The Gap in the Curtain

by John Buchan

  Charles dropped his head into his hands. The sight of Pamela thus restored to him was more than he could bear.

  Then she had an inspiration.

  “Do you remember the portrait in the dining room at Wirlesdon of old Sir Somebody-Ap-Something—Mamma’s Welsh ancestor? You know the story about him? He was on the side of Henry Tudor, and raised his men to march to Bosworth. But every witch and warlock in Carmarthen got on to their hind legs and prophesied—said they saw him in a bloody shroud, and heard banshees wailing for him, and how Merlin had said that when the Ap-Something red and gold crossed Severn to join the Tudor green and white it would be the end of the race—all manner of cheery omens. Everybody in the place believed them, including his lady wife, who wept buckets and clung to his knees. What did the old sportsman do? Told all the warlocks to go to the devil, and marched gaily eastward, leaving his wife sewing his shroud and preparing the family vault.”

  “What happened?” Charles had lifted his head.

  “Happened? He turned the day at Bosworth, set the Tudor on the throne, got the Garter for his services—you see it in the portrait—and about half South Wales. He and his men came merrily home, and he lived till he was ninety-three. There’s an example for you!”

  Pamela warmed to her argument.

  “That sort of thing happened all the time in the old days. Whenever anybody had a down on you he got a local soothsayer to prophesy death and disaster in case you might believe it and lose your nerve. And if you had been having a row with the church, some priest or bishop had an unpleasant vision about you. What was the result? Timid people took to their beds and died of fright, which was what the soothsayers wanted. Bold men like my ancestor paid not the slightest attention, and nothing happened—except that, when they got a chance, they outed the priest and hanged the soothsayer.”

  Charles was listening keenly.

  “But the soothsayers were often right,” he objected.

  “They were just as often wrong. The point is, that there were men brave enough to defy them—as you are going to do.”

  “But the cases aren’t the same,” he protested. “That was ordinary vulgar magic, with a personal grudge behind it. I’m up against the last word in impersonal science.”

  “My dear Charles,” she said sweetly, “you’ve let your brains go to seed. I never knew you miss a point before. Magic and astrology and that kind of thing were all the science the Middle Ages had, and they believed in them just as firmly as you believe in Moe. The point is that, in spite of their belief, there were people bold enough to defy it—and to win, as you are going to do. A thousand years hence the world may think of Moe and Einstein and all those pundits as babyish as we think the old necromancers. Beliefs change, but courage is always the same. Courage is the line for you, my dear.”

  At last she had moved him. There was a light in his eyes as he looked at her, perplexed and broken, but still a light.

  “You think . . .” he began, but she broke in . . .

  “I think that you’re face to face with a crisis, Charles dear. Fate has played you an ugly trick, but you’re man enough to beat it. It’s like the thing in the Bible about Jacob wrestling with the angel. You’ve got to wrestle with it, and if you wrestle hard enough it may bless you.”

  Her voice had lost its briskness, and had become soft and wooing. She jumped up from the sofa and came round behind his chair, as if she did not want him to see her face.

  “I refuse to give another thought to the silly thing,” she said. “We are going to behave as if Moe had never been born.” Her hand was caressing his hair.

  “But you are not condemned to death,” he said.

  “Oh, am I not?” she cried. “It’s frightfully important for me. On June 10th of next year I shall be starting on my honeymoon.”

  That fetched him out of his chair.

  He gazed blindly at her as she stood with her cheeks flushed and her eyes a little dim. For a full minute he strove for words and none came.

  “Have you nothing to say?” she whispered. “Do you realize, sir, that I am asking you to marry me?”

  Chapter 5

  It was now that I entered the story. Mollie Nantley came to town and summoned me to a family conclave. She and Tom were in a mood between delight and anxiety.

  “You got my wire?” she asked. “The announcement will be in the papers tomorrow. But they are not to be married till June. Too long to wait—I don’t like these long engagements.”

