CHAPTER XII
Charles need not have been anxious. Miss Schlegel had never heard of his mother’s strange request. She was to hear of it in after years, when she had built up her life differently, and it was to fit into position as the headstone of the corner. Her mind was bent on other questions now, and by her also it would have been rejected as the fantasy of an invalid.
She was parting from these Wilcoxes for the second time. Paul and his mother, ripple and great wave, had flowed into her life and ebbed out of it for ever. The ripple had left no traces behind; the wave had strewn at her feet fragments torn from the unknown. A curious seeker, she stood for a while at the verge of the sea that tells so little, but tells a little, and watched the outgoing of this last tremendous tide. Her friend had vanished in agony, but not, she believed, in degradation. Her withdrawal had hinted at other things besides disease and pain. Some leave our life with tears, others with an insane frigidity; Mrs. Wilcox had taken the middle course, which only rarer natures can pursue. She had kept proportion. She had told a little of her grim secret to her friends, but not too much; she had shut up her heart—almost, but not entirely. It is thus, if there is any rule, that we ought to die—neither as victim nor as fanatic, but as the seafarer who can greet with an equal eye the deep that he is entering, and the shore that he must leave.
The last word—whatever it would be—had certainly not been said in Hilton churchyard. She had not died there. A funeral is not death, any more than baptism is birth or marriage union. All three are the clumsy devices, coming now too late, now too early, by which Society would register the quick motions of man. In Margaret’s eyes Mrs. Wilcox had escaped registration. She had gone out of life vividly, her own way, and no dust was so truly dust as the contents of that heavy coffin, lowered with ceremonial until it rested on the dust of the earth, no flowers so utterly wasted as the chrysanthemums that the frost must have withered before morning. Margaret had once said she “loved superstition.” It was not true. Few women had tried more earnestly to pierce the accretions in which body and soul are enwrapped. The death of Mrs. Wilcox had helped her in her work. She saw a little more clearly than hitherto what a human being is, and to what he may aspire. Truer relationships gleamed. Perhaps the last word would be hope—hope even on this side of the grave.
Meanwhile, she could take an interest in the survivors. In spite of her Christmas duties, in spite of her brother, the Wilcoxes continued to play a considerable part in her thoughts. She had seen so much of them in the final week. They were not “her sort,” they were often suspicious and stupid, and deficient where she excelled; but collision with them stimulated her, and she felt an interest that verged into liking, even for Charles. She desired to protect them, and often felt that they could protect her, excelling where she was deficient. Once past the rocks of emotion, they knew so well what to do, whom to send for; their hands were on all the ropes, they had grit as well as grittiness and she valued grit enormously. They led a life that she could not attain to—the outer life of “telegrams and anger,” which had detonated when Helen and Paul had touched in June, and had detonated again the other week. To Margaret this life was to remain a real force. She could not despise it, as Helen and Tibby affected to do. It fostered such virtues as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank, no doubt, but they have formed our civilisation. They form character, too; Margaret could not doubt it; they keep the soul from becoming sloppy. How dare Schlegels despise Wilcoxes, when it takes all sorts to make a world?
“Don’t brood too much,” she wrote to Helen, “on the superiority of the unseen to the seen. It’s true, but to brood on it is medieval. Our business is not to contrast the two, but to reconcile them.”
Helen replied that she had no intention of brooding on such a dull subject. What did her sister take her for? The weather was magnificent. She and the Mosebachs had gone tobogganing on the only hill that Pomerania boasted. It was fun, but over-crowded, for the rest of Pomerania had gone there too. Helen loved the country, and her letter glowed with physical exercise and poetry. She spoke of the scenery, quiet, yet august; of the snow-clad fields, with their scampering herds of deer; of the river and its quaint entrance into the Baltic Sea; of the Oderberge, only three hundred feet high, from which one slid all too quickly back into the Pomeranian plains, and yet these Oderberge were real mountains, with pine-forests, streams, and views complete. “It isn’t size that counts so much as the way things are arranged.” In another paragraph she referred to Mrs. Wilcox sympathetically, but the news had not bitten into her. She had not realised the accessories of death, which are in a sense more memorable than death itself. The atmosphere of precautions and recriminations, and in the midst a human body growing more vivid because it was in pain; the end of that body in Hilton churchyard; the survival of something that suggested hope, vivid in its turn against life’s workaday cheerfulness;—all these were lost to Helen, who only felt that a pleasant lady could now be pleasant no longer. She returned to Wickham Place full of her own affairs—she had had another proposal—and Margaret, after a moment’s hesitation, was content that this should be so.
