Unknown (163 page)

“To tell me what? Something that Toss cried in her fever? God, Mary! She might have cried out practically anything. You saw what a state she was in? But let's have it. Let's hear the great revelation!”

“Toss spoke as if she'd seen that tramp aiming his iron thing at you; and Tom rushing in to take the blow.”

John certainly got a queer sensation as he heard this. The odd thing was, however, that while he accepted what Tossie had said without questioning it, he did not feel a rush of tender, melting gratitude to his dead friend! The truth was he had so long played the feminine role with Barter, so long leaned upon him, and relied upon his strength that he only felt now as if they had been in some desperate melee together, where Tom as he always did, had taken the lead; and for that reason had got hurt . . . had ... got ... in fact .. . killed; but when it came to making Tom's tragic death a sublime act of sacrifice and of sacrifice for him, John dodged that tremendous conclusion with shamefully blinking eyelids.

“But what on earth could the fellow have got against meV^ said John, ”Or do you suppose he meant to kill us both and ravish Tossie?"

He had such a very quaint expression, at once cringing and quizzical, panicky and humorous, as he sat up in bed, his flannel pyjamas, with their pierrot-like black-and-white stripes, showing so fantastical in the candlelight, that Mary could not suppress a smile. She thought, in her heart: “How queer men are! Here he is with his best friend—his boyhood friend—dead to save him; and all he can do is to try and scare himself like a child!” She sighed heavily when her smile died away. “It is in these matters of life and death,” she thought, “that men and women are especially different.' Women want to suck up to the last dregs every drop of the awful things that happen. They want to soak themselves in their feelings, to swim in them, to float on them, to drown in them, whereas John is squeezing all the love he really feels for Tom into a tight little juggler's ball and throwing it from hand to hand!”

She turned her head towards him from its white pillows. From each side of her cold clear forehead the brown hair was drawn smoothly back; and she had pulled the coil of it from off the nape of her neck and allowed it to fall over her left shoulder in a long single plait. She did not know that John had thought to himself, as in his heart-felt bewilderment he had done what he had never done before in his life, put on his pyjama-trousers over his drawers: “How queer girls are! Mary is looking in the mirror to see whether she has plaited her hair properly. I suppose she'll loosen it with her fingers, over her ears, just in that same careful way, when I'm lying in my coffin as cold as poor Tom!”

“Give me a cigarette, will you?” was what she had apparently turned her head towards him to say. It was his turn now to fumble among the objects on the little table at his side; but they were soon, both of them, smoking in pensive peace.

“What's the time, John dearest?”

He pulled out his watch from under his pillow. “A quarter past three,” he told her.

?'You don't think that drug's stopped acting, and she's awake, again, do you?"

John was silent; trying to catch every least sound in Number Fifteen, North-load Street.

“Could you bear it, dearest, to have Toss and the children with us out there?”

It would have been as impossible for John to have said “no” to this speech as it would have been for him to have got up and gone down to the room below.

“Of course, if you could!” he said.

Mary sighed. “Well, that's settled then. And the sooner we get away, the better for Toss. We could all stay in that North-wold Inn, couldn't we, till we get our place and get these things out there?”

“Tom must have left ... a fair sum . . . in the . . . bank,” murmured John in a ruminating voice.

“Now, you stop that!” cried Mary. “Tom's money must be kept for those little girls. These people here . . . Spear and Trent and Robinson . . . will have to get us all out there! It's the least they can do, with all Tom has done for their factory.” John relapsed into silence again. It was impossible for him to refrain from thinking how his delectable plan for being left absolutely alone with Mary out there was now smashed to bits. “Do you hate Glastonbury as much as you ever did?” Mary was surprised at herself for asking this question. It seemed to have come into her head and rushed to her lips independently of her conscious will. “No,” said John laconically. “Why not?” pressed the girl.

“Oh, damn it all!” cried John. “A person never knows why he feels these things. It's old Geard, I think! I've got fond of that old rascal in some odd sort of way.” He bent over the little table and extinguished his cigarette.

