Short Stories 1895-1926 (68 page)

I got back to John and Flora's before nightfall; meeting not a single human being on the way. My solitude seemed insipid and fatuous. I loafed from room to room in a fit of mental and spiritual indigestion. What I wanted of course was to talk to somebody, but my only company was the black butler, and he met every attempt I made at conversation with little more than an inexhaustibly genial but vacant grin.

John was nothing much of a bookman, and Flora confined her reading chiefly to fiction; and I searched their shelves in vain for any monograph on precious stones. But since then I have read the subject up a little. It is worth while solely for its own sake. The giants of the species have had alluring names, and many of them such bloody and romantic histories they might well have been the creation of the evil one.

But I might as profitably have remained resigned to my native ignorance. Not one of my specialists made any attempt to
explain
the human lust and infatuation produced by such baubles. It cannot be merely on account of their beauty and rarity? Hardly. Burton, as usual, blows hot and cold in turn. ‘“That stones can work any wonders let them believe that list … for my part I have found no virtue in them.”' On the other hand, ‘“They adorn kings' crowns, grace the fingers … defend us from enchantments … drive away grief, cares, and exhilarate the mind.”' He mentions in his inimitable fashion the sapphire, too, that mends manners; and the cheledonius (found in a swallow's belly) that makes lunatics amiable and merry. But concerning the diamond he is mum.

Browne is even more disappointing, merely citing (in order to dismiss it) the vulgar error that a diamond may be ‘made soft, or broke by the blood of a goat'. Charming speculations; but alas, the mystery remains. Personally I detest diamonds. They are hard and showy. They give any young and lovely human creature an air of meretriciousness; and merely serve to disguise and conceal the old and ugly. They price their wearer, and only the evil come alive in their baleful company. But I must cut this cackle – with the warning, a trifle late, perhaps, that this adventure of mine is nothing of a story. Like life itself, it will come to a full stop, but not to be continued in our next. Never mind. I want to get through with it.

In the small hours that night – and my windows were thickly curtained – I discovered myself lying wide awake in bed, the room an oven, my mind swept and garnished, my body in a cold sweat. I lay staring up into the dark, and the enormity of the evening's adventure swept over me. Like a cadging thief I had crept into what I believed to be an unprotected house, had made an impudent attempt to explore it, and had been caught in the act by an armed female. Vanity writhed within me like a wounded worm. The whole experience in those few hours of sleep had withered and rotted away like Jonah's gourd; had become utterly vulgarized.

In cowardly self-defence I began to consider the motives of my strange lady; and to speculate on the value of her charge. And once you invite the spectre of money, or of distrust, into your drowsy mind, not only sleep but the most precious ghost that's in you at once decamps. The very hint of money is in some degree destructive of one's peace and poise of mind. So at least it seems to me. Pay a man in kind – do you find him
gloating
on his earnings. Would the Hope Blue Diamond – that fragmentary frozen lump of violet light – have sent quite so many victims to a quick end if all that could be got in exchange for it had been beef and potatoes?

The Young Man in Holy Orders, for example, stooping in ecstasy over the dewy mould under that bottle-glassed wall that wondrous summer morning – was his soul's quarry only what the Rajah's heirloom would bring in hard cash? Didn't his aspirations reach out from cash to kind, from symbol to substance, and then on to symbol again? Not that R.L.S. was much concerned with such niceties in that particular context. That's what I enjoy in him. He tells
stories;
and he is only off and on a casuistical Scot. He amuses himself.

Let us get back to Virginia. For hours that night I tossed about in John and Flora's swans'-down guest-bed, prostrated with humiliation and chagrin. How much simpler, how much more restful an eventuality it would have been if my ‘armed female' had been the kind of ‘vamp' one would cheer to the echo in a detective story – a vamp decoying me on in order to give that wide-hatted husband of hers and the old negro a chance of digging my last resting-place under that tangled mat of wild convolvulus? But no; a cemetery with more headstones even than geraniums is likelier to be my final goal.

