The light was on over the door. Here was the place that I had chosen as the receptacle of my innocence, as Johnny, no less deluded, had chosen the town. Was it in there, that strangling, angel-black presence I came back here to murder? Here you are, and good luck to you. I stared up at the light. Why should I want to break bread with them here as the prodigal breaks bread in the house of his father; this was not my father’s house. Nor was it the house of righteousness, only the not impossible house—with a light on over its door. I rang.
I was about to ring again when I heard feet running and the door was opened by a fluttered young maid still tying her apron. “Yes, sir,” she said in thick Irish. “Excuse me, sir. Please to come in.” As the door closed behind me, a woman’s voice rang strongly from above. “Mr. Harley’s to be taken in to Sir Joseph at once, Maureen.” Before I could explain myself to the little maid, who was nodding over her shoulder and at the same time offering to take my things as shyly as if she had never done this before, the door of the morning room opened.
Stooped as he was, he was still almost as tall as I remembered him, with the same high-shouldered Egyptian narrowness, the head thrust from it like a buttonhook, the talon-nose carried forward to do the honors for the rest of his person which, scholarly reluctant, lagged behind—for these alone I might have known him, nothing else. The head was an old man’s enlarged pate now, with the yellowed baldness that comes to men of saturnine complexion; from beneath it the thin, oval face lengthened as if from a hat, an El Greco in oddly dashing eyeglasses, one of whose lenses was dark. He came toward me quavering, arms outstretched.
“Harley, how good of you—I scarcely dared hope.” One trembling hand grasped my waterproof. “Harley. She’s been calling all day—they have instructions not to prevent her from calling, you know—I couldn’t stick that. But I shall value your company down there tomorrow, more than I can say.” The rushing speech slowed. “I do beg your pardon. You’re not even out of the wet.” The hand dropped from my sleeve. “Do excuse me.” His head retracted in its wing collar, the lowered chin brushing it. “It’s the same thing, of course; she wants to come home. Raising his eyes, he stared at me. “You’d think I’d’ve got used to it in twenty years, wouldn’t you. And to those Mondays. But the truth is—” He passed a knuckle over the clearer lens. “The truth is, I’m getting on.” Shaking his head, stepping back, he collided with the maid waiting behind him. “Dear me.” Again the hand went out, encountering the girl’s hair—she was very small, perhaps fifteen. “Ah, m’dear, you’ll have to get used to me, too. Harley—” he went on, half turning, his hand still on her hair, “this is our little Maureen, Molly’s niece, come just last week to help us, all the way from County Wexford.” A flash of his former courtliness straightened him; inside this wavering apparition one saw for a second the ramrod of its youth. “She’s going to stay awhile,” he said, with a smile that knew itself liked. But tenderness to children had always been able to woo him from his distance, and this blunt-featured girl, not pretty but with babyhood still on her like a deer’s velvet, was only a child. I could remember how he had always stooped to them, not sparkled from a safe vantage like that other charmer whose name now was mine. “Lucky it wasn’t the Nailsea, eh?” he had said once, stooping down. “And Maureen,” he said now, “this gentleman is Mr. Harley, almost one of the family here.”
At this last, I remained speechless. I had not yet had a chance to take stock of my surroundings; it had been bemusement enough to be inside here, meet him even under the ordinary rules of exchange. Now, for one dread flash, I even wondered whether I could have constructed a “Harley” to enter here, which personality—in an ironically final stroke of amnesia—I had then forgot. Then from behind him a saving voice came, the one I had heard from above. She must have come quietly down during our interchange, and now she came forward without surprise, sending me one of those faint, telegraphic gestures we make behind the backs of the failing. This woman with the black still in her gray, the kindly face both sharp and blunt, was not Lady Goodman, could never have been, even though there had never been a death notice for Rachel, Lady Goodman, even if the old man, confirming a prescience I must have had ready for him, had not all but told me where his wife was. But this could very well be Molly, servant girl, grown to housekeeper’s estate, who had once looked not unlike Maureen here, Molly in dark blue neatness and a breastpin like the one my mother had received here one Christmas. She touched his sleeve. “The gentleman is not Mr. Harley, Sir Joseph.” She pressed a switch beside her and the central chandelier came on. “This weather, the lamps do nothing.” She turned to me, hands folded. “Yes, sir?”