“I'll miss Geard like the devil!” he muttered hoarsely. Mary was conscious of a funny sensation, like the impact of a piece of ice against her bare bosom. Had this queer being to whom she now belonged, body and soul, transferred his disturbing and perverse sexuality from Tom to the Mayor of Glastonbury? To conceal what she felt, “It's Geard, then,” she said, “not his Grail or his new religion, that interests you?”

“I don't know, Mary, and that's ihe truth,” sighed John. And then, as if continuing some line of thought that he had not revealed, “I wish, my dear, we could all stop on our way at Salisbury and see Stonehenge.”

“Well, we can't do that, John, dearest, so it's no use your talking about it. We've got to take Tom with us, you know!”

John turned round upon her with a startled swing of his pier-rot-like white-and-black figure------

“Take Tom?” he echoed.

“Of course! you don't think Toss is going to leave Tom in Glastonbury, do you? If she did, / wouldn't.”

“No, I suppose not,” he murmured; and it was his turn to feel a funny sensation go shivering through him. He had always been careful to avoid any probing of his feeling about the relations between his wife and his friend.

“Bury him in the Northwold churchyard, eh? Where Grandfather is, and his people? Yes, I suppose that is the thing to do!”

They both were silent for a while after that; and into that rosy-coloured room, where their two- shadows hovered so waver-ingly and ambiguously over Mr. Wollop's simple furniture, there came the etherealised essence of that road across Brandon Heath where they had met nearly a year ago; came the phantom-faint image of Harrod's mill-pool, of the spacious drawing-room with its low windows opening upon that grey twilit lawn, of their boat carried so fast on the glittering tide above the weeds and the darting fish of the Wissey, and of the great ash tree in that open field, where they said their farewells to their native pastures. Well! they were going back to those pastures again; going back to them to live the life they had dreamed of then but had not dared to hope for, going back to bury her friend and his friend, where that old man lay—his curly hair still fresh and white as the Head in the Apocalypse—who had been the friend of Geard of Glastonbury! Why was it then, that they both felt a curious and irresistible sadness as they thought of their return? Had they been captured in spite of themselves, by the terrible magic of this spot? Was John's clinging to his strange master a sign that something would be gone forever from each of their lives, when they went away, something that their dearest love for each other could only replace in a measure, in a fluctuating substitution? Did Mary recall the dawn of St. John's Day?

“Come back to us, Tom! Come back to us!” the big river and the little river were both calling; and it was with Tom that they were going back to the place where they would be; but they were carrying a corpse with them; not only the corpse of Tom Barter but the corpse of their stillborn never-returning opportunity of touching the Eternal in the enchanted soil where the Eternal once sank down into time!

THE FLOOD

THE GREAT WAVES OF THE FAR ATLANTIC, RISING FROM THE surface of unusual spring tides, were drawn, during the first two weeks of that particular March, by a moon more magnetic and potent as she approached her luminous rondure than any moon that had been seen on that coast for many a long year. Up the sands and shoals and mudflats, up the inlets and estuaries and backwaters of that channel-shore raced steadily, higher and higher as day followed day, these irresistible hosts of invading waters. Across the far-stretching flats of Bridgewater Bay these moon-drawn death-bringers gathered, stealing, shoaling, rippling, tossing, waves and ground-swells together, cresting billows and unruffled curves of slippery water, rolling in with a volume that increased its momentum with every tide that advanced, till it covered sand-wastes and sand-dunes, grassy shelves and sea-banks, that had not felt the sea for centuries. Out of the misty western horizon they came, rocking, heaving, rising, sinking, and beneath them were shoals of unusual fish and above them were flocks of unusual gulls. There was a strange colour upon them, too, these far-travelled deep-sea waves, and a strange smell rose up from them, a smell that came from the far-off mid-Atlantic for many days. They were like the death mounds of some huge wasteful battlefield carried along by an earthquake and tossed up into millions of hill summits and dragged down into millions of valley hollows as the whole earth heaved. They were not churned into flying spray, these swelling spring tides; they were not lashed into tossing spindrift. Each one of them rolled forward, over the sand and the mud, converting these expanses from a familiar tract of yellow-grey silence into a vast plain of hummings and murmurings that went on all night. Wide, wet reaches of sand, over which for years fishermen had walked in the dawn with wavering lanterns and whispering voices, and where decrepit posts, eaten by centuries of sea-worms and hung with festoons of grass-green seaweed, leaned to the left or leaned to the right, as change willed it, were now changed into a waste of grey water. Ancient sand-sunk boat skeletons, their very names forgotten, that had caught for years the blood-reflections of sunset in the pools of dead memories and lost disasters, were now totally submerged. Many of these incoming deep-sea waves had curving crest-heads that were smooth and slippery as the purest marble, heads that seemed to grow steadily darker and darker, as they gathered towards the land, till they added something menacing to every dawn and to every twilight. And as these tides came in, over the brown desolate mudflats, they awoke strange legends and wild half-forgotten memories along that coast. Ancient prophecies seemed to awake and flicker again, prophecies that had perished long ago, like blown-out candles in gusty windows, cold as the torch-flames by which they were chanted and the extinct fires by which they were conceived. Between the imaginations of men, especially such as are stirred up and made tense by wrestlings with the Unknown, and the geographical pattern of the earth's surface, are subtle correspondencies that may survive many sunken torch flares and many lost harp notes once heard across the capes and promontories. And the western coast that Spring seemed almost to welcome this sea invasion. Liberated from the frost and ice of winter, a thousand unfrequented backwaters, bordered by dead, wind-swept rushes, clammy with salt-smelling marsh-lichens and thick-stalked glaucous-grey weeds, seemed actually calling out to the sea to come and cover their brackish pools. Salt amphibious growths, weeds of the terraqueous marshes, they seemed to be yearning, these neutral children of the margin, for the real salt sea to rush over them and ravish them. Little did they dream how soon this ravishment would take place, how soon they would be drowned and with how deep a drowning!

