AFTERthis, Olivia took up her life, as she thought, in firm hands. She had made her reparation to her old friends. She joined the family party of the Trivetts at dinner, and mixed with the “homely folk” that assembled around old John Freke’s tea table. She lived in a glow of contrition for past snobberies. The vague story of her separation from Triona which she had told to the two old men not sufficing Medlow curiosity, she told what she believed to be the truth.
“My husband has gone to Poland to fight against the Russian Reds.”
And thereby she gave the impression that the cause of the break up of her married life was the incurable adventurous spirit of her husband. The suggestion fitted in with the town’s idea of the romance of her marriage and the legendary character of Alexis Triona, which had originally been inspired by the local bookseller eager to sell copies of Triona’s books. She herself, therefore, became invested in a gossamer garment of mystery, which she wore with becoming grace. Her homecoming was a triumph.
As the days passed and brought no news of Alexis, she grew convinced of the honesty of his last letter. His real achievements in the past confirmed her conviction. He was the born adventurer. It was like him to have sought the only field of mad action open at that hour of frantically guarded peace. He had gone to Poland. In her heart she rejoiced. She saw him striving to burn a past record and rise, Phœnix-like, from its ashes.
“If he came back a Polish General, all over stars and glory,” said Myra, during one of their increasingly intimate conversations, “would you take up with him again?”
Olivia reddened. “I should be glad for his sake.”
“I don’t see that you’re answering my question,” said Myra.
“I’ve told you once and for all,” flashed Olivia, “that I’ll have nothing more to do with him as long as I live.”
She meant it with all that she knew of her soul. His fraud was unforgivable; his perfect recognition of it constituted his only merit. In Poland, doing wild things, he was a picturesque and tolerable personage. In her immediate neighbourhood, he became once again a repellent figure. As far as she could, she blotted him out of her thoughts.
The threat of exposure at the hands of Onslow and Wedderburn still hung over her head. The disgrace of it would react on her innocent self. The laughter of the Lydian galley rang in her ears. She guessed the cynical gossip of the newer London world. That was hateful enough. She need never return to either. But it would follow her to Medlow. She would be pitied by the Trivetts and the Frekes, and the parents of the present generation of Landsdowne House. They would wonder why, in the face of the revelations, she still called herself “Mrs. Triona.” To spring her plain Mrs. Briggs-dom on Medlow she had not the courage.
She took counsel with Blaise Olifant. In his soldier-scholar protecting way he seemed a rock of refuge. He said:
“Write to them through Rowington and ask them to hold their hands until you can put them into communication with your husband, which you give your word of honour to do as soon as you learn his address.”
She did so. The bargain was accepted. When she received Rowington’s letter, she danced into Olifant’s study, and, sitting on the corner of his table, flourished it in his face.
“Oh, the relief of it! I feel ten years younger. I was on the verge of becoming an old woman. Now it will never come out.”
Olifant leaned back in his chair and looked at her wistfully. A faint flush coloured her cheeks, and her eyes were lit with the gladness of hundreds of days ago. Her lips were parted, showing the white, girlish teeth. Sitting there, vividly alive, in the intimate attitude, smiling on him, she was infinitely desirable.
“No,” said he. “It will never come out.”
A cloud passed over her face. “Still, one never knows——”
“I have faith in Alexis,” said he. “He’s a man of his word.”
“I think you’re the loyalest creature that ever lived.”
He raised a deprecating hand. “I would I were,” said he.
“What do you mean by that?” she asked pleasantly.
“If I were,” said he, his nose seeming to lengthen over the wry smile of his lips, “if I were, I would go out into the world and not rest till I brought him back to you.”
She slid to her feet. “With a barber’s basin for a helmet, and the rest of the equipment. If you did such an idiot thing, I should hate you. Don’t you understand that he has gone out of my life altogether?”
“Life is a long, long time to look forward to, for a woman so young as yourself.”
“You mean, I might fall in love with somebody else, and there would be horrid complications?” She laughed in the cocksureness of youth. “Oh, no, my dear Blaise. Once bitten, twice shy. Three times, four times, all the multiplication table times shy.”
Though impelled by primitive instinct, he could not press her further. He found himself in a position of poignant absurdity, compensated by the sweetness of their daily companionship. Sometimes he wondered how it could be that an awakened woman like Olivia could remain in calm ignorance of his love. Yet she gave never a sign of knowledge. She accepted friendship with full hands and gave it with full heart. Beyond that—nothing. From his sensitive point of view, it was all for the best. If, like a lean spider, he sat down beside her and talked of love, he would indubitably frighten Miss Muffet away from Medlow. Further, she would hold him in detestation for intentions which, in the queer circumstances, had no chance of being what the world calls honourable. He therefore put up with what he could get. The proclamation of her eternal man-shyness sounded like her final word on her future existence. So he came back to Rowington.
“I’m glad that’s all settled,” said he. “Now you can take up the threads of life again.”
“What do you think I can make of them?” she asked.
“I can’t sit here idle all my life—not here, at ‘The Towers,’ ” she laughed, “for I’m not going to inflict myself on you for a lifetime—but here, in the world.”
He had no practical suggestion to make; but he spoke from the sincerity of his tradition.
“A woman like you fulfils her destiny by being her best self.”
“But being good is scarcely an occupation.”
He smiled. “I give it up, my dear. If you like, I can teach you geology——”
She laughed. Geology had to do with dead things. She cared not a hang for the past. She wanted to forget it. The epoch of the dynosaurus and the period of the past year were, save for a few hundreds of centuries, contemporaneous. No past, thank you. The present and the future for her. The present was mere lotus-eating; delightful, but demoralising. It was the future that mattered.
“If only you were an astrologer, and could bind me apprentice,” she said. “No,” she added after a pause. “There’s nothing for it. I must do something. I think I’ll go in for Infant Welfare and breed bull-dogs.”
She watched him as he laboriously stuffed his pipe with his one hand by means of a little winch fixed to the refectory table and lit it by a match struck on a heavy mat stand; refraining from helping him, although all the woman in her longed to do so, for she knew his foibles. The very first time he had entered the house, he had refused her offer of help with his Burberry. He needed a woman to look after him; not a sister; not a landlady-lodger friend; a wife, in fact, whose arm and hand he would accept unquestionably, in lieu of his own. A great pity sprung in her heart. Why had no woman claimed him—a man stainless in honour, exquisite in thought, loyal of heart, and—not the least qualification for the perfect gentle knight in a woman’s eyes—soldier-like in bearing? There was something missing. That was all the answer she could give herself. Something intangible. Something magnetic, possessed by the liar and scamp who had been her husband. She could live with Blaise Olifant for a hundred years in perfect amity, in perfect sympathy . . . but with never a thrill.
