The Algernon Blackwood Collection

by Algernon Blackwood

  ‘And what were you thinking about, Tom?’ she enquired teasingly. ‘You haven’t said a word for a whole five minutes!’

  ‘I was thinking of Egypt,’ he answered with truth.

  She looked up quickly.

  ‘I’m to go out in December,’ he went on. ‘I told you. It was decided at our last Board Meeting.’

  She said she remembered. ‘But it’s funny,’ she added, ‘because I was thinking of Egypt too just then—thinking of the Nile, my river with the floating faces.’

  The week-end visit was typical of many others; Mrs. Haughstone, seeing safety in numbers possibly, was pleasant on the surface, Molly deflecting most of her poisoned darts towards herself; while Tom and Tony shared the society of their unconventional hostess with boyish enjoyment. Tom modified the air of ownership he indulged when alone with her, and no one need have noticed that there was anything more between them than a hearty, understanding friendship. Tony, for instance, may have guessed the true situation, or, again, he may not; for he said no word, nor showed the smallest hint by word, by gesture, or by silence—most significant betrayal of all—that he was aware of any special tie. Though a keen observer, he gave no sign. ‘She’s an interesting woman, Tom,’ he remarked lightly yet with enthusiasm once, ‘and a rare good hostess—a woman in a thousand, I declare. We make a famous trio. As you’ve got that Assouan job we’ll have some fun next winter in Egypt, eh?’

  And Tom, pleased and secretly flattered by the admiration, tried to make his confidences. Unless Tony had liked her this would have been impossible. But they formed such a natural, happy trio together, giving the lie to the hoary proverb, that Tom felt it was permissible to speak of her to his sympathetic cousin. Already they had laughingly discussed the half-forgotten acquaintanceship begun in the dahabieh on the Nile, Tony making a neat apology by declaring to her, ‘Beautiful women blind me so, Madame Jaretzka, that I invariably forget all lesser details. And that’s why I told Tom you were a Russian.’

  On this particular occasion, too, it was made easier because Tony had asked his cousin’s opinion about the Irish girl, invited for his special benefit. ‘I was never so disappointed in my life,’ he said in his convincing yet airy way. ‘She looked so wonderful the other night. It was the evening dress, I suppose. You should always see a girl first in the daytime; the daylight self is the real self.’ And Tom, amused by the irresponsible attitude towards the sex, replied that the right woman looked herself in any dress because it was as much a part of her as her own skin. ‘Yes,’ said Tony, ‘it’s the thing inside the skin that counts, of course; you’re right; the rest is only a passing glamour. But friendship with a woman is the best of all, for friendship grows insensibly into the best kind of love. It’s a delightful feeling,’ he added sympathetically, ‘that kind of friendship. Independent of what they wear!’

  He enjoyed his pun and laughed. ‘I say, Tom,’ he went on suddenly with a certain inconsequence, ‘have you ever met the Prince—Madame Jaretzka’s husband—by the way? I wonder what he’s like.’ He looked up carelessly and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘No,’ replied Tom in a quiet tone, ‘but I—exp—hope to some day.’

  ‘I think he ran away and left her, or something,’ continued the other. ‘He’s dead, anyhow, to all intents and purposes. But I’ve been wondering lately. I’ll be bound there was ill-treatment. She looks so sad sometimes. The other night at the theatre I was watching her——’

  ‘That Egyptian play?’ broke in Tom.

  ‘Yes; it was bad enough to make any one look sad, wasn’t it? But it was curious all the same——’

  ‘I didn’t mean the badness.’

  ‘Nor did I. It was odd. There was atmosphere in spite of everything.’

  ‘I thought you were too occupied to notice the performance,’ Tom hinted.

  Tony laughed good-naturedly. ‘I was a bit taken up, I admit,’ he said. ‘But there was something curious all the same. I kept seeing you and our hostess on the stage——’

  ‘In Egypt!’

  ‘In a way, yes.’ He hesitated.

  ‘Odd,’ said his cousin briefly.

  ‘Very. It seemed—there was some one else who ought to have been there as well as you two. Only he never came on.’