“Not—not—?” He peered at me. “Of course not. I do beg your pardon. I was expecting someone, my godson. I’m afraid my eyes are not what they were.”
“I’m the one who should apologize. Your secretary wrote saying you’d be here, but I should have telephoned.” The matter-of-fact, adult phrases came to my own ears as if they were lèse-majesté, a masquerading; this must be a common experience for those who speak as equals, after long absence, to elders who knew them last as a child. But I had never had that experience and now I shrank from it. I could not face his humility and my own advantage. I had left him so proud. It was Molly I turned to. “You’re Molly, aren’t you? Mary Mulvey. You must be.”
“You’re not—why you’ll be another one of them chaps from the papers, come about the Sweeps, are you, even on such a day. Well, you may leave off. I’ve said my say.” She leaned toward the old man. “Do go on then, sir. Go on in the library, do; the side room’s too cold. There’s a nice fire in the library. And if she rings again, I’ll answer.” Whispering this last, she turned back to me. “Yes, I’ve had the money. And yes, I’m still here. Now that’s all now, do you hear?”
“No, I’m not from the newspapers, although I read about your win—and your answer.” I must have answered her as slowly as if I were dreaming, for now I was beginning to take stock of my surroundings, and the mention, too, of her windfall had filled me with a dreamer’s sudden, lavish benevolence toward all those belowstairs who had been so kind to me in that haven of second breakfasts; I could have wished to have arrived in a whirligig of presents from America for them, and for those abovestairs too, like my namesake long gone. But my presents, couched with the deadly faith of those who remember too well, would have been awkward ones—a sack of immies and those baked-stone marbles from Tuscana, the like of which Martin would never have seen, an air gun for James’s excursions on the inflatable Taft, and—perhaps the only dateless one—for Cook a bottle of her ruby port. “I shouldn’t have burst in on you like this.” I was not sorry. “And I’m afraid you’ll have forgotten me.” But this too was the language of the masque; I did not really believe it. “I’m—” My glance, wandering, greeting this, that, was intercepted at the top of the stairs. “The Knights of Malta—he’s gone.” In the light of the chandelier, the landing window shone as ever, and clear.
“The—oh yes. Good Lord, the old Templar—he’s been gone a long time now. One of the boys broke it, wasn’t it, Molly. He wasn’t much really, you know, Flemish, but nowhere near first-rate. The house itself isn’t at all early, you know; I’d no idea we’d become antique enough for that sort of thing. Trust my secretary didn’t raise your hopes.” His voice was suddenly as suavely distant, competent as I remembered it, freed of its quaver if a bit breathy, as if he had outrun that—the same voice which had bent, museum professional, over the harlequin-feathered cape. “Maureen will take your things. Do excuse us. I can’t think—oh, of course—the dining room. It is Morris, and more intact than most, I suppose. We did once have a fellow come photograph that.”
“Sir—” Molly’s voice had the tremble now, and she had arrested Maureen with a swift hand. “Sir Joseph—James broke that window almost thirty years ago, sir. He couldn’t have been ten. With his ball.” Turning to me, she held the girl close. “Who are you!”
I turned again to Sir Jos
eph, giant preserved for my coming. Pitilessly straight as a compass needle, innocence turned me toward him. “Until I was about ten, too, I used to come here with my mother. I’m Dora Cross’s son, Sir Joseph.”
“Dora … Cross. Do—Forgive me if I don’t quite—” He passed a hand over the darkened lens, as if this must stand for all his lapses. And indeed it might, I thought, tender for all seventy-seven years of him still preserved, thinking of the thousands of names he must have gone through in those years and have had to put behind him, else how get through such a roster, else how get through? Allowance must be made for that, and for my present appearance, which would have set him searching in the wrong category, among names that belonged abovestairs.