She knew well enough the basis of sentiment underlying his friendship. If she were free to marry, he would declare himself in his restrained and dignified way. But with the barrier of the living Alexis between them, she laughed at the possibility of such a declaration. And yet, her inward laughter was tinged with bitterness. What kind of a man was it, who, loving a woman, did not catch her round the waist and swing her on his horse and ride away with her? Of course, she herself would have something to say in the matter. She would fight tooth and nail. She would fling the ravisher to Kingdom Come. But still her sex would have the gratification of being madly desired.
In some such confused way, she thought; the horror of Mavenna, and the romantic mastery of Alexis arising in comparison and contrast. To say nothing of Bobby Quinton. . . .
“I wonder how you can put up with me,” she said when he had set his pipe comfortably going.
“Put up with you? What do you mean?”
“You and I are so different.”
He had some glimmer of the things working behind her dark eyes.
“Do you still want adventures? Medlow is too dull for you?”
She felt guilty, and cried impulsively: “Oh, no, no. This is peace. This is Heaven. This is all I want.”
And for a time she persuaded herself that it was so.
Then there came a day when the lilac and the laburnum were out in the garden behind the house, and the row of beeches screening it from the east wind were all a riot of tender green, and Olivia was sitting with a book in the noon sunshine; and the book lay unread on her lap, for her thoughts went back to a magical day of greenery in Richmond Park; an imperishable memory. Her eyes filled with tears. For a few moments, she had recaptured the lost Alexis in that remembered hour of blue mist and mystery. And now, he was in Poland. Doing what?
The French window of Olifant’s study opened, and he came down the gravelled path towards her, a letter in his hand. His face was serious. She rose to meet him.
“I don’t know whether I ought to show you this—but, perhaps later you might blame me if I didn’t.”
She uttered a little cry which stuck in her throat.
“Alexis?”
“Yes.”
The eagerness with which she grasped the letter brought a touch of pain into his eyes. Surely she loved the man still.
“I’m afraid it gives less than news of him,” said he.
But, already reading the letter, she gave no heed to his words.
The letter was from Warsaw, and it ran:
“Sir, “I was commissioned by my friend, Mr. John Briggs, to communicate with you should anything befall him. Now something must have befallen him, because he has failed to keep with me very definite engagements into which he had entered with the utmost good faith and enthusiasm. He was to start on his journey hither, to join the Polish service, on a certain day. He was furnished with railway tickets and passports; also, on the night before his departure, with a letter to friends in Prague where he was to await my coming, and with a letter to friends in Warsaw, in case political exigencies should delay my arrival in Prague. The Prague letter has not been delivered, nor has Mr. Briggs appeared in Warsaw. Nor have I received from him any explanatory communication. That he should have changed his mind at the last moment is incredible, as his more than zealous intentions cannot be questioned.This letter, therefore, has a double object; first to acquaint you with these facts: and secondly to beg you of your courtesy to give me any information you may possess as to the fate of one whom I learned to hold in affectionate esteem.
“Sir, “I was commissioned by my friend, Mr. John Briggs, to communicate with you should anything befall him. Now something must have befallen him, because he has failed to keep with me very definite engagements into which he had entered with the utmost good faith and enthusiasm. He was to start on his journey hither, to join the Polish service, on a certain day. He was furnished with railway tickets and passports; also, on the night before his departure, with a letter to friends in Prague where he was to await my coming, and with a letter to friends in Warsaw, in case political exigencies should delay my arrival in Prague. The Prague letter has not been delivered, nor has Mr. Briggs appeared in Warsaw. Nor have I received from him any explanatory communication. That he should have changed his mind at the last moment is incredible, as his more than zealous intentions cannot be questioned.
This letter, therefore, has a double object; first to acquaint you with these facts: and secondly to beg you of your courtesy to give me any information you may possess as to the fate of one whom I learned to hold in affectionate esteem.
Yours faithfully,
“Paul Boronowski.”
Olivia grew very pale. Her hand shook as she gave the letter back to Olifant.
“Something must have happened to him,” he said.
“What has always happened to him,” she replied bitterly. “He says one thing and does another. One more senseless extravagant lie.”
“He was obviously going to Poland,” said Olifant.
“But he never started!”
Olifant persisted: “How do you know?”
“What can one ever know about him except that truth has no meaning for him? If you suggest that he has perished by the way on a railway journey between here and Prague—” she laughed scornfully. “Really, my dear Blaise, you’re too good for this world. If you caught a man with his hand in your waistcoat pocket, and he told you he only wanted to see the time by your watch, you’d believe him! Haven’t I been through this before? All this elaborate preparation for missions abroad which never came off? Didn’t he leave you here to go off to Helsingfors, and John o’ Groats was the nearest to it he got?”
“Then where do you think he is now?”
“Anywhere, except in Poland. It was the last place he had any intention of going to.”
“He might have written you a false account of his movements,” Olifant argued, “but why should he have deceived this good Polish gentleman?”
“It’s his way,” she replied wearily. “Oh, don’t you see? He’s always acting to himself. He can’t help leading a fictitious life. I can guess the whole thing. He goes to this Mr. Boronowski—one of his stray Russo-Polish acquaintances—with the idea in his head of putting me off his scent. Poland still is romantic and a terribly long way off. He can’t do a thing simply. He must do it fantastically. It’s not enough that I should think he was going to Poland. Mr. Boronowski must think so, too. He throws his arms about, persuading himself and everybody else that he is a Paladin going to fight for the sacred cause of an oppressed nationality. When the thing’s done, and the letter to me written, the curtain comes down on the comedy, and Alexis takes off his war paint and starts off for Pernambuco—or Haverstock Hill.”
“I think you’re unjust, Olivia,” said Olifant.
“And I think you’re too good to be true,” she retorted angrily, and she left him and went down the garden path into the house.
In her room, her mother’s room, with the old rose curtains and Chippendale and water colours, she rang the bell. Myra appeared.
“You know so much already, Myra,” she said in her defiant way, “that I think you ought to know everything. I’ve just heard that Mr. Triona never went to Poland.”
“Indeed?” said Myra impassively. “Do you know where he is?”
“No. And I don’t want to.”
“I can’t quite understand,” said Myra.
“I wish you would take some interest in the matter.”
“My interest is your interest. If you never want to see him again, what does it matter where he is? Perhaps you’re afraid he’ll come back to you?”
At the elder woman’s suggestion, the fear gripped her with dreadful suddenness. There had not yet been time for thought of such a possibility. If he had lied about fighting for Polish freedom, what truth was there in his perfervid declaration of the severance of his life from hers? She had been right in her analysis of his character. The curtain down on whatever comedy he might be now enacting, he would present himself unexpectedly before her with specious explanations of the past, and another glittering scenario of illusion. And with his reappearance would come exposure. She had pledged her word to Rowington.
She seized Myra by the wrist. “Do you think he will?”
“You are afraid,” said Myra.
“Yes. Dreadfully afraid.”
