“They have but a single soul. In those days men divided, and subdivided them, oblivious of the one pale spirit which underlay those seemingly separate forms.”
Cecilia’s glance passed swiftly from the manservant to Stephen.
She saw one of her husband’s eyes rise visibly. Stephen did so hate one thing to be confounded with another.
“Oh, come, sir,” she heard him say; “you don’t surely tell us that dandelions and roses have the same pale spirit!”
Mr. Stone looked at him wistfully.
“Did I say that?” he said. “I had no wish to be dogmatic.”
“Not at all, sir, not at all,” murmured Stephen.
Thyme, leaning over to her mother, whispered “Oh, Mother, don’t let grandfather be queer; I can’t bear it to-night!”
Cecilia, at her wits’ end, said hurriedly:
“Dad, will you tell us what sort of character you think that little girl who comes to you has?”
Mr. Stone paused in the act of drinking water; his attention had evidently been riveted; he did not, however, speak. And Cecilia, seeing that the butler, out of the perversity which she found so conspicuous in her servants, was about to hand him beef, made a desperate movement with her lips. “No, Charles, not there, not there!”
The butler, tightening his lips, passed on. Mr. Stone spoke:
“I had not considered that. She is rather of a Celtic than an Anglo-Saxon type; the cheekbones are prominent; the jaw is not massive; the head is broad – if I can remember I will measure it; the eyes are of a peculiar blue, resembling chicory flowers; the mouth – ,” Mr. Stone paused.
Cecilia thought: ‘What a lucky find! Now perhaps he will go on all right!’
“I do not know,” Mr. Stone resumed, speaking in a far-off voice, “whether she would be virtuous.”
Cecilia heard Stephen drinking sherry; Thyme, too, was drinking something; she herself drank nothing, but, pink and quiet, for she was a well-bred woman, said:
“You have no new potatoes, dear. Charles, give Mr. Stone some new potatoes.”
By the almost vindictive expression on Stephen’s face she saw, however, that her failure had decided him to resume command of the situation. “Talking of brotherhood, sir,” he said dryly, “would you go so far as to say that a new potato is the brother of a bean?”
Mr. Stone, on whose plate these two vegetables reposed, looked almost painfully confused.
“I do not perceive,” he stammered, “any difference between them.”
“It’s true,” said Stephen; “the same pale spirit can be extracted from them both.”
Mr. Stone looked up at him.
“You laugh at me,” he said. “I cannot help it; but you must not laugh at life – that is blasphemy.”
Before the piercing wistfulness of that sudden gaze Stephen was abashed. Cecilia saw him bite his lower lip.
“We’re talking too much,” he said; “we really must let your father eat!” And the rest of the dinner was achieved in silence.
When Mr. Stone, refusing to be accompanied, had taken his departure, and Thyme had gone to bed, Stephen withdrew to his study. This room, which had a different air from any other portion of the house, was sacred to his private life. Here, in specially designed compartments, he kept his golf clubs, pipes, and papers. Nothing was touched by anyone except himself, and twice a week by one particular housemaid. Here was no bust of Socrates, no books in deerskin bindings, but a bookcase filled with treatises on law, Blue Books, reviews, and the novels of Sir Walter Scott; two black oak cabinets stood side by side against the wall filled with small drawers. When these cabinets were opened and the drawers drawn forward there emerged a scent of metal polish. If the green-baize covers of the drawers were lifted, there were seen coins, carefully arranged with labels – as one may see plants growing in rows, each with its little name tied on. To these tidy rows of shining metal discs Stephen turned in moments when his spirit was fatigued. To add to them, touch them, read their names, gave him the sweet, secret feeling which comes to a man who rubs one hand against the other. Like a dram-drinker, Stephen drank – in little doses – of the feeling these coins gave him. They were his creative work, his history of the world. To them he gave that side of him which refused to find its full expression in summarising law, playing golf, or reading the reviews; that side of a man which aches, he knows not wherefore, to construct something ere he die. From Rameses to George IV. the coins lay within those drawers – links of the long unbroken chain of authority.
