“What the devil are you doing?”
The man replied: “Why we thought you was dead.”
At the significance of the plural, his grasp relaxed and he sat up, staring at two men who had come upon him in his solitude. They were dirty, unshaven, not nice to look upon. On one of them he noticed a pair of old khaki slacks. As soon as he moved they knelt one on each side of him.
“And if I’d been dead, you’d have run through my pockets wouldn’t you?” Suddenly he clapped his hands in front of him. “You swine, you’ve got my watch and chain.”
He thrust them aside and scrambled anyhow to his feet, and struck instinctively with his left full in the face of the nearest man who had sprung up also. But all his weight was then on his left foot and the flame of agony shot up through his thigh and his leg crumpled up before the blow reached the man. Then the one in the khaki slacks came in with an upper cut on the point of his jaw and he fell senseless.
When he recovered consciousness a few minutes afterwards, he found himself alone, dazed, rather sick, in an uncomprehended world of gathering darkness. Black clouds had swept over the brow of the quarry hill. A pattering noise some way off struck his ear. He realized it was rain on the road. He drew himself up to a sitting posture and in a moment or two recovered wits and memory. There had been a fight. There was one man in khaki slacks—why, that was the man who had asked him the time at four o’clock in the afternoon. He had lain in wait for him and robbed him of his watch and chain. What a fool he had been to parade it in this manner. Well, it was gone. It would teach him a lesson in prudence. But the other man? How did he come in? Why did they wait three or four hours before attacking him? Perhaps the man of the khaki slacks had struggled against temptation until a more desperate acquaintance came along. He remembered the landlord of the inn where he had lunched telling him of an ugly quarrying village he would pass through, a nest of out-of-works—owing to quarries, unprofitable at the high rate of wages, being closed down—living discontented Bolshevik lives on high out-of-work pay. He cursed his leg. If it had not failed him, he would have got home on the first man, as easily as shaking hands—the flabby, unguarded face shimmered in front of him; and then he could have turned his attention to the man in khaki slacks, a true loafer type, spiritless when alone—the kind of man, who, if he had worn those slacks in the army, would have been in guard-room every week, and would have cowered as a perpetual cleaner of latrines under the eyes of vitriol-tongued sergeants. Far from a fighting man. His imagination worked, almost pleasurably, in the reconstitution of the robbery. But for his abominable leg he would have downed both the degenerate scoundrels, and have recovered his precious belongings. He damned them and his leg impartially. The watch and chain were all that he had kept materially of Olivia. In the morning he had hesitated as to the advisability of carrying them with him, gold watches and chains not being customarily accoutrements of a common sailor in wind-jammer or tramp steamer fo’c’sle. But sentiment had prevailed. He could hide them somewhere, when he reached the port, and at convenient slop-shops he could have reorganized attire and equipment.
The rain pattering on the open road came dribbling through the branches of the pines. He cursed the rain. He must go on somewhere. Absurd to stay in the wood and get wet through. He struggled to his feet and then for the first time became aware of a looseness around his middle. He looked down. His trousers were unbuttoned, his shirt sagged out immodestly as if the front had been hurriedly tucked in. His hands sought his waist. The belt with all the money he had in the world had gone.
ITwas close on midnight when a car grated and stopped in front of the little Georgian house in Pendish, and the truant stumbled through the door, left open, into the presence of Mrs. Pettiland who was anxiously awaiting him. He was wet through, dishevelled, exhausted. He was shivering with cold and his face was like the mask of a ghost. She met him in the passage and dragged him into the little sea-haunted parlour.
“Oh, what have you been doing?”
She had been worried all day, unable to account for the money, a month’s rent and board in advance, in the envelope addressed to her.
“Didn’t I tell you not to overdo yourself?”
He greeted her upbraidings with a laugh of bravado.
“I set out to-day on my last adventure. This is the end of it. I’m here for the rest of time.”
“You’ll be in the churchyard for the rest of eternity, if you don’t go to bed at once,” she declared.
She packed him to his room; fussed motherwise about him; dosed him with ammoniated quinine; stuck hot-water bottles in his bed; stood over him with hot Bovril with an egg in it. She prescribed whisky, also hot; but since the fatal night at Rowington’s dinner party, he had abjured alcohol.
“Now perhaps you’ll tell me what has happened,” she said.
“My game leg gave out when I got to some quarries. I believe the beastly place is called Woorow——”
“Woorow! Why that’s the other side of the county!” She looked at him aghast. “Do you mean to say that you walked to Woorow in your state? Really men oughtn’t to be allowed to run about loose.”
“I’ve run about loose since I was fourteen,” said he.
“And a pretty mess you seem to have made of it. And then what did you do?”
She took away the cup of Bovril and poached egg which he had devoured ravenously, to her womanly satisfaction, and handed him another. He continued his story, recounting it, between spoonfulls, in his imaginative way. When he found he could go no further he curled up to sleep in a wood. When things went wrong, he assured her, there was nothing like going to sleep in a wood. All the pixies and elves and rabbits and stoats and weasels came and sat round you in a magic circle, shielding you from harm. What would have happened to the Babes in the Wood, he cried, if it hadn’t been for the robins?
“I wonder what your temperature is,” said Mrs. Pettiland.
“Normal,” said he. “This is the first hour I’ve been normal for months.”
“I’ll take it before I leave you,” she said. “Well, you went to sleep?”
Yes. He slept like an enchanted dog. He woke up four hours afterwards to find it pouring with rain. What could he do? He had to get back. Walking, with his rotten old leg, was out of the question. In the daytime a decent looking pedestrian may have the chance of stopping a motoring Good Samaritan and, with a tale of sudden lameness, get a lift by the side of the chauffeur. But at night it was impossible. To stand with arresting arms outspread in front of the hell-lamps of an advancing car would be an act of suicidal desperation. No; he had returned by all sorts of stages. He had almost forgotten them. A manure cart had brought him some way. Then he had gone dot and carry one for a mile. Then something else. He could only hail slow moving traffic in the wet and darkness. Then he spent an endless time in the cab of a steam traction engine which he had abandoned on seeing a two-seater car with flaring head-lamps, stationed at a cottage gate.
“The old campaigner’s instinct, Mrs. Pettiland. What should it be but a doctor’s car, outside a poor little cottage? And as the head-lamps were pointing to where I had come from, I concluded he had drawn up and would turn round and go where I wanted to get to.”
“And was it a doctor?”
He laughed. Of course it was. He had taken shelter from the rain under the hood of the car for an hour. Then, when the cottage door opened, he had scrambled out and waited for the owner. There had been a few words of explanation. By luck, it was Doctor Stansfield of Fanstead——
“Dr. Stansfield—why——”
“Why of course. He knows you inside and out. A charming fellow. He dropped me here, or rather I dropped him.”
