1910
Prologue
I
HE had passed down into the realm of pure sensation and association, losing for the time all that constituted his present objective life, inhabiting instead those inner chambers of memory where his past lay stored. Yet he did not regard them as the past, but as the present. He did not criticise, weigh, or appraise his actions; rather he retraced, as it seemed, in his own proper person, his actual experiences.
For example, it seemed that he was a boy again, how old he did not consider; but somewhere at that age when the external world, rather than the internal, is the source of sensation. It was a summer morning; lawns were radiant in sunshine; there was a target somewhere and a bow and arrows; and the great house with green-shuttered windows dozed in the heat. There was a sense of ecstatic well-being within him, of tremendous and vital youth... From within the house a piano, in some cool darkened room, poured out a torrent of melody; a gavotte danced in the air; and he knew that his mother, dead years ago, was playing. Presently she would come out... in fact, she was already come out, standing at the French windows in her big straw hat and white dress, looking out for him.
Then again it was the close of a summer afternoon; he was going out riding with his father--dead, too, years ago; and he stood, radiantly happy, listening to the champ and jingle of horses coming round from the stable. On the lawn, just out of sight, stood the tea-table, silver, china, in the shade of the lime, with his mother and sister the one who had died when he was ten years old--talking together there. From somewhere beyond the village came the crash of a band; there was some fête--a flower-show, he thought--in progress... His father came out and stood beside him, silent and smiling; but his face was altered, and it was plain he was a revenant, yet not terrible, only a little strange and mysterious: his head was lifted and his eyes looked out, seeing that which the boy could not see. It seemed as though he had returned from some long journey, and all was well again.
Or it was winter, as it was growing dark, and he was coming in through the park towards the garden. The great house, sombre against the flaming west, shone from window after window, as if the sun were setting beneath the very roof. There was a smell of frost in the air, suggestive of frozen ponds, the glow of skating, the pulsating of tingling blood. Above all suggestive of a long evening within closed curtains, on thick carpets. The house was full of guests, aunts and cousins--friendly presences; there would be games to-night, acting, hide-and-seek--and again a piano crashed, chord after chord, inexpressibly solemn and uplifting, bearing within its sounds so great a wealth of association, memory, and a present excitement, that he nearly cried aloud with joy.
And once more it was summer, and he stood, naked and exultant, on a lawn, with the river racing beneath; the air was full of singing and the rustling of a myriad leaves from the beeches that sloped down to the very water's edge. In his ears, too, hissed the rush of air-laden water, plunging from the weir, and the bursting of ten thousand tiny bubbles; and in his nostrils the smell of water. He was thirsty, intolerably thirsty, yet revelling in the knowledge that satisfaction lay in reach. The breeze played over every part of his body, thrilling beneath his heart. In an instant he would have plunged... He had already plunged, and was in a green world of twisting water, drinking with every pore of his body the exquisite refreshment... . And the gavotte pealing from the piano rang in the darkened room...
Yet now and again the actual world for an intolerable instant thrust itself into his inner world; a face looked at him, like a face thrust through the silver, oily surface of water towards a fish, cut off and detached from reality--the face of a woman--ah! that of his wife Mary, was it not?--pale, tortured, with dilated eyes of agony--and withdrew again. He sighed with satisfaction, closed his own eyes, and rolled again in his water-world among the lush grasses and the shining brown pebbles, while the river slid above him...
Then again a face splashed in and stared at him with moving lips--a ruddy face, clean-shaven, crowned with grey hair; and he could see the frosty patch beneath the nostrils where the razor had not done its work. The lips were moving, and he could hear, incredibly loud, like detached barks of thunder, Latin words that roared at him and ceased, echoless even in memory. They conveyed no meaning; consciousness was not continuous enough to carry on the sense from one to the other... Why could not the priests leave him alone even in his ecstasy of drowning; they were pushing grace at him, bothering and interrupting him in his joy of well-being... He rolled over with closed eyes, and the face vanished...
The water roared louder above him. He was flying down-stream now with its thunder in his ears--a thunder composed of many elements: the bellow over boulders, the gush of a sluice, the dripping of a tank, the patter of rain on leaves, the trickle of a runnel. This water, he perceived, was itself Pure Joy. Not its symbol, nor its language, but Itself. That was the secret of the world, he saw now; the mystery at which all religions aim, which all fail to find, the very quintessence of philosophy. How glorious that he had found the secret at last--so appallingly simple, yet so convincing. It held all things--the peal of a piano, the crash of a band, the joy of youth, the pleasure of a house green-shuttered in summer, the inexpressible comfort of parents, and familiarity and all sweetness. And the secret had been in his hands so many times, and he had failed to understand. How extraordinary that was! He must make haste and explain quickly. Why! He had found the key to happiness...
