return to the bleakness from which I had rescued it. I wanted to do this, because my efforts had been too successful, and as a consequence I expected to see Ruth appear in that doorway, white sewing in her hands, and a smile of welcome to me—to me!—in her eyes. I have often come home pleasantly tired from my day’s work, fully though sub-consciously confident that I should see her as I have described....
“That garden of mine had many narrow escapes. But I kept it, and I went on with my pretence, perfecting it here and there: I got a kennel for the puppy, and I got some doves that hung in a wicker-cage beside the door. At last the counterfeit struck MacPherson.
“‘Why,’ he said, stopping one evening, ‘it looks quite English.’
“‘Do you think so?’ I replied.
“‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but I tell you what, those flowers are wrong. An English cottage garden doesn’t have orchids; it has mignonette. How can we get some mignonette?’
“‘I might write home for some,’ I said slowly.
“It was true: I might write home for some. To whom? Mrs. Pennistan would send it me. Then it would have a sentimental value which it would lack coming from a seedsman. But I knew quite well that it was not to Mrs. Pennistan that I intended to write.
“After dinner I brought out a little folding table and set it by the door. MacPherson was there already, playing Patience as was his invariable habit.
“‘Going to write letters?’ he asked, seeing my inkpot.
“‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m going to write for the mignonette.’
“I headed my letter, ‘Ephesus,’ an address which always gave me satisfaction; not that I often had an opportunity of writing it.
“‘My Dear Ruth,—I am writing to you from a hill-side in Turkey to ask you if you will send me some seeds of mignonette for my garden; it is very easy to grow, and I think would do well in this soil. You would laugh if you could see my house, it is not like anything you have ever seen before. Please send me the mignonette soon, and a line with it to tell me if you are well.’
“I addressed it, ‘Mrs. Rawdon Westmacott, Vale Farm, Weald, Kent, England,’ and there it lay on my table grinning and mocking at me, knowing that it would presently cross the threshold I was dying to cross, and be taken in the hands I was dying to hold again.
“‘Done?’ said MacPherson. ‘Where have you ordered the seeds from? Carter’s?’
“‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ve asked a friend for them,’ and some odd impulse made me show him the address on the envelope.
“He read it, nodded, and said nothing. I was disappointed, though really I don’t know what I should have answered had he questioned me.
“After that my days were filled with one constant thought. I calculated the nearest date, and then coaxed myself into the belief that there would be a delay after that date had come and gone; a long delay; perhaps a month. So many things might happen, Ruth might not be able to get the seed, she might put off writing, she might simply send the seed with no covering letter at all. This last thought was unendurable. It grew, too, in my mind: people of Ruth’s upbringing and education didn’t like writing letters, they didn’t like perpetuating their opinions so irrevocably as ink on paper perpetuated them, and anyway they always had a conviction that the letter once written, would not arrive, especially at an unheard-of-place like Ephesus. It was difficult enough to imagine the safe transit of a letter from one English county to another, but that a letter posted in the Weald of Kent should arrive in due course at a place out of the Bible was unthinkable.... I became daily more persuaded that she would not write, and daily my gloom deepened. MacPherson noticed it.
“‘Feel ill?’ he asked.
“‘No, thanks,’ I said, annoyed.
“‘You’re not starting cholera?’ he suggested suspiciously.
“‘No, I tell you; I’m perfectly well.’
“‘Glad of that,’ he said, but I told myself peevishly that his gladness was based entirely on considerations of his own convenience.
“Ten days passed; a fortnight; three weeks; I was in despair. Then one morning, as I came out of our door with a basket in my hand to pick up a couple of eggs for breakfast, I saw a large magenta patch down below, on the hilly pathway which led from our house to the village. This, I knew, must be the old negro woman who brought our rare letters. I watched her; the morning was slightly misty, for it was very early, not long after sunrise, and I saw her black face emerge from the plum-coloured mashlak she wore. I started off to meet her. She came toiling up the hill, panting and blowing, for she was enormously fat, but an indestructibly good-humoured grin parted her lips over her gleaming teeth, and suddenly I fancied a grotesque resemblance to Mrs. Pennistan, and I laughed aloud as though a good omen had come to speed me.
“I came up to her. Her black skin was glistening with moisture, and her vast body rocked and swayed about inside her gaudy magenta wrapper; I suspected it of being her only covering. Still, I almost loved her as with a chatter of Turkish she produced a great black arm and hand out of the folds of her mashlak—a fat black hand so ludicrously like Mrs. Pennistan’s fat white one, holding a little packet which she tendered to me.
“I summoned my Turkish to thank her; this called forth a deluge of conversation on her part, with much shining of teeth and clattering of bangles, but I shook my head regretfully, and she, heaving her huge shoulders and displaying her palms in equivalent regret, turned herself round and started on the easier downward road to Ayasalouk. Could Ruth but have seen this voluminous magenta emissary! for the packet I held was indeed from Ruth and bore the Weald postmark.
“I sat down by the roadside to open it. The seeds were there, and a letter, written in a round, Board-school hand, accompanied them. I was suddenly unable to read; it was the first word, remember, that had come to me from her since that memorable day. I was more than moved; I was shaken, like a tree in the wind.
