“Gee, that’s queer!” said the man with the telescope; “seems as though one of them has seceded! Two republics on one derelict island!”
The three figures moved down to the beach, but the man and the girl held aloof from the woman.
“This beats the band!” said the Alabama’s captain; “they don’t even recognize each other! It’s a clean cut! Not on speaking terms! Wa’l, I always did say that to find out what the inside of life was like you’d got to be wrecked on a desert island with two women and no dog!”
But in the course of a few days he had learnt to appreciate the human irony of the affair, and had taken off his shoes in the “Court of the Lovers.”
“I guess that hell-cat has had her tail twisted!”
And when the girl and the man were married, he put on white cotton gloves and went ashore to help in the blessing.
CALIBAN
I was turning away from the bookstall at Waterloo when I met Netta Rainsford.
“The ubiquitous Josiah!” she said, smiling in my face; “I thought you were in Egypt.”
It had seemed to me Netta’s destiny to provoke the archaic, romantic and obvious man in me, and if I had been disastrously in love with her, I had found my love a disaster. A month ago we had quarrelled.
She provoked me now, this slim, audacious thing, so defiant, so fragile, so elusive. Her hair was the colour of honey, her red mouth the most tantalizing mouth I had ever seen. Her grey eyes with their long dark lashes always made one think of a sword half hidden under a cloak of black velvet.
“I suppose you are going to Merlin Court?” she added.
“I am.”
“And so am I.”
I saw her eyes defy me. It was Netta’s recklessness, her passion for discovering anything bizarre and unusual that had made me afraid for her.
“It’s impossible,” I said angrily; “you can’t go there.”
“Thank you. If you can go—why not I?”
“It’s different. I have a reason for going, and I happen to be a man.”
She looked at me and laughed.
“We can’t stand here quarrelling. You should not allow yourself to quarrel with a mere woman. A great big man who has hunted lions, and who was solemnly christened Josiah Orchardson.”
I know she thought me a fool, an old-fashioned, muscular, sentimental fool with all the passions and prejudices of an Elizabethan. She thought my name foolish. She was as quick as light, and I a great blundering bumble-bee, yet there were ugly shadows in life that this audacious and wilful child had not discovered, and we had quarrelled because I had tried to put myself between her and these shadows.
“You won’t go,” I said with sudden gentleness. “You may laugh at me and at my name, but you won’t go to Merlin Court.”
“I have my ticket and my luggage is labelled. Besides—it will be so amusing down there.”
“Amusing! I think I shall thrash that man Jerram for having the impertinence to ask you. What a set!”
She flushed up, and then grew very pale.
“Mr. Jerram is a genius. He interests me. I shall meet clever people there. I think it is Mr. Josiah Orchardson who shall stay behind.”
“He will be the fool—or Caliban. I am expected to take part in some futurist fooling or other: The Tempest—as it Really Happened, I think Musgrave called it.”
She turned and walked slowly towards the platform. People had begun to stare.
“How did you get your invitation?” she asked.
“Through Musgrave.”
“And why?”
“Because I thought you might be there.”
She was angry, and yet I had a feeling that there was something behind her anger. If that little red mouth of hers was tempted to exclaim, “Who will rid me of this turbulent fool?” her heart had a certain liking for the fool. I loved her. She might be a brilliant, elusive, mischievous Greek child of the Sun, but some day she might need the strong brown arms of a mortal man to seize the reins of her falling chariot.
I followed her through the gates. Her porter had secured her a corner seat in a first-class carriage in the centre of the train. She stepped in, sat down and opened a magazine.
“Please go away and smoke,” she said; “I might find it rather trying being caged up with a lion.”
I closed the door.
“Some day——” I began.
But she put up the magazine and pretended to hide a yawn.
I got into a “smoker” a few carriages away from her, but there was not much comfort in my pipe. So we had quarrelled again, and it appeared that we should go on quarrelling, my male creed clashing with her too restive feminine independence. I knew that she was far cleverer than I was, and yet her cleverness seemed no shield against the evil genius of Ambrose Jerram.
