Wood and Stone (56 page)

He remorsefully blamed himself that he had not compelled his brother to come down with them to the sea. He recalled the half-hearted invitation he had extended to James, not altogether sorry to have it refused, and not repeating it. He had been a selfish fool, he thought. Were James swimming now by his side, his pleasure in that violet-coloured coast-line and that titanic rock-monster, would have been doubled by the revival of indescribably appealing
memories
.

He made a vigorous resolution that never again—whatever mood his brother might be in—would he allow the perilous lure of exquisite femininity, to come between him and the nobler classic bond, of the love that “passeth the love of women.”

Conscious that he must return without a moment’s further delay if they were to catch their train, he swung round in the water and let the full tide bear him shoreward.

On the way back he was momentarily assailed by a slight touch of cramp in his legs. It quickly passed, but it was enough to give the life-enamoured youth a shock of cold panic. Death?
That
, after all, he thought, was the only intolerable thing. As long as one breathed and moved, in this mad world, nothing that could happen greatly mattered! One was conscious,—one could note the acts and scenes
of the incredible drama; and in this mere fact of consciousness, one could endure anything. But to be dead,—to be deprived of the sweet air,—that remained, that must always remain, the one absolute Terror!

Reaching his starting-place, Luke was amused to observe that the tide was already splashing over their rock, and in another minute or two would have drenched his clothes. He chuckled to himself as he noted how this very practical possibility jerked his mind into a completely different vein. Love,
philosophy
, friendship, all tend to recede to the very depths of one’s invaluable consciousness, when there appears a risk of returning to a railway station in a drenched shirt.

He collected his possessions with extreme rapidity, and holding them in a bundle at arm’s length from his dripping body, clambered hastily up the shore, and humorously waving back his modest companions, who were now being chaffed by quite a considerable group of soldiers on the cliff above, he settled himself down on a bank of sea-weed and began hurriedly to dry, using his waistcoat as a towel.

He was soon completely dressed, and, all four of them a little agitated, began a hasty rush for the train.

Phyllis and Polly scolded him all the way without mercy. Had he brought them out here, to keep them in the place all night? What would their mothers say, and their fathers, and their brothers, and their aunts?

Annie, alone of the party, remained silent, her full rich lips closed like a sleepy peony, and her heavy-lidded
velvety eyes casting little timid affectionate glances at her so unexpectedly committed lover.

The crossness of the two younger girls grew in intensity when, the ferry safely crossed, Luke dragged them at remorseless speed through the crowded town. Pitiful longing eyes were cast back at the glittering shops and the magical picture-shows. Why had he taken them to those horrid rocks? Why hadn’t he given them time to look at the shop-windows? They’d promised faithfully to bring back something for Dad and Betty and Queenie and Dick.

Phyllis had ostentatiously flung into the harbour her elaborately selected bunch of sea-flora, and the poor ill-used plants, hot from the girl’s hand, were now tossing up and down amid the tarry keels and swaying hawsers. The girl regretted this action now,—regretted it more and more vividly as the station drew near. Mummy always loved a bunch o’ flowers, and they were so pretty! She was sure it was Luke who had made her lose them. He had pushed her so roughly up those nasty steps.

Tears were in Polly’s eyes as, bedraggled and panting, they emerged on the open square where the gentle monarch looks down from his stone horse. There were sailors now, mixed with the crowd on the esplanade,—such handsome boys! It was cruel, it was wicked, that they had to go, just when the real sport began.

The wretched Jubilee Clock—how they all hated its trim appearance!—had a merciless finger pointing at the very minute their train was due to start, as Luke hurried them round the street-corner. Polly fairly began to cry, as they dragged her from the
alluring scene. She was certain that the Funny Men were just going to begin. She was sure that that distant drum meant Punch and Judy!

Breathlessly they rushed upon the platform. Wildly, with anxious eyes and gasping tones, they enquired of the first official they encountered, whether the Yeoborough train had gone.

Observing the beauty of the three troubled girls, this placid authority proceeded to tantalize them, asking “what the hurry was,” and whether they wanted a “special,” and other maddening questions. It was only when Luke, who had rushed furiously to the platform’s remote end, was observed to be
cheerfully
and serenely returning, that Phyllis recovered herself sufficiently to give their disconcerted insulter what she afterwards referred to as “a bit of lip in return for his blarsted sauce.”