  “You are pleased?” I asked.

  “Tremendously—in a way. But we don’t quite know what to think. They never saw each other for six months, and then it all came with a rush. Pam has been rather odd lately, you know, and Tom and I have been very worried. We saw that she was unhappy, and we thought that it might be about Charles. And Charles’s behaviour has been something more than odd—so odd that Tom was in two minds about consenting to the engagement. You know how fond we were of him and how we believed in him, but his conduct before Christmas was rather shattering. You are too busy to hear gossip, but I can assure you that Charles has been the most talked-of man in London. Not pleasant gossip either.”

  “But the explanation seems quite simple,” I said. “Two estranged lovers, both proud and both miserable and therefore rather desperate. Chance brings them together, misunderstandings disappear, and true love comes into its own.”

  Mollie bent her brows.

  “It’s not as simple as that. If that had been the way of things they ought to be riotously happy. But they’re not—not in the least. Pam is as white as a sheet, and looks more like a widow than a bride. She’s very sweet and good—very different from before Christmas, when she was horribly tiresome—but you never saw such careworn eyes. She has something heavy on her mind . . . And as for Charles! He is very good too and goes steadily to the city again, but he’s not my notion of the happy lover. Tom and I are at our wits’ end. I do wish you would have a talk with Pamela. She won’t tell me anything—I really don’t dare to ask—but you and she have always been friends, and if there is any trouble you might help her.”

  So Pamela came to tea with me, and the first sight of her told me that Mollie was right. In a week or two some alchemy had changed her utterly. Not a trace now of that hard, mirthless glitter which had scared me at the Lamanchas’. Her face was pale, her air quiet and composed, but there was in her eyes what I had seen in Charles Ottery’s, an intense, anxious preoccupation.

  She told me everything without pressing. She could not tell her parents, she said, for they would not understand, and, if they did, their sympathy would make things worse. But she longed for someone to confide in, and had decided on me.

  I saw that it would be foolish to make light of the trouble. Indeed, I had no inclination that way, for I had seen the tortures that Goodeve was undergoing. She told me what she had said to Charles, and the line they were taking. I remember wondering if the man had the grit to go through with it; when I looked at Pamela’s clear eyes I had no doubt about the woman.

  “He has gone back to his business and has forced himself to slave at it. He is crowding up his days with work. And he is keeping himself in hard training . . . You see, he has tried the other dopes and found them no good . . . But he has to fight every step of the road. Oh, Uncle Ned, I could howl with misery sometimes when I see him all drawn at the lips and hollow about the eyes. He doesn’t sleep well, you see. But he is fighting, and not yielding one inch.”

  And then she quoted to me her saying about Jacob wrestling with the angel. “If we keep on grappling with the brute, it must bless us.”

  “I have to hold his hand all the time,” she went on. “That’s his hope of salvation. He is feeding on my complete confidence . . . Oh no, it’s not easy, but it’s easier than his job. I’ve to pretend to be perfectly certain that we’ll be married next June tenth, and to be always talking about where we shall go for ou
r honeymoon, and where we shall live in town, and how we shall do up Marlcote.”

  She smiled wanly.

  “I chatter about hotels and upholsterers and house agents when I want to be praying . . . But I think I understand my part. I have a considerable patch of hell to plough, but it’s nothing like as hot as Charles’s . . . No, you can’t help, Uncle Ned, dear. We have to go through with this thing ourselves—we two—nobody else. Charles must never know that I have told you, for if he thought that anyone else knew it would add shyness to his trouble . . . But it’s a comfort to me to feel that you know. If anything happens . . . if we fail . . . I want you to realize that we went down fighting.”

  She kissed me and ran away, and I sat thinking a long time in my chair. She was right: no one could help these two through this purgatory. My heart ached for this child not out of her teens who was trying to lift her lover through the Slough of Despond by her sheer courage. I do not think that I have ever in my life so deeply admired a fellow-mortal. Pamela was the very genius of fortitude, courage winged and inspired and divinely lit . . . I told myself that such a spirit could not fail if there was a God in Heaven.