“I don’t think you need be,” said Myra.
Olivia flung away. “You take his part, just like Major Olifant. Neither of you seem to understand.” She turned. “Don’t you see the horror of it?”
“I’ve seen lots of horrors in my time,” replied Myra placidly. “But I shan’t see this one. He’s gone for good, dearie. You may be sure of that.”
“I wish I could think so,” said Olivia.
It was nearly lunch time. Myra went out and returned with a can of hot water.
“You’ll not see him so long as I’m about to look after you,” she remarked.
And Olivia laughed at the dragon of her childhood.
Some mornings afterwards, Myra came to her mistress.
“If it’s convenient to you, I should like a few days’ leave. I’ve had a letter.”
“Nothing serious, I hope?” asked Olivia, whose thoughts flew to the madman in the County Asylum.
“I don’t know,” said Myra. “Can I go?”
“Of course,” said Olivia.
So Myra packed her worn valise and left Medlow by the first available train. But the Asylum was not her destination. The next day saw her seeking admittance to University College Hospital, London.
WHENTriona after many dim day-dreams and relapses into nothingness, at last recovered consciousness, he found himself in a narrow sort of cubicle, staring upwards at a mile away ceiling. He was tightly bound, body and legs. He had a vague memory of a super-juggernaut of a thing killing him; therefore he sagely concluded that he was dead and this was the next world. It occurred to him that the next world had been singularly over-rated, being devoid of any interest for an intelligent being. Later, when the familiar figure of a nurse popped round the screen, he recognized, with some relief, the old universe. He was alive; but where he was, he had no notion.
Only gradually did he learn what had befallen him; that he had laid for weeks unconscious; that he had a broken thigh and crushed ribs; that most of the time he had hovered between life and death; that even now he was a very sick man who must lie quiet and do exactly what nurses and doctors told him. This sufficed for a time, while his brain still worked dully. But soon there came a morning when all the memories surged back. He questioned the nurse:
“When do you think I can start for Poland?”
“Perhaps in six months,” she replied soothingly.
He groaned. “I want to go there now.”
“What for?”
“To join the Polish Army.”
She had nursed through the war, and knew that men in his plight were of no further use in armies. Gently she told him so. He stared uncomprehensively on an empty world.
“What can I do when I leave here?”
“You must have a long, long rest, and do nothing at all and think of nothing at all.”
He tried to smile at the nurse’s pleasant face. “You’ve done me a bad turn in bringing me back to life,” said he.
When they thought him capable of grappling with his personal affairs, they brought him his bulging pocket-book, and bade him count his money. He laughed. It was quite safe. He handed back the roll of notes into the nurse’s keeping. But the other contents of the case he looked at dismally: the passport, with the foreign visas; the railway tickets; the letters to Prague and Warsaw. What were the good of them now? He would never go to Poland. When he got strong, all the fighting would be over. And when he did get strong, in a few months or a year, he would probably be lame, with odds and ends of organs gone wrong inside him. He tried to read the letters; but they were written in Polish—unintelligible now in spite of his strenuous short study of the language. They bore a signature which he could not decipher. But it was certainly not Boronowski. His mind soon tired of the puzzle. What was the good of keeping the letters? Drearily he tore them in pieces and gave them to the nurse to dispose of, when she brought him a meal.
Tired with the effort he slept. He awoke to a sense of something final done, or something important left undone. As his brain cleared, he realized that subconsciously he had been thinking of his duty to Boronowski. Of course, he must be informed at once of the reason for his defection.
And then dismay overwhelmed him. He had no address to Boronowski. The only channels of communication with him, the Prague and Warsaw letters, he had destroyed. A happy idea struck him. He toyed with it for what seemed interminable hours until the nurse came to his bedside. He called for writing materials, which were smilingly denied him. He was too weak. But the nurse would write a short letter from dictation. He dictated two identical letters, one to the Polish Legation, one to the Polish Consulate, asking for the address of Mr. Paul Boronowski, late of 21 Hillditch Street, St. Pancras. By return of post came polite replies from Legation and Consulate. Both disclaimed any knowledge of the identity of Mr. Paul Boronowski. Legation and Consulate were blandly ignorant of the existence of their confidential agents. Then he remembered the baffling signature to the two letters. He laughed somewhat bitterly. His life seemed to be involved in a tangle of false names.
After all, what did it matter? But it did matter, vitally. If ever he had set his soul on a true thing, he had set it on keeping faith with Boronowski. And Boronowski like the rest of the world would set him down as an impostor. In his desperate physical weakness the tears rolled down his cheeks; and so the nurse found him, with one of the letters clutched in his thin hand.
“My only friend in the world,” said he.
“Dead?” asked the nurse.
“No. Lost.”
He gave her the letter.
“Surely you have at least one more,” she said. “In fact I have written to her to tell her of your recovery.”
“Her?” He looked at the nurse out of ghastly eyes.
“Miss Myra Stebbings.”
“Oh, my God!” said he, and fainted.
Whereat the nurse, anxious to bring him comforting tidings was exceedingly troubled. The shock put him back for two or three days. He grew light-headed, and raved about a woman called Olivia, and about all sorts of strange and incomprehensible things. When he regained his senses it was an awakening to a life of even more terrifying consternation than before. Myra, he learned, had called daily at the hospital—to be denied access to him till he should be in a fit state to receive her. The nurse told him of her first visit the morning after the accident and of the newspaper paragraph which she had chanced to read. But if Myra knew, surely Olivia knew. And Olivia, knowing him to have been for weeks at death’s door, had treated him, as though he had already passed through that door to the other side. Horror gripped him. He questioned the nurse. This Miss Stebbings, had she left no message? No, she was a woman of few words. She had said, in an unemotional way: “I’ll come in again to-morrow.”
“For God’s sake don’t let her see me,” he cried.
But after a while he countermanded the request. He would learn the worst, and meet steadily the supreme punishment, the tale of Olivia’s implacable hatred. There were degrees in a woman’s scorn. Much he knew he had justly incurred; but his sick frame shuddered at this maximum of contempt and loathing. Ill-conditioned dog he avowed himself; yet to let him die, for aught she knew, like a dog, without sign or word of interest . . . it transcended thought.
“Are you sure there has been no other lady? Not a letter of enquiry? Nothing?”
“You’ll make yourself bad again, if you worry like that,” said the nurse.
“I wish to God I could,” said he; “and that would be the end of it all.”
In a large ward of a London hospital, nurses have not much time to devote to the sick fancies of patients. More than enough for them were their physical needs. The crumb of kindly commonplace was all that the nurse could give to the man’s hungering soul. He passed the day, staring up at the mile-high ceiling, incurious as to what vista of misery lay beyond the still remaining American-cloth covered screen.
