BLAISE OLIFANTsat over his work in the room which once, for want of a better name, the late Mr. Gale called his study; but it was a room transformed to studious use. The stuffed trout and the large scale-map of the neighbourhood and the country auctioneer’s carelessly bestowed oddments had been replaced by cases of geological specimens and bookshelves filled with a specialist’s library. The knee-hole writing-desk, with its cigarette-burned edge, had joined the rest of the old lares and penates in honourable storage, and a long refectory-table, drawn across the window overlooking the garden, and piled with papers, microscopes, and other apparatus, reigned in its stead. Olifant loved the room’s pleasant austerity. It symbolized himself, his aims and his life’s limitations. A fire burned in the grate, for it was a cold, raw morning, and, outside, miserable rain defaced the April day.
He smoked a pipe as he corrected proofs, so absorbed in the minute and half-mechanical task that he did not hear the door open and the quiet entrance of a maid.
“Mr. Triona, sir.”
The words cut through the silence so that he started and swung round in his chair.
“Mr. Triona? Where?”
“In the dining-room.”
“Show him in here.”
The maid retired. Olifant rose and stood before the fire with a puzzled expression on his face. Triona in Medlow at ten o’clock in the morning? Something serious must have brought a man, unannounced, from London to Shropshire. His thoughts flew to Olivia.
A moment afterwards the dishevelled spectre of Triona burst into the room and closed the door behind him. His coat was wet with rain, his boots and trouser hems muddy. His eyes stared out of a drawn, unshaven face.
“Thank God I’ve found you. During the journey I had a sickening dread lest you might be away.”
“But how did you manage to get here at this hour?” asked Olifant, for Medlow is far from London and trains are few. “You must have arrived last night. Why the deuce didn’t you come to me?”
“I got to Worcester by the last train and put up for the night and came on first thing this morning,” replied Triona impatiently.
“And you’ve walked from the station. You’re wet through. Let me get you a jacket.”
Olifant moved to the bell, but Triona arrested him.
“No—no. I’m taking the next train back to London. Don’t talk of jackets and foolery. I’ve left Olivia.”
Olifant made a stride, almost menacing, towards him, the instinctive gesture of his one arm curiously contrasting with the stillness of the pinned sleeve of the other.
“What?”
“What I say,” cried Triona. “I’ve left Olivia. I’ve left her for ever. I’m cutting myself out of her life.”
“You’re mad. Olivia——”
Triona put up a checking hand. “Oh, no, not Olivia.” He laughed bitterly at the indignant advocacy in Olifant’s tone. “Olivia’s there—where she always has been—among the stars. It’s I that have fallen. Good God! like Lucifer. It’s I that crawl.” He caught an accusing question in the other’s hardening eyes. “It isn’t what you might naturally think. There’s not the ghost of another woman. There never has been—never shall be. It’s my only clean record. And I love her—my God! My soul’s in Hell, aching and burning and shrieking for her. I shall live in Hell for the rest of my life.”
Olifant turned, and wheeling round his writing-chair sat down and pointed to an arm-chair by the fire.
“Sit down and tell me quietly what is the matter.”
But Triona waved aside the invitation and remained standing. “The matter is that I’m an impostor and a liar, and Olivia has found it out. Listen. Don’t ask questions until I’ve done. I’m here for Olivia’s sake. You’re the only creature in the world that can understand—the only one that can help her through. And she couldn’t tell you. Her pride wouldn’t let her. And if it did, the ordeal for her! You’ll be able to go to her now and say, ‘I know everything.’ ”
“Up to now, my dear fellow,” said Olifant, “you’ve been talking in riddles. But before you begin, let me remind you that there are two sides to every story. What I mean is—get it into your head that I realize I’m listening to your side.”
“But there aren’t two sides,” cried Triona. “You don’t suppose I’ve come down here to defend myself! If you see when I’ve done that I’ve had some excuse, that there is a grain of saving grace lying somewhere hidden—all well and good. But I’m not here to plead a case. Haven’t I cleared the ground by telling you I’m a liar and an impostor?”
Olifant again looked searchingly at the pale and haggard-eyed young man, his brown hair unkempt and falling across his broad forehead, his lips twitching nervously; and the elder man’s glance turned to one of pitying kindness. He rose, laid his hand on the lapel of the wet coat.
“You’ll take this off, at any rate. There—we’ll hang it over the fender-seat to dry. Sit beside it and dry your legs. It’s no good catching your death of cold.”
Triona submitted to the friendly authority and sat down in his shirt sleeves before the blaze. Olifant, aware of the sedative value of anticlimax, smiled and offered refreshments. Tea—coffee—a drop of something to keep out the cold. Triona suddenly glanced at him.
“I’ll never touch alcohol again as long as I live.”
A cigarette, then? Olifant handed the box, held a match. Triona smoked. Olifant re-lit his pipe and leaned back in his chair.
“Now let me have the plain, unvarnished tale.”