“I read:—
“‘Dear Mr. Malory—Yours to hand, and enclosed please find mignonette seeds as requested. I hope they will do well in your garden. Our garden was baked hard in the drowt last summer, but hope we will have more favourable weather this year. My husband and the boys are well, and send their respects. Well, must stop now as have no more news. Hoping this finds you well, I am,
“That was her letter—I have it here to copy, old and worn and torn—and in its stiff conventionality, its pathetically absurd phraseology, it seemed to tear my heart into little fluttering ribbons. Anything less like her I couldn’t conceive, yet she was indescribably revived to me; I saw her bending, square-elbowed, over that bit of paper, hesitating when she came to the word ‘drought,’ deciding wrong, tipping up the octagonal, penny bottle of ink which hadn’t much ink left in it; I saw her getting the seeds, making up the parcel, copying ‘Ephesus’ conscientiously from my letter. You may think me sentimental; it was the only tangible thing I had of hers.
“MacPherson met me at the top of the path.
“‘Letters?’ he said.
“‘Not for you, but I’ve got the mignonette seed.’
“He looked puzzled.
“‘The what?’ Heavens! the man has forgotten! ‘Oh, yes, I remember,’ he said; ‘let’s go and put it in.’
“I had got ready a prepared seed-bed, where I think I had broken up every lump of earth, however insignificant, with my own fingers, and here I sowed Ruth’s packet of seed. I sowed it with the solemnity of a priest sacrificing at the altar. MacPherson looked on as was his wont, unaware of anything special in the occasion, and rather impatient to get to breakfast.
“In a few weeks’ time the plants began to show; I watered them, and cherished them, thinned them out, put wire round them, treated them as never was hardy annual treated before. Soon the fragrant thing was all round our doorstep. I felt like a prisoner tending the plant between the flag-stones of his prison, or like Isabella with her pot of Basil. I laughed at myself, but still I continued my cult, and the nightly watering of the flowers throughout the hot summer became to me a species of ritual.
“You used to call me a pagan; that’s as it may be, but anyway I dedicated my whole garden to Ruth, growing my flowers in her honour, enlarging my plot, planting the hill-side outside the fence with broom and wild things, till the whole place was rich and blooming. This labour gave me the greatest satisfaction. My dreadful hungry craving for her living presence was momentarily lulled and I returned to that happier frame of mind when, as I described to you, I was content to live in the imagination. I could set her up now as a kind of idealised vision of all that was beautiful, all that was desirable. She was the deity of my garden, almost the deity of the great temple where I laboured. I should think MacPherson would have half killed me had I hinted this to him.
“I was happy again, and in the next spring I got Ruth to send me out some more seeds from her own garden. With them came another stilted little note, but this time there was a postscript: was I ever coming back to England? That disturbed me terribly; I knew it contained no double meaning, for I knew perfectly well that Ruth would never leave her children to come away with me, but at the same time it stirred up my sleeping desire to see England again. I analysed this, and found that I didn’t in the least want to see England; I only wanted to see Ruth. This frightened and distressed me; I had been so calm, so comparatively happy, and here a few idle words had thrown me into a state of emotional confusion. The ruins seemed odious to me that day, my garden seemed a mockery, and in the evening I said to MacPherson,—
“‘I am afraid I must go away.’
“He said, ‘Oh?’ less in a tone of dismay than of polite inquiry, and, as usual, of acceptance.
“‘I am getting restless here,’ I said, ‘but if I go and stretch my limbs a bit I shall be better; I will come back.’
“‘All right,’ he answered, as though there were no more to be said on the matter.
“‘That is, if you want me,’ I added, provoked.
“‘Naturally I shall be glad to see you whenever you choose to come back,’ he said, without a trace of emotion or cordiality in his tone.
IV
“Before I left I made arrangements with the Albanian to look after my garden during my absence; much as I hated leaving it to other hands I felt that I must get away or I should begin to scream upon the hills of Ephesus. I went down to Smyrna without much idea of what I should do after that, but when I got there I found a ship bound for Baku, so, thinking I might as well go there as anywhere else, I got on board and we sailed that night. I don’t want to give you a tedious account of my journey; I will only tell you that it did me all the good in the world, and that I walked up to Ephesus one evening in the late autumn with my toothbrush in my pocket and real home-coming excitement in my heart. There was the little house; there was my garden, showing quite a fair amount of colour for the time of year; there was MacPherson sitting outside, gravely playing his interminable Patience. The puppy—puppy no longer, but a dog of almost inconceivable ugliness—rushed out barking, and seized the ankle of my trousers in its joy. MacPherson looked up.
“‘Hallo,’ he said. ‘Evening.’
“‘Evening,’ I replied, and sat down.
“‘I believe this Patience is coming out,’ he said presently.
“‘Is it?’ I answered, vastly amused.
“‘Yes,’ said MacPherson, ‘if I could only get the three I should do it. Ah!’ and he made a little pounce, and shifted some cards. ‘Done it,’ he announced in a tone of mild triumph, adding regretfully, ‘now it won’t come out again for at least a week.’
“‘That’s a pity,’ I said.
“‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘I reckon it comes out about once in every hundred times. Garden’s all right, isn’t it?’
“‘Splendid,’ I said; ‘I was just looking at it. How’s your digging?’
“‘That’s all right, too. Glad you’re back.’
“I was surprised at this and gratified, but my gratification was damped when his obvious train of thought had occurred to me.
“‘Ready to work to-morrow?’ he asked, confirming my suspicion.
“‘Rather.’
“‘That’s all right,’ he said again.
“He did not ask me where I had been, and I thought I would not volunteer it, but after a day or two I did.
“‘I went to the Caucasus,’ I said.
