Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  “I hadn’t room for fear,” Michael Croyle answered. “I was simply conscious that it was my turn now to go into that room. This certainty filled me and I got up from the chair.

  “‘Oh, you’re not going to follow them?’ cried one of the ladies in a voice of agitation — I think that it was the middle-aged, stoutish wife.

  “‘It’s time that I did,’ I answered, and the husband grumbled a protest against my folly.

  “‘Not a bit of it, Mr. Croyle,’ he said. ‘There’s heaps of time. You’ll probably just spoil their game when they’ve just got it ready for us. Have a heart and give them a chance! There’s still an hour to go before midnight.’

  “He was right, for I looked at my watch. The hands pointed exactly to eleven o’clock. But the time mentioned was merely an excuse to stop me from doing the thing which it was ordained that I should do. An earthquake would not have stopped me at that moment.

  “‘It’s my turn,’ I said. ‘I am called,’ and I walked to the door rather stiffly, like a man walking along a narrow board.

  “‘You’re coming back, of course?’ the General said gruffly.

  “‘Of course,’ I answered. I turned the handle and went into the room. I heard the governess say, as the door was closing softly behind me, ‘I heard nobody call him. He’s as white as a ghost.’

  “That, of course, was the merest piece of imagination. They were all, I think, worked up to expect that some startling and dreadful catastrophe was hidden in my sitting-room. What I was expecting, frankly, I cannot tell you. During the last few minutes I had been moving without volition like an automaton on a string, but an automaton with his senses alert. The room in which I stood was dark, but outside the moon was riding high behind a fleece of white cloud and all the garden was bathed in a wan and vaporous light. The long windows stood open, and the freshness of the dew filled the air. It was very still. Occasionally a bird rustled on a branch and far away an owl hooted softly; and on the lawn in front of me Mark Stile was walking with his wife, his arm about her shoulders. That was what the catastrophe amounted to, Sylvia. Cynthia Stile, by the simple device of not answering the summons to the drawing-room, had lured her husband to join her in the glamour of that forest garden. Once he had joined her the magic of the night, something mystical in the pale radiance which lit it up, and the amazing riddle to them of their love, obliterated from their minds the drawing-room and our commonplace little company. They were deep in talk and we had ceased to be. Yes, but it couldn’t go on. They weren’t playing fair. We were a little community gathered up by chance into this space amongst the trees and united by certain needs most acutely felt at this one season of the year — children, relations, love, all of which we were without. And the two lovers, because they had everything they wanted, were a real solace to each one of us. They couldn’t be allowed to get away by themselves on this night of all nights. They were a ministration to us, the derelicts. So they must minister. I had to see to it that these lucky people did their duty by the waifs and strays.

  “I moved towards the window, but before I could open my mouth, I heard a whisper behind me:

  “‘Don’t call, my dear!’

  “The whisper was low and clear and — you won’t think me a fool, Sylvia? — in a moment the tears were running down my cheeks. You know how impossible it is to hear again by memory, however much you ply your imagination, a voice which once played upon your heart the loveliest music in the world. How often I had tried to recapture it! But it is just as impossible to mistake it when it falls actually upon your ears. Joan! Of course it was Joan who was speaking, and at once everything was explained to me. Why my letter-writing had come to an end, why I could watch the stretch of road with the white tavern at the corner without distress, why I had come back to the hotel in the forest which I had looked upon as forbidden land for me. I cried without shame, and I felt Joan’s hand upon my shoulder.

  “I turned round — or rather she turned me round. There was nothing strange or new in her. She was wearing a white velvet dress which she had bought in London just before her accident and had, I remembered, once worn. She glimmered white against the black of the room, her eyes darkly shining, her lips lovely with a smile. I think I babbled some excuse for my tears. I know that she was in my arms. The last time I had seen her, I had stooped and kissed her forehead — and it had been cold as marble. I remembered at this moment that I had not been sorry, for the coldness was a sign that the long days and nights of pain were over. I could afford to remember it, for now her lips were warm and tender and she lay in my arms pulsing with blood and life.

