The Unicorn (43 page)

Effingham’s departure from Riders had been hasty and absurd. He had prepared Alice for it by a number of vague remarks beforehand. Then after the long slow business of the funeral, the awkward jolting cortège through the narrow muddy lanes to the tiny distant church, he had acted with frenetic speed, hurling his clothes into suitcases with a sort of wild relief. He had not been able, until they were all safely hidden in the wet earth, to think, to feel, to stir a finger. Now it was as if his will to live had returned with some overplus. He had vitality, purpose, action, stored up to his credit.

He had had, on the previous evening, a talk with Alice. It was a curiously impressionistic talk. They had sat on the terrace, wrapped in coats and rugs, drinking whiskey before dinner and looking at the fading view of Gaze and the black cliffs, and each of them seemed to pursue an intermittent monologue. Effingham’s purpose was to free himself from Alice with as much gentleness and dignity as possible. Alice’s purpose was to let Effingham go without being tearful or troublesome. Together they managed it, as if lowering a heavy weight between them to the ground.

Alice had said, I seem to have mislaid you even as an object of love. I loved you when I was eighteen with a real passion. Perhaps my love for you never grew up. I remember times of real suffering. But lately in a way I haven’t suffered. Perhaps it was something to do with Hannah. As soon as you began to love her, that made my love for you into something else. I became a sort of spectator. I had a role of being the generous rejected one. And since your love was hopeless too there was a structure and a story on which I could rest. And so I stopped just loving you and I was consoled. Then there was Denis, and he might have awakened me with some real pain if only I could ever have stopped regarding him as a servant. But I never did. So I will let you go at last, Effie. Hannah kept you for me for a few dream years, but she has gone and she has set you free. I shall always remember with gratitude that you turned to me for a moment. Let us call it a gift that you gave to a girl of eighteen who really loved you.

Effingham had said, this adventure is over for me, and you, through having become a part of it, are over too. I could only love you, and I think I did love you for a day, as an incident in that story. I loved you for Hannah, against Hannah, and not for yourself. Whether I did right, whether I abandoned Hannah at her moment of need, whether I could have done otherwise, I do not know. I feel that perhaps it was all inevitable and we were all something in Hannah’s dream. And Hannah’s death, that was the most inevitable thing of all, that was what we were all the time waiting for. We were all the attendants upon that ceremony and we are all now dismissed. So we return to our real life and our real tasks: and God knows if we shall be the better for this dream of death, this enactment of last things.

Effingham had not seen Max alone before his departure. The old man seemed to have aged to a mysterious degree in the last weeks and now seemed a remote wizened sage who had long ago forgotten all about life. It was as if the funeral were Max’s funeral and they were conveying him ceremonially out of the world, as if those others were dream deaths while Max wore the real garb of mortality. Effingham had let it be known that he was going shortly, and after lunch had shaken Max by the hand and uttered vague good wishes and thanks. The old man had smiled upon him but had not drawn him aside into privacy or given him any admonitions or any blessing or made any comment whatever on what had passed. And why should he? Effingham had rather resentfully reflected. He had had enough of Max’s visions and interpretations. One could not go on forever regarding one’s old tutor as an infallible source of wisdom.

Effingham had left the house in haste, his bulging suitcases trailing ties and shirt-sleeves, dragging his coat on as he ran down the stairs, before Max had emerged from his afternoon rest. Alice had not made his departure any easier by trying to load him with gifts as if he were leaving for a long journey: the long journey of life without her. She gave him her fountain pen, which he had once borrowed and liked, a Japanese print from the bathroom which he had admired, a pretty edition of the poems of Marvell which they had once read together, a familiar china cat from his bedroom mantelpiece, and several of her favourite shells. These objects made such a bulky and fragile collection that he had had at the last moment to beg her to pack them carefully and send them after him. The little presents touched him very much; and he anticipated that he would weep in the taxi all the way to Blackport. But on that journey he was in fact chiefly engaged in wondering whether he had not been too forward in kissing Carrie at the moment of departure.