“And he never came in to look after you—a man in your condition? I’ll give him a piece of my mind when I see him.”
He soothed the indignant lady. The good doctor was unaware that anything particular was wrong with him. Poor man, he had been on the go since five o’clock the previous morning—human beings are born inconsiderate of the feelings of others—and he was dog-tired. Too dog-tired even to argue. He would have given a lift to Judas Iscariot, or the Leper of Aosta, so long as he wasn’t worried.
“He nearly pitched us over, at a curve called Hell’s Corner—you know. The near front wheel was just an inch off the edge. And then he stopped dead and flung his hands over his eyes and said: ‘Oh, my God!’ He had lost his nerve. Then when I told his I had driven everything from a General’s Rolls Royce to an armoured car all over Russia in the war, he let me take the wheel. And that’s the whole thing.”
He chatted boyishly, in high spirits, and smoked a cigarette. Mrs. Pettiland went for a clinical thermometer. To her secret disappointment, his temperature was only just above normal. She would have loved to keep him in bed a few days and have the proper ordering of him. A woman loves to have an amazing fool of a man at her mercy, especially if she is gifted with a glimmer of humour. When she left him, he laughed out loud. Well, he had had his adventure with a vengeance. A real old Will-o’-the-Wisp chase, which had landed him, as ever, into disaster. Yet it had been worth it, every bit, until his leg gave out on the quarry hill. Even his slumber he did not regret. His miserable journey back, recalling old days, had its points. It was good to get the better of circumstances.
As to his money which was to have started him in life among coral reefs and conch-shells, that had gone irretrievably. Of course, he could have gone to the nearest police-station. But if the miscreants were arrested, he would have to prosecute. Highway robbery was a serious affair; the stolen belt packed with bank notes, a romantic one. The trial would provide a good newspaper story. There would be most undesirable publicity; and publicity is the last thing a man dead to the world would desire. He shrugged philosophic shoulders. Let the money go. The humour of the situation tickled his vagabond fancy. He was penniless. That was the comical end of his pursuit of theignis fatuus. The freak finality and inevitability of it stimulated his sense of the romantic. If he had been possessed of real courage, he would have made over all his money, months ago, to Olivia and disappeared, as he was now, into the unknown. His experience of life ought to have taught him the inexorable fatality of compromise. What would he do? He did not know. Drowsy after the day’s fatigue, and very warm and comfortable, he did not care. He curled himself up in the bed and went to sleep.
One afternoon, a week afterwards, he limped into Mrs. Pettiland’s post-office with a gay air.
“Mrs. Pettiland,” said he, “at last I have found my true vocation.”
“I’m glad to hear it, sir,” she replied undisturbed in her official duties which consisted in taking the coppers from a small child in payment for two stamps. “You’ve been rather restless these last few days.”
Triona watched the child depart, clasping the stamps in a clammy hand.
“When one hasn’t a penny in the world and starvation stares you in the face, one may be excused for busy search for a means of livelihood.”
“You’ve got plenty of money.”
“I haven’t.”
“You paid me a month’s board and lodging in advance, the other day—though why you did it, I can’t understand.”
“I was going to run away,” he said cheerfully. “To compensate you in that miserable manner for inconvenience was the least I could do. But the gods rightly stepped in and hauled me back.” He swung himself on the counter and smiled at her. “I’m a fraud, you know.”
The plump and decorous lady could not realize his earnestness. Behind his words lay some jest which she could not fathom.
“You don’t believe me?”
He sighed. If he had told her a fairy tale she, like all the rest of the world in his past life, would have believed him. Now that he told the truth, he met with blank incredulity.
“I’m going to earn my living. I’m taking on a job as chauffeur.”
She stared at him. “A chauffeur—you?”
“Yes. Why not?”
Her mind ran over his intellectual face, his clothes, his manners, his talk—free and sometimes disconcertingly allusive, like that of the rare and impeccably introduced artists whom she had lodged—his books . . .
“Why—you’re a gentleman,” she gasped.
“Oh no. Not really. I’ve been all kinds of things in my time. Among them I’ve passed as a gentleman. But by trade I’m a chauffeur. I practically started life as a chauffeur—in Russia. For years I drove a Russian Prince all over Europe. Now there aren’t any more Russian Princes I’m going to drive the good people of Fanstead to railway stations and dinner parties.”
“Well, I never,” said Mrs. Pettiland.
“There’s a young man—an ex-officer—Radnor by name, in Fanstead—who has just set up a motor garage.” “He’ll fail,” said Mrs. Pettiland. “They all do. Old Hetherington of ‘The Bull’ has all the custom.”
“With one rickety death-trap for hire and a fool of a mechanic who has wrecked every car sent in for repairs for a radius of thirty miles. I offered Hetherington to teach him his business. You might as well sing ‘Il Trovatore’ to a mule. So I went to Radnor. He had just sacked a man, and with my invariable luck, I stepped in at the right moment. No, Mrs. Pettiland—” he swung his sound leg and looked at her, enjoying her mystification “—the reign of Hetherington is over. Radnor’s Garage is going to be the wonder of the countryside.”
He believed it implicitly. Radnor, a mild and worried young man, with quite a sound knowledge of his business, might struggle along and earn a hand-to-mouth living. But he lacked driving-power. To Triona, during his two or three interviews with him, that was obvious. He had sufficient capital for a start, a good garage equipment, a fairly modern 25 h.p. utility car and was trying to make up his mind to buy another. Triona divined his irresolution. He would be at the mercy of unscrupulous mechanics and chauffeurs. His spirit seemed to have been broken by two years imprisonment in Germany. He had lost the secret of command. And, by nature, a modest, retiring gentleman. Triona pitied him. He had wandered through the West of England seeking a pitch where the competition was not too fierce, and finding unprogressive Fanstead, had invested all his capital in the business. He had been there a couple of months during which very little work had come in. He could stick it out for six months more. After that the deluge.
“Give me four pounds a week as head mechanic and chauffeur,” said Triona, “and the deluge will be golden rain.”
This was after the exhibition of John Briggs’ papers—Armoured Car Column and Minesweeper—and the tale of his Russian chauffeurdom. He had also worked magic, having a diagnostician’s second sight into the inside of a car’s mechanism, with a mysteriously broken down 40 h.p. foreign car, the only one in the garage for repairs, which, apparently flawless, owner and chauffeur and Radnor himself regarded with hebetude.
“I’ll take you on all right,” said Radnor. “But, surely a man like you ought to be running a show of his own.”
