Olivia clutched Triona’s arm. “For God’s sake, Alexis, let us get out of this. It makes me sick.”
They drew deep breaths when they escaped into the fresh air. To Olivia, the little overcrowded drawing-room, deafening with loud voices, sour with the smell of milky tea and Virginian tobacco, reeking almost physically with the madness of anarchy, seemed a miniature of the bottomless pit. The irony of the man’s talk—the need to purify by flame a plague-stricken area! God once destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. Why did He not blast with fire from heaven this House of Pestilence?
Alexis Triona laughed sympathetically at her outburst.
“I confess they’re rather trying,” he remarked. “Whenever you hear English people say they belong to theintelligentsia, you may be sure they’re frightened at common sense as not being intellectual enough. Blenkiron and Dawkins are fools of the first water; but Pyefinch is dangerous. I am afraid I lost my temper,” he added after a few steps.
“You were splendid,” said Olivia.
More than ever did he seem the one clear-brained, purposeful man of her acquaintance in the confused London world. Rapidly she passed them in review as she walked. Of the others Mauregard was the best; but he was spending his life on fribbles, his highest heaven being a smile on the lips of a depraved dancing-woman. Then, Sydney Rooke, Mavenna, and, even worse now than Mavenna, the unspeakable Bobby Quinton. So much for the Lydian set of professed materialists and pleasure-seekers. In accepting Agnes Blenkiron’s invitation she had pleasurable anticipation of entering a sphere of earnest thinkers and social workers who might guide her stumbling footsteps into the path of duty to herself and her kind. And to her dismay she had met Dawkins and Blenkiron and Pyefinch, earnest, indeed, in their sophistry and mad in their theories of destruction. Her brain was in a whirl with the doctrines to which she had listened. She felt terrified at she knew not what. Even Lydia’s cynical world was better than this. Yet between these two extremes there must be a world of high endeavour, of science, art, philanthropy, thought; that in which, she vaguely imagined, Blaise Olifant must have his being; even that of the women at the club dinner. But her mind shook off women as alien to its subconscious argument. In this conjectural London world one man alone stood out typical—the man striding loosely by her side. A young careless angel, he had delivered her from Mavenna. A man, he had exorcised her horror of Bobby Quinton. And now, once more, she saw him, in her girlish fancy, a heroic figure, sane, calm, and scornful, facing a horde of madmen.
They walked, occasionally losing their way and being put on it by chance encounters, through the maze of new and distressingly decorous avenues, some finished, others petering out, after a few houses, into placarded building lots or waste land; a wilderness not of the smug villa-dom of old-established suburbs, but of a queer bungalow-dom assertive, in its distinctive architecture, of unreal pursuit of Aspirations in capital letters. Most of the avenues abutted on a main street of shops with pseudo-artistic frontages giving the impression that the inhabitants of the City could only be induced to satisfy the vulgar needs of their bodies by the lure of the æsthetic.
“Don’t let us judge our late friends too harshly,” said Triona waving an arm. “All this is the Land of Self-Consciousness.”
At last they made their way through the solider, stolider fringes of the main road, and emerged on the great thoroughfare itself, wide and unbusied on this late summer Sunday afternoon. Prosaically they lingered, waiting for an infrequent omnibus.
“Thank goodness, we’re out of the Land of Self-Consciousness,” said Olivia. “The Great North Road is too big a thing.”
Their eyes met in a smile.
“I don’t forget your love of big things,” said he. “It’s inspiring. Yes. It’s a big thing. And it doesn’t really begin in London. It starts from Land’s End—and it goes on and on through the heart of England and through the heart of Scotland carrying two nations’ history on its flanks, caring for nothing but its appointed task, until it sighs at John o’ Groats and says: ‘My duty’s done.’ There’s nothing that stirs one’s imagination more than a great road or a great river. Somehow I prefer the road.”
“You’re nearer to it because it was made by man.”
“How our minds work together!” he cried admiringly “I only have to say half a thing and you complete it. More than that—you give my meaningless ideas meaning. Yes. God’s works are great. But we can’t measure them. We have no scale for God, But we have for Man, and so Man’s big works thrill us and compel us.”
“What big thing could we do?” asked Olivia.
“Do you mean humanity—or you and I together?”
“Two human beings thinking alike, and free and honest.” Instinctively she took his arm and her step danced in time with his. “Oh, you don’t know how good it is to feel real. Let us do something big in the world. What can we do?”
“You can help me to the very biggest thing in all the universe—for me,” he cried, pressing her arm tight against him.
Her pulses throbbed. She knew that further argument on her part would be but exquisite playing with words. The hour which, in her maidenly uncertainty she had dreaded, had now come, and all fear had passed away. Yes; now she was real; now she was certain that her love was real. Real man, real woman. Her heart leaped to him with almost the shock of physical pain. Again in a flash she swept the Lydian and the Blenkiron firmament and exulted. Yet in her happiness she said with very foolish and with very feminine guile:
“Ah, my dear Alexis, that’s what I’ve longed for. If only I could be of some little help to you!”
“Help?” He laughed shortly and halted and swung her round. “Have you ever tried to think what you are to me? Would you like me to tell you?”
She disengaged herself and walked delicately on.
“It may pass the time till the bus comes,” she said.
He began to tell her. And three minutes afterwards the noisy, infrequent motor-bus passed them by, unheeded and even unperceived.
SOMEWHEREon the South Coast, screened from the vulgar by the trap of a huge watering-place, is a long, thin, sandy promontory sticking out to sea, like an innocent rib of wilderness. Here there is no fun of the fair, because there is no fair to provide the fun. There are no taverns, no boarding-houses, no lodgings. One exclusive little hotel rules the extreme tip of the tongue of land in consort with the miniature jetty and quay by which, in late exciting times, strange craft were moored, flying the white ensign and hoar with North Sea brine and deadly secrets. The rest of the spit is peppered with a score of little shy houses, each trying to hide itself from its neighbours, in the privacy of its own sandpit. If your house is on the more desirable side of it, you can look out over the vastness of the sea with the exhilarating certainty (if your temperament may thereby be exhilarated) that there is nothing but blue water between you and the coast of Africa. If your house is, less fortunately, on the other side, your view commands a spacious isle-studded harbour fringed by distant blue and mysterious hills. But it is given to any one to walk out of the back of his little hermitage, and, standing in the dividing road, to enjoy, in half a minute, both aspects at once. It is called esoterically by its frequenters “the Point,” so that the profane, map-searching, may not discover its whereabouts.
Just high enough to be under the lee of a sand-hill, with its front windows and veranda staring at the African coast, some thousand miles away, stood the tiniest, most fragile and most absurd of the habitations. Its name was “Quien Sabe,” suggestive of an imaginative abandonment of search after nomenclature by the original proprietor.
“A house called ‘Quien Sabe’——” said Alexis.
“Is the house for us,” cried Olivia, aglow.
