by Hugh Walpole
“Because it all depends on that. If she cares enough it won’t matter what you’ve done, and if she doesn’t care enough it won’t matter her knowing because you oughtn’t to marry her. Oh,” and Bunning’s eyes as they gazed at Olva were those, once more, of a devoted dog: “she’s lucky.” Then he repeated, as though to himself, in his odd husky whisper: “Anything that I can do . . . anything that I can do . . .”
2
On the next evening, about five o’clock, Olva went to the house in Rocket Road. He went through a world that, in its frosty stillness, held beauty in its hands like a china cup, so fragile in its colours, so gentle in its outline, with a moon, round and of a creamy white, with a sky faintly red, and stiff trees, black and sharp.
Cambridge came to Olva then as a very lovely thing. The Cambridge life was a lovely thing with its kindness, its simplicity, its optimism. He was penetrated too with a great sadness because he knew that life of that kind was gone, once and for ever, from him; whatever came to him now it could never again be that peace; the long houses flung black shadows across the white road and God kept him company. . . .
Miss Margaret Craven had not yet come in, but would Mr. Dune, perhaps, go up and see Mrs. Craven? The old woman’s teeth chattered in the cold little hall. “We are dead, all of us dead here,” the skins on the walls seemed to say; “and you’ll be dead soon . . . oh! yes, you will.”
Olva went up to Mrs. Craven. The windows of her room were tightly closed and a great fire was blazing; before this she lay stretched out on a sofa of faded green — her black dress, her motionless white hands, her pale face, her moving eyes.
She had beside her to-day a little plate of dry biscuits, and, now and again, her hand would move across her black dress and break one of these with a sharp sound, and then her hand would fall back again.
“I am very glad to see you. Draw your chair to the fire. It is a chill day, but fine, I believe.”
She regarded him gravely.
“It is not much of life that I can watch from this room, Mr. Dune. It is good of you to come and see me . . . there must be many other things for you to do.”
He came at once to the point.
“I want your permission to ask your daughter to marry me, Mrs. Craven.”
There was a long silence between them. He seemed, in his inner consciousness, to be carrying on a dialogue.
“You see,” he said to the Shadow, “I have forestalled you. I shall ask Margaret Craven this evening to marry me. You cannot prevent that . . . you cannot.”
And a voice answered: “All things betray Thee Who betrayest Me.”
“You have known us a very short time, Mr. Dune.” Mrs. Craven’s voice came to him from a great distance.
He felt as though he were speaking to two persons. “Time has nothing to do with falling in love, Mrs. Craven.”
He saw to his intense amazement that she was greatly moved. She, who had always seemed to him a mask, now was suddenly revealed as suffering, tortured, intensely human. Her thin white hands were pressed together.
“I am a lonely, unhappy woman, Mr. Dune. Margaret is now all that is left to me. Everything has been taken from me. Rupert—” Her voice was lost; very slowly tears rolled down her cheeks. She began again desperately. “Margaret is all that I have got. If I were left alone it would be too much for me. I could not endure the silence.”
It was the more moving in that it followed such stern reserve. His own isolation, the curious sense that he had that they were, both of them, needing protection against the same power (it seemed to him that if he raised his eyes he would see, on the opposite wall, the shadow of that third Presence); this filled him with the tenderest pity, so that suddenly he bent down and kissed her hand.
She caught his with a fierce convulsive movement, and so they sat in silence whilst he felt the pulse of her hand beat through his body, and once a tear rolled from her cheek on to his wrist.
“You understand . . .” she said at last. “You understand. I have always seen that you know. . .” Then she whispered, “How did you know?”
“Know?” He was bewildered, but before she could speak again the door opened and Margaret Craven came in.
She moved with that restrained emotion that he had seen in her when he had first met her. She was some great force held in check, some fire that blazed but must be hidden from the world, and as she bent over her mother and kissed her the embrace had in it something of passionate protest; both women seemed to assert in it their right to quite another sort of life.
