Kitabı oku: «Across the Stream», sayfa 17
At that moment she heard light, swift footsteps on the stairs, and instantly her mind was made up, and she came out into the broad passage just as Archie was opposite her door. His face was eager and alert; there was no trace of intoxication there.
"Hullo, Jessie," he said, smiling. "Not gone to bed yet?"
She had to be wise: mere helpless prayer would avail nothing if she did not exert herself and make use of her wits and her love.
"No: I didn't feel sleepy," she said. "You don't look sleepy either. Are you going to bed?"
"No, not yet," said Archie.
Jessie came a step closer to him.
"Oh, Archie, are you going to talk to Martin?" she asked. "Mayn't I come? I should so love to, for I know all that Martin means to you. You know I did hear him talking to you before. It would be lovely if I could hear you talking together, so that I knew what he said."
Archie looked at her.
"Well, I don't know why not," he said. "But you must promise not to interrupt. Perhaps you'll neither hear nor see anything. But I don't see why you shouldn't try. It's just a seance. Come along, Jessie."
He led the way into his bedroom, and shut the door.
"I shall really rather like you to be here," he said. "I'm glad you suggested it. For now and then I go into very deep trance, and then I can't remember what exactly has happened. I only know that there has been round me an atmosphere – to call it that – in which I glow and expand. Sometimes I rather think I struggle and groan: you mustn't mind that. It's only the protest of my material earthly self. Come on: let's begin. I long for Martin to come."
Jessie felt her dread and horror of the occult surge up in her, and it required all her resolution to remain here. But the call of her love was imperative: if she was to be permitted to help Archie at all, she must learn what it was that possessed him, and find means to combat it. She had to know first what it was, penetrate, so far as her love had power, into the source of it, diagnose it, if she was to help in curing.
"What are you going to do?" she said.
"It's very simple; you'll soon see. Sit down, Jessie."
He went to the window and drew aside the curtains. He put on the table in front of where he was to sit the silver top of some toilet-bottle, and then went to the door and turned out all the electric lights at the switch-board. The moonlight outside, without shining directly into the room, made the objects in it clearly though duskily visible, and Jessie, where she sat with her back to the light, could see Archie's face and outline, when her eyes got accustomed to the dimness, quite distinctly. He sat close to her at the end of the writing-table, and just in front of him glimmered the stopper from the toilet-bottle.
"Now I'm going to look at that till I go off into trance," he said. "Watch what happens very closely, for I may go into deep trance, and promise me not to move till I come round again. I daresay you will neither hear nor see anything, but I don't know."
For some few minutes, as far as the girl could judge, they sat in silence. Once or twice Archie shifted his position slightly, and she heard his shirt-front creak a little as he breathed quietly and normally. Outside a little wind stirred, and the tassel of the blind tapped against the sill.
Then there came a change: his breathing grew louder, as if he panted for air, and now and again he moaned, and she saw his head drop forward. This moaning sound was horrible to hear, and, but for her promise, and the insistent urging of her love, she must have got up and roused him. His breath whistled between his lips as he took it in, and his face seemed to be shining with some dew of anguish, and his arms twisted and writhed as if struggling against some overmastering force. Then suddenly all sign of struggle ceased, he sat bent forward, but perfectly still, and from the table in front of him came three loud, peremptory raps, as of splitting wood. From the dusk of the room came others which she could not localize.
Archie raised his head, and, instead of leaning over the table, sank back in his chair, his arms hanging limp by his side. He began to whisper to himself, and soon Jessie caught the words.
"Martin, are you here?" he kept repeating. "Martin, are you here?
Martin, Martin?"
There was more light in the room now. It came from a pale greyish efflorescence of illumination, globular in shape, that lay apparently over his left breast. It made its immediate neighbourhood quite bright: she could see the stud in his shirt with absolute distinctness. Out of it there came a little wisp of mist that floated up like a stream of smoke above his shoulders. In the air there, independently of this, there was forming another mist-like substance, and the stream that came away from Archie seemed to join this. It began to take shape: it spread upwards and downwards into the semblance of a column, its edges losing themselves in the dark. Lines began to be interwoven within it: it was as if something was forming inside it, like a chicken in an egg. It lost its vagueness of outline, plaiting and weaving itself together: there appeared an arm bare to the shoulder; above that she could see a neck, and slowly above the neck there grew a smiling, splendid face. There seemed to be a grey robe cast about the body, from which the bare arm protruded, but much of this was vague.
