PART III

I

During ten years my story remained at that, with a fictitious appearance of completion. Then I received a letter which, without further preamble, I here transcribe:—

“... I laugh to myself when I think of you receiving this letter, surely the most formidable letter ever penned by mortal man to mortal man, a letter one hundred and fifty pages long; who ever heard of such a thing? You will stare dismayed at the bundle, and, having forgotten the sight of my writing, will turn to the end for the signature; which finding, you will continue to stare bewildered at the name of Malory until light breaks upon you as faint and feeble as a winter dawn. Let me help you by reminding you of Sampiero first, and of Pennistans’ farm later. You see, I am not vain, and am perfectly prepared to believe that the little set of your 207fellow-men among whom I figured had entirely faded from your mind.

“Are they gradually reviving as I write? and do you, as they one by one sit up in the coffins to which you had prematurely relegated them, greet them with a smile? Oh, I don’t blame you, my dear fellow, for having put us away, myself included, in those premature graves. I should have done as much myself. I will go further: I should have buried the lot that day I left you at Sampiero; yes, I am sure I should not have displayed your energy in seeking out the birds in their very nest.

“I had better warn you at the start that you will find it hard to believe the things I am going to tell you. You know already of two crises in the lives of my Hispano-Kentish yeomen, two crises which I think have puzzled you sufficiently—though in the first case I suspect that you were more clear-sighted than I—but in this third crisis with which I deal you will probably refuse to believe altogether. I do not pretend to explain it myself. I only know that it happened, and therefore that it is true. Were it not true, I would not dare to foist its relation on any living man, however 208credulous. Human ingenuity could not, however, have planned this sequel, nor human courage have invented a solution at once so subtle and so naïf, and so in the absurd incredulity of my tale I place my reliance that it will carry conviction.

“Ours has been a queer friendship, but one which has held great value for me; I think many people would be better for such a friendship in their lives. Of course, to make it ideal, I should never have seen you; picked your name and address out of a telephone directory, and written; I am sure you would have answered. Then I should have had no reserve towards you, not that I have much now, but you see I never can be certain that I am not going to meet you in a train or in the street, when my ideally unknown correspondent and I could pass by without recognition, but when you and I would have to stop, and shake hands, and a host of intimate, remembered phrases would come crowding up to people our silence. I dislike such embarrassments. I find that solitude, like leprosy, grows upon one with age, for I observe myself physically wincing from the idea that I 209might possibly meet you as I have said, in a train or in the street.

“You will be surprised, after this, to hear that I no longer live alone. But I shall not give you the pleasure of anticipating the end of what I have set out to tell you; I am going to roll my story off my pen for my own delectation far more than for yours, and to see whether in the telling I cannot chance upon the explanation of various points which are still obscure.

“I was never a man who thought life simple; I had not a five-hundred word vocabulary wherewith I explained the primitive emotions of birth, hunger, adolescence, love, and death; no, life was always difficult and involved to me, but now in the evening of my own existence, serene and ordered as that evening turns out to be, it appears as a labyrinth beyond conception, with not one, but a thousand centres into which we successively stray. Difficult, difficult and heavy to shift are the blocks of which our mansion is built. Nor am I now speaking of social-political creeds which are to govern the world; I am speaking only of poor, elementary human beings, for, 210not having mastered the individual, I don’t attempt to discuss the system under which he lives. Big and little things alike go to our building; and if it was the war which first put the grace of humility into me, it is the sequel to a tale of plain people which has kept it there.

“Oh, the humility of me! I cross my arms over my eyes and bow myself down to the ground like a Mussulman at prayer. There’s nothing like life for teaching humility to a man, nothing like life for shouting ‘Fool! fool! fool!’ at him till he puts his hands over his ears. It buzzes round our heads like a mosquito inside mosquito-curtains. Humility isn’t the gift of youth—thank God—for it takes a deal of buffeting to drive it into us. The war should have taught us a lesson in humility; a wider lesson, I mean, than the accident of defeat or victory, efficiency or non-efficiency. Let us ignore those superficial aspects of the war. What we are concerned with, is the underlying forces, the courage, the endurance, the loyalty, the development of a great heart by little mean men; all this, abstract but undeniable, unrivalled, the broadest river of human excellence that ever flowed. 211What then? Mistaken, by God! wrongheaded! an immense sacrifice on the altar of Truth which was all the time the altar of Untruth. Doesn’t it make you weep? All the gold of the human heart poured out, like the gold of the common coffers, in a mistaken cause. It’s barbaric; it’s more than barbaric, it’s pre-historic; it’s going back to the Stone Age. We can’t say these things now; not yet; not from lack of courage, but from a sense of tact: we’re living in the wrong century. It’s an outrage on tact to say to your century what will be self-evident to the next; therefore we continue to hate our enemy and love our country; mistaken ideals both.

