Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  I refused the gift, of course. He wrapped the thing in newspaper and took it out under his arm. I happened to turn down the same street and saw him go into a pawnbroker’s shop. The long and short of that was that I interrupted his argument with the pawnbroker, who was refusing to lend more than, I think, ten shillings, and invited him to dinner. It was only five o’clock but I supposed he might be hungry, so we went there and then to the Holborn grill-room. Over beer and beefsteak we became rather friendly. I lent him five pounds, not expecting to get it back but rather counting on my money’s worth in the form of future conversation. As you know, he could talk like someone out of one of Wilde’s plays, skating on brilliant, thin ice over dark profundities. That shoal, as we see it now glittering in sunlight, reminds me of his conversation. There was spiritual peril close under the fascinating surface. Never, in all the years I have known him, have I heard from him one word of disrespect for love or woman, but I gathered from his conversation over dinner that day that he might be a dangerous man for a woman to know too intimately. There appeared to be one woman; he spoke of her with such peculiar contentment in his voice that I could not help wondering what sort of person she was.

  I soon learned, because he did repay the money. In the letter in which he enclosed a five-pound note he invited me to drop in for a meal whenever I might be passing his way. My home in Surrey was not more than ten miles from his studio, so I drove over; and there began the most intensely agonizing, and at the same time tragically important experience I have known. Understand me: I think Ramon Turner is dead, or I wouldn’t speak of it. As the only one concerned still living, the story is mine, and pondering such memories alone does not help to explain them or forget.

  Ramon Turner’s studio was simply an abandoned barn that he had rebuilt. It was exactly in key with his character. There was nothing superfluous. He had made the furniture himself. At one end, behind a brick wall, he had a small foundry, where he did all his own casting and experimented with metals, alloys, temperatures. There was a bathroom and one bedroom reserved for the use of guests. He and Dorothy lived, cooked and worked in the rest of the place, which was a huge square room with one long window at the north end and a skylight.

  Dorothy was Ramon’s model. Where and how he found her, who she was or what her previous history had been, I never knew because I never cared to ask. It was immediately obvious that she came of decent stock and had been nicely educated. I imagine they had simply met and recognized each other as the two halves’ of one existence. They had probably not talked it over much before she ran away to live with him. It was one of those things that naturally happen. They seemed completely to round out each other’s enjoyment. He worked like a Titan. She encouraged him, providing the only sort of peace that such a man as Ramon could enjoy or understand or even tolerate.

  No, they were not married. I don’t believe they had even thought about marriage until one day I suggested to them that it might be wiser. I had formed a habit of dropping in to spend the day and they seemed to accept me as a sort of lay confessor, drawing me into conversation about their intimate affairs, and keeping, as far as I know, nothing they thought worth knowing hidden from me. So I felt entitled to offer advice. But Ramon turned on me like a war-lord accusing a traitor.

  It appeared he regarded marriage as an insult to his own intelligence as well as a trap devised by tyrants seeking to exploit humanity, particularly women. He used all the familiar arguments as well as one or two that seemed to me original, and it was very easy to agree with him in theory. In practice, as I told him, theory is sometimes treacherous in proportion to the amount of clear reason it seems to contain.

  You knew him. You can probably imagine how that loosed his tongue and how he railed at my middle-class morals. Success, as he declared he measured it, was calculable only in terms of autonomy — not anarchy, but individual freedom to govern oneself. Love, he insisted, is either absolutely free or else a form of prostitution. He admitted no alternative, conceded nothing to con-vention. He asserted with considerable logic but no caution, and without the slightest fear of the fallibility of human judgment, that the same rule applies to art, religion and anything else that has any importance at all. He was extraordinarily plausible, as most fanatics are.

  But the least touch of fanaticism always affects me in the way that bell-buoy over there should affect a sailor. It makes me suspicious of surfaces — just as too much patina sets me looking for faults in a bronze.

  As a matter of plain fact it was not simply Ramon’s conversation, or his prodigious skill with metal that had brought me again and again to their studio. I had business, as it happened, that made those increasingly frequent visits quite a strain on my time. I neglected business. The truth is, I was in love with Dorothy. I knew it. Ramon never guessed it. I think she never suspected me of being more than friendly. But she is the reason why I have remained unmarried all these years. Other women, however desirable my reason may assure me they are, have served only to remind me that no one possibly could fill the place which Dorothy found vacant. I did not even know it was vacant until I met her.

  There is no reason or logic in being in love, any more than there is in religion. The experience brings out either the best or the worst in us — perhaps both. It made me doubly — trebly careful not to disturb their idyll. But it also made it next thing to impossible to keep away; and it made me meddlesomely eager to persuade them to get married and out of reach of a danger that I thought I foresaw. Knowing they were hard up, I even went to the length of offering to stand them a wedding and a week’s tour on the continent.