“He answered, ‘Oh.’ I was not offended, only greatly amused; he was a perpetual joy to me, that man.
“I took up my life again very much where I had left it, and now again a change came about in my thoughts; they were constantly occupied with Ruth and with that examination I had so long put off, of her relations with her husband. As the story which I shall presently tell you will make them quite clear to you—if anything so involved can ever be made quite clear—I shall not bore you now with my own conjectures. It is quite bad enough that I should bore you with my own life, but you will agree that I couldn’t say to you, ‘Now ten years passed,’ without giving you the slightest idea of my movements during those ten years. Those ten years, you see, are my little Odyssey; I look back on them now, and I see them in that light, but while they lasted I naturally didn’t look on them as a poetic spell out of my life; no, I looked on them as a sample of what my life would be till it came to the simplest of all ends: death. I supposed that I should stay at Ephesus with MacPherson till he got tired of excavating, which I knew would never happen, or till I got tired of excavating, which I thought was much more likely, or till the authorities turned us out. After that I didn’t know what I should do, but I thought, so far as I ever thought about it at all, that something would turn up in much the same way as the boat at Smyrna had turned up to take me to Baku. What did occasionally exercise my mind was the question whether I should ever see England again? If I couldn’t have Ruth I didn’t want to go to England; it would be a torment to know her so near; but on the other hand I foresaw that as an old man of seventy I should not want to be still knocking about the world or excavating at Ephesus. The ravens would have to provide. Why make plans? Fate only steps in and upsets them. How angry I used to make you by talking about Fate, do you remember?
“Meanwhile my Odyssey continued, and I found that every year my restlessness returned to me, so that sooner or later the moment always came when I said to MacPherson,—
“‘I am afraid I shall have to go away to-morrow,’ and he replied invariably,—
“‘Oh? All right.’
“I went to all manner of places, but never to England, and always in the autumn I returned to Ephesus to find MacPherson there unchanged, always glad to see me because of my help in his work, and in all those years he never once asked me where I had been to. I forget now myself where I went, except that I never once went anywhere near England, much as I wanted to go, because I knew the temptation would be too strong for me. This journey of mine became thus an annual institution. There was another annual institution of which MacPherson knew only the outer and less important part; this was the arrival of seeds from England, with Ruth’s little letter attached; I came to know all her phrases, which revolved with the years in a cycle: she hoped the seeds would do well with me; her garden had been dried up, or washed out, as the case might be, the previous summer—there is never a perfect summer for a gardener, just as there is never a perfect day for a fisherman; her children were well and sent their respects, varied by love; her husband was well too; she must stop as she had no more news, or, as the post was going. Occasionally she ended up, ‘In great haste,’ though what the haste could be in that leisurely life I failed to imagine.
“I came to look for this letter in my year as the devout man looks for a feast-day; it was, so to speak, my Easter. My little packet grew, that much-travelled little packet, which went with me on all my pilgrimages. I wondered whether she cherished my letters, over in England, as I cherished hers at Ephesus? In the meantime she was there, in the house I knew, living through these years in a calm monotony which was a consolation to me, because I could so well imagine it; I could call up a picture of her, in fact, at practically any moment of the day, for what variation could there be to her quotidian round of cooking, housework, washing, sewing? This was, I say, a pleasant reflection to me, though I was enraged to think that her care and labour should be expended upon another man and another man’s children. A placid existence, broken only by the calving of cows, the farrowing of swine, the gathering in of crops.... And I at Ephesus!
“MacPherson never spared me my share of the work, and a hard taskmaster he was, as hard to himself as to me. In the summer we breakfasted soon after the dawn had begun to creep into the sky, then with pick and mattock we trudged to the ruins, there to toil until the heat of the sun glaring upon the quantities of white marble which lay about drove us indoors until evening. MacPherson was always very grudging and resentful with regard to this enforced siesta. In fact he would not admit it as a siesta, but affected to consider it merely as a variation of work, and would remain below in our little sitting-room, turning over for the thousandth time his scraps and fragments of glass, pottery, and other rubbish, while I lay on my bed upstairs damning the mosquitoes and trying to go to sleep. No sooner had I dozed off than I would be aroused by MacPherson’s remorseless voice calling up to know if I was ready. Evening in the ruins I did not mind so much; a little breeze often sprang up from the sea, and I had the prospect of an hour’s gardening immediately in front of me. On the whole I was happy in those hours of toil. Living in my thoughts, and sparing just the bare requisite of consciousness to the needs of my tools, I became almost as taciturn as my companion. Yet I never came to look on Ephesus as a home; I was only a bird of passage—a passage lasting ten years, it is true, but still only a passage. I didn’t see how it was going to end, but my old friend Fate stepped in at last and settled that for me.
“It was July, and my annual restlessness had been creeping over me for some time; besides, it was getting unpleasantly hot at Ephesus, and I panted for the cold air of the mountains. So I said to MacPherson at breakfast,—
“‘I think the time for my yearly flitting has come round again; in fact, I think I’ll be off to-day.’
“I waited for the, ‘Oh? All right,’ but it didn’t come. Instead of that, he said after a little pause,—
“‘I wonder if you would put off going until to-morrow?’
“It was the first time I had ever heard him raise an objection to any suggestion of mine, and I was faintly surprised, but I said,—
“‘Of course I will. One day’s just as good as another. Got a special job for me?’
“‘No,’ he said, ‘it isn’t that.’
“I did not question him; I had long since followed his lead, and we never questioned one another.
