by Hugh Walpole
“I don’t give it up,” he said to her— “I shall write — I shall do things—”
She shook her head. “You’ve told me. I know what that means.” Then almost below her breath— “It’s horrible — It’s horrible. You mustn’t do it — you must go back to London — you must go back—”
But at that he rose and faced her.
“No,” he said, “I will not. I’ve given the other things a chance — all these years I’ve given them a chance. I’ve stood everything and at the end everything’s taken away from me. What shall I go back to? Who wants me? Who cares? God!” he cried, standing there, white-faced, dry-eyed, almost defying her— “Why should I go? Just to fail again — to suffer all that again — to have them take everything I love from me again — to be broken again! No, let them break the others — I’m done with it....”
“And the others?” she answered him. “Is it to be always yourself? You’ve fought for your own hand and they’ve beaten you to your knees — fight now for something finer—”
She seemed as she appealed to him to be shining with some great conquering purpose. Here, with her poor body broken and torn, her spirit, the purer for her physical pain, confronted him, shamed him, stretched like a flaming sword before the mean paths that his own soul would follow.
But he beat her down. “I will not go back — you don’t know — you don’t understand — I will not go.”
III
The little dusty Minstrels’ Gallery saw a good deal of him during these days. It was a lonely place at the top of the hotel, once intended to be picturesque and romantic for London visitors, but ultimately left to its own company with its magnificent view appreciated by no one.
Here Peter came. Every part of him now seemed to be at war with every other part. Had he gone straight to Scaw House with bag and baggage and never left it again, then the Westcott tradition might have caught him when he was in that numbed condition — caught him and held him.
Now he had stayed away just long enough for all the old Peter to have become alive and active again.
He looked back upon London with a great shuddering. The torment that he had suffered there he must never undergo again. Norah was now the one friend left to him in the world. He would cut himself into pieces to make these last days of hers happy, and yet the one thing that could give her happiness was that he should promise to go back.
She did not understand — no one could understand — the way that this place, this life that he contemplated, pulled him. The slackness of it, the lack of discipline in it, the absence of struggle in it. All the strength, the fighting that had been in him during these past years, was driven out of him now. He just wanted to let things drift — to wander about the fields and roads, to find his clothes growing shabby upon him, to grow old without knowing even that he was alive — all this had come to him.
She, on the other side, would drive him back into the battle of it all once more. To go back a failure — to be pointed out as the man whose wife left him because she found him so dull — to hear men like young Percival Galleon laughing at his book — to sell his soul for journalism in order to make a living — to see, perhaps, Clare come back into the London world — to break out, ultimately, when he was sick and tired of it all, into every kind of debauch ... how much better to slip into nothing down here where nobody knew nor cared!
And yet, on the other hand, he had never known until now the importance that Norah Monogue had held in his life.
Always, in everything he had done, in his ambitions and despairs, his triumphs and defeats, she had been behind him. He’d just do anything in the world for her! — anything except this one thing. Up and down, up and down he paced the little Minstrels’ room, with its dusty green chair and its shining floor— “I just can’t stand it all over again!”
But every time that he went in to see her — and he was with her continually — made his resistance harder. She didn’t speak about it again but he knew that she was always thinking about it.
“She’s worrying over something, Westcott — do you happen to know what it is?” the doctor asked him. “It’s bad for her. If you can help her about it in any way—”
The strain between them was becoming unbearable. Every day, when he went in to sit with her, they would talk about other things — about everything — but he knew that before her eyes there was that picture of himself up at Scaw House, and of the years passing — and his soul and everything that was fine in him, dying.
He saw her growing daily weaker. Sometimes he felt that he must run away altogether, go up to Scaw House and leave her to die alone; then he knew that that cruelty at any rate was not in him. One day he thought her brutal and interfering, another day it seemed that it was he who was the tyrant. He reminded himself of all the things that she had done for him — all the things, and he could not grant her this one request.
Then he would ask himself what the devil her right was that she should order his life in this way?... everyday the struggle grew harder.
The tension could not hold any longer — at last it broke.
IV
One evening they were sitting in silence beside her window. The room was in dusk and he could just see her white shadow against the dim blue light beyond the window.
Suddenly she broke down. He could hear her crying, behind her hands. The sound in that grey, silent room was more than he could bear. He went over to her and put his arms round her.
“Norah, Norah, please, please. It’s so awfully bad for you. I oughtn’t to come if I—”
She pulled herself together. Her voice was quite calm and controlled.
“Sit over there, Peter. I’ve got to talk to you.”
He went back to his chair.
“I’ve only got a few more weeks to live. I know it. Perhaps only a few more days. I must make the very utmost of my time. I’ve got to save you....”
He said nothing.
