by Hugh Walpole
He looked more wandering than ever with his high white collar, his large spectacles, and his thin, dusty hair; the fire of some hidden, vital spirit burnt beneath those glasses, and his face was so kindly that she felt ashamed of herself for having avoided him so often.
“Both the aunts are at Miss Avies’.” she said.
“Oh,” he said, looking at her rather blankly.
“Perhaps I’ll come another time,” and he turned towards the door.
“No,” she cried. “You won’t — I haven’t seen you for months.”
“That’s not my fault,” he answered. “I thought we were to have been friends, and you’ve run away every time you saw the corner of my dusty coat poking round the door.”
“Yes,” she said, “I have — I’ve been frightened of every one lately.”
“And you’re not now?” he asked, looking at her with that sudden bright sharpness that was so peculiarly his.
“No, I’m not,” she answered. “I’m frightened of nobody.”
He said nothing to that, but stared fixedly in front of him.
“I’m in a bad mood,” he said. “I’ve been trying for weeks to get on with a novel. Just a fortnight ago a young man and a young woman took shelter from the rain in the doorway of a deserted house — they’re still there now, and they haven’t said a word to one another all that time.”
“Why not?” asked Maggie.
“They simply won’t speak,” he answered her.
“Well then, I should start another story,” said Maggie brightly.
“Ah,” he said, shaking his head. “What’s the use of starting one if you know you’re never going to finish it, what’s the use of finishing it if you know no one is ever going to read it?” Maggie shook her head.
“You’ve changed. When I saw you last you told me that you didn’t mind whether any one ever read them or not, and that you just wrote them because you loved doing them.”
“Every author,” said Mr. Magnus gloomily, “says that to himself when he can’t sell his books, but it’s all vainglory, I’m afraid.”
“I can’t help being glad,” Maggie answered. “There are such interesting things you might do. I can’t imagine why any one writes books now when there are so many already in existence that nobody’s read.”
He wasn’t listening to her. He looked up suddenly and said quite wildly:
“It’s terrible all this that’s going on. You know about it, of course — Warlock’s visions I mean and the trouble it’s making. I’m outside it and you’re outside it, but we’re being brought into it all the same — how can we help it when we love the people who are in it? It’s so easy to say that it’s nonsense, that people ought to be wiser nowadays; that it’s hysteria, even insanity — I know all that and, of course, I don’t believe for a moment that God’s coming in a chariot of fire on New Year’s Eve especially for the benefit of Thurston, Miss Avies and the rest, but that doesn’t end it — it ought to end it, but it doesn’t. There’s more in some people’s madness than in other people’s sanity, and anyway, even if it’s all nonsense it means life or death to your aunt and some of the others, and it means a certain breaking up of all this place. And it probably means the triumph of a charlatan like Thurston and the increase of humbug in the world and the discouragement of all the honest adventurers. I call myself an adventurer, you know, Miss Maggie, although I’m a poor specimen — but I’m damned if it isn’t better to be a poor adventurer than to be a fat, swollen, contented stay-at-home who can see just as far as his nose and his cheque-book and might be just as well dead as alive — I beg your pardon,” he added suddenly, “for swearing — I’m not myself, I’m not really.”
She could see indeed that he was in great agitation of mind, and some of this agitation communicated itself to her. Had she not been selfish in forgetting all this through her own happiness? He was right, she was part of it all, whether she wished or no.
“What do you think,” she asked, dropping her voice a little, “is the real truth about it?”
“The real truth” — he looked at her suddenly with a tender, most charming smile that took away his ugliness. “Ah, that’s a tremendous question. Part of the truth is that Warlock’s been praying so much and eating so little that it would be odd indeed if he didn’t see visions of some sort. And part of the truth is that there are a lot of women in the world who’ll believe simply anything that you tell them. It’s part of the truth, too, that there are scoundrels in the world who will take advantage of anybody’s simple trust to fill their pockets. But that’s not all,” he went on, shaking his head, “no, that’s not all. It’s part of the truth that there is a mystery, and that human beings will go on searching whatever all the materialists and merchants in the world can try to do to stop them. I remember years ago an old man, a little off his dot, telling my father that he, the old man, was a treasure hunter. He told my father that the world was divided into two halves, the treasure hunters and the Town Councillors, and that the two halves would never join and never even meet. My father, who was a practical man, said that the old idiot should be shut up in an asylum, and eventually I believe he was. ‘We’ll have him going off one day,’ my father said, ‘in a cargo boat with a map in his pocket, looking for gold pieces.’ But it wasn’t gold pieces he was after.”
To Maggie it was always irritating the way that Mr. Magnus would wander away from the subject. She brought him back now with a jerk.
