Sylvia stooped forward suddenly, as though she were falling from her chair. She would have fallen but for Frances Sidney’s arms about her shoulders. For a few moments she lay like that, her eyes closed, her face white as paper. Then she drew herself free.
“There is a message for me here,” she said, turning again the letter in her hands. She spoke quietly and in an even voice. There was even a wistful smile upon her lips. “I am very well, Frances. Have no fear.”
Frances Sidney beckoned to her father, and they left the girl alone in the library as she meant them to do. She sat so still after they had gone that the room seemed empty or only tenanted by one who was dead. But Sylvia was alive and watching with a dreadful intentness scenes of horror. A great ship labouring amongst mists which thickened and dissolved and showed a doll swinging on a high yard — her lover who had died after what pain endured none but God could tell. Suddenly her voice sounded in the still room clearly, harshly, so that the sound shocked her.
“Hanged!” she said, and an appalling excitement seized upon her so that she found herself repeating the word on an ever-louder note. “Hanged! Hanged! Hanged!…” until she knew that this was the road to madness.
She opened the letter. It was no list of ships. It was written to her. If she could have heard his voice speaking the written words. But one loses voices — until one hears them again.
“But I shall,” she said to herself, and read:
“Darling,
“I take ship tomorrow on a voyage which, long or short, will bring me to you in the end. I see you under the trees in the Closewalks. I feel your dear lips on mine. I hear the words… You are very near to me tonight, Sweetheart. I think that I know all which makes you the lovely You you are and suddenly I discover something new and lovelier still. In my new tongue, A Rivederci.”
The letter was neither signed nor dated nor superscribed from any place. It was written at Lisbon the night before Anthony went aboard the Señora de la Rosa. Sylvia sat with the letter open in her hand, and in a little while she heard her voice again, very loving, very urgent.
“Come! Anthony, come back! Here, now! Oh, come!”
The evening was beginning to fall, the room was full of shadows. She felt that he must obey. The door would open. She watched the knob, expecting to see it turn. He would come as she had last seen him, slim and exquisite in his flesh-coloured velvet with his pearl in his ear and his gold chain with the emerald galleon about his shoulders. He would come to her debonair and young and beautiful, early a man and late a boy.
But the shadows deepened into darkness, and only the window panes glimmered, and still the room was empty.
“No,” she thought, and submitted herself to the thought. “I cannot bring him back that way.”
And having submitted herself to the law, she was in a little while aware of a presence in the dark room. The tears came into her eyes and flowed. And after that she felt that she was never quite alone.
PART THREE. ADRIAN SHARD
XXV. MIDNIGHT
First Dealer: If I buy you, what will you teach me?
Pythagoreanism: Nothing. I will remind you.
— Lucian
“Panem et circenses. That’s, of course, dole and dog tracks,” said the fat elderly man with the notebooks.
He was seated at a table placed on a large square wooden’ floor, raised a foot above the terrace. Overhead was a thatched roof supported upon pillars, but there were no walls. It was the ballroom of a great house in the tropics. The house itself was upon his left-hand side, and he sat facing the railing of the terrace, but he was much too busy to spare any attention for the magical scene in front of him. It was night, and electric lamps, hanging from the roof lit up this big roofed dais brilliantly.
“Rome’s growing downwards like a cow’s tail,” he quoted. “That’s Ganymede at the Banquet. You never came across that piece of Latin, Adrian, I’ll bet.” He looked towards a boy who was sitting by the railing and looking out with a curious intentness, as though he were listening.
“No, Mr Trapp,” he answered politely, but without turning his head.
“No, of course you didn’t. Petronius is for grown- ups.” Mr Trapp chuckled noisily and winked at the third of that party, a worn, thin man of Trapp’s own age who sat at the end of the house where a glass screen made a sheltered corner. “Old Petronius, he was a lad!”
He wrote again in his notebook.
“I’ll begin my book with the cow’s tail quotation. The label on the luggage, what?”
Mr Charles Trapp was a retired Indian Civil Servant. His last and highest post was that of Collector at Agra, but he nursed the strongest possible conviction that, if true merit had been given right of way, he would have been Governor of the United Provinces. He retired, therefore, with a grievance and a lively suspicion that the British Empire was tumbling downhill. The obvious comparison of Rome struck him as an idea quite startling and new, which was well worth exploring. Mr Trapp explored. Certainly the British Empire was sliding, and with it the rest of the civilized world, into the dark burial ground of nations and epochs. It almost deserved to do, since real ability never got its chance. At all events, its impending doom should be firmly pointed out to it and a disgruntled official get a little of his own back at the same time. Thus it happened that, oblivious of the beauty of a night in Jamaica with the moon at the full, he was plaguing his host Sir John Shard and his host’s son Adrian with his analogies. He pulled one of his books towards him.
“Now, here’s something,” he said. “Just listen to it, you two! I was before the new pronunciation, Adrian. So you must have it in the old: “Dat veniam corvis, vexat censura columbas.’ Do you hear that? Do you see what it means under the conditions of life as it is? Our taxation lets off the Co-ops and harasses the small tradesmen. Juvenal! Therefore true! He was a lad, was Juvenal!”