"Mary: it's in the bathroom; it's everywhere; it's in the water-bottles. Don't you understand? It's right in front of you. Oh! you must see. And you must remind me in case I forget."
No. He had not been able to say that loud enough. It had not gone up through the silver, oily surface. Well; he was too tired to explain all over again. He must remember when he woke.
There followed blankness. When he was conscious again a completely new set of sensations met him.
II
The broad lawns of the upper gardens lay level in gold and green under the hot afternoon sunshine, backed by the shadowy woods, and broken here by a terrace fringed with a blaze of flowers, nasturtiums, wallflowers, and climbing roses, here by a mellow brick wall, here by broad paths leading away towards the park beyond. And there, a little below, on the curve of the hill, rose the jumbled roofs, turreted here and there both in Tudor and Georgian days, the grey window-pierced walls, and the fragmentary restorations of old brick, of the house, Manningham Hall itself. Beneath lay the valley, dreaming in sunlight.
It was the kind of house and place that can be seen in England only in full perfection--a combination of art and nature of such a fashion that each would seem to be the other. The park below the house had a cultivated and ordered air; the gardens a look of pure nature. The very brickwork of the buildings was toned down by time into an appearance of primeval sandstone. All was finished down to the smallest details. There was none of the careful artificiality of the French château; none of the deliberate wildness of an Italian country-house. It might have stood for a symbol of the life of a man for whom conventions have become eternal laws, and eternal laws conventions.
But the gardens this afternoon had a strange, deserted, almost agitated air about them. In the centre of the main path, running upwards by steps and levels, stood a wheelbarrow, still loaded with flower-pots, and a garden instrument or two. Even a flung-down waistcoat showed the haste with which work had been interrupted. The door into the enclosed kitchen-garden on the north displayed within a manure-barrow on wheels, forsaken, it would seem, upon the instant; and in a little fenced paddock beneath the tall trees a pony, still in his leather foot-mufflers and harness, released from his mowing-machine, cropped the grass with a surprised kind of air, raising his head now and again as if to look for his master who had left him so abruptly a few minutes ago.
Yet if the gardens behind were deserted, the gravel plateau in front of the house was in a very different state. Two carriages and a motor-car were drawn up here; and a couple of servants, grave and silent, stood on the steps of the porch waiting in their liveries, now eyeing the cool hall within, now exchanging a look or a nod with the three drivers. The figures who so stood were no less eloquent of some crisis than the emptiness and silence behind.
So the minutes passed away. From the village below the park beneath came the usual little summer sounds--the trot of a horse's hoofs, the barking of a dog, and the whirr of some machine, as intermittent as the riddling of a grasshopper.
Then a gate clashed, and presently, riding hard in the heat, up came a panting post-office boy on a bicycle. He sprang off without a word, handed a couple of telegrams to one of the men, who disappeared within, and himself sat down on the horseblock. A few minutes passed away still in silence, until once more the man appeared, whispered a word or two, handed papers to the boy, and sent him again flying down the hill to the village. Gates clashed, in diminuendo, and all was still once more, except for the occasional stamping of a horse and a murmured growl from a coachman. The chauffeur had propped himself against a pillar of the porch, whence he was invisible from the windows, and was smoking a cigarette, held in the hollow of his hand.
Ten minutes later once more a gate clashed, and there came, riding up in haste, two figures, a woman followed by a groom.
She seemed a tall, attractive-looking girl as she sprang off her horse, and stood whispering to one of the men, and gathering up her riding-skirt before going up the steps; and there was a certain brisk, masterful energy about her, an air of confidence and proper assumption, that would have made a stranger think her someone of more or less importance.
"Yes, my lady," whispered the man... "Yes, my lady. Sir James came an hour ago by motor... No, my lady; we hear there is to be no operation."
The girl frowned a little, as if in thought, pursing her fresh lips, with a puzzled, anxious look in her clear face. She hesitated an instant; then she went energetically up the steps as the glass doors opened, and could be discerned within, talking with gestures to the grave butler in the hall. Then finally she disappeared into the interior of the house; and again the minutes began to pass.