In actual fact she had accompanied me a few hundred yards beyond the house, to see me on my way. Not a breath of wind had stirred between earth and evening sky. And apart from the chorus of grasshoppers the only sound that broke upon us, shrill and liquid – was the voice (I suppose) of the old negress singing in the backward parts of the house over a tub of washing. It was like a scene from a book, from an old Kentucky ballad. At times I wonder if the whole thing is not merely the memory of a dream. I wish it were.

My companion, during the few brief moments of our walk together, had seemed to be thinking – closely and rapidly. Now and again she turned as if to look at me or to speak to me, but desisted. I realized how anxious she was that I should keep my appointment with her; and yet just then was baffled to see why. It was not, I feel sure, from any want of confidence that her secret was safe with me. And on my side – well, my midnight ruminations were made none the happier by my implicit trust in her.

We arranged that she should put a couple of stones in a certain position near the furthest wheelmarks of the car. ‘Turn back at once,' she insisted, ‘if they are not there.' This was her last injunction. She looked me steadily in the face without offering her hand – her eyes as serenely clear with inward depths and distances as the evening sky itself – and we parted.

I had failed to tell her how little time was now left to me. John and Flora would be back on the Tuesday morning. In decency I could not stay beyond the Wednesday. Think of it! – to have to pack up my grip, go off on my travels again, and become a normal sociable being in a black bow and a Tuxedo after such an experience as that! It was mortifying to the last degree.

It is still more mortifying to realize now that this experience is to all intents and purposes
finally
over, that I haven't the faintest desire to see the place again – the house, I mean. I am not sure if I should even have wished to think of her there – growing old, growing listless, resigned. My mind becomes stupid and useless the moment I begin to reflect on this. Nor is it only because of what has happened since. The whole thing has slipped into my imagination, I suppose; and the imagination, as you yourself once observed, retains essences, not mere tinctures. And yet the whole experience remains not only a mortifying but a horrifying memory. If it is not absurd to say so – it terrifies me with its perplexity. I could never be ‘happy' about it, even if – but wait. I started off the next afternoon – it was a Sunday, of course – some hours later than before. This bothered me a little because it would entail my returning after dark. And though my road by now was fairly familiar, it would be none too easy for me to pick it out in the dark. As you know, I am little short of an idiot at finding my way. It would be nothing but a nuisance just then to have to spend the night in the woods, and there were excellent reasons for not converting the car into a travelling pharos on my return journey. So I kept a sharp eye on the road's turns and twistings, and having left the car some little distance down the hill, I followed the path past the track in the ravine, found the pre-arranged signal, and pushed on until I came to a semi-circular break in the woods, well above the precipitous descent at the foot of which was the house. By craning forward a little under a weeping willow I could now get a glimpse of one corner of its roof.

The evening was twin-sister to its predecessor – as quiet as a peep-show. Another sun-drenched day was drawing to its end – a day that throughout its course had remained so serene and still that one could with ease have counted the leaves that had fallen since its dawn. It was fascinating to stare at that edging of roof, realizing that beneath it was concealed a magnet potent enough to enslave every desperado and cut-throat this wicked world contains.

The lady was late but made no comment on that. She appeared quietly at my side and must have ascended the ravine by some path unknown to me. For a moment or two in her odd way she looked at me without speaking while she recovered her breath. She was without a hat, and wore the same faded blue gown that had haunted my miserable dreams in the dark of the night before. She was naturally pale, though her skin was slightly tanned; and she held herself upright as if by conscious habit. And if she looked at one at all, she turned her head completely to do so – never glancing out of the tail of her eye. Throughout her brief talk I detected no single wile or trick or hint of the ancient feminine – which is intended neither as a compliment nor the reverse. One merely gets accustomed to things.

Even in that dying twilight she looked a good deal older than I had assumed her to be. Her face was one you find yourself speculating about – exploring – even while you are actually talking to the owner of it: those dark, straight eyebrows; the wide, light, open eyes; the gold-streaked hair. A longish face, and not easily ‘read', explored, analysed.