“I haven’t a cent in the world,” replied Triona. “So I can’t!”
All this he told Mrs. Pettiland, swinging his sound leg, as he sat on the counter.
“The only fly in the ointment,” said he, “is that I shall have to move.”
“From here? Whatever for?”
“Chauffeurs don’t have luxurious bed-sitting-rooms with specially designed scenery for views. They can’t afford it. Besides, they’re not desirable lodgers.”
She flushed indignantly. If he thought she would prefer his room to his company, because he drove a car, he was very much mistaken. The implication hurt. Even suppose he was fit to look after a car, he was not yet fit to look after himself. Witness his folly of a week ago. He would pay her whatever he could afford and she would be more than contented.
“What wonderful people there are in the world,” he sighed.
But he withstood her generous blandishments. No, there was an eternal fitness of things. Besides, he must live at the garage, ready to attend telephone calls by day or by night. He couldn’t be hobbling backwards and forwards between Fanstead and Pendish. Against this practical side of the question there could be no argument.
“And what shall I do with the money you’ve paid in advance?”
“Keep it for a while,” said he. “Perhaps Randor will give me the sack and I’ll come creeping back to you.”
Thus did Triona, with bag and baggage take up his quarters in an attic loft in the garage yard at Fanstead.
Not since his flight from Olivia had he felt so free of care. Fate had condemned him to the backwater and in the backwater he would pass his contented life, a life of truth and honesty. And he had before him an essential to his soul’s health—an ideal. He would inspire the spiritless with spirit, the ineffectual with efficiency, the sick heart with health. The man Radnor had deserved well of his country through gallant service, wounds and imprisonment. His country had given him the military Cross and a lieutenant’s gratuity, and told him not to worry it any more. If Mrs. Pettiland’s prophecy came true and he failed, he would be cast upon a country that wouldn’t be worried. Triona swore that he should pull through. He would save a fellow-man from shipwreck, without his knowledge. It was something to live for. He became once more the perfect chauffeur, the enthusiastic motor-man, dreaming of a great garage—a sort of Palace of Automobiles for the West of England.
And as he dreamed, so did it begin to come to pass. The efficiency of the Quantock Garage became known for miles around. Owners of valuable cars forsook the professional wreckers in the great junction town and sent them to Fanstead. Radnor soon bought his second car; by the end of the autumn a third car; and increased his staff. Triona was foreman mechanician. Had he not so desired, he need not have driven. Nor need he have driven in the brass-buttoned livery on which he insisted that Radnor’s chauffeurs should be attired. Smartness, he argued rightly, caught the eye and imagination. But he loved the wheel. Driving cooled the vagabond fire in his veins. There was an old touring-car of high horse-power, excellent when nursed with loving hand and understanding heart, but a box of dismal caprice to the inexpert, which he would allow no one to drive but himself. Radnor held the thing in horror and wanted to sell it as a bad bargain. He had had it out once and it had broken down ten miles from home and had suffered the ignominy of a tow back. Triona wrought at it for three weeks, conjuring up spare parts from nowhere, and fitting to it new devices, and turned out a going concern in which he took inordinate pride. He whirled touring parties prodigious distances in this once rickety creature of his adoption. He could get thirty-five or forty out of her easily.
“All right. It’s your funeral, not mine,” said Radnor during one of their discussions.
It was a healthy life. His lameness did not matter. Whatever internal lesions he suffered from gave no symptoms of existence. His face lost its lines of suffering, his eyes their shifty haggardness. He put on flesh, as far as is possible for a naturally spare-built man. Randor, an honourable soul, when the business in the new year shewed proof of immense development, offered him a substantial increase in salary. But Triona refused.
“What do I want with money, my dear fellow? If I had more I’d only spend it for books. And I’ve more of them now than I know where to put them. No; keep all you can for capital in the business. Or stick it into an advertisement scheme I’ve been working out—”
“You’re an odd devil, Briggs,” said Radnor. He was a small dark man with great mournful eyes and a little clipped moustache over a timorous mouth, and his lips were always twitching. “A queer devil. What I should have done without you, I don’t know. If I could do what I want, I should offer you a partnership.”
“Don’t be a damned fool,” said Triona. “A partner puts in money and I haven’t a bean. Besides if I were a partner, the whole show would go to hell.”
“Why?”
“I should immediately want to go and do something else,” replied Triona.
“I give it up,” said Radnor.
“Best thing you can do,” said Triona.
How could the very grateful young proprietor divine the spiritual crankiness of his foreman? He went through the English equivalent of shoulder shrugging.
Briggs, from the business point of view, was a treasure fallen from Heaven. And Briggs was a mystery. He didn’t begin to pretend to understand Briggs. Briggs obviously didn’t want to be understood. Radnor was a gentleman. He could press the matter no further.
“Let us get this business up to a net profit of three thousand a year and then we may talk,” said Triona.
“Three thou—! Good God, man, I couldn’t talk. I’d slobber and gibber!”
“That’s where I’ll come in,” laughed Triona.
He had set his heart on this wash-out from the war making good. Just before Christmas he had an added incentive. A melancholy lady and a wistful pretty girl had flashed for a week end through Fanstead. They had come from London and had put up at The King’s Head. Radnor had made the tour of the proprietor through the garage.
“This is Mr. Briggs, my foreman, whom I’ve so often told you about.”
And afterwards, to Triona, with an air of inconsequence:
“A kind of aunt and cousin of mine who wanted to see how I was getting on.”
Poor old chap! Of course they wanted to see how he was getting on. The girl’s assessing eyes took in everything, himself included.
The unbidden phrase flashed through his brain.
“He shall marry the girl by Michaelmas Day!”
The sudden impishness of it delighted him.
“By God, he shall!” he swore to himself.
So he refused an increase of salary and, by following anignis fatuusof an ideal, he kept his conscience in a state of interested amusement at the mystification of his employer.
April came and found the Quantock Garage in full tide of business. Hetherington of “The Bull” had long since given up his wheezy station car and the motor-destroying works in which he housed it. Triona laboured from morning to night, for a while content to see the wheels of an efficient establishment go round. And then he began to grow restless. He had set Radnor permanently on his feet. If he left, the business would go on by its own momentum. Nothing more was needed than Radnor’s own conscientious plodding. Why should he stay? He had achieved his purpose. Radnor would surely be in a financial position warranting him to marry the girl by Michaelmas.
