Portrait of a Man with Red Hair/Part 1
PART I: THE SEA LIKE BRONZE....
PORTRAIT OF A MAN
WITH RED HAIR
PART I
THE SEA LIKE BRONZE...
I
You're my friend:
I was the man the Duke spoke to:
I helped the Duchess to cast off his yoke too;
So here's the tale from beginning to end,
My friend!
∵
Ours is a great wild country;
If you climb to our castle's top,
I don't see where your eye can stop;
For when you've passed the cornfield country.
Where vineyards leave off, flocks are packed.
And sheep-range leads to cattle-tract.
And cattle-tract to open-chase.
And open-chase to the very base
Of the mountain where, at a funeral pace,
Round about, solemn and slow,
One by one, row after row.
Up and up the pine trees go.
Go, like black priests up, and so
Down the other side again
To another greater, wilder country....
'To another greater, wilder country...
'To another greater...'
I
The soul of Charles Percy Harkness slipped, like a neat white pocket-handkerchief, out through the carriage window into the silver-blue air, hung there changing into a tiny white fleck against the immensity, struggling for escape above the purple-pointed trees of the dark wood, then, realising that escape was not yet, fluttered back into the carriage again, was caught by Charles Percy, neatly folded up, and put away.
The Browning lines—old-fashioned surely?—had yielded it a moment's hope. Those and some other lines from another outmoded book:
"But the place reasserted its spell, marshalling once again its army, its silver-belted knights, its castles of perilous frowning darkness, its meadows of gold and silver streams.
"The old spell working the same purpose. For how many times and for what intent? That we may be reminded yet once again that there is the step behind the door, the light beyond the window, the rustle on the stair, and that it is for these things only that we must watch and wait?"
For Harkness had committed the folly of having two books open on his knee—a peek at one, a peek at another, a long, eager glance through the window at the summer scene, but above all a sensuous state of slumber hovering in the hot scented afternoon air just above him, waiting to pounce... to pounce...
"First Browning, then this other, the old book in a faded red-brown cover, "To Paradise! Frederick Lester" At the bottom of the title-page, 1892—how long ago! How faded and pathetic the old book was! He alone in all the British Isles at that moment reading it—certainly no other living soul—and he had crossed to Browning after Lester's third page.
He swung in mid-air. The open fields came swimming up to him like vast green waves, gently to splash upon his face, hanging over him, laced about the telegraph poles, rising and falling with them....
The voice of the old man with the long white beard, the only occupant of the carriage with him broke sharply in like a steel knife cutting through blotting-paper.
"Pardon me, but there is a spider on your neck."
Harkness started up. The two books slipped to the floor. He passed his hand, damp with the afternoon warmth, over his cool neck. He hated spiders. He shivered. His fingers were on the thing. With a shudder he flung it out of the window.
"Thank you," he said, blushing very slightly.
"Not at all," the old man said severely; "you were almost asleep, and in another moment it would have been down your back."
He was not the old man you would have expected to see in an English first-class carriage, save that now in these democratic days you may see any one anywhere. But first-class fares are so expensive. Perhaps that is why it is only the really poor who can afford them. The old man, who was thin and wiry, had large shabby boots, loose and ancient trousers, a flopping garden straw hat. His hands were gnarled like the knots of trees. He was terribly clean. He had blue eyes. On his knees was a large basket and from this he ate his massive luncheon—here an immense sandwich with pieces of ham like fragments of banners, there a colossal apple, a monstrous pear—
"Going far?" munched the old man.
"No," said Harkness, blushing again. "To Treliss. I change at Trewth, I believe. We should be there at 4.30."
"Should be," said the old man, dribbling through his pear. "The train's late.... Another tourist," he added suddenly.
"I beg your pardon?" said Harkness.
"Another of these damned tourists. You are, I mean. I lived at Treliss. Such as you drove me away."
"I am sorry," said Harkness, smiling faintly. "I suppose I am that if by tourist you mean somebody who is travelling to a place to see what it is like and enjoy its beauty. A friend has told me of it. He says it is the most beautiful place in England."
"Beauty," said the old man, licking his fingers—"a lot you tourists think about beauty—with your char-a-bancs and oranges and babies and Americans. If I had my way I'd make the Americans pay a tax, spoiling our country as they do."
"I am an American," said Harkness faintly.
The old man licked his thumb, looked at it, and licked it again. "I wouldn't have thought it," he said. "Where's your accent?"
"I have lived in this country a great many years off and on," he explained, "and we don't all say 'I guess' every moment as novelists make us do," he added, smiling.
Smiling, yes. But how deeply he detested this unfortunate conversation! How happy he had been, and now this old man with his rudeness and violence had smashed the peace into a thousand fragments. But the old man spoke little more. He only stared at Harkness out of his blue eyes, and said:
"Treliss is too beautiful a place for you. It will do you harm," and fell instantly asleep.
II
Yes, Harkness thought, looking at the rise and fall of the old man's beard, it is strange and indeed lamentable how deeply I detest a cross word! That is why I am always creeping away from things, why, too, I never make friends—not real friends—why at thirty-five I am a complete failure—that is, from the point of view of anything real.
I am filled too with self-pity, he added as he opened To Paradise again and groped for page four, and self-pity is the most despicable of all the vices.
He was not unpleasing to the eye as he sat there thinking. He was dressed with exceeding neatness, but his clothes had something of the effect of chain armour. Was that partly because his figure was so slight that he could never fill any suit of clothes adequately? That might be so. His soft white collar, his pale blue tie, his mild blue eyes, his long tranquil fingers, these things were all gentle. His chin protruded. He was called "gaunt" by undiscerning friends, but that was a poor word for him. He was too slight for that, too gentle, too unobtrusive. His hair was already retreating deprecatingly from his forehead. No gaunt man would smile so timidly. His neatness and immaculate spotless purity of dress showed a fastidiousness that granted his cowardice an excuse.
For I am a coward, he thought. This is yet another holiday that I am taking alone. Alone after all these years. And Pritchard or Mason, Major Stock or Henry Trenchard, Carstairs Willing or Falk Brandon—any one of these might have wished to go if I had had courage ... or even Maradick himself might have come.
The only companions, he reflected, that he had taken with him on this journey were his etchings, kinder to him, more intimate with him, rewarding him with more affection than any human being. His seven etchings—the seven of his forty—Lepère's "Route de St. Gilles," Legros's "Cabane dans les Marais," Rembrandt's "Flight into Egypt," Muirhead Bone's "Orvieto," Whistler's "Drury Lane," Strang's "Portrait of Himself Etching," and Meryon's "Rue des Chantres." His seven etchings—his greatest friends in the world, save of course Hetty and Jane his sisters. Yes he reflected, you can judge a man by his friends, and in my cowardice I have given all my heart to these things because they can't answer me back, cannot fail me when I most eagerly expect something of them, are always there when I call them, do not change nor betray me. And yet it is not only cowardice. They are intimate and individual as is no other form of graphic art. They are so personal that every separate impression has a fresh character. They are so lovely in soul that they never age nor have their moods. My Aldegrevers and Penczs, he was reflecting.... He was a little happier now.... The Browning and To Paradise fell once more to the ground. I hope the old man does not waken, he thought, and yet perhaps he will pass his station. What a temper he will be in if he does that, and then I too shall suffer!
He read a line or two of the Browning:
Ours is a great wild country;
If you climb to our castle's top,
I don't see where your eye can stop...
How strange that the book should have opened again at that same place as though it were that it wished him to read I
And then To Paradise a line or two, now page 376, "And the Silver Button? Would his answer defy that too? Had he some secret magic? Was he stronger than God Himself?..."
And then, Harkness reflected, this business about being an American. He had felt pride when he had told the old man that that was his citizenship. He was proud, yes, and yet he spent most of his life in Europe. And now as always when he fell to thinking of America his eye travelled to his own home there—Baker at the portals of Oregon. All the big trains passed it on their way to the coast—three hundred and forty miles from Portland, fifty from Huntington. He saw himself on that eager arrival coming out by he 11.30 train from Salt Lake City, steaming in at 4.30 in the afternoon, an early May afternoon perhaps with the colours violet in the sky and the mountains elephant-dusk—so quiet and so gentle. And when the train has gone on and you are left on the platform and you look about you and find everything as it was when you departed a year ago—the Columbia Café. The Antlers Hotel. The mountains still with their snow caps. The Lumber Offices. The notice on the wall of the café: "You can eat here if you have no money." The Crabill Hotel. The fresh sweet air, three thousand five hundred feet up. The soft pause of the place. Baker did not grow very fast as did other places. It is true that there had been but four houses when his father had first landed there, but even now as towns went it was small and quiet and unprogressive. Strange that his father with that old-cultured New England stock should have gone there, but he had fled from mankind after the death of his wife, Harkness's mother, fled with his three little children, shut himself away, there under the mountains with his books, a sad, severe man in that long, rambling ramshackle house. Still long, still rambling, still ramshackle, although Hetty and Jane, who never moved away from it, had made it as charming as they could. They were darlings, and lived for the month every year when their brother came to visit them. But he could not live there! No, he could not! It was exile for him, exile from everything for which he most deeply cared. But Europe was exile too. That was the tragedy of it! Every morning that he waked he thought that perhaps to-day he would find that he was a true European! But no, it was not so. Away from America, how deeply he loved his country! How clearly he saw its idealism, its vitality, its marvellous promise for the future, its loving contact with his own youthful dreams. But back in America again it seemed crude and noisy and materialistic. He longed for the Past. Exile in both with his New England culture that was not enough, his half-cocked vitality that was not enough. Never enough to permit his half-gods to go! But he loved America always; he saw how little these Europeans truly knew or cared about her, how hasty their visits to her, how patronising their attitude, how weary their stale conventions against her full, bursting energy. And yet! And yet! He could not live there. After two weeks of Baker, even though he had with him his etchings, his diary in its dark blue cover, Frazer's Golden Bought and some of the Loeb Classics, life was not enough. Hetty and Jane bored him with their goodness and little Culture Club. It was not enough for him that Hetty had read a very good paper on "Archibald Marshall—the modern Trollope" to the inhabitants of Baker and Haines. Nevertheless they seemed to him finer women than the women of any other country, with their cheery independence, their admirable common sense, their warm hearts, their unselfishness, but—it was not enough—no, it was not enough ... What he wanted ...