“There, my dear fellow, I profoundly apologise; if I oughtn’t to say these things to my century I oughtn’t to say them to you either, not that you are narrow enough to condemn me, but because I shall bore you. I promised you, too, that my letter was to deal with our little corner of Kent, and on that understanding I have induced you to read thus far. I reflect, moreover, that I have no right to speak thus and thus to a man who has lost much of his activity in his country’s service. Mrs. Pennistan has drawn 212me a touching picture of you, though she hasn’t much descriptive talent, has she? A motherly soul, pathetically out of place among that untamed brood. Like the majority of people, she lives a life of externals, with sentimentality as a mild substitute for the more heroic things, and it has been her misfortune for her lot to fall among people who, in the critical moments of their lives, allow themselves to be guided by internal powers of which Mrs. Pennistan knows nothing. I said, nothing. Yet is such true placidity possible? When you see a person, a body, marvellous casket and mask of secrets, what do you think? I think, there stands a figure labelled with a name, but he, or she, has lived a certain number of years; that is to say, has suffered, rejoiced, loved, been afraid, known pain; owns secrets, some dirty, some natural, some shameful, some merely pathetic; and the older the figure, the greater my wonderment and my admiration. Mrs. Pennistan, dull, commonplace woman, once gave herself to Amos; was then that not an immortal moment? But if she remembers at all, she remembers without imagination; she can’t touch her recollection into life.

213“And she dwells among hot, smouldering natures to whom the life of the spirit is real. She doesn’t understand them, and when her daughter, who is apparently living in externals likewise, breaks out into the unexpected, she is perplexed, dismayed, aggrieved. She doesn’t travel on parallel lines with the workings of such a mind as her daughter’s and consequently has to catch up with a sudden leap forward which disturbs her comfortable amble. She had to take such a leap when her daughter eloped, and another similar leap when her daughter tried to shoot her son-in-law. Humorous, isn’t it? and rather sad. I feel less for Amos, whose instinct is more in tune with Ruth’s, and is able to follow quickly by instinct if not by reason.

“At present Mrs. Pennistan’s mind must be in chaos, but it is happy chaos, and so she accepts it without disproportionate bewilderment. Besides, she has come by now to a fortunate state of resignation, in which she is determined to be surprised at nothing. I have questioned her on the subject. She is so profoundly unanalytical that I had some difficulty in getting her to understand at all what I was driving at, let alone getting her to 214answer my questions; still, what she told me was, in substance, this:—

“‘Ruth was my own girl, and a quiet girl at that, but Rawdon isn’t my boy, and we all knew that Rawdon was queer (this is the adjective she invariably applies, I find, to anything a little bit beyond her), so we got into the way of not being surprised when Rawdon did queer things. Though, I must say, this beats all. After ten years!... And he no coward either, I’ll say that for him. He was always a reckless boy, and if you’d seen the things he did you’d wonder, like I do, that he ever lived to grow up.’

“That, of course, is where her lack of imagination leaves her so much at fault. She has seen Rawdon climb into the tops of spindly trees after jackdaws’ nests, and has trembled lest he should fall and break his head, and has marvelled at his daring; but she cannot imagine, because she cannot with her physical eyes behold the torments he endured of late because his moral imaginative cowardice was so much greater than his physical courage. She cannot understand that the force of his imagination was such as to drive him away from all that he most desired. She cannot 215understand this, and I will admit that for us, who are phlegmatic English folk, it is difficult to understand also. We must dismiss our own standards first, and approach the situation with an unbiased eye. We must, in fact, pull prejudice down from his throne and set up imagination in his place. We must forget our training and our national conventions, if we wish to understand something alien to ourselves, something alien, but not thereby impossible or, believe me, uninteresting.

“I look back over what I have already written, and am bound to confess that I have set down hitherto the incoherent thoughts that came into my head, simply because I have been afraid of tackling my settled duty. To deal with ten years—for it is now ten years since the period of our correspondence ceased with the ceasing of the war—is a very alarming task for any man to undertake. I could, of course, acquaint you in a dozen lines with the salient happenings of those years. But it amuses me to cast them into the form of a narrative, and you will forgive me if I should slip into elaborating scenes in which I played no part.

216“At the end of the war, I must tell you, I came back to England with no very fixed ideas as to my future. I had been a wanderer, and, I say it with shame, a dilettante all my life, and I felt that my restlessness had not yet spent itself. I had hated, oh, how I had hated, the discipline of the army! I had no joy in war; my theories—I can’t call them principles, for they were things too fluid for so imposing a name—my theories were in complete disaccord with war, and moreover my freedom, for the love of which I had sacrificed a possible home and children, was now taken from me, and, in its place, fetters both physical and moral were clamped upon me. As my feet had to move left! right! left! right! so my poor rebellious tongue had to move left! right! also. And yet, there were fine moments in that war; one learnt lessons, and one watched great splendid fountains leaping upwards out of that sea of humanity.... Then the end came when I was free, and could make a bonfire of my uniform. I wondered what I should do next, and as I wondered I became aware of two things pulling at me; one thing pulled me towards the Weald of Kent, and the other pulled me 217towards the Channel, where all the world would lie open to my wandering. I decided that the two were, in order, compatible.