No,—the train would not be starting for another ten minutes. Fortunate indeed was this accident of a chance delay on the Great Western Railroad,—the most punctual of all railroads in the world,—for it landed Luke with three happy, completely recovered damsels, and in a compartment all to themselves, when the train did move at last. Abundantly fortified with ginger-pop and sponge-cake,—how closely Luke associated the savour of both these refreshments with such an excursion as this!—and further cheered by the secure possession of chocolates, bananas, “Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday,” and the “
Illustrated
London News,”—the girls romped, and sang, and teased each other and Luke, and whispered endearing mockeries out of the window to sedately unconscious gentlemen, at every station where they
stopped until the aged guard’s paternal benevolence changed to irritable crossness, and Luke himself was not altogether sorry when the familiar landscape of Yeoborough, dusky and shadowy in the twilight, hove in sight.

Little Polly left them at the second of the two Yeoborough stations, and the others, crowding at the window to wave their goodbyes, were carried on in the same train to Nevilton.

During this final five minutes, Annie slipped softly down upon her lover’s knees and seemed to wish to indicate to Phyllis, without the use of words, that her relations with their common friend were now on a new plane,—at once more innocent and less reserved.

J
AMES ANDERSEN lay dead in the brothers’ little bedroom at the station-master’s cottage. It could not be maintained that his face wore the unruffled calm conventionally attributed to mortality’s last repose. On the other hand, his expression was not that of one who has gone down in hopeless despair.

What his look really conveyed to his grief-worn brother, as he hung over him all that August night, was the feeling that he had been struck in
mid-contest
, with equal chance of victory or defeat, and with the indelible imprint upon his visage of the stress and strain of the terrific struggle.

It was a long and strange vigil that Luke found himself thus bound to keep, when the first paroxysm of his grief had subsided and his sympathetic landlady had left him alone with his dead.

He laughed aloud,—a merciless little laugh,—at one point in the night, to note how even this blow, rending as it did the very ground beneath his feet, had yet left quite untouched and untamed his
irresistible
instinct towards self-analysis. Not a single one of the innumerable, and in many cases
astounding
, thoughts that passed through his mind, but he watched it, and isolated it, and played with it,—just in the old way.

Luke was not by any means struck dumb or
paralyzed by this event. His intelligence had never been more acute, or his senses more responsive, than they remained through those long hours of watching.

It is true he could neither eat nor sleep. The
influence
of the motionless figure beside him seemed to lie in a vivid and abnormal stimulation of all his intellectual faculties.

Not a sound arose from the sleeping house, from the darkened fields, from the distant village, but he noted it and made a mental record of its cause. He kept two candles alight at his brother’s head, three times refilling the candlesticks, as though the
guttering
and hissing of the dwindling flames would tease and disturb the dead.

He had been careful to push the two windows of the room wide open; but the night was so still that not a breath of wind entered to make the candles flicker, or to lift the edge of the white sheet stretched beneath his brother’s bandaged chin. This horrible bandage,—one of the little incidents that Luke marked as unexpectedly ghastly,—seemed to slip its knot at a certain moment, causing the dead man’s mouth to fall open, in a manner that made the watcher shudder, so suggestive did it seem of one about to utter a cry for help.

Luke noted, as another factor in the phenomena of death, the peculiar nature of the coldness of his brother’s skin, as he bent down once and again to touch his forehead. It was different from the coldness of water or ice or marble. It was a clammy coldness; the coldness of a substance that was neither—in the words of the children’s game—“animal, vegetable, nor mineral.”

Luke remembered the story of that play of
Webster’s
, in which the unhappy heroine, in the blank darkness of her dungeon, is presented with a dead hand to caress. The abominably wicked wish crossed his mind once, as he unclosed those stark fingers, that he could cause the gentle Lacrima, whom he regarded,—not altogether fairly,—as responsible for his brother’s death, to feel the touch of such a hand.

There came over him, at other times, as he inhaled the cool, hushed air from the slumbering fields, and surveyed the great regal planet,—Mr. Romer’s star, he thought grimly,—as it hung so formidably close to the silvery pallid moon, a queer dreamy feeling that the whole thing were a scene in a play or a story, absolutely unreal; and that he would only have to rouse himself and shake off the unnatural spell, to have his brother with him again, alive and in full consciousness.