  “‘Dearest and dearest, I have wanted you’ I said.

  “Joan stroked her hand down my cheek.

  “‘I know, darling. I read your letters.’

  “‘You did?’

  “‘Yes. Over your shoulder as you wrote them.’

  “‘I thought you did.’

  “‘Had you once faltered in your need of me,’ she said with loving pride, ‘I could not have come to you tonight,’ and her arms clung to me. ‘As it is—’ and such a sigh of happiness broke from her lips as made all my sorrows of no account.

  “‘You are here,’ I said, and I laughed.”

  Joan laid a finger on my lips.

  “‘Hush!’ and she pointed to the lovers deep in talk upon the lawn. I had forgotten them as completely as they had forgotten us. ‘We owe them a great deal,’ said Joan, with a laugh in her eyes. ‘Don’t let us bring them to earth before we need.’

  “‘What do we owe them?’ I asked in a low voice.

  “‘But for them I couldn’t have come to you, my dear. To come to you there was a bridge needed for me to cross — and the only one bridge by which I could cross was the bridge of a perfect love. That is the law.”

  “I looked out through the windows to where the two lovers waited in the silver grey and misty light for the chimes to break upon the stillness of the night. They seemed to me further away than they had been, ever so much further. The air about them was more vaporous, but it made a sort of archway in which they stood quite clearly, bathed in a lovely silver radiance. And all the time Joan was at my side, her hand clasping mine, her breath upon my cheek...I wanted you to know, Sylvia, for I am going to skip out when the lights go down.”

  Michael had hardly finished speaking when the lights went out in the great restaurant and every ship flying the Red Ensign between Pole and Pole struck sixteen bells. When the lights went up again, and the band broke into Auld Lang Syne, and Sylvia reached out a crossed hand to Michael Croyle, he had gone.

  “You saw him go?” she asked quietly to her neighbour as she closed up the gap.

  “Yes. He whispered good night and went away.”

  And with that answer Sylvia was contented, but only for a little while. Michael Croyle had spoken of New Year’s Eve as of a time long since past. But it was this New Year’s Eve, nevertheless, the New Year’s Eve which only five minutes ago was still to-night. He had told her a story of events not an hour old — events which had happened to him a hundred miles away in the depths of the New Forest. But he had not finished his story. Sylvia sat back in her chair startled and for a moment dismayed. It was she who had to finish it. She was sure of that just as Michael had been sure that it was his turn to go into the room which opened on to the garden.

  “I shan’t be a moment,” she said to the man who sat next to her. “Will you come with me to the telephone?”

  She tried to call up Croyle’s house in Deanery Street, but she could not get on. She rang up the supervisor and was told that the line was occupied by a trunk call from the New Forest, where Michael Croyle had just died in a room opening upon the garden.

  THE REVEREND BERNARD SIMMONS, B.D.

  DAVID SWAINE WORKED for more than eight hours a day and from a man became a master. He had his offices in Gracechurch Street and in this, his thirty-eighth year, a seat in the House of Commons; and up till now he had enjoyed a reasonable contentment. B
ut for no particular reason, the monotonous industry of his life began to be disturbed. Pictures of strange rivers and exotic cities drifted across the pages of his ledgers on dusty and sunlit afternoons. The air of the House of Commons, filtered up through fold upon fold of cotton-wool, became to his senses or imagination faded and sickly. He wanted a holiday. He wanted fresh air. He wanted colour.

  He proposed to himself a rush round the world, and he certainly did get as far as Ceylon. He landed at Colombo and did all the right things. He bought tortoise-shell at Galle and saw the Great Tooth in the Temple at Kandy. He climbed Adam’s Peak and watched the sun rise and the huge Shadow launch itself across the mists. He played a round of golf in the English climate of Nuwara Eliya, and visited the Rock Temple at Dhamballa. And finally, still revelling in the green and glistening radiance of the island, he came by some Stroke of Fate to Anuradhapura, the old dead city, dug after so many centuries out of its overgrowth of jungle.