“I’ll see him through,” he vowed, and stayed on. “And then——”
And then? Life once more became a blank. Of late he had drugged lonely and despairing thoughts by reading. Books grew into great piles in corners of his loft above the garage. But reading awoke him to the poignant craving for expression. He had half a dozen tantalizing plots for novels in his head, a score of great situations, a novelist’s gallery of vivid personalities. As to the latter, he had a superstition. If he gave one a name it would arise in flesh and blood, insistent on having its story told. So he shut tempting names resolutely from his brain; for he had made up his queer mind never to write another line of romance.
The spring stirred the sap within him. It was a year now since he had fled from Olivia. What was she doing, what feeling? Occasionally he called on Mrs. Pettiland.
Myra, he learned, had paid her weekly visit in October, had occupied his old room, had gone to visit her lunatic husband, had maintained her impenetrable silence as to her mistress’s doings. When Mrs. Pettiland had reported his chauffeur activities, Myra had said:
“I’m glad he has got honest employment.”
“Shall I let him know that you’re here?” Mrs. Pettiland had asked.
Myra had answered in her final way:
“I’ve no desire to see him and he certainly has no desire to see me.”
Myra, therefore, had come and gone without his knowledge. Often he wished that he had met her and wrung some information from her unwilling lips. And now, with his purpose accomplished, his heart aching for change, his spirit craving to pour itself out in tumultuous words, and his soul crying for her that was lost, the thought that had haunted the back of his mind for the past year stood out grimly spectre-wise. What right had he to live? Olifant had spoken truly. What right had he to compel her to perpetual widowhood that was no widowhood? She was tied to him, a husband lost, as far as she was concerned, to human ken, never to cross her path again; tied to him as much as Myra was tied to the poor wretch in the madhouse. And as Myra had grown soured and hard, so might Olivia grow. Olivia so young now, with all the joy of life before her. He gone, she could marry again. There was Olifant, that model of men, whom he guessed to have supplanted. With him she could be happy until her life’s end. Once more she could be Lady Bountiful of “The Towers.” . . . The conception was an agony of the flesh, keeping him awake of nights on the hard little camp-bed in the loft. He grappled with the torture, resolved to triumph over it, as he had gritted his teeth and triumphed over physical pain in hospitals. The knife was essential, he told himself. It was for her sake. It was his duty to put himself out of the world.
And yet the days went on, and he felt the lust of life in his blood. The question tauntingly arose: Is it braver to die than to live? Is it more cowardly to live than to die? He couldn’t answer it.
In the meantime he went on mending broken-down motor-engines and driving gay tourists about the countryside, in his car of resurrection.
WHATwas bound to happen had happened. Olifant the Galahad, out for grails, as Triona, and indeed as Olivia had pictured him, had lost his head, poured out a flow of mad words, and flung his arm about her and kissed her passionately. She had been caught, had half-surrendered; released, she had put hands to a tumultuous bosom and staggered away from him. And there had followed a scene enacted for the twenty-billionth time on the world’s stage. She had grown weak and strong by turns. At last she had said: “If you love me, go now and let me think it over and all that it means.”
And he had gone, passion yielding to his courteous consideration of her, and she was left alone in the drawing-room, staring through the open French windows at the May garden.
Since her return from the South of France, she had felt the thing coming. In October, as soon as Myra had returned from her holiday, fear had driven her from Medlow. The hunger in the man’s eyes proclaimed an impossible situation. The guest and host position she had changed after the first few weeks. Brother and sister and herself kept house together—on the face of it a sensible and economical arrangement. Mr. Trivett and Mr. Fenmarch, once more financial advisers, commended it with enthusiasm. The summer had passed happily enough. Themodus vivendiwith the sections of Medlow society respectively symbolized by Landsdowne House and Blair Park had arranged itself automatically. She found conferred upon her the Freedom of each. The essential snobbery of English life is a myth kept alive by our enemies. It is true that the squire and the linen-draper do not ask each other and their families to dinner. Their social worlds are apart. They don’t want to ask each other to dinner. They would never dream of asking each other to dinner, one no more than the other; they respect each other too mightily. But a dweller in both worlds, such as Olivia, Trivett-ed and Gale-d though she was on the one side, yet on the other, the wife of the famous Alexis Triona and the friend of the Olifants, folks whose genealogy was lost somewhere in a Pictish bonfire of archives, can wander up and down the whole social gamut at her good pleasure. Besides she herself does not mix the incompatible. A mere question of the art of life, which Olivia, with her London experiences found easy of resolution. So, in the mild and mellow way on which Medlow prided itself, she had danced and tennis-ed and picnic-ed the summer through. On the Blair Park side—she wondered laughingly at their unsupercilious noses—Blaise Olifant and his sister accompanied her in the gentle festivities. Each day had brought its petty golden dust—the futile Church bazaar, the tennis tournament, the whist-drive of which old John Freke, the linen-draper father of Lydia, had made her a lady-patroness, the motor-run into quaint Shrewsbury, on shopping adventure in quest of crab or lobster unobtainable in Medlow—a thousand trivial activities—to the innocent choking of her soul, to use Matthew Arnold’s figure, and an inevitable forgetfullness. Everything had gone well until October. Then she had taken prudent flight with Myra to the France and Italy which she had never seen—and there she had stayed till the beginning of May.
It was Mrs. Woolcombe who insisted on her return to Medlow. Where else should she return after her wanderings but to her own home? At first everything was just as it used to be. Then, on a trivial cause—an insult offered her by an Italian in Venice which she had laughingly recounted—the passion of Blaise Olifant had suddenly flamed forth.
She was frightened, shaken. He had given her the thrill, which, in her early relations with him she had half contemptuously deemed impossible. She found herself free from sense of outrage. She bore him no resentment. Indeed she had responded to his kiss. She was not quite sure, within herself, whether she would not respond again. The communicated thrill completed her original conception of him as the very perfect gentle knight. For after all, knights without red-blood in their veins might be gentle, but scarcely perfect.
If she were free, she would marry him out of hand, without further question. He had always dwelt in a tender spot of her heart. Now he had slipped into one more warm, smouldering with strange fires. But she was not free. She stood at once at the parting of the roads. She must go back to a wandering or lonely life, or she must defy conventions.
She went out into the ivy-walled garden, and walked up the central path, between the beds of wallflowers and forget-me-nots and the standard roses just bursting into leaf. What could she do? Once she had laughed scornfully at the idea of love playing any part in her life. She had not reckoned with her youth. And now she stared aghast at the vista of lonely and loveless years.
Presently Blaise Olifant came from his study and advanced to meet her.
He said: “Can you speak to me now?”
“Yes—now,” she answered.
“I’ve behaved like any blackguard. You must forgive me, if you can. The Italian cad who made me see red was not very much worse than myself.”
There was a smile in her dark eyes as she looked up at him.
