Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  Now Swaine was of the type which objects to moving amongst mysteries. He liked people in a category and things which could be exactly defined, so that he could choose his ground and deal with them. Therefore this curious little encounter remained in his mind, remained indeed uppermost in his mind throughout dinner and as soon as the Commissioner’s wife and his daughter had left the table, he returned to it.

  “Do you know a native clergyman or missionary here?” he asked.

  “Do I not,” replied Mr. Septimus Gordon, the Commissioner. He was a tall, thin, grey, tired man grown cynical with his years of service. “The Reverend Bernard Simmons, M.A., of Balliol College, Oxford, B.D. He is going to give me more trouble than all the rest of the district put together.”

  “Why?” asked Swaine.

  “First, he married a white woman and brought her out here. And that always means trouble.”

  Swaine jumped in his chair. Dulcie Elverton had prided herself on her modernity, her freedom from prejudice and convention. Was it to this that her modernity had brought her?

  “Secondly, he drinks,” continued Mr. Gordon in a drawl, “and he has taught his wife to drink too. Poor creature, I am not surprised. What else could she do?”

  So Dulcie was the wife. No wonder she had cried out against Swaine for not taking his courage in his hands and running away with her. Swaine twiddled the stem of his liqueur glass between his fingers and his thumb and wished to goodness that he had never come to Ceylon. The room with the faded air was better than this. For the first lesson to be learnt in that room was to cease to reproach yourself for any breaches of faith. He shifted his legs uncomfortably and looked up to find Mr. Gordon watching him with a hint of amusement in his eyes. However, he merely continued his catalogue.

  “Thirdly, the Reverend Bernard Simmons, M.A., B.D., is backsliding. Yes, that’s quite the natural thing to happen.”

  “Backsliding?” inquired Swaine.

  “Well, it depends upon your point of view,” answered Gordon. “Most people would call it backsliding, though for my part between Buddhism and Christianity there isn’t the thickness of a six-penny bit.”

  In that statement Mr. Septimus Gordon was wrong. There is one point of difference, a point which was to prove of enormous importance to David Swaine. Gordon was generalizing hastily with his thoughts rather upon the Reverend Bernard Simmons, B.D., and the trouble that man was going to give him. He gave Swaine a sketch of his history as far as he knew it.

  “He was a scholar with a sort of facile cleverness common enough amongst his type. He seems to have been swept rather off his feet by some Revivalist Meetings in the East End of London. He even changed his name, which is really Mahinda Bahu, to mark his complete severance from his old creed and its associations, and finally he took orders. Somehow he managed to marry some girl bored to death with her suburban surroundings and with her head full of ignorance and dreams. There’s some obscure sex-instinct too at the bottom of these marriages, no doubt.” Mr. Gordon shrugged his shoulders. “Some expectation of more than sane and normal...” — he hesitated upon the word pleasure, and chose the more decent and comprehensive— “happiness. Anyway he married her and the good people at home put the lid on the whole unfortunate business. They sent him back here as a missionary.”

  “It has been a failure?” Swaine asked miserably. He was disturbed by the uneasy suspicion which comes to all men, however successful they may be, at some time or another, that there is something wickedly, irretrievably wrong in the very make-up of the world. Here were two well-meaning young people, himself and Dulcie Elverton, and between them they had made the most dreadful hash of the girl’s life. Here were two very good qualities, ambition on his side, and a freedom from prejudice on hers, and together they had produced wreckage.

  “A complete failure,” replied Mr. Gordon. “How in the world could you with a house, and a servant, and an English wife, and a frock-coat and a clerical choker, expect to convert people whose priests go about in a fold of saffron cloth with a beggar bowl? It isn’t reasonable. And why should you try?”

  Once more Mr. Septimus Gordon overlooked the point of enormous difference with which David Swaine was to become acquainted.