They smoked many cigarettes and many pipes during the telling of the amazing story. As his life had unfolded itself in the grimness of the little Newcastle kitchen, so he recounted it to Olifant. In his passionate final grip on Truth, which for the last few months of his awakening had proved so elusive, he tried to lay bare the vain secret of every folly and the root of every lie. The tangled web of the hackneyed aphorism he unwove, tracking every main filament to its centre, every cross-thread from the beginning to end of its vicious circle.
Plain unvarnished tale it was not in the man’s nature to give. Even in his agony of avowal he must be dramatic, must seize on the picturesque. Now he sat on the narrow leather-covered fender-seat, hunched up, his eyes ablaze, narrating the common actualities of his life; and now he strode about the room, with great gestures of his pink-shirted arms, picturing vividly the conflicting emotions of his soul. First he sketched—so it seemed to the temperamentally remote Olifant—in broad outlines of flame, his true career. Then in strokes, like red-hot wire, he filled in the startling details. The grizzled head and sharp-cut features of the naked body of the dead man Krilov in the ditch—the cold grey waste around—the finding of the odds and ends, the glint of the pocket-compass behind a few spikes of grass, the false teeth, the little black book, the thing of sortilege, of necromantic influence . . . the spell of the book in the night watches in the North Sea, its obsession; his pixy-led infatuation which made him cast aside the slough of John Briggs and sun himself in the summer of the world as the dragonfly, Alexis Triona. In swift lines, too, of a Will-o’-the-Wisp’s dance he revealed the course of his love. Then, unconsciously, before the concentrated gaze of the other man he dropped a baffling gauze curtain, as on a stage, through which his motives and his actions appeared uncertain and unreal.
Olifant had listened in astounded silence. His first instinct was one of indignation. He had been unforgivably deceived by this exterior of friendship under false pretences. The blow dealt to unregenerate man’s innate vanity hurt like a stab. His own clear soul rose in revolt. The fellow’s mendacity, bewildering in its amplitude, would have set Hell agape. He shivered at the cold craft of his imposture; besides, he was a ghoul, a stripper of the dead. He lost the man he had loved in a new and incomprehensible monster. But as Triona went on he gradually fell under the spell of his passionate remorse, and found himself setting the human against the monstrous and wondering which way the balance would turn. And then he became suddenly aware of the impostor’s real and splendid achievements, and he stood in pitiful amaze at the futility of the unnecessary fraud.
“But why, in God’s name? Why?” he cried, staring through the baffling curtain. “A man of genius, you would have held your own without all this.”
“I could have done nothing without the help of that damned little black book. Don’t you see how the necromancy of the thing gripped me—how it has got its diabolical revenge? I told you not to ask me questions,” Triona burst out fiercely. “You’re trying to make me defend myself.” He swung away, then laughed mirthlessly. “There seems to be a poetic justice in life. This room in which we have spent so many hours—it’s filled from floor to ceiling with my lies. Now I come with Truth, a sort of disinfectant. Perhaps I was driven back just to do it.”
Olifant knitted a perplexed brow. Such fantastic psychologies were beyond his simple scientific habit of mind. He said:
“You told me you came here on account of Olivia.”
“Of course.”
“Well—I must ask you again the same everlasting ‘Why?’ How could you dare to marry her with this lie on your soul?”
“Yes. How dared I?” said Triona dejectedly.
“But wouldn’t it have been quite simple to tell her the truth? You could have afforded to make a clean breast of it. You had proved yourself a remarkable man, apart from—from the Triona myth. And she is big enough to have stood it. Why, in God’s name, didn’t you trust her?”
Triona threw out his hands helplessly. He did not know. Again he pleaded the unseen power that had driven him. When he had tried to resist, it was too late.
“And now you think me a fool and a knave.”
“I think you’re a fool,” said Olifant.
“But not a scoundrel? I should like to know. You were the first man who really held out the hand of friendship to me. Till then people regarded me as an interesting specimen. You took me on my human side. I shall never forget coming to your sister’s house at Oxford. It was a new and wonderful atmosphere.”
“If that is so,” said Olifant, “why didn’t it compel confidence—something of the real truth? I see you now telling my sister and myself your fairy tale; in the same fervid way as you’ve been telling me the truth this morning.”
Triona rose and put on his jacket which now was dry.
“How can I hope to make you understand, when I don’t understand myself? Besides,” he flashed, after shrugging himself impatiently into the garment, “haven’t I said I wasn’t seeking condonation or sympathy?”
“You asked me whether I thought you a scoundrel,” said Olifant quietly.
“Well, do you? Say I am, and have done with it.”
“If I did, I don’t see what good it would do,” replied Olifant, a vague comprehension of this imaginative alien soul dawning on his mind. “You’re out for penance in the same crazy way you’ve been out for everything else. So you hand me the scourge and tell me to lay on. But I won’t. Also—if I committed myself by calling you an unmitigated blackguard, I couldn’t give you the advice that it’s in my heart to give you.”
“And what’s that?”
“To go back to Olivia and do your penance with her by telling and living the truth.Magna est veritas et prævalebit.Especially with a woman who loves you.”