They took it at once, without question. It wasn’t as if it were an uncertain sort of place, like “Normanhurst,” or “Sea View.” The name proclaimed frankly the certainty of venturesomeness. And Alexis Triona, sitting on the scrubby grass and sand, his back against the little veranda, the infinite sea and all the universe enveloped in still moonlight, laughed the laugh of deep happiness at their childish inspiration. He rolled, licked and lit the final cigarette. Tobacco was good. Better was this August night of velvet and diamonds. Below, the little stone groin shone like onyx. The lazy surf of ebb-tide far away on the sand of a tiny bay glimmered like the foam in fairyland.
Only half the man’s consciousness allowed itself to be drenched with the beauty of the night. The other half remained alert to a voice, to a summons, to something more rare and exquisite than the silver air and murmuring sea and the shine of all the stars. A few minutes before, languorous by his side, she had been part and parcel of it all. The retreating ripple of wave had melted into the softness of her voice. Her laughing eyes had gleamed importance in the stellar system. The sweet throb of her body, as she had reclined, his arm about her, was rhythmic with the pulsation of the night. And now she had gone; gone just for a few moments; gone just for a few moments until she would divinely break the silence by the little staccato cry of his name; but, nevertheless, her transitory severance had robbed this outer world of half its beauty. He had consciously to incorporate her in order to give meaning to this wonder of amethyst and aquamarine and onyx and diamond and pearl and velvet and the infinite message of the immensities coming through the friendly silence of the moon.
They had been married all of a sudden, both caught up on the wings of adventure. They were young, free as air. Why should they wait? They kept it secret, a pair of romantics. Only Blaise Olifant, summoned from Medlow, and Janet Philimore were admitted into the conspiracy, and attended the wedding. At first Olivia had twinges of conscience. As a well-conducted young woman she ought to ask her old friend, Mr. Trivett, to standin loco parentisand give her away. But then there would be Mrs. Trivett and the girls to reckon with. Mr. Fenmarch, left out, might take offence. The news, too, would run through every Medlow parlour. Old John Freke, in his weekly letter to Lydia, would be sure to allude to the matter; and it was Lydia and the galley that she most desired to keep in ignorance. So they were married, by special licence, at the church in Ashley Place, one quiet, sunny morning, in the presence of Myra and the two witnesses they had convened.
As they emerged into the sunshine after the ceremony, Olifant said to her:
“I’ve never been so reluctant to give anything away in my life.”
She asked a laughing “Why?”
“Dog in the manger, I suppose.” He smiled whimsically. “I shall feel more of a bachelor than ever when I get back.”
“You needn’t, unless you like.” She motioned slightly with her head towards Janet, talking to Alexis, a few feet away. “I’ve not been too busy to think of matchmaking. She’s the dearest of girls.”
“But not my landlady.”
Her happy laughter rippled forth, calling the others near.
“He wants a law forbidding the marriage of landladies. But think of the advantage. Now you can have your landlady to stay with you—in strict propriety—if you will ask us.”
“We settled that with Alexis last night,” said he.
Three taxis were waiting. One for the bride and bridegroom. One, already piled with luggage, for Myra who after being fervently kissed in the vestry by Olivia, had said by way of congratulation:
“Well, dearie, it’s better than being married in a Registry Office,” and had gone forth unemotionally to see that the trunks were still there. And one for Olifant and Janet. They drove to the station, to the train which was to take them on their way to the home which in their romanticism they had never troubled to see.
“I’m sure it’s all right,” said Janet, who had been responsible for their taking “Quien Sabe.” “Father and I’ll be at The Point in a fortnight. If you don’t want to see us, tie a white satin bow on the gate and we won’t mind a bit.”
For General Philimore was the happy owner of one of the little hermitages on The Point, and like a foolish old soldier lived there in holiday times, instead of letting it for the few summer weeks at the yearly rental of his London flat; so that Janet assumed the airs of an authority on The Point, and wrote stern uncompromising business letters to agents threatening them with the displeasure of the daughter of a Major-General, if a “Quien Sabe” swept, garnished, and perfectly appointed, with a charwoman, ditto, in attendance, did not receive the bridal pair.
“It’s not a palace, Mr. Triona,” she said.
“What has it to do with me?” he answered. “A dream nest in a cliff for this bird wife of mine is all I ask for.”
Olivia’s eyes smiled on him. Why was he so different from the rest of men—even from so fine a type as Blaise Olifant? She appraised them swiftly. The soldier had not yet been sunk into the scholar. He stood erect, clean built, wearing his perfectly fitting grey suit like uniform, his armless sleeve pinned across his chest, his lip still bearing the smart little military moustache, his soft grey hat at ever so slightly a swaggering angle on his neatly cropped head. A distinguished figure, to which his long straight nose added a curious note of distinction and individuality. But all that he was you saw in a glance: the gentleman, the soldier, the man of intellect. On the other hand, there stood the marvellous man that was her husband, hiding behind the drawn boyish face God knew what memories of pain heroically conquered and God knew what visions of genius. Although he had gone to a good tailor for his blue serge suit—she had accompanied him—he had the air of wearing clothes as a concession of convention. The lithe frame beneath seemed to be impatient of their restraint. They fitted in an easy sort of way, but were dominated by his nervous eager personality. One flash of a smile illuminating eyes and thin face, one flashing gesture of hand or arm, and for ought any one knew or cared, he might be dressed in chain armour or dungaree.
The little speech pleased her. She slipped her hand through the crook of his arm in the pride of possession.
“Did you ever hear such an undomesticated pronouncement?” she laughed. “We’re going to change all that.”
And the train carried them off to the great wonder and change of their lives.
The train out of sight, Blaise Olifant stuck in his pocket the handkerchief he had been waving, and turned with a sigh.
“I hope she’ll be happy.”
“Why shouldn’t she?” asked Janet Philimore.
She was a bright-cheeked, brown-eyed, brown-haired girl, with a matter-of-fact manner.
“I know of no reason,” he replied. “I was expressing a hope.”
He saw her to her homeward-bound omnibus and walked, somewhat moodily, on his road. After a day or two, the pleasures of London proving savourless, he returned to Medlow. But “The Towers” no longer seemed quite the same. He could not tell why. The house had lost fragrance.
Meanwhile the pair had gone to the little toy home whose questioning name pointed to mystery. There were just three rooms in it, all opening on to a veranda full in sight (save for the configuration of the globe) of the African coast. On this veranda, sitting back, they lost sight of the whin-grown slope and the miniature sandy cove beneath; and their world was but a welter of sea, and its inhabitants but a few gulls, sweeping and swirling past them with a shy friendliness in their yellow eyes. In a dip of the sand-hill, just behind this elementary dwelling and communicating with it by a short covered way, stretched an old railway carriage divided into kitchen, pantry, bathroom, and bunks.
“It’s the craziest place I’ve ever seen,” said Myra. “People will be living in old aeroplanes next.”
But the very craziness of the habitation made for their selfish joy. The universe, just for these twain, had gone joyously mad. A cocky little villa made to the model of a million others would have defeated the universe’s benign intention. Nothing could be nearer to Triona’s dream nest in a cliff. Their first half-hour’s exploring, hand in hand, was that of children let loose in a fairy tale castle.