III
The old man awoke with a start.
"And when you come to this Prohibition question," he said, "the Americans have simply become a laughing stock...."
Harkness picked up the Browning firmly. "If you don't mind," he remarked, "I have a piece of work here of some importance and I have but little time. Pray excuse me...."
IV
How had he dared? Never in all his life had he spoken to a stranger so. How often had he envied and admired those who could be rude and indifferent to people's feelings. It seemed to him that this was a crisis with him, something that he would never forget, something that might alter all his life. Perhaps already the charm of which Maradick had spoken was working. He looked out of his window and always, afterwards, he was to remember a stream that, now bright silver, now ebony dark, ran straight to him from the heart of an emerald green field like a greeting spirit. It laughed up to his window and was gone.
He had asserted himself. The old man with the beard was reading the Hibbert Journal. Strange old man—but defeated! Harkness felt a triumph. Could he but henceforward assert himself in this fashion, all might be easy for him. Instead of retreating he might advance, stretch out his hand and take the things and the people that he wanted as he had seen others do. He almost wished that the old man might speak to him again, that he might once more be rude.
He had had, ever since he could remember, the belief that one day, suddenly, some magic door would open, some one step before him, some magic carpet unroll at his feet, and all life would be changed. For many years he had had no doubt of this. He would call it, perhaps, the coming of romance, but as he had grown older he had come to distrust both himself and life. He had always been interested in contemporary literature. Every new book that he opened now seemed to tell him that he was extremely foolish to expect anything of life at all. He was swallowed by the modern realistic movement as a fly is swallowed by an indifferent spider. These men, he said to himself, are very clever. They know so much more about everything than I do that they must be right. They are telling the truth at last about life as no one has ever done it before. But when he had read a great many of these books (and every word of Mr. Joyce's Ulysses) he found that he cared much less about truth than he had supposed. He even doubted whether these writers were telling the truth any more than the naive and sentimental Victorians; and when at last he heard a story all about an American manufacturer of washing machines whose habit it was to strip himself naked on every possible occasion before his nearest and dearest relations and friends, and when the author told him that this was a typical American citizen, he, knowing his own country people very well, frankly disbelieved it. These realists, he exclaimed, are telling fairy stories quite as thoroughly as Grimm, Fouqué, and De la Mare; the difference is that the realistic fairy stories are depressing and discouraging, the others are not. He determined to desert the realists and wait until something pleasanter came along. Since it was impossible to have the truth about life anyway let us have only the pleasant hallucinations. They are quite as likely to be as true as the others.
But he was lonely and desolate. The women whom he loved never loved him, and indeed he never came sufficiently close to them to give them any encouragement. He dreamt about them and painted them as they certainly were not. He had his passions and his desires, but his Puritan descent kept him always at one remove from experience. He never, in fact, seemed to have contact with anything at all—except Baker in Oregon, his two sisters, and his forty etchings. He was so shy that he was thought to be conceited, so idealistic that he was considered cynical, so chaste that he was considered a most immoral fellow with a secret double life. Like the hero of "Flegeljahre," he "loved every dog and wanted every dog to love him," but the dogs did not know enough about him to be interested; he was so like so many other immaculately-dressed, pleasant-mannered, and wandering American cosmopolitans that nobody had any permanent feeling for him—fathered by Henry James, uncled by Howells, aunted (severely) by Edith Wharton—one of a million cultured, kindly impersonal Americans seen as shadows by the matter-of-fact unimaginative British. Who knew or cared that he was lonely, longing for love, for home, for some one to whom he might give his romantic devotion? He was all these things, but no one minded.
And then he met James Maradick.
V
The meeting was of the simplest. At the Reform Club one day he was lunching with two men, one a novelist, Westcott, whom he knew very slightly, the other a fellow American. Westcott, a dark thick-set man of about forty, with a reputation that without being sensational was solid and well merited, said very little. Harkness liked him and recognised in him a kindly shyness rather like his own. After luncheon they moved into the big smoking-room upstairs to drink their coffee.
A large, handsome man of between fifty and sixty came up and spoke to Westcott. He was obviously pleased to see him, putting his hand on his shoulder, looking at him with kindly, smiling eyes. Westcott also flushed with pleasure. The big man sat down with them and Harkness was introduced to him. His name was Maradick—Sir James Maradick. A strange, unreal kind of name for so real and solid a man. As he sat forward on the sofa with his heavy shoulders, his deep chest, his thick neck, red-brown colour, and clear open gaze, he seemed to Harkness to be the typical rather naïve friendly but cautious British man of business.
That impression soon passed. There was something in Maradick that almost instantly warmed his heart. He responded—as do all American men—immediately, even emotionally, to any friendly contact. The reserves that were in his nature were from his superficial cosmopolitanism; the native warm-hearted, eager and trusting Americanism was as real and active as it ever had been. It was, in five minutes, as though he had known this large kindly man always. His shyness dropped from him. He was talking eagerly and with great happiness.
Maradick did not patronise, did not check that American spontaneity with traditional caution as so many Englishmen do; he seemed to like Harkness as truly as Harkness liked him.
Westcott had to go. The other American also departed, but Maradick and Harkness sat on there, amused, and even absorbed.
"If I am keeping you" Harkness said suddenly, some of his shyness for a moment returning.
"Not at all," Maradick answered. "I have nothing urgent this afternoon. I've got the very place for you, I believe."
They had been speaking of places. Maradick had travelled, and together they found some of the smaller places that they both knew and loved—Dragör on the sea beyond Copenhagen, the woods north of Helsingfors, the beaches of Ischia, the enchantment of Girgente with the white goats moving over carpets of flowers through the ruined temples, the silence and mystery of Mull. He knew America too—the places that foreigners never knew; the teeth-shaped mountains at Las Cruces, the lovely curve of Tacoma, the little humped-up hill of Syracuse, the purple horizons beyond Nashville, the lone lake shore of Marquette
"And then in this country there is Treliss," he said softly, staring in front of him,
"Treliss?" Harkness repeated after him, liking the name.
"Yes. In North Cornwall. A beautiful place."
He paused—sighed.
"I was there more than ten years ago. I shall never go back."
"Why not?"
"I liked it too well. I daresay they've spoiled it now as they have many others. Thanks to wretched novelists, the railway company and char-a-bancs, Cornwall and Glebeshire are ruined. No, I dare not go back."
"Was it very beautiful?" Harkness asked.
"Yes. Beautiful? Oh yes. Wonderful. But it wasn't that. Something happened to me there." [1]
"So that you dare not go back?"
"Yes. Dare is the word. I believe that the same thing would happen again. And I'm too old to stand it. In my case now it would be ludicrous. It was nearly ludicrous then." Harkness said nothing. "How old are you? If it isn't an impertinence"
"Thirty-five? You're young enough. I was forty. Have you ever noticed about places?" He broke off. "I mean Well, you know with people. Suppose that you have been very intimate with some one and then you don't see him or her for years, and then you meet again—don't you find yourself suddenly producing the same set of thoughts, emotions, moods that have, perhaps, lain dormant for years, and that only this one person can call from you? And it is the same with places. Sometimes of course in the interval something has died in you or in them, and the second meeting produces nothing. Hands cross over a grave. But if those things haven't died how wonderful to find
- ↑ See Maradick at Forty.
He broke off. "Places do the same, I think," he said. "If you have the sort of things in you that stir them they produce in their turn their things ... and always will for your kind ... a sort of secret society; I believe," he added, suddenly turning on Harkness and looking him in the face, "that Treliss might give you something of the same adventure that it gave me—if you want it to, that is—if you need it. Do you want adventure, romance, something that will pull you right out of yourself and test you, show you whether you are real or no, give you a crisis that will change you for ever? Do you want it?"
Then he added quietly, reflectively. "It changed me more than the war ever did."
"Do I want it?" Harkness was breathing deeply, driven by some excitement that he could not stop to analyse. "I should say so. I want nothing so much. It's just what I need, what I've been looking for"
"Then go down there. I believe you're just the kind—but go at the right time. There's a night in August when they have a dance, when they dance all round the town. That's the time for you to go. That will liberate you if you throw yourself into it. It's in August. August the I'm not quite sure of the date. I'll write to you if you'll give me your address."