He saw that his moment with Mrs. Craven had passed. That fire, that humanity had gone from her and she lay back now on her sofa with the faint waxen lids closed upon her eyes, her hands thinly folded, almost a dead woman.
Margaret kissed her again — now softly and gently, and Olva went with her from the room.
3
He was prepared to find that Rupert had told her everything. He thought that he saw in the gravity and sadness of her manner, and also in the silence that she seemed deliberately at first to place between them, that she was waiting for the right moment to break it to him. He felt that she would ask him gravely and with great kindness, but that, in the answer that he would give her, it must be all over . . . the end. The pursuit would be concluded.
Then suddenly in the way that she looked at him he knew that she had been told nothing.
“I’m afraid that mother is very unwell. I’m afraid that you must have found her so.”
“If she could get away—” he began.
“Ah! if we could all get away! If only we could! But we have talked of that before. It is quite impossible. And, even if we could (and how glad I should be!), I do not know that it would help mother. It is Rupert that is breaking her heart!”
“Rupert!”
For answer to his exclamation she cried to him with all the pent-up suffering and loneliness of the last weeks in her voice —
“Ah, Mr. Dune, help me! I shall go mad if something doesn’t happen; every day it is worse and I can’t grapple with it. I’m not up to it. If only they’d speak out! but it’s this silence!” She seemed to pull herself together and went on more quietly: “You know that Rupert and I have been everything to one another all our lives. We have never had a secret of any kind. Until this last month Rupert was the most open, dearest boy in the world. His tenderness with my mother was a most wonderful thing, and to me! — I cannot tell you what he was to me. I suppose, for the very reason that we were so much to one another, we did not make any other very close friends. I had girls in Dresden, of course, and there were men at school and college for whom he cared, but I think there can have been few brothers and sisters who were so entirely together in every way. A month ago that all ceased.”
She flung her head back with a sharp defiant movement as though the memory of it hurt her.
“I’ve told you this before. I talked to you about it when you were here last. But since then he has become much worse and I am afraid that anything may happen. I have no one to go to. It is killing my mother, and then — you were a friend of his.”
“I hope that I am now.”
“That is the horrible part of it. But it seems now that all this agitation, this trouble, is directed against you.”
“Against me”
“Yes, the other evening he spoke about you — here — furiously. He said you must never come here again, that I must never speak to you again. He said that you had done dreadful things. And then when I asked him he could not tell me anything. He seemed — and you must look on it in that light, Mr. Dune — as though he were not in the least responsible for what he said. I’m afraid he is very, very ill. He is dreadfully unhappy, and yet he can explain nothing. I too have been very unhappy, and mother, because we love him.”
“If he wishes that I should not come here again—” Olva began.
“But he is not responsible. He really does not know what he is doing. He never had the smallest trouble that he did not confide i
t to me, and now—”
“I have noticed, of course,” Olva said “that lately his manner to me has been strange. I would have helped him if he would let me, but he will not. He will have nothing to say to me . . . I too have been very sorry about it. I have been sorry because I am fond of Rupert, but also — there is another, stronger reason — because I love you, Margaret.”
As he spoke he got up and stood by her chair. He saw her take in his last words, at first with a wondering gravity, then with a sudden splendour so that light flooded her face; her arms made a little helpless gesture, and she caught his hand.
He drew her up to him out of her chair; then, with a fierce passionate movement, they held one another and clung together as though in a desperate wild protest against the world.
“You can’t touch me now — I’ve got her,” he seemed to fling at the blank face of the old mirror.
It was his act of defiance, but through his exultation he caught the whisper — it might again have been conveyed to him through the shrill shivering notes of the “Valse Triste”— “Tell her — tell her — now. Trust her. Dear son, trust Me . . . it must be so in the end.”
“Now,” he heard her say, “I can stand it all.”