Putting on an old black velvet jacket laid out for him across a chair, and lighting the pipe that he could never bring himself to smoke in his formal dinner clothes, he went to the right-hand cabinet, and opened it. He stood with a smile, taking up coins one by one. In this particular drawer they were of the best Byzantine dynasty, very rare. He did not see that Cecilia had stolen in, and was silently regarding him. Her eyes seemed doubting at that moment whether or no she loved him who stood there touching that other mistress of his thoughts – that other mistress with whom he spent so many evening hours. The little green-baize cover fell. Cecilia said suddenly:
“Stephen, I feel as if I must tell Father where that girl is!”
Stephen turned.
“My dear child,” he answered in his special voice, which, like champagne, seemed to have been dried by artifice, “you don’t want to reopen the whole thing?”
“But I can see he really is upset about it; he’s looking so awfully white and thin.”
“He ought to give up that bathing in the Serpentine. At his age it’s monstrous. And surely any other girl will do just as well?”
“He seems to set store by reading to her specially.”
Stephen shrugged his shoulders. It had happened to him on one occasion to be present when Mr. Stone was declaiming some pages of his manuscript. He had never forgotten the discomfort of the experience. “That crazy stuff,” as he had called it to Cecilia afterwards, had remained on his mind, heavy and damp, like a cold linseed poultice. His wife’s father was a crank, and perhaps even a little more than a crank, a wee bit “touched” – that she couldn’t help, poor girl; but any allusion to his cranky produce gave Stephen pain. Nor had he forgotten his experience at dinner.
“He seems to have grown fond of her,” murmured Cecilia.
“But it’s absurd at his time of life!”
“Perhaps that makes him feel it more; people do miss things when they are old!”
Stephen slid the drawer back into its socket. There was dry decision in that gesture.
“Look here! Let’s exercise a little common sense; it’s been sacrificed to sentiment all through this wretched business. One wants to be kind, of course; but one’s got to draw the line.”
“Ah!” said Cecilia; “where?”
“The thing,” went on Stephen, “has been a mistake from first to last. It’s all very well up to a certain point, but after that it becomes destructive of all comfort. It doesn’t do to let these people come into personal contact with you. There are the proper channels for that sort of thing.”
Cecilia’s eyes were lowered, as though she did not dare to let him see her thoughts.
“It seems so horrid,” she said; “and father is not like other people.”
“He is not,” said Stephen dryly; “we had a pretty good instance of that this evening. But Hilary and your sister are. There’s something most distasteful to me, too, about Thyme’s going about slumming. You see what she’s been let in for this afternoon. The notion of that baby being killed through the man’s treatment of his wife, and that, no doubt, arising from the girl’s leaving them, is most repulsive!”
To these words Cecilia answered with a sound almost like a gasp. “I hadn’t thought of that. Then we’re responsible; it was we who advised Hilary to make her change her lodging.”
Stephen stared; he regretted sincerely that his legal habit of mind had made him put the case so clearly.
“I can’t imagine,” he said, almost violently, “what possesses everybody! We – responsible! Good gracious! Because we gave Hilary some sound advice! What next?”
Cecilia turned to the empty hearth.
“Thyme has been telling me about that poor little thing. It seems so dreadful, and I can’t get rid of the feeling that we’re – we’re all mixed up with it!”
“Mixed up with what?”
“I don’t know; it’s just a feeling like – like being haunted.”
Stephen took her quietly by the arm.
“My dear old girl,” he said, “I’d no idea that you were run down like this. To-morrow’s Thursday, and I can get away at three. We’ll motor down to Richmond, and have a round or two!”
Cecilia quivered; for a moment it seemed that she was about to burst out crying. Stephen stroked her shoulder steadily. Cecilia must have felt his dread; she struggled loyally with her emotion.
“That will be very jolly,” she said at last.
Stephen drew a deep breath.
