Short Stories 1895-1926 (69 page)

I can just imagine how in these surroundings and with his temperament it must have vivified and infatuated that languid and rich Southern imagination which even to this day has never broken fully into flower. Fantastic, I admit. But remember that this thing was literally ex-terrestrial, a visitant from the wilds (or the serene) of ‘space', of the unknown, of the dreamed of. Nowadays we rap on a table and are presented with ectoplasm and similar evidences. On the other hand all pioneers, surely, in their exploitations even of the material world have had
some
twist and contortion of fantasy in their minds. This one's delight and desire were not in the gross world of the senses but in the regions of the mind. He had turned contemplative. It is easy to mock at him shut up, up there, in the silence with his talisman for whole nights together – the solitude, the intense heat of summer, the icy gales of winter, in that aloofness from most of what we mean by life. But in such times as ours is it worth while?

That black-haired creature then in saturnine cape and hat whom I myself had seen glide like an automaton into view and glide out of it again on the abandoned track, had sucked in his father's superstitions with his milk.
His
mind had been doubly dyed. He still secreted an implacable abhorrence of the North – an attitude, surely, nowadays only very faintly shared by any other living creature. But this was but one peculiar ingredient in the make-up of his extraordinary consciousness. Some day I will tell you a little more about him; but I doubt if my informant for an instant realized how queerly many of her intimate confidences that evening fell upon that cold, calm Englishman's ear.

While she talked, I listened and mused. It would be agreed I suppose that the winning side in that cruel and bloody Civil War has not hidden its own bright particular gems under a bushel. It has surged on from strength to strength. It has more diamonds to show than Beelzebub has flies. None the less even to-day in that vast half-ravished country of theirs there must be scores of half-hidden Koh-i-noors still waiting to be shared around – natural resources eagerly expecting the rap of some millionaire Moses's rod to pour out their abundance into the lap of these Nordic adventurers. Our own potentialities are now less abundant. It is a remarkable phenomenon. It sets one thinking – the problem, I mean, of hoarding versus exploiting; the problem of spiritual intensity versus material enterprise; of imaginative intuition versus man's mere reasoning powers. It sets me thinking of my own part in that afternoon's adventure. That inescapable law – the immutability of one's past!

Down there (as we sat in our moment's peace together), down there under cover of this shag of dusky woodlands lay concealed this incredible bauble which, if it emerged into our civilized world, would instantly knock the bottom out of the diamond market, and would awaken in scores of human hearts the vilest passion of which they are capable. There may be nothing much in that. But why should the mere memory of it have affected the very life and light of
me,
have sunk deep down into the depths of consciousness wherein all our ‘longings, dreams, and aspirations lie'? What strange inward radiance had shone on me that solemn hour? The problem – absurd though it may sound – continues to enthral me.

I stirred and looked round at her. For the moment I had not been listening. Perhaps that dark Edgar-Poe-like creature was even at this moment at his orisons! Night had been advancing while we talked and a stealthy moon-pale radiance lay over the wooded landscape spread out beneath us. And still this lady's low uneven voice in her peculiarly tortuous manner continued telling me her outlandish story, though I knew in my heart that she was sick to death of the whole business. For her its interest had long since worn through and was now worn out. The situation had become an unendurable burden and obstacle.

On the other hand, her mind was still obviously dominated by the presence and influence of her husband; though I rather doubt from what she said – mere inference, of course – if she had ever been for more than a little while in love with him. The momentary bonfire had burned itself out or been swiftly extinguished, and she had slipped apparently into the part of the childless mother, with this egocentric fanatic for
protégé
.

That is the position as it seemed to me then, as on reflection it seems to me now. Not that her husband was stark staring mad, only a little crazy. There are too few of his kind in this world. I wish there had been an opportunity of meeting the creature. Like nature with her sunsets, life, it seems, is beginning to mimic men's movies. The more I think of it, the more melodramatic the situation becomes. I hate fingering over, as Keats says, other people's domesticities. But it was plain from what she told me that for many years past a silent, continuous, but none the less embittered war of the spirit must have been raging between these two poor human derelicts.