“There’s only one egg-cup,” croaked Myra, surveying an exiguous row of crockery.
“How many more do we want?” cried Olivia. “We can only eat one egg at a time.”
They passed out and stood on the edge of their small domain, surveying the sandy beach and the seaweed and shell-encrusted groin and the limitless sea, and breathed in the soft salt wind of all the heavens sweeping through their hair and garments, and he put his arm around her and kissed her—and he laughed and said, looking into her eyes:
“Sweetheart, Heaven is empty and all the angels are here.”
On sunny days they lived in the sea, drying themselves on their undisturbed half-moon of beach.
“Where did you learn to swim?” she asked.
He hesitated for a second, casting at her one of his swift, half furtive glances. Then he replied:
“In the Volga.”
She laughed. “You’re always romantic. I learned at commonplace Llandudno.”
“Where’s your sense of relativity, beloved?” said he. “In Central Russia one regards the coast of Wales as fantastic fairyland.”
“Still, you can go to Llandudno to-morrow, if you like—taking me with you, of course; but I shall never swim in the Volga, or the Caspian Sea, or Lake Baikal, or any of those places with names that have haunted me since I was a little girl.”
“One of these days we’ll go—it may be some years, but eventually Russia must have a settled Government—and we’ll still be young.”
The sun and the hot sand on which she lay, adorable in deep red bathing kit and cap, warmed her through and through, flooding her with the sense of physical well-being. It was impossible that she should ever grow old.
“It’s something to look forward to,” she said.
Sometimes they hired a boat and sailed and fished. She admired his handiness and knowledge and prescience of the weather. Once, as the result of their fishing, they brought in a basket of bass and gar-fish, the latter a strange, dainty silver beast with the body of an eel and the tail of a trout and the beak of a woodcock, and in high spirits they usurped Myra’s railway-compartment kitchen, while he fried the catch for lunch. Olivia marvelled at his mastery. In spite of her sage and deliberate putting aside of the rose-coloured glasses of infatuation, in whatever aspect she viewed him, he stood supreme. From the weaving of high romance to the cooking of fish—the whole gamut of human activities—there was nothing in which he did not excel. Her trust in him was infinite. She lost herself in happiness.
It took some days to arouse her to a sense of the outer world. A letter from Lydia reminded her of her friend’s pleasant ignorance. With the malice of the unregenerate feminine, she wrote: “I’m so sorry I can’t be bridesmaid as you had arranged. How can I, seeing that I am married myself? It happened all in a hurry, as the beautiful things in life do. The fuss of publicity would have spoilt it. That’s why we told nobody. This is much better than Dinard”—Sydney Rooke’s selection for the honeymoon. “I haven’t worn a hat since I’ve been here, and my way of dressing for dinner is to put on a pair of stockings; sometimes a mackintosh, for we love to dine on the veranda when it rains. It rained so hard last night that we had to fix up an umbrella to the ceiling like a chandelier to catch the water coming through the roof. So you will see that Alexis and I are perfectly happy. By the way, I’ve not told you what my name is. It is Mrs. Triona. . . .” And so on and so on at the dictate of her dancing gladness, freakishly picturing Lydia’s looks of surprise, distaste, and reprobation as she read the letter. Yet she finished graciously, acknowledging Lydia’s thousand kindnesses, for according to her lights Lydia had done her best to put her on the only path that could be trod by comely and well-dressed woman.
She sealed up her letter and, coming out on to the veranda where Alexis was correcting the proofs of an article, told him all about it.
“Don’t you think we ought to please Lydia and go to Dinard and wear wonderful clothes, and mix with fashionable folk, and have expensive meals and gamble in the Casino, and dance and do our duty as self-respecting people?”
“You have but to change yourself into whatever fairy thing you like, my princess,” said he, “and I will follow you. Where you are, the world is. Where you are not, there is the blankness of before creation.”
Sitting that night, with his back against the veranda, he thought of this speech of the afternoon. Formulated a bit self-consciously, it was nevertheless true. The landscape, no matter what it was, existed merely as a setting for her. Even in this jewelled wonder of moonlit sea and sky there was the gap of the central gem.
He rolled and lit another cigarette—this time, surely, the very last. Why she took so long to disrobe, he never strove to conjecture. Her exquisite feminine distance from him was a conception too tremulous to be gripped with a rough hand and brutally examined. That was the lure and the delight of her, mystical, paradoxical—he could define it only vaguely as the nearness of her set in a far-off mystery. At once she was concrete and strong as the sea, and as elusive as the Will-o’-the-Wisp of his dreams.
Thus the imaginative lover; the man who, by imagining fantasies to be real, had made them real; who, grasping realities, had woven round them the poet’s fantasy.
And meanwhile Olivia, secure in her happiness, kept him waiting and dreaming because she had made a romantic vow to record, before going to sleep, each day’s precious happenings in a diary which she kept under lock and key in her dressing-case. She wrote sitting up in bed, and now and then she sniffed and smiled as the soft air came through the open window laden with the perfume of the cigarette.
INthe course of time, Janet Philimore and her attendant father, the General, arrived at their house on The Point, and as Olivia, apprised of their advent, did not tie a white satin bow on her gate, General and Miss Philimore left cards on the newly wedded couple, or, more exactly, a pencilled leaf torn out of a notebook.
Thus arose a little intimacy which Olivia encouraged on Alexis’s account. Had not her father and brothers trained her in the ways of men, one of which vital ways was that which led to the social intercourse of man with man? Besides, it was a law of sex. If she had not a woman to talk to, she declared, she would go crazy. It was much more comforting to powder one’s nose in the privacy of the gynæceum than beneath man’s unsympathetic stare. Conversely it had been a dictum of her father’s that, in order to enjoy port, men must be released from the distracting chatter of women.
“If I’m not broad-minded, I’m nothing,” said Olivia.
“ ‘Broad’ is inadequate,” replied her husband, thrusting back his brown hair. “The very wonder of you is that your mind is as wide as the infinite air.”
Which, of course, was as pleasant a piece of information as any bride could receive.
The magic of the halcyon days was intensified by the satisfaction of the sex cravings which, by the symbolism of nose-powdering and port-drinking, Olivia had enunciated. In the deeps of her soul she could find no consuming passion for sitting scorched in a boat with a baited and contemptuously disregarded line between expectant finger and thumb. She could not really understand the men’s anxiety to induce a mentally defective fish to make a fool of itself. Yet she would have sat blissfully for hours at his bidding, for the mere joy of doing as she was bidden; but not to be bidden was a great relief. Similarly, Alexis could not vie with Olivia in concentration of being over the selection of material (in the fly-trap of a great watering-place previously mentioned) and over the pattern and the manufacture by knitting of gaudy hued silk jumpers. His infatuated eye marvelled at the delicate swiftness of her fingers, at the magical development of the web that was to encase her adorable body. But his heart wasn’t in it. Janet’s was. And General Philimore brought to the hooking of bass the earnest singleness of purpose that, vague years ago, had enabled him to ensnare thousands of Huns in barbed-wire netting.