Soon afterwards, with a warm clasp of the hand, they parted.
VI
Two days later Harkness received a small parcel. Opening it he discovered an old brown-covered book and a letter.
The letter was as follows:
Dear Mr. Harkness—In all probability in the cold light of reason, and removed from the fumes of the Reform Club, our conversation of yesterday will seem to you nothing but foolishness. Perhaps it was. The merest chance led me to think of something that belongs, for me, to a life quite dead and gone; not perhaps as dead, though, as I had fancied it. In any case, I had not, until yesterday, thought directly of Treliss for years.
Let us put it on the simplest ground. If you want a beautiful place, near at hand, for a holiday, that you have not yet seen, here it is—Treliss, North Cornwall—take the morning train from Paddington and change at Trewth. If you will be advised by me you really should go down for August 6th, when they have their dance. I could see that you are interested in local customs, and here is a most entertaining one surviving from Druid times, I believe. Go down on the day itself and let that be your first impression of the place. The train gets you in between five and six. Take your room at the "Man-at-Arms" Hotel, ten years ago the most picturesque inn in Great Britain. I cannot, of course, vouch for what it may have become. I should get you what I mean.
Or go, as perhaps after all is wiser, simply to a beautiful place for a week's holiday, forgetting me and anything I have said.
Or, as is perhaps wiser still, don't go at all. In any case I am your debtor for our delightful conversation of yesterday.—Sincerely yours, James Maradick.
What Maradick had said occurred. As the days passed the impression faded. Harkness hoped that he would meet Maradick again. He did not do so. During the first days he watched for him in the streets and in the clubs. He devised plans that would give him an excuse to meet him once more; the simplest of all would have been to invite him to luncheon. He knew that Maradick would come. But his own distrust of himself now as always forbade him. Why should Maradick wish to gee him again? He had been pleasant to him, yes, hut he was of the type that would be agreeable to any one, kindly, genial, and forgetting you immediately. But Maradick had not forgotten him. He had taken the trouble to write to him and send him a book. It had been a friendly letter too. Why not ask Westcott and Maradick to dinner? But Westcott was married. Harkness had met his wife, a charming and pretty English girl, younger a good deal than her husband. Yes, all right about Mrs. Westcott, but then Harkness must ask another woman. Maradick, he understood, was a widower. The thing was becoming a party. They would have to go somewhere, to a theatre or something. The thing was becoming elaborate, complicated, and he shrank from it. So he always shrank from everything were he given time to think.
He paid all the gentle American's courtesy and attention to fine details of conduct. Englishmen often shocked him by their casual inattention, especially to ladies. He must do social things elaborately did he do them at all. He was gathering around him already some of the fussy observances of the confirmed bachelor. And therefore as Maradick became to him something of a problem, he put him out of his mind just as he had put so many other things and persons out of his mind because he was frightened of them.
Treliss too, as the days passed, lost some of the first magic of its name. He had felt a strange excitement when Maradick had first mentioned it, but soon it was the name of a beautiful but distant place, then a seaside resort, then nowhere at all. He did not read Lester's book.
Then an odd thing occurred. It was the last day in July and he was still in London. Nearly every one had gone away—every one whom he knew. There were still many millions of human beings on every side of him, but London was empty for himself and his kind. His club was closed for cleaning purposes, and the Reform Club was offering him and his fellow-clubmen temporary hospitality.
He had lunched alone, then had gone upstairs, sunk into an armchair and read a newspaper. Read it or seemed to read it. It was time that he went away. Where should he go? There was an uncle who had taken a shooting-box in Scotland. He did not like that uncle. He had an invitation from a kind lady who had a large house in Wiltshire. But the kind lady had asked him because she pitied him, not because she liked him. He knew that very well.
There were several men who would, if he had caught them sooner, have gone with him somewhere, but he had allowed things to drift and now they had made their own plans.
He felt terribly lonely, soused suddenly with that despicable self-pity to which he was rather too easily prone. He thought of Baker—Lord! how hot it must be there just now! He was half asleep. It was hot enough here. Only one other occupant of the room, and he was fast asleep in another arm-chair. Snoring. The room rocked with his snores. The papers laid neatly one upon another wilted under the heat. The subdued London roar came from behind the windows in rolling waves of heat. A faint iridescence hovered above the enormous chairs and sofas that lay like animals panting.
He looked across the long room. Almost opposite him was a square of wall that caught the subdued light like a pool of water. He stared at it as though it had demanded his attention. The water seemed to move, to shift. Something was stirring there. He looked more intently. Colours came, shapes shifted. It was a scene, some place. Yes, a place. Houses, sand, water. A bay. A curving bay. A long sea-line dark like the stroke of a pencil against faint egg-shell blue. Water. A bay bordered by a ring of saffron sand, and behind the sand, rising above it, a town. Tier on tier of houses, and behind them again in the farthest distance a fringe of dark wood. He could even see now little figures, black spots, dotted upon the sand. The sea now was very clear, shimmering mother-of-pearl. A scattering of white upon the shore as the long wave-line broke and retreated. And the houses tier upon tier. He gazed, filled with an overwhelming breathless excitement. He was leaning forward, his hands pressing in upon the arms of the chair. It stayed, trembling with a kind of personal invitation before him. Then, as though it had nodded and smiled farewell to him, it vanished. Only the wall was there.
But the excitement remained, excitement quite unaccountable.
He got up, his knees trembling. He looked at the stout bellying occupant of the other chair, his mouth open, his snores reverberant.
He went out. Six days later he was in the train for Treliss.
VII
Now too, of course, he had his reactions just as he always had. He could explain the thing easily enough; for a moment or two he had slept, or, if he had not, a trick of light on that warm afternoon and his own thoughts about possible places had persuaded him.
Nevertheless the picture remained strangely vivid—the sea, the shore, the rising town, the little line of darkening wood. He would go down there, and on the day that Maradick had suggested to him. Something might occur. You never could tell. He packed his etchings—his St. Gilles, Marais, his Flight into Egypt and Orvieto, his Whistler and Strang and Meryon. They would protect him and see that he did nothing foolish.
He had special confidence in his St. Gilles.
He had intended to read the Lester book all the way, but as we have seen, managed only a bare line or two; the Browning he had not intended even to have with him, but in some fashion, with the determined resolve that books so often show, it had crept into his bag and then was on his knee, he knew not whence, and soon out of self-defence against the old man he was reading "The Flight of the Duchess," carried away on the wings of its freedom, strength and colour.
Nevertheless, that is the kind of man I am, he thought, even the books force me to read them when I have no wish. And soon he had forgotten the old man, the carriage, the warm weather. How many years since he had read it? No matter. Wasn't it fine and touching and true? When he came to the place:
... the door opened and more than mortal
Stood, with a face where to my mind centred
All beauties I ever saw or shall see,
The Duchess—I stopped as if struck by palsy.
She was so different, happy and beautiful
I felt at once that all was best,
And that I had nothing to do, for the rest
But wait her commands, obey and be dutiful.
Not that, in fact, there was any commanding,
—I saw the glory of her eye
And the brow's height and the breast's expanding,
And I was hers to live or to die.
"Hurrah!" Harkness cried.
"I beg your pardon" the old man said, looking up.
Harkness blushed. "I was reading something rather fine," he said, smiling.
"You'd better look out for what you're reading, to whom you're speaking, where you're walking, what you're eating, everything, when you're in Treliss," he remarked.
"Why? Is it so dangerous a place?" asked Harkness.
"It doesn't like tourists. I've seen it do funny things to tourists in my time."
"I think you're hard on tourists," Harkness said. "They don't mean any harm. They admire places the best way they can."
"Yes, and how long do they stay?" the old man replied. "Do you think you can know a place in a week or a month? Do you think a real place likes the dirt and the noise and the silly talk they bring with them?"
"What do you mean by a real place?" Harkness asked.
"Places have souls just like people. Some have more soul and some have less. And some have none at all. Sometimes a place will creep away altogether, it is so disgusted with the things people are trying to do to it, and will leave a dummy instead, and only a few know the difference. Why, up in the Welsh hills there are several places that have gone up there in sheer disgust the way they've been treated, and left substitutes behind them. Parts of London, for instance. Do you think that's the real Chelsea you see in London? Not a bit of it. The real Chelsea is living—well, I mustn't tell you where it is living—but you'll never find it. However, Americans are the last to understand these things. I am wasting my breath talking."
The train had drawn now into Drymouth. The old man was silent, looking out at the hurrying crowds on the platform. He was certainly a pessimist and a hater of his kind. He was looking out at the innocent people with a lowering brow as though he would slaughter the lot of them had he the power. "Old Testament Moses" Harkness named him. After a while the train slowly moved on. They passed above the mean streets, the hoardings with the cheap theatres, the lines with the clothes hanging in the wind, the grimy windows. But even these things the lovely sky, shining, transmuted.
They came to the river. It lay on either side of the track, a broad sheet of lovely water spreading, on the left, to the open sea. The warships clustered in dark ebony shadows against the gold; the hills rose softly, bending in kindly peace and happy watchfulness.