Jessie felt as if some awful paralysis of terror lay over her spirit. The whole room, cool and fresh with the night-air passing through the open window, reeked, to her spiritual sense, with evil and unnameable corruption. Over her conscious superficial self, the mechanism that directed her limbs and worked in her brain, she had complete control: for Archie's sake she was learning about this hellish visitor who came to him. But within, her soul cried out in a horror of uttermost darkness. Then her will took hold of that too: whatever God permitted must be faced for the sake of love.
Just then Archie spoke in an odd muffled voice.
"I'm going very deep," he said. "But, Martin, you've made me so happy all day. You've hardly left me at all. You're getting to be part of me, aren't you? Let's talk about Helena. I say, she is a devil, isn't she?"
Jessie had not known that anything could be so horrible as the smiling face that the apparition bent on him.
"But you've ceased hating her," it said. "You love her, don't you?
Always cling to love!"
"I know, I adore her. I believe she loves me too." He laughed and licked his lips and his voice sank, so that Jessie could catch no word of what he said. But he spoke for a long time, laughing occasionally, and making horrible little movements with his arms as if he clasped something. Now and then he would perhaps ask a question, for in the same inaudible manner the apparition answered him, laughing sometimes in response. Once or twice in that devilish colloquy she caught a word or two of hideous and carnal import, and her sickened love nearly withered within her. But because love is immortal, and cannot perish though all the blasts of hell rage against it, it still stood firm, though scorched and beaten upon. If she let it die, she felt that she would be no better than that visible incarnation of evil that smiled and bent over Archie.
Presently that devilish whispering ceased, and she saw that the apparition was beginning to lose its clearness of outline. Slowly it began to disintegrate into the weavings of mist out of which it came, and Archie said, "Good-bye, Martin, but not for long." Some of these streamers seemed to disperse in the air, others, like an eddying water-spout, seemed to draw back into that focus of light which lay over Archie's breast. Then that too began to fade, and in the stillness and quiet she again heard the creaking of his shirt as he lay back in his chair with closed eyes. Then the struggles and moanings, the writhings of his arms began again, and again subsided, and he lay quite still. Outside the night-wind stirred and dropped.
Then Archie spoke in a tired, husky voice.
"Hullo, Jessie," he said, "it's all over. By Jove, it was ripping. But I went awfully deep. I can remember nothing after Martin came. What did he say?"
Jessie got up.
"I heard hardly anything," she said. "He spoke in whispers, and so did you."
"Did you see him?" asked Archie.
"Yes, quite clearly. But I think I'll go to bed now. You look very tired."
He had got up and turned on the electric light, and stood by the door rubbing his eyes.
"Yes, I am tired," he said, "but I'm divinely happy. Tell me to-morrow whatever you can remember. Good-night, Jess. You are a good sort."
He detained her hand for a moment.
"We're cousins, Jess," he said, "and you're an awfully good friend.
Won't you give me a kiss?"
For one second she shrank from him in nameless horror. The next she put it all from her, for her shrinking, no angel of the Lord, but a weak, cowardly impulse, stood full in the path of love, and while it was there she could not reach Archie.
"Why, of course," she said, kissing him. "Good-night, Archie; sleep well."
She went to her room, and turned on all the lights. She felt as if she had been assisting at some unclean orgy, she felt tainted and defiled by the very presence of that white evil thing that had stood close to her, and whispered and laughed with Archie. As yet she had but looked on it; what lay in front of her was to grapple with it and tear it out of the tabernacle which it had begun to inhabit. As far as she could understand the situation, it was not wholly in possession as yet, for part of it, when it materialized, seemed to form itself in the air, and part only to ooze out of its victim. Through what adventures and combats her way should take her she could form no conception, but what she had gained to-night, which was worth a hundred times the sickness and horror of her soul, was the certain knowledge that some spirit of discarnate evil was making its home in her beloved. It had usurped the guise of Martin, it masqueraded as Martin, Archie thought it was Martin. She remembered how, just a week ago, he had told her that he was like an empty house, denuded of the spirit that dwelt there, a living corpse by which he asked her to sit sometimes. At the time that had seemed to her just the figure by which he expressed the desolation of his heart; now it revealed itself as a true and literal statement. And there had begun to enter into him, as tenant of the uninhabited rooms, the horror that she had seen.