“What a free man I was! I enjoyed paying the full fare for my ticket, and no longer travelling by warrant. You and I both know that journey to Penshurst, but you don’t know the freedom that was mine in those fields; I shouted, I ran, I jumped the brooks, I was like a lamb in May, forgetful of my middle-age. And then I was suddenly lonely, wanting, for the first time in my life, a companion to share my light-heartedness. I wished that you were with me, for I couldn’t think of anybody else. Home from the war; free indeed, but no welcome anywhere. Not even a dog. And as for a woman!...

“Westmacott had come home, and I knew that he had found his children grown, and his wife, perhaps, temporarily happy to see him. At least he could turn to watch her beauty as she slept.... I cursed my instinct for following people into their private lives, a damnable trick, and nothing more than a trick, but one which made me lower my eyes in shame when next I met them. Peeping through keyholes. I had done it all my life. 218Well, if anybody peeped through my keyhole, there wouldn’t be much to see.

“How queerly things work out sometimes, for no sooner had I emerged from the fields on to the cross-roads, where the finger-post says ‘Edenbridge, Leigh, Cowden,’ still wrapped in my loneliness as in a cloak, I came upon Mrs. Pennistan walking slowly up and down, waiting, I presumed, for Amos. At the sight of me she stopped and stared, till we simultaneously cried one another’s names. I was filled with real warm gladness on seeing her there unchanged, unchangeable, and I went forward with my hands outstretched to clasp her fat, soft hands—do you remember her hands? they spoke of innumerable kneadings of dough, and she had no knuckles, only dimples where the knuckles should have been. And then, before I knew what had happened, that good woman’s arms were round my neck and her soft, jolly face was against mine, and she kissed me and I kissed her, and I swear there were tears in her eyes, which, for that matter, she didn’t trouble to conceal.

“Presently Amos came along. I had intended returning to London that night, but 219they would hear nothing of it, and I found myself supping as of old in their happy kitchen, and going upstairs later to that bare little room which had once been mine and had since been yours. It is a real satisfaction to me that you should be as familiar with these surroundings as I am myself, for you have, as you read, the same picture as I have as I write, and this harmony we could never achieve were I telling you of places and faces you had never seen.

“We talked, naturally, of you, for after the manner of old friends we travelled from one to the other of persons we had known. The sons, who were there solemnly munching, lent a certain constraint to the evening. And I missed so poignantly, so unexpectedly, the figure of the old woman by the fire. I had not realised until then what a prominent figure it had been, although so tiny and so silent, bent over the eternal chestnuts, the great-great grandmother of the little Westmacotts. Will you smile if I tell you that I took the diary up to bed with me, and read myself again into the underworld of Spain?

“Was it you, by the way, that drew a charcoal 220portrait of me over the wash-stand in my room?

“I got up and dressed the next morning still uncertain as to whether I should or should not go over to Westmacotts’. I do not exactly know why I was uncertain, but perhaps my loneliness on the previous day had more to do with it than my self-offered pretext, that my acquaintance with Ruth had better be left where it was at our last meeting. Remember, I had not seen her since she stood distraught but resolute in the cowshed with the Hunter’s moon as a halo behind her head. What could one say to people in greeting when one’s last words had been full of dark mystery and of things which don’t come very often to the surface of life? In a word, I was afraid. Afraid of embarrassment, afraid of the comfort of her home, afraid of her. Afraid of my own self as a companion through lonely years afterwards. I dressed very slowly because I wanted to put off the inevitable moment of making up my mind. And after all it was Mrs. Pennistan who made it up for me, for such was her surprise when I mentioned catching a train which 221would certainly leave me no time for the visit, that I said I would go.

“I realised then that I was glad. When I was a boy and couldn’t make up my mind whether I wanted to do a thing or not, I used to toss a coin, not necessarily abiding by the coin’s decision, but my own predominant feeling of relief or disappointment. I found the system invaluable. In this case Mrs. Pennistan had spun herself as a coin for me.

“Westmacott, I knew, would be out. Would Ruth be out, too? and my problem thus resolved by, as it were, another spin of the coin? She was not out; she was in her kitchen rolling a white paste with a rolling-pin, the sleeves of her blue linen dress turned back, and as she rolled she sang to the baby which lay in a low cradle in the corner. The baby lay on its back waving a piece of red coral which it occasionally chewed. I stood for quite a long time in the doorway watching them, and then Ruth looked up and saw me.