"Silence! We're crossing!" the old man cried. He was sitting forward, his gnarled hands on his broad knees, staring in front of him.
The train drew in to a small wayside station, gay with flowers. The trees blew about it in whispering clusters. The old man got up, gathered his basket and lumbered out, neither looking at nor speaking to Harkness.
He was alone. He felt an overwhelming relief. He had not liked the old man and very obviously the old man had not liked him. But it was not only that he was alone that pleased him. There was something more than that.
It was indeed as though he were in a new country. The train seemed to be going now more slowly, with a more casual air, as though it too felt a relief and did not care what happened—time, engagements, schedules, all these were now forgotten as they went comfortably lumbering, the curving fields embracing them, the streams singing to them, the little houses perched on the clear-lit skyline smiling down upon them.
It would not be long now before they were in Trewth, where he must change. He took his two books and put them away in his bag. Should he send the bag on and walk as Maradick had advised him? Three miles. Not far, and it was a most lovely day. He could smell the sea now through the windows. It must be only over that ridge of hill. He was strangely, oddly happy. London seemed far, far away. America too. Any country that had a name, a date, a history. This country was timeless and without a record. How beautifully the hills dipped into valleys. Streams seemed to be everywhere, little secret coloured streams with happy thoughts. Everything and every one surely here was happy. Then suddenly he saw a deserted mine tower like a gaunt and ruined temple. Haggard and fierce it stood against the skyline, and, as Harkness looked back to it, it seemed to raise an arm to heaven in desperate protest.
The train drew into Trewth.
VIII
Trewth was nothing more than a long wooden platform open to all the winds of heaven, and behind it a sort of shed with a ticket collector's box in one side of it.
Harkness was annoyed to see that others besides himself climbed out and scattered about the platform waiting for the Treliss train to come in.
He resented these especially because they were grand and elegant, two men, long, thin, in baggy knickerbockers, carrying themselves as though all the world belonged to them with that indifferent assurance that only Englishmen have; a large, stout woman, quietly but admirably dressed, with a Pekinese and a maid to whom she spoke as Cleopatra to Charmian. Five boxes, gun-cases, magnificent golf-bags, these things were scattered about the naked bare platform. The wind came in from the sea and sported everywhere, flipping at the stout lady's skirts, laughing at the elegant sportsmen's thin calves, mocking at the pouting Pekinese. It was fresh and lovely: all the cornfields were waving invitation.
It was characteristic of Harkness that a fancied haughty glance from the sportsmen's eye decided him. He's laughing at my clothes, Harkness thought. How was it that Englishmen wore old things so carelessly and yet were never wrong? Harkness bought his clothes from the best London tailors, but they were always finally a little hostile. They never surrendered to his personality, keeping their own proud reserve.
I'll walk, he thought suddenly. He found a young porter who, in anxious fashion, so unlike American porters who were always so superior to the luggage that they conveyed, was wheeling magnificent trunks on a very insecure barrow.
"These two boxes of mine," Harkness said, stopping him. "I want to walk over to Treliss. Can they be sent over?"
"Happen they can," said the young porter doubtfully.
"They are labeled to the 'Man-at-Arms' Hotel," Harkness said.
"They'll be there as soon as you will," said the young porter, cheered at the sight of an American tip which he put in his pocket, thinking in his heart that these foreigners were "damn fools" to throw their money around as they did. He advanced towards the stout lady hopefully. She might also prove to be American.
Harkness plunged out of the station into the broad white road. A sign pointed "Treliss—Three Miles." So Maradick had been exactly right.
As he left the village behind him and strode on between the cornfields he felt a marvellous freedom. He was heading now directly for the sea. The salt tang of it struck him in the face. Larks were circling in the blue air above him, poppies scattered the corn with plashes of crimson. Here and there gaunt rocks rose from the heart of the gold. No human being was in sight.
His love of etching had given him something of an etcher's eye, and he saw here a spreading tree and a pool of dark shadow, there a distant spire on the curving hill that he thought would have caught the fancy of his beloved Lepère, or Legros. Here a wayside pool like brittle glass that would have enchanted Appian, there a cottage with a sweeping field that might have made Rembrandt happy.
He seemed to be in unison with the whole of nature, and when the road left the fields and dived into the heart of a common his happiness was complete. He stood there, his feet pressing in upon the rough springing turf. A lark, singing above him, came down as though welcoming him, then circled up and up and up. He raised his head, staring into the pale faint blue until he seemed himself to circle with the bird, the turf pressing him upwards, his hands lifting him, he swinging into spaceless ecstasy. Then his gaze fell again and swung out beyond, and—there was the sea.
The Down ran in a green wave to the blue line of the sky, but in front of him it split, breaking into brown rocky patches, and between the brown curves a pool of purple sea lay like water in a cup.
He walked forward, deserting for a moment the road. He stood at the edge of the cliff and looked down. The tide was high and the line of the sea slipped up to the feet of the cliff, splashed there its white fringe of spray, then very gently fell back. Sea-pinks starred the cliffs with colour. Sea-gulls whirled, fragments of white foam, against the blue. Just below him one bird sat, its head cocked, waiting. With a shrill cry of vigour and assurance it flashed away, curving, circling, bending, dipping, as though it were showing to Harkness what it could do.
He walked along the cliff path happier than he had been for many many months. This was enough were there no more than this. For this at least he must thank Maradick—this peace, this air, this silence....
Turning a bend of the cliff he saw the town.
IX
It was absolutely the town of his vision. He saw, with a strange tightening of his heart as though he were being warned of something, that that was so. There was the curving bay with the faint fringe of white pencilling the yellow sand, there the houses rising tier on tier above the beach, there the fringe of dusky wood.
What did it mean? Why had he a clutch of terror as though some one was whispering to him that he must turn tail and run? Nothing could be more lovely than that town basking in the mellow afternoon light, and yet he was afraid at the sight of it—afraid so that his content and happiness of a moment ago were all gone and of a sudden he longed for company.
He was so well accustomed to his own reactions and so deeply despised them that he shrugged his shoulders and walked forward. Never, it seemed, was it possible for him to enjoy anything for more than a moment. Trouble and regret always came. But this was not regret, it was rather a kind of forewarning. He did not know that he had ever before looked on a place for the first time with so odd a mingling of conviction that he had already seen it, of admiration for its beauty, and of some sort of alarmed dismay. Beautiful it was, more Italian than English, with its white walls, its purple sea and warm scented air.
So peaceful and of so happy a tranquillity. He tried to drive his fear from him, but it hung on so that he was often turning back and looking behind him over his shoulder.
He struck the road again. It curved now, white and broad, down the hill toward the town. At the very peak of the hill before the descent began a man was standing watching something.
Harkness walked forward, then also stood still. The man was so deeply absorbed that his absorption held you. He was standing at the edge of the road and Harkness must pass him. At the crunch of Harkness's step on the gravel of the road the man turned and looked at him with startled surprise. Harkness had come across the soft turf of the Down, and his sudden step must have been an alarm. The fellow was broad-shouldered, medium height, clean-shaven, tanned, young, under thirty at least, dressed in a suit of dark blue. He had something of a naval air.
Harkness was passing, when the man said:
"Have you the right time on you, sir?" His voice was fresh, pleasant, well-educated.
Harkness looked at his watch. "Quarter past five," he said. He was moving forward when the man, hesitating, spoke again:
"You don't see any one coming up the road?"
Harkness stared down the white, sun-bleached expanse.
"No," he said after a moment, "I don't."
They looked for a while standing side by side silently.
After all he wasn't more than a boy—not a day more than twenty-five—but with that grave reserved look that so many British boys who were old enough to have been in the war had.
"Sure you don't see anybody?" he asked again, "coming up that farther bend?"
"No," said Harkness, shading his eyes with his hand against the sun; "can't say as I do."
"Damn nuisance," the boy said. "He's half an hour late now."
The boy stood as though to attention, his figure set, his hands at his side.
"Ah, there's some one," said Harkness. But it was only an old man with his cart. He slowly pressed up the hill past them urging his horses with a thick guttural cry, an old man brown as a berry.
"I beg your pardon," the boy turned to Harkness. "You'll think it an awful impertinence—but—are you in a terrible hurry?"
"No," said Harkness, "not terrible. I want to be at the 'Man-at-Arms' by dinner time. That's all."
"Oh, you've got lots of time," the boy said eagerly. "Look here. This is desperately important for me. The man ought to have been here half an hour ago. If he doesn't come in another twenty minutes I don't know what I shall do. It's just occurred to me. There's another way up this hill—a short cut. He may have chosen that. He may not have understood where it was that I wanted him to meet me. Would you mind—would you do me the favour of just standing here while I go over the hill there to see whether he's waiting on the other side? I won't be away more than five minutes; I'd be so awfully grateful."
"Why, of course," said Harkness.
"He's a fisherman with a black beard. You can't mistake him. And if he comes if you'd just ask him to wait for a moment until I'm back."
"Certainly," said Harkness.
"Thanks most awfully. Very decent of you, sir."
The boy touched his cap, climbed the hill and vanished.
Harkness was alone again—not a sound anywhere. The town shimmered below him in the heat. He waited, absorbed by the picture spread in front of him, then apprehensive again and conscious that he was alone. The alarm that he had originally felt at sight of the town had not left him. Suppose the boy did not return? Was he playing some joke on him perhaps? No, whatever else it was, it was not that. The boy had been deeply serious, plunged into some crisis that was of tremendous importance to him.