  Swaine wrote his name in the hotel book, left a letter of introduction at the house of the Commissioner of the District, and set enthusiastically out in search of tank and moonstone, temple and sacred tree. He was walking back in the late afternoon from those serried lines of low square stone pillars which pass by the name of the Brazen Palace, lost in an effort to shoot himself back into the age when High Priests and monks and a comparatively unimportant King actually lived in the Palace above the stones, when the most ancient and modern thing in the world happened. A woman called to him.

  He had been vaguely aware that someone had passed him. He had been vaguely conscious too that this someone had stopped and turned. But the call swung him round; for it was his Christian name which was used. He saw a middle-aged woman of a stout coarse build with a round red face which seemed to him swollen. Little red veins disfigured the whites of her eyes.

  “She drinks,” he said to himself, “but how the dickens does she know my name?”

  And the call came again, “David,” but this time upon a note of reproach. David walked slowly towards her, frowning in his perplexity. He saw a look of fear leap into her eyes.

  “You surely know me again, don’t you, David?” and ever so little her voice shook.

  So she had not always looked the round barrel of a woman she looked now, and in her heart she knew it, but dreaded to have to recognize it.

  “Of course I know you again,” he said quickly, and was rewarded by a smile of relief.

  “Then tell me my name,” she continued, with a dreadful archness which sat upon her monstrously.

  Now that was not fair. She should have given him a lead. She was asking for the very answer she dreaded; and but for the flash of fear which had shone so distinctly in her eyes she would have got it. It gave him no pleasure, however, to wound for the sake of wounding. Obviously he had once known this woman. He reflected and by some subconscious message of his memory, her name suddenly stood out. There was certainly nothing in her appearance, no accent in her husky voice to remind him of the pretty slender girl to whom years ago he had once made love in the country lanes between Dulwich and Forest Hill.

  “You are Dulcie Elverton,” he said with a smile, and he held out his hand.

  “Yes, that’s it,” she exclaimed with relief. “‘Ow, you gave me quite a turn when I thought you didn’t remember me — such sweethearts as we were too.”

  She slipped her hand inside his arm and walked on beside him.

  “Fancy meetin’ you in Ceylon, David! Well, you’ve got on in the world, haven’t you? I see your name in the papers regular. That wouldn’t have happened if we’d run away and got married at nineteen, as we talked of,” she added shrewdly, and was silent for a moment. Then the archness returned to her and she nudged him in the ribs.

  “D’you remember the laburnum tree, David?”

  “Could I forget it?” he asked uncomfortably.

  “Well, I don’t know. Men are that queer. You never do know.”

  The laburnum tree had overhung the high garden wall of the Elverton’s house and a couple kissing underneath it were hidden even from the topmost windows. The picture flashed back now into Swaine’s memory — of himself waiting under the cover of the wall, of Dulcie stealing out to him, of the stolen passionate kisses, nineteen years crying hungrily to eighteen years, of the hurried partings a little way from the house — for the Elvertons were wholesale people in the leather trade and David Swaine was merely a clerk on an office stool without any prospects whatever. David Swaine remembered now, remembered even the tragic emotions with which they parted, he to his advancement in Liverpool.

  “You never once wrote to me, David. No doubt you were right,” she said. “It all seemed pretty hopeless. But I was fairly heartbroken.”

  One thing Swaine couldn’t remember — the Cockney accent which she used now, which gave to her sentimental recollections a quite pathetic vulgarity. But she herself unconsciously supplied the explanation.

  “I knew you were going up and up,” she said in a voice of pride: and he remembered that he had been put to the greatest pains to get rid of a Cockney accent himself. He had taken lessons in elocution; he had watched himself and the faces of the people to whom he talked to make sure of his lapses, and correct them. He had gone up. Dulcie Elverton had stood still — there was the explanation.

  “Yes, it’s always been a pride to me that I was right about you,” she resumed. “I was modern, wasn’t I?”

  David Swaine laughed. He had not recollected that quality of hers until she mentioned the familiar word.

  “Of course you were,” he said.