  I can only guess at what Charles suffered in the first months of the year. The diary revealed something, but not much, for the entries were scrappy: you see, he was not fighting the battle alone, as he had done in the autumn; he had Pamela for his guide and confessor.

  He stuck like a leech to his work, and from all accounts did it well. My nephew said that old Charles had “taken a pull on himself, but had become a cheerless bird.” People in the city, when I asked about him, were cordial enough. He had been put on a new economic commission at which he was working hard. One man said that his examination of a high Treasury official was one of the most searching things he had ever heard. Our financial affairs at that time were in a considerable mess, and Charles was bending all his powers to straightening them out.

  It was much to have got his brain functioning again. But of course it did not mean the recovery of his old interests. He had only one interest—how to keep his head up till June, and one absorbing desire—to be with Pamela. The girl gave him more than the sustenance of her confidence; there were hours when the love of her so filled his mind that it drove out the gnawing pain, and that meant hours of rest. As sleep restores the body, so these spells of an almost happy absorption restored his spirit.

  But he had patches of utter blackness, as the diary showed. He held himself firm to his resolution by a constant effort of will. He could not despair when Pamela kept her courage . . . But he would waver at moments, and only recover himself out of shame. There were times, too, when he bitterly reproached himself. He had brought an innocent child into his tortured world, and made her share in the tortures. Another life besides his own would be ruined. Out of such fits of self-contempt he had to be dragged painfully by Pamela’s affection. She had to convince him anew that she preferred Tophet in his company to Paradise alone.

  In March Pamela told me that she had offered to marry him at once, and that he had refused. He was on his probation, he said, and marriage was to be the reward of victory. Also, if he was to be in the grave on June 10th, he did not want Pamela to be a widow. The girl argued, she told me, that immediate marriage would be an extra defiance to Fate, and a proof of their confidence, but Charles was adamant. I dare say he was right: he had to settle such a question with his own soul.

  I met him occasionally during those months. Never in ordinary society: by a right instinct Pamela and he decided that they could not go about together and be congratulated—that would make too heavy demands on their powers of camouflage. But I ran across him several times in the street; and I sat next to him at a luncheon given by the prime minister to the American Debt Commission. Knowing the story, I looked for changes in him, and I noted several things which were probably hidden from other people. He had begun to speak rather slowly, as if he had difficulty in finding the correct words. He did not look an interlocutor in the face, but fixed his eyes, while he spoke, steadily on the tablecloth. Also, though his colour was healthy, his skin seemed to be drawn too tight around his lips and chin, reminding me of a certain Army Commander during the bad time in ’18.

  I asked about Pamela.

  “Yes, she’s in town,” he said. “The Nantleys have been up since January. She has caught a beastly cold, and I made her promise to stay indoors in this bitter weather.”

  Two days later I picked up an evening paper and read a paragraph which sent me post-haste to the telephone. It announced that Lady Pamela Brune was ill with pneumonia, and that anxiety was felt about her condition.

  Chapter 6

  The diary told the tale of the next three weeks. Charles had to return to his diary, for he had no other confidant. And a stranger story I have never read.

  From the first he was certain that Pamela would die. He was quite clear about this, and he had also become assured of his own end. Their love was to be blotted out by the cold hand of death. For a day or two he was in a stupor of utter hopelessness, waiting on fate like a condemned man who hears the gallows being hammered together and sees the clock moving towards the appointed hour.

  Some of the entries were clear enough. He thought that Pamela would die at once while he himself must wait until June, and there were distraught queries as to how he could endure the interval. His appointed hour could not be anticipated, and a world without Pamela was a horror which came near to unhinging his mind. His writing tailed away into blots and dashes. In his agony he seemed several times to have driven his pen through the paper . . .

