‘You’re not married, Tony, are you?’ Tom asked him.
‘Married!’ Tony answered with a flush—he flushed so easily when teased— ‘I love my wild life and animals far too much.’ He stammered slightly. Then he looked up quickly into his cousin’s eyes with frankness. Tom, without knowing why, almost felt ashamed of having asked it. ‘I—I never can go beyond a certain point,’ he said, ‘with girls. Something always holds me back. Odd—isn’t it?’ He hesitated. Then this flashed from him: ‘Bees never sip the last, the sweetest drop of honey from the rose, you know. The sunset always leaves one golden cloud adrift—eh?’ So there was poetry in him too!
And Tom, simpler, as well as more rigidly moulded, felt a curious touch of passionate sympathy as he heard it. His heart went out to the other suddenly with a burst of confidence. Some barrier melted in him and disappeared. For the first time in his life he knew the inclination, even the desire, to speak of things hidden deep within his heart. His cousin would understand.
And Tony’s sudden, wistful silence invited the confession. They had already been talking of their forgotten youthful days together. The ground was well prepared. They had even talked of his sister, Mary, and her marriage. Tony remembered her distinctly. He spoke of it, leaning forward and putting a hand on his cousin’s knee. Tom noticed vaguely the size of the palm, the wrist, the fingers—they seemed disproportionate. They were ugly hands. But it was subconscious notice. His mind was on another thing.
‘I say,’ Tom began with a sudden plunge, ‘you know a lot about birds and natural history—biology too, I suppose. Have you ever heard of the spiral movement?’
‘Spinal, did you say?’ queried the other, turning the stem of his glass and looking up.
‘No—spiral,’ Tom repeated, laughing dryly in spite of himself. ‘I mean the idea—that evolution, whether individually in men and animals, or with nations—historically, that is—is not in a straight line ahead, but moves upwards—in a spiral?’
‘It’s in the air,’ replied Tony vaguely, yet somehow as if he knew a great deal more about it. ‘The movement of the race, you mean?’
‘And of the individual too. We’re here, I mean, for the purpose of development—whatever one’s particular belief may be—and that this development, instead of going forwards in a straight line, has a kind of— spiral movement—upwards?’
Tony looked wonderfully wise. ‘I’ve heard of it,’ he said. ‘The spiral movement, as you say, is full of suggestion. It’s common among plants. But I don’t think science—biology, at any rate—takes much account of it.’
Tom interrupted eagerly, and with a certain grave enthusiasm that evidently intrigued his companion. ‘I mean—a movement that is always upwards, always getting higher, and always looking down upon what has gone before. That, if it’s true, a soul can look back—look down upon what it has been through before, but from a higher point—do you see?’
Tony emptied his glass and then lit a cigarette. ‘I see right enough,’ he said at length, quick and facile to appropriate any and every idea he came across, yet obviously astonished by his companion’s sudden seriousness. ‘Only the other day I read that humanity, for instance, is just now above the superstitious period—of the Middle Ages, say—going over it again— but that the recrudescence everywhere of psychic interests— fortune-telling, palmistry, magic, and the rest—has become quasi-scientific. It’s going through the same period, but seeks to explain and understand. It’s above it—one stage or so. Is that what you mean, perhaps?’
Tom drew in his horns, though for the life of him he could not say why. Tony appropriated his own idea too easily somehow—had almost read his thoughts. Vaguely he resented it. Tony had stolen from him—offended against some schoolboy meum and tuum standard.
‘That’s it—the idea, at any rate,’ he said, wondering why confidence had frozen in him. ‘Interesting, rather, isn’t it?’
And then abruptly he found that he was staring at his cousin’s hands, spread on the table palm downwards. He had been staring at them for some time, but unconsciously. Now he saw them. And there was something about them that he did not like. Absurd as it seemed, his change of mood had to do with those big, ungainly hands, tanned a deep brown-black by the sun. A faint shiver ran through him. He looked away.