  Of course, as I can see now, I merely toughened Ramon’s obstinacy. Possibly, if I had held my tongue, he might have changed his mind; and marriage, I feel absolutely certain, would have made impossible what did happen, she being the woman she was. If Ramon had suggested marriage, she would have accepted his reversal of attitude as a sort of reward to herself for having tried so faithfully to understand him. She trusted him, always, instantly, however paradoxical he might seem. The breathless business of follow-my-leader after him through realms of almost always brilliant thought kept her excited and happy. Except when she was doing the housekeeping she used to pose for him from dawn to dark, he working in wax, now and then even in bronze with a chisel and file and corundum, striving to catch form in motion and the play of light and shadow on her naked flesh. She had the legs and torso of a Diana by Michael Angelo, if you can imagine that (you remember his David?); and she had an unself-conscious, tireless pose no matter how you posed her, that was as baffling to reproduce in any medium as, for instance, the colour and flight of those gulls on the shoal. But her real charm was her genuineness. Ramon was trying to reproduce that. She was eternally young and eternally learning, very often perplexed by Ramon’s paradoxes, but always so sure he was right that I think she was only puzzled as to why she could not always understand him.

  And Ramon, like many another artist, loved to reveal his inmost nature while he worked. He was a dangerous man in those moods. When he talked about love he was worse than dangerous. He utterly denied the right of anyone to own a hair or a hope or a second of time or a claim on the conscience of anyone else. He denied a man’s right to inhibit a woman from any experience. He insisted that love is the most dynamic force in nature. A man who should disrespect a woman merely because the love with which he loved her had aroused sex instincts that she could not govern, had no right to the name of homo sapiens.

  “Chastity,” he insisted, “is a sin if it is based on anything but the intention to do with oneself as one pleases. The worst sin is stupidity.”

  I used to try to turn the conversation. But Doro-thy was much too much in love with Ramon to permit that. She nearly always smoked cigarettes while she posed. She would inhale slowly, as if that helped to ponder his remarks. Then along with the smoke she would shoot some question at him, over her naked shoulder, that would start him off again distinguishing between love and the lies that are told ab
out it by hypocrites and spiritual cowards who know love would rob fear of its rule over men. It was wonderful theory — wonderful. Probably true. But hardly suitable, without some mental safeguards, to the gross world we have to live in.

  You see, she was innocent; and Ramon was her first, her only love. She was almost divine in her innocence.

  She lacked experience with which to qualify and possibly to doubt the absoluteness of the laws he laid down for her guidance. And she was a healthy girl with healthy appetites — as clean and naturally pagan as a mortal daughter of some Greek god. Body and soul she was Ramon’s and he knew it; but the fool could not rest until he had convinced her that he would continue to love her whatever might happen. I believe he was telling the truth as far as he could see the truth. But who sees all of it? It never dawned on her or on him either, that something within herself might prove less generous than Ramon’s attitude. It was a paradise without a serpent until Ramon introduced one.

  He went up to London to sell some bronzes. He returned with a person named Major Aleck Proudman of the Anglo-Indian army, and I knew the paradise was lost before a word was spoken. Ramon was a plain damned fool in money matters and he had had one of those economical brain-storms that such fools get. He had agreed to take Proudman into his household as what is euphemistically called a paying guest. I have no doubt the suggestion came from Proudman, who had seen the bronzes in an auction-room and learned that they were more or less portraits of Dorothy.

  Proudman still had three months of his leave unexpired, and he described himself as fed up with London. I learned later that the men with whom he had been associating had found he was a cad and had dropped him; one or two women had made the same discovery. His haunts had grown uncomfortable. He had, so to speak, descended to the picture galleries and auction-rooms for lack of company when he ran into Ramon. He was a perfectly obvious type — the sort that wins promotion and gets the soft jobs by a mixture of guile and blackmail. An envious smart Aleck, whose natural instinct was to acquire for himself by intrigue whatever some other man might have obtained by good fortune or merit. He was damned good looking, though, if all you see is surfaces. He was muscular. He could sing, do tricks with cards and tell amusing stories. He was much too smart to be a drunkard, but he introduced champagne the day after his arrival on the scene. That and what is usually called sex appeal become an absolutely deadly combination in the hands of an unprincipled man or woman.

  His game was obvious from the beginning, but what could I do? I did try to warn Ramon. I even tried to warn Dorothy. But neither of them was good at taking hints; they liked outright statements of opinion and they rather naturally, and quite accurately, suspected me of being jealous. I more than suspected myself of the same disgusting motive. So I took what seemed to me to be the only decent course and prolonged my absences, until at last I let three weeks go by without paying them a visit.

  Ramon, when at last I did drive over, was away again in London, and the first glance told me what had happened. Proudman had accomplished what he came to do. He looked like a cat that has just eaten the canary. Dorothy looked enough defiant to inform me that the after-taste of the episode was not what she expected.

