And now, now, now for his reward!
Oleron crossed the room. All his doors were open; his eyes shone as he placed himself within that of his bedroom.
Fool that he had been, not to think of destroying the manuscript sooner! …
How, in a houseful of shadows, should he know his own Shadow? How, in a houseful of noises, distinguish the summons he felt to be at hand? Ah, trust him! He would know! The place was full of a jugglery of dim lights. The blind at his elbow that allowed the light of a street lamp to struggle vaguely through – the glimpse of greeny blue moonlight seen through the distant kitchen door – the sulky glow of the fire under the black ashes of the burnt manuscript – the glimmering of the tulips and the moon-daisies and narcissi in the bowls and jugs and jars – these did not so trick and bewilder his eyes that he would not know his Own! It was he, not she, who had been delaying the shadowy Bridal; he hung his head for a moment in mute acknowledgment; then he bent his eyes on the deceiving, puzzling gloom again. He would have called her name had he known it – but now he would not ask her to share even a name with the other …
His own face, within the frame of the door, glimmered white as the narcissi in the darkness …
A shadow, light as fleece, seemed to take shape in the kitchen (the time had been when Oleron would have said that a cloud had passed over the unseen moon). The low illumination on the blind at his elbow grew dimmer (the time had been when Oleron would have concluded that the lamplighter going his rounds had turned low the flame of the lamp). The fire settled, letting down the black and charred papers; a flower fell from a bowl, and lay indistinct upon the floor; all was still; and then a stray draught moved through the old house, passing before Oleron’s face …
Suddenly, inclining his head, he withdrew a little from the doorjamb. The wandering draught caused the door to move a little on its hinges. Oleron trembled violently, stood for a moment longer, and then, putting his hand out to the knob, softly drew the door to, sat down on the nearest chair, and waited, as a man might await the calling of his name that should summon him to some weighty, high and privy Audience …
11
One knows not whether there can be human compassion for anaemia of the soul. When the pitch of Life is dropped, and the spirit is so put over and reversed that that only is horrible which before was sweet and worldly and of the day, the human relation disappears. The sane soul turns appalled away, lest not merely itself, but sanity should suffer. We are not gods. We cannot drive out devils. We must see selfishly to it that devils do not enter into ourselves.
And this we must do even though Love so transfuse us that we may well deem our nature to be half divine. We shall but speak of honour and duty in vain. The letter dropped within the dark door will lie unregarded, or, if regarded for a brief instant between two unspeakable lapses, left and forgotten again. The telegram will be undelivered, nor will the whistling messenger (wiselier guided than he knows to whistle) be conscious as he walks away of the drawn blind that is pushed aside an inch by a finger and then fearfully replaced again. No; let the miserable wrestle with his own shadows; let him, if indeed he be so mad, clip and strain and enfold and couch the succubus; but let him do so in a house into which not an air of Heaven penetrates, nor a bright finger of the sun pierces the filthy twilight. The lost must remain lost. Humanity has other business to attend to.
For the handwriting of the two letters that Oleron, stealing noiselessly one June day into his kitchen to rid his sitting-room of an armful of fetid and decaying flowers, had seen on the floor within his door, had had no more meaning for him than if it had belonged to some dim and faraway dream. And at the beating of the telegraph-boy upon the door, within a few feet of the bed where he lay, he had gnashed his teeth and stopped his ears, He had pictured the lad standing there, just beyond his partition, among packets of provisions and bundles of dead and dying flowers. For his outer landing was littered with these. Oleron had feared to open his door to take them in. After a week, the errand lads had reported that there must be some mistake about the order, and had left no more. Inside, in the red twilight, the old flowers turned brown and fell and decayed where they lay.