Perhaps it was the sinister and strange genius of the man that attracted her. If I thought of Netta as a white nymph of the woods, I could picture Jerram as a faun. He was extraordinarily ugly, monstrously yet magnificently ugly, a great swarthy creature with the head of a Pan and eyes of fire. The Jerrams had all been wild men, from the first Jerram in history who had blown up his own ship and two Spaniards who lay beside him, rather than surrender. If genius spells madness, then this last of the Jerrams was mad, and with a malicious, brilliant and extravagant madness that seemed inspired by the Spirit of Evil. Clever people had read his poems, and some of them had burnt the book—and gone out into a place where flowers grew. With all that coarse Pan’s face of his he had touches of the divine fire. No narcotized, anæmic decadent—this. At Oxford he had been feared for his wild, mad animal strength. He was a musician, a rhapsodist, a fine horseman, a powerful swimmer. He had wit, a sort of devilish, playful eloquence that made the average man sit and stare like a yokel in a thunderstorm.
His house-parties were famous. He always had some mad burlesque to amuse people, and worldlings who were exquisitely bored with life gathered at Merlin Court. It was Musgrave who had obtained me the invitation by boasting that I could bray like an ass. “We are going to revise Shakespeare” was all he had said to me; “bring a Monsieur Beaucaire suit and a white wig.”
A big, black limousine was waiting for us at Frencham station, and whirled us towards the sunset and Merlin Court. We went down into a deep green valley that was all dusky with the shadows of huge beech-trees. Netta sat with her hands in her lap, her dark eyes looking towards the sunset, her hair ashine with it, and I thought that I had never seen any creature look more ethereal and enchanting.
I had apologized for being in the car, and she had made my sarcasm sound foolish.
“Why did they christen you Josiah?” she had asked.
We drove through Jerram’s woods in silence.
I felt strangely sensitive that summer evening, sensitive to Netta’s beauty, to the sun-splashed splendour of the woods and their strange, mysterious shadows. This valley seemed enchanted. It was part of a goblin world, and yet the very beauty of it was evil. I am not a “psychic,” but this landscape breathed whisperings of tragedy. When the car climbed out of the gloom of the park into a gorgeous wilderness of rhododendrons and azaleas, the world seemed on fire, aflame to the very foot of the old red Jacobean house. The cedars on the lawn were black against the sunset, and from under one of them came Ambrose Jerram with his tawny eyes and all his magnificent ugliness. It struck me suddenly that he should have been naked, a figure of barbaric bronze, horned and hoofed like a satyr.
I noticed a group of people under the nearest cedar, all dressed in the costume of the Georges. Jerram himself wore a suit of black satin. He stood bowing to Netta—and when I saw him look at her I knew that I hated Jerram with all my body and soul.
“I hope you will excuse the incongruity of the car. You see—we have all gone back a hundred and fifty years.”
He kissed her hand, and his big red mouth seemed to cover the whole of it.
Netta smiled at him.
“If you had sent a coach we should have
missed our dinner, and Mr. Orchardson cannot bear to be unpunctual.”
Jerram looked at me and held out a hand. It was a big hand, shaded with black hair.
“Glad to see you; I hope you have come dressed for the part.”
I took his hand. His tawny eyes looked into mine. They were like the eyes of some great cat—menacing, yet ironical.
Musgrave came up to my room and helped me to change. He was in white and silver, colours that suited his florid and handsome face. I liked Musgrave. His world was the world of the man about town, but there was no harm in him. He helped me into my green satin coat and tied my lace cravat for me, and from him I learnt the names of Jerram’s other guests. The group under the cedar had included Bertrand Blare, poet and decadent; Agatha Western, secretary of the Pomegranate Club; Haines of the Foreign Office, a “highbrow”; Millie Cumberbatch, who looked like a Watteau shepherdess; and Backhouse of the “Guards,” one of the finest polo players in the world. There were others; but they were mere supernumeraries, figures in Ambrose Jerram’s landscape.