At this, the boy at last turned his head and showed to Mr Trapp a face which was delicate in feature and fine yet without weakness. At the present moment perplexity troubled it.
“But you are writing a book, Sir,” he cried.
“Yes, and a book the world is waiting for,” said Mr Trapp.
“Then you can’t take Juvenal on trust like that, can you?” the boy asked pleasantly but very seriously.
“And why not?”
“He was a snob, wasn’t he, Sir? The worst kind of a snob. He thought everybody was despising him because he wasn’t well-born, as if anybody cared then or cares now how a man’s born, so long as he delivers the goods.”
Mr Trapp sat back in his chair. Juvenal a snob! Why, he was the next thing to the Bible.
“A snob! So that’s what they teach you nowadays at school, is it?”
Adrian Shard was in still greater perplexity. He could not remember any schoolmaster who had given him that information. Yet someone had — surely. For he recollected it.
“Well, I’ll have to look into it,” said Mr Trapp, not at all good-humouredly. “John, that boy of yours ought to be in bed.”
John Shard and his son exchanged a smile. Clearly they shared a secret into which Mr Trapp was not initiated.
“It’s his last night here,” said John Shard, “and Heaven knows when he will come back again.”
He might have added “or whether he will come back at all.” For that alternative was present to all their minds. John Shard, after a lifetime of soldiering in India, had been stricken by the modern curse of asthma and, after many experiments, had found that in the climate of Jamaica he could breathe most easily. He had bought this house of High Park above St. Ann’s Bay and settled there. But even so, his heart had to work overtime, and since he was now in the sixties, he could not look forward very far. Meanwhile Adrian was at Winchester, and only by sailing on the first day of his summer holidays to Montreal and thence by one of the “Lady” boats southwards through the islands, could he snatch a few days with his father at High Park.
Charles Trapp grunted sympathetically and return
ed to his theme. For a time his pen scratched and the notebooks were collated. Then he looked up again.
“Was it Commodus or Caracalla who said, ‘The Emperor’s the only one who ought to have money and he only to buy the army with’?”
The question was addressed to Adrian, who replied: “I’m afraid I can’t say, Sir. I haven’t got as far as the Emperors.”
“What!” cried Mr Trapp indignantly. “How old are you?
“Fifteen.”
“And at Winchester! And you don’t know whether it was Commodus or Caracalla! It passes belief. Now, when I was your age and at school—”
“You didn’t know it either, Sir,” the boy interrupted with a smile.
General Shard laughed outright, and Mr Trapp had to join him in the end.
“Well, you’re right, boy. I didn’t, and I don’t know it now. For I’m hanged if I can read my own handwriting. But the infernal fellow began with a C. However, I’ve got to get him right. The parallel’s too good. The Government stands for the Emperor. So the sentence runs: ‘The Government’s the only one that ought to have money and it only to buy the voters with.’ Pretty exact, eh? Commodus — Caracalla — and our Governments in England. Oh, there’s no doubt of it. The world’s growing downwards like—”
He did break off now from his task. He was looking straight ahead of him over the railing.
“Mother of Heaven, what a night!” he exclaimed, almost in awe. He left his books and went forward to the edge of the terrace. Immediately below him a garden of steep paths and big pale flowers dropped to a bathing pool where a fountain leaped and splashed. Below that great trees, bread and mangrove and cassava, marched down to the ocean’s edge, the dark leaves of their foliage shining in the moonlight like armour. On the spit to the right a grove of coconuts seemed to stand in the sea, their stems separated by the bright shafts of silver light, the tufts of their heads mingling one with another. A short, thatch-roofed pier was thrust out into the lagoon. A coral reef, broken at one point to make a gateway, enfolded it. A three- masted schooner, its riding light burning in its rigging, lay at the anchorage, a toy upon a sheet of glass. A tender and unearthly radiance softened every harsh edge and outline. And over all rode a moon white as an enormous lily. Even Mr Trapp was stirred by the glory of the scene.
Adrian turned to him.
“I am going to bed now,” he said pleasantly. “Goodnight.”
“I, too,” said Mr Trapp.
Whilst he went back to his table, shut up his notebooks, and turned out the lights, the boy crossed to his father.
“You’ll call me, Sir?” he asked in a low voice.
“Rather!” John Shard replied. “We’ll not miss this parade.” And again he might have added, “It may be the last.” For that possibility was in the thoughts of both. The boy laid his hand on his father’s arm with a gentle and caressing touch and went off into the house. It was then close upon midnight.
Five hours later John Shard waked him up in his bed in the wide latticed porch on the first floor.
“We’ve comfortable time,” he said in a low voice. “Don’t make a noise. We don’t want old Trapp to join us, do we? He’d think us a couple of fools, one in his second childhood and one in his first.”
Adrian slid out of bed, found his shoes and his dressing gown in the dark, and followed his father noiselessly downstairs. A door stood open, and in the room to which it led, a window overlooked the garden and the sea.
“I have put everything ready. For I didn’t want to wake you up too soon.” John Shard looked at his watch, which had illuminated hands. “We have only a few minutes to wait.”