Triona turned to the table by the window and stared out into the rain-swept garden, and the vision of a girl horror-stricken, frozen, dead, rose before his eyes. Presently he said, his back to the room:
“You mean kindly and generously. But it’s impossible to go back. The man, Alexis Triona, whom she loved, has melted away. He never had real existence. In his place she sees a stranger, one John Briggs, whom she loathes like Hell—I’ve seen it in her eyes. She feels as if she had been contaminated by contact with some unclean beast.”
Olifant sprang from his chair and, catching him by the shoulder, swung him round.
“You infernal fool, she doesn’t!”
“I know better,” said Triona.
“I’m beginning to think I knowherbetter,” Olifant retorted.
“Well—that is possible,” said Triona. “You’re of her caste. I’m not. I’ve pretended to be, and that’s how I’ve come to grief. You’re a good fellow, Olifant, straight, just like her; and neither of you can understand the man who runs crooked.”
“Crooked be damned!” exclaimed Olifant.
But all his condemnation of self-accusing epithets could not dissuade the fate-driven young man from his purpose. Triona repeated the original intention of his visit: to put Olifant in complete possession of facts which Olivia’s pride might not allow her to reveal, and to charge him, thus equipped, with Olivia’s immediate welfare. At last he burst out again:
“Man alive! Don’t torture me. All the devils in Hell are doing it, and they’re enough for any man. Have some imagination! Think what it would mean to her to have me crawling about in her path for ever and ever. When love is dead it’s dead. There’s no resurrection. She loved Alexis Triona. Won’t you ever understand? He’s dead. The love’s dead. If I stayed with her, I should be a kind of living corpse to which she’s tied. So I’m going away—out of her life altogether.”
“And where are you going?”
“Just out into the spaciousness of the wide world,” replied Triona with a gesture. He looked suddenly at his wrist watch. “Good Lord!” he cried. “I’ve only just time to catch my train. Good-bye.”
“Wait a minute,” said Olifant. “Do you think it fair on a woman? While you disappear for ever into spaciousness she’ll remain none the less married—tied to you for the rest of her life.”
“Oh, don’t let her worry about that!” cried Triona. “I’ll soon be dead.”
He sped to the door. Olifant clutched at him and for a while held fast.
“Never mind trains. You’ll stay here to-day. I can’t let you go—in this hysterical state.”
But Triona wrenched himself free. A one-armed man is at a physical disadvantage in a struggle with a wiry two-armed opponent. Olifant was pushed staggering back, and, before he could recover himself, Triona had flashed from the room, and a moment later the clang of the front door told him he had left the house.
Olifant, after a moment’s reflection, went to the telephone and gave a London number. Then he drew his chair nearer the fire and re-lit his pipe and waited for the call to come through. Work was impossible. He was in no mood to enter into the gaiety of printers in their dance through the dead languages with which his biological pages were strewn. His heart was exceeding heavy. He stared into the fire and thought of what might have been, had he not been a fool. At any rate, she would have been spared misery such as this. He had loved her from the moment she had opened that untouched room upstairs, and the delicate spirit of one that was dead had touched them with invisible hands. And he had been a fool. Just a dry stick of a tongue-tied, heart-hobbled, British fool. It had only been when another, romantic and unreticent, had carried her off that he realized the grotesqueness of his unutterable pain. Well, she was married, and married to the man to whom he had given his rare affection; and, folly of follies, all his intimacy with her had grown since her marriage. She was inexpressibly dear to him. Her hurt was his hurt. Her happiness all that mattered. And she loved her madman of a husband. Deep down in her heart she loved him still, in spite of shock and disillusion. Of that he was certain. He himself forgave him for his wild, boyish lovableness. Olivia abandoned—it was unthinkable!
After an eternity the telephone bell rang. He leaped up. Eventually came the faint, clear notes of a voice which was Olivia’s. They established identities.
“Alexis has been here. Has told me everything. He has left here by the midday train. Of course, I don’t know whether you want to see him; but if you do his train gets into Paddington at six-fifteen.”
And the voice came again:
“Thanks. I’ll meet him there.”
And there was silence.
Olivia and Myra met the train at Paddington. But they sought in vain for Alexis Triona. He had not arrived in London.
THEunhappy young man rushed through the train to the railway station, goaded by the new passion of remorse and frantic with the despair which had driven him from the accusing horror in Olivia’s eyes. It was only when he waited on the platform at Worcester, where he must change to the main line, that he became suddenly aware of loss of sanity. His suit-case, containing all the belongings which he had taken from the flat, was lying a mile or so away at the inn where he had spent the night. He had not slept, not even gone to bed, not even opened the suit-case. He had dashed out before the inn was awake to catch the earliest morning train to Medlow. And from that moment to this, just as the London train was steaming in, both luggage and unpaid bill had vanished from his mind. There was nothing to do but go to the inn and proceed to London by a later train. Thus, Fate had stage-managed for him another deception of Olivia.
