She shrank more and more into her solitude, and she grew more and more afraid.
Solitude—a beautiful solitude, and yet—it seemed to her to be dying, dying for her, because in spite of its beauty it could not give her self-expression.
She asked herself what she understood by self-expression. What did most women mean by it? Sex and its feathers? Yes, sex; but not the crude, physical sex from which she revolted, but the more subtle symbolism that was behind sex. Duality, the interaction of two contrasting yet comprehending spirits—love.
She stood by the moat, looking down at the still water and the floating lilies.
“I’m incomplete,” she thought.
Her eyes were afraid.
“Is it that I am the only one of my sort in the wide world, a kind of psychic monstrosity? Oh, horrors!”
The dusk gathered down, and feeling like a soul marooned on a desert island she fell into a sudden panic. Why was she not like other humans, warmly solid and mercifully dressed in comfortable and normal consciousness? This horror of isolation! For she understood now that the ordinary human animal would shrink from her. She was uncanny; she was not like the rest of the pack.
Even those old servants—if they were to realize——?
Would they stay with her?
Or would they compromise with the problem by voting her sweetly and harmlessly insane?
This panic mood made her remember a night-terror she had experienced as a child, of a dark place, a cave from which she was trying to escape, but the darkness had moved with her so that she had never gained the daylight. The child had given way to panic, but the woman resisted panic. She kept on reminding herself that the issue had to be faced and to be faced calmly. If this extraordinary power was hers, might there not be a reason for it?
But how would a calm attitude towards the problem help her loneliness, and make her feel less of a monstrosity?
It was very natural that she should recoil from her sense of abnormality, and of a sudden she found herself yearning to be an ordinary woman, and content with an ordinary woman’s emotions. To be part of that more comfortable and less hyperconscious life.
“Oh, God! take it away from me?”
She wandered about Carberry’s garden like a child, even recalling Mrs. Soutar’s simile of a white-faced Dryad, a hunted spirit afraid of itself. In her solitude she would stand clasping the trunks of the old trees, and pressing her forehead against the bark. She hid herself in the deep, flowery seclusions, and once old Boggis caught sight of her kneeling in the little garden house as though in prayer.
She was praying:
“Oh—if there is any merciful Intelligence—beyond—let this thing pass from me. Let me be stupid, insensitive, one of the crowd.”
Boggis was troubled, as were her other devoted servants. Her melancholy was growing so obvious, and they were struck by her look of yearning, almost of despair.
“Why don’t she marry Mr. Jeremy?”
That was Boggis’s solution. There was nothing wrong with Mr. Jeremy, so far as he could see.
“She’s got the mopes. Livin’ like an old lady, and at her age, and with her looks.”
Kate and Ellen were not quite sure that they agreed with Mr. Boggis, but they understood that something was very wrong with their beloved one, and Boggis might be right.
“Mr. Jeremy hasn’t been near her for nearly a year.”
And suddenly it occurred to these good souls that this might be the reason of her unhappiness.
Disastrous hypothesis! Mr. Soutar was climbing other mountains, but at this most critical moment he descended from Olympus and appeared to the smiling Kate, looking so very much the man of destiny to Kate who had always thought him such a handsome gentleman.
“Well—I never—sir—— You’ll excuse me——”
“Is Miss Sybil at home?”
“She’s somewhere in the garden, sir.”
Jeremy looked at Kate with those all conquering blue eyes of his.
“Supposing—I go and find her?”
“Why not, sir.”
Kate was an incurable romanticist.
Conversely, Mr. Soutar was an incorrigible climber of mountains, and the mountain that defied him was the mountain to be climbed. His rebuff had lasted him a year, and the motive that had brought him to Vine Court was less generous than it might have been.
Unfortunately he came at a moment when Sybil was holding out her hands to some shadowy and imagined comrade, the desired partner of her dreams. She was crying out for a live and human presence, something that was simple and sensitive and clean. A lonely woman is in danger, for in flying from her own loneliness she may leap over a precipice.
“Jeremy!”
For the moment she was glad to see even Jeremy. She had emerged upon him from the lilac walk, a tangled place where the branches of lilac and syringa met, and in putting back one of those green curtains she saw Jeremy. He looked different—thinner, less brazen. And to Jeremy she appeared as Mrs. Soutar’s Dryad, a creature with big dark eyes looking out of the green shadows.
“Ha!” thought he, “not quite so much of the Cassandra, my lady, what! You are just a little bit glad to see me.”
He had his grudge: he was the sort of man who must crow on his mountain top when once he has climbed it.
“Well, how’s the world, Sybil; your world?”
He was smiling, and she came to meet his smile. There was something in him that baffled her, she could not read it, for it seemed to her that this was a more impersonal Jeremy, kinder and less red. Moreover, she thought it was rather generous of him to come to Vine Court after all these months and the things she had said to him.
“Where have you been? Climbing mountains?”
“I’m always climbing mountains,” he said. “How are you, Sybil?”
He was vague to her; but he was human, and in her loneliness she was glad of his presence.
