The Relentless City/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI
Charlie Brancepeth was sitting in a wooden summer-house on the lawn of his mother's house at Brighton. It was set upon a pivot in the centre of its floor, so that it could be turned with little effort to any point of the compass, so as to face the sun and avoid the wind. In it—so much, at any rate, he practised of the treatment which he had compared to the fattening of a Strasburg goose—he passed the whole day, only sleeping indoors. But this he did because it seemed to him a very rational and sensible mode of life, soothing to the nerves, and producing in him a certain outdoor stagnation of the brain. He did not want to think; he wanted merely to be as quiet and drowsed as he could, and not to live very long; for, since Sybil's final rejection of him, the taste had gone out of life—temporarily it might be only—but while that was still very new and bitter within him had come this fresh blow, the discovery that he was suffering from tubercular disease of the lungs. For some months before he had suspected this; then, soon after the departure of Sybil and Bertie for America, he had had an attack of influenza from which he did not rally well; he had a daily rise of temperature, a daily intolerable lassitude, and his doctor, seeking for the cause of this, had found it. Then, following his advice, he tried a cure on the east coast of England, in which he had to get up at the sound of a bell and proceed out of doors, there to remain all day till a bell summoned him and the other patients in again. At frequent intervals he had to eat large quantities of fattening food; at other hours he had to walk quietly along a road. Work of all sorts, even more than an hour or two's reading, was discouraged, and the days had been to him a succession of nightmares, all presenting the same dull hopelessness. So, after a fortnight of it, he decided to persevere with it no more, and, if he had to die, to die. He had talked the thing out once with his mother, and had promised to go to Davos for the winter, if it was recommended to him, and in the interval to lead a mode of life that was rational for his case without being unbearable. They both agreed finally to dwell on the subject as little as possible in their thoughts, and dismiss it altogether from their conversation.
Just now she was away for a day or two, and he was alone as he waited for Sybil's arrival. That he was alone he had felt himself bound to tell her, but he felt certain that she would come all the same. And though he waited for her in a sort of anguish of expectation, he felt that life, for the first time since the Sunday at Haworth at the end of July, was interesting. What she would say to him, how he would take it, even the vaguest predication of their intercourse, was beyond him to guess. Indeed, it was scarcely worth while, he thought, trying to conjecture what it would be. For Love and Death were near to him, august guests.
The shelter was lit by an electric light, and he had just turned this on when he heard the wheels of her cab drive up. He went in through the garden-door to meet her, his heart beating wildly, found her in the moment of arrival, and advanced to her with outstretched hands.
' Ah, this is charming of you,' he said; ' I am delighted to see you!'
But she had involuntarily paused a moment as she saw him, for, though his disease had made no violent inroads on him, yet the whole manner of his face, his walk, his appearance, was changed. His eyes were always large, they now perhaps looked ever so little larger; his face was always thin, it was perhaps a shade thinner; he always stooped, he stooped perhaps a little more. But, even as one can look at a portrait and say ' I see no point on which it is not like, yet it really has no resemblance to the man,' so, though Charlie was changed so little, yet he was not like him with whom she had walked on the hot Sunday afternoon of July last. Then it was summer, now it was autumn; and, instead of the broad brightness of sun, a little bitter wind stirred among the trees. For the flame of life there was substituted the shadow of death, intangible, indescribable, untranslatable into definite thought, but unmistakable.
But her pause was only momentary; the quick, practical part of her nature leaped instinctively to the surface to do its duty. She was here, if possible, to help, and she came quickly forward to meet him.
' My dear Charlie,' she said, ' it is good to see you again.'
She took both his hands in hers.
' You bad boy,' she said, ' to get ill. Judy told me. It was not her fault; I made her.'
' I meant to tell you myself,' said he; ' but it does not matter. Now, that is enough of that subject; my mother and I never talk of it—we hardly ever think of it. Now, will you take off your things?'