“When you came into this room weeks ago,” she went on, “I loved you; from the very first instant. Now I do not mind what any one can do.”
“I too loved you from the first instant.”
“You were so grave. I tried at first not to think of you as a person at all because I thought that it was safer, and then gradually, although I fought against you, I could not keep you out. You drove your way in. You understood so wonderfully the things that I wanted you to understand. Then Rupert and mother drove me to want you more and more. I thought that you liked me, but I didn’t know. . . .” Then with a little shiver she clung to him, pressing close to him. “Oh! hold me, hold me safe.”
The room was now gathering to itself that dusk that gave it its strangest air. The fire had fallen low and only shone now in the recesses of the high fireplace with a dull glimmer. Amongst the shadows it seemed that the Presence was gravely waiting. As Olva held Margaret in his arms he felt that he was fighting to keep her.
In the dark hollow of the mirror he thought that he saw the long white road, the mists, the little wood and some one running. . . .
It seemed to him that Margaret was not there, that the room was dark and very heavy, that some bell was ringing in his ear. . . . Then about him a thousand voices were murmuring: “Tell her — tell her — tell her the truth.”
With a last effort he tried to cry “I will not tell her.”
His lips broke on her name “Margaret.” Then, with a little sigh, tumbling forward, he fainted.
CHAPTER XIII
MRS. CRAVEN
1
Afterwards, lying in his easy chair before his fire, he was allowed a brief and beautiful respite. It was almost as though he were already dead — as though, consciously, he might lie there, apart from the world, freed from the eternal pursuit, at last unharassed, and hold, with both hands, that glorious certainty — Margaret.
He had a picture of her now. He was lying where he had tumbled, there on the floor with the silver trays and boxes, the odd tables, the gimcrack chairs all about him. Slowly he had opened his eyes and had gazed, instantly, as though the gates of heaven had rolled back for him, into her face. She was kneeling on the floor, one hand was behind his head, the other bathed his forehead. He could see her breasts (so little, so gentle) rise and fall beneath her thin dress, and her great dark eyes caught his soul and held it.
In that one great moment God withdrew. For the first time in his knowledge of her they were alone, and in the kiss that he gave to her when he drew her down to him they met for the first time. Death and the anger of God might come to him — that great moment could never be taken from him. It was his. . . .
He had seen that she was gravely distressed with his fainting, and he had been able to give her no reason beyond the heat of the room. He could see that she was puzzled and felt that there was some mystery there that she was not to know, but she too had found in that last kiss a glorious certainty that no other hazard could possibly destroy.
He loved her — she loved him. Let the Gods thunder!
But he knew, nevertheless, as he lay back there in the chair, that he had received a sign. That primrose path with Margaret was not to be allowed him, and so sure was he that now he could lie back and look at it all as though he were a spectator and wonder in what way God intended to work it out. The other side of him — the fighting, battling creature — was, for the moment, dormant. Soon Bunning would come in and then the fight would begin again, but for the instant there was peace — the first peace that he had known since that far-away evening in St. Martin’s Chapel.
As with a drowning man (it is said) so now with Olva his past life stretched, in panorama, before him. He saw the high rocky grey building with its rough shape and shaggy lichen, its neglected courtyard, its iron-barred windows, the gaunt trees, like witches, that hemmed it, the white ribbon of road, far, far below it, the shining gleam of the river hidden by purple hills. He saw his father — huge, flowing grey beard, eyebrows stuck, like leeches, on to his weather-beaten face, his gnarled and knotted hands. He saw himself a tiny boy with thin black hair and grave eyes watching his father as he bathed in the mill-pool below the house — his father rising naked from the stream, hung with the mists of early morning, naked with enormous chest, huge flanks, his beard black then and sweeping across his breast, his great thighs shining with the dripping water — primitive, primeval, in the heart of the early morning silence.
