by Dion Fortune
CHAPTER TWO
Such social relaxation as Rupert Malcolm permitted himself consisted in listening to or reading papers before learned societies upon his own speciality or its allied subjects, and as he invariably cleared out when the learned part of the proceedings was over and the social part began, the relaxation thus obtained was minimal; his brusque, forbidding manner and hard expressionless face made it improbable, however, that he would have got much more even if he had stopped on.
The long day following his return from the seaside was rounded off by one of these evenings of mutual edification among the learned. Leaving as early as he decently could, he took a taxi back to his rooms and climbed wearily up the hundred-odd steps to the top of the house. His present landlady was the niece of his original one, but things went on unchanged. Occasionally she threatened to have his rooms done up, but retreated intimidated before his scowl and contented herself with painting them piecemeal during his absences at the seaside villa.
Into this dingy abode with its old-fashioned furnishings he entered without a glance, threw his hat and despatch-case on the table and his overcoat after them, dropped into the worn leather armchair beside the hearth, kicked the banked-up fire into activity with the toe of his shoe and sat staring at it. It was the first moment since he had quitted the train, taking his unsolved problem with him, that he had had any time for thought.
He had been amazed to find that his release from what he had always considered a duty sternly to be discharged had cut the very ground from under his feet. All through the long years of the marriage that was not a marriage he had been supported by the belief that his wife needed his care, and now he found that that belief was without foundation. He ought, he knew, to have felt relief, but instead he felt like a lost dog. The man who had spoken the few common-sense words in the fire-lit room had not the faintest realisation of the effect they had on the man who heard them. Not a tone of the voice, not a quiver of the face had betrayed anything; it was the same granite-hard countenance it had always been. Nevertheless, one life had ended, and some means had to be found of enabling another to begin. Rupert Malcolm felt rudderless, anchorless, at the mercy of every wind that blew. His own code of honour still imposed the same inflexible fidelity upon him, but he knew now that all the invalid in the seaside town required of him were the comforts his income so easily provided, and that from the man himself she wanted nothing save to be let alone. Her little dog, her budgerigars and her faithful companion filled all her emotional needs. When the dog, or an occasional budgerigar died, it was replaced, and life, after a brief tearful interlude, went on as usual in the pleasant, sunny house overlooking the sea. The sole disturbing influence—himself—had now been removed, and he could picture the two women singing as the evening hymn they always had: “Now thank we all our God.”
The uncurtained window irritated him, and he crossed the room and jerked dusty green serge across it. His hand on the second curtain, he paused and looked out onto the arc-lit night and the sullen river. Immediately opposite his quarters, across the dark water, a cul-de-sac debouched onto the further embankment, and at its end he could see a thing he had never noticed before—the lit-up facade of a small church. He could see the circular outline of the west window, but whether it held the coloured glass of a fanciful religion or the plain glass of a plain one, distance prevented him from discerning. He stood staring at it, the curtain in his hand, wondering what faith it was that conducted its devotions at that hour of the night. Catholic, he supposed; Protestants attended to their religious duties during an eight-hour day. Staring at the lighted facade behind which folk might be presumed to be adoring their Creator, he marvelled that anyone could see anything in religion. He supposed they must get something out of it or they wouldn't stick to it, but what that might be was beyond his comprehension. Then, as he watched, the light went out in the distant facade, and he took the hint and went to bed himself. There, once again, he wandered in the silvergrey country between sleeping and waking, but there was no companion.
The fact that he now had all his weekends at his own disposal gave Malcolm a vague sense of freedom and relief. Missing his walks on the downs, he thought of going off for country weekends, but somehow never got started. He did not know where to go, or what to do, or how to make a beginning, so he just relapsed back into an orbit that was narrower than ever. He made an abortive attempt to improve his mind with a modern novel, but soon found it best to let sleeping dogs lie. He went to the National Gallery, but found himself studying the endocrine balance of the nudes. So on the whole he decided that he would have to go on as he had always gone, accept life as he found it, and think about it as little as possible. He was still dreaming of landscapes, despite the fact that the medical school was closed for the holidays and his work consequently considerably lightened. This worried him a little, for if he were like this now, what would he be like when the new term got going in good earnest?
It suddenly occurred to him that the additional fatigue of the teaching and lecturing might serve to bring back the cloaked figure in his dreams, and he found himself looking forward to the beginning of the term with a strange eagerness. He found himself counting the days and realised how much the idea of the woman whose face he had never seen had taken hold on his imagination. It had even begun to console him for the fact that he had cast such poor pearls as he possessed before one who had no conceivable use for them.
He discovered that the surest way to put himself to sleep was to set off in imagination for that walk on the Embankment with the cloaked woman on ahead. He never tried to catch up with her and see her face—dreaded to do so, in fact, feeling certain of disillusion; but he felt that in the shadowy cloaked figure he had found a kind of spirit-guide through the bewilderments of life, for he was at heart a simple soul, despite his brains.