The primitive laws of sex asserted themselves, to the common happiness. The men fished; the women fashioned garments out of raw material. We can’t get away from the essentials of the Stone Age. And why in the world should we?
But—and here comes the delight of the reactions of civilization—invariably the last quarter of an hour of these exclusive sex-communings was filled with boredom and impatience. Alone at last, they would throw themselves into each other’s arms with unconscionable gracelessness and say: “Thank Heaven, they’ve gone!” And then the sun would shine more brightly and the lap of the waves around them would add buoyancy to their bodies, and Myra, ministering to their table wants, would assume the guise of a high priestess consecrating their intimacy, and the moon would invest herself with a special splendour in their honour.
Now and then the four came together; a picnic lunch at some spot across the bay; a wet after-dinner rubber at bridge, or an hour’s gossip of old forgotten far-off things and battles of the day before yesterday, or—in the General’s house—a little idle music. There it was that Olivia discovered another accomplishment in her wonderful husband. He could play, sensitively, by ear—knowledge of notated music he disclaimed. Having been impressed as a child with the idea that playing from ear was a sin against the holy spirit of musical instruction, and gaining from such instruction (at Landsdowne House—how different if she had been trained in the higher spheres of Blair Park!) merely a distaste for mechanical fingering of printed notes, she had given up music with a sigh of relief, mingled with regret, and had remained unmusical. And here was Alexis, who boasted his ignorance of the difference between a crotchet and an arpeggio, racking the air with the poignant melancholy of Russian folk-songs, and, in a Puckish twinkle, setting their pulses dancing with a mad modern rhythm of African savagery.
“But, dear, what else can you do?” she asked, after the first exhibition of this unsuspected gift. “Tell me; for these shocks aren’t good for my health.”
“On the mouth-organ,” he laughed, “I’ve not met any one to touch me.”
It was not idle boasting. On their next rainy-day visit to the neighbouring town, Olivia slipped into a toy shop and bought the most swollenly splendid of these instruments that she could find, and Alexis played “The Marseillaise” upon it with all the blare of a steam orchestrion.
The happy days sped by in an atmosphere of love and laughter, yet filled not only with the sweet doings of idleness. Olivia discovered that the poet-artist must work, impelled thereto by his poet-artistry. He must write of the passing things which touched his imagination and which his imagination, in turn, transmuted into impressions of beauty. These were like a painter’s sketches, said he, for use in after-time.
“It’s for you, my dear, that I am making a hoard of our golden moments, so that one of these days I may lay them all at your feet.”
And he must read, too. During the years that the locust of war had eaten, his educational development had stood still. His English literary equipment fell far short of that required by a successful English man of letters. Vast tracts of the most glorious literature in the world he had as yet left unexplored. The great Elizabethan dramatists, for instance. Thick, serious volumes from the London Library strewed the furniture of the wind-swept sitting-room. Olivia, caught by his enthusiasm and proud to identify herself with him in this feeding of the fires of his genius, read with him; and to them together were revealed the clanging majesty of Marlowe, the subtle beauty of Beaumont and Fletcher, the haunting gloom of Webster. In the evenings they would sit, lover-like, the book between them, and read aloud, taking parts; and it never failed to be an astonishment and a thrill to the girl when, declaiming a fervid passage, he seemed for the moment to forget her and to live in the sense of the burning words. It was her joy to force her emotion to his pitch.
Once, reading Beaumont and Fletcher’sPhilaster, he clutched her tightly with his left arm, while his right hand upstretched, invoked unheeding Heaven, and declaimed:
“And then have taken me some mountain girl,Beaten with winds, chaste as the hardened rocksWhereon she dwells; that might have strewn my bedWith leaves and reeds, and with the skins o’ Beasts,Our neighbours; and have borne at her big breastsMy large coarse issue! This had been a lifeFree from vexation.”
“And then have taken me some mountain girl,Beaten with winds, chaste as the hardened rocksWhereon she dwells; that might have strewn my bedWith leaves and reeds, and with the skins o’ Beasts,Our neighbours; and have borne at her big breastsMy large coarse issue! This had been a lifeFree from vexation.”
“And then have taken me some mountain girl,Beaten with winds, chaste as the hardened rocksWhereon she dwells; that might have strewn my bedWith leaves and reeds, and with the skins o’ Beasts,Our neighbours; and have borne at her big breastsMy large coarse issue! This had been a lifeFree from vexation.”
“And then have taken me some mountain girl,
Beaten with winds, chaste as the hardened rocks
Whereon she dwells; that might have strewn my bed
With leaves and reeds, and with the skins o’ Beasts,
Our neighbours; and have borne at her big breasts
My large coarse issue! This had been a life
Free from vexation.”
“But, Alexis, darling, I’m so sorry,” she cried.
“Why? What do you mean?”
“You said it as if you meant it, as if it was the desire of your heart. I’m not a bit like that.”
They laughed and kissed. A dainty interlude.
“You’ve never really felt like that?”
“Never.”
“The idea isn’t even new,” exclaimed Olivia, with grand inversion of chronology. “Tennyson has something like it inLocksley Hall. How does it go?”
With a wrinkling of the brow she quoted:
“Then the passions cramped no longer shall have scope and breathing spaceI will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.“Iron-jointed, supple-sinewed, they shall dive and they shall run,Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun.”
“Then the passions cramped no longer shall have scope and breathing spaceI will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.“Iron-jointed, supple-sinewed, they shall dive and they shall run,Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun.”
“Then the passions cramped no longer shall have scope and breathing spaceI will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.
“Then the passions cramped no longer shall have scope and breathing space
I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.
“Iron-jointed, supple-sinewed, they shall dive and they shall run,Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun.”
“Iron-jointed, supple-sinewed, they shall dive and they shall run,
Catch the wild goat by the hair, and hurl their lances in the sun.”
“So he did!” cried Triona. “How wonderful of you to remember! Why—the dear beautiful old thief!” He forgot the point at issue in contemplation of the literary coincidence of plagiarism. “Well, I’m damned! Such a crib! With the early Victorian veil of prudery over it! Oh, Lord! Give me the Elizabethan, any day. Yet, isn’t it funny? The period-spirit? If Tennyson had been an Elizabethan, he would have walked over Beaumont and Fletcher like a Colossus; but in a world under the awe of Queen Victoria’s red flannel petticoat he is reduced to stealing Elizabethan thunder and reproducing it with a bit of sheet iron and a stick.”
“Dear,” said Olivia, “we have much to be thankful for.”
“You and I?” he queried.
“Our generation. We live in the sun. No longer under the shadow of the red flannel petticoat.”
Rapturously he called her a marvel among women. Olivia’s common sense discounted the hyperbole; but she loved his tribute to her sally of wit.
The book slipped to the floor, while she began an argument on the morality of plagiarism. How far was a man justified in stealing another man’s idea, working up another man’s material?
His sudden and excited defence of the plagiarist surprised her. He rose, strode about the room and, talking, grew eloquent; quoted Shakespeare as the great exemplar of the artist who took his goods from everywhere he found them. Olivia, knowing his joy in conversational fence, made smiling attack.