“I suppose I had remembered her blush as the most vivid thing about her, for I had waited there fully expecting her to look up and colour as she always did when surprised in any way, but instead of this she stood there 222gazing at me with the colour faded entirely from her face. She stood holding the rolling-pin, as white as the flour upon her hands and arms. The strong light of the window was upon her. Red geraniums were in the window. The strident voice of a canary broke our stillness.

“‘Ruth,’ I said, ‘aren’t you glad to see me?’

“I went forward into the kitchen, standing close to her by the table, and light was all around us, light, and the song of the bird. Everything was light, white, and dazzling; a flood of light, and bright colours. Revelation, like an archangel, was in that room.

“She asked,—

“‘Where have you come from?’

“‘From your father’s house.’

“‘You’re living there?’

“‘Only for to-day.’

“‘And then you’re going...?’

“‘Away.’

“‘Away?’

“‘Yes.’

“‘For good?’

“‘To travel....’

“I saw her face, and her beauty began to 223swim in front of my eyes, and a roaring began in my ears like a man who is breathing chloroform. Swimming, swimming, all the room and the light, and I heard my own voice as I had never heard it before,—

“‘Ruth! Ruth! you must come with me.’

“‘Come with you?’

“‘Yes, now, at once. Before your husband comes back. Get your things. I give you five minutes.’

“She cried,—

“‘Oh, but the baby?’

“‘I’ll look after it while you go upstairs.’

“‘No, no,’ she said, ‘not now; afterwards?’

“I understood.

“‘Take it with you.’

“‘But, my dear, I’ve three children!’

“The divinity was vanishing from the room, the sunlight grew flat and cold. We stared at one another. I heard Westmacott’s voice out in the yard. I said desperately,—

“‘Let me tell him!’

“‘Oh, no!’ she cried shrinking, ‘no, no, no.’

“‘You’re afraid,’ I taunted her.

“‘What if I am? Please go.’

“‘Alone?’

“‘Please, please go.’

224

II

“You want to know if I went? I did, and in the yard I met Westmacott, who discussed with me the prospects of the season. He was particularly affable, and I did my utmost not to appear absent-minded. I suppose that I succeeded, for his affability increased, culminating in an invitation to join him in a glass of ale within the house. I was dismayed, and protested that I had no time, also—quite untruthfully—that since the war I had given up drink of all kinds. He urged me.

“‘You’ll not refuse to taste my wife’s cider?’

“I thought that I cried out,—

“‘Man alive, I come straight from imploring your wife to come away with me,’ but as his expression remained the same, and neither glazed into horror nor blazed into fury, I suppose that the words, though they screamed in my head, never materialised on my lips.

“I was helpless. He led me back, odious and hospitable, into the kitchen where Ruth 225still stood rhythmically rolling the dough. The sun had gone behind a cloud, and the room, which had been so dazzling with its colours and its clarity, was dim, even to the red of the geraniums, even to the glow under the skin of Ruth. Dead, I thought, dead, dead.

“Westmacott stood outside, stamping the clay from his boots, and calling to his wife for cider. I winced from his heartiness, and from the tragic absurdity of my position. If only tragedy could be our lot, we should at least enjoy the consolation of the heroic, but in the comic tragedy to which Providence so delights in exposing us, there is no consolation. I was thankful that Westmacott did not know what a fool he was successfully making of me.

“Ruth took down from the dresser an earthenware jug, and went through into the little back hall of the place. I watched her through the door which she had left open. She filled the jug at a great wooden barrel; the golden cider streamed out from the tap, and she held the jug with a precision and a steadiness of hand that made me marvel. Returning, she set it with two glasses on the table.

226“‘This is my own brewing,’ she said to me.

“I thought that the cider must surely spill from my glass as I raised it from the table, or that it must bubble and choke in my throat as I drank with her eyes upon me. I felt trapped and prisoned, but in Westmacott’s face there was nothing sinister, no trace of suspicion. He was not playing a game with me. Perversely enough, I should have preferred an outburst of fury on his part, to have felt his fist in my face, and to roll with him, body grappling with body, on the floor. But this could not be, and I must sit, drinking cider, between those two, a husband and wife whom the flash of a revolver had so nearly separated not many weeks beforehand, a revolver fired in anger and hatred, and in a desire for freedom; I must sit there, near a woman between whom and myself unforgettable words had been suddenly illuminatingly spoken. I laughed; Westmacott had just made some remark to which my laugh came as an inappropriate answer; he looked a little surprised, and I was hunting about for some phrase to cover my lapse, when Ruth said,—

“‘Here are the boys.’

227“They came in whistling, but fell silent as they saw me, and took their caps off awkwardly. They were good-looking little boys—but I forget: you’ve seen them. Westmacott glanced at them with obvious pride. Ruth moved with her former steadiness to the cupboard to cut them each a chunk of bread liberally spread with jam; she pushed their chairs close up to the table, and ran her fingers through their rough mops of hair. They began to eat solidly. Westmacott winked at me.

“‘There’s a mother for you,’ he said.