“There’s all the difference in the world. I disliked the Italian very much.” She touched his sleeve. “You are forgiven, my dear friend. It’s all my fault. I oughtn’t to have come back.”
“You’re the most wonderful of women,” said he.
The most wonderful of women made a little wry movement of her lips.
“It’s all a might-be and a can’t-be,” she said in a low voice.
“Do you suppose, my dear, I don’t know that? If it could be, do you think I should regret losing my self-control?”
She said. “If it’s any consolation to you—perhaps I lost mine too. We’re both human. Perhaps a woman is even more so than a man. That’s why I went away in October—things were getting impossible——”
“Good God!” he exclaimed, “I thought you were bored to death!”
A little laugh could not be restrained. The blindness of man to psychological phenomena is ever a subject for woman’s sweet or bitter mirth. But it was not in his heart to respond.
“Then you do care for me a little?”
“I shouldn’t be standing here with you now, if I didn’t. I shouldn’t have made the mistake of coming back, if I hadn’t wanted to see you.”
“Mistake?” He sighed and turned a step away. “Yes. I suppose it was. I should have been frank with Mary and shewn her that it was impossible—for me.”
“It would be best for me to go to-morrow,” said Olivia.
“Where?”
“London. A hotel. Any old branch.” She smiled. “I must settle down somewhere sooner or later. The sooner the better.”
“That’s monstrous,” he declared with a flash in his eyes. “To turn you out of your home—I should feel a scoundrel.”
“I don’t see how we can go on living together, carrying on as usual, as though nothing had happened.”
For a few moments they walked up the gravelled path in silence, both bareheaded in the mild May sunshine.
“Listen,” he said, coming to a pause. “I’m a man who has learned self-control in three hard schools—my Scotch father’s, science, war. If I swear to you, on my honour, that nothing that has passed between us to-day shall ever be revived by me in look or word or act—will you stay with us, and give me your—your friendship—your companionship—your presence in the house? It was an aching desert all the time you were away.”
She walked on a pace or two, after a hopeless sigh. Could she never drive into this unworldly head the fact that women were not sexless angels? How could their eyes forever meet in the glance of a polite couple discussing the weather across a tea-table? She could not resist a shaft of mockery.
“For all of your philosopher father and science and war—I wonder, my dear Blaise, how much you really know of life?”
He halted and put a hand on her slim shoulder.
“I love you so much my dear,” said he, “that I should be content to hang crucified before you, so that my eyes could rest upon you till I died.”
He turned and strode fast away. She followed him crying “Blaise! Blaise!” He half turned with an arresting arm—and even at that moment she was touched by the pathos of the other empty sleeve——
“No, don’t—please.”
She ran hard and facing him blocked his way.
“But what of me? What of my feelings while I saw you hanging crucified?”
That point of view had not occurred to him. He looked at her embarrassed. His Scottish veracity asserted itself.
“When a man’s mad in love,” said he, “he can’t think of everything.”
She took his arm and led him up the gravelled path again.
“Don’t you see, dear, how impossible it all is?”
“Yes. I suppose so. It must be one thing or the other. And all that is good and true and honourable makes it the other.”
Tears came at the hopelessness of it. She seized his hand in both of hers.
“What you said just now is a thing no woman could forget to the day of her death.”
She kissed the hand and let it drop, stirred to the inmost. What was she, ineffectual failure, to command the love of such a man? He stood for a while looking into the vacancy of the pale blue sky over the ivy-clad wall. Before her eyes garden and house and wall and sky were blotted out; and only the one tall figure existed in the scene. Her heart beat. It was a moment of peril, and the moment seemed like an hour.
At last he turned and looked at her with his grave smile. She put her hand on her heart not knowing whether to cry or laugh at the relaxation of tension.
“You stay here with Mary,” he said gently. “I’ll go away for a change—a holiday. I need one. There’s an old uncle of mine in Scotland. I’ve neglected him and his salmon-fishing shamefully for years. How I can fish with one arm, heaven only knows. I’ve learned to do most things. It’ll be a new experience. As a matter of fact, I should have gone last month, if the temptation to wait for you hadn’t been so strong. It’s up in the wilds of Inverness——”
She made feeble protest. It was she who drove him out of his home. Far better for her to cut herself adrift from Medlow. But he prevailed. He would go. In the meantime things might right themselves.
He departed the following morning, leaving Olivia to a new sense of loneliness and unrest. She lived constantly in the tense moment, catching her breath at the significance of its possibilities. Unbidden and hateful the question recurred: if positions had been reversed; if Blaise had been the lost husband and Alexis the lover, would Alexis have let her go? Certainly not Alexis. And yet deep down in her heart she was grateful that she had come scathless through the moment.
The little round of country gaieties went on and caught her up in its mild gyrations. Mrs. Woolcombe deplored her brother’s absence. He had been looking forward to the social life with Olivia, especially the tennis parties. It was wonderful how he had overcome the handicap of his one arm; the effectual service he had perfected, tossing up the ball with his racket and smiting it at the dead point of ascent. It had all been due to Olivia’s encouragement the previous summer; for till then he had not played for years. But he had been sadly overworked. When a man cannot sleep and rises up in the morning with a band of iron round his head, it is obvious that he needs a change. It was the best thing for Blaise, undoubtedly; but it must be dull for Olivia. So spake Mary Woolcombe, unaware of kisses and tense moments.
Olivia said to Myra: “This is an idle, meaningless life. We’ll go back to London and settle down.”
“Will life mean much more when you get there?” asked Myra.
“I can do something.”
“What?”
“How do I know? Why are you so irritating, Myra?”
“It isn’t me,” said Myra.
“What is it, then?”
“A woman wants a man to look after,” said Myra in her unimpassioned way. “If she can’t get a man she wants a woman. I’ve got you, so I’m not irritated. You haven’t got either, so you are.”
Olivia flushed angrily and swerved round in her chair before the mirror on her toilet-table—Myra was drying her hair—as she had dried it from days before Olivia could remember.
“That’s a liberty, Myra, which you oughtn’t to have taken.”
“I dare say, dearie,” replied Myra unmoved, “but it’s good for you that somebody now and then should tell you the truth.”
“I want neither man nor woman,” Olivia declared. Myra gently squared her mistress’s shoulders to the mirror and went on with her task.
“I wonder,” she said.
“I think you’re hateful,” said Olivia.
“Maybe. But I’ve got common-sense. If you think you’re going to London to stand for Parliament or write poetry and get it printed or run a Home for Incurable Camels, you’re mistaken, dear. And you’ll have no truck with women. You’ve never had a woman friend in the world—anyone you’d die for.”