“In the last three hundred years we have developed a literary conscience.”
“A commercial matter,” he declared. “A question of copyright. I granted that. You have no right to exploit another man’s ideas to his material loss. But take a case like this”—he paced before her for a few seconds—“on the spur of the moment. It must have happened a thousand times in the War. An unknown dead man just a kilometre away from a bleak expanse of waste covered with thousands of dead men. Some one happens upon him. Searches him for identification. Finds nothing of any use or interest save a little notebook with leaves of the thinnest paper next his skin. And he glances through the book and sees at once that it is no ordinary diary of war—discomfort of billets, so many miles’ march, morale of the men and so forth—but something quite different. He puts it in his pocket. For all that the modern world is concerned, the dead man is as lost as any skeleton dug up in an ancient Egyptian grave-yard. The living man, when he has leisure, reads the closely written manuscript book, finds it contains rough notes of wonderful experiences, thoughts, imaginings. But all in a jumble, ill expressed, chaotic. Suppose, now, the finder, a man with the story-teller’s gift, weaves a wonderful thrilling tale out of this material. Who is injured? Nobody. On the contrary, the world is the richer.”
“If he were honest, he ought to tell the truth in a preface,” said Olivia.
Triona laughed. “Who would believe him? The trick of writing false prefaces in order to give verisimilitude is so overworked that people won’t believe the genuine ones.”
“I suppose that’s so,” she acquiesced. Her interest in the argument was only a reflection of his. She was far more eager to resume the interrupted reading ofPhilaster.
“It’s lovely that we always see things in the same way,” said he, sitting down again by her side.
Besides all this delightful work and play there was the practical future to be considered. They could not live for ever at “Quien Sabe” on The Point, nor could they live at the Lord knows where anywhere else. They must have a home.
“Before you stole over my being and metamorphosed me, I should have asked—why?” he said. “Any old dry hole in a tree would have done for me, until I got tired of it and flew to another. But now——”
“Now you’re dying to live in a nice little house and have your meals regular and pay rates and taxes, and make me a respectable woman.”
They decided that a house was essential. It would have to be furnished. But what was the object of buying new furniture at the present fantastic prices when she had a great house full of it—from real Chippendale chairs to sound fish-kettles? The answer was obvious.
“Why not Medlow? Olifant won’t stay there for ever. He hinted as much.”
She shook her head. No. Medlow was excellent for cabbages, but passion-flowers like her Alexis would wilt and die. He besought her with laughing tenderness not to think of him. From her would he drink in far more sunlight and warmth than his passion-flower-like nature could need. Had she not often told him of her love for the quaint old house and its sacred associations? It would be a joy to him to see her link up the old life with the new.
“Besides,” he urged, attributing her reluctance to solicitude for his happiness, “it’s the common-sense solution. There’s our natural headquarters. We needn’t stay there all the year round, from year’s end to year’s end. When we want to throw a leg we can run away, to London, Paris, “Quien Sabe,” John o’ Groats—the wide world’s before us.”
But Olivia kept on shaking her head. Abandoning metaphor, she insisted on the necessity of his taking the position he had gained in the social world of art and letters. Hadn’t he declared a day or two ago that good talk was one of the most stimulating pleasures in life? What kind of talk could Medlow provide? It was far more sensible, when Major Olifant’s tenancy was over, to move the furniture to their new habitation and let “The Towers” unfurnished.
“As you will, belovedest,” he said. “Yet,” he added, with a curious note of wistfulness, “I learned to love the house and the sleepy old town and the mouldering castle.” The practical decision to which she was brought out of honeymoon lotus-land was the first cloud on her married happiness. It had never occurred to her before that she could have anything to conceal from her husband. Not an incident in the Lydian galley had her ingenuousness not revealed. But now she felt consciously disingenuous, and it was horrible. How could she confess the real reason for her refusal to live in Medlow? Was she not to him the Fairy Princess? He had told her so a thousand times. He had pictured his first vision of her glowing flame colour and dusk beneath the theatre portico, his other vision of her exquisite in moonlight and snowflake in the great silent street. His faith in her based itself on the axiom of her regality. Woman-like, she had laughed within herself at his dear illusions. But that was the key of the staggering position; his illusions were inexpressibly dear to her; they were the priceless jewels of her love. With just a little craft, so sweet, so divinely humorous, to exercise she could maintain these illusions to the end of time. . . .
But not at Medlow.
She had gone forth from it, on her pilgrimage, in order to establish herself in her mother’s caste. And she had succeeded. The name of her grandfather, Bagshawe of the Guides, had been a password to the friendships which now she most valued. Marriage had defined her social ambitions. They were modest, fundamentally sane. Her husband, a man of old family and gentle upbringing, ranked with her mother and General and Janet Philimore. He was a man of genius, too, and his place was among the great ones of the social firmament.
She thought solely in terms of caste, gentle and intellectual. She swept aside the meretricious accessories of the Sydney Rooke gang with a reactionary horror.
A few days before, Alexis, lyrically lover like, had said:
“You are so beautiful. If only I could string your neck with pearls, and build you a great palace . . .” etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, in the manner of the adoring, but comparatively impecunious poet.
And she had replied:
“I don’t want pearls, palaces or motor-cars. They’re all symbols, my dear, of the Unreal. Ordinary comfort of food and warmth and decent clothes—yes. But that’s all. So long as you string my heart with love—and my mind with noble thoughts.”
She longed passionately to live with him, above herself. And yet, here at the outset, was she living below herself. She would wake in the morning and, sleepless, grow hot and clammy at the thought of her deception. And the whole of her Medlow life drifted miserably through her consciousness: the schoolgirl’s bitter resentment of the supercilious nose in the air attitude of the passing crocodile of Blair Park; of the vicar’s daughters’ condescending nod—he was a Canon of somewhere and an “Honourable” to boot—at “that pretty Miss Gale”; her recognition, when she came to years of sense, of the social gulf between her family and the neighbouring gentry whose lives, with their tennis parties and dances and social doings, seemed so desirable and so remote. To bring her wonderful husband into that world of “homely folk,” the excellent, but uncultivated Trivetts, the more important tradespeople, the managers of the mills, the masters of the County School, her father’s world, and to see him rigidly excluded from that to which her mother and he himself belonged, was more than she could bear. She tortured herself with the new problem of snobbery—rating herself, in this respect, beneath Lydia, who was frankly cynical as to both her own antecedents and her late husband’s social standing. But for the life of her she could not bring herself to explain to Alexis the real impossibility of Medlow. When she tried, she found that his foreign upbringing failed to seize the fine shade of her suggestion.
His gay carelessness eventually lulled her conscience. As soon as Olifant had done with “The Towers,” they could transfer the furniture to whatever habitation they chose and let the house.
“I feel you couldn’t find it in your heart to sell the old place,” he said. “Besides—who knows—one of these days——”
She thought him the most delicately perceptive of men.
“No, dear,” she said, her cheek against his. “I couldn’t sell it.”