Jessie fell on her knees by her bedside, and opened her heart to the Infinite Love. It was through Its aid alone that she would be able to accomplish the rescue for which she was willing to give her life and soul.
CHAPTER XII
Archie was walking back to the house in Grosvenor Square from Oakland Crescent, on the afternoon of Helena's wedding. Owing to the acute suspense of the European situation, the plans of the newly married couple had been changed, and, instead of setting off at once in the yacht for a month in the Norwegian fjords, they had gone to a house of Lord Harlow's in Surrey to await developments in the crisis or some kind of settlement. It was still uncertain whether England would be drawn into the war, though opinion generally regarded that as inevitable, and in this case no doubt Lord Harlow, an ex-Guardsman, would rejoin his regiment. Archie's mother, after the departure of the bridal couple, had also left town for Lacebury, taking with her Jessie and Colonel Vautier for a few days' visit; but Archie had decided to stop another night in London.
There had been the usual crowds and chatterings and excitement, the front pew kept for a princess, the signing of names in the vestry, the red carpets and wedding-marches, and the whole ceremony had filled Archie with the greatest amusement. But the subsequent proceedings had not amused him so much, and Helena's departure, looking prettier than ever, with her husband, had annoyed and exasperated him. He did not like to think of them together, and, though only a couple of nights ago he and Martin had found good cause for whispers and laughter over this, it was not so diverting when it actually occurred as it had promised to be. Part of that midnight seance which he could not at first remember had found its way into his conscious mind, and he knew that had been talked about, and had ascertained, with considerable relief, that Jessie had not been able to hear it. But now there was a savage bitterness in his mind about it; Helena seemed to have played him false again. She ought to have refused to marry the Bradshaw at the last moment, and it was an ineffectual balm to know she did not care for him. Perhaps, as Jessie had once said (though withdrawing it afterwards), she cared for nobody, but now Archie believed that she cared for him. It maddened him to think that she was the Bradshaw's "ABC," and in those circumstances he had judged it better to remain in town for the night, and distract his mind and soothe his longings with the amusement and aids to forgetfulness which London was so ready to offer to a young man who was looking for adventures.
But London proved disappointing: it did not seem to be thinking of its amusements at all. Archie called to see a friend who last week had shown himself an eager and admirable companion, but, found him to-day disinclined for another night of similar diversion, for he could neither think nor talk about anything else than the imminence of war. Archie felt himself quite incapable of taking any active interest in that; it weighted nothing in the balance compared with the stern duty of seeking enjoyment and forgetting about Helena. What if England did go to war with Germany? Certainly he hoped she would not; she had made no more than a friendly understanding with her Allies – indeed they were not even Allies, they were but well-disposed nations – but, even if she did, what then? There was an English fleet, was there not, which cost an immense amount of money to render invincible; but it was invincible. Why, then, should he bother about it, since he was not a sailor? It was further supposed that Germany had an invincible army; and there you were! And if England had no army at all to speak of, it was quite clear she could no more fight Germany on land than Germany could fight her by sea. So what on earth prevented a little dinner at a restaurant and an hour at a music-hall and a little supper somewhere and anything that turned up? Something always turned up, and was usually amusing for an hour or two. But his friend thought otherwise, and kept diving out into the street to get some fresh edition of an evening paper hot from the press and crammed with fresh inventions, and Archie left this insane patriot in disgust at his excitement over so detached an affair as a European war. He tried a second friend with no better success; there was a certain excuse for him, as he was a subaltern in the Guards. But for the first friend there was none, as he was only in an office in the city.