  Tom made no comment. Was this thought-transference, he wondered?

  The natural sympathy between them furnished the requisite conditions certainly.

  ‘He never came on,’ continued Tony, ‘and I had the queer feeling that he was being kept off on purpose, that he was busy with something else, but that the moment he came on the play would get good and interesting—real. Something would happen. And it was then I noticed Madame Jaretzka——’

  ‘And me, too, I suppose,’ Tom put in, half amused, half serious. There was an excited yet uneasy feeling in him.

  ‘Chiefly her, I think. And she looked so sad,—it struck me suddenly. D’you know, Tom,’ he went on more earnestly, ‘it was really quite curious. I got the feeling that we three were watching that play together from above it somewhere, looking down on it—sort of from a height above——’

  ‘Above,’ exclaimed his cousin. There was surprise in him—surprise at himself. That faint uneasiness increased. He realised that to confide in Tony was impossible. But why?

  ‘H’m,’ Tony went on in a reflective way as if half to himself. ‘I may have seen it before and forgotten it.’ Then he looked up at his cousin. ‘And what’s more—that we three, as we watched it, knew the same thing together—knew that we were waiting for another chap to come on, and that when he came the silly piece would turn suddenly interesting, dramatic in a true sense, only tragedy instead of comedy. Did you, Tom?’ he asked abruptly, screwing up his eyes and looking quite serious a moment.

  Tom had no answer ready, but his cousin left no time for answering.

  ‘And the fact is,’ he continued, lowering his voice, ‘I had the feeling the other chap we were waiting for was him.’

  Tom was too interested to smile at the grammar. ‘You mean—her husband?’ he said quietly. He did not like the turn the talk had taken; it pleased him to talk of her, but he disliked to bring the absent husband in. There was trouble in him as he listened.

  ‘Possibly it was,’ he added a trifle stiffly. Then, ashamed of his feeling towards his imaginative cousin, he changed his manner quickly. He went up and stood behind him by the open window. ‘Tony, old boy, we’re together somehow in this thing,’ he began impulsively; ‘I’m sure of it.’ Then the words stuck. ‘If ever I want your help——’

  ‘Rather, Tom,’ said the other with enthusiasm, yet puzzled, turning with an earnest expression in his frank blue eyes. In another moment, like two boys swearing eternal friendship, they would have shaken hands. Tom again felt the impulse to make the confidences that desire for sympathy prompted, and again realised that it was difficult, yet that he would accomplish it. Indeed, he was on the point of doing so, relieving his mind of the childhood story, the accumulated details of Wave and Whiff and Sound and Eyes, the singular Montreux meeting, the strange medley of joy and uneasiness as well, all in fact without reserve—when a voice from the lawn came floating into the room and broke the spell. It lifted him sharply to another plane. He felt glad suddenly that he had not spoken— afterwards, he felt very glad. It was not right in regard to her, he realised.

  ‘You’re never ready, you boys,’ their hostess was saying, ‘and Miss Monnigan declares that men always wait to be fetched. The lunch-baskets are all in, and the motor’s waiting.’

  ‘We didn’t want to be in the way,’ cried Tony gaily, ever ready with an answer first. ‘We’re both so big and clumsy. But we’ll make the fire in the woods and do the work that requires mere strength without skill all right.’ He leaped out of the window to join them, while Tom went by the door to fetch his cap and overcoat. Turning an instant he saw the three figures on the lawn standing in the sunlight, Madame Jaretzka with a loose, rough motor-coat over her white dress, a rose at her throat
and the long blue veil he loved wound round her hair and face. He saw her eyes look up at Tony and heard her chiding him. ‘You’ve been talking mischief in there together,’ she was saying laughingly, giving him a searching glance in play, though the tone had meaning in it. ‘We were talking of you,’ swore Tony, ‘and you,’ he added, turning by way of polite after-thought to the girl. And one of his big hands he laid for a moment upon Madame Jaretzka’s arm.