From the shaft of fierce sunshine on the wall to his right, he gathered that spring had passed into early summer. The outside world was a-riot in the new life of wild flowers and trees and birds and human hopes and loves. Outside that prison of his—a whitewashed wall, a screen, a window behind his head reaching sky-high—spread this world with whose pulsations his heart had ever throbbed in unison. God! How he had loved it! Every leaf, every crested wave, every patch of sand, every stretch of heat, every rusty horse grazing on a common, every child before a cottage door, every vibrating sound or sight of great cities, every waste in regions of grand desolation, every man with sinews or with purpose in his eyes, every woman parading the mystery of her sex, from the tow-haired, dirt-encrusted goose-girl of a Russian village to the wonder of ever inscrutable wonders that was Olivia.
In all his dreams he inevitably came back to Olivia. Indeed she was the centripetal force of his longings. All that earth held of the rustle of leaves and the murmur of waters, the magic of dawn and the roar of town multitudes and the laughter of green forests and the silence of frozen steppes, were incorporated in the woman of his adoration. Through her spoke the voices of the infinite universe. And all that was visible of it, the patch of sunlight on the whitewashed wall, said:
“She lives and I, a reflected glory of her, live too; but even if you go hence I shall only appear mockingly before you, on prison walls, until you are dead. And you will never find me on the blue seas or the joyous roads or the stone-bounded, clattering haunts of mankind, other than a meaningless mirage, because the inspired meaning of it all which is Olivia, has passed from you for evermore.”
“Damn you,” said he, and turned away his head, for he could not turn his plaster of Paris encased body, and shut out the white line from his burning eyes.
The next morning Myra came. He had been prepared for her visit. She sat on the cane-bottomed chair by his bedside. As soon as the nurse left them together:
“I’m glad you are better, Sir,” she said.
“Have you brought me any message from Mrs. Triona?” he asked.
She looked at him steadily. “You don’t suppose Mrs. Triona knows you are here?”
It was some time before he could appreciate the meaning of her words.
“She thinks I’m in Poland?”
“She doesn’t know you are here,” said Myra truthfully. “She doesn’t know where you are.”
“Or care?”
“Or care,” said Myra, and her tone was flat like that of a Fate.
For a while he was silent, accepting the finality of Myra’s words.
“You’ve left her in ignorance of my accident?”
“Yes,” said Myra. “Haven’t you done the same since you’ve recovered your wits?”
Her dry logic was unanswerable. Yet a man does not expect logic from an elderly waiting-woman. He passed a hand over his eyes and held it there for a long time, while Myra sat patient and unemotional. He understood nothing of her motives. For the moment he did not seek to understand them. One fact alone mattered. Olivia did not know. She had not, with horrible contempt, left him to die like a dog. By the thought of such a possibility he had wronged her. She might, with every reason, desire never to set eyes on him again—but of active cruelty he should have known her incapable.
Presently he withdrew his hand and turned to Myra. “My head’s not altogether right yet,” he said half-apologetically.
“I can quite believe it,” said Myra.
“Why you should bother with me, I don’t understand,” he said.
“Neither do I,” she replied in her disconcerting way. “If you had died I shouldn’t have been sorry. For her sake. Now you’re not going to die, I’m glad. For yours.”
“Thank you,” said he with a note of irony. And then after a pause:
“How is your mistress?”
“She is quite well, sir.”
“And happy?”
“Begging your pardon, sir,” said Myra stiffly, “but I’ve not come here to be asked questions. I’ve no intention of your using me as a go-between.”
“It never entered my head,” he declared.
“It might,” said Myra. “So I give you warning. Whatever go-between-ing I do will be to keep you apart from Mrs. Triona.”
“Then why are you worrying about me?” he asked.
“Because I’ve found you in affliction and I’m a Christian woman.”
Neither of them understood the other. He said suddenly with a flash of the old fire:
“Will you swear you’ll never tell your mistress where I am?”
A faint light flickered in her pale eyes. “I’ll swear if you like. But haven’t you taken in what I’ve been telling you all the time?”
“So long as we can trust each other—that is all that matters.”
“You can trust me all right,” said Myra.
They talked the ground over again for a while longer. Then he grew tired with the strain, and the nurse put an end to the interview. But Myra came the next day and the day after that, and Triona grew to long for her visit. He became aware of a crabbed kindness in her attitude towards him side by side with her jealous love for Olivia. She was anxious for his welfare within grimly prescribed limitations. His immediate future concerned her. What did he purpose to do with his invalid-dom after his discharge from the hospital? He himself, at this stage, had no notion. He confided to her the despair of his active life. The motor-lorry had wrecked his hopes of salvation. He told her the whole Boronowski story. Myra nodded; but faithful to the part she had chosen, she said nothing of Boronowski’s letter to Major Olifant. Only by keeping the lives of the ill-fated pair in tightly sealed and non-communicable compartments, could she be true to an ethical code formulated by many definite sorrows and many vague, but none the less poignant, spiritual conflicts.
“It’s funny,” said he, “that you’re the only human being I should know in the world.”
Her intuition skipped the gap of demonstration of so extraordinary a pronouncement, and followed his flight into the Unknown.
“It might be luck for you,” she said.
He smiled wistfully on her.
“Why?”
He hung on her answer which she took some time to give. In the lines on the pallid face, in the dull blue eyes of this sphinx-like woman so correct in her negative attire of black coat and skirt and black hat with just a redeeming touch of white, and on the thin, compressed lips, his sick man’s brain seemed to read his destiny. She hovered over him, impressive, baffling, ever about-to-be oracular. Combined with her mystery existed the strange fact that she was his sole link with the world, not only the great humming universe of thought and action, but the inner spiritual world in which Olivia reigned. He regarded her with superstitious dread and reverence; conscious all the time of the comedy of so regarding the woman whose duty had been to fold up his trousers and set out his underclothes on the hot rail of the bathroom.
“What are you going to do when you leave?” she asked, and he guessed a purpose behind her question.
“I must hide until I am strong enough to take up active life again.”
“Where will you hide?”
He didn’t know. He had not thought—so remote did the date of his discharge appear. It must be some secluded, man-forgotten spot.
“If the worst comes to the worst and you need a place where you’ll be looked after, I’ll give you an address of friends of mine,” said Myra. “You’ll, maybe, spend the rest of your life on crutches, and have all sorts of things wrong inside you. I shouldn’t like you to feel I was abandoning you. If you were broken down and needed help, I suppose you wouldn’t write to me, would you?”
“I most certainly shouldn’t,” said Triona.
“I thought so,” said Myra. “In that case I’d better give you the address.” She scribbled it on the writing pad by his bedside. “There. Take it or leave it. It’s the best I can do.”
She left him with an abrupt “Good day, sir,” and took the next train back to Medlow.
“You haven’t had a long holiday, Myra,” Olivia remarked when she arrived.
“I didn’t say I was going on a holiday.”
“I hope things were all right.”