“And don’t you worry, dear,” he said, “about your dad; he’ll have forgotten the whole thing in a day or two; he’s far too wrapped up in his book. Now trot along to bed; I’ll be up directly.”
Before going out Cecilia looked back at him. How wonderful was that look, which Stephen did not – perhaps intentionally – see. Mocking, almost hating, and yet thanking him for having refused to let her be emotional and yield herself up for once to what she felt, showing him too how clearly she saw through his own masculine refusal to be made to feel, and how she half-admired it – all this was in that look, and more. Then she went out.
Stephen glanced quickly at the door, and, pursing up his lips, frowned. He threw the window open, and inhaled the night air.
‘If I don’t look out,’ he thought, ‘I shall be having her mixed up with this. I was an ass ever to have spoken to old Hilary. I ought to have ignored the matter altogether. It’s a lesson not to meddle with people in those places. I hope to God she’ll be herself tomorrow!’
Outside, under the soft black foliage of the Square, beneath the slim sickle of the moon, two cats were hunting after happiness; their savage cries of passion rang in the blossom-scented air like a cry of dark humanity in the jungle of dim streets. Stephen, with a shiver of disgust, for his nerves were on edge, shut the window with a slam.
CHAPTER XXVIII
HILARY HEARS THE CUCKOO SING
It was not left to Cecilia alone to remark how very white Mr. Stone looked in these days.
The wild force which every year visits the world, driving with its soft violence snowy clouds and their dark shadows, breaking through all crusts and sheaths, covering the earth in a fierce embrace; the wild force which turns form to form, and with its million leapings, swift as the flight of swallows and the arrow-darts of the rain, hurries everything on to sweet mingling – this great, wild force of universal life, so-called the Spring, had come to Mr. Stone, like new wine to some old bottle. And Hilary, to whom it had come, too, watching him every morning setting forth with a rough towel across his arm, wondered whether the old man would not this time leave his spirit swimming in the chill waters of the Serpentine – so near that spirit seemed to breaking through its fragile shell.
Four days had gone by since the interview at which he had sent away the little model, and life in his household – that quiet backwater choked with lilies – seemed to have resumed the tranquillity enjoyed before this intrusion of rude life. The paper whiteness of Mr. Stone was the only patent evidence that anything disturbing had occurred – that and certain feelings about which the strictest silence was preserved.
On the morning of the fifth day, seeing the old man stumble on the level flagstones of the garden, Hilary finished dressing hastily, and followed. He overtook him walking forward feebly beneath the candelabra of flowering chestnut-trees, with a hail-shower striking white on his high shoulders; and, placing himself alongside, without greeting – for forms were all one to Mr. Stone – he said:
“Surely you don’t mean to bathe during a hail storm, sir! Make an exception this once. You’re not looking quite yourself.”
Mr. Stone shook his head; then, evidently following out a thought which Hilary had interrupted, he remarked:
“The sentiment that men call honour is of doubtful value. I have not as yet succeeded in relating it to universal brotherhood.”
“How is that, sir?”
“In so far,” said Mr. Stone, “as it consists in fidelity to principle, one might assume it worthy of conjunction. The difficulty arises when we consider the nature of the principle … There is a family of young thrushes in the garden. If one of them finds a worm, I notice that his devotion to that principle of self-preservation which prevails in all low forms of life forbids his sharing it with any of the other little thrushes.”
Mr. Stone had fixed his eyes on distance.
“So it is, I fear,” he said, “with ‘honour.’ In those days men looked on women as thrushes look on worms.”
He paused, evidently searching for a word; and Hilary, with a faint smile, said:
“And how did women look on men, sir?”
Mr. Stone observed him with surprise. “I did not perceive that it was you,” he said. “I have to avoid brain action before bathing.”