“I could make no reply to his hideous jocularity; if I had spoken, I should have screamed.

“I felt that I should never escape, that the situation would last for ever. I was, naturally enough, not very clear in my mind just then, but already I seemed to see my recent scene with Ruth as a sunlit peak bursting out of the dreariness and blindness of days, as brief as the tick of a clock, but as vibrant as a trumpet-call, while the present scene was long, interminable, flat as a level plain. Yes, that was my impression: the peak and the plain. I longed to get 228away, that I might dwell at my leisure upon that moment full of wonder. I bitterly resented my bondage. I wanted to go away by myself to some solitary corner where I might sit and brood for hours over the one moment in which, after years of mere vegetation, I could tell myself that I had truly lived. I felt that every minute by which my stay in that kitchen was prolonged, was making of the place a thing of nightmare, instead of the enchanted chamber it actually was, and this also I resented. Why could not I have come, lived my brief spell, and gone with an untarnished treasure imprisoned for ever within my heart? Why should perfection be marred by the clumsiness of a farmer’s hospitality?

“Nor was this all. Creeping over me came again the humiliating sensation which I had more than once experienced in the presence of Ruth and Westmacott, the sensation that they were alien to me, bound together by some tie more mysterious than mere cousinship, a tie which, I believed, held them joined in spite of the hatred that existed between them. I won’t go into this now. It is a mystery which lies at the very 229root of their strange relationship. I do not suppose that Ruth was conscious of it—she was, after all, an essentially unanalytical and primitive creature—but it drove her now to a manifestation as typical of her in particular as it was of all women in general.

“She set herself deliberately to increase my misery and discomfort by every trick within her power. She must have been aware of what I was enduring, and you would have thought, however indifferent to me in the emotional sense, that she would have tried, in ordinary human pity and charity, to help me to escape as soon as possible from my wretched position, and to make that position less wretched while it still lasted. You would have thought this. Any man would have thought it. But apparently women are different.

“She took, then, my misery and played with it, setting herself to intensify it by every ruse at her disposal. She contrived, with diabolical subtlety, to separate us into two groups, one consisting of herself, her husband, and her children, the other consisting of me, isolated and alone. To this day I do not know whether she wanted to punish me 230for my former temerity, or whether she was simply obeying some obscure feminine instinct. In any case, she succeeded. I had never felt myself such an intruder. Even the resemblance between husband and wife, the curious, intangible resemblance of race and family in their dark looks, rose up and jeered at me. ‘We understand one another,’ something seemed to say, ‘and we are laughing together at your expense.’

“I realised then that the calm with which she had received me, and had drawn my cider, the matter-of-fact way in which she had told me it was of her own brewing, were all part of her scheme, as was her present conversation, standing by the table, and her occasional demonstrations of affection towards her boys. You will remember perhaps that I once told you of a walk she and I had taken to Penshurst. Well, I dimly felt that her behaviour on that occasion and upon this were first-cousins. I don’t know why I felt this; I only record it for you without comment.

“So she stood there talking, a hard devil behind all her commonplace words. I hated her; I wished myself dead. My one consolation, 231that Westmacott did not know what a fool he was making of me, was gone, since Ruth was making of me a much bigger fool, and was doing it in all consciousness. How I hated her! and at the same time, through her hatefulness, she seemed to me more than ever desirable. Westmacott knew nothing of what had gone before, but, sensitive as he was underneath his brutality, with the unmistakable sensitiveness of the Latin, he was, I think, aware of some atmospheric presence in the room. At any rate, he realised the devilish attraction of his wife, and in his spontaneous foreign way he put out his hand to touch hers. An English farmer! I nearly laughed again. When he did this, she sat down on the arm of his chair, and, putting her arms round his neck, laid her cheek against his hair, with her eyes on me all the while. Then, as though she had released some lever by her action, he turned within her arms, and kissed her savagely.

“The next thing I knew was that I was walking at an extraordinary pace across the fields, gasping in the air, and that strong shudders like the shudders of a fever were 232running down my frame. I am not really very clear as to how I spent the rest of that day, or of the days that followed. Do you know that familiar nightmare in which you roll a tiny ball no bigger than a cartridge-shot between your finger and thumb, till it grows and grows into an immense ball that overwhelms you? So through a nightmare haze I rolled the memory of that horrible little scene into a tight ball, till I could see neither beyond nor above it, but all my horizon was obscured by the distended pellet in my brain. And during all this time I moved about the world like a man in full possession of his senses, making my dispositions for a long absence abroad, talking to my banker out of the depths of a leather arm-chair, buying my tickets from Thomas Cook, directing the packing of my luggage, and, so far as I know, neither my banker nor Cook’s clerk nor the club servant realised that anything was amiss with me.