Maybe she herself was a pace or two over the borderland. Like most people who are accustomed to solitude she would now and then forget as it were to go on talking, her eyes fixed meanwhile as if in reverie or in contemplation of some thought or feeling which she was anxious but loth or unable to express. Her eyes indeed had that half-vacant look in their beauty of those who day-dream. They seemed to divine rather than observe. And though she uttered no word to suggest she was unhappy, the tones of her voice, every instinctive gesture of her hands, told the same tale. There are sorrows and misgivings in every mind which we as human creatures shrink from revealing – that of growing old, for example; of falling short of one's poor best. But this was a canker much nearer home even than these. It was at her heart. She had been ‘confined into a cage' and had long since begun to realize what that means – even though freedom might prove nothing but a treachery and a delusion. Then, suddenly, had appeared this interloper from the great Outside – and had reminded her of her childhood and of England.

I see as I write the troubled simplicity that lightened her face as she spoke of it. The very ghost of childhood returned into it. Her own small daughter, if she had ever had one, might have looked like that – the young moon in the old moon's arms. Not, I suppose, that I am to blame for that, any more than the executioner's axe is to
blame
for the mute head in the basket of sawdust.

She has had her revenge, too; for now as I sit here, wasting my time and all this ink, and return in fancy to her Virginia, ‘my heart aches and a drowsy numbness fills my sense, As though of hemlock I had drunk'. It is useless to attempt to follow the inward workings of one's mind. All may seem quiet, and in repose there; and then you realize – by the weedy flotsam, the rollers, the screaming of the birds and the wreckage – the storm that is now over. However that may be, it is nothing but the truth to say that the faintest memory of her Virginia – the mere sound of the word makes me as homesick as a cat. Homesick, and I know not what else besides.

She can't have foreseen that. I must have appeared repulsively cold and indifferent – but I hope not mistrustful. You appear what you feel, feign as you may. I had butted in, then; unforgivably if you consider how. But apart from that, and far worse, it became clearer and clearer to me while we talked or sat silent that she had seen in me her long-deferred opportunity to escape. I was the fate-ordained saviour come to rescue her from the island on which she had been so long marooned. Even to suggest the faintest consciousness of such a thing may seem incredibly raw and ugly, if not worse. But there it is. Remember too, that the actual rights and wrongs of the problem did not so much as even arise. Maybe I should not now be loathing myself like this if they had. Yet it was not exactly cowardice that kept them back. All I can say is that I listened to these undertones in a fever of disquiet and perplexity.

I listened; but after all, the thread that skeins up even the most sophisticated heart is tied only with a slip knot. And how I wish I could give you the faintest notion of the marvel of that scene and night. The first thin silver of a crescent moon had come into the sky low down in the west and was being dogged by a planet glassy as a raindrop by candle-light. The blue above our heads was of a depth and brilliance that no Chinaman even has succeeded in putting on paper or clay. And there was I – the doors of understanding, of compassion, even of mere humanity shut and bolted – gently, insistently temporizing; and she zigzaggedly insinuating her long-suppressed desires, aspirations and anxieties into my mind.

‘What is he going to do with the thing when he goes?' I croaked at last. Can you imagine a more idiotic question in the circumstances? Think how it might have been taken! But the faintest subterfuge was impossible to her. She did not ‘take it' at all; she replied as simply as a child that the diamond was to be buried with him: ‘interred with his bones'! He had long since arranged, it seems, that the two old servants who from his infancy had watched over him as closely as guardian angels, were to dispose of his body so that not even the privy wolves of Hatton Garden could dig it up again. And Providence itself had made this possible.