The proposal had not been a serious matter. It was the work of Fraulein Mosebach, who had conceived the large and patriotic notion of winning back her cousins to the Fatherland by matrimony. England had played Paul Wilcox, and lost; Germany played Herr Forstmeister some one—Helen could not remember his name. Herr Forstmeister lived in a wood, and, standing on the summit of the Oderberge, he had pointed out his house to Helen, or rather, had pointed out the wedge of pines in which it lay. She had exclaimed, “Oh, how lovely! That’s the place for me!” and in the evening Frieda appeared in her bedroom. “I have a message, dear Helen,” etc., and so she had, but had been very nice when Helen laughed; quite understood—a forest too solitary and damp—quite agreed, but Herr Forstmeister believed he had assurance to the contrary. Germany had lost, but with good-humour; holding the manhood of the world, she felt bound to win. “And there will even be some one for Tibby,” concluded Helen. “There now, Tibby, think of that; Frieda is saving up a little girl for you, in pig-tails and white worsted stockings but the feet of the stockings are pink as if the little girl had trodden in strawberries. I’ve talked too much. My head aches. Now you talk.”
Tibby consented to talk. He too was full of his own affairs, for he had just been up to try for a scholarship at Oxford. The men were down, and the candidates had been housed in various colleges, and had dined in hall. Tibby was sensitive to beauty, the experience was new, and he gave a description of his visit that was almost glowing. The august and mellow University, soaked with the richness of the western counties that it has served for a thousand years, appealed at once to the boy’s taste; it was the kind of thing he could understand, and he understood it all the better because it was empty. Oxford is—Oxford; not a mere receptacle for youth, like Cambridge. Perhaps it wants its inmates to love it rather than to love one another; such at all events was to be its effect on Tibby. His sisters sent him there that he might make friends, for they knew that his education had been cranky, and had severed him from other boys and men. He made no friends. His Oxford remained Oxford empty, and he took into life with him, not the memory of a radiance, but the memory of a colour scheme.
It pleased Margaret to hear her brother and sister talking. They did not get on overwell as a rule. For a few moments she listened to them, feeling elderly and benign.
Then something occurred to her, and she interrupted.
“Helen, I told you about poor Mrs. Wilcox; that sad business?”
“Yes.”
“I have had a correspondence with her son. He was winding up the estate, and wrote to ask me whether his mother had wanted me to have anything. I thought it good of him, considering I knew her so little. I said that she had once spoken of giving me a Christmas present, but we both forgot about it afterwards.”
“I hope Charles took the hint.”
“Yes—that is to say, her husband wrote later on, and thanked me for being a little kind to her, and actually gave me her silver vinaigrette. Don’t you think that is extraordinarily generous? It has made me like him very much. He hopes that this will not be the end of our acquaintance, but that you and I will go and stop with Evie some time in the future. I like Mr. Wilcox. He is taking up his work—rubber—it is a big business. I gather he is launching out rather. Charles is in it, too. Charles is married—a pretty little creature, but she doesn’t seem wise. They took on the flat, but now they have gone off to a house of their own.”
Helen, after a decent pause, continued her account of Stettin. How quickly a situation changes! In June she had been in a crisis; even in November she could blush and be unnatural; now it was January and the whole affair lay forgotten. Looking back on the past six months, Margaret realised the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians. Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent. It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a good, and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life fully armed. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty. Margaret hoped that for the future she would be less cautious, not more cautious, than she had been in the past.
CHAPTER XIII
Over two years passed, and the Schlegel household continued to lead its life of cultured, but not ignoble, ease, still swimming gracefully on the grey tides of London. Concerts and plays swept past them, money had been spent and renewed, reputations won and lost, and the city herself, emblematic of their lives, rose and fell in a continual flux, while her shallows washed more widely against the hills of Surrey and over the fields of Hertfordshire. This famous building had arisen, that was doomed. To-day Whitehall had been transformed; it would be the turn of Regent Street to-morrow. And month by month the roads smelt more strongly of petrol, and were more difficult to cross, and human beings heard each other speak with greater difficulty, breathed less of the air, and saw less of the sky. Nature withdrew; the leaves were falling by midsummer; the sun shone through dirt with an admired obscurity.