The realization of his crazy lapse of memory was a sobering shock. Never before had he lost grip of himself. Hitherto, the tighter the corner—and he had found himself in many—the clearer had been his brain. The consciousness of the working of a cool intellect had given a pleasurable thrill to danger. Now, for over twenty-four hours, he had been acting like a madman, in contemplation of which the only thrill he experienced was one of profound disgust. To enter whatever sphere of life the effacement of Alexis Triona should render necessary, raving like a maniac would be absurd. It would need all his wit.
His retrieved suit-case in the rack of the third-class carriage, the paid hotel bill in his pocket, and food, up to then forgotten, in his stomach, he fortified himself in this decision, until exhausted nature claimed profound and untroubled sleep.
He awoke at Paddington, homeless for the night. Now his brain worked normally. Alexis Triona had disappeared from the face of the earth. It was therefore essential to avoid hotels where Alexis Triona might possibly be recognized. Besides, he knew that West End hotels were congested, that the late-comers to London had been glad to find a couch at a Turkish Bath. His chauffeur’s knowledge of London came to his aid. He drove to a mouldy hotel in the purlieus of the Euston Road, and there found a frowzy room. The contrast between the bed, its dingy counterpane sagging into the worn hollow of the mattress beneath, the threadbare rugs askew on the oilcloth, the blistered deal washstand and dressing-table, the damp, dirty paper, the bleak blinds, and the sweet and dainty appointments of the home he had left smote him till he could have groaned aloud. Not that he gave a thought to such things in themselves. Physical comfort meant little to him. But the lost daintiness signified Olivia; this abominable room, the negation of her.
He sat on the bed, rolled a cigarette, and began to think clearly. That he had for ever forfeited Olivia’s affection it never entered his head to doubt. He saw her face grow more cold and tragic, and her eyes more horror-stricken at every fresh revelation of mendacity. Loathing himself, he had not pleaded for forgiveness; he had done penance, applied the lash, blackening himself unmercifully. He had lost sense of actual things in his cold romance of deception. He stood before her self-proclaimed, a monster of lies. Now he saw himself an unholy stranger profaning the sanctity of her life. He had fought for Heaven with Hell’s weapons, and Eternal Justice had hurled him back into the abyss. In the abyss he must remain, leaving her to tread the stars.
The exposure of the Vronsky myth had hurt her as much as anything.
“Vronsky?” She put her hands, fingers apart, to her temples. “But you made me give my heart to Vronsky!”
Yes, surely he had committed towards her the unforgivable sin. He was damned—at any rate, in this world. To rid her irremediably of his pestilent existence was the only hope of salvation. Olifant was a fool, speaking according to the folly of an honourable gentleman. He clenched his teeth and gripped his hands. If only he could have been such a fool! To appear the kind of man that Olifant easily, naturally, was had been his gnawing ambition from his first insight into gentle life, long ago, in the Prince’s household. But, all the same, Olifant was a fool—a sort of Galahad out for Grails, and remote from the baseness in which he had wallowed.
“Go to Olivia. She loves you.”
Chivalrous imbecile! He had not seen Olivia’s great staring dark eyes with rims around them, and the awful little drawn face.
He was right—it was the only way out.
Yet, during all this interview with Olivia, he had been quite sane. He had indulged in no histrionics. He had not declaimed, and flung his arms about, as he had done in Olifant’s study. He had felt himself talking like a dead man immersed up to the neck in the flames of Hell, but possessed of a cold clear intellect. In a way, he was proud of this. To have made an emotional appeal would have obscured the issue towards which his new-found honesty was striving.
His last words to Olivia were:
“And the future?”
She said hopelessly: “Is there a future?”
Then she drew a deep breath and passed her fingers across her face.
“Don’t talk to me any more, for heaven’s sake. I must be alone. I must have air. I must walk.”
She shrank wide of him as he opened the door for her, and she passed out, her eyes remote.
It was then that the poet-charlatan became suddenly aware of his sentence. If the Avengers, or what not uncheerful personages of Greek Tragedy had surrounded him with their ghastly shapes and had chanted their dismal Choric Ode of Doom, his inmost soul could not have been more convinced of that which he must forthwith do. He never thought of questioning the message. He faced the absolute.
Waiting until he heard the click of the outer door of the flat announcing Olivia’s departure in quest of unpolluted air, he went into his dressing-room and packed a suit-case with necessaries, including the despatch-case which contained his John Briggs papers and the accursed little black book.
He met Myra in the hall, impassive.
“If you had told me you were going on a journey, I would have packed for you. Does Mrs. Triona know?”
“No,” said he. “She doesn’t. Wait.”
He left her, and returned a few moments afterwards with a note he had scribbled. After all, Olivia must suffer no uncertainty. She must not dread his possible return.
“Give that to Mrs. Triona.”
“Are you coming back?”
He looked at her as at a Fate in a black gown relieved by two solitary patches of white at the wrists.
“Why do you ask me that?”
“You look as if you weren’t,” said Myra. “I know there has been trouble to-day.”