“It was good of you to come.”
Soutar was watching her. To him she was less of the mountain, and more of a creature that had bitten him a year ago, and who—to expiate the insult—should come to him humbly. Jeremy had the hot egoist’s streak of cruelty.
“You think so,” he said; “and so do I. Perhaps one of us has changed a little, Sybil.”
Was he being ironical? Irony was the last thing that she asked for. Her dark eyes seemed to flicker.
“Of course—one changes.”
She allowed him that much, and instantly he seized all that a man might assume that he had the right to seize. She was penitent; she had come to realize that men of his calibre were not to be picked out of gooseberry bushes. Moreover, she had retained her peculiar power to provoke the lover in him, and to make him feel that he wanted her as he had never wanted less obvious women.
“Yes, one changes,” he said.
There was no doubt, about his irony. She should make it up to him for the things that she had said a year ago—and her surrender should be complete. Rather a charming sensation, humiliating this pretty creature, and listening to her hurried breathing, while he spoke to her sternly and felt the quivering of her beneath his mastery. She should give herself up; he would insist upon a little passionate and emotional crawling before he let himself go.
“Something to say to me, haven’t you, Sybil?”
She stood looking at him, and suddenly she understood. Her hands went up to her face, for the shock of his coarse selfishness was like a blow.
“Oh—Jeremy——!”
“Ah—I thought so——”
He blazed, for to him her cry of anguish was nothing but a confused confession, her woman’s tribute to his maleness.
“All red—am I?”
He caught her roughly as she stood there with her hands up—and for a moment he held her slim and rigid and bewildered in his arms.
“Now then, you’ll kiss me, and say that you are sorry——”
She put her two hands against his face.
“You
beast,” she said.
Her strength—and her fierceness annoyed him. She twisted free, and recoiling from him, fell back into the smother of the green branches.
Soutar stood staring. His egotism might be a pretty brazen thing, but her eyes scorched it; for she was a soul, and he a mere blundering animal.
She made a movement, and one of the green boughs covered her body. She seemed to melt into the foliage until he could see nothing but her feet and knees and the white flare of her outraged face.
He tried to smile.
“Well, upon my word, of all——”
She said nothing for the moment, but continued to look at him as though he had tried to stab her soul. Then he saw her lips move.
“Please go, Jeremy.”
Surprised at himself he turned and walked away across the grass.
VIII
At nightfall a mantle of silence seemed to fall upon the garden and the park, and the eyes looked out into a great circle of darkness which gave to Sybil the feeling that she was surrounded by infinite space. There was not a light to be seen, nothing but the stars. Moreover the night was soundless, save for the movement of some wild creature, or the voice of the wind, or the tapping of a bough against some other bough. Solitude—and this absolute silence of great spaces.
On that night after Jeremy’s second self-betrayal, the silence and the solitude and the darkness terrified her. She wandered about the garden, past the dim statues and under the old trees, feeling that she could not bear this solitude and this darkness.
They were so empty, and no one understood.
“Yet, if I had given myself to Jeremy,” she thought, “closed my soul’s eyes and ears—I should still have felt the horror of him. I’m not like ordinary women. It hurts me.”
She paused, leaning upon the balustrade of the bridge and looking down at the water. She remembered how she had seen those flames in the water, but she saw nothing now—nothing but that dim and darkened mirror. She could not help thinking how easy it would be to die, only that she knew in her heart that death is not the end of things, and that life has a message, a sealed letter that must be opened, and that those who throw that message away unread may have to puzzle it out with suffering in the world of some other consciousness.
“I wonder if anyone would believe me——?”
Yes; if only she were believed—if this strange power of hers was of use, not an hysterical delusion to be scoffed at.
She felt that she would have to pour out her soul to someone or go mad.
Sybil was bending low over the balustrading when the black water of the moat changed for her. There was a blur of light, an iridescence, and then in that dark medium—as in a crystal—she saw a picture grow. It became vivid and distinct. She saw a man with white hair sitting at a desk with books and papers before him. His face was familiar to her, and what was more surprising she could put a name to the face, though she could not say that she had ever seen the man. The figure in the chair remained quite still. It had a listening look, as though some sound had interrupted the man in his work.
Then she saw him draw a writing-pad towards him, pick up a pencil and jot down something on the pad. She wished that she could read what he had written. Abruptly—the picture vanished, leaving her uttering a name.
“Sir Roger Lyall.”
Who was Sir Roger Lyall?
Did he exist?
IX
Lyall paused, with his latchkey in the blue door of his house in Brunswick Square. A hired car was drawn up by the kerb, but not so directly opposite his house that he could infer its having deposited a visitor at his door.
A thought had crossed his mind. He appeared to reflect a moment, his big, lion’s head slightly bent, his blue eyes conveying an impression of stillness.
“I wonder!”
His housekeeper met him in the hall.
“There’s a lady to see you, sir. She has been here two hours. I told her you were not in.”
“What is her name?”