Gradually his power was draining away. The Abomination fastened on Oleron’s power. The steady sapping sometimes left him for many hours of prostration gazing vacantly up at his red-tinged ceiling, idly suffering such fancies as came of themselves to have their way with him. Even the strongest of his memories had no more than a precarious hold upon his attention. Sometimes a flitting half-memory, of a novel to be written, a novel it was important that he should write, tantalised him for a space before vanishing again; and sometimes whole novels, perfect, splendid, established to endure, rose magically before him. And sometimes the memories were absurdly remote and trivial, of garrets he had inhabited and lodgings that had sheltered him, and so forth. Oleron had known a good deal about such things in his time, but all that was now past. He had at last found a place which he did not intend to leave until they fetched him out – a place that some might have thought a little on the green-sick side, that others might have considered to be a little too redolent of long-dead and morbid things for a living man to be mewed up in, but ah, so irresistible, with such an authority of its own, with such an associate of its own, and a place of such delights when once a man had ceased to struggle against its inexorable will! A novel? Somebody ought to write a novel about a place like that! There must be lots to write about in a place like that if one could but get to the bottom of it! It had probably already been painted, by a man called Madley who had lived there … but Oleron had not known this Madley – had a strong feeling that he wouldn’t have liked him – would rather he had lived somewhere else – really couldn’t stand the fellow – hated him Madley, in fact. (Aha! that was a joke!) He seriously doubted whether the man had led the life he ought; Oleron was in two minds sometimes whether he wouldn’t tell that long-nosed guardian of the public morals across the way about him; but probably he knew, and had made his praying hullabaloos for him also. That was his line. Why, Oleron himself had had a dust-up with him about something or other … some girl or other … Elsie Bengough her name was, he remembered …
Oleron had moments of deep uneasiness about this Elsie Bengough. Or rather, he was not so much uneasy about her as restless about the things she did. Chief of these was the way in which she persisted in thrusting herself into his thoughts; and, whenever he was quick enough, he sent her packing the moment she made her appearance there. The truth was that she was not merely a bore; she had always been that; it had now come to the pitch when her very presence in his fancy was inimical to the full enjoyment of certain experiences … She had no tact; really ought to have known that people are not at home to the thoughts of everybody all the time; ought in mere politeness to have allowed him certain seasons quite to himself; and was monstrously ignorant of things if she did not know, as she appeared not to know, that there were certain special hours when a man’s veins ran with fire and daring and power, in which … well, in which he had a reasonable right to treat folk as he had treated that prying Barrett – to shut them out completely … But no: up she popped, the thought of her, and ruined all. Bright towering fabrics, by the side of which even those perfect, magical novels of which he dreamed were dun and grey, vanished utterly at her intrusion. It was as if a fog should suddenly quench some fair-beaming star, as if at the threshold of some golden portal prepared for Oleron a pit should suddenly gape, as if a bat-like shadow should turn the growing dawn to mirk and darkness again … Therefore, Oleron strove to stifle even the nascent thought of her.
Nevertheless, there came an occasion on which this woman Bengough absolutely refused to be suppressed. Oleron could not have told exactly when this happened; he only knew by the glimmer of the street lamp on his blind that it was some time during the night, and that for some time she had not presented herself.
He had no warning, none, of her coming; she just came – was there. Strive as he would,
he could not shake off the thought of her nor the image of her face. She haunted him.
But for her to come at that moment of all moments! … Really, it was past belief! How she could endure it, Oleron could not conceive! Actually, to look on, as it were, at the triumph of a Rival … Good God! It was monstrous! Tact – reticence – he had never credited her with an overwhelming amount of either: but he had never attributed mere – oh, there was no word for it! Monstrous – monstrous! Did she intend thenceforward … Good God! to look on! …
Oleron felt the blood rush up to the roots of his hair with anger against her.