Sybil drew her cloak round her.
' No, certainly not,' said she. ' Judy told me you lived in a summer-house. Well, I did not come down here to see you through the window; lead on to the summer-house.'
' It will be too cold for you,' said he.
' It will be nothing of the kind.'
They talked till dinner on indifferent subjects; she sketched New York for him with a brilliant, if not a very flattering, touch; she did her best for the Revels, but suddenly in the middle broke down.
' It really is awful what a beast one is!' she said. ' But there, somehow, where what I am describing to you is natural, where everyone is so extraordinarily kind and so entirely uncultured, the vulgarity did not strike me. I like the people, and, as you know, I like the sense of wealth. Who is it who talks about moral geography? Burke, I think. Well, that is a very suggestive expression. You can do in New York what you cannot possibly conceive doing in England, just as you can grow plants in the South which will not stand our climate.'
Charlie shook his head.
' I don't think I could stand that anywhere,' he said.
' Oh yes, you could. Milieu, environment is everything; but now, as I sit here and look at the big trees in the garden, covered with that wash of moonlight, it is different. You too—you are so very un-American. I always told you you were old-fashioned.'
Charlie looked at her in silence a moment.
' And you,' he said at length—' you yourself? Have you changed, as Ginger prophesied? Do I seem to you more old-fashioned than ever? I am a very good test question, I imagine.'
' Why?'
' Because you have seen, have you not? a good deal of my double, Bilton. The contrast of our natures ought to be all the more apparent for the similarity of our appearance.'
She got up.
' I have a great deal to talk to you about, Charlie,' she said; ' but it is after-dinner talk. A good deal is about you; the rest is about myself. I have also made another discovery: I am a more profound egotist than I knew. Did I always strike you as egotistic?'
' Dominant people are always egotistic,' said he.
' Dominant? Am I dominant? You will not think so when you have heard.'
' Have things gone wrong?' he asked.
' Yes—or right; I do not know which. Anyhow, they have gone differently to what I—well, planned. Now, the plans of dominant people go as they expect them to go.'
' Until they meet a more dominant person.'
She shook her head.
' No, if my plans have been upset, anyhow, I have upset others,' she said.
They dined rather silently, for both of them were thinking of the talk which was coming, and Sybil again was conscious of her own indecision. Then, after dinner, since delay only made her more heavily conscious of it, she went straight to the subject.
' Judy told me you had left Sheringham,' she said—' that you had practically taken yourself out of the hands of doctors who, humanly speaking, could probably have cured you. Do you think you have any right to do that?'
' My life is my own,' said he.
' Ah, I dispute that. One does not belong to one's self—at any rate, not wholly. One belongs to one's friends—to those who care for one.'
' Who cares for me? Bertie Keynes, I suppose, cares for me, but I entirely deny his right to any disposal of what I do.'
' Your mother, then.'
' In the main she agrees with me. Supposing I had cancer, she would not urge me for a moment to have an operation which was uncertain of success; and my case is similar.'
Sybil was silent a moment.
' I, then,' she said. ' I entirely disapprove of your action. I care for you; you should consider me as well. It is in that sense your life is not your own; you have made yourself a niche, so to speak, in other people's lives; you have put an image of yourself there—given it them—and you have no right to take it away.'
He took a cigarette from a box near him.
' And you are not allowed to smoke,' she added.
He laughed and lit it.
' We have got to talk,' he said. ' If you convince me I have no right to—well, to commit what will probably be a very lengthy suicide, I will smoke no more. If you don't, I shall continue to smoke, and in the interval I can talk more easily. Now you have spoken so frankly to me, I shall use the same frankness.'
She nodded.
' A man's life,' he said, ' belongs to himself until he has given it to a woman, and she has accepted it. Then it is no longer his, but hers, and she may dispose of it. No woman has accepted mine.'
She made a little movement in her chair, as if wincing, and he saw it.