  Tom turned sharply and hurried on into the hall. The first thought in his mind was how tender and gentle Madame Jaretzka looked standing in the sunshine, her eyes turned up at Tony. His second thought was vaguer: he felt glad that Tony admired and liked her so. The third was vaguer still: Tony didn’t really care for the girl a bit and was only amusing himself with her, but Madame Jaretzka would protect her and see that no harm came of it. She could protect the whole world. That was her genius.

  In a moment these three thoughts flashed through him, but while the last two vanished as quickly as they came, the first lingered like sunlight in him. It remained and grew and filled his heart, and all that day it kept close by him—her love, her comfort, her mothering compassion.

  And Tom felt glad for some reason that his confidences to Tony after all had been interrupted and prevented. They remained thus interrupted and prevented until the end, even when the ‘other’ came upon the scene, and above all while that ‘other’ stayed. It all seemed curiously inevitable.

  CHAPTER XII.

  ..................

  THE LAST FEW WEEKS OF September they were much alone together, for Mrs. Haughstone had gone back to her husband’s tiny house at Kew, Molly to the Dresden school, and Tony somewhere into space—northern Russia, he said, to watch the birds beginning to leave.

  Meanwhile, with deepening of friendship, and experiences whose ordinariness was raised into significance because this woman shared them with him, Tom saw the summer fade in England and usher in the longer evenings. Light and heat waned from the sighing year; winds, charged with the memory of roses, took the paling skies; the swallows whispered together of the southern tour. New stars swam into their autumnal places, and the Milky Way came majestically to its own. He watched the curve of it on moonless nights, pouring its grand river across the heavens. And in the heart of its soft brilliance he saw Cygnus, cruciform and shining, immersed in the white foam of the arching wave.

  He noticed these things now, as once long ago in early boyhood, because a time of separation was at hand. His yearning now was akin to his yearning then—it left a chasm in his soul that beauty alone could help to fill. At fifteen he was thirty-five, as now at thirty-five he was fifteen again.

  Lettice was not, indeed, at a Finishing School across the Channel, but she was shortly going to Warsaw to spend October with her husband, and in November she was to sail for Egypt from Trieste. Tom was to follow in December, so a separation of three months was close at hand. ‘But a necessary separation,’ she said one evening as they motored home beneath the stars, ‘is always bearable and strengthening; we shall both be occupied with things that must—I mean, things we ought to do. It’s the needless separations that are hard to bear.’ He replied that it would be wonderful meeting again and pretending they were strangers. He tried to share her mood, her point of view with honesty. ‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘only that wouldn’t be quite true, because you and I can never be separated—really. The curve of the earth may hide us from each other’s sight like that,’—and she pointed to the sinking moon—’but we feel the pull just the same.’

  They leaned back among the cushions, sharing the mysterious beauty of the night-sky in their hearts. They lowered their voices as though the hush upon the world demanded it. The little things they said seemed suddenly to possess a significance they could not account for quite and yet admitted.

  He told her that the Milky Way was at its best these coming months, and that Cygnus would be always visible on clear nights. ‘We’ll look at that and remember,’ he said half playfully. ‘The astronomers say the Milky Way is the very ground-plan of the Universe. So we all come out of it. And you’re Cygnus.’ She called him sentimental, and he admitted that perhaps he was. ‘I don’t like this separation,’ he said bluntly. In his mind he was thinking that the Milky Way had his wave in it, and that its wondrous arch, like his life and hers, rose out of the ‘sea’ below the world. In that sea no separation was possible.

  ‘But it’s not that that makes you suddenly poetic, Tom. It’s something else.’

  ‘Is it?’ he answered. A whisper of pain went past him across the night. He felt something coming; he was convinced she felt it too. But he could not name it.

  ‘The Milky Way is a stream as well as a wave. You say it rises in the autumn——?’ She leaned nearer to him a little.

  ‘But it’s seen at its best a little later—in the winter, I believe.’

  ‘We shall be in Egypt then,’ she mentioned. He could have sworn she would say those very words.

  ‘Egypt,’ he repeated slowly. ‘Yes—in Egypt.’