The next person to approach the group was an ecclesiastic from the interior of the house, a middle-aged priest with an air of extraordinary perturbation. He was a solidly built man, of no great impressiveness, ruddy-faced and genial, with dark hair streaked with grey showing beneath his biretta. He carried three or four objects in his hands--a book, a strip of violet ribbon, and a little leather-covered case. He appeared first hesitating in the hall; then he came abruptly out, nodded to one of the men who lifted his hat, and then once more paused.
"No, Pat," he said in an undertone. "He is unconscious. It is useless."
He shook his head gravely, came down the steps, turned to the right, and disappeared with an anxious, nervous kind of air into the doorway of a little turret, by the side of which rose up what was obviously the east window of some kind of chapel.
The sun was beginning to draw more obviously westwards, and the shadow of the house had completely covered the vehicles and the men before any other marked incident took place; and this was of a general rather than a particular nature--a stir everywhere, yet far more startling than the firing of a gun.
First, somewhere overhead, a window was thrown open, and a voice was heard talking in a rapid whisper to someone within; then very quick footsteps were heard, that rose and died again. The door in the turret opened abruptly; once more the priest appeared, and this time bareheaded; he ran straight up the steps and vanished into the house. The men at the porch exchanged glances, shifted their attitudes a little as if in expectancy; and the chauffeur hastily replaced a third cigarette which he had just drawn from his case. Then down from somewhere at the back of the house the figure of a man appeared running, drawing on a jacket as he ran; he waved his hand ominously to his fellows at the door, plunged over the sloping lawns; a gate clashed, and his footsteps died away into silence. The men looked at one another and nodded with a certain grimness. Then, as steps sounded on the flags of the hall inside, once more the mask-like look was resumed on their faces.
It was a little procession that was approaching; and the chauffeur, seeing his master through the glass doors, sprang to his car to make all ready.
First came a tall, lean, bowed man, with the face of an artist enclosed in short grey whiskers; he came through with a sort of noble courtesy, as if to deprecate his seniority to the short, stout doctor who followed. The butler, very grave and serious, came after, and stood awaiting any last messages that should be given.
But no word was spoken. The two doctors stood there, with that look on their faces so unmistakable and so eloquent, silently awaiting the moving of the motor. Sir James Martin, the specialist, was neatly drawing on his gloves, and presently slipped his arms into the motoring-coat that one of the men held up to him. The other doctor stood, meditative and serious, waiting till his companion was ready. A boy in a short striped jacket ran out presently at a gesture from the butler, and went down to open the gate for the motor to pass through.
Just, however, as Sir James stood aside for the other to mount before him, once more there was a step in the hall, and the tall girl who had entered an hour before came quickly out.
"One moment, Sir James," she said; and the two stepped out of the porch on a strip of turf that ran below the windows. But they were not far enough away for their voices to be altogether inaudible; and the man who stood nearest caught at least fragments of what they said, to be recounted later and embroidered and exaggerated beyond all reason, in view of the marvel that followed.
"I know," said the girl; "but she does not believe it. What can I do?"
A murmur answered her.
"Tell me again, exactly. I can tell her little by little. Quick, please. I must get back to her at once."
(The man only caught fragments of the answer.)
"Syncope... Yes, that means failure of the heart's action... Not the shadow of a doubt. Suggest to her..."
"She won't hear of it."
"... Oh! it's natural enough. Poor soul... You'll find to-morrow..."
"Yes, of course, I shall sleep here..."
"Let the nurses do their work at once. She'll understand better then... Certificate of death... Certainly."
And so after a few moments the two came back; and the motor began to throb.
Then the marvel happened.
As the girl still stood on the steps with her grieved face and anxious eyes, and the butler behind her; as Sir James, after the door of the car had been closed and the chauffeur had mounted, was already lifting his hat, there came on a sudden a rush of footsteps; the glass door was flung back, and a French maid, her face mad with terror, stood on the steps raving--
"Il vive!... Il vive!... Oh! mon Dieu!... Les mouvements!... on a vu... madame a vu... Il a parlé."
There was one moment of frozen motionlessness, then Sir James was out of the carriage and up the steps; and there poured back into the hall and vanished a torrent of men and women, running like hounds--more terrified, it seemed, by the possible rumour of life than by the certain descent of death.
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