“No, but what do you think is going to happen?” she asked him.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “I can’t tell, but I know all my happiness here is coming to an end, and I don’t know what I shall do. If I were a strong man I would go out and find all the other treasure hunters, all the vicious ones, and the diseased, and the drunkards and the perverted, and I would try to found some kind of a society so that they should recognise one another all the world over and shouldn’t feel so lonely and deserted and hopelessly done for. I don’t mean a society for improving them, mind you, or warning them or telling them they’ll go to prison if they don’t do better, that’s none of my business. But it seems to be a solemn fact that you aren’t a treasure hunter until there’s something wrong with you, until you’ve got a sin that’s stronger than you are, or until you’ve done something that’s disgraceful in the eyes of the world — not that I believe in weakness or in giving way to things. No one admires the strong and the brave more than I do. I think a man’s a fool if he doesn’t fight as hard as he can. But there’s a brotherhood of the dissatisfied and the uneasy and the anxious-hearted, and I believe it’s they who will discover the Grail in the end if it’s ever going to be discovered at all.”
He broke off, then said restlessly: “I think things out, you know, and at last I come to a conclusion, and it ends by being a platitude that all the goody, goody books have said times without number. But all the same that doesn’t prevent it from being my discovery. It’s nothing to do with goodness and nothing to do with evil, it’s nothing to do with strength, and nothing to do with weakness; it simply is that there are some people who want what they can see and no more, and there are others, the baffled, fighting and disordered others, for whom nothing that they can see with their mortal eyes is enough, and who’ll be restless all their days with their queer little maps and their mysterious, thumbed directions to some island or other that they’ll never reach and never even get a ship for.”
He stopped and there was a long silence between them, Maggie was silent because she never knew what to say when he burst into parables and divided mankind, under strange names, into different camps. And yet this time she did know a little what he was after. There was that house of Katharine Mark’s the other day, with its comfort and quiet and kind smiling clergyman — and there was this strange place with all of them in an odd quiver of excitement waiting for something to happen. But she couldn’t speak to him about that, she couldn’t say anything to him at all. He cleared his throat as though he were embarrassed and we
re conscious that he had been making a fool of himself. Maggie felt that he was disappointed in her. She was sorry for that, but she was as she was.
“Well, I’m glad you’re happy,” he said, looking at her wistfully. He got up and stood awkwardly looking at her.
“I want you to promise me something,” he said, “that’s really what I came for. I want you to promise that you won’t in any case leave your aunts before the New Year.”
She got up, looked at him and gave him her hand.
“Yes,” she said. “I promise that.”
The year had only a week or two more to run and she was not afraid of that little space of time. He seemed to want to say something more, but after hesitating he suddenly made a bolt for the door and she could hear him stumbling downstairs.
She forgot him almost as soon as he had left the house, but his words nevertheless brought her to consider her aunts. Next morning at breakfast time she had a further reason to consider them. Aunt Elizabeth met her, when she came downstairs, with a very grave face.
“Your aunt’s had a terrible night,” she said. “She’s insisted on coming downstairs — I told her not. She never listens to anything I say.”
Maggie could see that something more than ordinary had occurred. Aunt Elizabeth was on the edge of tears, and in so confused a state of mind that she put sugar into her egg, and then ate it with a puzzled air as though she could not be sure why it tasted so strange. When Aunt Anne came in it was plain enough that she had wrestled with demons during the night. Maggie had often seen her before battling with pain and refusing to be defeated. Now she looked as though she had but risen from the dead. It was a ghost in very truth that stood there; a ghost in black silk dress with white wristbands and a stiff white collar, black hair, so tightly drawn back and ordered that it was like a shining skull-cap. Her face was white, with the effect of a chalk drawing into which live, black, burning eyes had been stuck. But it was none of these things that frightened Maggie. It was the expression somewhere in the mouth, in the eyes, in the pale bony hands, that spoke of some meeting with a torturer whose powers were almost omniscient — almost, but not quite. Pain, sheer physical, brutal pain, came into the room hulking, steering behind Aunt Anne’s shoulder. It grinned at Maggie and said, “You haven’t begun to feel what I can do yet, but every one has his turn. You needn’t flatter yourself that you’re going to escape.”
When Aunt Anne moved now it was with infinite caution, as though she were stalking her enemy and was afraid lest any incautious gesture should betray her into his ambush. No less marked than her torture was her courage and the expectation that sustained that courage. She had her eyes set upon something very sure and very certain. Maggie was afraid to think what that expectation might be. But Maggie had grown during these last weeks. She did not now kiss her aunt and try to show an affection which was not so genuine as she would have liked it to be by nervous little demonstrations. She said gravely:
“I am so sorry, Aunt Anne, that you have had so bad a night. Shall I stay this morning and read to you?”
Even as she spoke she realised with sharp pain what giving up her meeting with Martin meant.