  And now fate or something stepped in. Ramon came home in an ambulance, hurt in a railway accident — so badly hurt, if I may make my meaning plain without going into details, that for several months, although perfectly bright in his mind, he was unquestionably physically out of action. He was paralyzed from the waist down. He had savagely refused to be taken to a hospital after the accident. His confidence in Dorothy was so great that he felt his one chance was to get to her at the first possible moment. Someone sent a telegram but it arrived two hours after he did. When they carried him in on a stretcher his relief and his faith in Dorothy and his love for her were so obvious that even Proudman noticed it. And he must have been blind if he had not realized how instantly and utterly unimportant he had become in Dorothy’s estimation.

  Proudman showed his colours then; he promptly packed up his belongings and rode away in the same ambulance that had brought Ramon. He said it would save everybody trouble. He was that kind of man; in any crisis he could always pull a more or less plausible mask over the face of safety first. To put it plainly, he scooted, remarking that his leave would be up in a few days anyhow. He hardly said good-bye, he was in such a hurry. And he went away owing a week’s board.

  Naturally, I resumed my former position as next friend. I threw up business, put my means at their dis-posal until the railway people settled for damages, introduced a very eminent specialist of my acquaintance, spent most of my time at the studio and did whatever could be done to make Dorothy’s job easier — running errands and all that kind of thing, but mainly helping her to entertain the patient when his natural mental energy made him irritable. It was torture for a man of Ramon’s constitution to be forced to lie still. And it was torture to me to watch Dorothy’s face as the weeks went by and to read there something that she did not dare to tell me or Ramon.

  I couldn’t pretend to myself that I didn’t know her secret. Probably I knew it almost as soon as she did. There were signs one could not overlook. Perhaps the least of them was the self-control with which she hid her horror of the champagne that Proudman had left behind him. There were two bottles. I saw her bury them by night. But one can’t bury memories that way. Ramon, of course, observed her unhappiness but he naturally supposed it was due to his own condition, so he did his utmost to be cheerful. He was a plucky fellow. When he couldn’t think of jokes he praised her and boasted of his convalescence. It was the fight he made that, together with Dorothy’s nursing, gradually pulled him out from the shadow of death. But Dorothy, of course, grew daily nearer to her crisis and the shadow of that grew deeper.

  My specialist friend was not an obstetrician. Maternity cases were not in his line. Dorothy was none of his business excepting in her role as nurse. But he drove over from his private hospital every evening after his heavy day’s work was done and it became absolutely impossible as weeks wore by for Dorothy’s condition to escape his notice. And of course she knew that. One night, she pledged him to secrecy, told him her condition and implored him to perform an operation. He refused. He gave her a talking to — said what any decent doctor naturally would say — and bluntly but very kindly offered, at the proper time, to make provision for her in a private maternity hospital conducted by someone he knew.

  It was the night after that, that despair made her make me her confidant. She told me of her conversation with the doctor and, not knowing what in the world to say, I asked her why she dreaded to become a mother?

  She confessed then, what I knew from the first, that the child would not be Ramon’s. She would not have had the slightest objection to bearing Ramon’s child. She spoke soberly, calmly, truthfully and with such magnificent self- control that the tragedy which was eating her heart out momentarily escaped my notice. I was naturally looking for solutions, not for blind ends, so I made the gross mistake of quoting the Book of Proverbs, to the effect that it is a wise child that knows its own father. I told her frankly I would keep her secret, and that Ramon would probably never suspect.

  She broke down then. It was the worst hour I ever went through. It was even worse than what followed because it left one’s emotions numbed; things went from bad to worse, but one could never again be quite so sensitive. Ramon was asleep. Until long after midnight she sat with me under a tree in the garden and told me, bit by bit, between agonied silences, what it means to love, as she did, and to know that words — mere words — the words of her beloved — had let grossness seem something less than treachery, so that she fell, as she put it, from grace.

  She said: “And now I am no longer Ramon’s. And he isn’t mine. I have no right to him.”

  If I had not loved her, as I never loved anyone else in my life, it might have been easier to find words to relieve her distress. If she had pitied herself, perhaps I could have found some way to comfort he
r. But she was too brave. She had no self-pity, and no blame for anyone else — not even Proudman.

  “What does Proudman matter?” she insisted when I cursed him and the day she met him. “What did he know? He is simply a treacherous animal. If it hadn’t been Proudman it might have been you. It would certainly have been someone. I let words and curiosity deceive me into thinking cleanness can’t be touched by dirt. So now I’m dirty, and I can’t ever feel clean any more.”

  The iron had gone far too deep into her soul for me to reach it. It had entered mine, too, which didn’t matter, except that it made me so loathe Proudman that my wits almost deserted me and I probably made all the possible mistakes. For instance, I suggested that it might be better for me to break the news to Ramon. But she very quickly knifed that impudence. She answered she, and only she, would tell him the entire truth. She was only waiting for him to be well enough. Did I think he was well enough now to be told?

  I said yes, the sooner the better, since it had to be done. So she said she would wake him and tell him.

  “But alone, please. Go away until morning.”