Then all Medlow danger was over. She breathed freely. But still—the little cloud of deceit hung over her serene mind and cast ever so tiny a shadow over her rapturous life.
They had been four weeks in the deliciously sure uncertainty of “Quien Sabe,” when, one noon while they were drying themselves in the hot sand and sunshine of their tiny bay, after a swim, Myra came down gaunt through the whin-covered hill-side with a telegram in her hand. With the perversity of her non-recognition of the household paramountcy of her master, she handed the envelope to Olivia. The name was just “Triona.” Olivia was about to open it instinctively when Alexis started to a sitting position, and, with an eager glance, held out his hand.
“I think it’s for me. I was expecting it. Do you mind?”
She passed it over with a smile. Alexis rose to his feet, tore the envelope open, and moving a few yards away towards the surf read the message. Then slowly he tore it up into the tiniest fragments and scattered them on the last wavelets of the ebb tide, and stood for a second or two, staring across the sea. At last he turned. Olivia rose to meet him. Myra was impassively making her way back up the rough slope.
“What’s the matter?” asked Olivia, puzzled at his scrupulous destruction of the telegram and reading something like fear in his eyes.
“I’ve had bad news,” he said. He picked up his bath-gown, shook it free from sand, and huddled it around him. “Let us get up to the house.” He shivered. “It’s cold.”
She followed him wonderingly.
“What bad news?” she asked.
He turned his head, with a half-laugh. “Nothing so very desperate. The end of the world hasn’t come yet. I’ll tell you when I’ve changed.”
He rushed up the steps of the veranda and into his little dressing-room. Olivia, dry and warm, sat in a sun-beat chair and anxiously waited for him. The instinct of a loving woman, the delicacy of a sensitive soul, forbade her teasing with insistent questions a man thrown for the moment off his balance. Yet she swept the horizon of her mind for reasons.
A quarter of an hour afterwards—it had seemed a quarter of a century—he appeared, dressed, not in his customary flannels, but in the blue serge suit of their wedding day. The sight of it struck a chill through her heart.
“You are going away?”
He nodded. “Yes, my dear, I have to.”
“Why? What has happened?”
“I can’t tell you, dear. That’s the heart-rending part of it. It’s secret—from the Foreign Office.”
She reacted in laughter. “Oh, my darling—how you frightened me. I thought it was something serious.”
“Of course it’s serious, if I have to leave you for three or four days—perhaps a week.”
“A week!” She stood aghast. It was serious. How could she face a lonely epoch of seven days, each counting twenty-four thousand halting hours? What did it mean?
“There are not many men who know Russian as I do. I’ve been in touch with the Intelligence Department ever since I landed in England. That’s why I went to Finland in the autumn. These things bind me to inviolable secrecy, beloved. You understand, don’t you?”
“Of course I understand,” she replied proudly.
“I could refuse—if you made a point of it. I’m a free man.”
She put her two hands on his shoulders—and ever after he had this one more unforgettable picture of her—the red bathing cap knotted in front, dainty, setting off her dark eyes and her little eager face—the peignoir, carelessly loose, revealing the sweet, frank mould of her figure in the red bathing suit.
“My father and my two brothers gave their lives for England. Do you think I could be so utterly selfish as to grudge my country a week of my husband’s society?”
He took her cheeks in his hands. “More and more do you surpass the Princess of my dreams.”
She laughed. “I’m an Englishwoman.”
“And so, you don’t want to know where I’m going?”
She moved aside. “Of course I do. I shall be in a fever till you come back. But if I’m not to know—well—I’m not to know. It’s enough for me that you’re serving your country. Tell me,” she said suddenly, catching him by the coat lapels. “There’s no danger.”
He smiled. “Not a little tiny bit. Of that you can be assured. The worst is a voyage to Helsingfors and back. So I gathered from the telegram, which was in execrable Foreign Office Russian.”
“And when are you going?”
“By the first train. I must report to-night.”
“Can’t I come with you—as far as London?”
He considered for a moment. “No,” he said. “Where would you sleep? In all probability I shall have to take the midnight boat to Havre.”
An hour later they parted. She returned to the empty house frightened at she knew not what, insecure, terrifyingly alone; she was fretted by an uncanny sense of having mated with the inhabitant of another planet who had suddenly taken wing through the vast emptiness to the strange sphere of his birth. She wandered up and down the veranda, in and out of the three intimate rooms, where the traces of his late presence, books, papers, clothes, lay strewn carelessly about. She smiled wanly, reflecting that he wore his surroundings loosely as he did his clothes. Suddenly she uttered a little feminine cry, as her glance fell on his wrist watch lying on the drawing-room mantelpiece. He had forgotten it. She took it up with the impulsive intention of posting it to him at once. But the impulse fell into the nervelessness of death, when she remembered that he had given her no address. She must await his telegram—to-morrow, the next day, the day after, he could not say. Meanwhile, he would be chafing at the lack of his watch. She worried herself infinitely over the trifle, unconsciously finding relief in the definite.
The weary hours till night passed by. She tried to read. She tried to eat. She thought of going over the road to the Philimores’ for company; but her mood forbade. For all their delicacy they would ask reasons for this sudden abandonment. She magnified its importance. She could have said: “My husband has gone to London on business.” But to her brain, overwrought by sudden emotion, the commonplace excuse seemed inadequate. She shrank from the society of her kind friends, who would regard this interplanetary mystery as a matter of course.
If only Alexis had taken his watch! Perhaps he would have time to buy another—a consoling thought. Meanwhile she strapped it on her own wrist, heroically resolved not to part with it night or day until he returned.
She sat by the lamp on the sitting-room table, looking out over the veranda at the pitch blackness of a breathless night in which not even the mild beat of the surf could be heard. She might have been in some far Pacific desert island. Her book lay on her lap—the second volume of Motley’sDutch Republic. All the Alvas and Williams, all the heroes and villains, all the soldiers and politicians and burghers were comfortably dead hundreds of years ago. What did these dead men matter, when one living man, the equal of them all, had gone forth from her, into the unknowableness of the night?
Myra came into the room with an amorphous bundle in her hand.
“The camp bed in the dressing-room isn’t very comfortable—but I suppose I can sleep on it.”
Olivia turned swiftly in her chair, startled into human realities.
“No. It’s a beast of a thing. But I should love to have you to be with me. You’re a dear. You sleep in my bed and I’ll take the dressing-room.”
“You once gave signs of being a woman of sense,” said Myra tonelessly. “It seems I was mistaken.”
She disappeared with her bundle. Olivia put out the light and went to bed, where she lay awake all the night, fantastically widowed, striving with every nerve and every brain-cell to picture the contemporaneous situation of her husband. Three o’clock in the morning. He would be in mid-Channel. Had he secured a berth? Or was he forced to walk up and down the steamer’s deck? Thank Heaven, it was a black still night. She stole out of bed and looked at the sea. A sea of oil. It was something to be grateful for. But the poor boy without his watch—the watch which had marked for him the laggard minutes of captivity, the racing hours of approaching death, the quiet, rhythmic companion and recorder of his amazing life.