  “Anyway, the Reverend Bernard Simmons, M.A., Oxford, B.D., alias Mahinda Bahu, isn’t trying any more,” he resumed. “He’s amongst his own people. Disappointment, drink, quarrels with his wife, who is of course bitterly handicapped by her marriage, are driving him back to the old beliefs and — worse — to the old superstitions. Yes, that’s the really bad thing. But it was bound to be, wasn’t it? Extreme left goes extreme right, and doesn’t oscillate gently in the middle.”

  Mr. Septimus Gordon suddenly broke off and switched his chair round to face Swaine.

  “I have told you all this for a reason. You can do a good thing. You can persuade Dulcie Simmons to get out of this place and go back to her own people.”

  “She has probably quarrelled with them,” said Swaine slowly, “if they are still alive. I never knew the parents, but I should think that they had wiped her off the family.”

  He was the more sure of it the more clearly he recollected them, a stiff-necked couple who uttered the responses in church louder than anyone else, looked upon “business” as something peculiarly righteous, and the wealthiest families in their residential suburb as the greatest leaders of Society. Then he looked at Mr. Septimus Gordon in surprise.

  “How do you know that Mrs. Simmons is a friend of mine?”

  Mr. Gordon laughed outright.

  “Everybody within miles knows that you are a friend of hers. Everybody within miles knows that you are here staying at this hotel. I don’t wonder that the Reverend Simmons was hanging about to have a look at you. She talks about you:

  “‘From morn to afternoon — From afternoon to night—’”

  he quoted, from ‘The Yeomen of the Guard.’ “Do you know what you are to Dulcie Simmons? You are her beau ideal.”

  Words could not describe the languid mockery with which Mr. Gordon pronounced that dreadful phrase. David Swaine flushed to the roots of his hair.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he answered uncomfortably. “I’ll call on her to-morrow if you will give me her address.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Gordon. “They live in the native quarter, of course;” and he wrote the address down, whilst more and more David Swaine wished that he had booked a passage straight on to Australia, Burma, Penang, Singapore — to anywhere in the world which avoided a prolonged stoppage at Ceylon.

  “You can do us all a good service, I am sure,” said Mr. Septimus Gordon.

  II

  David Swaine, however, did not after all call upon Mrs. Simmons. He started out with that object certainly in the afternoon of the next day, but as he closed the white gate of the drive behind him, she called to him again from a clump of trees at the side of the road; and she called in a low and agitated voice.

  “David!”

  He turned on to the turf and found her holding her hand against her heart and her lips trembling.

  “Oh, I thought you were never goin’ to come out of the hotel,” she said. “I’ve been waitin’ for you the whole afternoon. I’ve got to talk to you.”

  She turned and hurried by a path through the trees until she came to an open space where a temple on a raised platform above a terrace and a neatly kept garden of flowers was built against a tall rock. In front of it slept a tank overshadowed on one side by high trees, and over its smooth water kingfishers flitted with a glint of gold and vivid blue. Dulcie Elverton sank down upon a garden seat on the edge of the tank and quite in the open.

  “We shall be safe here,” she said. “Tourists are always coming to this temple. So he wouldn’t come near it.”

  There was no doubt in Swaine’s mind who “he” must be.

  “But I should have thought,” he rejoined, “that with his Oxford training he would have welcomed—”

  “White people,” interrupted Dulcie.
“Not he! All that was veneer. He has gone back to his own people — angrily.”

  “Then you ought to leave him,” said Swaine, obeying Mr. Septimus Gordon’s instructions.

  Dulcie shook her head decidedly.

  “I? Where should I go to?”

  “Home.”

  “There’s no such place for me, my dear,” she returned, with half an attempt at a smile which ended in a complete sob. “I quarrelled once and for all with my people over — over — Bernard. They’d never have me back again, and if they would, I wouldn’t go. What would I look like, creeping back — looking,” and her voice sank to a whisper, “looking as I do look. I who am remembered at all events as a pretty girl. You were very kind to me yesterday, David, pretending to remember me. But you didn’t really. No, I couldn’t go back;” and then seizing fast hold of a purpose which she had clean forgotten, she exclaimed: “But you! You must. That’s what I waited by the gate to tell you! You must go, David! You must pack your bag and hire a car and get away. I am afraid whilst you’re here. You can reach Colombo to-night in a car if you start off at once. As long as you’re here I’m frightened, desperately frightened.”