“Of course I haven’t,” snapped Olivia.
“It’s a man’s woman you are,” continued Myra. “You’ve looked after men ever since your dear mother was taken ill. It’s what God meant you to do. It’s all you can do. And you haven’t got a man and that’s what’s making you unhappy.”
Olivia sprang from her chair, looking with her long black hair ruffled and frizzed and spreading out around her warm oval face, like an angry sea-nymph on a rock disputed by satyrs.
“I hate men and everything connected with them.”
“You still hate your husband?” asked Myra looking at her with cold pale eyes.
“I loathe him. How dare you? Haven’t I forbidden you to mention his name?”
“I didn’t mention his name,” said Myra. “But if you like, I won’t refer to him again. Sit down and let me put on the electric dryer. Your hair’s still wringing wet.” She yielded, not with good grace. Myra had her at her mercy. Dignity counselled instant dismissal of Myra from her presence. But the washing and drying of her long thick hair had ever been a problem; so dignity gave way to comfort.
She was furious with Myra. We all are with people who confront us with the naked truth about ourselves. That was all she was fit for; all that life had taught her; to look after a man. She stared at the blatant proposition in the grimness of the night-watches. What else, in God’s name, was she capable of doing for an inch advancement of humanity? She had gone forth long ago—so it seemed—from Medlow, to open the mysterious mysteries of the world. She had opened them—and all the pearls, good, bad and indifferent, were men. All the ideals; all the colour and music and gorgeous edifices of life; all the world vibration of thought and action and joy of which she had dreamed, every manifold thrill that had run through her being from feet to hair on that first night in London when she had leaned out of her Victoria Street flat and opened her young soul to the informing spirit of the vast city of mystery—the whole spiritual meaning, nay, the whole material reason for her existence, was resolved into one exquisitely pure, bafflingly translucent in its mystery of shooting flames, utterly elemental crystal of sex. Sex, in its supreme purity; but sex all the same.
She was a man’s woman. It was at once a glory and a degradation. Myra was right. What woman, in the course of her life, had she cared a scrap for? Her mother. Her mother was a religion. And men? Her chastity revolted. When had she sought to attract men? Her conscience was clear. But men had been the terror, the interest, the delight of her life from the moment she had left the cloistral walls of her home. And even before that, on a different plane, had she not, while keeping house for father and brothers, always thought in terms of man?
And now she was doing the same. The emptiness of her prospective life in London appalled her. The mad liar, her husband, an unseizable, unknown entity, of whom she thought with shivering repulsion, was away somewhere, living a strange, unveracious life. The soldier, scholar and gentleman, who loved her, into whose arms, into whose life, she had all but fallen, had fled, saving her from perils. Before he returned she must, in decency and honour, take up her solitary abode elsewhere. Or else she could terminate his tenancy of “The Towers” and carry on an old-maidish life in Medlow for evermore. Anyway, a useless sexless thing for all eternity.
The second post had brought her some letters, a few bills and receipts, a note from Janet Philimore with whom she kept up a casual correspondence, and a long untidy screed from Lydia. Lydia had conceived the idea of visiting Medlow. Her father, old John Freke, whom she had not seen for years, was ailing. What did Olivia think of the notion? Olivia, sitting in the little ivy-clad summer-house at the end of the garden, thought less of the notion than of the amazing lady. To ask her, an outsider, whether she should come to her father’s bed of sickness! She made up her mind to write: “Oh, yes, come at once, but wear the thickest of black veils, so that no one will recognize you.” Her mind wandered away from the hypothetical visit—London and Lydia again! Just where she was when she started. Life seemed a hopeless muddle.
“I’m sorry,” said Myra’s voice breaking suddenly on her meditations. She looked up and beheld Myra more than usually grave and cold. “I’m sorry to disturb you. But I’ve just had a letter. He’s dead.”
Olivia, with a shock through all her being, started to her feet.
“Dead. My husband?”
“No,” said Myra. “Mine.”
“Oh!” said Olivia somewhat breathless—and sank on the bench again. She recovered herself quickly.
“I’m sorry, Myra. But after all, it’s a merciful release.”
“God’s mercies are inscrutable,” said Myra.
So, thought Olivia, was Myra’s remark.
“I’ve always loved him, you see,” said Myra. “I suppose you’ll have no objections to my going to bury him?”
“My dear old Myra,” cried Olivia. “Of course, my dear, you can go—go whenever you like.”
“I’ll come back as soon as it’s over,” said Myra.
She turned and walked away, and Olivia saw her lean and unexpressive shoulders rise as though a sob had shaken her.
OFthe death of Myra Stebbings’s husband and of her second appearance in Pendish during his sojourn in the West Country, Triona knew nothing. Again she had forbidden her sister-in-law to give him any information as to her doings. Again she disclaimed interest in the young man. Nor was he aware, a week after the funeral, that Myra, who had stood by the graveside in the pouring rain, and had insisted on jogging back to Pendish wet through, in the undertaker’s brougham, lay dangerously ill in the upstairs bedroom of the little Georgian house. The increasing business of the Quantock Garage diverted his energies from polite tramps into Pendish to enquire into Mrs. Pettiland’s state of health. Also, he was growing morose, his soul feeding on itself, and beginning to develop an unwholesome misanthropy. Like Hamlet, man didn’t delight him; no, nor woman neither. When not working in the garage or driving the old touring-car, he retired to brood in his loft and eschewed the company of his kind.
“You’re overdoing it,” said Radnor, a kindly person. “Why not go away on a holiday and have a change?”
“Only one change would do me any good,” he replied gloomily, “and that would be to get out of this particularly vile universe.”
Radnor looked round his well ordered, bustling establishment and smiled.
“It isn’t as bad as all that.”
Triona shrugged his shoulders and spanner in hand turned to the car he was doctoring, without a reply.
A few days afterwards Radnor said:
“We’re going to be married in August, and I don’t mind saying it’s mostly thanks to you.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Triona. “I’ll stick it out till then.”
“And then?”
“I’ll have the change you’ve been talking of.”
Radnor laughed. “You’ll let me have a bit of a honeymoon first, won’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” replied Triona. “You can have your honeymoon.”
The weakening incentive to life would last till September. He would make it last. It was now the beginning of June. Three months or so more wouldn’t matter. To carry on a meaningless existence further would be absurd. Indeed, it would be immoral. Of that, for some time past he had convinced himself.
England ran motor-mad that summer. It awoke to find war restrictions removed, roads free and petrol to be had for the buying. In its eagerness to race through a beloved land closed up for years and view or review historic spots of loveliness, and otherwise to indulge in its national vagabond humour it cared little for the price of petrol. The hiring garages, in anything like tourist centres, found their resources strained. Radnor bought another car, and still had more orders than he could execute. He drove one car himself.