Many, many other pictures of those first days, but always Olva and his father, moving together, speaking but seldom, sitting before the fire in the evenings, watching the blaze, despising the world. The contempt that his father had for his fellow-beings! Had a man ever been so alone? Olva himself had drunk of that same contempt and welcomed his solitude at Harrow. The world had been with him a place of war, of hostility, until he had struck that blow in Sannet Wood. He remembered the eagerness with which, at the end of term, he had hastened back to his father. After the noise and clatter of school life how wonderful to go back to the still sound of dripping water, to the crackle of dry leaves under foot, to the heavy solemn tread of cattle, to those evenings when at his father’s side he heard the coals click in the fire and the old clock on the stairs wheeze out the passing minutes. That relationship with his father bad been, until this term, the only emotion in his life — and now? And now!
It was incredible this change that had come to him. First there was Margaret and then, after her, Mrs. Craven, Rupert, Lawrence, Cardillac, Bunning. All these persons, in varying degree, bad become of concern to him. The world that had always been a place of smoke, of wind, of sky, was now, of a sudden, crowded with figures. He bad been swept from the hill-top down into the market-place. He had been given perhaps one keen glance of a moving world before he was drawn from it altogether. . . . Now, just as he had tasted human companionship and loved it, must he die?
He knew, too, that his recent popularity in the College had pleased him. He wanted them to like him . . . he was proud to feel that because he was he therefore Cardillac resigned, willingly, his place to him. But if Cardillac knew him for a felon, knew that he might be hanged in the dark and flung into a nameless grave, what then? If Cardillac knew what Rupert Craven almost knew, would not his horror be the same? The world, did it only know. . . .
To-morrow was the day of the Dublin match. Olva and Cardillac were both playing, and at the end of the game choice might be made between them. Did Olva care? He did not know . . . but Margaret was coming, and, in the back of his mind, he wanted to show her what he could do.
And yet, whilst that Shadow hovered in the Outer Court, how little a thing this stir and movement was! No tumult that the material world could ever make could sound like that whisper that was with him now again in the room — wi
th him at his very heart— “All things betray Thee. . . .”
The respite was over. Bunning came in.
Change had seized Bunning. Here now was the result of his having pulled himself together. Olva could see that the man bad made up his mind to something, and that, further, he was resolved to keep his purpose secret. It was probably the first occasion in Bunning’s life of such resolution. There was a faint colour in the fat cheeks, the eyes bad a little light and the man scarcely spoke at all lest this purpose should trickle from his careless lips. Also as he looked at Olva his customary devotion was heightened by an air of frightened pride.
Olva, watching him, was apprehensive — the devotion of a fool is the most dangerous thing in creation.
“Well, have you seen Craven again?”
“Yes. We had a talk.”
“What did he say?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“Rot. He didn’t stop and talk to you about the weather. Come on,
Bunning, what have you been up to?”
“I haven’t been up to anything.”
The man’s lips were closed. For another half an hour Bunning sat in a chair before the fire — silent. Every now and again he flung a glance at Olva. Sometimes he jerked his head towards the window as though he heard a step.
He had the look of a Christian going into the amphitheatre to face the
Beasts.
2
About eleven o’clock of the next morning Olva went to see Margaret. He had written to her the night before and asked her not to tell Rupert the news of their engagement immediately, but, when the morning came, he could not rest with that. He must know more.
It was a damp, misty morning, the fine frost had gone. He was going to Margaret to try and recover some reality out of the state that he was in. The recent incidents — Craven’s suspicions, the 5th of November evening, Bunning’s alarm, the scene with Margaret — bad dragged him for a time from that conviction that he was living in an unreal world. That day when he had run in the snowstorm from Sannet Wood had seemed to him, during these last weeks, absurd and an effect, obviously, of excited nerves. Now, on this morning of the Dublin match, he awoke again to that unreal condition. The bedmaker, the men passing through the Court beneath his windows, the porter at the gate — these people were unreal, and above him, around him, the mist seemed ever about to break into new terrible presences.