  Her large red face had a mottled look, the hands she held out to him beseechingly shook and in her eyes there was so urgent a prayer that Swaine was shocked by it.

  “But, Dulcie,” he exclaimed. “He daren’t hurt you! He’s here, in the open—” and suddenly he stopped. For all the fear in her face had turned to perplexity.

  “Me?” she cried. “I’m not in danger. It’s you — don’t you understand that? Of course it’s you! You see, I have talked of you — yes, more than I ought to have done — when we quarrelled at night. I’ve held you up against him. I’ve said that I could have married you and had a fine home in England, if I had chosen. Yes, I’ve said that over and over. He hates you, and he’s gone back to Buddhism — yes,” and she nodded her head at him. “Don’t you see what a difference that makes?”

  “No, I don’t,” replied Swaine stoutly, although a troublesome recollection of the Reverend Bernard Simmons, B.D., standing in the drive and locating the exact position of his bedroom window did recur to him. He recollected the man, however, too, a little square creature, sturdy enough no doubt, but not one to inspire terror.

  “I don’t understand what difference his going back to Buddhism can make to me. Why, only last night the Commissioner told me there wasn’t the breadth of a sixpence between Buddhism and Christianity.”

  Dulcie Simmons could hardly let him finish, so immense was her contempt.

  “He told you that!” she cried scathingly, and in one dreadful sentence she put the difference clear and stark before her companion. “If you hate enough. Buddhism makes murder worth while.”

  “Murder!”

  Swaine had come up from Colombo, a mere law-abiding globe-trotting tourist to see a buried city of olden times, and he was confronted suddenly with a threat of violent death. He was not going to believe it — no! — there was a police force in Ceylon — yet a chill even in that bright sunlight crept into his flesh and his bones and set him shivering.

  “Yes, murder,” she went on eagerly. “Don’t you see, David?” and she beat her fist upon her knee in her anger at the obtuseness of men.

  “If he’s tried, if he’s hanged, what does it matter? You think he’s dead. He knows better. He’s going to live again, perhaps as an animal, yes, perhaps as the lowest sort of animal, since he has a crime to expiate; but he’s going to work up again. In a few generations — and what are a few generations? — he’ll be not the Reverend Bernard Simmons again, no, he won’t make that mistake, but Mahinda Bahu getting nearer and nearer to the final blissful extinction.”

  She looked around suddenly and though no one was within earshot and only a few tourists were on the terrace of the great Dagoba, she lowered her voice.

  “I know he’s planning mischief. For he made a wax image last night and stabbed it through the heart.”

  Swaine’s common sense revolted.

  “My dear Dulcie, sorcerers did that sort of thing in the Middle Ages.”

  “And natives of Ceylon who hate enough, do that sort of thing still,” she rejoined stubbornly.

  The sun was going down fast behind the trees. Dulcie Simmons sprang to her feet.

  “I must go,” she exclaimed. “He’s certain to imagine that I am with you, if I don’t get back. No, don’t come with me, please! Only go, David! Promise me!”

  He took her trembling hand in his.

  “I was going to-morrow morning anyway, Dulcie. I’ll keep to my arrangement. I can’t run away, you know. But I’ll go early.”

  He made that concession. It was the most his pride would let him do. After all, he, David Swaine, M.P., was not going to turn tail before a missionary, whatever murderous designs that missionary might be nursing in his heart. Dulcie shrugged her shoulders. She knew the uselessness of arguing in favour of the things that aren’t done.

  “Very well. Only to-night, David, take care! Oh, take good care! Good-bye!” and she wrung his hand and hurried off in a stumbling run as if she could hardly see whether she kept the path or no. But she disappeared amongst the rain trees at last, a grotesque ambling ruin of a woman blinded with tears.