To speak against London is no longer fashionable. The Earth as an artistic cult has had its day, and the literature of the near future will probably ignore the country and seek inspiration from the town. One can understand the reaction. Of Pan and the elemental forces, the public has heard a little too much—they seem Victorian, while London is Georgian—and those who care for the earth with sincerity may wait long ere the pendulum swings back to her again. Certainly London fascinates. One visualises it as a tract of quivering grey, intelligent without purpose, and excitable without love; as a spirit that has altered before it can be chronicled; as a heart that certainly beats, but with no pulsation of humanity. It lies beyond everything; Nature, with all her cruelty, comes nearer to us than do these crowds of men. A friend explains himself; the earth is explicable—from her we came, and we must return to her. But who can explain Westminster Bridge Road or Liverpool Street in the morning—the city inhaling—or the same thoroughfares in the evening—the city exhaling her exhausted air? We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human face. London is religion’s opportunity—not the decorous religion of theologians, but anthropomorphic, crude. Yes, the continuous flow would be tolerable if a man of our own sort—not any one pompous or tearful—were caring for us up in the sky.
The Londoner seldom understands his city until it sweeps him, too, away from his moorings, and Margaret’s eyes were not opened until the lease of Wickham Place expired. She had always known that it must expire, but the knowledge only became vivid about nine months before the event. Then the house was suddenly ringed with pathos. It had seen so much happiness. Why had it to be swept away? In the streets of the city she noted for the first time the architecture of hurry and heard the language of hurry on the mouths of its inhabitants—clipped words, formless sentences, potted expressions of approval or disgust. Month by month things were stepping livelier, but to what goal? The population still rose, but what was the quality of the men born? The particular millionaire who owned the freehold of Wickham Place, and desired to erect Babylonian flats upon it—what right had he to stir so large a portion of the quivering jelly? He was not a fool—she had heard him expose Socialism—but true insight began just where his intelligence ended, and one gathered that this was the case with most millionaires. What right had such men—But Margaret checked herself. That way lies madness. Thank goodness, she, too, had some money, and could purchase a new home.
Tibby, now in his second year at Oxford, was down for the Easter vacation, and Margaret took the opportunity of having a serious talk with him. Did he at all know where he wanted to live? Tibby didn’t know that he did know. Did he at all know what he wanted to do? He was equally uncertain, but when pressed remarked that he should prefer to be quite free of any profession. Margaret was not shocked, but went on sewing for a few minutes before she replied:
“I was thinking of Mr. Vyse. He never strikes me as particularly happy.”
“Ye—es.” said Tibby, and then held his mouth open in a curious quiver, as if he, too, had thought of Mr. Vyse, had seen round, through, over, and beyond Mr. Vyse, had weighed Mr. Vyse, grouped him, and finally dismissed him as having no possible bearing on the Subject under discussion. That bleat of Tibby’s infuriated Helen. But Helen was now down in the dining room preparing a speech about political economy. At times her voice could be heard declaiming through the floor.
“But Mr. Vyse is rather a wretched, weedy man, don’t you think? Then there’s Guy. That was a pitiful business. Besides”—shifting to the general—“every one is the better for some regular work.”
Groans.
“I shall stick to it,” she continued, smiling. “I am not saying it to educate you; it is what I really think. I believe that in the last century men have developed the desire for work, and they must not starve it. It’s a new desire. It goes with a great deal that’s bad, but in itself it’s good, and I hope that for women, too, ‘not to work’ will soon become as shocking as ‘not to be married’ was a hundred years ago.”
“I have no experience of this profound desire to which you allude,” enunciated Tibby.
“Then we’ll leave the subject till you do. I’m not going to rattle you round. Take your time. Only do think over the lives of the men you like most, and see how they’ve arranged them.”
“I like Guy and Mr. Vyse most,” said Tibby faintly, and leant so far back in his chair that he extended in a horizontal line from knees to throat.
“And don’t think I’m not serious because I don’t use the traditional arguments—making money, a sphere awaiting you, and so on—all of which are, for various reasons, cant.” She sewed on. “I’m only your sister. I haven’t any authority over you, and I don’t want to have any. Just to put before you what I think the Truth. You see”—she shook off the pince-nez to which she had recently taken—“in a few years we shall be the same age practically, and I shall want you to help me. Men are so much nicer than women.”
“Labouring under such a delusion, why do you not marry?”
“I sometimes jolly well think I would if I got the chance.”
“Has nobody arst you?”
“Only ninnies.”
“Do people ask Helen?”
“Plentifully.”
“Tell me about them.”
“No.”
“Tell me about your ninnies, then.”