  Dulcie Elverton had been all for the latest movements. Her last word of contempt had been “Mid-Victorian.” She had dared to smoke a cigarette, she had even dared to mention Oscar Wilde, she had been the very impersonation of the Forward Movement in her little suburban circle.

  “Yes, I always had courage, hadn’t I?” — and suddenly her voice rang with a sudden note of despair, which made the embarrassed David look sharply into her face.

  “Have things gone wrong with you, Dulcie?” he asked lamely — foolishly. For looking at her now and comparing her with the dainty slip of a girl she had been, he knew there was no need to ask that question.

  “No, no, not a bit,” she replied bravely. But she sent a quick glance of fear to this side and that like a criminal with the police on his track, and she added in a low hurried voice: “I must go. I must go.”

  She drew her hand away from Swaine’s arm, and then seized it again and clung to it.

  “I’d have bolted with you, David, in a sec. if you’d asked me. Oh, why didn’t you?”

  Swaine had never in his life heard a regret so pitiful. He began confusedly to stammer a few incoherencies. It wouldn’t have been fair to her...He had no position, no security to offer to her...It would have meant poverty made poorer perhaps by children...Dulcie cut quickly into his explanations.

  “It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “But I’m awfully proud of you, David. Do you remember what I used to call you? You’ve forgotten. You were my beau ideal;” and with that piece of banality she turned away. They were standing in a broad road in the native city and he saw her disappear into the darkness between two shops gaudily lit by petrol lamps.

  It is uncomfortable to meet unexpectedly your first love and to find that she has swollen into a mountainous ruin. You begin to speculate whether you, though you cannot see it, are something of a ruin yourself. It becomes still more uncomfortable if you are made to realize that you are in some way responsible for the ruin. This was David Swaine’s position as he walked back to his hotel with all his eager enjoyment quenched.

  A hundred torturing questions, which he had never asked, which Dulcie Elverton had determined that he should not ask, presented themselves to him now, demanding answers. Why was Dulcie in Ceylon at all? Was she living there, or a tourist like himself? Why had she suddenly turned away from him and disappeared — as if — yes, as if she feared to be seen with him even in the
native bazaar? What had happened to bring her down from her status as a suburban heiress to that of a lone disfigured creature driven to try to warm her hands at the cold ashes of a boy and girl romance?

  David Swaine walked back to the hotel set in a sort of park of turf and red-flowered rain trees and was very uncomfortable indeed. Therefore he was grateful for a curious little incident which distracted his thoughts.

  In the lobby of the hotel, a man in a suit of khaki drill was examining the visitors’ book; his back was turned towards Swaine, and all that Swaine noticed at first was that he wore a soft flat clerical hat. But he noticed something else immediately afterwards. The native clerk behind the desk touched the man in the clerical hat quickly with the butt of his pen; and the man sprang up and turned round. He was undoubtedly a Cingalese too, but he wore the stiff white stock and black silk breastplate which are the trade-marks of the English clergyman.

  “A missionary,” said Swaine to himself, and he politely raised his hat.

  The missionary, if such he was, returned the bow with a singular obsequiousness, so marked indeed that it had all the appearance of a sneer. Swaine passed on and upstairs and along the corridor to his room, which had a balcony overlooking the park and just to the right of the porch. On the table was a polite letter from the Commissioner bidding him to dinner that evening at eight. Swaine scribbled an acceptance — he might find an answer to some at all events of his hundred questions at the Commissioner’s dinner- table — and, after ringing the bell, sent his letter off by a messenger. Then he lit a cigarette and stepped out upon his balcony, and he saw on the sandy drive beneath him the missionary. The missionary was looking up with a frown at the facade of the hotel, and made a little movement as Swaine appeared. Swaine had an impression that the man had been waiting for his appearance, and that, now that he had appeared, he was fixing in his mind the exact location of his room. Of course it was fancy, he argued; but none the less the missionary walked off now along the drive to the white entrance gates with the air of a man who had found out just what he wanted to find out and had nothing more to do there.