' Shall I not go on?' he said.
' No, go on; it is this for which I came here.'
' So everybody,' said he, ' has about the same weight with me, and that combined weight is less than my right to do as I choose. Bertie Keynes, you, Judy, Ginger—you all want me to be what you call sensible, and live as long as possible. But my indifference to life is stronger than your desire that I should live. My mother alone wishes me to do as I choose, because she understands.'
He paused, and saw that Sybil was looking, not at him, but into the fire, and that unshed tears stood in her eyes, fighting with some emotion that would not let them fall.
' I understand too,' she said in a whisper; and it looked as if the tears would have their way. Then they were checked again as she continued: ' But you are grossly unfair to me—both you and Judy. You saddle me with this responsibility. You say it is my fault that you are indifferent to life. Indeed it is not fair. I am what I am. You may hate me or love me, but it is me. I am hard, I dare say, without the power to love; that is me too. And you say to me, “ Alter that, please, and become exceedingly tender and devoted.” And because I don't—ah, there is your mistake; it is because I can't. I could pray and think and agonize, and yet not add an inch to my stature; and do you think, then, it is likely that I could alter what is so vastly more me than my height?'
' Ah, I don't blame you,' said he, ' and I don't saddle you with any responsibility.'
' But if I loved you, you would care to live.'
' Yes; but I don't say that it is your fault that you don't. That would be interfering in your life—a thing which I am deprecating in regard to my own.'
She made a hopeless gesture with her hands.
' We are talking in a circle,' she said. ' Leave it for a moment; I have something else to tell you.'
He sat very upright in his chair, grasping the arms in his hands, feeling that he knew for certain what this was.
' You mean you are going to marry Harold Bilton?'
' No, I mean exactly the opposite; I mean that I am not.'
He dropped the cigarette he had just lit into the fireplace. With her woman's quickness, she instantly saw the symbolical application of this, and, with her passion for analysis, could not resist casting a fly, as it were, over it. She pointed to the grate.
' You have dropped your cigarette,' she said.
He looked at her for one half-second, and then, with rather slower-moving mind, recalled what he had said about not smoking any more.
' Yes, the doctors told me not to,' he said, feeling again the thrill of even this infinitesimal piece of fencing with her. ' They said it was a bad habit for me.'
She got up.
' Charlie, I don't know if I was right to tell you that,' she said.
' You mean it may lead me to hope that—I assure you it shall not. But it leaves things less utterly hopeless.'
She shook her head.
' You mustn't even think that,' she said.
' I can't help thinking that. While there is life, you know——— I was lying '—and his eye brightened with a sudden excitement—' with throat ready for the guillotine. I could see it; they had not bandaged my eyes—but they have taken the knife away. No, I don't ask “ What next?” The knife is gone: that is sufficient for the moment.'
She stood close to him by the fire, with eyes that strayed from him to a picture, down to the fire again, and again back to him.
' It is late,' she said at length; ' I must go to bed, and so must you. I have got to go back to-morrow. I shall see you in the morning. Good-night.'
He lit a candle for her, and she went to the foot of the stairs, then paused a moment, with her back to him.
' You will stop to smoke another cigarette before you come up,' she said.
She heard him take a couple of steps inside the room she had just left, and then a vague sort of rustle.
' I have thrown them all into the fire,' said he.
' Oh, Charlie, how wasteful!' she cried, beginning to ascend the stairs; ' and how——— ' And she paused at the corner.
He appeared in the doorway on the instant.
' How———?' he asked.
' Nothing.'
' What were you going to say, Sybil?' said he. ' On oath, mind.'
She leaned over the banisters.
' Premature,' she whispered, and rustled up the remaining steps.
