The Gap in the Curtain (21 page)

He was sitting next afternoon in his rooms in Mount Street when a lady was announced, and Pamela marched in on the heels of his servant. The room was in dusk, and it was her voice that revealed her to him.

“Turn on the light, Crocker,” she said briskly, “and bring tea for two. As quick as possible, please, for I'm famishing.”

I can picture her, for I know Pamela's ways, plucking off her hat and tossing it on to a table, shaking up the cushions on the big sofa, and settling herself in a corner of it—Pamela no longer the affected miss of recent months, but the child of April and an April wind, with the freshness of a spring morning about her.

They had tea, for which the anxious Crocker provided muffins, rejoicing to see once again in the flat people feeding like Christians. Pamela chattered happily, chiefly gossip about Wirlesdon, while Charles pulled himself out of his lethargy and strove to rise to her mood. He even went to his bedroom, changed his collar and brushed his hair. When Crocker had cleared away the tea, she made him light his pipe. “You know you are never really happy with anything else,” she said; and he obeyed, not having smoked a pipe since Newfoundland.

“Now,” she said at last, when she had poked the fire into a blaze, “I want you to repeat very carefully all that rubbish you told me yesterday.”

He obeyed—told the story slowly and dispassionately, without the emotion of the previous day. She listened carefully, and wrote down from his dictation the exact words he had read in
The Times
. She knitted her brows over them. “Pretty accurate, aren't they?” she asked. “Not much chance of mistaken identity.”

“None,” he said. “There are very few Otterys in the world, and every detail about me is correct.”

“And you believe in it?”

“I must.”

“I mean to say, you believe that you really saw that thing in
The Times
? You didn't dream it afterwards?”

“I saw it as clearly as I am seeing you.”

“I wondered what tricks that old professor man was up to at Flambard, but I had no notion it was anything as serious as this. What do you suppose the others saw? Uncle Ned is sure to know— I'll ask him.”

“He saw nothing himself—he told me so. Lady Flambard fainted, and he was looking after her.”

“She saw nothing either, then? I'm sorry, for I can't ask any of the men. I don't know Mr. Tavanger or Mr. Mayot or Sir Robert Goodeve, and Reggie Daker is too much of a donkey to count. It would be too delicate a subject to be inquisitive about with strangers . . . You really are convinced that the professor had got hold of some method of showing you the future?”

“Convinced beyond any possibility of doubt,” said Charles dismally.

“Good. That settles one thing . . . Now for the next point. The fact that you saw that stuff is no reason why it should happen. Supposing you had dreamed it, would you have allowed a dream, however vivid, to wreck your life?”

“But, Pamela dear, the case is quite different. Moe showed us what he called ‘objective reality.' A dream would have been my own concern, but this came from outside, quite independent of any effort of mine. It was the result of a scientific experiment.”

“But the science may have been all cockeyed. Most science is—at any rate, it changes a good deal faster than Paris fashions.”

“You wouldn't have said that if you had been under his influence. He didn't want me to die—he didn't make the
Times
paragraph take that form—he only lifted the curtain an inch so that I could see what had actually happened a year ahead. How can I disbelieve what science brought to me out of space, without any preparation or motive? The whole thing was as mathematical and impersonal as an eclipse of the moon in an almanac.”

“All right! Let's leave it at that. Assume that
The Times
is going to print the paragraph. The answer is that
The Times
is going to be badly diddled. Somebody will make a bloomer.”

Charles shook his head. “I've tried to think that, but well—you know, that kind of mistake isn't made.”

“Oh, isn't it? The papers announced Dollie's engagement to three different men—exact as you please—names and dates complete.”

“But why should it make a blunder in this one case out of millions? Isn't it more reasonable to think that there is a moral certainty of its being right?”

Pamela was not succeeding with her arguments. They sounded thin to her own ears, in spite of her solid conviction at the back of them. She sat up, an alert, masterful figure, youth girt for command. She had another appeal than logic.

“Charles,” she said solemnly, “this is a horrible business for you, and you've got to pull yourself together. You must defy it. Make up your mind that you're not going to give it another thought. Get back to your work, and resolve that you don't care a lop-eared damn for Moe or science or anything else. Lose your temper with fate and frighten the blasted hussy.” Tom Nantley had a turn for robust speech in the hunting field, and his daughter remembered some of it.

Charles shook his head miserably.

“I've tried,” he said, “but I can't. I simply haven't the manhood . . . I know it's the right way, but my mind is poisoned already. I've got a germ in it that fevers me . . . Besides, it isn't sense. You can't stop what is to be by saying that it won't be.”

“Yes, you can,” said the girl firmly. “That's the meaning of free will.”

Charles dropped his head into his hands. The sight of Pamela thus restored to him was more than he could bear.

Then she had an inspiration.