“Still, I wondered to myself, as one cannot help wondering when anything unusual, however slight, occurs to break a regularity such as ours. A stone thrown in a rough sea falls unperceived, but thrown into a pond of mirror-like surface it creates a real disturbance. So all the morning I observed MacPherson as closely as I dared; I saw him go to get his things, and I detected a slight weariness in his walk; still he said nothing. It was glaringly hot at the ruins. I thought of suggesting that we should go home earlier than usual, and, turning round to look for MacPherson, I saw him at a little distance, sitting on a boulder, with his head in his hands. This was so unusual that I immediately crossed over to him.
“‘I say, aren’t you feeling well?’
“He raised to me a livid face.
“‘I shall be all right presently.... A touch of the sun.’
“‘You must come indoors at once,’ I said firmly. ‘You must be mad to sit here in this heat. Can you walk?’
“He rose with infinite weariness, but without a word of complaint, and attempted to lift his pick.
“‘I’ll take that,’ I said, taking it from him, and he gave it up without a word. ‘Is there anything else to bring?’
“He shook his head, and began to stumble off in the direction of the house. Long before we had reached home, I knew what was the matter with my companion. The sun was not responsible. He was in the grip of cholera.
“The Albanian, who was splashing cold water from a bucket over the tiled floor of our little sitting-room when we arrived, stared at us in astonishment. MacPherson, his face faded to the colour of wood-ashes, had his arm round my neck for support, and already the terrible cramps of the disease were beginning to twist his body as he dragged one leaden foot after the other. I called to Marco, and between us we half carried him upstairs and laid him on his bed, where he lay, silent, but drawing his breath in with the long gasps of pain, and with his arm flung across his eyes so that we should not observe his face.
“I drew Marco out on to the landing. I bade him saddle the mule and ride straight to the station, where he must take the train for Smyrna and return without delay with the English doctor. I did not think, in my private mind, that the doctor could arrive in time, or that he could do more than I could, who had some experience of cholera, but still I was bound to send for him. Marco nodded violently all the time I was speaking. I knew I could trust him; he was an honest man. I went back to MacPherson.
“I had never been into his bedroom before. The Venetian blinds were lowered outside the windows, and the floor and walls were barred with the resulting stripes of shade and sun. A plaid rug lay neatly folded across the foot of the bed. On the dressing-table were two wooden hair-brushes and a comb, on the wash-stand were sponges, but no possessions of a more personal nature could I discover anywhere. The man, it seemed, had no personal life at all.
“He was lying where I had left him, still breathing heavily; his skin was icy cold, so I covered him over with the quilt from my own room, knowing that it was no use attempting to get him into bed, and feeling, in a sympathetic way, that he would prefer to be left alone. I went to get what remedies I could from our medicine-chest downstairs, and as I was doing this my eye fell on his little cupboard where behind glass doors he kept his precious shards, all labelled and docketed in his inhumanly neat handwriting, and I wondered whether, in a week or so, I should see him sitting down there, fingering his treasures with hands that, always thin, would surely be shrunken then to the claws of a skeleton.
“It’s bad enough to see any man in extreme agonies of pain, but when the man is an uncommunicative, efficient, self-reliant creature like MacPherson it becomes ten times worse. I felt that a devil had deliberately set himself to tear the seals from that sternly repressed personality. MacPherson, who had always assumed a mask to disguise any human feelings he may have had, was here forced, driven, tortured into the revelation of ordinary mortal weakness. I believe that, even through the suffering which robs most men of all vestiges of their self-respect, he felt himself to be bitterly humiliated. I believe that he would almost have preferred to fight his disease alone in the wilderness. Yet I could not leave him. He was crying constantly for water, which I provided, and besides this there were many services to render, details of which I will spare you. I sat by the window with my back turned to him whenever he did not need me, glad to spare him what observation I could, and glad also, I confess, to spare myself the sight of that blue, shrivelled face, tormented eyes, and of the long form that knotted and bent itself in contortions like the man-snake of a circus.... His courage was marvellous. He resolutely stifled the cries which rose to his throat, hiding his face and holding his indrawn breath until the spasm had passed.
“I knew that this stage of the disease would probably continue for two or three hours, when the man would collapse, and when the pain might or might not be relieved. The sun was high in the heavens when I noticed the first signs of exhaustion. MacPherson sank rapidly, and the deadly cold for which I was watching overcame him; I covered him with blankets—this he feebly resisted—and banked him round with hot water bottles, of which we always kept a supply in case of emergency. It was now midday, and I had continually to wipe the sweat from my face, but I could not succeed in bringing much warmth to poor MacPherson. He lay quiet and silent now, save when the fearful sickness returned, as it did at short intervals. I sat beside him, ready with the water for which he was continually asking.
“He was, as I have said, always thin, but by this time his face was cavernous; I could have hidden my knuckles in the depression over his temples, and my fist in the hollow under his cheek-bones. His scant, reddish hair, always carefully smoothed, lay about his forehead in tragic wisps. His pale blue eyes showed as two smears of colour in their great sockets. His interminable legs and arms stirred at unexpected distances under the pile of blankets. He was very weak. I feared that he would not pull through.
“When the merciless sun was beginning to disappear round the corner of the house, MacPherson, who had been lying for the last hour or so in a state of coma, spoke to me in a low voice. I was staring in a melancholy way from my chair by his side, across the bed, between a chink of the Venetian blind; I don’t know what I was thinking of, probably my mind was a blank. I started when I heard him whisper my name, and bent towards him. He whispered,—
“‘I don’t think I’m going to recover.’