More and more did the fantasy of the cloaked figure grow on him as night after night, with unfailing regularity, he took the same path into the kingdom of sleep—the path along the Thames Embankment with the leafless plane-trees on one hand and the darkly glittering, hurrying water on the other, and always, sooner or later, the cloaked figure on ahead would appear and he would follow it with a sense of intense relief into the land of sleep.
Presently he noticed a curious fact. Last thing before getting into bed he always drew back the curtains from the window to let in the air, and as he looked out across the river he saw that sometimes the facade of the Surrey-side church was lit up, and sometimes it was not. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason in the hours kept by that denomination. Frequently it would be in action till one or two in the morning, and upon these occasions he noticed he could never get to sleep till the light across the river was put out. Sometimes when sleep defied him, he would raise himself in his bed until he could see it out of the window. He would watch it and wait, and as soon as the light went out, would settle down on his pillow in expectation, and then in twenty minutes or so he would pick up the trail of the figure ahead and pass into sleep; and sleep thus obtained, he discovered, was particularly restful, and sometimes he came back from it with a strange sense of happiness—a sensation to which he had long been a stranger.
More and more, as the days went by, did he become obsessed by this quest of the cloaked woman. He never desired to catch up with her, but if a night passed and he had not glimpsed her shadowy figure, he was agitated and miserable all next day; not until once again the fantasy had ushered in his sleep was he restored to peace of mind. But it was more than fantasy. He could picture to himself the Embankment in the dusk, with its plane-trees and swirling river, but the picture of the shadowy cloaked figure meant nothing; only when it appeared spontaneously in his fantasy did it afford him any satisfaction. Then, for just so long as he could maintain himself on the threshold of sleep, neither rousing into full wakefulness nor sliding off into unconsciousness did he experience the joy, rising as time went on into ecstasy, of keeping her in sight. At the hospital after such nights they found him
rather absent-minded, but much easier to work with.
Finally the holidays came to an end; term started again and he flung himself into his work with a kind of frenzied energy, intent on wearing himself down to the point when the vision should appear in his dreams in good earnest. Then, when he was already doing the work of three average men, a colleague went sick and he took over his private practice for him.
The days were lengthening, but the extra work kept him so late at the hospital that he never seemed to come home by daylight. He had promised himself that as soon as he was a little less busy he would walk home every night and so replace he walks on the downs to which he had been accustomed. But somehow he never seemed to have the energy after being on his feet in the wards or the lecture room for hours on end, and so the spring advanced and he never heeded it.
Then, one day, he came out into the hospital quadrangle and saw the evening star, great Venus, low in the western sky in the last of the sunset, and a sudden resolution determined him, fatigued though he was, to walk home by the Embankment. Someone caught him and delayed him however; papers had to be signed in the almoner's office; and by the time he climbed up the steps by the bridge that brought him on to the Embankment, Venus had disappeared in the evening mist and the dusk was drawing in.
He walked as if in a dream. He had pictured that walk so often that he hardly knew whether this particular evening was fantasy or reality. Staring ahead into the gathering dusk, he looked for the shadowy cloaked figure, but she failed to appear, and finally, footsore and disappointed he turned into his lodgings, dropped into his old armchair more dead than alive, and then, in the very act of kicking off his shoes, moved by what impulse he knew not, heaved himself wearily out of the frowzy cushions, crossed the room, drew back the curtains, and looked out to see if the facade of the church across the water were lit up. Sure enough, it was. That settled it. She never came while they were holding a service, and somehow reassured, he knew not why, he went to bed without bothering about supper, and to sleep without bothering about cloaked women. Towards midnight he woke up, however, and raising himself in bed, looked out to see if the church window were still illuminated. It was, but even as he watched, the light went out, and in a short time he saw ahead of him the cloaked figure and entered once more the land of dreams in her company.
Next day, well pleased with his walk on the Embankment, he repeated it at an earlier hour, and went home with the glory of the sunset over Westminster in his face; and from then on the walk home beside the river was an unvarying routine, and his health benefited in consequence. He was more serene in his mind also, but he realised how dependent he was upon this nightly vision.
Once, for a whole week, she failed to appear, and he went nearly demented. Nothing would have induced him to consult a colleague, and nothing would have induced him to take sedative drugs of his own prescribing, so he began to be in a bad way. Then, when he was almost at the end of his tether, there came the dream, the genuine dream of the cloaked figure in the grey landscape—the actual dream that hitherto, despite his efforts to exhaust himself, had never come. So desperate was he in his eagerness that for the first time he pursued that cloaked figure with determination to catch up with it. Over the grey dream landscape he toiled in a kind of nightmare, his feet held at every step as if in a bog, his heart beating as if it would burst. Then, as he was almost upon the figure and was just putting out his hand to catch the floating cloak, he woke, bathed in sweat, with the sound of a woman's scream ringing in his ears. He sprang out of bed, flung up the window and put his head out, and even as he did so, saw the light go on in the church over the water. All was quiet in the moonlit roadway, however, and all was quiet in the stuffy house when he leant over the well of the staircase and listened. Little Miss Humphreys, his landlady, he knew would come rushing up to him if anything were wrong—scared of him as she was at normal times; but all was quiet, and he went back to bed again, concluding that the screamer was either dead, delivered, or a phantom of his imagination.