“Do you remember the portrait in the dining room at Wirlesdon of old Sir Somebody-Ap-Something—Mamma's Welsh ancestor? You know the story about him? He was on the side of Henry Tudor, and raised his men to march to Bosworth. But every witch and warlock in Carmarthen got on to their hind legs and prophesied—said they saw him in a bloody shroud, and heard banshees wailing for him, and how Merlin had said that when the Ap-Something red and gold crossed Severn to join the Tudor green and white it would be the end of the race—all manner of cheery omens. Everybody in the place believed them, including his lady wife, who wept buckets and clung to his knees. What did the old sportsman do? Told all the warlocks to go to the devil, and marched gaily eastward, leaving his wife sewing his shroud and preparing the family vault.”

“What happened?” Charles had lifted his head.

“Happened? He turned the day at Bosworth, set the Tudor on the throne, got the Garter for his services—you see it in the portrait—and about half South Wales. He and his men came merrily home, and he lived till he was ninety-three. There's an example for you!”

Pamela warmed to her argument.

“That sort of thing happened all the time in the old days. Whenever anybody had a down on you he got a local soothsayer to prophesy death and disaster in case you might believe it and lose your nerve. And if you had been having a row with the church, some priest or bishop had an unpleasant vision about you. What was the result? Timid people took to their beds and died of fright, which was what the soothsayers wanted. Bold men like my ancestor paid not the slightest attention, and nothing happened—except that, when they got a chance, they outed the priest and hanged the soothsayer.”

Charles was listening keenly.

“But the soothsayers were often right,” he objected.

“They were just as often wrong. The point is, that there were men brave enough to defy them—as you are going to do.”

“But the cases aren't the same,” he protested. “That was ordinary vulgar magic, with a personal grudge behind it. I'm up against the last word in impersonal science.”

“My dear Charles,” she said sweetly, “you've let your brains go to seed. I never knew you miss a point before. Magic and astrology and that kind of thing were all the science the Middle Ages had, and they believed in them just as firmly as you believe in Moe. The point is that, in spite of their belief, there were people bold enough to defy it—and to win, as you are going to do. A thousand years hence the world may think of Moe and Einstein and all those pundits as babyish as we think the old necromancers. Beliefs change, but courage is always the same. Courage is the line for you, my dear.”

At last she had moved him. There was a light in his eyes as he looked at her, perplexed and broken, but still a light.

“You think . . .” he began, but she broke in . . .

“I think that you're face to face with a crisis, Charles dear. Fate has played you an ugly trick, but you're man enough to beat it. It's like the thing in the Bible about Jacob wrestling with the angel. You've got to wrestle with it, and if you wrestle hard enough it may bless you.”

Her voice had lost its briskness, and had become soft and wooing. She jumped up from the sofa and came round behind his chair, as if she did not want him to see her face.

“I refuse to give another thought to the silly thing,” she said. “We are going to behave as if Moe had never been born.” Her hand was caressing his hair.

“But
you
are not condemned to death,” he said.

“Oh, am I not?” she cried. “It's frightfully important for me. On June 10th of next year I shall be starting on my honeymoon.”

That fetched him out of his chair.

He gazed blindly at her as she stood with her cheeks flushed and her eyes a little dim. For a full minute he strove for words and none came.

“Have you nothing to say?” she whispered. “Do you realize, sir, that I am asking you to marry me?”

It was now that I entered the story. Mollie Nantley came to town and summoned me to a family conclave. She and Tom were in a mood between delight and anxiety.

“You got my wire?” she asked. “The announcement will be in the papers tomorrow. But they are not to be married till June. Too long to wait—I don't like these long engagements.”

“You are pleased?” I asked.

“Tremendously—in a way. But we don't quite know what to think. They never saw each other for six months, and then it all came with a rush. Pam has been rather odd lately, you know, and Tom and I have been very worried. We saw that she was unhappy, and we thought that it might be about Charles. And Charles's behaviour has been something more than odd—so odd that Tom was in two minds about consenting to the engagement. You know how fond we were of him and how we believed in him, but his conduct before Christmas was rather shattering. You are too busy to hear gossip, but I can assure you that Charles has been the most talked-of man in London. Not pleasant gossip either.”

“But the explanation seems quite simple,” I said. “Two estranged lovers, both proud and both miserable and therefore rather desperate. Chance brings them together, misunderstandings disappear, and true love comes into its own.”

Mollie bent her brows.

“It's not as simple as that. If that had been the way of things they ought to be riotously happy. But they're not—not in the least. Pam is as white as a sheet, and looks more like a widow than a bride. She's very sweet and good—very different from before Christmas, when she was horribly tiresome—but you never saw such careworn eyes. She has something heavy on her mind . . . And as for Charles! He is very good too and goes steadily to the city again, but he's not my notion of the happy lover. Tom and I are at our wits' end. I do wish you would have a talk with Pamela. She won't tell me anything—I really don't dare to ask—but you and she have always been friends, and if there is any trouble you might help her.”

So Pamela came to tea with me, and the first sight of her told me that Mollie was right. In a week or two some alchemy had changed her utterly. Not a trace now of that hard, mirthless glitter which had scared me at the Lamanchas'. Her face was pale, her air quiet and composed, but there was in her eyes what I had seen in Charles Ottery's, an intense, anxious preoccupation.