With the image of Hannah he had not made his peace and perhaps he never would. It haunted his dreams and shifted before his waking eyes, sometimes piteous, sometimes accusing, always beautiful. He did not feel that he had killed her. It was rather as if she had attempted to kill him, a beautiful pale vampire fluttering at his night window, a
belle dame sans merci.
But he had never really let her in, not really inside. If he had let her in he might now be dead himself. What, he wondered, had saved him? Was it merely his colossal, almost with satisfaction he recognized, really fat and monumental egoism? Or was it some streak of health and sanity in a nature also but too prone to be fascinated by the weird and the deathly? What had made the noticeable, the crucial difference at the end was her terrible descent from her pinnacle of isolation, her unspeakable surrender to Scottow. And if that made so much difference did it not suggest that her vigil had had a spiritual meaning after all? She had been their nun and she had broken her vows.

Yet it was a strange nun that she had been. How little time ago it was that he had been sitting with her in her tired, crowded, golden room, her cluttered cell. The memory was smooth and rounded like a piece of amber. It smelt of an old degenerate happiness. He had been glad to have her reserved, sequestered, caged. Max had been right perhaps when he said that they had all turned towards her to discover a significance in their own sufferings, to load their own evil on to her to be burnt up. It had been a fantasy of the spiritual life, a story, a tragedy. Only the spiritual life has no story and is not tragic. Hannah had been for them an image of God; and if she was a false God they had certainly worked hard to make her so. He thought of her now as a doomed figure, a Lilith, a pale death-dealing enchantress: anything but a human being.

If what was over had indeed been a fantasy of the spiritual life, it was its fantastic and not its spiritual quality which had touched him. He had, through egoism, through being in some sense too small, too trivial to interest the powers of that world, escaped from evil. But he had not either been touched by good. That vision, true or false, he would leave to Max, of the good forced into being as the object of desire, as if one should compel God to be. He himself would hurry back to his familiar ordinary world. Ah, how he looked forward to it now, how he looked forward to the round of office and pub and dinner parties and dull country weekends. He even anticipated the pleasure it would be to catch up on the gossip. He would try to forget what he had briefly seen.

It was raining now. The train was late as usual. Effingham idly undid the copy of the
Blackport Gazette
which he had bought that morning and had not yet had time to read. Newspapers, unobtainable at Riders, were still something of a treat, a diverting little repast of triviality. Then his eye was suddenly caught by a familiar name. He turned the page back.
A Tragic Accident. It is learnt with regret that a sad accident occurred yesterday on the estate of Mr Max Lejour, the well-known writer. Mr Lejour’s son, Mr Philip Lejour, accidentally shot and killed himself while cleaning his gun.
…

Effingham folded up the paper. For one agonizing moment he wondered whether he ought not to go straight back to Riders. But with a sense of craven relief he thought: no. It was the merest chance that he had seen the news before he left. For all they knew he might be far away by now. And in any case there was no place for him there, he could have no part any more in comforting the Lejour family. He would never go back. He thought of Pip, at first with pain and pity, and then also with a strange sort of satisfaction. There was a time when he might have envied him, but that time was gone. Pip’s long vigil was over. And his death rounded the thing off, gave it a tragic completeness which made it all the easier to cut free of it, to let it drift away like a great buoyant sphere into the past Hannah had claimed her last victim.

Effingham heard the distant train. He was now in a frenzy to be off, to have escaped. He gathered his cases, and as the little train came rumbling slowly in he made a dash through the rain towards the first-class carriage. As he bundled his things hastily in he caught a glimpse further down the platform of Marian Taylor getting into a second-class compartment. He wondered if she had seen him. He sat quietly, breathing hard after the exertion of lifting his cases, leaning well back and waiting for the train to start. He could not, until then, feel entirely safe.

The train moved at last. The shabby station slid away. The bare domes of the Scarren were grey as lead in the drifting rain. The train went with gathering speed through the treeless land. Effingham sighed and crumpled the newspaper in his hand. This was his defeat, this was his triumph, that he had lived to speak their elegy. There are no voices that are not soon mute, there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echoes are not faint at last.’ He was the angel who drew the curtain upon the mystery, remaining himself outside in the great lighted auditorium, where the clatter of departure and the sound of ordinary talk was coming now to be heard. He sighed again and closed his eyes upon the appalling land.

At Greytown Junction he would telephone to Elizabeth. And perhaps, the thought did not displease him, when they had got on to the other train, he would summon little Marian Taylor to his carriage. He was still touched by her attachment to him. She would be delighted. And she too belonged out in the big well-lighted world. They would talk the whole thing over as the express carried them away across the central plain.