There were still four or five hours to get through before it would be reasonable to think about dinner, after which, even if he started alone, the hours would take care of themselves very pleasantly; but he had to fill the interval somehow. There were some proofs of his book waiting for him at home, and, hoping to get interested in this first-born public child of his brain, he sat down with a view to correcting them. But he found himself reading the pages as if there was nothing intelligible printed on them. True, if he forced himself to attend, he could see that grammatical sentences succeeded each other; but they conveyed no further impression. There was a lot about the sea, but why on earth had he taken the trouble to write it? He could remember writing it; he could call up an image of himself sitting in the garden at Silorno, eagerly writing, conscientiously erasing, walking up and down in the attempt to frame a phrase that should exactly reproduce some mood of his mind. But what had inspired those strivings and despairs and exultations?
Here was the record of them, and it seemed now to be about nothing. "The rain in the night had washed the white soil into the rim of the sea, and it was clouded like absinthe." He could well remember the search for, and the finding of that particular simile. He and Harry had been into Genoa a week before, and, out of curiosity, had ordered absinthe at a cafe. The drink, qua drink, was mildly unpleasant, resembling aniseed, but it had been worth while having it, merely to have got that perfectly fitting simile. The effect, too, had been rather remarkable; it produced a sort of heady lightness and sense of well-being; colours seemed strangely vivid and intensified, and…
Archie got up from his meaningless proofs. It was absinthe that would help him to fill up those dull hours till dinner-time, and he remembered having seen in some little French restaurant in Soho the stuff he wanted. Very likely you could get it anywhere, but he wanted it from that particular place, for there had come in one evening, when he dined there, a most melancholy-looking person who had ordered it and sat and sipped. Somehow the man's face had made an impression on him, so unhappy was it. He remembered also his face half an hour afterwards, when he began his dinner, and no serener, more contented countenance could have been imagined… So he must have his absinthe from that restaurant; clearly they had a very good brand of it there.
As he drove out alone that evening to dine, he heard the newsvenders shouting out the English ultimatum to Germany, and saw the placards in the streets. The shouting sounded wonderfully musical, and below the roar of the street traffic was a muffled harmony as of pealing bells. The drab colours of London were shot with prismatic hues; never had the streets appeared so beautiful. There was even beauty in the fact of the outbreak of war, for England was going to war for the sake of liberty, which was a fine, a noble adventure. And how lovely the English girls and boys were, who crowded the pavements! They were like beds of exquisite flowers. For himself, he was going back to dine at the French restaurant in Soho, for that would be in the nature of supporting our new Allies. Afterwards there were the streets and the music-halls, and all the mysteries of the short summer night. Then dawn would break, rose-coloured dawn, with her finger on her lips, and sweet, silent mouth, a little ashamed of her sister, night, but sympathetic at heart. Dawn was always a little prudish, a little Quakerish.
* * * * *
The days of a divine August went by, and the line of German invasion swept forward like a tide that knows no ebb over all Belgium and North-East France. The British Expeditionary Force started, and was swept back like the flotsam on the seashore. The call came for the raising of an army, and east and west, north and south, the recruiting offices were like choked waterways, and still the flood of men, in whose hearts the fact of England had awoke, poured in. Hospitals were gorged with the returning wounded; women by the hundred and by the thousand volunteered as nurses, and went to hospitals to be trained. The whole of comfortable England, intent hitherto on its sports, its leisure, its general superiority to the rest of the world, suddenly became aware that an immense and vital danger threatened it. A chorus of objurgation arose from the brazen-throated press, each organ striving to shout the loudest, at the unpreparedness of the country, and much valuable energy was spent in headlines and recriminations. There was a shortage of guns, a shortage of ammunition, a shortage of everything which constitutes the sinews of war. The only thing of which there was not a shortage was of those who threw aside all other considerations, such as income and secure living and life itself, and gave themselves to assist, in what manner they could, the cause for which England had gone to war.