It was a soft June evening. Triona sat at the wheel of the great antiquated touring-car to which he had given its new lease of life, driving homewards from the neighbourhood of the Great Junction Town. He had taken a merry party that day some hundred and fifty miles through the tenderest greenery of early summer, through dark gorges with startling shadows, through cool lanes, over hills in the open sunshine; and, in the sweetness of the evening, he had put them down at the place whence they had started. For all his mood of despair, he had enjoyed the day. The poet in him had responded to the eternal call of the year’s life laughing in its gay insolence of youth. Since nine in the morning the sweet wind of the hills had swept through his lungs and scenes of loveliness had shimmered before his eyes.
Alone at the wheel, he thought of the passing day of beauty. Was it not worth living—just to enjoy it? Was it not worth living—just to translate into words, if only for the sake of the doing, the emotion of that enjoyment? He had passed through a beech wood, a world of pale emerald, like fairy seas, above, and a shimmer of blue-bells below as though the sky had been laid down for a carpet. . . .
He drove slowly and carefully. The car had done its good day’s work. It was knocking a bit, like an old horse wheezing in protest against over-estimation of its enduring powers. He had tried it perhaps too high to-day. He loved the re-created old car, as though it were a living thing. A valiant old car, which had raced over awful roads in Flanders. It was a crazy irritation that he could not pat it into comfort. Nursing it with the mechanician’s queer tenderness, he came to the straight mile, near home, of road on the mountain side, with its sheer drop into the valley, ending at the turn known as Hell’s Corner, at which the overwrought doctor, on the night of mad adventure, had lost his nerve. Just past the corner branched the secondary road to Fanstead, for the great road swept on by the expiring end of Pendish village; but by walking from Pendish, as he had done on the day of the aforesaid adventure, through lanes and fields, one cut off a great bend of road and struck it on the fair-mile beyond the turn. And now a few hundred yards from the corner the engine gave trouble. He descended from his seat and opened the bonnet. He discovered a simple matter, the choking of a plug. The knocking, he knew was in the cardan shaft. He would have to replace the worn pin. While cleaning out the choked plug with a piece of wire and blowing through it to clear it from the last fragment of grit, he wondered how long it would take to have the spare pin made. He was going out again the day after to-morrow. Could he risk the old car? To-morrow he would take her down and see for himself the full extent of the trouble. Meanwhile he screwed the plug on again, shut down the bonnet, cranked up the starting handle and jumped up beside the wheel.
But just as he put in the low gear, his eyes were riveted on a familiar figure some twenty yards away, walking towards him. For a moment or two he remained paralysed, while the old-fashioned gears crunched horribly. There she advanced slim, erect, in Tussore silk coat and skirt, a flash of red bow at the opening of her blouse. The car began to move. At that instant their eyes met. Olivia staggered back, and he read in her bewildered gaze the same horror he had last seen in her eyes.
What she was doing here, on this strip of remote road, he could not understand. Obviously she had not expected to find him, for she looked at him as though he were some awful ghost. He changed gear, went full speed ahead and passed her in a flash. Then suddenly, the command of doom shot through his brain. This was the end. Now was the end that should have come, had he not been a coward, months ago. He deliberately swerved off the road and went hurtling over the hill-side.
Olivia staring, wide-eyed, wondering, at the racing car, saw it happen. It was no accident. It was deliberate. Her brain reeled at the sudden and awful horror. She swayed to the bank and fainted.
A two-seater car, a young man and woman in it, came upon her a few moments later and drew up. The woman ministered to her and presently she revived.
“There has been a horrible accident,” she explained haggardly. “A car went over—you can see the wheel marks—Oh my God!”
She pointed. A column of smoke was rising from the valley into the still evening air. She scrambled to unsteady feet, and started to run. The young man detained her.
“The car will take us quicker. Maggie, you drive. I’ll stand on the footboard.”
They swiftly covered the hundred yards or so to the scene of the catastrophe. And there thirty feet below in the ravine the old car was burning amid the heavy vapour of petrol smoke.
“Quick,” cried Olivia, “let us get down! He may still be alive.”
The young man shook his head. “Not much chance, poor devil.”
“Did you know him?” asked the lady.
“It was my husband,” cried Olivia tragic-eyed.
They all plunged down the slope, the young man going straight in the ruts of the leaping car. Olivia, after a fall or two, ran gropingly to side levels, catching hold of bushes to aid her descent, her brain too scorched with the terror of that which lay below, for coherent thought.
Again her light, high-heeled shoes tripped her on the smooth grass and she slithered down a few yards. And then, as she steadied herself once more on her feet, she heard a voice from behind a clump of gorse:
“Just my damned luck!”
Her knees shook violently. She wanted to shriek, but she controlled herself and, staggering round the gorse bush, came upon Alexis, seated on a hummock, his head between his hands. He looked up at her stupidly; and she, with outspread fingers on panting bosom:
“Thank God, you’re not dead.”
“I don’t know so much about that,” said he, rising to his feet.
The young woman of the car who had been following Olivia more or less in her descent, appeared from behind the bush.
She, too, thanked God. He had been saved by a miracle. How had he escaped?
“A providence which looks after idiots caused me to be hurled out of the car at the first bump. I fell into the gorse. I’m not in the least bit hurt. Please don’t worry about me.”
“You must let us drive you home—I’ll call my husband,” said the young woman.
“Thank you very much,” said he, “but I’m perfectly sound and I’d rather walk; but this lady seems to have had a shock and no doubt——”
The young woman, perplexed, turned to Olivia. “You said this—gentleman—” for Alexis stood trim in brass-buttoned and legginged chauffeur’s livery—“you said he was your husband.”
“A case of mistaken identity,” he replied suavely. Olivia, her brain in a whirl, said nothing. The young woman advanced a few steps and coo-eed to the young man who had just reached the ravine. As he turned on her hail, she halloed the tidings that all was well.
“He’ll be here in a few minutes,” she said.
They stood an embarrassed trio. Alexis explained how the steering-rod, which had given him trouble all day, had suddenly snapped. It had been the affair of a moment. As for the car, it was merely a kind of land ark fitted with a prehistoric internal combustion engine. Insured above its value. The proprietor would be delighted to hear the end of it.
The young man joined them, out of breath. Explanations had to be givenda capo. Again Good Samaritan offers to put their two-seater at the disposal of the derelicts. With one in the back seat they could crowd three in front. They were going to Cullenby, twenty miles on, but a few miles out of their way, if need be, were neither here nor there. A very charming, solicitous, well-run young couple. Olivia scarcely knew whether to shriek at them to go away, or to beg them to remain and continue to save a grotesque situation.