“Neither did I, and seeing that he had made the remark as a statement of fact, in his usual tone, though low-pitched, I waited for what he should say next. He said,—
“‘I am sorry to be a bore.’
“This was a hard remark to answer, but I murmured something. He went on, still in that hoarse whisper,—
“‘I must talk to you first.’
“I saw that he was perfectly lucid in his mind, and thinking that he wanted to give me some necessary instructions I encouraged him to go on, but he only shook his head, and I saw that he had fallen back into the characteristic apathy. I sat on, expecting the arrival of Marco and the doctor at any moment.
“Towards night, MacPherson roused himself again. He was so much weaker that I could barely make out the words he breathed.
“‘It is time you went to water your garden.’
“I shook my head. A distressed look came over his face, and to comfort him I said,—
“‘Marco has promised to do it for me.’
“He was content with that, and lay quiet with his long, long arms and thin hands outside the coverlet. I thought that he wanted to speak again, but had not the energy to begin, so, to help him, I suggested,—
“‘Was there anything you wanted to say to me?’
“He nodded, more with his eyelids than with his head, then, bracing himself with pain for the effort, he whispered,—
“‘You won’t stay on here?’
“I answered, ‘No,’ feeling that to adopt a reassuring, hearty attitude would be an insult to the man.
“After a long pause he said,—
“‘I want to be buried up here. By the ruins. I don’t care about consecrated ground.’
“An appalling attack of sickness interrupted him, after which he lay in such complete exhaustion that I thought he would never speak again. But after about half an hour, he resumed,—
“‘Give me your word of honour. They will try to prevent you.’
“I swore it—poor devil.
“‘Bury me deep,’ he said with a grim, twisted smile, ‘or some one will excavate me.’
“He seemed a little stronger, but I knew the recovery could only be fictitious. Then he went on,—
“‘Will you do something else for me?’
“‘Of course I will,’ I answered, ‘anything you ask.’
“‘My wife ...’ he murmured.
“‘Your wife?’ I said.
“‘She’s in London,’ he whispered, and he gave me the address, dragging it up out of the depths of his memory.
“In London! Even in that dim room, with the dying man there beneath my hand, I felt my heart bound with a physical sensation.
“‘Just tell her,’ he added; ‘she won’t mind. She won’t make you a scene.’
“He was silent then, but drank a great draught of water.
“‘Is there any one else?’ I asked.
“His head moved very feebly in the negative on the pillow.
“‘And what am I to do with your things?’ I asked lastly.
“‘Look through them,’ he breathed; ‘nothing private. Give the fragments to the British Museum. I’ve made a will about money.’
“‘And your personal things? Would you like me to give them to your wife?’
“‘Oh, no,’ he said wearily, ‘’tisn’t worth while.’ Then after a long pause in which he seemed to be meditating, he said, with evidently unconscious pathos, ‘I don’t know.... Better throw them away.’
V
“MacPherson died that night about an hour before the doctor came; Marco and the doctor had missed each other, and had missed the trains, but the doctor reassured me that I had done all that was possible, and that had he arrived by midday he could not have saved MacPherson’s life.
“‘I suppose you will want to bring him down to the English cemetery at Smyrna?’ he said, with an offer of help tripping on the heels of his remark. He looked horrified when I told him of MacPherson’s wish and of my intention of carrying it out.
“‘But no priest, I am afraid, will consent to read the burial service over him under those conditions,’ he said primly.
“‘Then I will read it myself,’ I replied in a firm voice.
“‘You must please yourself about that,’ said the doctor, giving it up. His attitude towards me, which had started by being sympathetic, was now changing subtly to a slight impatience. He took out his watch. ‘I am afraid I ought to be going,’ he remarked, ‘if I am to catch the last train down to Smyrna, and there seems to be nothing more I can do for you here. There will have to be a certificate of death, of course; I will send you that. And if you like I will stop in the village on the way, and send some one up to you; you understand me—a layer-out.’
“I said that I should be much obliged to him, and, accompanying him as far as the front door, I watched him go with Marco and a lantern, the little parallelogram of yellow light criss-crossed with black lines, swaying to and fro in the night.
“I could not go to bed, and as I was anxious to leave Ephesus as soon as possible, I thought I would employ my time in going through poor MacPherson’s few possessions. As he said, there was nothing private. I sat downstairs in the sitting-room we had shared, with his tin box open on the table before me, shiny black, and the inside of the lid painted sky-blue. It was pitifully empty. His will was in a long envelope, a will making provision for his wife, and bequeathing the remainder of his income to an archæological society; there was also a codicil directing that his Ephesian fragments were to go, as he had told me, to the British Museum. The box also contained a diary, recording, not his life, but his discoveries; and a few letters from men of science. For the rest, there were his books, his clothes, his wrist-watch, his plaid rug, and a little loose cash in Turkish coins. And that was all. There was absolutely nothing else. Not a photograph, not a seal, not even a bunch of keys. Nothing private! I should think not, indeed.
“I sat there staring at the bleak little collection when Marco came in to say that he had returned with the layer-out. I went into the passage, and there I found our old negro post-woman, grinning as usual in her magenta wrapper; it seemed that she combined several village functions in her own person. I felt an instinctive horror at the thought of those black hands pawing poor MacPherson, but the thing was unavoidable, so I took her upstairs to where he lay in a repose that appeared to me enviable after the brief but terrible suffering he had undergone, and left her there, bending over him, the softer parts of her huge body quivering as usual under her mashlak. I went downstairs again, and stood outside to breathe the clean, cool air; the sky hung over me swarming with stars; I tried not to think of the old negress exercising her revolting profession on MacPherson’s body.