It seemed, too, to be strangely, incredibly familiar to me. It was as if we had lived together, she and I, for years at a stretch, had parted and had now met again after a prolonged absence; and yet as if that meeting had been a bitter disappointment and disillusionment. I cannot account for this except by supposing that into a moment of acute sensibility – some sudden drop of the mind into the deeps – one may condense a prolonged experience. Imaginatively exhaust it, so to speak. That few instants' intimacy had been too much for human nerves and hearts. I felt desperately listless, yet afflicted and aggrieved. Circumstances had betrayed me; I had turned from the first to the last chapter of my tale of mystery and somehow its glamour had gone. How can I explain myself ?

Circumstantially all had been well. Her husband had noticed nothing amiss. ‘And even
live
men sometimes tell no tales, it seems!' she faintly smiled at me. ‘I believed you would come, and yet – well of course I could not be certain if I should ever see you again.'

We sat down awhile in that tepid air, beneath the brilliant but now darkened autumnal branches, and she told me her story in her own languid, uninterested, broken fashion; our voices falling lower yet when, presently after, we rose again and wandered on a little further up the hill until at last we could actually see through a crevice of the trees (though we ourselves remained hidden) the window of the sanctuary itself.

It was an outlandish story, and, like the one I am telling you, of the ‘shocker' variety. But I have no reason to disbelieve it. It would never occur to me indeed to mistrust a single word she uttered. There was a tinge of the sleepwalker in all she said and did.

The house, it seemed, had been built by the grandfather of the present owner, a quixotic creature who had fought – and fought fiercely – in the Civil War. He was killed early in ‘sixty-five, leaving an only son, a boy of sixteen or so, though how this youngster had himself escaped being roped into the army even at that early age I don't know. Until then he had been left in charge of faithful negro servants at home. The family was old and well-to-do if not wealthy, but even before the war had been slipping into the shade.

The boy's grandfather had formerly owned a large property further south with its usual complement of slaves, but had lost most of it by sheer neglect and by reason of his habit of wandering off on long and apparently aimless journeys over the countryside. He seems to have been a natural vagrant – in search of Mecca, maybe.

On one of these expeditions he had chanced on this ravine. Its beauty and isolation alone might have been fascination enough, but there was also apparently something in the soil that attracted his attention, and he discovered too that this particular ‘desirable site' had once been the scene of a violent convulsion of nature, during which it welcomed a visitor more alarming (though less extensive in effect) than Columbus himself.

An enormous meteorite had found here its earthly abiding-place. I suppose such things are not so rare as one supposes. There must be scores of them in the oozy bed of old Ocean. There is a famous one, isn't there, in the wilds of Arizona? It was his son, who, some time in the 'eighties, succeeded at last in blowing a huge fragment of this meteorite to smithereens with a stick of dynamite. No one seems to have had an inkling of what he hoped to discover in its entrails. What he did discover, however, brought his labours in this world to an end. Up till then the ravine had been used in a modest way as a stone quarry; hence the low-gauge railway. After the night of that explosion the industry ceased – for the owner of it had disinterred from amongst the slag and refuse left by his experiment the diamond down below. It must have been a queer and shattering moment. The effect on him seems to have resembled that of a wild Southern love-affair; it changed his complete existence.

At that time the lady's husband must have been a boy in his early teens, and had already as a child been initiated into the company of this peculiar prey in what I gathered was little short of a religious ceremony. I can see it, too, the narrow, dark, pallid boy open-eyed in that radiance, and the father (to judge from one of the portraits I saw) of the Old Abe type – an early ‘highbrow', with a beard. Oddly enough I heard nothing of the mother, but whether or not she or any one else knelt there with these two at that ceremony, I wish Vermeer could have been there to paint it. This boy, no doubt as time went on, came to think of the stone as a kind of symbol of the Lost Cause – and of
his
lost cause. Some ghastly shock to nerve and mind during the war had intensified an hereditary bent and left him a prey to intense melancholy and depression. It was he who had found for the gem its wooden sentinel seraphs and had hung up that sun in the shrine I have described. It seems to have become a refuge for his tormented spirit, the holy place not only of this indestructible emblem and of the ravaged South, but of his own half-broken insatiable spirit and possibly much else besides.