She told me everything without pressing. She could not tell her parents, she said, for they would not understand, and, if they did, their sympathy would make things worse. But she longed for someone to confide in, and had decided on me.

I saw that it would be foolish to make light of the trouble. Indeed, I had no inclination that way, for I had seen the tortures that Goodeve was undergoing. She told me what she had said to Charles, and the line they were taking. I remember wondering if the man had the grit to go through with it; when I looked at Pamela's clear eyes I had no doubt about the woman.

“He has gone back to his business and has forced himself to slave at it. He is crowding up his days with work. And he is keeping himself in hard training . . . You see, he has tried the other dopes and found them no good . . . But he has to fight every step of the road. Oh, Uncle Ned, I could howl with misery sometimes when I see him all drawn at the lips and hollow about the eyes. He doesn't sleep well, you see. But he is fighting, and not yielding one inch.”

And then she quoted to me her saying about Jacob wrestling with the angel. “If we keep on grappling with the brute, it
must
bless us.”

“I have to hold his hand all the time,” she went on. “That's his hope of salvation. He is feeding on my complete confidence . . . Oh no, it's not easy, but it's easier than his job. I've to pretend to be perfectly certain that we'll be married next June tenth, and to be always talking about where we shall go for our honeymoon, and where we shall live in town, and how we shall do up Marlcote.”

She smiled wanly.

“I chatter about hotels and upholsterers and house agents when I want to be praying . . . But I think I understand my part. I have a considerable patch of hell to plough, but it's nothing like as hot as Charles's . . . No, you can't help, Uncle Ned, dear. We have to go through with this thing ourselves—we two—nobody else. Charles must never know that I have told you, for if he thought that anyone else knew it would add shyness to his trouble . . . But it's a comfort to me to feel that you know. If anything happens . . . if we fail . . . I want you to realize that we went down fighting.”

She kissed me and ran away, and I sat thinking a long time in my chair. She was right: no one could help these two through this purgatory. My heart ached for this child not out of her teens who was trying to lift her lover through the Slough of Despond by her sheer courage. I do not think that I have ever in my life so deeply admired a fellow-mortal. Pamela was the very genius of fortitude, courage winged and inspired and divinely lit . . . I told myself that such a spirit could not fail if there was a God in Heaven.

I can only guess at what Charles suffered in the first months of the year. The diary revealed something, but not much, for the entries were scrappy: you see, he was not fighting the battle alone, as he had done in the autumn; he had Pamela for his guide and confessor.

He stuck like a leech to his work, and from all accounts did it well. My nephew said that old Charles had “taken a pull on himself, but had become a cheerless bird.” People in the city, when I asked about him, were cordial enough. He had been put on a new economic commission at which he was working hard. One man said that his examination of a high Treasury official was one of the most searching things he had ever heard. Our financial affairs at that time were in a considerable mess, and Charles was bending all his powers to straightening them out.

It was much to have got his brain functioning again. But of course it did not mean the recovery of his old interests. He had only one interest—how to keep his head up till June, and one absorbing desire—to be with Pamela. The girl gave him more than the sustenance of her confidence; there were hours when the love of her so filled his mind that it drove out the gnawing pain, and that meant hours of rest. As sleep restores the body, so these spells of an almost happy absorption restored his spirit.

But he had patches of utter blackness, as the diary showed. He held himself firm to his resolution by a constant effort of will. He could not despair when Pamela kept her courage . . . But he would waver at moments, and only recover himself out of shame. There were times, too, when he bitterly reproached himself. He had brought an innocent child into his tortured world, and made her share in the tortures. Another life besides his own would be ruined. Out of such fits of self-contempt he had to be dragged painfully by Pamela's affection. She had to convince him anew that she preferred Tophet in his company to Paradise alone.

In March Pamela told me that she had offered to marry him at once, and that he had refused. He was on his probation, he said, and marriage was to be the reward of victory. Also, if he was to be in the grave on June 10th, he did not want Pamela to be a widow. The girl argued, she told me, that immediate marriage would be an extra defiance to Fate, and a proof of their confidence, but Charles was adamant. I dare say he was right: he had to settle such a question with his own soul.

I met him occasionally during those months. Never in ordinary society: by a right instinct Pamela and he decided that they could not go about together and be congratulated—that would make too heavy demands on their powers of camouflage. But I ran across him several times in the street; and I sat next to him at a luncheon given by the prime minister to the American Debt Commission. Knowing the story, I looked for changes in him, and I noted several things which were probably hidden from other people. He had begun to speak rather slowly, as if he had difficulty in finding the correct words. He did not look an interlocutor in the face, but fixed his eyes, while he spoke, steadily on the tablecloth. Also, though his colour was healthy, his skin seemed to be drawn too tight around his lips and chin, reminding me of a certain Army Commander during the bad time in '18.

I asked about Pamela.

“Yes, she's in town,” he said. “The Nantleys have been up since January. She has caught a beastly cold, and I made her promise to stay indoors in this bitter weather.”

Two days later I picked up an evening paper and read a paragraph which sent me post-haste to the telephone. It announced that Lady Pamela Brune was ill with pneumonia, and that anxiety was felt about her condition.