Presently Triona repeated his thanks and declined the proffered lift. Walking would do him all the good in the world; would steady his nerves after his calamitous bump. The young man eyed him queerly. It was a strange word for a chauffeur.
“But if you would take this lady,” said Triona again.
Olivia recovered her wits.
“I will walk too, if you don’t mind. I’m only a mile from home. And this gentleman is really my husband.”
“If we can really do nothing more?” The young man raised his hat.
“A thousand thanks for all your kindness,” said Olivia.
The very mystified young couple left them and remounted the hill.
The subjects of their mystification stood for a while in silence. Presently Olivia, whose limbs not yet recovered from the shock trembled so that her knees seemed to give her no support, said:
“Don’t you think we might sit down for a little?”
“As you will,” said Alexis, seating himself on his hummock.
She cast herself down on the slope and closed her eyes for a moment.
“You did that on purpose,” she said at last. “You don’t suppose I believe the story of the broken steering-rod?”
He smiled with some bitterness. Fate was for ever against him. The moment they met in this extravagant way, there started up the barrier of a lie.
“I couldn’t very well scare those young folks with a confession of attempted suicide, could I? After all, the naked truth may at times be positively indecent.”
“Then you intended to do it?”
“Oh, yes,” said he. “But it ended, like every other Great Adventure I’ve attempted in my life, in burlesque. I assure you, that when I found myself pitched into this clump of gorse and able to pick myself up with nothing worse than a gasping for breath, I—well—the humiliation of it!—I cursed the day I was born.”
“Why did you do it?” she asked.
She had scarcely regained balance. The situation seemed unreal. But a few minutes ago he had been far from her thoughts, which were concerned with the woman to whose possibly dying bed she had been summoned, with the dreary days at Medlow now that Blaise Olifant had gone, with the still beauty of the hills and their purple sunset shadows. And now, here she was, alone with him, remote from the world, conversing as dispassionately as though he had returned from the dead—as indeed he had almost returned. At her question, he threw his chauffeur’s cap on the grass and passed his hand over his hair. The familiar gesture, the familiar nervous brown hand brought her a step nearer to reality.
“If you can’t guess, it is useless for me to tell you,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe me.”
He took out a cigarette. She noted a trembling of the fingers.
“Do you mind?” She nodded, he lit the cigarette. “I thought here, at any rate, I was hidden from you for the rest of my life. It wouldn’t have been very long anyway. I had made up my mind some day soon to set you free of me—and to-day or to-morrow—what did it matter? I don’t ask you to believe that either. I don’t see how you can believe a word I say. I gave you to understand, that I was in Poland—you find me here. When did Myra tell you I was here?”
Returning sanity had corrected his first mad impression. How could she be a mile from Pendish if she had not heard from Myra? But she regarded him open-mouthed.
“Myra? What has Myra to do with it? Of course I had no conception you were here? I knew you were not in Poland. A man—a Pole—I forget his name—wrote to Major Olifant, last year, wondering what had become of you. You had never joined him——”
“Boronowski,” said Triona.
“That was the name——”
“And you took it for granted I had lied to him too.” Her eyes dropped beneath his half sad, half ironic gaze. She made a little despairing gesture.
“What would you have?”
“And Myra never told you anything about me?”
“You haven’t answered my question,” she said, straightening herself: “Where does Myra come in?”
“That’s rather a long story. I should prefer her to tell it to you. Myra knows everything about me since the day after you received my last letter over a year ago.”
She leaned forward, an angry spot burning on both cheeks. “Myra has been hiding you here all the time and has told me nothing about it!”
“She has her excellent reasons. She will tell you in a very few words——”
“She can’t. At any rate not now. She has been very ill with pneumonia. They thought she was dying and sent for me. Why otherwise should I be here?”
“Are you staying at Mrs. Pettiland’s?”
“Of course.”
“I didn’t even know Myra was in Pendish—I’m grieved to hear she’s ill. I’m afraid I’ve neglected Mrs. Pettiland of late. She was very kind to me.” He paused and added with a smile, “I see Myra’s loyalty. She forbade Mrs. Pettiland to mention the name of the young man called Briggs. You’ve never heard of such a person at Pendish.”
“Not a word,” said Olivia. “But I shall never forgive Myra. Never, never,” she cried indignantly. “To fool me like that!”
He caught sudden hope from the flash in her dark eyes.
“Would you have liked to know where I was?”
“I hate duplicity. I thought that Myra, at least—my God! Is there anybody in the world one can trust?”
Suddenly she turned on him. “What are you doing in that absurd livery?”
“I’ve been earning my living in it, since last August. I’ve done it before. It’s an honester way than many others.”
“Forgive me, if I don’t understand,” she said, still half-bewildered. “You have no need to earn your living by driving a car—a common chauffeur—unless——”
She checked herself with a little gasp—but his quick brain divined her impulsive thought.
“Unless I had taken to drink and gone to the bad, etcetera, etcetera——”
She interrupted him quickly. “No, no. I never thought that. It was areductio ad absurdum. But on what other hypothesis——? You’ve still your brain, your talent, your genius. Your pen——”
“Which is mightier than the wheel,” he remarked.
“I don’t know why you didn’t go to Poland. Perhaps you’ll explain. Anyhow you didn’t. You came here—to the absolute quiet of the country. Why haven’t you gone on writing?”
“For the simple reason,” said he, “that Alexis Triona and all his works are dead. Washed out from the Book of Life. That side of me is all over and done with. You who know everything, can’t you understand?”
She caught the note of truth in his words and gradually there began to dawn on her the immensity of his artist’s sacrifice.
“Do you mean that you’re never going to write again?”
“Never,” said he. “Does this look like it?” and he touched the brass buttons on his livery.
She weakened through impatience at his aloofness, craving to know all that had happened to him, to get to the roots of Myra’s mysterious intrigue. His fatalistic attitude was maddening. The whole crazy combination of tragedy and farce that had set them down in the gorse-enclosed hollow of the hill-side, as though they were the only people on God’s earth, was maddening. The brass buttons were maddening. She flung sudden arms out wide.
“For God’s sake tell me everything that has happened to you.”
“If you’ll believe it,” said he.
She sat silent for a moment, feeling as though she were under his rebuke, and gazed over the valley at the hills black beneath the dying green and faded orange of the sunset. The thin smoke of the burned car mounted into the windless air faint with the smell of petrol fumes and scorched woodwork. And Triona looked down too and saw the end of the creation of his resurrection. He pointed to it.