“Next day two men in baggy trousers and red sashes came up to the house carrying the hastily-made coffin. Then we set out, Marco, myself, and the two men with the coffin and MacPherson inside it. Providentially there were no tourists that day at Ephesus. Marco and I had been hard at work all the morning digging the grave, and as I drove my pick I reflected that this was, humanly speaking, the last time I should ever break up the flinty ground of Ephesus. After ten years! With regard to myself and my future, I dared not think; my present preoccupation was to have finished with MacPherson and his widow.
“Well, I buried him up there, and may I be hanged if I don’t think the man was better and more happily buried in the place he had loved, than stuck down in a corner of some unfriendly cemetery he had never seen. For myself—such is the egoism of our nature—I was thinking all the while that I would leave behind me a written request to be buried within sight of Westmacott’s farm in Kent. And after I had buried him, and had got rid of Marco and the two men over a bottle of raki in the kitchen, I took all the flowers from my garden and put them on his grave, and I dug up some roots of orchid and cyclamen and planted them at his head and at his feet; but I don’t suppose they ever survived the move, and probably to this day the tourists who wander far enough afield to stumble over the mound, say, ‘Why, some one has buried his dog out here.’
“A week later I was in London, on a blazing August day which seemed strangely misty to me, accustomed as I was to the direct, unmitigated rays of the sun on the Ephesian hills. I still hadn’t thought about my future, and I was resolved not to do so until, my interview with Mrs. MacPherson over, I could look upon the whole of the last ten years as an episode of the past. I had tried to forget that I was in the same country as Ruth; but this had been difficult, for the train from Dover had carried me through the heart of Ruth’s own county, a cruel, unforeseen prank of fortune; I had pulled down the blinds of my railway carriage, greatly to the annoyance of my fellow-travellers, but these good people, who might have been involved with Fate in a conspiracy against me, had their unwitting revenge and defeated my object utterly by saying, as we flashed through a station, ‘That was Hildenborough; now we have to go through a long tunnel.’
“Hildenborough! After ten years, during which I had consistently kept at least fifteen hundred miles between us, I was at last within two miles of her home. I nearly sprang out of the train at the thought. But I resolutely put it away, so resolutely that I found myself pushing with my hands and with all my force against the side of the railway carriage.
“It was too late, when I reached London, to do anything that day. I slept at my old club, where everybody started at the sight of me as of a ghost, and the following morning I went to the address MacPherson had given me. It was in a block of flats, a long way up. I was left stranded upon the tiny landing by the lift-boy, who, with his lift, fell rapidly down through the floor as though pulled from below by a giant’s hand. I rang the bell. It tinkled loudly; I heard voices within, and presently a woman came to open the door, with an expression of displeased inquiry on her face; a middle-aged woman, wearing a dingy yellow dressing-gown which she kept gathering together in her hand as though afraid that it would fall open.
“‘Can I see Mrs. MacPherson?’ I asked.
“She stared at me.
“‘There’s no Mrs. MacPherson here.’
“I heard a man’s voice from inside the flat,—
“‘What is it, Belle?’
“She called back over her shoulder,—
“‘Here’s a party asking to see Mrs. MacPherson.’
“‘Who is it?’ asked the voice.
“‘Who are you, anyway?’ said Belle to me.
“‘I have been sent here by Mr. MacPherson, Mr. Angus MacPherson, with a message for his wife,’ I said, ‘but as I have evidently made a mistake I had better apologise and go away.’
“She looked suddenly thoughtful—or was it apprehensive?
“‘No, don’t go away,’ she said. ‘You haven’t made a mistake. Come in.’
“I went in, and she closed the door behind me. I followed her into the sitting-room where, amid surroundings at once pretentious and tawdry, a man, also in a dressing-gown, lay stretched on the sofa smoking cigarettes. He was handsome in a vulgar way, with black wavy hair and a curved, sensuous mouth.
“‘Now,’ said Belle, ‘let’s hear your news of Mr. Angus MacPherson?’
“‘First of all,’ I answered, ‘may I know who I am talking to?’
“Belle and the man exchanged glances.
“‘Oh, well,’ she said then, I am Mrs. MacPherson all right enough. If you have really got a message for me, let’s hear it.’
“There was anxiety in her tone, and she edged nearer to the handsome man, and surreptitiously took possession of his hand.
“I did not think that the news of MacPherson’s death was likely to cause much grief to his widow. I therefore said without preamble,—
“I have come to tell you that he died a week ago of cholera. I was with him at the time, and I have brought you the certificate of his death, also his will. He left no other papers.’
“‘Angus dead?’ said Angus’s widow. ‘You don’t say! Poor old Angus!’
“She was relieved by my words; I know she was relieved. She began reading the will with avidity. If I could find nothing else to admire about her, I could at least admire her candour.
“‘He’s left me five hundred a year,’ she said abruptly, ‘and the rest to some archi—what is it? society. Five hundred a year, and he had a thousand!’
“‘Oh, come, Belle,’ said the handsome man, ‘that’s better than nothing.’
“She let her eyes dwell on his face with real affection, real kindliness.
“‘Let’s have a look at that will,’ he murmured lazily.