Harkness decided that he would wait until the shadow of a solitary tree to his right reached him and then go. The shadow crept slowly to his feet. At the same moment a figure turned the bend, a man with a black beard. He was walking quickly up the hill as though he knew that he was late.
Harkness went forward to meet him. The man stopped as though surprised. "I beg your pardon," said Harkness; "were you expecting to meet some one here?"
"I was—yes," said the man.
"He will be back in a moment. He was afraid that you might come up the other way. He went over the hill to see."
"Aye," said the man, standing, his legs apart, quite unconcerned. He was a handsome fellow, broad-shouldered, wearing dark blue trousers and a knitted jersey. "You'll be a friend of Mr. Dunbar's maybe"
"No, I'm not," Harkness explained. "I was passing and he asked me to wait for a moment and catch you if you came while he was away."
"Aye," said the fisherman, taking out a large wedge of tobacco and filling his pipe, "I'm a bit later than I said I'd be. Wife kept me."
"Fine evening," said Harkness.
"Aye," said the man.
At that moment the boy came over the hill and joined them. "Very good of you, sir," he said. "You're late, Jabez!"
"Good night," said Harkness, and moved down the hill. He could see the two in urgent conversation as he moved forward. The incident occupied his mind. Why had the matter seemed of such importance to the boy? Why a meeting so elaborately appointed out there on the hillside? The fisherman too had seemed surprised that he, a stranger, should be concerned in the matter.
Had he been in America the affair would have been at once explained—boot-legging of course. But here in England....
X
When he reached the bottom of the hill he found that he was in the environs of the town. He was walking now along a road shaded by thick trees and close to the sea-shore.
The cottages, white-washed, crooked and, many of them, thatched, ran down to the road, their gardens like little coloured carpets spreading in front of them. The evening air was thick with the scent of flowers, above all of roses. He had never smelt such roses, no, not in California.
There was a breeze from the sea, and it seemed to blow the roses into his very heart, so that they seemed to be all about him, dark crimson, burning white, scattering their petals over his head. He could hear the tune of the sea upon the sand beyond the trees.
He stood for a moment inhaling the scent—delicious, wonderful. He seemed to be crushing multitudes of the petals between his hands.
After a while the road broke away and he saw a path that led directly through the trees to the sea.
So soon as he had taken some steps across the soft sand he seemed to be alone in a world that was watching every movement that he made. It was as though he were committing some intrusion. He stopped and looked behind him: the thin line of trees had retreated, the cottages vanished. Before him was a waste of yellow sand, the deep purple of the sea rose like a wall to his right, hiding, as it were, some farther scene, the sky stretching over it a pale blue curtain tightly held.
A mist was rising, veiling the town. No living person was in sight. He reached a stretch of hard firm sand, thin rivulets of water lacing it. The air was wonderfully mild and sweet.
Never before in his life had he known such a feeling of anticipation. It was as though he knew the stretch of sand to be the last brook to cross before he would come into some mysterious country.
How commonplace this will all seem to me to-morrow, he said to himself, when, over my eggs and bacon at a prosperous modern hotel, I shall be reading my Daily Mail and hearing of the trippers at Eastbourne and who has taken "shooting" in Scotland and whether Yorkshire has beaten Surrey at cricket. He wanted to keep this moment, not to enter the town, even he had a mad impulse to walk on the sand for an hour, to see the colour fade from the sky and the sea change to a ghostly grey, then to return up the hill to Trewth and catch the night train back to London.
It would be wonderful like that; to have only the impression of the walk from the station, the talk with the boy on the hill, the scent of the roses and the afternoon sky. Everything is destroyed if you go into it too closely, or it is so for me. I should have a memory that would last me all my life.
But now the town was advancing towards him. His steps made no sound so that it seemed that he himself stood still, waiting to be seized. He took one last look at the sea. Then he was caught up and the houses closed about him.
XI
Six was striking from some distant clock as he started up the street. At the bottom of the hill there were fishermen's cottages, nets spread out on the stones to dry, some boats drawn up above a wooden jetty. Then, as the street spread out before him, some little shops began. Figures were passing hither and thither all transmuted in the afternoon light. Maradick need not have feared, he thought, this town has not been touched at all.
As he advanced yet further the houses delighted him with their broad doorways, their overhanging eaves, crooked roof and worn flights of steps. He came to a place where wooden stairs led to an upper path that ran before a higher row of houses and under the steps there were shops.
He could feel a stir and bustle in the place as though this were a night of festivity. Groups were gathered at corners, women stood in doorways laughing and whispering, a group of children was marching, wearing cocked hats of paper, beating on a wooden box and blowing on penny trumpets.
Then on coming into the Square he paused in sheer delighted wonder. This stands on a raised plateau above the sea, and the town hall, solid and virtuous above its flight of wide grey steps, is its great glory. Streets seemed to tumble in and out of the Square on every side. On a far corner there was a merry-go-round and there were booths and wooden trestles, some tents and flags waving above them. But just now it was almost deserted, only a man or two, some children playing in and out of the tents, a dog hunting among the scraps of paper that littered the cobbles.
A church of Norman architecture filled the right side of the Square, and squeezed between its grey walls and the modern town hall was a tall old tower of infinite age, with thin slits of windows and iron bars that pushed out against the pale blue sky like pointing fingers.
There were houses in the Square that were charming, houses with queer bow-windows and protruding doors like pepper-pots, little balconies, and here and there old carved figures on the walls, houses that Whistler would have loved to etch. Harkness stopped a man.
"Can you tell me where I shall find the 'Man-at-Arms' Hotel?" he asked.
"Why, yes," the man answered as though he were surprised that Harkness should not know. "Straight up that street in front of you. You'll find it at the top."
And he did find it at the top after what seemed to him an endless climb. The houses fell away. An iron gate was in front of him as though he were entering some private residence. Going up a long drive he passed beautiful lawns that shone like silk. to the right the grass fell away to a pond fringed with trees. Flowers were around him on every side and again in his nostrils was the heavy scent of innumerable roses.
The drive swept a wide circle before the great eighteenth-century house that now confronted him. But it is not a hotel at all, he thought, and he would have turned back had not, at that moment, a large hotel omnibus swept up to the door and discharged a chattering heap of men and women, who scattered over the steps screaming about their luggage, collecting children. The spell was broken. He had not realized how alone he had been during the last hour and with what domination his imagination had been working, creating for him a world of his own, encouraging in him what hopes, fears and anticipations!
He slipped in after the rest and stood shyly in the hall while the others made their wants triumphantly felt. A man of about forty, stout and round like an egg, but very shinily dressed, came forward and, bending and bowing, smiled at the women and spoke deferentially to the men.
This must be Mr. Bannister—"the King of the Castle" Maradick had told him in the Club. Not the original Mr. Bannister who has made the place what it is. He is, alas, dead and gone. Had he been still there and you had mentioned my name he would have done wonders for you. I don't know this fellow, and for all I know he may have ruined the place.
However, the original Bannister could not have been politer. Harkness was always afraid of hotel officials, and it was only when the invasion had broken up and begun to scatter that he came forward. But Mr. Bannister knew all about him—indeed was expecting him. His luggage had already arrived. He should be shown his room, and Mr. Bannister did hope that it would be.... If anything in the least wasn't....
Harkness started upstairs. There is a lift here, but if the gentleman doesn't mind.... His room is only on the second floor and instead of waiting.... Of course the gentleman doesn't mind. And still less does he mind when he sees his room.
This is mine absolutely, Harkness said, as though it had been waiting for me for years and years with its curved bow-window, its view over that enchanting garden and the line of sea beyond, its white wall unbroken by those coloured prints that hotel managers in my own country find it so necessary always to provide. Those chintz curtains with the roses are delicious. Just enough furniture. "There is no private bath of course?"
"The bathroom is just across the passage. Very convenient," said the man.
"Yes, in England we haven't reached the private bathroom yet, although we are supposed to be so fond of bathing."
"No, sir," said the man. "Anything else I can do for you?"
"No, thank you," said Harkness, smiling, as he looked on the white sunlit walls and checking the tip that, American fashion, he was about to give. "How strong the smell of the roses. It is very late for them, isn't it?'
"They are just about over, sir."
"So I should have thought."
Left alone he slowly unpacked. He liked unpacking and putting things away. It was packing that he detested. He had a few things with him that he always carried when he travelled—a red leather writing-case, a little Japanese fisherman in coloured ivory, two figures in red amber, photographs of his sisters in a silver frame. He put out these little things on a table of white wood near his bed, not from any affectation, but because when they were there the room seemed to understand him, to settle about him with a little sigh as though it granted him citizenship—for so long as he wished to stay. Then there were his prints. He took out four, the Lepère "St. Gilles," Strang's "Etcher," the Rembrandt "Flight into Egypt" and the Whistler "Drury Lane." The Strang he had on one side of the looking-glass, the "Drury Lane" on the other, the "Flight into Egypt" at the back of the writing- table, whither he might glance across the room at it as he lay in bed, the "St. Gilles" close to him near to the red writing-case and the ivory fisherman.