She forced all her will power to sleep; but the blank of him there on the infinite expanse of mattress she felt like a frost. The dawn found her with wide and sleepless eyes.
And while she was picturing this marvel among men standing by the steamer’s side in the night, in communion with the clear and heavy stars, holding in his adventurous grasp the secret of a world’s peace, Alexis Triona was speeding northwards, sitting upright in a third-class carriage, to Newcastle-on-Tyne. And at Newcastle he expected no ship to take him to Finland. Lucky if he found a cab in the early morning to take him to his destination three miles away.
For the telegram which he had torn to pieces had not come from the War Office. It was not written in Russian. It was in good, plain, curt English:
“Mother dying. Come at once.”
ATAXICABtook him in dreary rain through the squalor of Tyneside, now following the dismal tram lines, now cutting through mean streets, until they reached a row of low, bow-windows agglutinated little villas with handkerchief of garden separating them from the road. At No. 17 he dismissed the cab and swung wide the flimsy gate. Before he could enter, the house door opened and a woman appeared, worn and elderly, in a cheap, soiled wrapper.
“I suppose that’s you, John. I shouldn’t have recognized you.”
She spoke with a harsh, northern accent, and her face betrayed little emotion.
“You’re Ellen,” said he.
“Aye. I’m Ellen. You didn’t think I was Jane?”
She led the way into a narrow passage and then into the diminutive parlour.
“Of course not,” said he. “Jane died three years ago. But you I haven’t seen since I was a child.”
She looked him up and down: “Quite the gentleman.”
“I hope so. How’s mother?”
She gave the news dully. The sick woman had passed through the night safely and was now asleep.
“She had made up her mind to see you before she died—she always was strong willed—and that has kept her alive. Until I read your telegram I didn’t think you would come.”
He flashed one of his quick glances. “Why not? This isn’t the first time I’ve come to see her since my return. If I’ve made my way in the world, that’s no reason for you to call me undutiful.”
“I don’t want to quarrel, John,” she said wearily. “Yes. I know about your visits and the bit of money you send her. And she’s grateful, poor soul.” She paused. Then: “You’ll be wanting breakfast.”
“Also a wash.”
“Are you too grand for the sink, or must you have hot water in your room?”
“The sink will do. It will be less trouble for you.”
Alexis Triona followed her down the passage, and having washed himself with a bit of yellow soap and dried himself on the coarse towel hung on a stretch of string, went into the tidy kitchen, hung with cheap prints and faded photographs of departed Briggses, his coat over his arm, and conversed with his sister in his shirt sleeves while she fried the eggs and bacon for his meal. His readiness to fall into the household ways somewhat mollified her. Her mother had been full of pride in the great man John had become, and she had expected the airs and graces of the upstart. Living at Sunderland with her husband, a foreman riveter, and her children, and going filially to Newcastle only once a year, she had not met him on his previous visits. Now her mother’s illness had summoned her three or four days before, when the neighbour’s daughter who “did for” Mrs. Briggs, ordinarily a strong and active woman, found the sudden situation beyond her powers and responsibility. So, until the ailing lady discoursed to her of the paragon, she had scarcely given him a thought for the sixteen years they had been separated. Her memories of him as a child who alternated exasperating mischief with bone-idle fits of reading had not endeared him to her practical mind; and when the impish dreamer disappeared into the vast inane of foreign parts, and when she herself was driven by she knew not what idiot romanticalism into the grey worries of wifehood and motherhood, her consciousness recorded the memory of a brother John, but whether he was alive or dead or happy or miserable was a matter of illimitable unconcern. Now, however, he had come to life, very vivid, impressing her with a certain masterfulness in his manner which had nothing to do with the airs and graces she despised. Yet she still regarded him with suspicion; even when, seating himself at the roughly laid end of the kitchen table and devouring bacon and eggs with healthy appetite, he enthusiastically praised her cookery.
“What I can’t understand is,” she said, standing at the other end of the table and watching him eat, “why the name of John Briggs isn’t good enough for you.”
“It’s difficult to explain,” said he. “You see, I’ve written a book. Have you read it?”
She regarded him scornfully. “Do you suppose, with a husband and seven children I’ve time to waste on books? I’ve seen it,” she admitted. “Mother has it bound in brown paper, by the side of her bed.”
“You must read it,” replied Triona, somewhat relieved. “Then you’ll see why I’ve changed my name.” He laughed at her uncomprehending face. “I’ve done nothing criminal, you know, and I’m not hiding from justice.”
“I suppose an outlandish name brings in more money,” she suggested practically.
“That’s so,” said he.
“Fools must be fools.”
He acquiesced gladly, gauging the end of an embarrassing examination, and turned the conversation to her domestic affairs.
Breakfast over, he lit a cigarette and watched her clear away, viewing through the smoke the memories of his childhood. Just so, in that very wooden arm-chair, though in another kitchen, used his father to sit, pipe in mouth, while the women did the household work. It was all so familiar, yet so far away. Between then and now stretched a lifetime—so it seemed—of wide and romantic happenings. There, before him, on the wall hung, as it did years ago, the haunting coloured print, cut from some Christmas Number, of young Amyas Leigh listening to Salvation Yeo. As a child, Salvation Yeo’s long arm and finger pointing out to sea had been his inspiration. He had followed it, and gone to distant lands and gone through the promised adventures, and had returned to the picture, wondering whether all that had been was real and not the figment of a dream.
A little later, after the doctor’s visit, he was admitted to his mother’s room. For an hour or so he sat with her and gave a human being deep happiness. In the afternoon she lost consciousness. For a day or two she lingered on, and then she died.
During the dreary interval between his interview and the funeral, Alexis Triona sat for many hours in his father’s chair, for the North was smitten with a dismal spell of rain and tempest which discouraged rambling out of doors, reconstructing his life, unweaving fact from fiction, tearing aside the veils of self-deception wherein he had enwrapped his soul. Surely there was some basis of fact in the romantic history of Alexis Triona with which for the past year he had identified himself. Surely a man could not dwell so intensely in an imaginary life if none of it were real. Even while tearing open veils and viewing his soul’s nakedness, he sought justification.
Did he not find it in that eagerness of spirit which had sent him, in obedience to Salvation Yeo’s pointing finger, away from the dour and narrow father and the first taste of the Tyneside works, penniless, over the wild North Sea to Archangel, town of fairy wonders, and thence, so as not to be caught on the ship again and taken back to Newcastle, to wanderings he scarce knew whither? Did he not find it in the strange lure of Russia which impelled him, when, after a few voyages, he landed in the port of London, to procure a passport which would make him free for the land of his fascination? Did he not find it in the resourcefulness of brain which, the mariner’s life forsaken, first secured him employment in the English racing establishment of a Russian Prince, and then interested recognition by the Princess herself, so that, after a strenuous while he found himself no longer as an inconsiderable stable hand, but as a human being who counted in the world? Did he not find it in his fond ambitions, when the Princess at his request transferred him from stables to garage, from garage to motor-works for higher training; when he set himself to learn Russian as no Englishman should ever have learned it; when afterwards he steeped his mind in Russian poetry and folk-lore, sleeping four or five hours a night, compelled by dreams of greatness in which there figured as his bride of the golden future the little Princess Tania, whose governess-taught English was as pure as the church bells on a frosty night? Did he not find it in those qualities of practical command of circumstance and of poetic vision which had raised him in a few years from the ragged, semi-ignorant, sea-faring English lout alone in Russia to the trusted chief of a Prince’s fleet of a dozen cars, to the courier-chauffeur, with all the roads and ways and customs and languages of Russia, from Riga to Tobolsk, and from Tobolsk to Tiflis, and from Tiflis to St. Petersburg, at his finger tips; to the Master of Russian Literature, already something of a published poet, admitted into intellectual companionship by the Prince and thereby given undreamed of leisure for further intellectual development? What were those qualities but the qualities of genius differentiating him from the ordinary run of men and absolving him from such judgments as might be passed upon the errant of them? Without this absolving genius could he have marched in and taken his place in the modern world of English letters?