They sat down by the window, both of them listening intently. There was not a sound to be heard. Inside the room the fireflies gleamed and vanished like so many sparks driven by a wind. Outside a magical glamour lay upon garden and forest and sea, giving them enchantment and mystery. Suddenly the silence was broken and the enchantment deepened. For somewhere very far away, a clock struck slowly the hour of midnight. At the first stroke Adrian stretched out his hand and caught his father’s arm and thus they remained until the last vibration had died upon the air, and even afterwards, like people who have been present at some moving ritual.
For the strokes had the deep organ note, authentic and unmistakable, of the great clock at Westminster. John Shard had placed the loud-speaker out of sight upon the terrace. Now, relayed from Aranjuez and the Azores and Curaçao, the sound reached them across three thousand miles, resonant and clear as though they stood upon a height of Hampstead rather than upon a hill over a bay of coral in Jamaica. A call, a claim. A call for service, a claim upon heart and brain, muscle and blood.
After a little while John Shard spoke.
“Trapp may be right, of course. There are signs enough. No leaders and little courage. They know what’s wrong and haven’t the great heart necessary to denounce it. They play a game in a room with the world as a playball. For if England goes, the world as we know it goes too. But he may be wrong. There may still come a race of young men who’ll serve, not for rewards, not for the game, not for a fine big name in the newspapers, not even for real fame, though that’s an end worthy enough, but just for service sake — service to the King’s realm. Men who will say boldly what we all know, that the cost of government must come down by millions if England is to live, and will see to it that it does.” He stood up and changed to a lighter note. “Here’s a lecture that’s keeping you out of bed and me, too.”
He closed the shutters again. In the darkness they crept up the stairs, taking pains not to stumble. At Adrian’s door, his father held him for a moment in his arms.
“Never forget tonight and the call of those twelve strokes, Adrian,” John Shard whispered, “and what they have said to you and me. You’ll have money enough to give yourself to public service when I go. I want you to hear those strokes over your head one day.”
Adrian lay awake for an hour in the darkened porch with the fireflies glancing about his mosquito curtains. He was receptive rather than thoughtful. Stray wisps of the stuff of dreams, glimpses of pictures, vague fancies which seemed compounded half of memory, drew near from a vast distance and hung about him and changed. He saw, for instance, a girl in some sort of masquerade dress, dancing on a lawn before an audience of gaily dressed people, they too in fancy dress. But one of them, a woman with a face which was familiar, was angry. Next he saw great ships, like castles, lumbering in front of a gale past an island of white cliffs and green Downs. That picture melted into another, of a couple in dress of a yet different and older fashion, who stood close together in front of a slab of chalk which one of them, the youth, carved with a short sword. The girl moved, and he saw her, and she was the same who danced upon the lawn. The curious thing about her was that in both pictures her face was veiled, yet he recognized her certainly. Then the youth with the short sword turned, and with an odd shock he saw himself. And these pictures were all accompanied by the resonant strokes of Big Ben. The strokes, indeed, were more than an accompaniment. They acted as a sort of solvent which blended all these visions into a pattern and, despite all the differences of dress and place, made them one...
At this point Adrian fell asleep. The next morning he drove across the island with his father to Kingston and went off alone to Montreal and England.
XXVI. THE INDIGO ROOM
Moreover, something is or seems
That touches me with mystic gleams
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams.
— Tennyson
Eight years later, towards the end of Whitweek, Adrian Shard travelled by the Simplon Express to Milan. He changed his train there and, whilst waiting on the platform, was hailed by a noisy voice.
“Adrian! What a small world it is! Or is it? I haven’t seen you since we were both at High Park in Jamaica just before your father died. A long time!”
Adrian turned round and, with a smile, held out his hand.
“Eight years, Sir,” he said.<
br />
It was Charles Trapp who had hailed him, a Charles Trapp aged and now very fat and rather pasty of face, but still alert with indignant energy.
“I would have recognized you anywhere,” he cried, as though Adrian Shard had done him a wrong by being so easily recognizable. “Taller, of course. That was to be expected. But you haven’t filled out below the shoulders.”
“I don’t want to, yet,” said Adrian meekly. “How’s the great work going?”
“Almost finished,” said Mr Trapp. “Another six months and — let ’em all look out, I say! Devastating, my boy. Chapter and verse.” He spoke, darkly threatening a world on the slide. “How long have you got?” he asked.
“Twenty minutes,” said Adrian.
“Then we’ll slip one,” said Mr Trapp and he conducted his prisoner to the buffet. Over a vermouth and seltzer he expanded.
“The book must come out in monthly parts. See the idea? It must soak in. Publishers? They say it’s depressing. Of course it’s depressing! I want every clerk in Highgate to know he’s mincing on the crust of a volcano. But publishers! There! You know what Byron said about them.”
“Yes,” said Adrian, “and what the curate said about his egg.
Mr Trapp blinked.
“You were always rather flippant, young Shard,” he observed. “Your judgment is very faulty, I think. But you wouldn’t take things so lightly if you had been with me during the last week.” He nodded portentously at the youth by his side. “I have paid my final visit to Pompeii.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 630