He sighed with satisfaction as, sitting down on his bed, he looked at them. He felt that he needed them to-night as he had never needed them before. The sense of excited anticipation that had increased with him all day was now surely approaching its climax. That excitement had in it the strangest mixture of delight, sensuous thrill and something that was nothing but panicky terror. Yes, he was frightened. Of what? Of whom? He could not tell. But only as he looked across the room at those familiar scenes, at the massive dark tree of the "St. Gilles" with the hot road, the high comfortable hedge, the happy figures, at the adorable face of the donkey in the Rembrandt, at the little beings so marvellously placed under the dancing butterfly in the Whistler, at the strong, homely, friendly countenance of Strang himself, he felt as he had so often felt before, that those beautiful things were trying themselves to reassure him, to tell him, that they did not change nor alter and that where he would be there they would be too.
He took Maradick's letter from his pocket and read it again. Here he was—now what must happen next? He would dress now at once for dinner and then walk in the garden before the light began to fail. Or no. Wasn't he to go down into the town after dinner and to see this dance, to share in it even? Hadn't Maradick said that that was what, above all else, he must do?
And then what was this about a Minstrels' Gallery somewhere? He would have a bath, change his linen, and then begin his explorations. He undressed, found the bathroom, enjoyed himself for twenty minutes or more, then slipped back across the passage into his room again. It was now nearly seven o'clock. As he was dressing the sun was getting low in the sky. A beam of sunshine caught the intent gaze of Strang, who seemed to lean across his etching board as though to tell him, to reassure him, to warn him....
He slipped out of his room and began his explorations.
XII
For a while he wandered, lost in a maze of passages. He understood that the Minstrels' Gallery was at the top of the house. He did not use the lift, but climbed the stairs, meeting no one; then he was on a floor that must, he thought, be servants' quarters. It had another air, something less arranged, less handsome, old-fashioned, as though it were even now as it had been two hundred years ago—a survival as the old grey tower in the market-place was a survival.
For a little while he stood hesitating. The passage was dark and he did not wish to plunge into a servant's room. Strange that up here there was no sound at all—an absolute deathly stillness!
He walked down to the end of the passage then, turning, came to a door that was larger than the others. He could see as he looked at it more closely that there was some faint carving on the woodwork above it. He turned the handle, entered the room, then stopped with a little cry of surprise and pleasure.
Truly Maradick had been right. Here was a room that, if there was nothing more to come, made the journey sufficiently of value. An enchanting room! On the left side of it were broad bright windows, and at the farther end, under the Minstrels' Gallery, windows again. There were no curtains to the windows—the whole room had an empty deserted air—but the more for that reason the place was illuminated with the glow of the evening light. The first thing that he realised was the view—and what a view!
The windows were deep set and hung forward, it seemed, over the hill, so that town, gardens, trees, were all lost and you saw only the sea.
At this hour you seemed to swing in space; the division lost between sea and sky in the now nearly horizontal rays of the sun—only a golden glow covering the blue with a dazzling blaze of colour. He stood there drinking it in, then sat in one of the window-seats, his hands clasped, lost in happiness.
After a while he turned back to the room. Flecks of dust, changed into gold by the evening light, floated in mid-air. The room was disregarded indeed. The walls were panelled. The little Minstrels' Gallery was supported on two heavy pillars. The floor was bare of carpet and had even a faint waxen sheen, as though, in spite of the room's general neglect, it was used, once and again, for dances.
But what pathos the room had! He did not know that almost fifteen years before Maradick had felt that same thing. How vastly now that pathos was increased, how greatly since Maradick's day the world's history had relentlessly cut away those earlier years. He saw that round the platform of the gallery was intricate carving, and, going forward more closely to examine, saw that in every square was set the head of a grinning lion. Some high-backed, quaintly-shaped chairs, that looked as though they might be of great age, were ranged against the wall.
Being now right under the gallery he saw some little wooden steps. He climbed up them and then from the gallery's shadow looked down across the room. How clearly he could picture that old scene, something straight from Jane Austen with Miss Bates and Mrs. Norris, stiff-backed, against the wall, and Anne Elliott and Elizabeth Bennet, Mr. Collins and the rest. The fiddlers scraping, the negus for refreshment, the night darkening, the carriages with their lights gathering....
The door at the far end of the room closed with a gentle click. He started, not imagining that any one would choose that room at such an hour.
Two figures were there in the shadow beyond the end room. The light fell on the man's face—Harkness could see it very clearly. The other was a woman wearing a white dress. He could not see her face.
For an instant they were silent, then the man said something that Harkness could not hear.
The girl at once broke out: "No, no. Oh, please, Herrick."
She must be a very young girl. The voice was that of a child. It had in it a desperate note that held Harkness's attention instantly.
The man said something again, very low,
"But if you don't care," the girl's voice pleaded, "then let me go back. Oh, Herrick, let me go! Let me go!"
"My father does not wish it."
"But I am not married to your father. It is to you."
"My father and I are the same. What he says I must do, I do."
"But you can't be the same." Her voice now was trembling in its urgency. "No one could love their father more than I do and yet we are not the same."
"Nevertheless you did what your father asked you to do. So must I."
"But I didn't know. I didn't know. And he didn't know. He has never seen me frightened of anything, and now I am frightened.... I've never said I was to any one before, but now ... now ..."
She was crying, softly, terribly, with the terrified crying of real and desperate fear.
Harkness had been about to move. He did not, unseen and his presence unrealised, wish to overhear, but her tears checked him. Although he could not see her he had detected in her voice a note of pride. He fancied that she would wish anything rather than to be thus seen by a stranger. He stayed where he was. He could see the man's face, thin, white, the nose long pointed, a dark, almost grotesque shadow.
"Why are you frightened?"
"I don't know, I can't tell. I have never been frightened before."
"Have I been unkind to you?"
"No, but you don't love me."
"Did I ever pretend to love you? Didn't you know from the very first that no one in the world matters to me except my father?"
"It is of your father that I am afraid.... These last three days in that terrible house.... I'm so frightened, Herrick. I want to go home only for a little while. Just for a week before we go abroad."
"All our plans are made now. You know that we are sailing to-morrow evening."
"Yes, but I could come afterwards.... Forgive me, Herrick. You may do anything to me if I can only go home for just some days.... You may do anything...."
"I don't want to do anything, Hesther. No one wishes to do you any harm. But whatever my father wishes that every one must do. It has always been so."
She seemed to be seized by an absolute frenzy of fear; Harkness could see her white shadow quivering. It appeared to him as though she caught the man by the arm. Her voice came in little breathless stifled cries, infinitely pitiful to hear.
"Please, please, Herrick. I dare not speak to your father. I don't dare. I don't dare. But you—let me go—Oh! let me go—just this once, Herrick. Only this once. I'll only be home for a few days and then I'll come back. Truly I'll come back. I'll just see father and Bobby and then I'll come back. They'll be missing me. I know they will. And I'll be going to a foreign country—such a long way. And they'll be wanting me. Bobby's so young, Herrick, only a baby. He's never had any one to do anything for him but me...."
"You should have thought of that before you married me, you cannot leave me now."
"I won't leave you. I've never broken my word to any one. I won't break it now. It's only for a few days."
"How can you be so selfish, Hesther, as to want to upset every one's plans just for a whim of your own? For myself I don't care. You could go home for ever for all I care. I didn't want to marry any one. But what my father wished had to be."
She clung to him then, crying again and again between her sobs:
"Oh, let me go home! Let me go home! Let me go home!"
Harkness fancied that the man put his hands on her shoulders. His voice, cold, lifeless, impersonal, crossed the room.
"That is enough. He is waiting for us downstairs. He will be wondering where we are."
The little white shadow seemed to turn to the window, towards the limitless expanse of sunlit sea. Then a voice, small, proud, empty of emotion, said:
"Father wished me"
Harkness was once more alone in the room.
XIII
They had gone but the girl's fear remained. It was there as truly as the two figures had been and its reality was stronger than their reality.
Harkness had the sense of having been caught, and it was exactly as though now, as he stood alone there in the gallery staring down into the room, some Imp had touched him on the shoulder, crying, "Now you're in for it! Now you're in for it! The situation has got you now."
He was, of course, not "in for it" at all. How many such conversations between human beings there were: it simply was that he had happened against his will to overhear a fragment of one of them. Yes, "against his will." How desperately he wished that he hadn't been there. What induced them to choose that room and that time for their secret confidences? He felt still in the echo of their voices the effect of their urgency.
They had chosen that room because there was some one watching their every movement and they had had only a few moments. The child—for surely she could not be more—had almost driven her companion into that two minutes' conversation, and Harkness could realise how desperate she must have been to have taken such a course.
But after all it was no business of his! Girls married every day men whom they did not love and, although apparently in this case, the man also did not love her and they were both of them in evil plight, still that too had happened before and nothing very terrible had come of it.
It was no business of his, and yet he did wish, all the same, that he could get the ring of the girl's voice out of his ears. He had never been able to bear the sight, sound or even inference of any sort of cruelty to helpless humans or to animals. Perhaps because he was so frantic a coward himself about physical pain! And yet not altogether that. He had on several occasions taken risks of pretty savage pain to himself in order to save a horse a beating or a dog a kicking. Nevertheless, those had been spontaneous emotions roused at the instant; there was something lingering, a sad and tragic echo, in the voice that was still with him.