“She passed it across to him, sat down on a stool, clasped her knees, and became meditative.
“‘Poor old Angus!’ she repeated. ‘Fancy that! Well, he was rare fun in his day, wasn’t he, Dick?’
“‘No end of a dog,’ replied Dick without removing his eyes from the will.
“‘Perhaps, if there are no questions you want to ask me, I had better be going now,’ I began. I was bewildered, for MacPherson, in spite of his eccentricities, had undoubtedly been a scholar and a man of refinement.
“Dick stirred from his spoilt torpor.
“‘I suppose it is quite certain,’ he said, ‘that there is no mistake? I mean, it’s quite certain he’s dead?’
“‘Quite,’ I answered rather grimly, as certain visions rose before my eyes. ‘I buried him myself;’ and the flat with its dirty lace, its cheap pretension, melted away into the quiet beauty of Ephesus.
“I walked away from the building with an inexpressible loneliness at heart, faced with my own immediate and remoter future, a problem I had hitherto refused to consider, but which now rushed at me like the oncoming wave rushes at the failing swimmer and overwhelms him. I had finished with Ephesus and MacPherson, and with MacPherson’s wife, and to say that I felt depressed would give you no idea of my feelings: an immense desolation took possession of me, an immense desolation, and more: an immense, soul-destroying disgust and weariness at the cruelty of things, a lassitude such as I had never conceived, so that I envied MacPherson lying for ever at peace, away from strife and difficulties and things that would not go right, among beautiful and untroubled hills, with wild flowers blooming round his grave. Yes, I envied him, I that am a sane man and have always prized rich life at its full value.
“And as I walked I met two men I had known, who spoke to me by my name and stopped me.
“‘Why, it’s Malory,’ said one of them. ‘I haven’t seen you lately. Somebody told me you had gone to Scotland?’
“‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I went to Scotland.’
“He asked me, ‘What part of Scotland?’
“‘To Aberdeen,’ I cried, ‘to Aberdeen!’ and laughed, and left them.
“I had been prepared to pass unrecognised after ten years, but for this friendliness, which had not ‘seen me lately,’ I was unprepared. I turned into a park, longing instinctively for the country as the only palliative for my loneliness and melancholy. In all London that day I think there was no lonelier soul than I. I would have sought you out, but in such crisis of world-sorrow as was mine, I could desire only one presence—a presence I might not have. She could have annihilated my sorrow by a word, could have made me forget the dirt, and the irony; all that hurt me so profoundly—though I don’t think myself a sentimentalist. For I was hurt as a raw sentimentalist is hurt, and this pain blended with my own trouble into a sea of despair. I wanted to find a haven of refuge, some beautiful gulf where the wind never blows, but where harmonious hills rise serenely from the water, and all is cultivated and easy and fertile.
“I sat for a long time under the trees, gazing immovably at the ground between my feet, and then I got up mechanically, without any plan in my head, and wandered as mechanically home towards my club. My club burst incongruously enough on my dreams of a beautiful gulf; that, again, was part of the irony on this most cruel of days. But I had nowhere else to go to.
“I began to write to MacPherson’s solicitors to inform them of their client’s death; the new life was so empty that I clung for as long as I was able to the old. As I wrote, the hall-boy came and stood at my elbow.
“‘Please, sir, there’s a young woman asking to see you.’
“A young woman? Could it be Belle? so equipped for the day’s battle as to pass for young?
“‘What’s her name? what does she want?’
“‘She won’t say, sir; she wants to see you.’
“I went out. Ruth was standing by the hall-door, plainly dressed in a dark coat and skirt, and a sailor hat, and holding a couple of faded red roses in her hand.
“I looked at her incredulously, and all the world stood still.
“She began, shyly and hurriedly,—
“‘Oh, I don’t want to bother you if you are busy....’
“That made me laugh.
“‘I am not busy,’ I told her.
“‘Oh, then perhaps I could speak to you for a few minutes? somewhere just quietly, and alone?’
“I glanced round. The porter was standing there with a face carved in stone.
“‘You can’t come in here,’ I said. ‘Where can I take you? Will you come to an hotel?’
“‘Oh, no!’ she said, shrinking, and I noticed her little gray cotton gloves.
“‘At any rate, let us get away from here. Then we can think where to go.’
“We went down the steps, across Piccadilly, and passed into the Green Park. There I stopped, but she would not sit on the chair I suggested. She stood before me, her eyes downcast, and her gloved fingers twisting the stems of her roses. I bethought myself to ask her,—
“‘How on earth did you find me, to-day of all days?’
“‘I came to ask,’ she answered, still in that shy, hurried tone, ‘whether they knew when you would be coming to London.’
“‘And they told you I was there?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘You came up from the Weald on purpose to ask that?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘But why?’
“She was silent.
“‘Why, Ruth?’
“‘Because I wanted to see you.’
“‘To see me?’
“‘To tell you something,’
“‘What is it?’
“‘I can’t tell you here,’ she murmured.
“‘Come to an hotel,’ I said again, ‘we can get a private sitting-room; we can talk.’
“‘Oh, no, not that. I suppose ... I suppose you wouldn’t ... I am sure you are busy.’
“‘No, no, on my honour, Ruth, I have absolutely nothing to do either to-day, or to-morrow, or the next day, or any day after that.’
“‘Sure?’ she said eagerly, raising her eyes for one moment to mine and then lowering them again.
“‘Quite sure.’