“They were men who had nothing better to do,” said his sister, feeling that she was entitled to score this point. “So take warning; you must work, or else you must pretend to work, which is what I do. Work, work, work if you’d save your soul and your body. It is honestly a necessity, dear boy. Look at the Wilcoxes, look at Mr. Pembroke. With all their defects of temper and understanding, such men give me more pleasure than many who are better equipped, and I think it is because they have worked regularly and honestly.”
“Spare me the Wilcoxes,” he moaned.
“I shall not. They are the right sort.”
“Oh, goodness me, Meg—!” he protested, suddenly sitting up, alert and angry. Tibby, for all his defects, had a genuine personality.
“Well, they’re as near the right sort as you can imagine.”
“No, no—oh, no!”
“I was thinking of the younger son, whom I once classed as a ninny, but who came back so ill from Nigeria. He’s gone out there again, Evie Wilcox tells me—out to his duty.”
“Duty” always elicited a groan.
“He doesn’t want the money, it is work he wants, though it is beastly work—dull country, dishonest natives, an eternal fidget over fresh water and food... A nation that can produce men of that sort may well be proud. No wonder England has become an Empire.”
“EMPIRE!”
“I can’t bother over results,” said Margaret, a little sadly. “They are too difficult for me. I can only look at the men. An Empire bores me, so far, but I can appreciate the heroism that builds it up. London bores me, but what thousands of splendid people are labouring to make London—”
“What it is,” he sneered.
“What it is, worse luck. I want activity without civilisation. How paradoxical! Yet I expect that is what we shall find in heaven.”
“And I,” said Tibby, “want civilisation without activity, which, I expect, is what we shall find in the other place.”
“You needn’t go as far as the other place, Tibbikins, if you want that. You can find it at Oxford.”
“Stupid—”
“If I’m stupid, get me back to the house-hunting. I’ll even live in Oxford if you like—North Oxford. I’ll live anywhere except Bournemouth, Torquay, and Cheltenham. Oh yes, or Ilfracombe and Swanage and Tunbridge Wells and Surbiton and Bedford. There on no account.”
“London, then.”
“I agree, but Helen rather wants to get away from London. However, there’s no reason we shouldn’t have a house in the country and also a flat in town, provided we all stick together and contribute. Though of course—Oh, how one does maunder on and to think, to think of the people who are really poor. How do they live? Not to move about the world would kill me.”
As she spoke, the door was flung open, and Helen burst in in a state of extreme excitement.
“Oh, my dears, what do you think? You’ll never guess. A woman’s been here asking me for her husband. Her WHAT?” (Helen was fond of supplying her own surprise.) “Yes, for her husband, and it really is so.”
“Not anything to do with Bracknell?” cried Margaret, who had lately taken on an unemployed of that name to clean the knives and boots.
“I offered Bracknell, and he was rejected. So was Tibby. (Cheer up, Tibby!) It’s no one we know. I said, ‘Hunt, my good woman; have a good look round, hunt under the tables, poke up the chimney, shake out the antimacassars. Husband? husband?’ Oh, and she so magnificently dressed and tinkling like a chandelier.”
“Now, Helen, what did really happen?”
“What I say. I was, as it were, orating my speech. Annie opens the door like a fool, and shows a female straight in on me, with my mouth open. Then we began—very civilly. ‘I want my husband, what I have reason to believe is here.’ No—how unjust one is. She said ‘whom,’ not ‘what.’ She got it perfectly. So I said, ‘Name, please?’ and she said, ‘Lan, Miss,’ and there we were.”
“Lan?”
“Lan or Len. We were not nice about our vowels. Lanoline.”
“But what an extraordinary—”
“I said, ‘My good Mrs. Lanoline, we have some grave misunderstanding here. Beautiful as I am, my modesty is even more remarkable than my beauty, and never, never has Mr. Lanoline rested his eyes on mine.’”
“I hope you were pleased,” said Tibby.
“Of course,” Helen squeaked. “A perfectly delightful experience. Oh, Mrs. Lanoline’s a dear—she asked for a husband as if he were an umbrella. She mislaid him Saturday afternoon—and for a long time suffered no inconvenience. But all night, and all this morning her apprehensions grew. Breakfast didn’t seem the same—no, no more did lunch, and so she strolled up to 2 Wickham Place as being the most likely place for the missing article.”