The odd thing about it was that he found himself refusing to believe that this was his brother at all,—this mask beneath the white sheet,—and even fancying that at any moment the familiar voice might call to him from the garden, and he have to descend to unlock the door.

That thought of his brother’s voice sent a pang through him of sick misgiving. Surely it couldn’t be possible, that never, not through the whole of eternity, would he hear that voice again?

He moved to the window and listened. Owls were hooting somewhere up at Wild Pine, and from the pastures towards Hullaway came the harsh cry of a night-jar.

He gazed up at the glittering heavens, sprinkled
with those proud constellations whose identity it was one of his pastimes to recognize. How little they cared! How appallingly little they cared! What a farce, what an obscene, unpardonable farce, the whole business was!

He caught the sound of an angry bark in some distant yard.

Luke cursed the irrelevant intrusive noise. “Ah! thou vile Larva!” he muttered. “What! Shall a dog, a cat, a rat, have life; and thou no breath at all?”

He leant far out of the window, breathing the perfumes of the night. He noticed, as an interesting fact, that it was neither the phloxes nor the late roses whose scent filled the air, but that new exotic
tobacco-plant
,—a thing whose sticky, quickly-fading,
trumpet
-shaped petals were one of his brother’s especial aversions.

The immense spaces of the night, as they carried his gaze onward from one vast translunar sign to another, filled him with a strange feeling of the utter unimportance of any earthly event. The Mythology of Power and the Mythology of Sacrifice might wrestle in desperate contention for the mastery; but what mattered, in view of this great dome which overshadowed them, the victory or the defeat of either? Mythologies were they both; both woven out of the stuff of dreams, and both vanishing like dreams, in the presence of this stark image upon the bed!

He returned to his brother’s side, and rocked
himself
up and down on his creaking bedroom chair. “Dead and gone!” he muttered, “dead and gone!”

It was easy to deal in vague mystic speculation.
But what relief could he derive, he who wanted his brother back as he was, with his actual tones, and ways and looks, from any problematic chance that some thin “spiritual principle,” or ideal wraith, of the man were now wandering through remote, unearthly regions? The darling of his soul—the heart of his heart—had become forever this appalling waxen image, this thing that weighed upon him with its presence!

Luke bent over the dead man. What a personality, what a dominant and oppressive personality, a corpse has! It is not the personality of the living man, but another—a quite different one—masquerading in his place.

Luke felt almost sure that this husk, this shell, this mockery of the real James, was possessed of some detestable consciousness of its own, a consciousness as remote from that of the man he loved as that pallid forehead with the deep purple gash across it, was remote from the dear head whose form he knew so well. How crafty, how malignant, a corpse was!

He returned to his uncomfortable chair and
pondered
upon what this loss meant to him. It was like the burying alive of half his being. How could he have thoughts, sensations, feelings, fancies; how could he have loves and hates, without James to tell them to? A cold sick terror of life passed through him, of life without this companion of his soul. He felt like a child lost in some great forest.

“Daddy James! Daddy James!” he cried, “I want you;—I want you!”

He found himself repeating this infantile
conjuration
over and over again. He battered with clenched
hand upon the adamantine wall of silence. But there was neither sign nor voice nor token nor “any that regarded.” There was only the beating of his own heart and the ticking of the watch upon the table. And all the while, with its malignant cunning, the corpse regarded him, mute, derisive, contemptuous.

He thought, lightly and casually, as one who at the grave of all he loves plucks a handful of flowers, of the girls he had just parted from, and of Gladys and all his other infatuations. How impossible it seemed to him that a woman—a girl—that any one of these charming, distracting creatures—should strike a man down by their loss, as he was now stricken down.

He tried to imagine what he would feel if it were Annie lying there, under the sheet, in place of James. He would be sorry; he would be bitterly sad; he would be angry with the callous heavens; but as long as James were near, as long as James were by his side,—his life would still be his life. He would suffer, and the piteous tragedy of the thing would smite and sicken him; but it would not be the same. It would not be like this!

What was there in the love of a man that made the loss of it—for him at least—so different a thing? Was it that with women, however much one loved them, there was something equivocal, evasive, intangible; something made up of illusion and sorcery, of magic and moonbeams; that since it could never be grasped as firmly as the other, could never be as missed as the other, when the grasp had to relax? Or was it that, for all their clear heads,—heads so much clearer than poor James’!—and for
all their spiritual purity,—there was lacking in them a certain indescribable mellowness of sympathy, a certain imaginative generosity and tolerance, which meant the true secret of the life lived in
common
?