To Archie this all seemed a very hysterical and uncomfortable attack of nerves. In several ways it affected him personally, for William, than whom there was no more reliable servant, was among the first to leave his well-paid situation and present himself at a recruiting office. Archie hated that: there would be the nuisance of getting a new servant, who did not know where precisely he ought to put Archie's tooth-powder, and how to arrange his clothes. William had announced the fact too, in the suddenest of manners; he brought it out as he brought in Archie's morning tea.
"And if you can spare me at once, my lord," he said, "I had better go on
Saturday."
Archie felt peculiarly devilish that morning; it rained, and the absinthe that should have arrived last night had not come.
"I think it's very inconsiderate of you, William," he said. "But I suppose you expect to get on well, and draw higher pay than you get here. So I shall have to raise your wages. All right; I'll give you a pound a month more, and don't let me hear any more about it."
He knew perfectly well that this was not William's reason, but it amused him to suggest it. He wanted to see how William would take it. The fact that he knew that the man was devoted to him made the point.
William busied himself with razors and tooth-brushes, replying nothing.
"Can't you hear what I say?" asked Archie, pouring himself out his tea.
William faced round.
"Yes, Master Archie," he said. "I heard. But I knew you didn't mean that. You know how I've served you and worked for you all these years. You would scorn to think that of me, I should say."
Archie had noticed the "Master Archie" instead of "my lord"; both William and Blessington often forgot that he was "my lord," and it always used to please him that to the sense of love he was still a young boy. And, in spite of his irritation and peevish morning temper, it touched some part of him that still loved below the corruption that was spreading over him like some jungle-growing lichen. But he had to force his way through that to reply.
"You must do as you think right, William," he said.
William had finished the arrangements of his dressing, and stood for a moment by his bedside with Archie's evening clothes bundled on to his arm.
"Yes, Master Archie," he said. "And you'll be joining up too before long, won't you? I should dearly love to be your soldier-servant, sir, if you could manage it."
All Archie's ill-humour returned at that unfortunate suggestion.
"Perhaps you had better not be impertinent," he said. "That'll do."
William's face fell.
"I had no thought of impertinence, my lord," he said. "I only thought – "
"I told you that would do," said Archie.
* * * * *
Three days afterwards William left. He came to say good-bye to Archie, who did not look up from the paper he was reading. Archie was suffering inconvenience from his departure, and this was the best way of making William feel it. But when the door had shut again, and William was gone, he felt a sudden horror of the thing that seemed to be himself, and he ran out, and called William back. All these days he had not had a word or kindly gesture for him…
"Good-bye, William," he said. "I wish you all good luck. I've treated you like a beast these last days, and I'm awfully sorry. You're the best fellow a man could have, and you must try to forget the horrid way I've behaved."
William stood with his hand in Archie's for a moment.
"You're always my Master Archie, sir," he said.
* * * * *
Well, there was an end of William: before he had got back to his paper again Archie wondered what had possessed him to throw a kind word to a dog like that, who had left him at three days' notice to join this ridiculous military conspiracy. William did not care how much he inconvenienced Archie, who had always treated him more like a subordinate friend than a servant. He had helped William in a hundred ways: had given him old clothes, had constantly asked after his mother, had left his letters about for William to read if he chose. It seemed rank treachery…
Others were treacherous too; his mother, for instance, was immediately going up to town, to take charge of the house in Grosvenor Square, which was to be turned into a hospital for wounded officers. She was to become a sort of housekeeper, so Archie figured it, and merely superintend domestic arrangements. She would have nothing to do with the nursing and the surgery, which had a certain fascination… He could picture a sort of pleasure in seeing a man's leg cut off, or in standing by while doctors pulled bandages off festering wounds. To feel well and strong while others were suffering had an intelligible interest: to witness decay and corruption and pain was a point that appealed to him now. But Lady Tintagel was going to do nothing of the sort: she was just going to be a housekeeper. It was very selfish of her; Archie would certainly want, from time to time, to go up to town and spend a night or two there, and now he would have to go to a hotel or a club, instead of profiting by the spacious privacy of his father's house. Charity begins at home; and his mother had started charity on most extraneous lines. Jessie had followed this lead, "the lead of so-called trumps," as Archie framed a private phrase. She would start by being not even a housekeeper, but a sort of kitchen-maid at the same hospital. She had an insane desire to work, to do something that cost her something, instead of engaging a kitchen-maid, and paying her wages to go to some hospital or other. There was a craze for "personal service," instead of getting other people to do work for you, if you felt work had to be done. People wanted to "do their bit," to employ an odious expression which was beginning to obtain currency. The nation was going to be mobilized; hand and heart had to serve some vague national idea. Occasionally, as on the night when war was declared, Archie saw an aesthetic beauty in the notion of upholding rights and liberties; but he had not then reckoned with the fact that personal inconvenience might result from that quixotic revolution. Quixotism was fine in theory, but it was a dream, not to be encouraged in waking hours, when far more important and realizable commodities, like whisky and absinthe, engaged the true attention.