‘Extraordinary,’ Tony went chattering on. ‘It explains these new wild dances perhaps. Anything more spiral and twisty than these modern gyrations I never saw!’ He turned it off in his light amusing way, yet as though quite familiar with the deeper aspects of the question—if he cared. ‘And what the body does,’ he added, ‘the mind has already done a little time before!’
He laughed, but whether he was in earnest, or merely playing with the idea, was uncertain. What had stopped Tom was, perhaps, that they were not in the same key together; Tom had used a word he rarely cared to use— soul—it had cost him a certain effort—but his cousin had not responded. That, and the hands, explained his change of mood. For the first time it occurred to his honest, simple mind that Tony was of other stuff, perhaps, than he had thought. That remark about the bees and sunset jarred a little. The lightness suggested insincerity almost.
He shook the notion off, for it was disagreeable, ungenerous as well. This was holiday-time, and serious discussion was out of place. The airy lightness in his cousin was just suited to the conditions of a winter-sport hotel; it was what made him so attractive to all and sundry, so easy to get on with. Yet Tom would have liked to confide in him, to have told him more, asked further questions and heard the answers; stranger still, he would have liked to lead from the spiral to the wave, to his own wavy feeling, and, further even—almost to speak of Lettice and his boyhood nightmare. He had never met a man in regard to whom he felt so forthcoming in this way. Tony surely had seriousness and depth in him; this irresponsibility was on the surface only.… There was a queer confusion in his mind—several incongruous things trying to combine.…
‘I knew a princess once—the widow of a Russian,’ Tony was saying. He had been talking on, gaily, lightly, for some time, but Tom, busy with these reflections, had not listened properly. He now looked up sharply, something suddenly alert in him. ‘They’re all princes in Russia,’ Tony laughed; ‘it means less than Count in France or von in Germany.’ He stopped and drained his glass. ‘But you know,’ he went on, his thoughts half elsewhere, it seemed, ‘it’s bad for a country when titles are too common, it lowers the aristocratic ideal. In the Caucasus— Batoum, for instance—every Georgian is a noble, your hotel porter a prince.’ He broke off abruptly as though reminded of something. ‘Of course!’ he exclaimed, ‘I was going to tell you about the Russian woman I knew who had something of that idea of yours.’ He stopped as his eye caught his cousin’s empty glass. ‘Let’s have another,’ he said, beckoning to the waitress, ‘it’s very light stuff, this beer. These long ski-trips give one an endless thirst, don’t they?’ Tom didn’t know whether he said yes or no. ‘What idea?’ he asked quickly. ‘What do you mean exactly?’ A curious feeling of familiarity stirred in him. This conversation had happened before.
‘Eh?’ Tony glanced up as though he had again forgotten what he was going to say. ‘Oh yes,’ he went on, ‘the Russian woman, the Princess I met in Egypt. She talked a bit like that once… I remember now.’
‘Like what?’ Tom felt a sudden, breathless curiosity in him: he was afraid the other would change his mind, or pass to something else, or forget what he was going to say. It would prove another Japanese tale— disappear before it satisfied.
But Tony went on at last, noticing, perhaps, his cousin’s interest.
‘I was up at Edfu after birds,’ he said, ‘and she had a dahabieh on the river. Some friends took me there to tea, or something. It was nothing particular. Only it occurred to me just now when you talked of spirals and things.’
‘You talked about the spiral?’ Tom asked. ‘Talked with her about it, I mean?’ He was slow, almost stupid compared to the other, who seemed to fla
sh lightly and quickly over a dozen ideas at once. But there was this real, natural sympathy between them both again. It seemed he knew exactly what his cousin was going to say.
Tony, blowing the foam off his beer glass, proceeded to quench his wholesome thirst. ‘Not exactly,’ he said at length, ‘but we talked, I remember, along that line. I was explaining about the flight of birds— that all wild animal life moves in a spontaneous sort of natural rhythm— with an unconscious grace, I mean, we’ve lost because we think too much. Birds in particular rise and fall with a swoop, the simplest, freest movement in the world—like a wave——’
‘Yes?’ interrupted Tom, leaning over the table a little and nearly upsetting his untouched glass. ‘I like that idea. It’s true.’