“I had only one desire: to get away, to think. I was as impatient for solitude as the thirsty man is for water. I resented every one in my surroundings and my delay in London much as I had resented Westmacott 233and my delay in the kitchen. Until I could get away, I banished all thought from my mind; only, as I tell you, the scene in the kitchen remained whirling and whirling beyond my control.

“Finally I escaped from England, and as I lay sleepless, buffeted all night in the train, one thought persisted like music in my brain, ‘To-morrow I shall be alone, I shall be rid of nightmare, I shall be able to dwell luxuriously upon the magical moment, and all that it means, all that it entails. Yes! I shall be alone with it, for weeks, months, years if I like. I shall no longer be forced to grant undue proportion to the nightmare; until now it has made black night of my days, but to-morrow it will recede like a fog before the sun, and I shall dwell in the crystal light of the mountain-tops.’

“My destination was—I wonder if you have guessed it already?—Sampiero. I knew that there I was certain of peace, hospitality, familiar rooms. Besides, it was there that I had spoken to you for so many hours of the opening chapters of this story, and I had a fancy that if I took my dreamings up 234to the clump of pines, the shadows of those earlier chapters might come, re-evoked to brush like soft birds against my cheek. I had planned to go up to the clump of pines on my first evening after dinner. My dear fellow, do not be offended when I tell you that as I arrived by that absurd mountain railway at Sampiero, I was seized by a sudden panic that some desire for rest and peace might have brought you, like myself, to the same old haunt. I suppose that I was in an excitable state of mind already, for by the time I reached our old lodging-house I was in a fever and a passion of certainty that I should find you there before me. Signora Tagliagambe was at the door to welcome me, but I rushed at her with inquiries as to whether I was or was not her only guest. She stared at me with obvious concern for my reason. There were no other guests. I had my former room, also the sitting room to myself. I should be completely undisturbed.

“I recovered myself then, realising that I had been a fool, as I dare say you are thinking me at this moment. A delicious peace came stealing over me, the peace of things 235suspended. I was half tempted to give myself the luxury of putting off my first visit to the stone-pines until the following day. But the evening fell in such perfection that I wandered out, much as you and I have often wandered out to sit there in silence, sucking at our pipes; in the days, I mean, before I asked you that memorable question about the Weald of Kent.

“So there I was, at length, at peace, and I stretched myself out on the ground beneath the pines, pulling idly at a tuft of wild thyme, and rubbing it between my hands till the whole evening was filled with its curious aromatic scent, that came at me in gusts like a tropical evening comes at one in gusts of warmth. I had not yet begun to think, for, knowing that the moment when thought first consciously began to well up in my spirit would take its place in the perspective of my life not far short of that other moment on whose sacredness I scarcely dared to dwell, I put it off, even now, when it had become inevitable, torturing myself with the Epicureanism of my refinement. I was thirsty, thirsty, thirsty, and though the water stood there, sparkling and clear, I still 236refused myself the comfort of stretching out my hand.

“And then it came. Slowly and from afar, almost like pain running obscurely and exquisitely down my limbs, reflection returned to me like light out of darkness. I lay there absolutely motionless, while in my head music began to play, and I was transported to palaces where the fountains rose in jets of living water. Light crept all round me, and music, music ... a great chorus, now, singing in unison; swelling and bursting music, swelling and bursting light, louder and louder, brighter and more dazzling; a deafening crash of music, a blinding vision of light.

“I stood at last on the sunlit peak.

“All around me, but infinitely below, stretched the valleys and plains of darkness where I had dragged out my interminable days. I looked down upon them from my height, knowing that I should never return. I knew that I now stood aloft, at liberty to examine the truth which had come to me, turning it over and over in my hands like a jewel, playing with it, luxuriating in its possession. It was to be mine, to take at 237will from the casket of my mind, or to return there when other, prosaic matters claimed my attention. But, whether I left it or whether I took it out, I should bear it with me to the ends of the earth, and death alone could wrench me from its contemplation.

“What a lunatic you must think me after this rhapsody! What! you will say, does the man really mean that he wouldn’t exchange the recollection of a moment for the living, material presence of the woman concerned? Well, it is very natural that you should think me a lunatic, but have patience; take into consideration my life, which has been lived, as you know, alone; always in unusual places, with no one near my heart. Living, material presences come to have comparatively little significance after twenty or thirty years of solitude. Try it, and you will see. One drifts into a more visionary world, peopled by shadowy and ideal forms; memories assume incredible proportions and acquire an unbelievable value; one browses off them like a camel off his hump. Do you begin to understand now that this great, shining, resplendent moment should rush in to fill a 238mind so dependent on the life unreal? One must have something, you see, and if one can’t have human love one must fall back upon imagination. Hence the romantic souls of spinsters....