Charlie did not smoke another cigarette after she had gone, for the simplest of all reasons, but he broke another rule of health by sitting up much later than he should. He listened, in the way a man does, for the sound of the closing of her door, hoping, for some hopeless, groundless reason, that she would come back. Then, because the room was hot, and to him, in his open-air sojournings, airless with the closed windows, he opened one and sat by it, looking out into the still, starry night. And even as the coolness and breeze of air refreshed his body, so the thought of the talk he had had with her refreshed and was wine to his soul. At present he hoped for nothing; it was not necessary for him to tell himself not to be sanguine, for she had done nothing for him that she would not have done for a hundred other friends. She had, in fact, told him no more than others when she had said that his life did not belong entirely to himself; and she had told him no more than a penny newspaper might have told him when she had said she was not going to marry Bilton. Yet the imminent knife had gone; whether her mere presence again was tonic to him, or whether it was that there was again for him a loophole for hope—something possibly his to win—he did not stop to inquire. The upshot was that life (his life, that is to say, which is all that the most altruistic philosophers really mean when they talk of life) was again interesting, worthy of smiles or tears, as the case might be. Whether it was to be smiles or tears he did not at this moment care; the fact that it merited emotion was enough. ' The chequer-board of nights and days ' was still in movement; he was not yet a taken piece. For the last three months he had thought of himself as exactly that, and simultaneously with that conviction had come the conviction that the chequer-board and the game played thereon was utterly without interest. His part in it was over; he no longer cared. And, as has been said, even the most altruistic and the most philosophical cannot do much better. ' Quelle perte irréparable!' was Comte's exclamation when he was told that he had to die.
' How premature!' Was not that, too, an indication, however veiled, that it was not premature? She would not have said that his holocaust of the cigarettes was premature if it was so; she would merely have thought to herself, ' Poor fellow!' But the hopelessness of the thought was neutralized by its announcement. Not the most matter-of-fact physicians broke news of fatal illness like that. . . . And again he reminded himself that he must not be sanguine. Anyhow, she had reminded him (like everybody else, no doubt) that his life was not entirely his own. She had told him also (there was nothing secret about it) that she was not going to marry Harold Bilton. But it was she who had told him.
Bilton, meantime, with the speed of his race, had completed his contract for the lease of the Coronation Theatre for the next season, and had finished, on behalf of Lewis S. Palmer, the purchase of the Molesworth property. It was quite characteristic of him that he should postpone for these affairs which were really imminent the piece of private business which had, more than either of them, perhaps more than both, brought him to England. Consequently, it was not till the afternoon of the next day that he called at Judy's and asked to see Mrs. Massington. Sybil had spent the morning at Brighton, and had arrived only some half-hour before he called. But, with the instinct of the autumn perhaps strong in her, she had said she would see him, rejecting Judy's offer to put herself in the way of a tête-à-tête.
He was shown into the room where Judy usually sat, a sitting-room off the drawing-room. It had been furnished with her unerring bizarre taste, and looked like nothing whatever except Judy's room. There was a bearskin on the floor because somebody had given it her. Two execrable water-colours were on the wall for the same reason, and on the same walls were three wonderful prints of Reynolds' engraved by Smith. There was a grand piano there, making locomotion difficult, because Judy played much and badly, and Steinway, so she always said, knew what she meant better than anybody. There was some good French furniture there because it was hers, and some hopeless English armchairs because they were comfortable. Finally, there was Sybil there because she was her sister, and at this moment there had entered Harold Bilton because she had said she would see him.
She got up, and advanced to him.
' This is quite unexpected,' she said. ' I thought you were in America. Pray sit down. What has happened? Has Mrs. Emsworth also come back?'
Bilton sat down. He brought his hat and stick with him, according to the custom of his countrymen, and Sybil, who had never noticed it there, noticed it in London. She noticed it more particularly since the stick fell down from the angle where he had propped it with a loud clatter.
' No; Mrs. Emsworth is still in America,' he said. ' She has left New York, and gone on tour. I think her tour will be very successful.'
' So glad,' said Sybil. ' Tea?'