Musgrave had two letters to write, and I went out to explore. My bedroom door opened on a great gallery that ran from east to west. It was hung with pictures and armour and lined with old furniture, and its black and polished floor caught the last sunlight that poured in through the western window, making me think of the still black waters of some Flemish canal mirroring the old houses on either side of it. The surface gave one a strange sense of depth and of mystery. I saw the silver of the armour reflected in it, the red and blue and gold of the lacquer cabinets, even the colours of the pictures. I was standing there obsessed by its almost sinister beauty when I saw Netta Rainsford come out of her room, and pause to look at some portrait that hung opposite her door. She was dressed in white, and the great western window gave her figure an aura of yellow light.
I walked slowly up the gallery and stood by her side. She was looking at the portrait of one of the Jerrams, a man in black satin and wearing a heavy black periwig. The portrait was two hundred years old, but the face was the face of Ambrose Jerram.
“Heredity,” I said.
She gave me a slightly impatient look.
“And minute, my dear Josh?”
“The obvious thing may be very remarkable. I wonder which Jerram this was?”
She continued to gaze at the portrait.
“Lucifer Jerram. He was supposed to be mad. Some Italian killed him at Naples.”
“My sympathies are with the Italian,” I said.
I heard a door open, and turning my head saw Jerram looking at us. It was as though the man had stepped down from the picture, and the likeness troubled me.
So did Jerram’s smile. It was so ugly, so full of some unfathomable madness. His eyes looked like two points of fire.
“You know my ancestor, Miss Rainsford?”
She laughed.
“I was trying to explain him to Mr. Orchardson.”
“There are some things that it would be difficult to explain to Mr. Orchardson——”
His smiling eyes were on me, and I knew that we hated each other.
“Sometimes the unexplainable things are obvious,” I said.
Dinner was an exotic affair, and the long “cavalier table” so piled with flowers and fruit that it made me think of some Bacchic feast. Jerram had Netta on his right, and I sat next to her with Agatha Western as my partner. Jerram was brilliant. I think he had acknowledged me as his rival, and that his placing me next to Netta was a challenge. He meant to out-talk me, eclipse me, make me seem a heavy, sententious fool, and he succeeded.
I could make nothing of Agatha Western; she was too modern and too cynical, and I think she enjoyed seeing me blundering in the mazes of Jerram’s wit. He was mad, divinely mad, and even his gigantic ugliness came to have devilish fascination. He seemed to mesmerise Netta, and I saw little more than the curves of her profile and of her shoulder; and once, when Jerram stung me with some stab of wit, she laughed like a Bacchic girl.
I was angry, and my anger made me more clumsy.
“I am afraid I am not much good at blowing froth,” I said.
Someone laughed.
“Define froth,” drawled Blare from the other side of the table.
Jerram took up the challenge.
“Froth is the foam that genius blows from the muddy ale of mediocrity. Mr. Orchardson prefers the ale.”
“It is honest stuff,” I said.
The whole party mocked me.
“Say, rather—respectable.”
“Perhaps Mr. Orchardson will lecture us on his duty towards his neighbour?”
I looked at Netta.
“That might be too personal.”
She gave a defiant lift of the head.
“Mr. Orchardson is too—-sane,” said Jerram; “sanity is the great illusion. We are mad, hopelessly mad. Of course, Mr. Orchardson would argue——”
“I won’t argue the extent of your madness.”
His eyes gave me a flash of mockery. He picked up a pomegranate from a silver dish and put it on Netta’s plate.
“Madness is the seed of life. It was Eve who coveted the first pomegranate.”
From that moment I felt that I was contending with him for Netta’s soul, that the Spirit of Evil in him coveted her, and that the strife between us was as old as Time.