“Oh! I know that it must all have seemed to you abominable — as though I were making use of this illness of mine to extort a promise from you, as though just because I’m weak and feeble I can hold an advantage over you. Oh! I know it’s all abominable! — but I’ll use everything — yes, simply everything — if I can get you to leave this place and go back!”
He could feel that she was pulling herself together for some tremendous effort.
“Peter, I want you now just to think of me, to put yourself out of everything, absolutely, just for this half-hour. After all as I’ve only a few half-hours left I’ve got that right.”
Her laugh as she said it was one of the saddest things he’d ever heard.
“Now I’m going to tell you something — something that I’d never thought I’d tell a soul.
“I’ve not had a very cheerful life. It hasn’t had very much to make it bright and interesting. I’m not complaining but it’s just been that way—” She broke off for a moment. “I don’t want you to interrupt or say anything. It’ll make it easier for me if I can just talk out into the night air, as it were — just as though no one were here.”
She went on: “The one thing that’s made it possible, made it bearable, made it alive, has been my love for you. Always from the first moment I saw you I have loved you. Oh! I haven’t been foolish about it. I knew that you’d never care for me in that kind of way. I knew from the very first that we should be pals but that you’d never dream of anything more romantic. I’ve never had any one in love with me — I’m not the kind of woman who draws the romance out of men.
“No, I knew you’d never love me, but I just determined that I’d make you, your career, your success, the pivot, the centre of my life.
“I wasn’t blind about you — not a bit. I knew that you were selfish, weak, incredibly young about the world. I knew that you were the last person in existence to marry Clare — all the more reason it seemed to me why I should be behind you. I was behind you so much more than you ever knew. I wonder if you’ve the least idea what most wome
n’s lives are like. They come into the world with the finest ideals, the most tremendous energies, with a desire for self-sacrifice that a man can’t even begin to understand. Then they discover slowly that none of those things, those ideals, those energies, those sacrifices, are wanted. The world just doesn’t need them — they might as well never have been born. Do you suppose I enjoyed slaving for my mother, day and night for years? Do you suppose that I gladly yielded up all my best blood, my vitality, to the pleasure of some one who never valued it, never even knew that such things were being given her? Before you came I was slowly falling into despair. Think of all the women who are haunted by the awful thought— ‘The time will come when death will be facing me and I shall be forced to own that for any place that I have ever filled in the world I might never have been born.’ How many women are there who do not pray every day of their lives, ‘God, give me something to do before I die — some place to fill, some work to carry out, something to save my self-respect.’
“I tell you that there is a time coming when women will force those things that are in them upon the world. God help all poor women who are not wanted!
“I wasn’t wanted. There was nothing for me to do, no place for me to fill... then you came. At once I seized upon that-God seemed to have sent it to me. I believed that if I turned all those energies, those desires, those ambitions upon you that it would help you to do the things that you were meant to do. I was with you always — I slaved for you — you became the end in life to which I had been called.
“All the time you were only a boy — that was partly I think why I loved you. You were so gauche, so ignorant, so violent, so confident one moment, so plunged into despair the next. For a while everything seemed to go well. I had thought that Clare was going to be good for you, was going to make you unselfish. I thought that you’d got the better of all that part of you that was your inheritance. Even when I came down here I thought that all was well. I knew that I had come down to die and I had thanked God because He had, after all, allowed me to make something of my life, that I’d been able to see you lifted into success, that I’d seen you start a splendid career.... Then you came and I knew that your life was broken into pieces. I knew that what had happened to you might be the most splendid thing in the world for you and might be the most terrible. If you stay down here now with your father then you are done for — you are done for and my life has, after all, gone for nothing.”
Her voice broke, then she leaned forward, catching his hands:
“Peter, I’m dying — I’m going. If you will only have it you can take me, and when I am gone I shall still live on in you. Let me give you everything that is best in me — let me feel that I have sent you back to London, sent you with my dying breath — and that you go back, not because of yourself but because of everything that you can do for every one else.
“Believe me, Peter dear, it all matters so little, this trouble and unhappiness that you’ve had, if you take it bravely. The courage that you’ve wanted before is nothing to the courage that you want now if you’re going back. Let me die knowing that we’re both going back.
“Think of what your life, if it’s fine enough, can mean to other people. Go back to be battered — never mind what happens to your body — any one can stand that. There’s London waiting for you, there’s life and adventure and hardship. There are people to be helped. You’ll go, with all that I can give you, behind you ... you’ll go, Peter?”
He sat with his teeth set, staring out into the world. He had known from the first sentence of her appeal to him that she had named the one thing that could give him courage to fight his cowardice. Some one had once said: “If any one soul of us is all the world, this world and the next, to any other soul, then whoever it may be that thus loves us, the inadequacy of our return, the hopeless debt of us, must strike us to our knees with an utter humility.”