Amid the forlorn and untraversed mudflats in that singular region various patches of cultivated ground appear and inhabited buildings, some of stone, some of wattles and lath-and-plaster cement. It is about these outlying farms and hamlets—in this strange region of sluices and weirs and dams and rhynes— that so many curious Celtic syllables still cling, like the appellative Gore, for instance, syllables full of old mythological associations.

It was from these isolated farm-houses, situated among sandy reaches where such old magical names lingered intact, that the ,first rumours began to spread of a serious sea invasion. These rumours, once started among these outposts of human habitation, excited anxious alarm; and well they might, for that whole district is a very peculiar one. On one side of it lies the great Western Channel of those moon-drawn tides, and on the other so many brackish ditches and inland meres that the dams and dykes, if they once yield to the mounting-up of the waters, are liable to give way in vast numbers. In the memory of the older dwellers in those regions—a queer amphibious race, descended from Norse invaders and from Celticised aboriginals—was a vivid image of the last time the sea-banks had broken and the land had been flooded, an image of drowned cattle and ruined pastures and hurried and tumultuous human flights and escapes. On that occasion the waters of the sea had swept so far inland, mingling with the waters of the land, that the configuration of the country had completely changed. Overtopping the banks, breaking the sluices, turning rivers into huge floods and tiny streams into rushing rivers, the sea had come so far that the land—in many cases always lower than sea-level—had reverted to the sea and become part of the sea. With the waning of the moon, on that occasion, the waters retreated, but not before they had left their tribute. Many infinitesimal sea creatures, tiny sea animalculse and microscopic salt-water beings must have been carried over the land where these unnatural tides pushed their way, and it is likely enough that many of these marine invaders, when the waters receded, were deposited ia the rich loam of the Isle of Glastonbury. An island indeed did Glastonbury become in those strange days! Mr. Sheperd, the Glastonbury policeman, and Mr. Merry, the Glastonbury curator, would frequently speak of that epoch with bated breath.

Well! if some of the rumours that ran along those sandy flats and leapt, like living messengers of disaster, from bog-tussock to' bog-tussock, were not without cause, there was likely to be this year, ere March ended, an inundation even more serious than that land had known since very ancient days. For these dark-green waves, smooth and slippery, without spray, without spindrift, and smelling so strangely of the mid-Atlantic, brought memories of far-off mysterious disasters. Intimations, they brought, of lost islands and submerged sea-reefs, where, if Plutarch is to be trusted, Demetrius the Traveller, a hundred years before Christ heard tales of superhuman personalities living remote and sea-encircled.