“As right as they ever can be,” replied Myra.
The weary weeks of convalescence dragged themselves out. Myra did not come again; and of course he had no other visitor. He made casual acquaintances in the ward; here and there an ex-soldier with whom he could exchange reminiscences of warfare.
Once a discharged sailor in the next bed—the screen had long since been removed—recovering from an operation, spoke to him of mine-sweeping days, and perils of storm and submarine and he grew to regard him as a brother. Both regretted the deluging waters of the North Sea. The sailor in these times of peace drove a dust cart for the St. Pancras Borough Council. The wages were good—but what a life for a sea-faring man! He would have stuck to his old job were it not that a wave had washed him down on the slithery deck and had brought his knee-cap up against a stanchion and had stiffened it out so that his career on board-ship was over. But those were good times, weren’t they? Oh yes. Of course they groused. But they only groused when they had time. Mostly they hadn’t. Dust-collecting was an open-air life, true enough; but there was a difference between the smell of brine and the stench of house refuse. It was in summer that it made him sick. The odours of the fo’c’sle were not those of a hairdresser’s shop—nothing smelt so fine, he declared, as a hairdresser’s shop—they were a bit thick, but a man could go on deck and fill his lungs with good salt air. And the grub! What an appetite! He conjured up gargantuan meals in perilous tempests. Nothing of the sort now. Everything he ate tasted of sour potato peelings.
“That’s the taste of everything in these post-war days,” said Triona, “everything in life—sour potato peelings.”
The dustman reckoned he was right. In those old days of mine-sweeping, a man had no anxieties. He had no responsibilities. He was happy as the day was long. Now he was married and already had a couple of kids. Life was just one wearisome worry, a continuous accumulation on the debit side of the slate, with few advantages on the credit side to balance. If it wasn’t the wife it was the boy; if it wasn’t the boy, it was the baby; and if it wasn’t them, it was his appendix which had just been removed. Whoever heard of a sailor-man aboard ship getting appendicitis? No, all them things, said he, were blessings of peace. Besides, how was he going to feed his family when they grew older? And clothes, boots, schooling? And he himself—limited to beer—and such beer! He hadn’t tasted a drop of rum——. Was there anything like it? Sometimes he saw it and smelt it in his dreams, but he always woke up before he could put his lips to the pannikin. If only one could get something to hold on to in dreams. He never had need to dream of rum in the navy. So much for peace. Give him the good old war again.
And when his wife, a thin lipped, scraggy blonde, with a moth-eaten fur stole round her neck (although it was sweltering summer), and a pallid baby in her arms came to visit him, and spoke querulously of domestic affairs, Triona gave him his unreserved sympathy.
“And it ain’t,” said the ex-mariner, “as if I couldn’t carry on straight and proper in civil life. I wonder how many of my mates are getting what I’m getting. She ought to be proud of me, she ought. Instead of that—you heard what she said?”
Triona had heard. She had upbraided him for his ungenteel occupation, considering herself, the daughter (so Triona learned) of a small sweet-stuff monger in Dover, where they had met during his sea-going days, socially degraded by her marriage with a municipal collector of dust. She had married him, by the by, before his present appointment, while he was drawing out-of-work pay. Apparently he was possessed of some low-comedy histrionic talent, and she was convinced that he could make his fortune as a cinema star.
“You married?” he asked.
“Not now,” said Triona.
“You’ve been through it,” said the misogynist. “Women! There never was a woman who knew when she was well off! Oh, Gawd! Give me the old days on theBarracouta, where there wasn’t any thought of women. That was my last ship. I had nine months in her. There wasBarracouta,Annie Sandys,Seahorse. . . .”
He ran through the names of his squadron, forgetful, in the sudden flush of reminiscence, of domestic cares.
“And what did you say you were in?”
“Vestris.”
“Of course. I remember. Torpedoed. But even that was better than this?”
Triona agreed, and the eternal talk of the sea went on, until the nostalgia for the wide, free spaces of the world gripped his vitals with the pains of hunger.
“What are you going to do when you come out?” asked the dustman.
“About the same as you,” replied Triona. “What’s the good of a man with a game leg?”
The dustman sighed. “You’ve got education,” said he.
At first, aware of accent and manner of expression, the dustman had taken him for an ex-officer. Only the discharge-papers of John Briggs, able-seaman, convinced him of John Briggs lowly estate. Still, in theBarracoutathey had an elderly stoker who had been at Cambridge College. Such a man might be his neighbour.
“I ran away to sea when I was a boy,” said Triona.
So had the dustman. He waxed more confidential. His name was Josh Bunnings, and he had sailed in every conceivable kind of craft from Alaska to Singapore. But he had found no time for education. How did his neighbour acquire it? Books? He shook his head. He had been cured of books on his first voyage, when the second mate catching him reading a tattered manual on gardening, when he ought to have been washing up in the galley, had kicked and cuffed him round the deck. Triona’s mind went back to his boyhood—to an almost identical incident. There was much in common between himself and Josh Bunnings. They had started on even terms. They had met on even terms in the foul fo’c’sles on the North Sea. They were on even terms, now, lying side by side, lamed, their life of free adventure a thing of the past. Each dreaded the future; Josh Bunnings condemned to cart refuse beneath the affected nose of a shrew of a wife for the remainder of his days; he, Triona, to deal with such refuse as the world would leave him, but away from the wife who abhorred him and all his works. On the other hand, between him and Josh Bunnings lay a great gulf. He had made himself a man of wide culture. Josh Bunnings had remained abysmally ignorant. But Josh Bunnings had lived his life an honourable man. If he told his story to Josh Bunnings he would be condemned by him, even as he had been condemned by his sister on the morning of his mother’s funeral. So, when the dustman, with another sigh, harked back to his former idea and said:
“If only I had education.”
“You’re a damned sight better man than I am, without it,” Triona replied bitterly.
When the three weeks’ comradeship came to an end, on the discharge of Josh Bunnings, he found himself lost again in a friendless world. The neighbouring familiar bed was occupied by an ancient man in the throes of some ghastly malady, and around him was stretched the horrible, death-suggesting screen. And behind the screen, a week later, the old man died. It was to relieve the nervous tension of this week that he began a correspondence with Josh Bunnings. The writing man’s instinct awoke—the mania of self-expression. His letters to the dustman, full of the atmosphere of the ward, vivid with lightning sketches of house-surgeons, sisters, nurses and patients, with here and there excursions into contrasting tempests, storms of battle, and everywhere touched with the magic of his queer genius, would, if sent to his literary agents, have gained him a year’s subsistence.