  Then suddenly the mist cleared. The diary was nothing but jottings and confused reflections, so the sequence of his moods could not be exactly traced, but it was plain that something tremendous had happened . . .

  It seemed to have come suddenly late at night, for he noted the hour—1:30—and that he had been walking the Embankment since eight. Hitherto he had had a dual consciousness, seeing Pamela and himself as sufferers under the same doom, and enduring a double torture. Love and fear for both the girl and himself had brought his mind almost to a delirium, but now there descended upon it a great clarity.

  The emotion remained, but now the object was single, for his own death dropped out of the picture. It became suddenly too small a thing to waste a thought on. There were entries like this: “I have torn up the almanac on which I had been marking off the days till June tenth . . . I have been an accursed coward, God forgive me . . . Pamela is dying, and I have been thinking of my own wretched, rotten life.”

  He went on steadily with his work, because he thought she would have wished him to, but he never moved far from a telephone. Meanwhile, the poor child was fighting a very desperate battle. I went round to South Audley Street as often as I could, and a white-faced Mollie gave me the last bulletins. There was one night when it seemed certain that Pamela could not see the morning, but morning came and the thread of life still held. She was delirious, talking about Charles mostly, and the mountain inn in the Tyrol where they were going for their honeymoon. Thank God, Charles was not there to listen to that!

  He did not go near the house, which I thought was wise, but the diary revealed that he spent the midnight hours striding about Mayfair. He was waiting for her death, waiting for Mollie’s summons to look for the last time upon what was so dear . . .

  He was no longer in torment. Indeed, he was calm now, if you can call that calm which is the uttermost despair. His life was bereft of every shadow of value, every spark of colour, and he was living in a bleak desert, looking with aching eyes and a breaking heart at a beautiful star setting below the skyline, a star which was the only light in the encroaching gloom to lead him home. That very metaphor was in the diary. He probably got it out of some hymn, and I never in my life knew Charles use a metaphor before.

  And then there came another change—it is plain in the diary—but this time it was a wholesale revolution, b
y which the whole man was moved to a different plane.

  His own predestined death had been put aside as too trivial for a thought, but now suddenly Death itself came to have no meaning. The ancient shadow disappeared in the great brightness of his love.

  Every man has some metaphysics and poetry in his soul, but people like Charles lack the gift of expression. The diary had only broken sentences, but they were more poignant than any eloquence. If he had cared about the poets he might have found some one of them to give him apt words; as it was, he could only stumble along among clumsy phrases. But there was no doubt about his meaning. He had discovered for himself the immortality of love. The angel with whom he had grappled had at last blessed him.

  He had somehow in his agony climbed to a high place from which he had a wide prospect. He saw all things in a new perspective. Death was only a stumble in the race, a brief halt in an immortal pilgrimage. He and Pamela had won something which could never be taken away . . . This man of prose and affairs became a mystic. One side of him went about his daily round, and waited hungrily for telephone calls, but the other was in a quiet country where Pamela’s happy spirit moved in eternal vigour and youth. He had no hope in the lesser sense, for that is a mundane thing; but he had won peace, the kind that the world does not give.

  Hope, the lesser hope, was to follow. There came a day when the news from South Audley Street improved, and then there was a quick uprush of vitality in the patient. One morning early in May Mollie telephoned to me that Pamela was out of danger. I went straightway to the city and found Charles in his office, busy as if nothing had happened.

  I remember that he seemed to me almost indecently composed. But when he spoke he no longer kept his eyes down, but looked me straight in the face, and there was something in those eyes of his which made me want to shout. It was more than peace—it was a radiant serenity. Charles had come out of the Valley of the Shadow to the Delectable Mountains. Nothing in Heaven or earth could harm him now. I had the conviction that if he had been a poet he could have written something that would have solemnised mankind. As it was, he only squeezed my hand.