I laughed, and in laughing saved my dignity and recovered my poise. A sportsman learns to keep his temper, and I kept it the whole evening in spite of some rather vicious teasing. I watched Netta and was puzzled, for I had not realized then that a woman can be clever and audacious and yet remain most amazingly ingenuous. To Netta all this fooling was mere preposterous and amusing mischief. She was still an incorrigible child chasing butterflies, suspecting no guile.
Jerram played the violin, and he played like a divine madman. Backhouse and Millie Cumberbatch began to waltz on the terrace. Soon they were all dancing in the moonlight to the sound of Jerram’s violin. I was sitting on the balustrade talking to a pleasant little widow who seemed lost in such company; Netta was dancing with Musgrave. Suddenly I saw Jerram start up and begin to dance to his own music. A sudden childish madness seized everybody. Agatha Western had run in through one of the French windows, seated herself at the piano, and caught up the waltz that Jerram was playing.
I saw Jerram toss his violin through the window, sweep across the terrace with arms spread, and take Musgrave by the neck.
“Mine, sir, mine.”
He took Netta from Musgrave, and next moment he had her in his arms, and they were moving together in the moonlight, the white figure and the black. There was an abandonment in Jerram’s dancing that made me savage. He swept Netta close to me, looking me in the face with a smile of triumph.
“Hallo, Mr. Dull Ale.”
I gripped the stone coping of the balustrade, and made myself go on talking to little Mrs. Erskine whose eyes made me think of the shocked eyes of a child.
When this mad mood had passed I walked across the terrace to Netta who was standing by one of the open windows. Jerram had disappeared and I heard him talking to Agatha Western.
“Play the Hungarian Rhapsody,” I heard him say to her.
I took Netta’s arm. She was still a little breathless and excited.
“You are not going to dance again,” I said very quietly.
She looked at me over her shoulder.
“Why not?”
“That man is mad.”
“Oh, don’t be so foolish.”
I kept my hand on her arm.
“You don’t realize his madness,” I said, “but I do. It is for you to choose. Either you go to bed—or——”
Her eyes met mine.
“How impossible you are! You are hurting my arm.”
“I’m sorry. Are you going to bed—or shall I have to pitch Jerram over that balustrade? He is my host—you know.”
“Josh, you are a savage!”
I drew her away towards the end of the ter
race.
“Netta, won’t you believe that I care a little, that I am not a jealous fool? You ought not to be here; you are much too fine, and too clean. You can’t marry that man. He would make your life a hell.”
She was angry; I had hurt her pride.
“Thank you. Do you think that I am quite incapable of managing my own affairs? Don’t be so absurd. I have no intention of marrying Ambrose Jerram, or any other man.”
“But Jerram may not agree.”
She turned quickly and faced me.
“What do you mean?”
“That man is dangerous; he is not sane.”
“Mr. Orchardson—you——”
She twisted herself free.
“You—you are quite impossible. You cannot even enjoy a little mad fooling. Good night.”
She turned and walked into the house, putting everyone—even Jerram—aside with a merciless dignity.
“No; I am tired. Good night.”
Jerram looked at me with his eyes of fire.
“You fool,” they seemed to say.
They were still dancing when I went to bed, and I had turned out the light before I heard their laughter and a shutting of doors in the great gallery. The moon was full on my window. I had left the curtains undrawn and the blind up, for I felt that I should not go to sleep. I was too angry and too troubled, and too much in love with Netta Rainsford. Even my exasperation at being pushed by circumstances into this second quarrel was effaced by the impatience of my tenderness for her.
I could not sleep and, getting out of bed, I pushed an arm-chair to the window and sat there in the full light of the moon. It was an exquisite night, and so still that I could hear the water falling over the weir in the valley half a mile away. The great trees were masses of black silence, their trunks splashed with the moonlight. The park was a roiling sheet of silver stippled with patches of shadow. I could smell the strange, pungent scent of the azaleas in the beds below the terrace.
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 24