“But how on earth—”
“Don’t begin how on earthing. ‘I know what I know,’ she kept repeating, not uncivilly, but with extreme gloom. In vain I asked her what she did know. Some knew what others knew, and others didn’t, and then others again had better be careful. Oh dear, she was incompetent! She had a face like a silkworm, and the dining-room reeks of orris-root. We chatted pleasantly a little about husbands, and I wondered where hers was too, and advised her to go to the police. She thanked me. We agreed that Mr. Lanoline’s a notty, notty man, and hasn’t no business to go on the lardy-da. But I think she suspected me up to the last. Bags I writing to Aunt Juley about this. Now, Meg, remember—bags I.”
“Bag it by all means,” murmured Margaret, putting down her work. “I’m not sure that this is so funny, Helen. It means some horrible volcano smoking somewhere, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t think so—she doesn’t really mind. The admirable creature isn’t capable of tragedy.”
“Her husband may be, though,” said Margaret, moving to the window.
“Oh no, not likely. No one capable of tragedy could have married Mrs. Lanoline.”
“Was she pretty?”
“Her figure may have been good once.”
The flats, their only outlook, hung like an ornate curtain between Margaret and the welter of London. Her thoughts turned sadly to house-hunting. Wickham Place had been so safe. She feared, fantastically, that her own little flock might be moving into turmoil and squalor, into nearer contact with such episodes as these.
“Tibby and I have again been wondering where we’ll live next September,” she said at last.
“Tibby had better first wonder what he’ll do,” retorted Helen; and that topic was resumed, but with acrimony. Then tea came, and after tea Helen went on preparing her speech, and Margaret prepared one, too, for they were going out to a discussion society on the morrow. But her thoughts were poisoned. Mrs. Lanoline had risen out of the abyss, like a faint smell, a goblin football, telling of a life where love and hatred had both decayed.
CHAPTER XIV
The mystery, like so many mysteries, was explained. Next day, just as they were dressed to go out to dinner, a Mr. Bast called. He was a clerk in the employment of the Porphyrion Fire Insurance Company. Thus much from his card. He had come “about the lady yesterday.” Thus much from Annie, who had shown him into the dining-room.
“Cheers, children!” cried Helen. “It’s Mrs. Lanoline.”
Tibby was interested. The three hurried downstairs, to find, not the gay dog they expected, but a young man, colourless, toneless, who had already the mournful eyes above a drooping moustache that are so common in London, and that haunt some streets of the city like accusing presences. One guessed him as the third generation, grandson to the shepherd or ploughboy whom civilisation had sucked into the town; as one of the thousands who have lost the life of the body and failed to reach the life of the spirit. Hints of robustness survived in him, more than a hint of primitive good looks, and Margaret, noting the spine that might have been straight, and the chest that might have broadened, wondered whether it paid to give up the glory of the animal for a tail coat and a couple of ideas. Culture had worked in her own case, but during the last few weeks she had doubted whether it humanised the majority, so wide and so widening is the gulf that stretches between the natural and the philosophic man, so many the good chaps who are wrecked in trying to cross it. She knew this type very well—the vague aspirations, the mental dishonesty, the familiarity with the outsides of books. She knew the very tones in which he would address her. She was only unprepared for an example of her own visiting-card.
“You wouldn’t remember giving me this, Miss Schlegel?” said he, uneasily familiar.
“No; I can’t say I do.”
“Well, that was how it happened, you see.”
“Where did we meet, Mr. Bast? For the minute I don’t remember.”
“It was a concert at the Queen’s Hall. I think you will recollect,” he added pretentiously, “when I tell you that it included a performance of the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven.”
“We hear the Fifth practically every time it’s done, so I’m not sure—do you remember, Helen?”
“Was it the time the sandy cat walked round the balustrade?”
He thought not.
“Then I don’t remember. That’s the only Beethoven I ever remember specially.”
“And you, if I may say so, took away my umbrella, inadvertently of course.”
“Likely enough,” Helen laughed, “for I steal umbrellas even oftener than I hear Beethoven. Did you get it back?”
“Yes, thank you, Miss Schlegel.”
“The mistake arose out of my card, did it?” interposed Margaret.
“Yes, the mistake arose—it was a mistake.”
“The lady who called here yesterday thought that you were calling too, and that she could find you?” she continued, pushing him forward, for, though he had promised an explanation, he seemed unable to give one.
“That’s so, calling too—a mistake.”
“Then why—?” began Helen, but Margaret laid a hand on her arm.
“I said to my wife,” he continued more rapidly “I said to Mrs. Bast, ‘I have to pay a call on some friends,’ and Mrs. Bast said to me, ‘Do go.’ While I was gone, however, she wanted me on important business, and thought I had come here, owing to the card, and so came after me, and I beg to tender my apologies, and hers as well, for any inconvenience we may have inadvertently caused you.”