“‘Then,’ with sudden boldness, ‘will you come down to the Weald with me? now? at once?’
“‘To the Weald? Of course I will, I’ll do anything you like. We’ll go straight to Charing Cross, shall we?’
“‘Oh, yes, please, you are very good. And please, don’t ask me any questions till we get there.’
“My ten years’ training with MacPherson proved invaluable to me now, and I can say with pride that neither by direct nor indirect means did I seek to extract any information from Ruth. Indeed, I was content to observe her as she sat by me in the cab, no longer the girl I remembered, but a woman of ripe beauty, and yet in her confused manner there was a remnant of girlishness, in her lowered eyes, and her tremulous lips. I saw that she sat there full of suppressed emotion, buoyed up by some intense determination which carried her over her shyness and confusion as a barque carries its passenger over high waves. I was too bewildered, too numb with joy, to wonder much at the cause of her journey.
“At Charing Cross she produced the return half of her third-class ticket from her little purse, refusing to let me pay the excess fare which would allow us to travel first. I think she was afraid of being shut alone with me into a first-class carriage, knowing that in the humbler compartment she could reckon on the security of company. So we sat on the hard wooden benches, opposite one another, rocking and swaying with the train, and trying to shrink away in our respective corners from the contact of the fruit-pickers who crowded us unpleasantly: Ruth sat staring out over the fields of Kent, her hands in their neat gray cotton gloves lying on her lap, and the tired roses drooping listlessly between her fingers; she looked a little pale, a little thin, but that subtle warmth of her personality was there as of old, whether it lay, as I never could decide, in the glow under her skin or in the tender curves of her features. She looked up to catch me gazing at her, and we both turned to the landscape to hide our confusion.
“Ah! I could look out over that flying landscape now, with no need to pull down the window-blinds, and Penshurst station, when we reached it, was no longer a pang, but a rejoicing. The train stopped, I struggled with the door, we jumped out, the train curved away again on its journey, and we stood side by side alone on the platform.
“It was then about five o’clock of a perfect August day. Little white clouds stretched in a broken bank along the sky. Dorothy Perkins bloomed in masses on the palings of the wayside station. The railway seemed foreign to the country, the English country which lay there immovable, regardless of trains that hurried restless mankind to and fro, between London and the sea.
“‘Let us go,’ I said to Ruth.
“We set out walking across the fields, infinitely green and tender to my eyes, accustomed to the brown stoniness of Ephesus. We walked in silence, but I, for one, walked happy in the present, and feeling the aridity of my being soaked and permeated with repose and beauty. Ruth took off her jacket, which I carried for her, walking cool and slender in a white muslin shirt. In this soft garment she looked eighteen, as I remembered her.
“We took the short cut to Westmacotts’. There it was, the lath and plaster house, the farm buildings, the double oast-house at the corner of the big black barn, simmering, hazy and mellow, in the summer evening. A farm-hand, carrying a great truss of hay on a pitchfork across his shoulder, touched his cap to Ruth as he passed. There was no sign of Westmacott.
“‘Where ...’ I began, but changed my question. ‘Where are the children?’
“‘I left them over with mother before I came away this morning,’ she answered.
“We went into the house, into the kitchen, the same kitchen, unchanged.
“She took refuge in practical matters.
“‘Will you wait there while I take off my things and get the tea?’
“I sat down like a man in a dream while she disappeared upstairs. I was quite incapable of reflection, but dimly I recognised the difference between this clean, happy room of bright colours and shining brasses, and the tawdry, musty flat I had penetrated that morning, and the contrast spread itself like ointment over a wound.
“Ruth returned; she had taken off her hat and had covered her London clothes by a big blue linen apron with patch pockets. Her sleeves were rolled up to the elbow; I saw the smooth brown arm with the delicate wrist and shapely hand.
“‘You’ll want your tea,’ she said briskly.
“I had had nothing to eat since breakfast.
“You told me once in a letter that you had been to tea with Ruth, so you know the kind of meal she provides: bread, honey, scones, big cups, and tea in an enormous teapot. She laid two places only, moving about, severely practical, but still quivering with that suppressed excitement, still tense with that unfaltering determination.
“‘It’s ready,’ she said at length, summoning me.
“I couldn’t eat, for the emotion of that meal alone with her was too strong for me. I sat absently stirring the sugar in my cup. She tried to coax me to eat, but her solicitude exasperated my overstrained nerves, and I got up abruptly.
“‘It’s no good,’ I said, ‘I must know. What is it, Ruth? What had you to tell me?’
“The moment had rushed at her unawares; she looked at me with frightened eyes; her determination, put to the test, hesitated.
“I went over to her and stood before her.
“‘What is it, Ruth?’ I said again. ‘You haven’t brought me down here for nothing. Hadn’t you better tell me before your husband comes in?’
“‘He won’t come in,’ she said, hanging her head so that I could only see the wealth of her hair and her little figure in the big blue apron.
“‘How do you know?’ I asked.
“‘He isn’t here.’
“‘Where is he, then?’
“She raised her head and looked me full in the face, no longer frightened, but steady, resolute.
“‘He has left me,’ she said.
“‘Left you? What do you mean? For good?’
“‘Yes. He’s left me, the farm, and the children; he’s never coming back.’
“‘But why? Good Heavens, why?’
“‘He was afraid,’ she said in a low voice.
“‘Afraid?’
“‘Yes. Of me. Oh,’ she broke off, ‘sit down and I will tell you all about it.’