He had always stood in some awe of this efficient automaton of a woman, who had never given him a shadow of offence, but in whom he had divined a jealousy which he had always striven to propitiate. But now she awakened a forlorn sense of dignity.
He picked up his suit-case.
“What has that got to do with you, Myra?”
“If Mrs. Triona’s room was on fire and I rushed in through the flames to save her, would you ask me what business it was of mine?”
The artist in him wondered for a moment at her even, undramatic presentation of the hypothesis. He could not argue the point, however, knowing her life’s devotion to Olivia. So yielding to the unlit, pale blue eyes in the woman’s unemotional face, he said:
“Yes. There is trouble. Deadly trouble. It’s all my doing. You quite understand that?”
“It couldn’t be anything else, sir,” said Myra.
“And so I’m going away and never coming back.”
He moved to the door. She made the swift pace or two of the trained servant to open it for him. She stood for a few seconds quite rigid, her hand on the door-knob. Their eyes met. He saw in hers a cold hostility. Without a word he passed her, and heard the door slam behind him.
It was when he reached the pavement, derelict on the wastes of the world, that his nerves gave way. Until the click of his brain at Worcester station, he had been demented.
“Never again,” said he.
He undressed and went to bed. It was some hours before he could sleep. But sleep came at last, and he woke in the morning refreshed physically, and feeling capable of facing the unknown future. As yet he had no definite plan. All he knew was that he must disappear. Merely leaving Olivia and setting up for himself elsewhere as Alexis Triona was not to be thought of. Alexis Triona and all that his name stood for—good and evil—must be blotted out of human ken. He must seek fortune again in a foreign country. Why not America? Writing under a fresh pseudonym, he could maintain himself with his pen. Bare livelihood was all that mattered. Even in this earthly Lake of Fire and Brimstone to which, as a liar, he had apocalyptically condemned himself, a man must live. During moments of his madness he had dallied with wild thoughts of suicide. His fundamental sanity had rejected them. He was no coward. Whatever punishment was in store for him, good God! he was man enough to face it.
In his swift packing he had seized a clump of his headed note-paper. A sheet of this he took when, after breakfast, he had remounted to his frowzy room, and wrote a letter to his publishers informing them that he was suddenly summoned abroad, and instructing them to pay, till further notice, all sums accruing to him into Olivia’s banking account. Consulting his pass-book, he drew a cheque in Olivia’s favour, which he enclosed with a covering letter to Olivia’s bankers. Then, driving to his own bank, he cashed a cheque for the balance of some hundreds of pounds. With this, he prepared to start life in some new world. Restless, he drove back to his hotel. Restless still, he obeyed the instinct of his life, and began to wander; not about any such haunts as might be frequented by his acquaintances, but through the dingy purlieus of the vague region north of the line of Euston and King’s Cross Stations.
It was in a mean street in Somers Town, a hopeless, littered street of little despairing shops, and costers’ barrows, and tousled women and unclean children, that they met. They came up against each other face to face, and recoiled a step or two, each scanning the other in a puzzlement of recognition. Then Triona cried:
“Yes, of course—you’re Boronowski.”
“And you—the name escapes me—” the other tapped his forehead with a fat, pallid hand “—you’re the chauffeur-mechanic of Prince——”
“Briggs,” said Triona.
“Briggs—yes. The only man who knew more than I of Ukranian literature—I a Pole and you an Englishman. Ah, my friend, what has happened since those days?”
“A hell of a lot,” said Triona.
“You may indeed say so,” replied Boronowski. He smiled. “Well?”
“Well?” said Triona.
“What are you, well-dressed and looking prosperous, doing in this—” he waved a hand “—in this sordidity?”
Triona responded with a smile—but at the foreign coinage of a word.
“I’m just wandering about. And you?”
“I’m living here for the moment. Living is costly and funds are scarce. I go back to Warsaw to-morrow—next week—a fortnight——”
“Poland’s a bit upset these days,” said Triona.
“That is why I am here—and that is why I am going back, my friend,” said the Pole.
He was a stout man, nearing forty, with dark eyes and a straggly red moustache and beard already grizzled. His grey suit was stained with wear; on his jacket a spike of thread showing where a button was missing. He wore an old black felt hat stuck far back on his head, revealing signs of baldness above an intellectual forehead.
Triona laughed. “Was there ever a Pole who was not a conspirator?”
“Say rather, was there ever a Pole who did not love his country more than his life?”
“Yes. I must say, you Poles are patriotic,” said Triona.
Boronowski’s dark eyes flashed, and seizing his companion’s arm, he hurried him along the encumbered pavement.
“Why do you Englishmen who have lately died and bled in millions for your country, always have a little laugh, a little sneer, at patriotism? To listen to you, one would think you cared nothing for your country’s welfare.”
“We’ve been so sure of it, you see.”
“But we Poles have not. For two centuries we have not had a country. For two centuries we have dreamed of it, and now we have got it at last, and our blood sings in our veins, and we have no other interest on earth. And just as we are beginning to realize the wonder of it, we find ourselves enmeshed in German intrigue, with our promised way to the sea blocked, with the Powers saying: ‘No Ukraine, no Galicia,’ and with the Russian Red Army attacking us. Ah, no. We are not so assured of our country’s welfare that we can afford to depreciate patriotism.”