‘Damnation take her!’ he choked …
But the next moment his heat and resentment had changed to a cold sweat of cowering fear. Panic-stricken, he strove to comprehend what he had done. For though he knew not what, he knew he had done something, something fatal, irreparable, blasting. Anger he had felt, but not this blaze of ire that suddenly flooded the twilight of his consciousness with a white infernal light. That appalling flash was not his – not his that open rift of bright and searing Hell – not his, not his! His had been the hand of a child, preparing a puny blow; but what was this other horrific hand that was drawn back to strike in the same place? Had he set that in motion? Had he provided the spark that had touched off the whole accumulated power of that formidable and relentless place? He did not know. He only knew that that poor igniting particle in himself was blown out, that – Oh, impossible! – a clinging kiss (how else to express it?) had changed on his very lips to a gnashing and a removal, and that for very pity of the awful odds he must cry out to her against whom he had lately raged to guard herself … guard herself …
‘Look out!’ he shrieked aloud …
* * *
The revulsion was instant. As if a cold slow billow had broken over him, he came to to find that he was lying in his bed, that the mist and horror that had for so long enwrapped him had departed, that he was Paul Oleron, and that he was sick, naked, helpless, and unutterably abandoned and alone. His faculties, though weak, answered at last to his calls upon them; and he knew that it must have been a hideous nightmare that had left him sweating and shaking thus.
Yes, he was himself, Paul Oleron, a tired novelist, already past the summit of his best work, and slipping downhill again empty-handed from it all. He had struck short in his life’s aim. He had tried too much, had over-estimated his strength, and was a failure, a failure …
It all came to him in the single word, enwrapped and complete; it needed no sequential thought; he was a failure. He had missed …
And he had missed not one happiness, but two. He had missed the ease of this world, which men love, and he had missed also that other shining prize for which men forgo ease, the snatching and holding and triumphant bearing up aloft of which is the only justification of the mad adventurer who hazards the enterprise. And there was no second attempt. Fate has no morrow. Oleron’s morrow must be to sit down to profitless, ill-done, unrequired work again, and so on the morrow after that, and the morrow after that, and as many morrows as there might be …
He lay there, weakly yet sanely considering it …
And since the whole attempt had failed, it was hardly worth while to consider whether a little might not be saved from the general wreck. No good would ever come of that half-finished novel. He had intended that it should appear in the autumn; was under contract that it should appear; no matter; it was better to pay forfeit to his publishers than to waste what days were left. He was spent; age was not far off; and paths of wisdom and sadness were the properest for the remainder of the journey …
If only he had chosen the wife, the child, the faithful friend at the fireside, and let them follow an ignis fatuus – that list! …
In the meantime it began to puzzle him exceedingly that he should be so weak, that his room should smell so overpoweringly of decaying vegetable matter, and that his hand, chancing to stray to his face in the darkness, should encounter a beard.
‘Most extraordinary!’ he began to mutter to himself. ‘Have I been ill? Am I ill now? And if so, why have they left me alone? … Extraordinary! …’
He thought he heard a sound from the kitchen or bathroom. He rose a little on his pillow, and listened … Ah! He was not alone, then! It certainly would have been extraordinary if they had left him ill and alone – Alone? Oh no. He would be looked after. He wouldn’t be left, ill, to shift for himself If everybody else had forsaken him, he could trust Elsie Bengough, the dearest chum he had, for that … bless her faithful heart!
But suddenly; a short, stifled, spluttering cry rang sharply out.
‘Paul!’
It came from the kitchen.
And in the same moment it flashed upon Oleron, he knew not how, that two, three, five, he knew not how many minutes before, another sound, unmarked at the time but suddenly transfixing his attention now, had striven to reach his intelligence. This sound had been the slight touch of metal on metal – just such a sound as Oleron made when he put his key into the lock.
‘Hallo! … Who’s that?’ he called sharply from his bed.
He had no answer.
He called again. ‘Hallo! … Who’s there? … Who is it?’
This time he was sure he heard noises, soft and heavy, in the kitchen.
‘This is a queer thing altogether,’ he muttered. ‘By Jove, I’m as weak as a kitten too … Hallo, there! Somebody called, didn’t they? … Elsie! Is that you? …’
Then he began to knock with his hand on the wall at the side of his bed.
‘Elsie! … Elsie! … You called, didn’t you? … Please come here, whoever it is! …’
There was a sound as of a closing door, and then silence. Oleron began to get rather alarmed.
‘It may be a nurse,’ he muttered; ‘Elsie’d have to get me a nurse, of course. She’d sit with me as long as she could spare the time, brave lass, and she’d get a nurse for the rest … But it was awfully like her voice … Elsie, or whoever it is! … I can’t make this out at all. I must go and see what’s the matter …’
He put one leg out of bed. Feeling its feebleness, he reached with his hand for the additional support of the wall …
* * *
But before putting out the other leg he stopped and considered, picking at his new-found beard. He was suddenly wondering whether he dared go into the kitchen. It was such a frightfully long way; no man knew what horror might not leap and huddle on his shoulders if he went so far; when a man has an overmastering impulse to get back into bed he ought to take heed of the warning and obey it. Besides, why should he go? What was there to go for? If it was that Bengough creature again, let her look after herself; Oleron was not going to have things cramp themselves on his defenceless back for the sake of such a spoilsport as she! … If she was in, let her let herself out again, and the sooner the better for her! Oleron simply couldn’t be bothered. He had his work to do. On the morrow, he must set about the writing of a novel with a heroine so winsome, capricious, adorable, jealous, wicked, beautiful, inflaming, and altogether evil, that men should stand amazed. She was coming over him now; he knew by the alteration of the very air of the room when she was near him; and that soft thrill of bliss that had begun to stir in him never came unless she was beckoning, beckoning …
He let go the wall and fell back into bed again as – oh, unthinkable! – the other half of that kiss that a gnash had interrupted was placed (how else convey it?) on his lips, robbing him of very breath …
12
In the bright June sunlight a crowd filled the square, and looked up at the windows of the old house with the antique insurance marks in its walls of red brick and the agents’ notice-boards hanging like wooden choppers over the paling. Two constables stood at the broken gate of the narrow entrance-alley, keeping folk back. The women kept to the outskirts of the throng, moving now and then as if to see the drawn red blinds of the old house from a new angle, and talking in whispers. The children were in the houses, behind close
d doors.
A long-nosed man had a little group about him, and he was telling some story over and over again; and another man, little and fat and wide-eyed, sought to capture the long-nosed man’s audience with some relation in which a key figured.
‘ … and it was revealed to me that there’d been something that very afternoon,’ the long-nosed man was saying. ‘I was standing there, where Constable Saunders is – or rather, I was passing about my business, when they came out. There was no deceiving me, oh, no deceiving me! I saw her face …’
‘What was it like, Mr Barrett?’ a man asked.
‘It was like hers whom our Lord said to, “Woman, doth any man accuse thee?” – white as paper, and no mistake! Don’t tell me! … And so I walks straight across to Mrs Barrett, and “Jane,” I says, “this must stop, and stop at once; we are commanded to avoid evil,” I says, “and it must come to an end now; let him get help elsewhere.”
‘And she says to me, “John,” she says, “it’s four-and-sixpence a week” – them was her words.
‘ “Jane,” I says, “if it was forty-six thousand pounds it should stop” … and from that day to this she hasn’t set foot inside that gate.’
There was a short silence: then, ‘Did Mrs Barrett ever … see anythink, like?’ somebody vaguely enquired.
Barrett turned austerely on the speaker. ‘What Mrs Barrett saw and Mrs Barrett didn’t see shall not pass these lips; even as it is written, keep thy tongue from speaking evil,’ he said.
Another man spoke.
‘He was pretty near canned up in the Waggon and Horses that night, weren’t he, Jim?’
‘Yes, ’e ’adn’t ’alf copped it …’
‘Not standing treat much, neither; he was in the bar, all on his own …’
‘So ’e was; we talked about it …’