So did he feel now. Out of the wreck there had survived this one thing. He remembered what Henry Galleon had once said about Fortitude, that the hardest trial of all to bear was the consciousness of having missed the Finest Thing. All these years she had been there by the side of him and he had scarcely thought of her — now, even as he watched her, she was slipping away from him, and soon he would be left alone with the consciousness of missing the greatest chance of his life.
The one thing that he could do in return was to give her what she asked. But it was hard — he was under no illusion as to the desperate determination that it would demand. The supreme moment of his life had come. For the first time he was going to fling away the old Peter Westcott altogether. He could feel it clinging to him. About him, in the air, spirits were fighting. He had never before needed Courage as he was needing it now. It seemed to him that he had to stand up to all the devils in the world — they were thick on every side of him.
Then, with a great uplifting of strength, with a courage that he had never known before, he picked up Peter Westcott in his hands, held him, that miserable figure, high in air, raised him, then flung him with all his strength out, away, far into space, never to return, never to encumber the earth again.
“I’ll go back,” Peter said — and as he said it, there was no elation in him, only a clear-sighted vision of a life of struggle, toil, torment, defeat, in front of him, something so hard and arduous that the new Peter Westcott that had now been born seemed small indeed to face it.
But nevertheless he knew that at the moment that he said those words he had broken into pieces the spell that had been over him for so many years. That Beast in him that had troubled him for so long, all the dark shadows of Scaw House ... these were at an end.
He felt tired, discouraged, no fine creature, as he turned to her, but he knew that, from that moment, a new life had begun for him.
He put his arms round Norah Monogue and kissed her.
V
He got up very early next morning and went down to the Harbour. The fishing-boats were coming in; great flocks of gulls, waiting for the spoil that was soon to be theirs, were wheeling in clouds about the brown sails.
The boats stole, one after another, around the pier. The air was filled with shrill cries — the only other sound was the lapping of the water as it curled up the little beach.
As Peter stood there there crept upon him a sensation of awe. He took off his hat. The gulls seemed to cease their cries.
As another brown sail stole round the white point, gleaming’ now in the sun, he knew, with absolute certainty, that Norah Monogue was dead.
CHAPTER IV
THE GREY HILL
I
The day of Norah Monogue’s funeral was fine and clear. Peter and little Mr. Bannister were the only mourners and it was Peter’s wish that she should be buried in the little windy graveyard of the church where his mother had been buried.
There was always a wind on that little hill, but to-day it was gentler than he had ever known it before. His mind went back to that other funeral, now, as it seemed, such a lifetime ago. Out of all the world these two women only now seemed to abide with him. As he stood beside the grave he was conscious that there was about him a sense of peace and rest such as he had never known before. Could it be true that some of Norah Monogue’s fine spirit had come to him? Were they, in sober fact to go on together during the remainder of his days?
He lingered for a little looking down upon the grave. He was glad to think that he had made her last hours happy.
Indeed she had not lived in vain.
II
Heavy black clouds were banking upon the horizon as he went down the hill and struck the Sea Road in the direction of Scaw House. Except in that far distance the sky was a relentless, changeless blue. Every detail in the scene was marked with a hard outline, every sound, the sea, the Bell Rock, the cries of sheep, the nestling trees, was doubly insistent.
He banged the knocker upon the Scaw House door and when the old woman came to open to him he saw that something had occurred. Her hair fell about her neck, he
r face was puckered with distress and her whole appearance was dismayed.
“Is my father in?” he asked.
“He is, but he’s ill,” she answered him, eyeing him doubtfully. “He won’t know yer — I doubt he’ll know any one. He’s had a great set-back—”
Peter pushed past her into the hall— “Is he ill?”
“Indeed he is. He was suddenly took — the other evenin’ I being in my kitchen heard a great cry. I came runnin’ and there in the dining-room I found him, standing there in the midst, his hands up. His eyes, you must understand, sir, were wide and staring— ‘They’ve beaten me,’ he cried, ‘They’ve beaten me’ — just like that, sir, and then down he tumbled in a living fit, foaming at the mouth and striking his poor head against the fender. Yer may come up, sir, but he won’t know yer which he doesn’t me either.”
Peter followed her up to the dreary room that his father inhabited. Even here the paper was peeling off the walls, some of the window-glass was broken and the carpet was torn. His father lay on his back in an old high four-poster. His eyes stared before him, cheeks were ashen white — his hands too were white like ivory.
His lips moved but he made no sound. He did not see Peter, nor did his eyes turn from the blank stare that held them.
“Has he a doctor?” Peter asked the old woman.
“Ay — there’s a young man been coming—” the old woman answered him. She was, he noticed, more subservient than she had been on the former occasion. She obviously turned to him now with her greedy old eyes as the one who was likely soon to be in authority.