“What are you doing here in England?” asked Triona.
“Breaking my heart,” cried Boronowski passionately. “I come for help, and find only fair words. I ask for money for guns and munitions for the enforcement of the Treaty of Versailles, and they reply, ‘Oh, we can’t do that. Our Labour Party wouldn’t allow us to do that. But we’ll tell those naughty Bolshevists to leave you alone.’ So I return, my mission a failure. Oh, I play a very humble part. I do not wish to magnify myself. Those with me have failed. We are cast on our own resources. We are fighting for our new national life. And as the blood in our hearts and the thought in our brains cry ‘Poland, Poland,’ so shall the words be ever loud in our mouths. And look. If we did not cry out, who would listen to us? And we are crying our ‘Poland, Poland,’ in all the Entente and neutral countries—I, Boronowski, the most unimportant of all. Perhaps we are voices crying in the wilderness. But one Voice, once on a time, was heard—and revolutionized the world.”
The man’s voice, crying in the wilderness of the sordid Somers Town street, awoke at any rate a responsive chord in the sensitive creature by his side.
“Of course, I understand,” said he. “Forgive my idle speech. But I am in great personal trouble, and I spoke with the edge of my lips.”
Boronowski flashed a glance at him.
“Do you know the remedy? The remedy for silly unhappinesses that affect you here and here—” he swung a hand, touching forehead and heart “—the little things——”
“I’m damned if they’re little,” said Triona.
“Yes, my friend,” exclaimed the Pole, halting suddenly in front of a wilting greengrocer’s shop, and holding him by the lapel of his coat. “Procure for yourself a sense of proportion. In the myriad of animated beings, what is the individual but an insignificant atom? What are your sufferings in the balance of the world’s sufferings? Yes. Yes. Of course you feel them—the toothache, the heartache, the agony of soul. But I claim that the individual has a remedy.”
“What is that?” asked Triona.
“He must cast off the individual, merge his pain in the common sorrow of humanity. He must strip himself free of self, and identify himself with a great cause.”
A rusty virago, carrying a straw marketing bag, pushed him rudely aside, for he was blocking the entrance to the shop.
“We can’t talk here,” he said, recovering his balance. “Do you want to talk?” he asked abruptly.
“Very much,” replied Triona, suddenly aware that this commonplace looking prophet, vibrating with inspiration, might possibly have some message for him, spiritually derelict.
“Then come up to my rooms.”
To Triona’s surprise, he plunged into the crowded greengrocer’s shop, turned into an evil-smelling, basket-littered passage at the back, mounted a couple of flights of unclean stairs, and unlocked and threw open the door of an untidy sitting-room looking out on to the noisy street. He swung a wooden chair from a little deal table strewn with paper, and pointed to a musty sofa.
“That,” said he courteously, “is the more comfortable. Pray be seated.”
He picked a depopulated packet of cigarettes from the table.
“Will you smoke? For refreshment, I can offer you tea—” he pointed to a spirit-lamp and poor tea equipage in a corner. He did the honours of his mildewed establishment with much grace. Triona accepted the cigarette, but declined the tea. Boronowski seated himself on the wooden chair. Having taken off his hat, he revealed himself entirely bald, save for a longish grizzling red fringe at the back, from ear-tip to ear-tip. The quick rites of hospitality performed, he plunged again into impatient speech, recapitulating what he had said before and ending in the same peroration.
“Salvation lies in a man’s effacement of himself, and his identification with a great cause.”
“But, my dear man,” cried Triona feverishly, “what great cause is there in the world for an Englishman of the present day to devote himself to? Look at the damned country. You’re living in it. Is there a cry anywhere, ‘England über alles?’ Have you seen any enthusiasm for any kind of idea? Of course I love my country. I’ve fought for her on land and sea. I’ve been wounded. I’ve been torpedoed. And I’d go through it all over again if my country called. But my country doesn’t call.”
He rose from the sofa and walked up and down the little room, throwing about his arms, less like an Englishman than his Polish host, who, keeping his eyes on him, nodded his head in amazed approbation as he developed his thesis—that of the fervid creature eager to fight England’s battles, but confronted with England’s negation of any battles to fight.
“The only positive ideal in England at the present moment is Bolshevism. The only flag waved in this war-wearied country is the red flag. All the rest is negative. Not what we can do—but what we can prevent. And you, Boronowski, a professor of history, know very well that no Gospel of Negation has ever succeeded since the world began. Look at me,” he said, standing before the Pole, with wide, outstretched arms, “young, fit, with a brain that has proved itself—I won’t tell you how—and eager to throw my personal sufferings into the world’s melting-pot—to live, my dear fellow, to work, to devote myself to some ideal. I must do that, or die. It’s all very well for you to theorize. You do it beautifully. There’s not a word wrong in anything you say. But what is the Great Cause that I can devote myself to?”