‘And—oh, that all the forces known to science move in a similar way—by wave-form, don’t you see? Something like that it was.’ He took another draught of the nectar his day’s exertions had certainly earned.
‘She said that?’ asked Tom, watching his cousin’s face buried in the enormous mug.
Tony set it down with a sigh of intense satisfaction, ‘I said it,’ he exclaimed with a frank egoism. ‘You’re too tired after all your falls this afternoon to listen properly. I was the teacher on that occasion, she the adoring listener! But if you want to know what she said too, I’ll tell you.’
Tom waited; he raised his glass, pretending to drink; if he showed too much interest, the other might swerve off again to something else. He knew what was coming, yet could not have actually foretold it. He recognised it only the instant afterwards.
‘She talked about water,’ Tony went on, as though he had difficulty in recalling what she really had said, ‘and I think she had water on the brain,’ he added lightly. ‘The Nile had bewitched her probably; it affects most of ‘em out there—the women, that is. She said life moved in a stream—that she moved down a stream, or something, and that only things going down the stream with her were real. Anything on the banks— stationary, that is—was not real. Oh, she said a lot. I’ve really forgotten now—it was a year or two ago—but I remember her mentioning shells and the spiral twist of shells. In fact,’ he added, as if there was no more to tell, ‘I suppose that’s what made me think of her just now—your mentioning the spiral movement.’
The door of the room, half café and half bar, where the peasants sat at wooden tables about them, opened, and the pretty head of Irena Nagorsky appeared. A burst of music came in with her. ‘We dance,’ she said, a note of reproach as well as invitation in her voice—then vanished. Tony, leaving his beer unfinished, laughed at his cousin and went after her. ‘My last night,’ he said cheerily. ‘Must be gay and jolly. I’m off to Trieste tomorrow for Alexandria. See you later, Tom—unless you’re coming to dance too.’
But, though they saw each other many a time again that evening, there was no further conversation. Next day the party broke up, Tom returning to the Water Works his firm was constructing outside Warsaw, and Tony taking the train for Budapesth en route for Trieste and Egypt. He urged Tom to follow him as soon as his work was finished, gave the Turf Club, Cairo, as his permanent address where letters would always reach him sooner or later, waved his hat to the assembled group upon the platform, and was gone. The last detail of him visible was the hand that held the waving hat. It looked bigger, darker, thought Tom, than ever. It was almost disfiguring. It stirred a hint of dislike in him. He turned his eyes away.
But Tom Kelverdon remembered that last night in the hotel for another reason too. In the small hours of the morning he woke up, hearing a sound close beside him in the room. He listened a moment, then turned on the light above the bed. The sound, of an unusual and peculiar character, continued faintly. But it was not actually in the room as he first supposed. It was outside.
More than ten years had passed since he had heard that sound. He had expected it that day on the mountains when the wavy feeling and the Whiff had come to him. Sooner or later he felt positive he would hear it. He heard it now. It had merely been delayed, postponed. Something gathering slowly and steadily behind his life was drawing nearer—had come already very close. He heard the dry, rattling Sound that was associated with the Wave and with the Whiff. In it, too, was a vague familiarity.
And then he realised that the wind was rising. A frozen pine-branch, stiff with little icicles, was rattling and scraping faintly outside the wooden framework of the double windows. It was the icy branch that made the dry, rattling sound. He listened intently; the sound was repeated at certain intervals, then ceased as the wind died down. And he turned over and fell asleep again, aware that what he had heard was an imitation only, but an imitation strangely accurate—of a reality. Similarly, the wave of snow was but an imitation of a reality to come. This reality lay waiting still beyond him. One day—one day soon—he would know it face to face. The Wave, he felt, was rising behind his life, and his life was rising with it towards a climax. On the little level platform where the years had landed him for a temporary pause, he began to shuffle with his feet in dream. And something deeper than his mind—looked back.…
The instinct, or by whatever name he called that positive, interior affirmation, proved curiously right. Life rose with the sweep and power of a wave, bearing him with it towards various climaxes. His powers, such as they were, seemed all in the ascendant. He passed from that level platform as with an upward rush, all his enterprises, all his energies, all that he wanted and tried to do, surging forward towards the crest of successful accomplishment.