“And hence, I might say, a great many other things which practical men barely acknowledge. I find myself straying off down paths of thought which may lead me into swamps of digression. Hence religion, hence poetry, hence art, hence love itself—the spiritual side of love. All these things, unpractical, inconvenient, unimportant things, all sprung from a craving in man’s nature! A craving for what? Hasn’t he been given strength, health, bodily well-being, hunger and thirst, fellow-men to fight, and fists to fight them with? What more does the creature want? He wants a thing called Beauty, but what it is he can’t tell you, and what he wants to do with it when he’s got it he can’t tell you; but he wants it. Something that he calls his soul wants it. A desire to worship.... Beauty, a purely arbitrary thing. All men strive after it, some men so little that they are themselves unconscious of the desire, other men so passionately 239that they give up their whole lives to its pursuit; and all the graded differences come in between.

“Here am I, then, a man of irregular and spasmodic occupation, an unsatisfactory, useless member of society, I’ll admit, useless, but quite harmless; an educated man, what you would call an intellectual, not endowed with a brain of the good, sound type, but with a rambling, untidy sort of brain that is a curse to himself and a blessing to nobody. Here am I, without one responsibility in the world, with nothing to do unless I go out and forage for it, living alone with books, dabbling in this and that, and necessarily thrown for a certain number of hours each day on my own resources. You cannot wonder that my life of the imagination—as I will call it—becomes of supreme importance to me as my only companion. It had been a singularly blank life, so blank that when I went out for walks alone I used to fall back on repeating verse aloud, so you see it was a life of books, and man wants more than that. He wants something that shall be at once ideal and personal. There is only one thing which fulfils those two conditions: 240Woman. But, you will say, if there’s no woman in a man’s life he has only himself to blame. You’re right; I don’t know why I never set out to find myself a woman, perhaps because I was too hard to please, perhaps because I knew myself to be too fickle and restless. You used to laugh at me when I said this. Of course, I don’t pretend that there haven’t been incidents in my life; but they never lasted, never satisfied me for long; they weren’t even good to think about afterwards. Anyway, there I was: free, but lonely.

“And now I had got this new, precious, incredible thing to think over. I am afraid to tell you how long I stayed at Sampiero, doing nothing, lapped in my thoughts as in a bath of warm water. My conversation with Ruth had been brief, and I knew every word of it by heart; my hour started from when I had come up to her house and had stolen surreptitiously to the doorway to take her unawares, and had stood there with a smile on my lips, waiting for her to look up. I saw again the light and the flowers and the baby in the cradle. I felt again the swimming in my head as I looked, for the 241first time, it seemed, into the beauty of her face. I heard again my own voice saying, ‘Ruth! Ruth! you must come with me.’

“But I told you all that before; why do I repeat it? Because I lived through it all an infinitude of times myself. I thought I couldn’t exhaust the richness of my treasure. Nor could I, but after a while I found that my perfect contentment was being gradually replaced by a hunger for something more; I was human; the imagination wasn’t enough.

“I began to want Ruth, Ruth herself, warm and living, and when I made this discovery I took a step I had long since prepared in my mind, foreseeing the day when dissatisfaction would overcome me: I left Sampiero and joined a party that was going into Central Africa after ivory.

242

III

“The change in my existence was two-fold; I was now busy instead of idle, and in my thoughts I was unhappy instead of happy. At moments, indeed, I was so acutely unhappy that I welcomed desperately the preparations of our expedition, which gave me plenty to do. I looked back to my months at Sampiero as one of the best periods of my life. One of my new companions asked me what I had been doing since the end of the war. I replied,—

“‘I’ve been on a honeymoon with a thought,’ and he stared at me as though I were mad, and never quite trusted me for the rest of the expedition.

“I was busy before we started, and that took my mind off my own affairs, but on the ship I was again unoccupied; I used to lean my arms on the rail and stare down into the churning water, and feel my heart being eaten out as though by scores of rats with pointed teeth. I longed, I longed madly, for Ruth. In those days I used to 243think of her as a person, not as an abstraction; I wondered whether she was unhappy or fairly contented; I tried to draw up in my own mind a scheme of her relations with Westmacott. But I couldn’t; I couldn’t face that just then, I put it off. I knew that sooner or later I must think the whole thing out, but when one has a score or more years in front of one, one can afford to delay.

“Apart from this, I enjoyed my African experience; the men I was with were all good, dull fellows; I didn’t make friends with any of them, beyond the comradeship of every day. What I enjoyed were the days of hunting, and the nights of waiting under such stars as I’d never seen; well, I suppose it is all lying there now as I write, just as I used to think of the untroubled Weald lying there spread under an English sky. It’s funny to think of places you’ve been to, existing just the same when you aren’t there. Yes, I liked Africa, and I tried to live in the present, but when the expedition was over, and I found myself landed alone at Naples, I realised with a shock that I had only succeeded in putting ten months of my life away behind me, and 244that an unknown quantity of years stretched out in front.

“I was sitting outside my hotel after luncheon, smoking, and looking over that most obvious and panoramic of bays. I hated Naples, I hated Italy; I thought it a blatant, superficial country, with no mystery, therefore no charm. I had almost made up my mind to take ship for Gibraltar, when a voice beside me said,—

“‘You look pretty blue.’