From the thought of his girls, Luke’s mind
wandered
back to the thought of what the constant presence of his brother as a background to his life had really meant. Even as he sat there, gazing so hopelessly at the image on the bed, he found himself on the point of resolving to explain all these matters to James and hear his opinion upon them.

By degrees, as the dawn approached, the two blank holes into cavernous darkness which the windows of the chamber had become, changed their character. A faint whitish-blue transparency grew visible within their enclosing frames, and something ghostly and phantom-like, the stealthy invasion of a new presence, glided into the room.

This palpable presence, the frail embryo of a new day, gave to the yellow candle-flames a queer sickly pallor and intensified to a chalky opacity the dead whiteness of the sheet, and of the folded hands resting upon it. It was with the sound of the first twittering birds, and the first cock-crow, that the
ice-cold
spear of desolation pierced deepest of all into Luke’s heart. He shivered, and blew out the candles.

A curious feeling possessed him that, in a sudden ghastly withdrawal, that other James, the James he had been turning to all night in tacit familiar appeal, had receded far out of his reach. From indistinct horizons his muffled voice moaned for a while, like the wind in the willows of Lethe, and then died away
in a thin long-drawn whisper. Luke was alone; alone with his loss and alone with the image of death.

He moved to the window and looked out. Streaks of watery gold were already visible above the eastern uplands, and a filmy sea of white mist swayed and fluttered over the fields.

All these things together, the white mist, the white walls of the room, the white light, the white covering on the body, seemed to fall upon the worn-out watcher with a weight of irresistible finality. James was dead—“gone to his death-bed;—he never would come again!”

Turning his back wearily upon those golden
sky-streaks
, that on any other occasion would have thrilled him with their magical promise, Luke observed the dead bodies of no less than five large moths grouped around the extinct candles. Two of them were “currant-moths,” one a “yellow under-wing,” and the others beyond his entomological knowledge. This was the only holocaust, then, allowed to the dead man. Five moths! And the Milky Way had looked down upon their destruction with the same placidity as upon the cause of the vigil that slew them.

Luke felt a sudden desire to escape from this room, every object of which bore now, in dimly obscure letters, the appalling handwriting of the ministers of fate. He crept on tiptoe to the door and opened it stealthily. Making a mute valedictory gesture towards the bed, he shut the door behind him and slipped down the little creaking stairs.

He entered his landlady’s kitchen, and as silently
as he could collected a bundle of sticks and lit the fire. The crackling flames produced an infinitesimal lifting of the cloud which weighed upon his spirit. He warmed his hands before the blaze. From some remote depth within him, there began to awake once more the old inexpugnable zest for life.

Piling some pieces of coal upon the burning wood and drawing the kettle to the edge of the hob, he left the kitchen; and crossing the little hall, impregnated with a thin sickly odor of lamp-oil, he shot back the blots of the house-door, and let himself out into the morning air.

A flock of starlings fluttered away over the meadow, and from the mist-wreathed recesses of Nevilton House gardens came the weird defiant scream of a peacock.

He glanced furtively, as if such a glance were almost sacrilegious, at the open windows of his brother’s room; and then pushing open the
garden-gate
emerged into the dew-drenched field. He could not bring himself to leave the neighbourhood of the house, but began pacing up and down the length of the meadow, from the hedge adjacent to the railway, to that elm-shadowed corner, where not so many weeks ago he had distracted himself with Annie and Phyllis. He continued this reiterated pacing,—his tired brain giving itself up to the monotony of a heart-easing movement,—until the sun had risen quite high above the horizon. The great fiery orb pleased him well, in its strong indifference, as with its lavish beams it dissipated the mist and touched the tree-trunks with ruddy colour.

“Ha!” he cried aloud, “the sun is the only God!
To the sun must all flesh turn, if it would live and not die!”

Half ashamed of this revival of his spirits he obeyed the beckoning gestures of the station-master’s wife, who now appeared at the door.

The good woman’s sympathy, though not of the silent or tactful order, was well adapted to prevent the immediate return of any hopeless grief.

“’Tis good it were a Saturday when the Lord took him,” she said, pouring out for her lodger a steaming cup of excellent tea, and buttering a slice of bread; “he’ll have Sunday to lie up in. It be best of all luck for these poor stiff ones, to have church bells rung over ’em.”