' I guess I won't, thank you,' said Bilton; ' I don't want anything. I want just to talk to you.'
Sybil pulled herself together. In other words, she tried to remember that a man in New York, if he crosses an insignificant ocean, is the same man who lands at Liverpool. She succeeded moderately well.
' And how is everybody?' she asked. ' How is Mrs. Palmer, and Amelie, and all the Long Island party?'
' They're all right,' said Bilton. ' Mrs. Palmer's giving a woodland fête this week; it will be very complete, and I guess the sea will come and swallow up Newport. But I didn't come here to talk about Mrs. Palmer.'
He finished taking off his gloves, threw them into his hat, and took a chair exactly opposite her, so that they faced each other as in a waggonette, which to Sybil was an odious vehicle for locomotion. His likeness to Charlie was somehow strangely obliterated to-day; she thought of the latter as of something suffering, in need of protection, whereas the same-featured man who sat opposite her looked particularly capable of self-defence, and, if necessary, of aggression. For the first time she rather feared him, and dislike looked hazily out through the tremor of fear.
' You ran away from America in a great hurry,' he said. ' You left us very desolate.'
Something in this quite harmless speech displeased Sybil immensely.
' Ran away?' she asked.
' Yes, ran away; but only incidentally from America. You ran away from me; I came after you.'
Sybil got up.
' Really, Mr. Bilton,' she said, ' you have left your manners the other side of the Atlantic.'
She went half-way across the room with the intention of ringing the bell, but she stopped before she got there; curiosity about the development of this situation conquered, and she sat down again.
He took no notice of her remark about his manners.
' I have come to ask you to marry me,' he said. ' You are the woman I have been looking for all my life. I will try to make you very happy.'
She answered him without pause.
' I am very grateful to you,' she said; ' but I cannot.'
' You led me to suppose you would,' said he.
' I am very sorry for it.'
There was a moment's silence.
' You changed your mind when you saw me come into Dorothy Emsworth's room,' he said. ' Now, I always meant to tell you about that. It is perfectly true that for nearly two years——— '
She held up her hand.
' You need not trouble,' she said. ' I know.'
Bilton paused a half-second to arrange his reply in the way he wished.
' I always supposed she would tell you,' he said.
Her silence admitted it, and he had scored a side-point. He wished to know whether Dorothy had told her.
' I think you are hard on me,' he said; ' or perhaps I do not understand. You were, before you knew that, prepared to accept my devotion. Do you reject it now because I have led that sort of life?'
Sybil frowned.
' I can't discuss the question with you,' she said. ' I will just suggest to you this, that you went to see your mistress while I, to whom you had expressed devotion, was staying in the house. If you can't understand my feeling about that, I can't explain it to you.'
' I will promise never to see her again,' said Bilton.
Suddenly and almost with the vividness of actual hallucination the figure of the man who was so like him rose up before Sybil, and she all but saw Charlie taking Bilton's place there, and imagined that it was he who was saying what Bilton said. For a moment she invested him with the grossness of his double, and loathed and shuddered at the picture she had conjured up. Charlie behaving like Bilton was an image so degrading and humiliating that she could not contemplate it. The very thought was to do him dishonour. But Bilton, so she recognised, was acting now up to his very best; it was the best of his nature which promised not to see Mrs. Emsworth again. But Charlie in a corresponding position was unthinkable. Against this grossness all Sybil's fineness, all her taste, ran up like a wave against a stone sea-jetty, and was broken against it, and the jetty did not know what it had done. She rose, conscious that she was trembling.
' It is a matter of entire indifference to me,' she said, ' when or where or how soon you see her again. I want you to understand that.'
Bilton sat quite unmoved.
' If you were quite certain of yourself, you would not be so violent,' he said. ' You are overstating your feelings; that is because you are rather perplexed as to what they are.'
Sybil turned quickly round to him. She could not help showing her appreciation of this.