  Swaine walked back towards his hotel courageously enough to begin with. For he could not associate the appearance of Dulcie Simmons with violent events. She was so utterly in keeping with the ordinary humdrum world where nothing happens to-day which did not happen yesterday. But as he walked, the sun dropped behind the trees suddenly, and the gold was off the world. It sank like a ship, a burning ship, into a cold sea, and a chill breath of wind made gooseflesh of his back. “Somebody’s walking over my grave,” he said to himself inadvertently, and was troubled by the inadvertence. “Nonsense,” he said, now correcting himself, and he quickened his pace. But Dulcie Simmons’ appearance was fading from his memories, as quickly as the light was disappearing out of the sky. On the other hand, something frantic in her gestures, the terror which winged her words, the contempt with which she had torn through and through the Commissioner’s tolerant philosophy, asserted themselves and re-asserted themselves. “Yes, men labour over books and theories and experiments and observations,” he argued, “and women pluck the truth out of things by a sure instinct.”

  He was passing through the trees now, and he began to run a little until his pride came to his help, and forced him to dawdle. But he dawdled in a rising fear. “It is ridiculous that — anything of the kind” — even in his thoughts he could not bring himself to be more precise than that— “should happen to me,” he exclaimed, with at the same time an amazed helpless consciousness that after all just that thing might happen to him. He came to the white gate with a gasp of relief. He flung it open and passed through, and the clink of the latch, repeated and repeated as it swung backwards and forwards behind him, comforted him with a sound which was homely and familiar.

  But a little way ahead of him the facade and the porch of the hotel rose, the lower windows ablaze with light, the upper ones shuttered and dark; and as he stood watching it, his momentary sense of comfort oozed out of him.

  “Take care to-night! Take care!”

  The trees about him began to whisper the warning and he realized with an exaggerated sense of desolation that he was in a strange land amongst a strange people. How could he take care when he didn’t know what to take care against? The squat sturdy figure of the missionary under his clerical hat became ominous and sinister. Swaine stepped off the hard surface of the drive on to the turf, so that his footsteps might not be heard. Standing in the darkness outside he peered into the lighted lounge. It was empty. He walked in. Beyond the lounge on the right side facing the staircase was an office-desk at which sat a Cingalese clerk. Swaine stepped up to the desk and ordered a motor-car for the next morning to take him into Colombo.

  “You are leaving us so soon, Mister Swaine M.P.!” said the clerk with a polite smile.

&
nbsp; “I must be on board before four o’clock,” said Swaine. Already he felt the breeze as his steamer put out between the enormous breakwaters to the open sea. “So I should like to start at eight in the morning. Can you arrange for that?”

  “Of course, Mister Swaine,” said the clerk, and — was it the dim light of the electric lamp in the office, or some passing shadow — his smile all at once seemed secret. Swaine began to interpret it. “You won’t leave here tomorrow morning at all, Mister Swaine M.P. The motorcar will be on the bill, but you won’t be in the motor-car — no, no, Mister Swaine M.P.”

  He turned away abruptly and went upstairs. Outside his door, his bearer was waiting, the door was open, the light burning within, and his change of clothes laid out for him.

  “You will have to pack this evening,” said Swaine.

  “Everything packed already, sir,” said the bearer, lifting the lid of the suit-case. “Just night things and clothes for the morning left out.”

  Swaine experienced another of his alternations, this time from doubt to confidence. The company of others in the dining-room, like himself seeing the world, confirmed his courage. He drank half a bottle of champagne and felt himself again. A missionary from Balliol and a Bachelor of Divinity must be a civilized person. Swaine scoffed at his folly in allowing himself to be frightened.

  Yes, he admitted it now — now that it was all over. He had actually been frightened — actually he — and in the midst of a conversation on the history of moonstones, which he was having with an erudite American, he sprang up from his chair, his face white, his eyes staring.

  “What has happened?” asked his companion.

  “I thought that I saw someone flit by the open door.”

  “I saw no one,” the American assured him.

  “A shadow, no doubt,” said Swaine. But he remained on his feet staring out through the open door of the dining-room, through the lounge beyond and into the darkness of the park. For the momentary chill of sunset had been followed by a stifling heat and every door stood open.