Next day he was kept late at the hospital, and though tired after his broken night, his mind was at rest, and so things went better with him. Late as it was, he determined to walk home. It had become a kind of ritual with him, part of his worship, and for no amount of fatigue would he miss it. It was just about the same degree of dusk that it had been upon the occasion of his first Embankment walk, and his pilgrimage of faith seemed that evening to have a peculiar kind of reality about it. As he walked, he wondered what sort of a husband he would have made if his marriage had run a normal course. He would have been a difficult one; exacting, tempestuous, jealous; but he knew that he could have given an intensity of love that the light-hearted little thing he had married would have had no idea what to do with. He realised for the first time that even if catastrophe had not descended on his marriage, it was unlikely to have been an outstanding success, and the realisation gave him an extraordinary sense of relief and release. Then in the very moment of the burden rolling from his shoulders, he saw some thirty yards ahead of him the cloaked figure of a woman, not in fantasy, but in actuality.
For a moment he swayed as if drunk, and then pulled himself together. The reality possessed nothing like the same fascination as the fantasy. Mackintosh capes were common among women, and it was highly improbable that this was the original cape-wearer who had started him off on his dreams.
He continued his walk, watching with a faintly cynical amusement the cloaked figure on ahead. The reality was in every way inferior to the dream. There was nothing that he could see to make a fuss about over a woman in a mackintosh. Then suddenly he realised the pace at which he, and consequently she, were walking, and knew that it must indeed be the original cape-wearer, for few women could hit that gait and keep it up. By a sprint that was almost a run he shortened the distance between them and was able to observe the manner in which she moved. Accustomed to diagnosing by pit and stance, he learnt much. He saw that she moved all in one piece, gliding over the ground with a movement that ran like a ripple from the ball of the foot to the hip, swinging the folds of the cape from the square-held shoulders as rhythmically as a pendulum. He had never seen a human body more perfectly balanced and poised, and forgetting his romance for the moment, he watched that walk with professional interest, assessing the perfect co-ordination of every muscle in the rhythmically moving body. Her figure and build he could not judge, for the folds of the cloak hid all, but that gait he would never forget as long as he lived. A mad idea entered his head of hastening after the woman and accosting her, but was instantly dismissed; apart from the inadvisability of such a proceeding for a professional man of standing, he was, and always had been, as shy as a schoolboy behind his brusque exterior. So he strode on till the traffic lights again played him a scurvy trick and he lost her once more.
He raced up the stairs to his room, flung back the curtains, stared across the river, and even as he did so, the lights went on in the dark facade of the church over the water. Some time, he told himself, when he was less busy, he would cross by the neighbouring bridge, have a look at that church, and see what denomination worshiped so capriciously.
But it was some time before he was less busy; he was so busy, in fact, that he had temporarily and reluctantly to abandon his Embankment walks, but his vision still served the purpose of putting him off to sleep each night with unfailing regularity. He did not have to visualise her now, for as soon as he put his head on the pillow she came of her own accord.
There had been a meeting of the governors of the hospital, of which he was one, and it had been not altogether peaceful. A complaint had been made in influential quarters about his manners and methods, and the matter had been raised—as tactfully as possible, it is true, but still it had been raised—and just as when his wife's doctor had bidden him remove his unwanted presence, so now he was startled, bewildered and humiliated to find he had been upsetting people and making himself generally detested. The council, who had been dreading the ordeal of bel
ling their formidable cat, were amazed to find him begging to be told what he had done wrong. This so took the wind out of their sails that they ended by assuring him that he had done nothing wrong, and generally smoothing him down and soothing him, and then sat back and stared at each other in amazement after he had taken his usual precipitate departure.
It was foggy when he came out into the hospital quadrangle in the dusk, but that did not alter his decision to walk home. Nothing, he felt, could soothe and console him so effectually as the imagined presence of his fair one. When a man has given of his best for a quarter of a century, and is suddenly told that his best is not good enough, he is apt to feel as if the world were falling about his ears.
What did he do that upset people? It is true that he had never cultivated the social side of hospital life, but he had genuinely done his job to the best of his ability. He tried to console himself with the memory of his outstanding successes, and they were many—patients rescued from a living death whom everyone else had abandoned as hopeless; surely that counted for something? But apparently not. Hurt, bewildered, his self-confidence shaken to its foundations, he walked more slowly than was his wont, and as he walked he saw as if in a dream the cloaked woman overtake and pass him.