“My mother used to sew for her ladyship.” Softened with revelation, I could afford to be modest, even servile, to wait for his “Sew?—why, she was with Rachel when we married. Remember you—tumbling about underfoot with our own children? Why, my dear boy, you may not know it, but you were born here!” I trembled on the verge of his smile.
And now, if he delayed, surely it was because he was sifting through another category as numerous, that other long roster of benevolences cast so freely, so casually by such a house, upon the waters—so few of which, persevering as I, would have floated themselves back. I waited, in trust for them all. “For her ladyship?” he said, not infirm, not wavering, but he had slipped off his glasses to stare past me, baring the one empty eye socket already closed, quietly sealed. In it I saw my answer, not only to the favor—of remembrance—that I had just asked of him, but to that other more impossible request to which it was bound. No. To none of us—neither on our deathbeds nor on our childish knees. No, we may not. Not in any house for long, not anywhere. We may not stay. “For her ladyship?” he repeated. “Ah, that must have been a long time ago.”
“Dora Cross! Dora Cross—as went to America!” The cry was Molly’s, the face thrust up to mine, smiling and tearful, was Molly’s, the arms half extended to encircle the boy I had been, drawn up short before the man I had become, were hers; for a moment the hall was filled with all the sounds of welcome that could be made by a chorus of one. Tea was just on the way—if Sir Joseph would be good enough to go in by the fire ahead of us. He submitted as the old do, with a humble pleasure at still being part of the bustle of the world; meanwhile, I might just glimpse, peeped out like a fine pocket handkerchief to the son of a woman whose place here had been well above a kitchen-maid’s, how Molly reigned here now. “Lost an eye in the blitz,” she whispered after him, “and now Doctor thinks the other is going.” She stood off and regarded me. “Crossie’s son. And how is—?” My hesitation told her; before I said more she had collected its meaning without a hitch, like the commonest of passwords, as indeed it must be by now in this house. “Cook and I wondered, many’s the time. Your mother always wrote to her, so likely we never knew when it stopped.” So my mother had remembered. To all I had not known about her, to the great pile of secrets of the dead which must form somewhere in space-time their Everest, I added this leaf.
“She’s—you know—” Now it was Molly who hesitated and I who nodded, collecting the password as smoothly. “In a—nursing home, in Worthing. Has been, these twenty years.” She clapped her hands together. “But what am I thinking, to keep you standing here. And without your tea.” She turned, and I thought she meant to lead me to her own quarters, where the prodigal had after all been remembered, and perhaps she did. Midway, she swiveled round again to have a look at me, at first with unease, but when she spoke, her tone had a certain old-fashioned distance, satisfied, even triumphant. From it, I might read if I wished, if after all these years I was still able, how far I had risen. “Maureen! Take the gentleman’s things.”
He was already seated on one side of the fire when I entered, and motioned me into the chair opposite. While we drank our tea, Molly hovered; I had the feeling that on his deathbed, if he came to it with none of his family about as there seemed to be none now, she would grip his hand with the most natural fealty, but in any situation short of it she would never sit down. When he was not using his cup, he himself sat with his long hands alternately hanging or upturned on the arms of his chair. “And your mother,” he said, “is she—?”
“Dead for many years. More than twenty.”
He nodded. After an interval he spoke again. “My wife would have been so happy to see you, no doubt. But she has been ill, you know. For many years.” I could not tell whether or not he had echoed by accident the phrase that seemed to equate her illness with death, or whether he had remembered me by now; here his gentility did have the advantage, for if he would not pretend on first sight, he would not clumsily repair on second, taking for granted that my own good manners would not press it, and so awarding me them in his way exactly as Molly had awarded me my rise. Meanwhile I sat on with them in that suspended room.