And a dozen times at least he caught himself asking mentally for his cousin Tony; wishing he had confided in him more, revealed more of this curious business to him, exchanged sympathies with him about it all. A kind of yearning rose in him for his vanished friend. Almost he had missed an opportunity. Tony would have understood and helped to clear things up; to no other man of his acquaintance could he have felt similarly. But Tony was now out of reach in Egypt, chasing his birds among the temples of the haunted Nile, already, doubtless, the centre of a circle of new friends and acquaintances who found him as attractive and fascinating as the little Zakopané group had found him. Tony must keep.
Tom Kelverdon meanwhile, his brief holiday over, returned to his work at Warsaw, and brought it to a successful conclusion with a rapidity no one had foreseen, and he himself had least of all expected. The power of the rising wave was in all he did. He could not fail. Out of the success grew other contracts highly profitable to his firm. Some energy that overcame all obstacles, some clarity of judgment that selected unerringly the best ways and means, some skill and wisdom in him that made all his powers work in unison till they became irresistible, declared themselves, yet naturally and without adventitious aid. He seemed to have found himself anew. He felt pleased and satisfied with himself: always self-confident, as a man of ability ought to be, he now felt proud; and, though conceit had never been his failing, this new-born assurance moved distinctly towards pride. In a moment of impulsive pleasure he wrote to Tony, at the Turf Club, Cairo, and told him of his success.… The senior partner, his father’s old friend, wrote and asked his advice upon certain new proposals the firm had in view; it was a question of big docks to be constructed at Salonica, and something to do with a barrage on the Nile as well—there were several juicy contracts to choose between, it seemed,—and Sir William proposed a meeting in Switzerland, on his way out to the Near East; he would break the journey before crossing the Simplon for Milan and Trieste. The final telegram said Montreux, and Kelverdon hurried to Vienna and caught the night express to Lausanne by way of Bâle.
And at Montreux further evidence that the wave of life was rising then declared itself, when Sir William, having discussed the various propositions with him, listening with attention, even with deference, to Kelverdon’s opinion, told him quietly that his brother’s retirement left a vacancy in the firm which—he and his co-directors hoped confidently— Kelverdon might fill with benefit to all concerned. A senior partnership was offered to
him before he was thirty-five! Sir William left the same night for his steamer, and Tom was to wait at Montreux, perhaps a month, perhaps six weeks, until a personal inspection of the several sites enabled the final decision to be made; he was then to follow and take charge of the work itself.
Tom was immensely pleased. He wrote to his married sister in her Surrey vicarage, told her the news with a modesty he did not really feel, and sent her a handsome cheque by way of atonement for his bursting pride.
For simple natures, devoid of a saving introspection and self-criticism, upon becoming unexpectedly successful easily develop an honest yet none the less corroding pride. Tom felt himself rather a desirable person suddenly; by no means negligible at any rate; pleased and satisfied with himself, if not yet overweeningly so. His native confidence took this exaggerated turn and twist. His star was in the ascendant, a man to be counted with.…
The hidden weakness rose—as all else in him was rising—with the Wave. But he did not call it pride, because he did not recognise it. It was akin, perhaps, to that fatuous complacency of the bigoted religionist who, thinking he has discovered absolute truth, looks down from his narrow cell upon the rest of the world with a contemptuous pity that in itself is but the ignorance of crass self-delusion. Tom felt very sure of himself. For a rising wave drags up with it the mud and rubbish that have hitherto lain hidden out of sight in the ground below. Only with the fall do these undesirable elements return to their proper place again—where they belong and are of value. Sense of proportion is recovered only with perspective, and Tom Kelverdon, rising too rapidly, began to see himself in disproportionate relation to the rest of life. In his solid, perhaps stolid, way he considered himself a Personality—indispensable to no small portion of the world about him.
The Algernon Blackwood Collection Page 209