There was a crevasse a few hundred yards beyond the valley beneath us. The meteor had at its impact split earth's shallow, brittle crust, and this was the scar. Drop him and his charge into that, down there – well, it would be a final exit for them both.

Time was flitting by and darkness had come before we rose from where we had seated ourselves at the edge of the track. The thick dust muffled our footsteps; the languid sweetness of the autumnal air was still resonant with the clashing cries of tiny ardent creatures exulting in their brief moment of life. My companion seemed to be in no apprehension of being missed from the house. It was her custom to wander in these solitudes alone in the evening.

I think of her there in the earlier days when love and marriage, when that tranquil shrine of light and loveliness, and these hills and unravished valleys were still new to her and still seemingly inexhaustible in romance and delight and promise. But now … For twelve solid months, she assured me, but one single stranger, and he only an enterprising hobo, had come their way; and hoboes prefer a different welcome from the one this particular hobo received. Twelve months: to her of waste and weariness; and I – I would all but sell my soul for but one week of it!

Well, there is no more story left. She asked me, she seemed to expect me, to come again the following evening. And I hadn't the courage to tell her it would be my last. I half-promised to do so, realizing none the less, I know, that it
was
only a half-promise and without much genuine intention behind it. What could I do? What purpose would there be? I have asked myself the question a thousand times. I am sick of it.

You yourself, I am sure, would vouch for my staidness and respectability even to an Income Tax Inspector. But then you are a seasoned sophisticated wretch. You enjoy looking at life steadily, especially when its back is turned. But what, say, of Blanche? What would she have said, do you think, if, like the Good Samaritan, I had brought the lady home in my hold-all? But that, yet again, does not arise. The one and only question that does is this: What kind of
me
was there for porter? My old jaded mind is utterly incapable of anything that America would recognize as ordinary hospitality. And there is a hospitality of the spirit.

You will notice I am facing the delicate situation not exactly with
sang
froid,
but with a hideous insensibility. I am not intending that. I am trying not to excuse, not even to explain, but to express my feelings
then –
the most obvious being that I hadn't the faintest wish in the world to enter that secret shrine again and to stand beneath that gilded sun. The mere thought of it was distasteful to the last degree. It had been an ‘event' in my uneventful existence – an initiation, a mystery, if you like; and it was over.

But apart from that, I see now (though not then, I swear) that other hidden door, ajar: that other shrine and gilded sun; enraying the secrecy of this desolated creature's mind and heart. Whatever, too, I may have said to the contrary, her company was strangely moving, strangely exciting. And I mean the company not merely of her mind and personality, but of her body. There was something in her face, her talk, her presence, that suggested an infinity of interest and suppressed activity. Some human beings are not merely intensely life-giving; but one realizes that the mystery of them is infinite – their reserves. You never get to the end of them. They may say the same thing a thousand times and it is always different. A Will-o'-the-wisp or a Kindly Light, whichever it may be, leads you on.

I guessed too, vaguely, the hoard of day-dreams and speculations which she was keeping back, which she could not express or had not the heart to express; which yet, given the opportunity, might have found their ease and happiness. Let me, at risk of banality and worse, be even more explicit. It was as if we two, for the century of a passionate moment, had been in love, and that in that moment I myself had exhausted that strange and terrifying experience. And then so far as I was concerned – then, not now – only ashes, ennui, disillusionment. And yet, I blame it less on myself than on the stone – its dream, its nightmare. And how could I justify that – say, to an English jury? It's monstrous I should be writing like this; but it must stand.

‘You will be going back to England soon?' she said to me after a long pause, and when we were about to say good-bye. I nodded, listening on and on to the broken syllables of that
England;
and once more silence edged in between us. Her face was close to mine in the dark. I was conscious of her breathing, that tears were in her eyes; conscious too of that other vision of her during the few minutes that had transcended these as manna transcends unleavened bread. If only the sister-meteorite of that ravished visitor below could at that instant have descended out of the intense inane and blotted me out.