“Poland,” said Boronowski.
THEword was like the lash of a whip. He stared at the patriot open-mouthed.
“Yes, Poland,” said Boronowski. “Why not? You want to fight for a Great Cause. Is not a free and independent Poland the keystone of the arch of reconstructed Europe? It is a commonplace axiom. Poland overthrown, overrun with Bolshevism, all Europe crumbles into dust. The world is convulsed. Fighting for Poland is fighting for the salvation of the world. Could there be a greater cause?”
His dark eyes glowed with compelling inspiration. His outflung arm ended in a pointing finger. And Triona saw it as the finger of Salvation Yeo in his boyhood’s picture.
“Wonderful, wonderful,” he said, below his breath.
“And simple. Come with me to Warsaw. I have friends of some influence. Otherwise I should not be here. The Polish Army would welcome you with open arms.”
Triona thrust out a sudden hand, which the other gripped.
“By God!” he cried, “I’ll come.”
An hour afterwards, his brain dominated by the new idea, he danced his way through the melancholy streets. Here, indeed, was salvation. Here he could live the life of Truth. Here was the glorious chance—although he would never see her on earth again—of justifying himself in Olivia’s eyes. And in itself it was a marvellous adventure. There would be endless days when he should live for the hour that he was alive, without thought of an unconjecturable to-morrow. Into the cause of Poland he would fling his soul. Yes, Boronowski was right. The sovereign remedy. His individual life—what did it matter to him? All the beloved things were past and gone. They lay already on the further side of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. His personality was merged into a self-annihilating creature that would henceforth be the embodiment of a spiritual idea.
Thus for the rest of the day, and during the night, his mind worked. Arrived in Poland, he would press for the fiercest section of the front. The bullet that killed him would be welcome. He would die gloriously. Olivia should know.
As John Briggs, with his papers in order, he found his passport a simple matter. Boronowski, with whom he spent most of his time, obtained a speedy visa at the Polish and other Consulates. During the period of waiting he went carefully through the contents of the suit-case and removed all traces of the name and initials of Alexis Triona. The little black book he burned page by page with matches in the empty grate of his room. When it was consumed, he felt himself rid of an evil thing. In strange East London emporiums, unknown to dwellers in the West End, and discovered by restless wandering, he purchased an elementary kit for the campaign. Much of his time he spent in Boronowski’s quarters in Somers Town, reading propaganda pamphlets and other literature dealing with Polish actualities. When the Polish Army welcomed him with open arms, they must find him thoroughly equipped. He bought a Polish grammar, and compiled with Boronowski a phrase-book so as to be prepared with an elementary knowledge of the language. The Pole marvelled at his fervour.
“You spring at things like an intellectual tiger,” said he, “and then fasten on to them with the teeth of a bulldog.”
“I’m a quick worker when I concentrate,” said Triona.
And for many days he concentrated, sleeping and eating little, till his cheeks grew gaunt and his eyes bright and haggard. In his interminable talks with Boronowski, he concentrated all his faculties, until the patriot would laugh and accuse him of a tigerish spring on the secrets of his soul.
“It’s true,” cried Triona, “it’s the soul of Poland I want to make enter my being. To serve you to any purpose I must see through Polish eyes and feel with a Polish heart, and feel my veins thrill with the spirituality of Poland.”
“Is that possible?”
“You shall see,” answered Triona.
And just as he had fallen under the obsession of the dead Krilov during the night watches in the North Sea, so did he fall under the obsession of this new Great Cause. Something fundamentally histrionic in his temperament flung him into these excesses of impersonation. Already he began to regret his resumption of the plain name of John Briggs. Even in the pre-war Russian days he had seldom been addressed by it. For the first social enquiry in Russia elicited the Christian name of a man’s father. And his father’s name being Peter, he was called by all and sundry Ivan Petrovitch. So that even then, in his fervent zeal to merge himself into the Russian spirit, he had grown to regard the two downright words of his name as meaningless monosyllables. But he strangled the regret fiercely as soon as it arose.
“No, by heaven!” said he, “No more lies.”
And yet, in spite of unalterable resolve, as he lay sleepless with overwrought nerves in the sour room in the Euston Road, he was haunted by lunatic Polish forms, Brigiovski, Brigowski, which he might adopt without breaking his vow; he could not see himself in the part of a Polish patriot labelled as John Briggs; just as well might a great actor seek to identify himself with Hamlet while wearing cricketing flannels and a bowler hat.
Only once in his talks with Boronowski did he refer to the unhappiness to which he was to apply the sovereign remedy. The days were passing without sign of immediate departure. Boronowski, under the orders of his superiors, must await instructions. Triona chafed at the delay.
Boronowski smiled indulgently.
“The first element in devotion to a cause, or a woman, is patience. Illimitable patience. The demands of a cause are very much like those of a woman, apparently illogical and capricious, but really inexorable and unswerving in their purpose.”