“No inconvenience,” said Helen; “but I still don’t understand.”
An air of evasion characterised Mr. Bast. He explained again, but was obviously lying, and Helen didn’t see why he should get off. She had the cruelty of youth. Neglecting her sister’s pressure, she said, “I still don’t understand. When did you say you paid this call?”
“Call? What call?” said he, staring as if her question had been a foolish one, a favourite device of those in mid-stream.
“This afternoon call.”
“In the afternoon, of course!” he replied, and looked at Tibby to see how the repartee went. But Tibby was unsympathetic, and said, “Saturday afternoon or Sunday afternoon?”
“S—Saturday.”
“Really!” said Helen; “and you were still calling on Sunday, when your wife came here. A long visit.”
“I don’t call that fair,” said Mr. Bast, going scarlet and handsome. There was fight in his eyes. “I know what you mean, and it isn’t so.”
“Oh, don’t let us mind,” said Margaret, distressed again by odours from the abyss.
“It was something else,” he asserted, his elaborate manner breaking down. “I was somewhere else to what you think, so there!”
“It was good of you to come and explain,” she said. “The rest is naturally no concern of ours.”
“Yes, but I want—I wanted—have you ever read The Ordeal of Richard Feverel?”
Margaret nodded.
“It’s a beautiful book. I wanted to get back to the earth, don’t you see, like Richard does in the end. Or have you ever read Stevenson’s Prince Otto?”
Helen and Tibby groaned gently.
“That’s another beautiful book. You get back to the earth in that. I wanted—” He mouthed affectedly. Then through the mists of his culture came a hard fact, hard as a pebble. “I walked all the Saturday night,” said Leonard. “I walked.” A thrill of approval ran through the sisters. But culture closed in again. He asked whether they had ever read E. V. Lucas’s Open Road.
Said Helen, “No doubt it’s another beautiful book, but I’d rather hear about your road.”
“Oh, I walked.”
“How far?”
“I don’t know, nor for how long. It got too dark to see my watch.”
“Were you walking alone, may I ask?”
“Yes,” he said, straightening himself; “but we’d been talking it over at the office. There’s been a lot of talk at the office lately about these things. The fellows there said one steers by the Pole Star, and I looked it up in the celestial atlas, but once out of doors everything gets so mixed.”
“Don’t talk to me about the Pole Star,” interrupted Helen, who was becoming interested. “I know its little ways. It goes round and round, and you go round after it.”
“Well, I lost it entirely. First of all the street lamps, then the trees, and towards morning it got cloudy.”
Tibby, who preferred his comedy undiluted, slipped from the room. He knew that this fellow would never attain to poetry, and did not want to hear him trying.
Margaret and Helen remained. Their brother influenced them more than they knew; in his absence they were stirred to enthusiasm more easily.
“Where did you start from?” cried Margaret. “Do tell us more.”
“I took the Underground to Wimbledon. As I came out of the office I said to myself, ‘I must have a walk once in a way. If I don’t take this walk now, I shall never take it.’ I had a bit of dinner at Wimbledon, and then—”
“But not good country there, is it?”
“It was gas-lamps for hours. Still, I had all the night, and being out was the great thing. I did get into woods, too, presently.”
“Yes, go on,” said Helen.
“You’ve no idea how difficult uneven ground is when it’s dark.”
“Did you actually go off the roads?”
“Oh yes. I always meant to go off the roads, but the worst of it is that it’s more difficult to find one’s way.”
“Mr. Bast, you’re a born adventurer,” laughed Margaret. “No professional athlete would have attempted what you’ve done. It’s a wonder your walk didn’t end in a broken neck. Whatever did your wife say?”
“Professional athletes never move without lanterns and compasses,” said Helen. “Besides, they can’t walk. It tires them. Go on.”
“I felt like R. L. S. You probably remember how in Virginibus.”
“Yes, but the wood. This ‘ere wood. How did you get out of it?”
“I managed one wood, and found a road the other side which went a good bit uphill. I rather fancy it was those North Downs, for the road went off into grass, and I got into another wood. That was awful, with gorse bushes. I did wish I’d never come, but suddenly it got light—just while I seemed going under one tree. Then I found a road down to a station, and took the first train I could back to London.”
“But was the dawn wonderful?” asked Helen.
With unforgettable sincerity he replied, “No.” The word flew again like a pebble from the sling. Down toppled all that had seemed ignoble or literary in his talk, down toppled tiresome R. L. S. and the “love of the earth” and his silk top-hat. In the presence of these women Leonard had arrived, and he spoke with a flow, an exultation, that he had seldom known.