Of all the rooms in the house other than his fourth-floor study, this one, often containing an overflow of materia belonging to the Museum, and therefore kept locked against that race of children which had reigned everywhere else, was the only one unfamiliar to me. It was a faded enough room that had perhaps achieved its character only very late in life. Fire had persisted here, and rain, and a few furnishings of the sort kicked about on the foam-edges—it was a room where only people mattered now. If this was limbo, it was one that was new to me, for I found that if I thought of the two older ones sitting here with me in the portion of their real existence which for the moment I was sharing, they had nothing to do with the legend I had made of them, although the legend was still there. Here in this fogbound room the three of us were together in some middle distance, middle darkness, where, with the same ichor in our veins, we were all three of us shades.
“Cook died three years ago,” said Molly, energetically refilling both our cups. “You remember her, don’t you—Mrs. Holland?”
I nodded without comment, risking the charge of coldness rather than embark on all I remembered here. They would never understand what I had made of them. Here in the place—if such there was—was the last place in the world to unburden it. In a few minutes, with only that knowledge to brood on later, as was my way, having done nothing, nothing—as was my way—I could take my leave.
At Molly’s remark, Sir Joseph’s long hands had again made their slow reversal, as if to say “Enough of that side of the medal. Enough.” He leaned forward now, shoulders tensing away from some deep, and again I saw the ramrod, heard the sudden, alternative youth. “So you’re an American now, eh? Then I may ask you that very American question, ‘What do you do?’”
I told him about Lasch’s, keeping back only that I was its head. He knew of it, of course, and leaped eagerly to the subject, rapping out pertinent inquiries on our publications in fields allied to his own, going on from there to recent work, not his own but important, at the Museum where he kept a token office, even ranging on, with that proprietary passion Englishmen have for the social order—he was Labour, he told me—to sharply dubious queries on ours. I listened to him as I would listen to any in this house, from the sheer marvel of being in it as I was, my own Doppelgänger, whirled through thirty years at a stroke, to be addressed as I was being now. But what I saw, with the half of me which for the moment had regained the gift of that purer, still-life vision before words complicate, was his terrible struggle for liveliness. Once it faltered, when the telephone rang, and until Molly returned from answering, he dropped the thread of what he had been saying. “Ah,” he said when she gave him the message that Mr. Harley would arrive tomorrow in time to go with him—only “Ah.” There was a pause. I could better have understood dread—at that other expected phone call, or satisfaction at Harley’s—indeed any other emotion. But this was the blankness of a man utterly lost—“Ah,” he repeated, and on the same note again, “Ah”—of a man who had lost the thread not only of me, of Molly who had gone out leaving us together, but of Harley and even of “her.”
Sort of weathe
r the old ones die in, I thought, but his color had not changed and he was sitting very straight in his chair. His lips moved, bit themselves, said to themselves what I thought was “I must do better. I must do,” and as I caught their drift I could have groaned with him, for I began to understand what I was seeing. What I had written off as the mild alternations of senility was the exceptional struggle of a man to keep himself complete, summon himself back from the ordinary deeps of decay. The one clear eye looked at me, utterly lost—yet it had not been blessed with complete loss—it still knew. None are so brave as the old, I thought, and could not help him. What I had mistaken for an effort toward liveliness was the mortal struggle of a man to keep that vital intelligence which to him was life. “Ah-h-h,” he said, this time in a growl from depths that were scarcely human, but above, the lone eye maintained itself, and as I watched it, grew not merely human again, for it was already bitterly that, but more so, as if I could all but see behind it the resumption of that ticktock flame. “Stukely,” he suddenly said in the most natural way, picking up the thread where we had left it. “So you’ve met him, eh? Hmm. Stukely. One of our better lightweights, of course, but still—Hmmm. Stukely.”
I scarcely had time to accept this irony—that of all the names, recognitions, I had hoped to exchange in this house, this one should be the one to appear—when the door opened to Maureen, shyly bearing a tray which she set down between us. Just then, Sir Joseph spoke again, stretching a hand to me across the tray.
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