' Ah, you are frightfully clever,' she said; ' I do you that justice.'
He rose.
' I shall not give up hope,' he said.
' That is as you please,' she said. ' I have stated as clearly as I can that I can give you none.'
' It is not your fault that you don't convince me,' said he; ' it is the fault of my own determination. Good-bye.'
Sybil shook hands with him.
' What are your movements?' she asked.
' I return to America almost immediately to collect my company for the Coronation Theatre.'
' Ah, you are going to have an American company, then?' she asked.
' Certainly—two companies, rather. I shall have two pieces running simultaneously, with two performances a day. No one has yet thought of producing entertainments to last from about five till eight in the evening.'
When he had gone, she sat down without book, paper, or work, simply to think. Despite herself, and despite the disgust for him which, sown by that moment in Mrs. Emsworth's room, had grown up fungus-like in her mind, this unhurrying, relentless activity, so typical of him and of the nation to which he belonged, which had so stirred her in America, stirred her again. The practical side of her nature responded to it, as an exhausted man responds to alcohol. It woke in her the need to do something definite with her life; it reminded her that the mere observation of other people was not to her, as it was to Ginger, a sufficient excuse for her existence. She felt that her quick brain, her sure analytic grasp, could not find its permanent fruition in mere quickness or in mere analysis. Something of the passion for deeds, for accomplishment, that instinct which blindly spurs on bees to labour and men to work, had got hold of her. But what was she to do? She refused to marry Bilton, for, apart from the fungus of disgust, this very need for activity rejected him. That niche for herself, in front of which should burn in her honour the thick incense of wealth, no longer attracted her. She wanted to accomplish, to make; to be, in however small a degree, an active, creating force. So strong at the present moment was the impulse that she wondered, probably correctly, whether her refusal of Bilton did not dip some root-fibre into this soil.
The thought stirred within her till sitting still became impossible, and she rose and walked up and down the room. Soon her eye fell on the great nosegay of Michaelmas daisies which she had gathered in Charlie's garden that morning before leaving, and, with her keen dislike of waste, her unwillingness that anything should perish without having got the best out of itself, she busied herself for a few moments in filling a tall Venetian vase with water to place them in. The stalks were a little dry and sapless at the ends, and she made another journey to her room in order to get some scissors to cut off the dry pieces. Even a flower should be made to do its best, to look its best, and last as long as possible. Even flowers should be strenuous, and here was she and nine-tenths of her nation drifting like thistledown on a moor wherever the wind happened to carry it. To work—that was the impulse she had brought back with her from America—not to scheme merely with her busy brain, to intrigue, to find, as she always had found, endless amusement and entertainment in watching others, even though she exerted her intellect to its fullest in intelligently watching them; but to make some plan, and carry it out—to find some work to do, and do it.
Suddenly, in the middle of her neat, decisive clipping of the flower-stalks, she stopped and laid the scissors down. Surely there was a piece of work that lay very ready to her hand, though twice in the last day or two she had resented the responsibility being laid on her. But if she took it on herself—if she led Charlie back to interest in life, if she coaxed from him his apathy—was not that worth doing?
There were difficulties in the way sufficient to rouse enthusiasm in one who was much less on fire with the desire for production than she. She would be quite honest with him; she would not hold out any hope of which the fulfilment was not sure; she would not let him think for a moment that she would ever marry him. If the thing was to be done at all, she would do it by inciting him to live for the sake of life, by making him feel the unworthiness of giving in—the unworthiness, too, of the only condition on which he at present cared to live. She was not in love with him, but even if she had been, that would have made but a poor motive. The vitality that was hers was so abundant that surely she could impart some of it to him—make something of it bubble in his veins. His nature, his perception, were of a fine order, and though disappointment first and then disease might have dulled their sensibilities for the time, yet surely their numbness was only temporary—a passing anæsthesia. Anyhow, here lay a work worth doing.