“It’s all very well to talk of patience,” Triona fumed, “but when one is hag-ridden as I am——”
Boronowski smiled again. “Histoire de femme——”
Triona flushed scarlet and sprang to his feet.
“How dare you twist my words like that?”
Boronowski looked at him for a puzzled moment, seeking the association of ideas. Then, grasping it:
“Forgive me, my friend,” he said courteously. “My English, after all, is that of a foreigner. The word connection was far from my mind. I took your speech to mean that you were driven by unhappiness. And the unhappiness of a young man is so often—— Again, I beg your pardon.”
Triona passed his hand through his brown hair.
“All right,” he said, “I’m sorry. Yes. If you want to know, it’s a woman. She’s the day-spring from on high, and I’m damned beyond redemption. The best thing that could happen would be if she knew I were dead.”
Boronowski tugged at his little greyish-red beard. A follower of great causes was never the worse for having the Furies at his heels. But he was a man of kindly nature.
“No one while he is alive can be damned beyond redemption,” he said. “I don’t wish to press my indiscretion further. Yet, as an older man, could I be of service to you in any way?”
“No, you’re very kind, but no one can help me.” Then an idea flashed across his excited brain. “Not until I’m dead. Then, perhaps, you might do something for me.”
“You’re not going to die yet, my friend.”
“How do we know? I’m going to fight. The first day I may get knocked out. Should anything happen to me, would you kindly communicate with some one?”
He moved to the paper-littered table and began to scribble.
“It’s all rather premature, my friend,” said Boronowski. “But as you wish.” He took the scrap of paper which bore the name and address of Major Olifant. “This I may be liable to lose. I will enter it in my notebook.” He made the entry. Then, “May I say a serious word to you?”
“Anything you like.”
“There is such a thing as the fire of purification. But—” he put a hand on the younger man’s shoulder, “you can’t call it down from Heaven. You must await its coming. So we get back to my original remark. Patience, more patience, and always patience.”
This was consoling for the moment; but after a few days’ further grappling with the Polish language, he burst into Boronowski’s lodgings and found the patriot at his table, immersed in work.
“If we don’t start soon,” he cried, “I’ll go mad. I haven’t slept for nights and nights. I’ll only sleep when we are on our journey, and I know that all this is reality and not a dream.”
“I’ve just had orders,” replied Boronowski. “We start to-morrow morning. Here are our tickets.”
That night, Triona wrote to Olivia. It was an eternal farewell. On the morrow he was leaving England to offer up his unworthy life as a sacrifice to the Great Cause of Poland. The only reparation he could make for the wrong he had done her was to beseech her to look on him as one already dead. It covered many pages.
When he returned to his musty room after this last hour’s heart-breaking communion with her, he sat on his bed overwhelmed by sudden despair. What guarantee had she of this departure for Poland greater than that of his mission to Helsingfors last summer? Would she not throw the letter aside in disgust—another romantic lie? He wished he had not written. He took faint hope again on the reflection that by posting another letter from Warsaw he could establish his veracity. But why should he keep on worrying her with the details of his miserable existence? Better, far better that she should look on him as dead; better, far better that she should believe him dead, so that she could reconstruct her young and broken life. He might die in battle; but then he might not. He had already carried his life safely through battles by land and sea. Again he might come out unscathed. Even if he was killed, how should she hear of his death? And if he survived, was it fair that she should be bound by law eternally to a living ghost? Somebody had said that before. It was Olifant. Olifant, the fool out for Grails, yet speaking the truth of chivalry. Well, this time—he summoned up the confidence of dismal hope—he would make sure that he was dead and that she heard the news. At any rate, he had prepared the ground; Boronowski would communicate with Olifant.
Then came a knock at his door—it was nearly midnight. The night porter entered. A man downstairs wished to see him—a foreigner. A matter of urgent importance.
“Show him up,” said Triona.
He groaned, put both his hands up to his head. He did not want to see Boronowski to-night. His distraught brain could not stand the patriot’s tireless lucidity of purpose. Boronowski belonged to the inhuman band of fanatics, the devotees to one idea, who had nothing personal to sacrifice. Just like lonely old maids who gave themselves up to church-going and good works, and thereby plumed themselves on the acquisition of immortal merit. What soul-shattering tragedy had Boronowski behind him, any more than the elderly virgins aforesaid? If Boronowski kept him up talking Poland till three o’clock in the morning—as he had already done—he would go mad. No, not to-night. The mounting steps on the uncarpeted stairs hammered at every nerve in his body. And when the door opened, it was not Boronowski who appeared, but a pallid, swarthy wisp of a man whom Triona recognized as one Klinski, a Jew, and a trusted agent of Boronowski. He was so evilly dressed that the night porter, accustomed to the drab clientele of the sad hostelry, yet thought it his duty to linger by the door.
Triona dismissed him sharply.
“What’s the matter?” he asked in Russian, for he was aware of the man’s scanty English.
Klinski did not know. He was but the bearer of a letter, a large envelope, which he drew from his breast pocket. Triona tore it open. It contained two envelopes and a covering letter. The letter ran: