The day that had unfurled itself with a spreading of dove’s wings above a brooding breast was closing with the beat and clamour of an eagle’s flying. The wind had risen almost to gale force and wild shreds and tatters of cloud were flying across the sky like torn feathers; grey they were, trailing here and there an angry red-blood streak. There was a roaring in the air, a hint of battle and tumult. Ranulph, hunting round the farm for André with a letter in his hand, felt oppressed and laboured, as though he too were fighting. . . . Fighting for what? . . . Life? . . . He didn’t know. He only knew he wished this storm were over. Spring storms could be nasty. He wished it were over.
He found André ministering to the pigs. “I want to talk to you,” he shouted above the wind. “When you’ve tucked them up and kissed them come to my room.” Then he abruptly turned his back and disappeared. He loathed the pigs. The monotony of their conversation and the inadequacy of their legs revolted him. André, scowling, watched him go, his slight figure leaning up against the wind, the letter in his hand gleaming white. He had a good mind not to obey the command. The friendship that he and Ranulph had achieved during Colette’s illness had now entirely disappeared. . . . He loathed the fellow. . . . The blame lay at the door of Rachell.
Suffering the pangs of an over-active conscience Rachell, with a stupidity extraordinary in so wise a woman, had told André all about the affair with Ranulph. When the curtains of their four-poster had enclosed her and André in that little intimate twilit world that was all their own she had felt her extraordinary behaviour rising up like a barrier between them. . . . She could not bear it. . . . For sixteen years she had kept nothing from André except the methods which she employed in dealing with him. . . . She blurted the whole thing out. . . . As soon as she had done it she felt immensely relieved and comforted, but the effect upon André had been quite disastrous.
He had kissed and comforted Rachell, explaining her behaviour to her as the effect of the extraordinary magnetism of the man. An unhealthy magnetism, he averred, compelling, queer. André himself had felt it. And grandpapa. Look how extraordinary had been the power of Mabier over grandpapa. And the children. They scampered at his heels like the rats after the Pied Piper. Something odd about the man.
“A fallen angel,” murmured Rachell to her pillows.
“What?” said André.
“That’s why he has such power,” said Rachell. “The giants, even though they fall from heaven, keep their stature.”
“What?” said André.
“Even though they take the wrong turning they still tower over pygmy men. And they see farther too. Even if they have barred themselves out from Paradise they can still see which way the paths run there, and how the fountains play, and suffer in proportion to their vision.”
“What?” said André.
“Good-night, darling,” said Rachell, and, relieved of her burden, slept.
But André did not. His feelings towards Ranulph, as the days went on, crystallized into something like hatred. The man had come between him and his father on his deathbed. Between him and his children, taking their confidence. Worst of all, he threatened to come between him and his wife. . . . Who and what was he?
André, washing the pigs off himself in the scullery, had a good mind not to obey Ranulph’s summons. Why should he? Then he remembered that letter, showing up so whitely. Somehow it drew him. He put on his coat again and went out into the windy twilight. He went up the stone steps built, French fashion, on the outside of the stable wall, and knocked at Ranulph’s door. It opened at once and he went in. He had not been in this room since Ranulph’s occupation and he looked round him curiously. The room, facing landwards away from the storm, was hushed and peaceful. A fire of vraic was burning and outside, through the window, André could just distinguish in the twilight the whiteness of the ladies-smocks in the meadow beyond the farmyard and the dim horizon of the bluebells. The room was very bare. Ranulph had added nothing to its simple furnishings but a writing table and a bookcase, but yet it seemed to André to be very much alive. The colour of the vraic flames was deeper, he thought, and the shadows darker and more shifting here than in other rooms. A great bowl of primroses stood on the table in the window—André wondered with a stab of jealousy if Rachell had given them to Ranulph—and the smell of the flowers, mingled with the scent of tobacco smoke and burning vraic, was to come back vividly to André, again and again, for the rest of his life.
“Sit down,” said Ranulph curtly.
“Thanks,” said André, and remained standing.
“I’ve a letter from a friend of mine, a man I met once out in Egypt, Charles Blenkinsop, a publisher. I’d like you to read it.”
“Blenkinsop, of Blenkinsop and Garland?” asked André. He spoke the great names of a leading English publishing firm with the breathless reverence of all unpublished authors for the gods upon Olympus. He took the letter in a hand that trembled a little—though why he could not conceive—and carried it to the window.
Ranulph, standing in front of the fire, his hands in his pockets, watched him. In spite of the dim light he could see André’s face go dead white and see how his hands trembled. He turned his back on him and lit the candles on the mantelpiece. When he turned round again it was to find André fixing him with eyes blazing with anger. The mixture of emotions in his face, fury and bewilderment with joy struggling somewhere behind them, was so comic that Ranulph laughed. The laugh added fuel to André’s rage.
“Did you—dare—to take my papers from my desk and read them?” he stuttered.
Ranulph laughed again. “Come, come, man, it didn’t take all that courage. You’re not as formidable as all that.”
André scented contempt, and flushed hotly. “It was unpardonable,” he said.
“Oh, quite,” said Ranulph dryly, “most of the things I do are. It was your own fault though. You let me loose on the farm on Christmas morning. I naturally ransacked your room. What else would you expect?”
André choked and Ranulph went gaily on. “Having found what I considered works of genius I naturally sent an example of them to an expert for his opinion. I always refer everything to experts. It saves trouble in the end. I was flattered to find his opinion coincides with my own.” He flicked the letter in André’s hands with his finger, and André looked down again at the sentences that seemed burning themselves into his brain. . . . “miracles of loveliness. Both poems and essays have a luminous beauty that is most arresting. . . . The power of deep thinking linked with both beauty and simplicity of expression is rare. . . . It is difficult to launch an unknown poet, but nevertheless at whatever risk to myself this one must be launched. . . . I hope you will be able to send me the rest of his work to consider. . . . I shall congratulate myself upon having the opportunity. . . . . I shall be happy to meet—”
Ranulph’s voice cut across the butter-smooth sentences. “One more bit of evidence for the superiority of my judgment over other people’s—yours for instance. I gather, since you apparently did nothing with them, that you thought nothing of your own work?”
André moistened his dry lips with his tongue. An intense palpitating joy was slowly creeping in and eating up his anger.
“I sent it to one or two publishers; they thought nothing of it,” he said hoarsely.
“And you sat down under their opinion? You aided and abetted them in hiding your light under a bushel? How like you! How like your crawling subservient humility!”
Again there was a tiny lash of contempt in Ranulph’s voice. André’s anger flickered back again at its touch.
“You have, I believe, done me an immeasurable service. . . . But yet you had no right—”
“None at all,” said Ranulph easily, “my behaviour was quite unprincipled, but then, luckily for you, I have no principles. . . . Sometimes, André, I wonder what measure of success would ever come to the children of light if they had not got
the children of this world to boost them.” He smiled and filled his pipe. “Yes, that’s it. Every successful child of light is surrounded by a little group of worldly children who take the bushel off the flame, shout about its brilliance, tell lies about its heat, blow out, when possible, rival flames, haggle for terms and generally advertise heaven by the methods of hell.”
He laughed and André, trembling, groped for the chair beside the fire. “Yes, André, there’s money to be made out of you and Blenkinsop, aided by me, will make it. Trust Blenkinsop. That’s all bunkum about the difficulty of launching unknown poets. Blenkinsop wouldn’t be gurgling about the cost to himself of publishing your work unless he thought it was a loss likely to be repaid a thousandfold. Yes, André, you’re rare. Didn’t you know you were rare?”
He spoke suddenly very gently, drew up a chair opposite to André and sat down, looking at him.
“No.” André, looking up, saw the queer tawny eyes, alight and eager, fixed on him. It struck him, irrelevantly, that in their eagerness and colour they were like Peronelle’s. But he was too stunned to follow out the idea. Ranulph leant back in his chair and began to talk, quietly and appreciatively and with deep insight, of André’s work. He seemed not to have forgotten a single word of the poems and essays he had read. He quoted whole lines of them and all the thought in them he seemed to have made his own. As he talked André felt all anger melt out of him, its place taken by a sensitive shrinking. . . . Those poems had been self-revealing and now this man, a stranger whom he disliked, had, in reading what he had written, read him too. Ranulph talked on and gradually this sensitiveness receded. So great was the man’s understanding that he felt something of the relief of a penitent who has shared the burden of self-knowledge with his confessor, followed in its turn by almost a feeling of affection for this man who knew his secrets. Then all other feeling was swamped in a flood of joy, a joy that as yet he could not quite analyse. He felt liberated. He felt, in anticipation, fulfilled. He felt alive and growing. Skilfully Ranulph turned the talk from André’s writing to himself. He spoke with admiration of André’s toil and with sympathy of his frustration. Letting loose his story-teller’s gifts he built a rosy picture of André’s future as a writer. Warming to his subject he leaned forward in his chair, waving his pipe and gesticulating. . . . André was reminded suddenly of an elder brother telling him stories in the garden at Le Paradis. . . . He began to smile at the other’s vehemence.
“And what of the farm?” he asked.
“You must get a good bailiff. You must waste no more time over the farm. It is a criminal, damnable shame that your talents should be wasted. . . . Waste. . . . There’s nothing worse in this world and nothing more tragic than the right man in the wrong place. Stay on at Bon Repos by all means, it’s your home and you and Rachell have created its spirit, but waste no more time on pig wash. Get a good bailiff.”
“And how am I to pay him?” smiled André. “If, as you think, a writer’s career is before me it will yet be some time before my earning powers can support bailiffs.”
“Get a bailiff with money of his own who will throw in his lot with yours and leave you his money when he dies,” said Ranulph.
André laughed out loud.
“This is not midsummer eve,” he said, “I shall not find such a rare bird under a rose bush at midnight.”
“It is Good Friday and you will find him on the other side of the hearth,” said Ranulph.
André stared and the laughter went out of his face. “You?”
“Yes,” said Ranulph, “I. I’ve been a wanderer all my life and I’d like to anchor at Bon Repos. I love the place, every stick and stone of it. I ask nothing better than to stay here. I’m a good farmer—I’ve given you proof of that—and I have money—plenty of it. I’ll put it into the farm. If I die first all that I have will be yours.”
André did not answer. Ranulph saw that all joy, amusement, gratitude and affection were draining away from his face, leaving it like stone. He realized, bitterly, that hidden under all surface emotions André had a fundamental dislike of him. . . . He did not want him at Bon Repos.
“I could not let you do that,” said André harshly.
“Why not?”
“It’s fantastic and I should not wish to give up all control of my own farm.”
“It would not be necessary for you to do that, or to give up all the work even. A little practical work is necessary to thought, I know—the rhythm of it. We would work together, but you would be free of all anxiety, able to come and go as you wished.”
“I could not possibly accept all that service from a stranger. It is strange to me that you should offer it. . . . What makes you?”
“Love of Bon Repos.”
“You talk more like a crazy idealist than like the practical man of affairs that you are. You know as well as I do that these compacts between strangers end badly.”
“I am no stranger.” He spoke seriously and André feared that he had wounded him.
“No,” he said generously, “you have been and are an amazingly good friend. I have no words to thank you. But there is no tie of blood between us—”
“Yes.” The word seemed to rip across the quietness of the room as though a curtain were torn from top to bottom. André looked up startled, and found the other man’s eyes fixed on him piercingly. He felt, as Rachell had felt, that Ranulph had come right into him, had taken possession of him. He felt almost a little thrill of fear and was aware again of the far away moaning of the wind, coming like a traveller from far distances, beating with its clamour about Bon Repos, sweeping on again into invisible space. This man in front of him, he felt, had something of the quality of a storm about him, something mysterious and restless, fierce and clamorous. He had felt this power often in the sailors and Island born men whom he had known—this strength of the sea and surge of the tides active in a man’s blood. He leant forward, gazing at Ranulph, afraid, yet drawn irresistibly to him.
Ranulph smiled. “André, to think that you wrote those amazing poems and then thought so little of them that you knuckled under to the opinion of two beggarly publishers! And to hide them away even from Rachell. What an instance of your appalling self-depreciation! Even as a baby you were like that—the result of our father’s bullying. We were both driven to loneliness by it, both of us. I rebelled and went off by myself, you hid. . . . Well, we’ve come together again now.”
The room was whirling round André. The faint noise of the wind seemed to have risen to a great roar in his ears and the vraic flames were sheets of fire in front of his eyes. Through it all he was aware that he had got up and gripped Ranulph’s hand. He heard strange sounds which seemed to be himself trying to speak and then from very far away came Ranulph’s voice saying, “Let’s have a drink. We need it,” and from even farther away came the clinking of glasses. Emotion swept over them and even Ranulph was submerged.
It seemed days later that, restored, they were sitting in their chairs and rising to the surface again after hours of talk.
“Why did you not tell me? Why did you not tell me?” reiterated André like a parrot.
“Independence. I did not want to admit the claims of family. I thought they would bore me. Then the children laid siege and my defences gradually came down. . . . The children did it.”
“And Rachell?” Ranulph fancied there was a touch of hardness in his brother’s voice. He looked him full in the eyes, challenging it.
“Yes, and Rachell. . . . And the discovery through your poems of the stuff of which you are made. . . . And the old man’s death. . . . They all took me captive.”
“The old man knew you? That was why he wanted you when he was dying?”
“Yes. He did not need telling. . . . Why did you think he wanted me?”
“He took strange fancies for people. It would have been like him to want a stranger at his deathbed rather than his
own son. We saw nothing strange in that, Rachell and I. And you are compelling. Rachell considers you of giant stature, a fallen angel.”
Ranulph got up. “I think I put that idea into her head,” he murmured. “I told her once that Apollyon, from outside the gate, could direct you correctly through the lanes of heaven. . . . Shall we go to her? Shall we tell her? I’d like her to know to-night.”
Twilight had deepened into night, and it was pitch dark as they went down the steps. The wind had risen higher and came leaping at them over the garden wall. It pounced on them, tearing at them, trying to drag them apart. André, he did not know why, suddenly gripped his brother’s arm as though to keep him at Bon Repos. Afterwards he remembered this little action.
V
By the afternoon of Saturday, as Ranulph had foreseen, it was blowing great guns. All night the wind increased and by morning there were floods of rain and a sou’wester that nearly lifted the roof off. The farm men, fighting their way in at Bon Repos gateway, declared that they had never known so sudden a spring storm. “Bad work on the sea to-night,” they muttered to each other ominously, and went about their work in silence. And, indeed, everyone was silent. Used as they were to storms they found something unusually oppressive in this one. The roar and the deluge, coming crash in the middle of an unusually lovely spring, seemed almost cruelly destructive, as though the gods, unpropitiated, had vowed to make men’s pleasure in peace and sunshine a brief thing.