“The dawn was only grey, it was nothing to mention.”
“Just a grey evening turned upside down. I know.”
“—and I was too tired to lift up my head to look at it, and so cold too. I’m glad I did it, and yet at the time it bored me more than I can say. And besides—you can believe me or not as you choose—I was very hungry. That dinner at Wimbledon—I meant it to last me all night like other dinners. I never thought that walking would make such a difference. Why, when you’re walking you want, as it were, a breakfast and luncheon and tea during the night as well, and I’d nothing but a packet of Woodbines. Lord, I did feel bad! Looking back, it wasn’t what you may call enjoyment. It was more a case of sticking to it. I did stick. I—I was determined. Oh, hang it all! what’s the good—I mean, the good of living in a room for ever? There one goes on day after day, same old game, same up and down to town, until you forget there is any other game. You ought to see once in a way what’s going on outside, if it’s only nothing particular after all.”
“I should just think you ought,” said Helen, sitting on the edge of the table.
The sound of a lady’s voice recalled him from sincerity, and he said: “Curious it should all come about from reading something of Richard Jefferies.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Bast, but you’re wrong there. It didn’t. It came from something far greater.”
But she could not stop him. Borrow was imminent after Jefferies—Borrow, Thoreau, and sorrow. R. L. S. brought up the rear, and the outburst ended in a swamp of books. No disrespect to these great names. The fault is ours, not theirs. They mean us to use them for sign-posts, and are not to blame if, in our weakness, we mistake the sign-post for the destination. And Leonard had reached the destination. He had visited the county of Surrey when darkness covered its amenities, and its cosy villas had re-entered ancient night. Every twelve hours this miracle happens, but he had troubled to go and see for himself. Within his cramped little mind dwelt something that was greater than Jefferies’ books—the spirit that led Jefferies to write them; and his dawn, though revealing nothing but monotones, was part of the eternal sunrise that shows George Borrow Stonehenge.
“Then you don’t think I was foolish?” he asked becoming again the naive and sweet-tempered boy for whom Nature intended him.
“Heavens, no!” replied Margaret.
“Heaven help us if we do!” replied Helen.
“I’m very glad you say that. Now, my wife would never understand—not if I explained for days.”
“No, it wasn’t foolish!” cried Helen, her eyes aflame. “You’ve pushed back the boundaries; I think it splendid of you.”
“You’ve not been content to dream as we have—”
“Though we have walked, too—”
“I must show you a picture upstairs—”
Here the door-bell rang. The hansom had come to take them to their evening party.
“Oh, bother, not to say dash—I had forgotten we were dining out; but do, do, come round again and have a talk.” “Yes, you must—do,” echoed Margaret.
Leonard, with extreme sentiment, replied: “No, I shall not. It’s better like this.”
“Why better?” asked Margaret.
“No, it is better not to risk a second interview. I shall always look back on this talk with you as one of the finest things in my life. Really. I mean this. We can never repeat. It has done me real good, and there we had better leave it.”
“That’s rather a sad view of life, surely.”
“Things so often get spoiled.”
“I know,” flashed Helen, “but people don’t.”
He could not understand this. He continued in a vein which mingled true imagination and false. What he said wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t right, and a false note jarred. One little twist, they felt, and the instrument might be in tune. One little strain, and it might be silent for ever. He thanked the ladies very much, but he would not call again. There was a moment’s awkwardness, and then Helen said: “Go, then; perhaps you know best; but never forget you’re better than Jefferies.” And he went. Their hansom caught him up at the corner, passed with a waving of hands, and vanished with its accomplished load into the evening.