“She would not give any name, sir. She said that she could not go away without seeing you.”
“Where is she?”
“In the dining-room, sir.”
Obviously Sir Roger’s housekeeper considered the visitor to be something of an oddity, but then so many odd people came to the house in Brunswick Square. She opened the dining-room door for her master, who entered, acknowledging the courtesy with a gentle movement of his massive head.
He saw a girl sitting in one of his Hepplewhite chairs, with her back to the window and the green trees in the square, and his first impression of her was of her extreme stillness, the stillness of fear. She made him think of a hare, motionless, looking at him with big brown eyes.
He gave her a little, old-fashioned bow.
“Well, young lady, what can I do for you?”
He felt her brown eyes feeling him. A hand slid along the arm of a chair. Her lips moved, but they moved so slowly that they suggested the stiffness of a year’s silence.
“Sir Roger Lyall—yes—I have come up from the country. And London—London terrifies me.”
“It terrifies many people. I am not surprised——”
“I closed the window. I hope——”
Quietly he drew up a chair, and though her sudden agitation surprised him, he looked at her as though her fear was the most natural thing in the world.
“You have not told me your name.”
“Before I tell you my name—I want to ask you—whether—three nights ago——”
She saw his head rise with a little jerk of alert attention.
“Three nights ago——? One moment. Will you excuse me?”
She nodded, and watched him go out of the room and return with something white in his hand. He closed the door, and stood there regarding her with those silent and infinitely wise eyes of his. He made her think of a big, fresh-coloured old farmer, a man of the open, tranquil and stately. She felt the goodness of him.
“Before you tell me anything—may I tell you something. Three nights ago, about half-past nine, I was writing at my desk when I felt suddenly impelled to pause and listen. Sometimes—I get messages—and I write them down. Now—this——”
He held out the writing-pad.
“It was not exactly a message; it was more like a cry—like the cry of a bird coming out of the night. It may be—there is just the chance—and to prove the things we are trying to prove—it is necessary to seize every chance——”
He crossed the room and handed her the writing-pad.
“Has it any significance—for you?”
She took the pad and read:
“If anyone would believe me.”
For an instant there was a great stillness between them. Her eyes lifted to his, and he saw that the fear had gone.
“That was what I was crying to myself—that night—before I saw you.”
“You saw me?”
He remained standing, his face making her think of the luminous face of her father.
“Yes; you were sitting in a chair, writing. Your face seemed familiar, though I cannot remember having seen you before. I am in great trouble. I was leaning over the bridge looking at the water. I saw it all in the water. And then—I heard your name.”
He made a movement of the head as though bidding her go on.
“My name is Carberry—Sybil Carberry. My father died about a year and a half ago. I live very much alone; I have to live alone——May I tell you? Oh, I must tell you. I’m not mad—but unless someone believes me——”
“I shall believe you,” he said.
She told him everything, beginning with the life at Vine Court in her father’s day, and going on to describe the sudden shock of her first moments of lucidity, and how the power had grown.
“It did not worry me so much at first; but later, when I began to realize what it meant to me, I began to be afraid. I saw myself as something abnormal, a monstrosity——”
He made a gentle and pr
otesting movement with his hand.
“You must not say that.”
“But it was the loneliness that began to terrify me. I felt that I had to keep away from people, for how could I go about seeing their naked souls, so to speak, and such souls——Oh, not all of them are ugly——But the solitude! I did not mind it so much at first; but later——A horrible sense of incompleteness. I was shut away in a little world of my own. There was nobody to whom I could pour out my soul.”
She paused, with eloquent eyes on his, fearing to find incredulity there though the other consciousness that was in her divined his understanding.
“I should have been so glad to die; but then, you see——”
“It wouldn’t be death,” he said; “there is no death. You cannot cut the live stream of consciousness in half. Besides——”
He sat thinking a moment.
“You are not quite alone, you know. There are others—more than the ordinary world guesses. We don’t care to gabble too much. But this power of yours, this super-consciousness—or whatever we choose to call it—is rather unique. Hasn’t it ever occurred to you——?”
Her face looked all smoothed out, and there was a radiance upon it, for here was a fellow creature who understood.
“In what way?” she asked.
“This power of yours, not as it concerns yourself, but other people——?”
“How?”
“Isn’t it on the way towards proving something, towards a possible—sacred comforting of those who are groping and crying in the dark——?”
He saw her draw a deep and relieved breath, as though some spasm of pain had passed.
“True; that was coming from you to me, somehow, before you put it into words. I see people coloured, and you have a kind of soft silveriness. Wisdom and gentleness. Yes; I do see. You have studied these—things?”
“For twenty years—ever since I lost my wife.”
“And does she——?”
“Yes; I am sure of it. Think what that means. The immense and sacred significance of it. The creeds had died and left the world crying in a wilderness.”
She bowed her head.
“I have been very selfish,” she said; “and to-day—London terrified me. It was as though thousands of horrible discords were screaming in my ears. And the faces! I see faces—as they are—inside. So—you can imagine——”
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 69