They had crossed the road dividing the Gardens from the Park, and, seeing that Mr. Stone had already seen the water where he was about to bathe, and would now see nothing else, Hilary stopped beside a little lonely birch-tree. This wild, small, graceful visitor, who had long bathed in winter, was already draping her bare limbs in a scarf of green. Hilary leaned against her cool, pearly body. Below were the chilly waters, now grey, now starch-blue, and the pale forms of fifteen or twenty bathers. While he stood shivering in the frozen wind, the sun, bursting through the hail-cloud, burned his cheeks and hands. And suddenly he heard, clear, but far off, the sound which, of all others, stirs the hearts of men: “Cuckoo, cuckoo!”
Four times over came the unexpected call. Whence had that ill-advised, indelicate grey bird flown into this great haunt of men and shadows? Why had it come with its arrowy flight and mocking cry to pierce the heart and set it aching? There were trees enough outside the town, cloud-swept hollows, tangled brakes of furze just coming into bloom, where it could preside over the process of Spring. What solemn freak was this which made it come and sing to one who had no longer any business with the Spring?
With a real spasm in his heart Hilary turned away from that distant bird, and went down to the water’s edge. Mr. Stone was swimming, slower than man had ever swum before. His silver head and lean arms alone were visible, parting the water feebly; suddenly he disappeared. He was but a dozen yards from the shore; and Hilary, alarmed at not seeing him reappear, ran in. The water was not deep. Mr. Stone, seated at the bottom, was doing all he could to rise. Hilary took him by his bathing-dress, raised him to the surface, and supported him towards the land. By the time they reached the shore he could just stand on his legs. With the assistance of a policeman, Hilary enveloped him in garments and got him to a cab. He had regained some of his vitality, but did not seem aware of what had happened.
“I was not in as long as usual,” he mused, as they passed out into the high road.
“Oh, I think so, sir.”
Mr. Stone looked troubled.
“It is odd,” he said. “I do not recollect leaving the water.”
He did not speak again till he was being assisted from the cab.
“I wish to recompense the man. I have half a crown indoors.”
“I will get it, sir,” said Hilary.
Mr. Stone, who shivered violently now that he was on his feet, turned his face up to the cabman.
“Nothing is nobler than the horse,” he said; “take care of him.”
The cabman removed his hat. “I will, sir,” he answered.
Walking by himself, but closely watched by Hilary, Mr. Stone reached his room. He groped about him as though not distinguishing objects too well through the crystal clearness of the fundamental flux.
“If I might advise you,” said Hilary, “I would get back into bed for a few minutes. You seem a little chilly.”
Mr. Stone, who was indeed shaking so that he could hardly stand, allowed Hilary to assist him into bed and tuck the blankets round him.
“I must be at work by ten o’clock,” he said.
Hilary, who was also shivering, hastened to Bianca’s room. She was just coming down, and exclaimed at seeing him all wet. When he had told her of the episode she touched his shoulder.
“What about you?”
“A hot bath and drink will set me right. You’d better go to him.”
He turned towards the bathroom, where Miranda stood, lifting a white foot. Compressing her lips, Bianca ran downstairs. Startled by his tale, she would have taken his wet body in her arms; if the ghosts of innumerable moments had not stood between. So this moment passed too, and itself became a ghost.
Mr. Stone, greatly to his disgust, had not succeeded in resuming work at ten o’clock. Failing simply because he could not stand on his legs, he had announced his intention of waiting until half-past three, when he should get up, in preparation for the coming of the little girl. Having refused to see a doctor, or have his temperature taken, it was impossible to tell precisely what degree of fever he was in. In his cheeks, just visible over the blankets, there was more colour than there should have been; and his eyes, fixed on the ceiling, shone with suspicious brilliancy. To the dismay of Bianca – who sat as far out of sight as possible, lest he should see her, and fancy that she was doing him a service – he pursued his thoughts aloud:
“Words – words – they have taken away brotherhood!” Bianca shuddered, listening to that uncanny sound. “‘In those days of words they called it death – pale death – mors pallida. They saw that word like a gigantic granite block suspended over them, and slowly coming down. Some, turning up their faces at the sight, trembled painfully, awaiting their obliteration. Others, unable, while they still lived, to face the thought of nothingness, inflated by some spiritual wind, and thinking always of their individual forms, called out unceasingly that those selves of theirs would and must survive this word – that in some fashion, which no man could understand, each self-conscious entity reaccumulated after distribution. Drunk with this thought, these, too, passed away. Some waited for it with grim, dry eyes, remarking that the process was molecular, and thus they also met their so-called death.'”