London was beginning to illuminate herself against the night. Electric lights sizzled and jagged in the main thoroughfares, gas-lamps in the side streets glimmered a canary gold or green. The sky was a crimson battlefield of spring, but London was not afraid. Her smoke mitigated the splendour, and the clouds down Oxford Street were a delicately painted ceiling, which adorned while it did not distract. She had never known the clear-cut armies of the purer air. Leonard hurried through her tinted wonders, very much part of the picture. His was a grey life, and to brighten it he had ruled off a few corners for romance. The Miss Schlegels—or, to speak more accurately, his interview with them—were to fill such a corner, nor was it by any means the first time that he had talked intimately to strangers. The habit was analogous to a debauch, an outlet, though the worst of outlets, for instincts that would not be denied. Terrifying him, it would beat down his suspicions and prudence until he was confiding secrets to people whom he had scarcely seen. It brought him many fears and some pleasant memories. Perhaps the keenest happiness he had ever known was during a railway journey to Cambridge, where a decent-mannered undergraduate had spoken to him. They had got into conversation, and gradually Leonard flung reticence aside, told some of his domestic troubles and hinted at the rest. The undergraduate, supposing they could start a friendship, asked him to “coffee after hall,” which he accepted, but afterwards grew shy, and took care not to stir from the commercial hotel where he lodged. He did not want Romance to collide with the Porphyrion, still less with Jacky, and people with fuller, happier lives are slow to understand this. To the Schlegels, as to the undergraduate, he was an interesting creature, of whom they wanted to see more. But they to him were denizens of Romance, who must keep to the corner he had assigned them, pictures that must not walk out of their frames.
His behaviour over Margaret’s visiting-card had been typical. His had scarcely been a tragic marriage. Where there is no money and no inclination to violence tragedy cannot be generated. He could not leave his wife, and he did not want to hit her. Petulance and squalor were enough. Here “that card” had come in. Leonard, though furtive, was untidy, and left it lying about. Jacky found it, and then began, “What’s that card, eh?” “Yes, don’t you wish you knew what that card was?” “Len, who’s Miss Schlegel?” etc. Months passed, and the card, now as a joke, now as a grievance, was handed about, getting dirtier and dirtier. It followed them when they moved from Camelia Road to Tulse Hill. It was submitted to third parties. A few inches of pasteboard, it became the battlefield on which the souls of Leonard and his wife contended. Why did he not say, “A lady took my umbrella, another gave me this that I might call for my umbrella”? Because Jacky would have disbelieved him? Partly, but chiefly because he was sentimental. No affection gathered round the card, but it symbolised the life of culture, that Jacky should never spoil. At night he would say to himself, “Well, at all events, she doesn’t know about that card. Yah! done her there!”
Poor Jacky! she was not a bad sort, and had a great deal to bear. She drew her own conclusion—she was only capable of drawing one conclusion—and in the fulness of time she acted upon it. All the Friday Leonard had refused to speak to her, and had spent the evening observing the stars. On the Saturday he went up, as usual, to town, but he came not back Saturday night, nor Sunday morning, nor Sunday afternoon. The inconvenience grew intolerable, and though she was now of a retiring habit, and shy of women, she went up to Wickham Place. Leonard returned in her absence. The card, the fatal card, was gone from the pages of Ruskin, and he guessed what had happened.
“Well?” he had exclaimed, greeting her with peals of laughter. “I know where you’ve been, but you don’t know where I’ve been.”
Jacky sighed, said, “Len, I do think you might explain,” and resumed domesticity.
Explanations were difficult at this stage, and Leonard was too silly—or it is tempting to write, too sound a chap to attempt them. His reticence was not entirely the shoddy article that a business life promotes, the reticence that pretends that nothing is something, and hides behind the Daily Telegraph. The adventurer, also, is reticent, and it is an adventure for a clerk to walk for a few hours in darkness. You may laugh at him, you who have slept nights out on the veldt, with your rifle beside you and all the atmosphere of adventure pat. And you also may laugh who think adventures silly. But do not be surprised if Leonard is shy whenever he meets you, and if the Schlegels rather than Jacky hear about the dawn.
That the Schlegels had not thought him foolish became a permanent joy. He was at his best when he thought of them. It buoyed him as he journeyed home beneath fading heavens. Somehow the barriers of wealth had fallen, and there had been—he could not phrase it—a general assertion of the wonder of the world. “My conviction,” says the mystic, “gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it,” and they had agreed that there was something beyond life’s daily grey. He took off his top-hat and smoothed it thoughtfully. He had hitherto supposed the unknown to be books, literature, clever conversation, culture. One raised oneself by study, and got upsides with the world. But in that quick interchange a new light dawned. Was that “something” walking in the dark among the suburban hills?
He discovered that he was going bareheaded down Regent Street. London came back with a rush. Few were about at this hour, but all whom he passed looked at him with a hostility that was the more impressive because it was unconscious. He put his hat on. It was too big; his head disappeared like a pudding into a basin, the ears bending outwards at the touch of the curly brim. He wore it a little backwards, and its effect was greatly to elongate the face and to bring out the distance between the eyes and the moustache. Thus equipped, he escaped criticism. No one felt uneasy as he titupped along the pavements, the heart of a man ticking fast in his chest.