“What were you going to do, dear?” asked Aunt Anne, her eyes seeing as ever far beyond Maggie and the room and the house. As she spoke Thomas, the cat, came forward and began rubbing himself very gently, as though he were whispering something to his mistress, against her dress. Maggie had an impulse, so strong that it almost defeated her, to burst out with the whole truth. She almost said: “I’m going out to meet Martin Warlock, whom I love and with whom I’m going to live.” She hated deceit, she hated lies. But this was some one else’s secret as well as her own, and telling the truth now would only lead to much pain and distress, and then more lies and more deceit.
So she said:
“I’m going to Piccadilly to get some things for Aunt Elizabeth.”
“Yes,” said Aunt Elizabeth, “she saves me a great deal of trouble. She’s a good girl.”
“I know she’s a good girl,” said Aunt Anne softly.
It was strange to remember the time not so long ago when to run out of the house and post a letter had seemed a bold defiant thing to do threatened with grave penalties. The aunts had changed their plans about her and had given her no reasons for doing so. No reasons were ever given in that house for anything that was done. The more Maggie went out, the more she was drawn in.
On her way to Martin that morning the figure of Aunt Anne haunted her. She felt for a brief moment that she would do anything, yes, even surrender Martin, to ease her aunt’s pain. And then she knew that she would not, and she called herself cruel and selfish and felt for an instant a dark shadow threatening her because she was so. But when she saw Martin outside Hatchard’s she forgot it all. It was a strange thing that during those weeks they neither of them asked any questions about their home affairs. It was as though they both inwardly realised that there was trouble for them of every kind waiting outside and that they could only definitely realise their happiness by building a wall around themselves. They knew perhaps in their secret hearts, or at any rate Martin knew, that they could not hold their castle for long. But is not the gift of three perfect weeks a great thing for any human being to be given — and who has the temerity, the challenging audacity, to ask with confidence for even so much?
On this particular morning Martin said to her:
“Before we get into the ‘bus, Maggie, you’ve got to come into a shop with me.” He was especially boyish and happy and natural that morning. It was strange how his face altered when he was happy. His brow was clear, his eyes were bright, and he had a kind of crooked confident smile that must have won anybody’s heart. His whole carriage was that of a boy who was entering life for the first time with undaunted expectation that it could give him nothing but the best and jolliest things. Maggie as she looked at him this morning caught her breath with the astonishing force of her love for him. “Oh, how I’ll look after him,” was her thought. “He shall never be unhappy again.”
They crossed the street together, and stood for a moment close together on the kerb in the middle way as though they were quite alone in the world. She caught his arm and they ran before a charging motor-’bus, laughing. People turned back and looked at them, so happy they seemed. They walked up Bond Street and Martin drew her into a jeweller’s. She had never possessed any ornament except her coral necklace in all her life and she knew now for the first time how terribly she liked beautiful things. It was useless of her to pretend that she did not know that he was going to give her something. She did not pretend. A very thin old man, who looked like one of the prophets, drawn out of the wilderness and clothed by the most fashionable of London tailors, looking over their shoulders as he talked to them because he saw at once that they were not customers who were likely to add very much to his shop’s exchequer, produced a large tray, full of rings that glittered and sparkled and danced as though they’d been told to show themselves off to the best possible advantage. But for Maggie at once there was only one possible ring. It was a thin hoop of gold with three small pearls set in the middle of it; nothing very especial about it, it was in fact less striking than almost any other ring in the tray. Maggie looked at the ring and the ring looked at Maggie. It was as though the ring said, “I shall belong to you whether you take me or no.”
“Now,” said Martin with a little catch in his throat, “you make your choice, Maggie.” He was not a millionaire, but he did honestly intend that whatever ring she chose she should have.
“Oh,” said Maggie, whispering because the shop was so large and the prophet so indifferent, “don’t you think you’d better choose?”
At the same time she felt the anxious gaze of the three little pearls upon her.
“No,” said Martin, “I want to give you what you’d like.”
“I’d like what you’d like,” said Maggie, still whispering.
At this banality the prophet made a little impatient mo
vement as though he really could not be expected to stand waiting there for ever. Also a magnificent lady, in furs so rich that you could see nothing of her but her powdered nose, was waving ropes of pearls about in a blase manner very close to them, and Maggie had a strange, entirely unreasonable fear that this splendour would suddenly turn round and snatch the little pearl ring and go off with it.
“I’d like that one,” said Maggie, pointing. She heard the prophet sniff his contempt, but she did not care.
Martin, although he would willingly have given her the most gorgeous ring in the shop, was delighted to find that her taste was so good, and like herself. He had great ideas about taste, some of his secret fears had been lest her strange uncouth upbringing should have caused her to like gaudy things. He could have hugged her before them all when she chose that particular ring, which he had himself noticed as the prettiest and neatest there.
“Just see whether it fits, darling,” he said. At the word “darling” the prophet cast another despairing look about the shop, as though he knew well the length of time that lovers could take over these things if they once put their hearts into it. Maggie was ashamed of her stubby finger as she put her hand forward — but the ring fitted exactly.