Josh Bunnings visited him occasionally, when freed from municipal, and escaped from domestic, obligations. The visits, he explained, were in return for the letters; for being no scholar, he could not reply. Then one day he appeared and sat on the chair by Triona’s bed, with the air of a man about to bring glad tidings. He was rather a heavy, pallid, clean-shaven man, with a curl of black hair sweeping down to his eyebrows. His small dark eyes gleamed. At once he disemburdened his honest soul. He was a Church of England man; always held with church-going—so did his wife; it was the great bond of union between them. So he was on friendly terms with the curate of St. Simon’s. And being on friendly terms with the curate, he had shewn him the letters.
“And, would you believe it, mate?” said he. “Would you believe it? He wants to put them in print in the Parish Magazine. In print! Fancy!”
He slapped his thigh. Triona stared at him for a moment and then laughed out loud for the first time for many weeks.
“What are you laughing at?” asked the astonished Bunnings.
“It seems so funny,” said Triona.
“That’s what I thought.”
“And a great honour,” said Triona recovering.
“Of course. Only he said he couldn’t print ’em without your permission.”
Triona gave permission, stipulating, however, that his name should not be used. His modesty forbade it he explained. Josh Bunnings went away delighted. In the course of a few posts came a grateful letter from the curate. In Mr. Briggs’s writing he saw signs of considerable literary talent which he hoped Mr. Briggs would cultivate. If he could be of help in this way, he put his services at Mr. Briggs’s disposal. Triona again laughed, with grim amusement, at a funny, ironical world.
Then, suddenly, the underlying tragedy of this comic interlude smote him breathless. Alexis Triona was dead and so were his writings, for evermore. But the impulse to write stirred within him so vehemently that even in these idle letters to Josh Bunnings he had put all his vividness of literary expression. The curate’s dim recognition of the unusual was a sign and a token. Whatever he wrote would be stamped with his individuality and if published, even anonymously, would lead to his identification. The arresting quality of his style had been a main factor in his success. This flashing pictorial way of his he could not change. If he strove self-consciously to write sober prose, he would produce dull, uninspired stuff that no man could read; if he lost self-consciousness, automatically he would betray himself. He would re-appear in the Olivia-dominated world. Every book or article would dance before her eyes like anignis fatuus, reminding her maddeningly of his existence in her propinquity.
Anignis fatuus. At this point of his reflection he remembered his first talk with her, wherein he had counselled her never to lose faith in her Will-o’-the-Wisp, but to compel it to be her guiding star. More ironical laughter from the high gods! And yet, why not? He wrestled with the temptation. As he lay, convalescent on his back, his brain clear, the sap of youth working in his veins, the uncontrolled fancies of the imaginative writer wove themselves into shreds of fine romance and tapestries of exquisite scenes. Just a little concentration, impossible in the open hospital ward, and all these would blend together into a thing of immortal beauty. He would find a publisher. Nothing easier. No name would appear. Or else, perhaps, as a handle for convenience sake, he would sign the book “Incognito.” It would stir the hearts of men, and they would say: “There is but one man living who could do this and that is Alexis Triona.” And Olivia, reading it, and beholding him in it, would find her heart stirred with the rest, yet far far more deeply than the rest, and would seek him out, obeying his far-off counsel, and believe that, in his essential self and in his infinite love, he was verily her guiding-star.
But when the hour of exaltation had passed and given way to the dreary commonplace, when the nurse came to wash him like a child, or to chatter pleasantly of the outside world, the revue which she had seen on her free afternoon, or the sentimental novel which had beguiled her scanty leisure, he knew that he had been living in a land of dreams. His real achievement Olivia knew, and by it she was unmoved. Myra had held out to him no chance of hope; only certainty of despair. By no further achievement could Olivia be persuaded. She realized her Will-o’-the-Wisp as what it really was, a miasmatic gas leading her into quagmires. She would bitterly resent his reappearance. It would be another trick, another way of flaunting before her under false pretences. As well write to her now that he was a mangled wreck in University College Hospital.
In the course of time he was able to leave his bed and be wheeled about the ward and afterwards to hobble about on a crutch. But the injured leg was just a bit shorter than the other, so that he was condemned to a perpetual limp; and though the ribs were mended, yet their breakage had occasioned internal lesions which would have to be watched for the rest of his life. No more adventures in wide spaces. No more tramps to John o’ Groats.
“But I’m a born wanderer,” he cried to the surgeon who made the final pronouncement. “What shall I do when the wander fever is on me?”
“Fill yourself up with bromide and stick leeches on your head.”
He laughed into the smiling kindly face, and was silent for a moment.
“I can drive a car, I suppose?” he said after a while.
“Safer to drive a horse. You haven’t to crank it up.”
“So I’m going out, a hopeless crock.”
“Oh no. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t live, with reasonable care, to ninety. You’re fit for light work. Why not office work? An educated chap like you——By the way, you were off to Poland, if I remember rightly, when you met with your accident. What’s your trade or profession?”
“Before the war, I was a cosmopolitan chauffeur,” said Triona.
“And since?”
“The damnedest fool God ever made.”
The surgeon asked him no more questions.
FANSTEADis a little country town built on the plan of a sparsely equipped herring bone. There is the central High Street, a jumble of old half-timbered houses and staring modern red-brick buildings, and sprouted from it a series of lateral roads, lanes and alleys, dwindling in importance to the High Street tip, and each petering out into the sweet country vagueness of hedges and fields. All save two. One of these ends abruptly at an inconveniently distant railway station. The other, villa bordered, meanders pleasantly for a mile or so to the tiny village of Pendish where it meets at right angles the great high road, and stops modestly, confronted all of a sudden with rolling open country, swelling downs patched with meadow and corn-field and crowned with great clumps of woodland.
Pendish was too small even to have a church. There was a tiny chapel for the convenience of Baptists. But Anglicans tramped into Fanstead or to the larger village of Banton-on-the-Hill, another mile along the great high road. It had a tumbled-down inn, the “Whip and Collar,” and a straggling row of thatched cottages, and a tiny red-brick villa labelled as the home of the County Police. But it also had a post-office, which was also a shop; and this was a small, square two-storied Georgian house imposing among its thatched neighbours and maintaining itself with a curious air of dignity, in spite of the front door open to the public during business hours, and the miscellaneous assortment of sweets, tobacco, tapes and picture postcards exposed in what was once the dining-room window.
It was the freehold of Mrs. Pettiland, a widow of fifty; she had inherited it from her father, a Norfolk thatcher who had brought his mystery to the west and practising it with skill and saving a little fortune brought to him by his wife, had amassed enough to buy the square stone house where he had ended his days. They said in the village that he had never recovered from the shock occasioned by the fate of his son, his apprentice and later his partner, who had gone raving mad a week or two after his marriage and had to be confined in the County Asylum.
Well, the old man had slept with his fathers for many years; his wife had joined him; the son still lingered on in the madhouse; and Mrs. Pettiland, very much alone in the world, save for her husband’s relatives in Fanstead, sold stamps and sweets to the village, and as a very great favour let the best bedroom to an occasional painter with unimpeachable introductions.