But, whoever else was treacherous, his father at least was loyal, and showed no sign of becoming a butler or a footman, to correspond with his wife and Jessie. Occasionally some grave report concerning the German advance through Belgium used to reach his brain, and he would walk up and down his room in the evening with a martial tread, and a glance at a sword that hung above his writing-table, and wish he was younger and able to "have a go" at those invading locusts. But invariably this mood, which was always short, was succeeded by another, not bellicose but domestic.
"This damned war is going to break up home-life in England," he would say, "and I've no doubt that was what the Germans aimed at. And they're succeeding too. Look at this house: there's you mother going to leave us, and there's Helena's husband expecting every day to be sent to France, and there's Jessie leaving her father to wash up dishes. What's going to become of our English homes if that goes on? – for, mark you, they are the root of our national life. It's digging up the trees' roots to break up English homes. You and I, Archie, are the only ones who are staunch to our homes. Pass me that bottle, will you?"
"May I help myself on the way?" said Archie.
"Yes, of course, my dear boy. I say, it was a funny state of things when you and I used to have our evening drinks alone, instead of enjoying them and chatting over them together. Your man, William, too, he's gone and enlisted, hasn't he? The old bulwarks of England are going fast: the homes are being broken up, and the very servants come and go as they choose. An establishment was an establishment in the old days: it all stood and fell together, if you see what I mean. But I wish I was young enough to have a go at the Boches."
"I'm thinking of going," Archie would say, merely in order to enjoy his father's reply.
"Well, in my opinion, you'll be doing a very wrong thing, then," said Lord Tintagel. "I hope you won't seriously think of that. I tell you your duty is here, with your poor old father. When I'm gone you may do what you please, and I daresay you won't have very long to wait. But, while I'm here, I hope you'll remember that they say in church 'Honour thy father and thy mother.' You can't go behind the commandments, or the psalms, whichever it is."
But these sessions in Lord Tintagel's room of an evening, with the liquid in the decanter sinking steadily like a well in time of drought, were becoming rather tedious to Archie. Since his discovery of absinthe they had even become rather gross, and he congratulated himself on having seen the sordidness of mere swilling. That sort of thing was only fit for coarse, rough tastes; it seemed to him to lack all delicacy and aesthetic value, and he often left his father, who congratulated him on his abstemiousness after no more than a friendly glass of good fellowship, and went upstairs to his room to enjoy subtler and more refined sensations. Indeed, his chief interest in that half-hour or so in his father's room was derived from the sight of his father's heavy potations, the struggle of his maundering thoughts to emerge into language, much as a tilted half-moon struggles to pierce the flying clouds on some tempestuous night. The sight of his father's deterioration and gradual wreck somehow fascinated him; there was decay and corruption there, and those no longer aroused in him that horror with which in dream he had observed the emergence of the writhing worms from the white statue of Helena. Such things were no longer disgusting and repulsive: they claimed kinship with something in his soul that was very potent. Once Martin had alluded to that vision as a warning, and he had not taken that warning, in consequence of which he had passed an utterly miserable month after Helena's rejection of him. Now values had altogether changed: decay no longer revolted him. But, with a hypocrisy that had become characteristic of him, he told himself that the sight of his father's nightly intoxication was a lesson to himself. He must observe that degrading spectacle, and learn from it what the result of too much whisky was. And then he retired to his bedroom to think it over as he sipped the clouded aroma of his absinthe.