  And a little shiver came over him, so slight, so quickly gone again, that he hoped it was imperceptible. Yet she had noticed it.

  ‘Why, Tom, don’t you like the idea?’

  ‘I wonder—’ he began, then changed the sentence—’I wonder what it will be like. I have a curious desire to see it—I know that.’

  He heard her laugh under her breath a little. What came over them both in that moment he couldn’t say. There was a sense of tumult in him somewhere, a hint of pain, of menace too. Her laughter, slight as it was, jarred upon him. She was not feeling quite what he felt—this flashed, then vanished.

  ‘You don’t sound enthusiastic,’ she said calmly.

  ‘I am, though. Only—I had a feeling——’ He broke off. The truth was he couldn’t describe that feeling even to himself.

  ‘Tom, dear, my dear one—’ she began, then stopped. She also stopped an impulsive movement towards him. She drew back her sentence and her arms. And Tom, aware of a rising passion in him he might be unable to control, turned his face away a moment. Something clutched at his heart as with cruel pincers. A chill followed close upon the shiver. He felt a moment of keen shame, yet knew not exactly why he felt it.

  ‘I am a sentimental ass!’ he exclaimed abruptly with a natural laugh. His voice was tender. He turned again to her. ‘I believe I’ve never properly grown up.’ And before he could restrain himself he drew her towards him, seized her hand and kissed it like a boy. It was that kiss, combined with her blocked sentence and uncompleted gesture, rather than any more passionate expression of their love for one another, that he remembered throughout the empty months to follow.

  But there was another reason, too, why he remembered it. For she wore a silk dress, and the arm against his ear produced a momentary rustling that brought back the noise in the Zakopané bedroom when the frozen branch had scraped the outside wall. And with the Sound, absent now so long, the old strange uneasiness revived acutely. For that caressing gesture, that kiss, that phrase of love that blocked its own final utterance brought back the strange rich pain.

  In the act of giving them, even while he felt her touch and held her within his arms—she evaded him and went far away into another place where he could not follow her. And he knew for the first time a singular emotion that seemed like a faint, distant jealousy that stirred in him, yet a spiritual jealousy… as of some one he had never even seen.

  They lingered a moment in the garden to enjoy the quiet stars and see the moon go down below the pine-wood. The tense mood of half an hour ago in the motor-car had evaporated of its own accord apparently.

  A conversation that followed emphasised this elusive emotion in him, because it somehow increased the remoteness of the part of her he could not claim. She mentioned that she was taking Mrs. Haughstone with her to Egypt in November; it again exasperated him; such unselfishness he could not understand. The invitation came, moreover, upon what Tom felt was a climax of shameless behaviour
. For Madame Jaretzka had helped the family with money that, to save their pride, was to be considered lent. The husband had written gushing letters of thanks and promises that—Tom had seen these letters—could hardly have deceived a schoolgirl. Yet a recent legacy, which rendered a part repayment possible, had been purposely concealed, with the result that yet more money had been ‘lent’ to tide them over non-existent or invented difficulties.

  And now, on the top of this, Madame Jaretzka not only refused to divulge that the legacy was known to her, but even proposed an expensive two months’ holiday to the woman who was tricking her.

  Tom objected strongly for two reasons; he thought it foolish kindness, and he did not want her.

  ‘You’re too good to the woman, far too good,’ he said. But his annoyance was only increased by the firmness of the attitude that met him. ‘No, Tom; you’re wrong. They’ll find out in time that I know, and see themselves as they are.’

  ‘You forgive everything to everybody,’ he observed critically. ‘It’s too much.’

  She turned round upon him. Her attitude was a rebuke, and feeling rebuked he did not like it. For though she did not quote ‘until seventy times seven,’ she lived it.

  ‘When she sees herself sly and treacherous like that, she’ll understand,’ came the answer, ‘she’ll get her own forgiveness.’

  ‘Her own forgiveness!’

  ‘The only real kind. If I forgive, it doesn’t alter her. But if she understands and feels shame and makes up her mind not to repeat—that’s forgiving herself. She really changes then.’