She was dark-haired, fresh-coloured, and buxom; she dressed with neatness, wearing old-fashioned stays that gave her a waist and a high bust; and she was the most considerable personage in Pendish.
When she had received a letter from her sister-in-law, Myra Stebbings, asking her as a favour to put up a foolish young man named Briggs who had got himself run over by a motor-lorry, if ever he should act on her suggestion and come to Pendish, she considered it less as an introduction than as a command. Whether she loved Myra or not, she did not know. But she had an immense respect for the dry, grey-faced woman who had come every year to stay with her, so that she could visit the brother whom she had loved, in the house of awfulness, five or six miles away. She stood somewhat in awe of Myra. Her own good man had died comfortably in his bed and had gone for ever, after a couple of years of placid content. It was sad; but it was the common lot. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. But at the idea of a woman’s husband being shut off from the world in the living tomb of the County Asylum, she shuddered. Myra always conveyed to her the vague impression, so impossible to be formulated by an uneducated woman ignorant of traditional reference, of a human soul defying the tragedy of existence.
So when this Mr. Briggs wrote from the hospital in London, she sent him a cordial answer. Any friend of Myra Stebbings was more than welcome. She would not charge him more than out-of-pocket expenses. For she did not know who this foolish young man might be. Myra sphinx-like, as usual, had given no clue. But for Myra to ask a favour was an unprecedented occurrence. She must have far more than ordinary interest in the welfare of the young fellow. Mrs. Pettiland’s curiosity was aroused and she awaited the arrival of her new lodger with impatience.
The station car from the Fanstead garage brought him, on a late summer afternoon, with his brown canvas kit-bag and suit-case and khaki overcoat. She stood in the pedimented doorway, over which was fixed the wooden post-office board, and watched him descend. He faced her for a moment, and raised his hat.
“Mrs. Pettiland?”
She looked at his clear cut face, so boyish in spite of whiteness and haggardness, at his careless brown hair sweeping over his temples, at the lips parted in a smile, at the lithe young figure. She caught the significance of his uplifted hat and the pleasant tone of his voice. In her limited category of values he would be only one thing—a gentleman. The manners of an instant charmed her.
“Mr. Briggs?”
“I hope I shan’t be a dreadful nuisance to you, but I need rest and quiet and Miss Stebbings told me to come. And,” he smiled, “What she says generally goes.”
“I see that you know her, sir,” said Mrs. Pettiland pleasantly.
The luggage taken in, the cab dismissed she led him up to his room—a large bed-sitting room, looking over a wild garden and a wide expanse of rolling downs, with the faint white ribbon of high road circling in and out and round about them. His meals, she informed him, he could take in the parlour downstairs, without extra charge.
“But I insist on paying my way,” he said. “Unless my staying here is profitable to you, I can’t remain. For the present at least, I can well afford it.”
So a modest arrangement was made and Triona settled down in his new home.
For some days he enjoyed the peace of Pendish. He had brought with him books, ordered from the hospital; books which would take him long to read; some of the interminable modern French novels; a complete Fielding and Smollett;Paradise LostandThe Faerie Queene, neither of which he had as yet had time to go through. He spent hours in the sunny garden riotous with ingenous roses and delphinium and Canterbury bells and burning red-hot pokers as they call them in the West. Often he limped along the green lanes that wound between the fields up and down the downs. Becoming aware that he knew nothing of bird-life, he procured through the Fanstead bookshop popular works on British Birds, and sitting under a tree in a corner of a meadow would strive to identify them by their song and plumage and queer individual habits. He talked to the villagers. He talked to Mrs. Pettiland, who told him the tragic story of Myra and the man in the County Asylum. Of Myra’s doings all the year round, he found she knew little. She was with her lady whom she had served most of her life and had gone back with her to Medlow. Of the lady herself Myra never spoke. Mrs. Pettiland did not know whether the lady was married or not. That was Myra Stebbings’s way. She gave no information and no one dared ask her questions.
“She never even told me, in her letter, who you were, sir,” she added.
“I am just under her protection,” he smiled. “She took me up when I had no one to defend me.”
“She’s a curious woman,” sighed Mrs. Pettiland.
“With strange tastes in protégés.” He laughed. “To tell you the truth, Mrs. Pettiland, I don’t quite know myself what I am. But doubtless sooner or later I’ll do something to astonish you.”
The yearning to do this fretted his secret heart. To move about the summer fields when the weather was fine, to lounge in an easy-chair over books in seasons of rain, was all very well for the period of convalescence after the confinement in the hospital ward. But after a while, when his muscles regained strength and the new blood coursing through his veins brought colour to his cheeks, he began to feel the old imperious need of movement and of action. Sometimes he went back, as in his talks with the dustman, to the idyllic tempests in the North Sea; sometimes to the fierce freedom of the speed across the illimitable steppes of Russia; sometimes to his perilous escape to Petrograd; sometimes to his tramps along the safe roads of England; to his wanderings through the dangerous by-ways of the East End. Bitterly he cursed the motor-lorry that had knocked him out of his Polish adventure. Except on Olivia he had never so set his heart on a thing before. Well, he shrugged angry shoulders. It was no use thinking of that. Poland had gone, like Olivia, out of his life. And when he came to think of it, so had everything that had made up all that he had known or conceived of life.
He closedTom Jones, and stared out of the window on the rain-drenched hills; Tom Jones, with his physical lustiness, his strong animal bravura, was more than he could bear. Tom Jones, no matter in what circumstance he was placed, had all the world before him. His gay confidence offended the lost man. For he was lost. Not a lost soul, he told himself; that was taking an absurd Byronical view of the matter. To pose as a modern Manfred would be contemptible. He went down to bed-rock of commonplace. He was a lost man—a fact which was quite serious enough for any human being to contemplate with dismay. Lost, tied by a lame leg in a deadly little backwater of the world, where he must remain till he died. He could write, pour out all the fever of his soul into words. But what was the good, if no word of his could be transmitted from this backwater into the haunts of men? Work without hope—a verse of Coleridge came vaguely to him—was like draining nectar through a sieve. It could only end in heart-break. He stared through the dripping window-pane at the free hills, dim and hopeless in the mist of deluge. Nothingness confronted him.
He wondered whether Myra, with diabolical insight and deliberate malice, had not lured him hither, so that she could hold him in relentless grip. At any rate she had cast him into this prison.
He lay awake all that night. The next morning the sky had cleared and the sun shone down on the gratefully steaming land of green. He breakfasted in the tiny parlour opposite the shop-post-office on the ground floor. The ornaments in it were those of long ago. Prints of the landing of the Guards after the Crimea, of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort. Curiously carved and polished coconut shells, and a great egg on which a staring mermaid was nudely painted stood on the mantelpiece. On the chiffonier were calabashes, with gaudy figures of indigenous Indians, such as came from the West Indies seventy years ago, and a model of a full-rigged ship under a glass case, and a moulting stuffed toucan, with its great beak and yellow and red plumage. The late Mr. Pettiland’s father, he had learned, had followed the sea. So, beside the objects on the crowded mantelpiece and in front of palm-leaf fans were sprigs of white coral and strings of strange beads, and a dumpy, shapeless, wooden Polynesian god. And at the end lay a great conch shell with its wide, pink, curving lips, mysterious and alluring.