Meanwhile, being of frugal tastes, he had grown rich beyond the dream of the Tyneside urchin’s avarice. He had visions of great motor-works, the manufacture of an all-Russian car, built up by his own resources. The princely family encouraged him. Negotiations had just begun—was his story so devoid of truth?—when the great world cataclysm brought more than his schemes for an all-Russian car toppling to the ground. The Prince’s household was disintegrated; horses and cars were swallowed up in the great convulsion.
He found himself driving generals around the shell-scarred front as a volunteer, for being of British nationality he had not been called up for military service. With them he served in advances and retreats and saw battles and burnings like many millions of other men, but from the comparative safety of a headquarters car. It was not until he ran into the British Armoured Car Column that his patriotism took fire, and he became a combatant in British uniform. He remained with the Column for most of the campaign. Badly wounded towards the end, he was left in a Russian hospital, a British naval rating. He remained there many months; a bullet through his chest had missed a vital part and the wound had soon healed, but his foot had gangrened, and only the star in which he trusted had saved it from amputation. There was no fiction about the three lost toes whose gap he had shown to Olifant.
So far did Alexis Triona, sitting in the kitchen arm-chair, salve his conscience. In his story had he done more than remodel the contour of fact? Beneath it did not the living essence of truth persist? Was he not a highly educated man? Had he not consorted—before the cataclysm, and later in the strangely filled hospital—with the young Russianintelligentsia, who talked and talked and talked——? Who could know better than he how Russia had floundered in their tempestuous ocean of talk? And, finally, had he not gone, stout-hearted, through the perils and hardships and exquisite sufferings of the cataclysm?
So far, so good. But what of the rest? For the rest, was not Fate responsible?
The Revolution came, and Russian organization crumbled like a castle touched with an enchanter’s wand. He went forth healed from the hospital into chaos; Petrograd, where his little fortune lay, his objective. Sometimes he found a foothold on an aimless train. Sometimes he jogged weary miles in a peasant’s cart. Sometimes he walked. When he learned that British uniform was no longer held in high esteem he changed to peasant’s dress. So far his journey through revolutionary Russia was true. But he had enough money in his pocket to keep him from want.
And then arrived the day which counted most in his life’s history, when that which he had recounted to Olivia as a fantastic possibility happened in sober fact.
He had been given to understand that if he walked to a certain junction he might find a train returning to Petrograd. Tired, he sat by the wayside, and undoing his wallet ate the black bread and dried fish which he had procured at the last village. And, while eating, he became aware of something gleaming in the rank grasses of the ditch—something long and pallid and horrible. He slid down and found a dead man, stark naked, lying on his back with the contused mark of a bullet hole in his chest. A man of fifty, with short-cropped, grizzled hair and moustache, and clear, refined features. He must have been dead two days. There he lay, constricted of limb, stripped of everything that could mean warmth or comfort or money to his murderers. The living man’s short experience told him that such things were not uncommon in great revolutions. He was about to leave the corpse—for what could he do?—when his eyes caught the glint of metal a few feet away. It was a pocket compass. And further on he found at intervals a toothbrush; a coverless, tattered copy of Tacitus; a little faded snapshot of a woman mounted on cardboard; a vulcanite upper plate of half a dozen false teeth; and a little fat book with curling covers of American cloth. Had he continued his search he might have found many other objects discarded by the robbers as useless. But what was the good of pieces of conviction for a judicial enquiry that would never take place? The little fat book, which on opening he found to be manuscript in minute handwriting, he thrust in his pocket. And so he went his way.
But on his way, his curiosity being aroused, he read in the little book an absorbing diary of amazing adventures, of hardships and prison and tortures unspeakable; and without a thought of its value, further than its romantic fascination, he grew to regard it during his wanderings as his most precious possession.
So far again, until he reached Riga, there was truth in the story of his Russian traverse. Had he not prowled suspect about revolutionary Petrograd? Had not the Prince and Princess, the idealized parents of the story, been murdered and their wealth, together with his own few thousand roubles, been confiscated? Was he not a fugitive? Indeed, had he not seen the inside of a horrible prison? It is true that after a day or two he managed by bribery to escape. But the essence of things was there—the grain of fact which, under the sunlight of his genius, expanded into the splendid growth of Truth. And his wit had served him, too. His guards were for taking away the precious book. Knowing them to be illiterate, he declared it to be the manuscript of his republican poem. Challenged to read, he recited from memory verses of Shevchenko, until they were convinced, not only of the book’s contents, but of his own revolutionary opinions. This establishment of his orthodoxy, together with a few roubles, assured his escape. And thence had he not gone northwards, hungry and footsore?
And had he not been torpedoed? Cast ashore in shirt and trousers, penniless? Was not the real truth of this adventure even more to his credit than the fictitious narrative? For, a naval rating, he had reported to a British man-of-war, and had spent months in a mine sweeper in the North Sea, until the final catastrophe occurred. Then, after a short time in hospital a kindly medical board found something wrong with his heart and sent him out into the English world, a free man.
Yes. His real record was one that no man need be ashamed of. Why, then, the fiction?
Sitting there in the uncompromising reality of his mother’s kitchen, he strove for the first time to answer the question. He found an answer in the obsession of the little book. During the scant leisure of his months at sea it had been his breviary. More, it had been a talisman, a secret scroll of enchantment which, wrapped in oilskin, never left his person, save when, beneath the dim lamp of the fo’c’sle, he pored over it, hunched up against a bulkhead. The spirit of the writer whom he had seen dead and naked, seemed to have descended upon him. In the bitter watches of the North Sea he lived through the dead man’s life with bewildering intensity. There were times, so he assured himself, when it became a conscious effort to unravel his own experiences from those of the dead man. That he had not lived in remoter Kurdistan was unthinkable. And, surely too, he had been tortured.
And when, in the attic in Cherbury Mews, impelled by irresistible force, he began to write his fantasia of fact and imagination, the obsession grew mightier. His pen was winged with flame.
“Why,” said he, half aloud, one day, staring into the kitchen fire, “why should it not be a case of psychic obsession for which I am not responsible?”
And that was the most comforting solution he could find.