The very pathos of the room that he was in—the lingering of so many old notes that had been rung and rung again, notes of anticipation, triumph, disappointment, resignation, made this fresh, living sound the harder to escape.
By Jupiter, the child was frightened—that was the final ringing of it upon Harkness's heart and soul. But he was going to have his life sufficiently full were he to step in and rescue every girl frightened by matrimony! Rescue! No, there was no question of rescue. It wasn't, once again, his affair. But he did wish that he could just take her hand and tell her not to worry, that it would all come right in the end. But would it? He hadn't at all cared for the fragment of countenance that fellow had shown to him, and he had liked still less the tone of his voice, cold, unfeeling, hard. Poor child! And suddenly the thought of his Browning's "Duchess" came to him:
I was the man the Duke spoke to:
I helped the Duchess to cast off his yoke too;
So, here's the tale from beginning to end,
My friend!
Well, here was a tale with which he had definitely nothing to do. Let him remember that. He was here in a most beautiful place for a holiday—that was his purpose, that his intention—what were these people to him or he to them?
Nevertheless the voice lingered in his ear, and to be rid of it he left the room. He stepped carefully down the wooden steps, and then at the bottom of them, under the dark lee of the gallery, he paused. He was so foolishly frightened that he could not move a step.
He waited. At last he whispered "Is any one there?"
There was no answer. He pushed his way then out of the shadow, his heart drumming against his shirt. There was no one there. Of course there was not.
In his room once more with his friend Strang and the Rembrandt Donkey to take him home he sat on his bed holding his hands between his knees.
He was positively afraid of going down to dinner. Afraid of what? Afraid of being drawn in. Drawn into what? That was precisely what he did not know, but something that ever since his first glimpse of Maradick at the Reform Club had been preparing. It was that he saw, as he sat there thinking of it, that he feared—this Something that was piling up outside him and with which he had nothing to do at all.
Why should he mind because he had heard a girl say that she was frightened and wanted to go home? And yet he did mind—minded terribly and with increasing violence from every moment that passed. The thought of that child without a friend and on the very edge of an experience that might indeed be fatal for her, the thought of it was more than he could endure.
He was clever at escaping things did they only give him a moment's pause, but in this case the longer he thought about it the harder it was to escape from. It was as though the girl had made her personal appeal to himself.
But what an old scamp her father must be, Harkness thought, to give her up like this to a man for whom she has no love, who doesn't love her. Why did she do it? And what kind of a man is the father-in-law of whom she is so afraid and who dominates his son so absolutely? In any case I must go down to dinner. I must just take what comes...
Yes, but his prudence whispered, don't meddle in this affair actively. It isn't the kind of thing in which you are likely to distinguish yourself.
"No, by Jove, it isn't."
"Well, then, be careful."
"I mean to be." Then suddenly the girl's voice came sharp and clear. "Damn it, I'll do anything I can," he cried aloud, jumped from the bed and went downstairs.
XIV
As he went downstairs he felt a tremendous sense of liberation. It was as though he had, after many hesitations and fears, passed through the first room successfully and closed the door behind him. Now there was the second room to be confronted.
What he immediately confronted was the garden of the hotel. The sun was slowly setting in the west, and great amber clouds, spreading out in swathes of colour, ate up the blue.
The amber flung out arms as though it would embrace the whole world. The deep blue ebbed from the sea, was pale crystal, then from length to length a vast bronze shield. The amber receded as though it had done its work, and myriads of little flecks of gold ran up into the pale blue-white, thousands of scattered fragments like coins flung in some God-like largesse.
The bronze sea was held rigid as though it were truly of metal. The town caught the gold and all the windows flashed. In the fresh evening light the grass of the lawn seemed to shine with a fresh iridescence—the farther hills were coldly dark.
Several people were walking up and down the gravel paths pausing before going in to dinner. In the golden haze only those things stood out that were more important for the scene, nature, as always, being more theatrical than any man-contrived theatre. The stage being set, the principal actor made his entrance.
A window running to the gravel path caught the level rays of the setting sun. A man stepped before this, stopping to light a cigarette and then, being there, stayed like an oriental image staring out into the garden.
Harkness looked casually, then looked again, then, fascinated, remained watching. He had never before seen such red hair nor so white a face, nor so large a stone as the green one that shone in a ring on the finger of his raised hand. He was lighting his cigarette—it was after this that he fell into rigid immobility, and the fire of the match caught the ring until, like a great eye, it seemed to open, wink at Harkness, and then regard him with a contemptuous stare.
The man's hair was en brosse, standing straight on end as Loge's used to do in the old pre-war Bayreuth "Ring." It was, like Loge's, a flaming red, short, harsh, instantly arresting. Evening dress. One small black pearl in his shirt. Very small feet in shining shoes.
There had stuck in Harkness's mind a phrase that he had encountered once in George Moore's description of Verlaine in Memories and Opinions—"I shall not forget the glare of the bald prominent forehead (une tête glabre)...." That was the phrase now, une tête glabre—the forehead glaring like a challenge, the red hair springing from it like something alive of its own independence. For the rest this interesting figure had a body round, short and fat like a ball. Over his protruding stomach stretched a white waistcoat with three little plain black buttons.
The colour of his face had an unnatural pallor, something theatrical like the clown in Pagliacci or again, like one of Benda's masks. Yes, this was the truer comparison, because through the mask the eyes were alive and beautiful, dark, tender, eloquent, but spoilt because above them the eyebrows were so faint as to be scarcely visible. The mouth in the white of the face was a thin hard red scratch. The eyes stared into the garden. The body soon became painted into the window behind it, the round short limbs, the shining shoes, the little black pearl in the gleaming shirt.
Harkness, from the shadow where he stood, looked and looked again. Then, fearing that he might be perceived and his stare be held offensive, he moved forward. The man saw him and, to Harkness's surprise, stepped forward and spoke to him.
"I beg your pardon," he said; "but do you happen to have a light? My cigarette did not catch properly and I have used my last match."
Here was another surprise for Harkness. The voice was the most beautiful that he had ever heard from man. Soft, exquisitely melodious, with an inflection in it of friendliness, courtesy and culture that was enchanting. Absolutely without affectation.
"Why, yes. Certainly," said Harkness.
He felt for his little gold matchbox, found it, produced a match and, guarding it with his hand, struck it. In the light the other's forehead suddenly sprang up again like a live thing. For an instant two of his fingers rested in Harkness's hand. They seemed to be so soft as to be quite boneless.
"Thank you. What an exquisite evening!"
"Yes," said Harkness. "This is a very beautiful place."
"Yes," said the other, "is it not? And this is incidentally the best hotel in England."
The voice was so beautiful to Harkness, who was exceedingly sensitive to sound, that his only desire was that by some means he should prolong the conversation so that he might indulge himself ii; the luxury of it.
"I have only just arrived," he said; "I came only an hour ago, and it is my first visit."
"Is that so? Then you have a great treat in store for you. This is splendid country round here, and although every one has been doing their best to spoil it there are still some lovely places. Treliss is the only town in Southern England where the place is still triumphant over modern improvements."
There was a pause, then the man said:
"Will you be here for long?"
"I have made no plans," Harkness replied.
"I wish I could show you around a little. I know this country very well. There is nothing I enjoy more than showing off some of our beauties. But, unfortunately, I leave for abroad early to-morrow morning."
Harkness thanked him. They were soon talking very freely, walking up and down the gravel path. The exquisite modulation of the man's voice, its rhythm, gentleness, gave Harkness such delight that he could listen for ever. They spoke of foreign countries. Harkness had travelled much and remembered what he had seen. This man had been apparently everywhere.
Suddenly a gong sounded. "Ah, there's dinner." They paused. The stranger said: "I beg your pardon. You tell me that you are American, and I know therefore that you are not hampered by ridiculous conventionalities. Are you alone?"
"I am," said Harkness.
"Well, then—why not dine with us? There is myself, my son and a charming girl to whom he has lately been married. Do me that pleasure. Or, if people are a bore to you be quite frank and say so."
"I shall be delighted," said Harkness.
"Good. My name is Crispin."
"Harkness is mine."
They walked in together.
XV
He had, as he walked into the hall, an overwhelming sense that everything that was occurring to him had happened to him before, and it was only part of this dream-conviction that Crispin should pause and say:
"Here they are, waiting for us," and lead him up to the girl who, half an hour before, had been with him in the little gallery. He had even a moment of protesting panic crying to the little imp whose voice he had already heard that evening: "Let me out of this. I am not so passive as you fancy. It is a holiday I am here for. There is no knight errantry in me—you have caught the wrong man for that."
But the girl's face stopped him. She was beautiful. He had from the first instant of seeing her no doubt of that, and it was as though her voice had already built her up for him in that dim room.
Straight and dark, her face had child-like purity in its rounded cheeks, its large brow and wondering eyes, its mouth set now in proud determination, but trembling a little behind that pride, its cheeks very soft and faintly coloured. Her hair was piled up as though it were only recently that it had come to that distinction. She was wearing a very simple white frock that looked as though it had been made by some little local dressmaker of her own place. She had been proud of it, delighted with it, Harkness could be sure, perhaps only a week or two ago. Now experiences were coming to her thick and fast. She was clutching them all to her, determined to face them whatever they might be, finding them, as Harkness knew from what he had overheard, more terrible than she had ever conceived.