He could scarcely eat. The night had shaken him. He gulped down some food and coffee, lit a pipe and wandered restlessly about the room, looking at these tokens of the lands far away which he had never seen. The coral fascinated him. In the hospital he had readTypeeandOomooof Herman Melville in Dent’s cheap collection of classics. The sight of the coral quickened dormant longings. He took the great conch-shell in his hand wondering at its beauty of curve and colour. And as he did so his mind went back to early childhood—to an old aunt whom he occasionally was taken to visit in torturing Sunday clothes sacrosanct from the defilement of jam under dreadful penalties, and who possessed such a shell. He remembered that the shell was the glory that compensated the frigid horror of that house. He would hold it to his ear and listen to the boom of far-off surfs and then go home and mingle the message with the pointing finger of Salvation Yeo. And now, grown man, inured to adventure, he put the shell to his ear, and the message was the same, vibrating the call of oceans thundering on distant beaches through the fibres of his being.
He went out into the garden and stood in the sun and looked almost unseeingly at the rolling downs. Suddenly he became aware of the ribbon of road that lost itself not far away, behind a bluff. It was the Great High Road that led eventually to a great western port, where great ships sailed to the South Seas. The Power seemed to impel him, as it had impelled him as a boy to run away from home. By following that road, he would reach the port. At the port he could ship before the mast. On board his limp would not matter. For the rest, he was strong, as strong as a lion, in spite of all pronouncements by the doctors. It was the one adventure life left open to him. Nay more, the one chance of maintaining his reason. He stood with hands clenched staring at the road, the sweat beading on his forehead.
To pack up belongings and arrive with genteel suit-case and kit-bag at the dock-side and expect to be taken on as an ordinary hand would be the act of an embecile. He passed his hand mildly through his hair in his instinctive gesture. Why not go as he was, a cap on his head, and his money, all he had in the world, in a belt (bought for Poland) round his waist? It was escape from prison. Escape from Myra. The final disappearance from the orbit of Olivia.
Perhaps it was the maddest thing he had done in his life. But what did it matter? If he crocked up, he crocked up. At least he could try. He went indoors and in the parlour found an old railway timetable. There were only two trains a day from Fanstead to the main-line junction, and the morning train had already gone. Why should he not tramp to the Junction, as in the old days, getting a lift here and there on a cart, and know again the freedom of the vagabond road?
He went up to his room, put on his belt of money and good thick boots, and made up a bundle of necessaries. On his dressing-table he left a letter addressed to Mrs. Pettiland, enclosing a month’s rent. He looked round the room for the last time, as he had looked round so many in his life, and laughed. No books on this journey. As he had not left the Tyneside with books years ago, so would he start now afresh, with the same equipment. He went downstairs with a light heart, and called out to Mrs. Pettiland busy in her post-office.
“I’m going off on a jaunt—so don’t expect me till you see me.”
And the answer came: “Don’t overdo yourself with your lame leg.”
He laughed at the idea. His leg could bear his whole weight to-day without a twinge. Retracing his steps down the passage, he entered the garden and left the place by the wicket-gate and struck up the winding lanes and across fields to the high road, his stick and bundle over his shoulder. By doing so, instead of taking the road at the end of the village, he could cut off a mile. It was a morning of freshness and inspiration. A cool breeze sent the clouds scurrying across the sky and rustled the leaves of the elms and rippled the surface of the half-grown corn. His spirits rose as he walked, somewhat of a jog-trot walk, it is true, but that would last for the rest of his life; so long as the pain had gone for ever, all was well. He reached the high road and settled down to his tramp, gladdened by the sight of cart and car and cottage gardens flaming with roses and hollyhocks or restful with screens of sweet-peas. In the soft-mannered West-country fashion, folks gave him “good day” as he passed. The road undulated pleasantly, now and then sweeping round the full bosom of a hill, with a steeply sloping drop of thirty feet to the valley. Such spots were grimly sign-posted for motorists; for at one of them, so Mrs. Pettiland had told him, a motor-lorry during the war had slipped over at night and all the occupants had been killed. He regarded it with a chauffeur’s eye and smiled contemptuously at the inefficiency of the driver. He could race along it at sixty miles an hour. But still, if you did go over—there was an end of you.
By noon he was hungry and ate cold meat and bread at a wayside inn, and smoked contentedly afterwards on the bench outside and talked of crops and licensing laws with the landlord. When he started again he felt stiff from the unaccustomed exercise. Walking would relax his muscles. Yet he began to tire. A while later he came upon a furniture removing van which had broken down. Two men drew their heads from below the bonnet and looked at each other ruefully, and their speech was profane. He asked what was wrong. They didn’t know. He threw off his coat, glad to get to an engine again, and in a quarter of an hour had set it going merrily. For two or three miles he sat on the tailboard between the two canvas-aproned packers, enjoying the respite. When they turned off eventually from the main road, and he had to descend, he felt strangely disinclined to walk. The Junction was still a long way off. It would have been better, after all, to wait for the evening train from Fanstead. He was always starting on crazy ventures without counting the cost. But he limped on.
The road went through a desolate land of abandoned quarry and ragged pine woods. The ascent was steep. Suddenly, as though someone had pierced his leg with hot iron, flamed the unmistakable pain. He stood aghast at the pronouncement of doom. At that moment, while he hung there in agony, a rough figure of a man in old khaki slacks rose from a near hollow in the quarry and, approaching him, asked what time it was. Triona took out his watch, a gold one, the gift of Olivia. It was four o’clock. The man thanked him gruffly and returned to his stony Bethel. Triona hobbled on a few more steps. But the torture was too great. He must rest. The pine-wood’s cool quiet invited him. He dragged himself thither wearily, and sat down, his back against the trunk of a tree. He tried to think. Of course the simplest method of extrication was to hail any passing car and beg for a lift, either to the Junction or back to Pendish. Walking was out of the question. But which of those ways should he take? The weight of physical tiredness overwhelmed him and dulled the deciding brain. He had set out at nine in the morning and it was now four o’clock in the afternoon. He had not realized how slow his progress had been. Yes, he was exhausted and sleepy. Nothing mattered. He rolled on his side, stuck his arm under his head and fell into a dead sleep. Thirty yards away, at varying intervals, motor vehicles flashed by.
He was dreaming of a rabbit running across his throat, when suddenly he awoke to find the rabbit a man’s arm. He gripped it, instinctively. It was nearly dark.