His voice ceased, and in place of it rose the sound of his tongue moistening his palate. Bianca, from behind, placed a glass of barley-water to his lips. He drank it with a slow, clucking noise; then, seeing that a hand held the glass, said: “Is that you? Are you ready for me? Follow. ‘In those days no one leaped up to meet pale riding Death; no one saw in her face that she was brotherhood incarnate; no one with a heart as light as gossamer kissed her feet, and, smiling, passed into the Universe.'” His voice died away, and when next he spoke it was in a quick, husky whisper: “I must – I must – I must – ” There was silence; then he added: “Give me my trousers.”
Bianca placed them by his bed. The sight seemed to reassure him. He was once more silent.
For more than an hour after this he was so absolutely still that Bianca rose continually to look at him. Each time, his eyes, wide open, were fixed on a little dark mark across the ceiling; his face had a look of the most singular determination, as though his spirit were slowly, relentlessly, regaining mastery over his fevered body. He spoke suddenly:
“Who is there?”
“Bianca.”
“Help me out of bed!”
The flush had left his face, the brilliance had faded from his eyes; he looked just like a ghost. With a sort of terror Bianca helped him out of bed. This weird display of mute white will-power was unearthly.
When he was dressed in his woollen gown and seated before the fire, she gave him a cup of strong beef-tea, with brandy. He swallowed it with great avidity.
“I should like some more of that,” he said, and fell asleep.
While he was asleep Cecilia came, and the two sisters watched his slumber, and, watching it, felt nearer to each other than they had for many years. Before she went away Cecilia whispered —
“B. if he seems to want that little girl while he’s like this, don’t you think she ought to come?”
Bianca answered: “I don’t know where she is.”
“I do.”
“Ah!” said Bianca; “of course!” And she turned her head away.
Disconcerted by that sarcastic little speech, Cecilia was silent; then, summoning all her courage, she said:
“Here’s the address, B. I’ve written it down for you;” and, with puckers of anxiety in her face, she left the room.
Bianca sat on in the old golden chair, watching the deep hollows beneath the sleeper’s temples, the puffs of breath stirring the silver round his mouth. Her ears burned crimson. Carried out of herself by the sight of that old form, dearer to her than she had thought, fighting its great battle for the sake of its idea, her spirit grew all tremulous and soft within her. With eagerness she embraced the thought of self-effacement. It did not seem to matter whether she were first with Hilary. Her spirit should so manifest its capacity for sacrifice that she would be first with him through sheer nobility. At this moment she could almost have taken that common little girl into her arms and kissed her. So would all disquiet end! Some harmonious messenger had fluttered to her for a second – the gold-winged bird of peace. In this sensuous exaltation her nerves vibrated like the strings of a violin.
When Mr. Stone woke it was past three o’clock and Bianca at once handed him another cup of strong beef-tea.
He swallowed it, and said: “What is this?”
“Beef-tea.”
Mr. Stone looked at the empty cup.
“I must not drink it. The cow and the sheep are on the same plane as man.”
“But how do you feel, dear?”
“I feel,” said Mr. Stone, “able to dictate what I have already written – not more. Has she come?”
“Not yet; but I will go and find her if you like.”
Mr. Stone looked at his daughter wistfully.
“That will be taking up your time,” he said.
Bianca answered: “My time is of no consequence.”
Mr. Stone stretched his hands out to the fire.
“I will not consent,” he said, evidently to himself, “to be a drag on anyone. If that has come, then I must go!”
Bianca, placing herself beside him on her knees, pressed her hot cheek against his temple.
“But it has not come, Dad.”
“I hope not,” said Mr. Stone. “I wish to end my book first.”
The sudden grim coherence of his last two sayings terrified Bian