She had been crying, as he knew, only half an hour ago, but now there were no traces of tears, only a faint shell-like flush on her cheeks.
The man standing beside her was not much more than a boy, but Harkness thought that he had seldom perceived an uglier countenance. A large broad nose, a long thin face like a hatchet, grey colourless eyes and a bony body upon which the evening clothes sat awkwardly, here was ugliness itself, but the true unpleasantness came from the cold aloofness that lay in the unblinking eyes, the hard straight mouth.
"He might be walking in his sleep," Harkness thought, "for all the life he's showing. What a pair for the girl to be in the hands of!" Harkness was introduced:
"Hesther, my dear, this is Mr. Harkness who is going to give us the pleasure of dining with us. Mr. Harkness, this is my boy, Herrick."
The little man led the way, and it was interesting to perceive the authoritative dignity with which he moved. He had a walk that admirably surmounted the indignities that the short legs and stumpy body would, in a less clever performer, have inevitably entailed. He did not strut, nor trot, nor push out his stomach and follow it with proud resolve.
His dignity was real, almost regal, and yet not absurd. He walked slowly, looking about him as he went. He stopped at the entrance of the dining-hall now crowded with people, spoke to the head waiter, a stout pompous-looking fellow, who was at once obsequious, and started down the room to a reserved table.
The diners looked up and watched their progress, but Harkness noticed that no one smiled. When they came to their table in the middle of the room, Mr. Crispin objected to it and they were at once shown to another one beside the window and looking out to the sea.
"It will amuse you to see the room, Hesther. You sit there. You can look out of the window too when you are bored with people. Will you sit here, Mr. Harkness, on my right?"
Harkness was now opposite the girl and looking out to the sea that was lit with a bronze flame that played on the air like a searchlight. The window was slightly open, and he could hear the sounds from the town, the merry-go-round, a harsh trumpet, and once and again a bell.
"Do you mind that window?" Crispin asked him. "I think it is rather pleasant. You don't mind it, Hesther dear? They are having festivities down there this evening. The night of their annual ceremony when they dance round the town—something as old as the hill on which the town is built, I fancy. You ought to go down and look at them, Mr. Harkness."
"I think I shall," Harkness replied, smiling.
He noticed that now that the man was seated he did not look small. His neck was thick, his shoulders broad, that forehead in the brilliantly-lit room absolutely gleamed, the red hair springing up from it like a challenge. The mention of the dance led Crispin to talk of other strange customs that he had known in many parts of the world, especially in the East. Yes, he had been in the East very often and especially in China. The old China was going. You would have to hurry up if you were to see it with any colour left. It was too bad that the West could not leave the East alone.
"The matter with the West, Mr. Harkness, is that it always must be improving everything and everybody. It can't leave well alone. It must be thrusting its morals and customs on people who have very nice ones of their own—only they are not Western, that's all. We have too many conventional ideas over here. Superstitious observances that are just as foolish as any in the South Seas—more foolish indeed. Now I'm shocking you, Hesther, I'm afraid. Hesther," he explained to Harkness, "is the daughter of an English country doctor—a very fine fellow. But she hasn't travelled much yet. She only married my son a month ago. This is their honeymoon, and it is very nice of them to take their old father along with them. He appreciates it, my dear."
He raised his glass and bowed to her. She smiled very faintly, staring at him for an instant with her large brown eyes, then looking down at her plate.
"I have been driven," Crispin explained, "into the East by my collector's passions as much as anything. You know, perhaps, what it is to be a collector, not of anything especial, but a collector. Something in the blood worse than drugs or drink. Something that only death can cure. I don't know whether you care for pretty things, Mr. Harkness but I have some pieces of jade and amber that would please you, I think. I have, I think, one of the best collections of jade in Europe."
Harkness said something polite.
"The trouble with the collector is that he is always so much more deeply interested in his collection than any one else is, and he is not so interested in a thing when he owns it as he was when he was wondering whether he could afford it.
"However, women like my jade. Their fingers itch. It is pleasant to see them. Have you ever felt the collector's passion yourself"
"In a tiny way only," said Harkness. "I have always loved prints very dearly, etchings especially. But I have so small and unimportant a collection that I never dream of showing it to anybody. I have not the means to make a real collection, but if I were a millionaire it is in that direction that I think I would go. Etchings are so marvellously human, unaccountably personal."
"Why, Herrick, listen to that! Mr. Harkness cares about etchings! We must show him some of ours. I have a 'Hundred Guilders' and a 'De Jonghe' that are truly superb. Do you know my favourite etcher in the world? I am sure that you will never guess."
"There is a large field to choose from," said Harkness, smiling.
"There is indeed. But Samuel Palmer is the man for me. You will say that he goes oddly enough with my jade, but whenever I travel abroad 'The Bellman' and 'The Ruined Tower' go with me. And then Lepère—what a glorious artist! and Legros's woolly trees and our old friend Callot—yes, we have an enthusiasm in common there."
For the first time Harkness addressed the girl directly:
"Do you also care about etchings, Mrs. Crispin?"
She flushed as she answered him: "I am afraid that I know nothing about them. Our things at home were not very valuable, I am afraid—except to us," she added.
She spoke so softly that Harkness scarcely caught her words. "Ah, but Hesther will learn," Crispin said. "She has a fine taste already. It needs only some more experience. You are learning already, are you not, Hesther?"
"Yes," she answered almost in a whisper, then looked up directly at Harkness. He could not mistake her glance. It was an appeal absolutely for help. He could see that she was at the end of her control. Her hand was trembling against the cloth. She had been drinking some of her Burgundy, and he guessed that this was a desperate measure. He divined that she was urging herself to some act from which, during all these weeks, she had been shuddering.
His own heart was beating furiously. The food, the wine, the lights, Crispin's strange and beautiful voice were accompaniments to some act that he saw now hanging in front of him, or rather waiting, as a carriage waits, into which now of his own free-will he is about to step to be whirled to some terrific destination.
He tried to put purpose into his glance back to her as though he would say "Let me be of some use to you. I am here for that. You can trust me."
He felt that she knew that she could. She might, such was her case, trust any one at this crisis but she had been watching him, he felt sure, throughout the meal, listening to his voice, studying his movements, wondering, perhaps, whether he too were in this conspiracy against her.
He had the sudden conviction that on an instant she had resolved that she could trust him, and had he had time to do as was usual with him, to step back and regard himself, he would have been amazed at his own happiness.
They had come to the dessert. Crispin, as though he had no purpose in life but to make every one happy, was cracking walnuts for his daughter-in-law and talking about a thousand things. There was nothing apparently that he did not know and nothing that he did not wish to hand over to his dear friends.
"It is too bad that I can't show you my 'Hundred Guilders.'" He cracked a walnut, and his soft boneless fingers seemed suddenly to be endued with an amazing strength. "But why shouldn't I? What are you doing this evening?"
"I have no plans," said Harkness; "I thought I would go perhaps down to the market and look at the fun."
"Yes—well.... Let me see. But that will fit splendidly. We have an engagement for an hour or two—to say good-bye to an old friend. Why not join us here at—say—half-past ten? I have my car here. It is only half an hour's drive. Come out for an hour or two and see my things. It will give me so much pleasure to show you what I have. I can offer you a good cigar too and some brandy that should please you. What do you say?"
Harkness looked across at the girl. "Thank you," he said gravely, "I shall be delighted."
"That's splendid. Very good of you. The house also should interest you. Very old and curious. It has a history too. I have rented it for the last year. I shall be quite sorry to leave it."
Then, smiling, he lent across—"What do you say, Hesther? Shall we have our coffee outside?"
"Yes, thank you," she answered, with a curious childish inflection as though she were repeating some lesson that was only half remembered.
She rose and started down the room. Harkness followed her. Half-way to the door Crispin was stopped for a moment by the head waiter and stayed with his son.
Harkness spoke rapidly. "There is no time at all, but I want you to know that I was in the room at the top of the house just now when you were there. I heard everything. I apologise for overhearing. I could not escape, but I want you to know that if there's anything I can do—anything in the world—I will do it. Tell me if there is. We have only a moment."
On looking back afterwards he thought it marvellous of her that, realising who was behind them, she scarcely turned her head, showed no emotion, but speaking swiftly, answered:
"Yes, I am in great trouble—desperate trouble. I am sure you are kind. There is a thing you can do."
"Tell me," he urged. They were now nearly by the door and the two men were coming up.
"I have a friend. I told him that if I would agree to his plan I would send a message to him to-night. I did not mean to agree, but now—I'm not brave enough to go on. He is to be at half-past nine at a little hotel—'The Feathered Duck'—on the sea-front. Any one will tell you where it is. His name is Dunbar. He is young, short, you can't mistake him. He will be waiting there. Go to him. Tell him I agree. I'll never forget...."
Crispin's forehead confronted them. "What do you say to this? Here is a sheltered corner."
Dunbar? Dunbar? Where had he heard the name before?
They all sat down.