“I turned round and saw a long, leggy creature stretched out on a deck-chair beside me; he was squinting up at me from under a straw hat.

“‘I feel it,’ I replied; ‘about as blue as that sea.’

“‘What are you going to do?’ he went on.

“I told him that I had just been thinking of going to Gibraltar.

“‘And what’ll you do when you get there?’

“‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ I answered.

“‘On a holiday?’ he inquired.

“‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t work; I lead an aimless sort of life.’

“‘Great mistake,’ said he.

“I agreed.

245“‘How did it come about?’ he asked.

“Somehow I found myself telling him.

“‘When I was young—that is to say, after I had left Oxford—I thought I’d like to see the world, so I started; I travelled, stopping sometimes for six months or two if I liked the place. Then when I got tired of that, I took to specialising in different subjects, giving a year, two years, three, to each. So I drifted on till the war, and here I am.’

“‘I see,’ he said. ‘And now you’re bored.’

“‘Yes,’ I said, adding, ‘and worse.’

“He made no comment on that; I don’t know whether he heard. He said presently, in the same tone as he would have used to remark on current politics,—

“‘I’m going to Ephesus to-morrow, you’d better come with me. My name’s MacPherson.’

“‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll come. My name’s Malory. What are you going to do at Ephesus?’

“He replied, ‘Excavate.’

“That will tell you what MacPherson was like; an eccentric, laconic sort of fellow; he 246never argued, he just made proposals, and, whether they were accepted or declined, nodded briefly in acquiescence without further discussion. For a long time I thought that I should never get any further with him, then gradually I began to find him out: a grim, sardonic soul, with only one passion in life, if I can give the name of passion to a determination so cold and unshakable; I mean his passion for excavation. I have seen him labouring for hours under the sun, dusty and indistinguishable from the ruins among which he worked, apparently tireless and thirstless; I have seen him labour like a man under the domination of a great inspiration, of a force such as drives fanatics to cut their own heads and cover their own backs with wales from the rod, but I have never heard an expression of delight or enthusiasm, or even of satisfaction, escape his lips at the result of his labours. Scientists and archæologists came to him with respect, invited his opinion, paid him compliments evidently sincere; he listened in total indifference, neither disclaiming nor acknowledging, only waiting for them to have done that he might get back to his work.

247“Such was the man with whom I now lived, and you may imagine that I was often puzzled to know what had prompted his original invitation to me. I could, of course, have asked him, but I didn’t. He took my presence absolutely as a matter of course, made use of me,—at times I had to work like a navvy,—never gave me his confidence, never expected mine. It was a queer association. We lived in a native house not far from the site of the temple on the hill above the ramshackle Turkish village of Ayasalouk, and one servant, an Albanian, did our housework for us, washed our clothes, and prepared our meals. We shared a sitting-room, but our bedrooms were separate; it was a four-roomed house. Occasionally, about once a month, MacPherson would go down into Smyrna and return next day with provisions, cigarettes, and a stock of tools and clothes, and sometimes an English paper.

“He let me off on Sundays, ungraciously, grudgingly, if silence can be grudging. I insisted upon it. At Pennistans’ I had had a half-holiday on Sunday, and at Ephesus I would have it too. But here my hours of freedom were spent in loneliness. Lonely I 248would tramp off to the banks of the Cayster, and, standing among tall bulrushes and brilliant iris, would fish dreamily for mullet, till the kingfishers swept back, reassured, to the stream and joined me in my fishing.

Jam varias pelagi volucres, et quæ Asia circum

Dulcibus in stagnis rimantur prata Caystri.

You will admit, I think, that the quotation is singularly apposite. Or, as with Ruth I had climbed the hills above the Weald, I would climb alone the heights of Mount Coressus, where the golden angelica surged about me, or the heights of Prion, which showed me, across the plain of Ephesus, the flatter plain of deep blue sea, broken by the summits of Samos—the very sea, the very Samos, where Polycrates flung forth his ring in defiance of the gods.

“A certain number of travellers came to Ephesus, whom MacPherson regarded with a patient disdain, but whom I welcomed as messengers of the outside world. I wanted to question them, but they were always so eager to question me, making me into a sort of guide, and inveigling me into doing them the honours of the place. This used to annoy 249MacPherson, though he never said anything; I think he felt it as a sort of desecration. I could see him watching me with disapproval, standing there among the columns in his dust-coloured shirt and trousers and sombrero hat, leaning his hands on the handle of his pick-axe, a hard, muscular man, thin and wiry as an Australian bush-settler. The tourists questioned me about him and about our life, but I noticed they rarely approached him, or, if they did so once, they did not do so twice. After talking to me, they would move away, decide—thankfully—among themselves that I could not be offered a tip, and finally would stroll off in the direction of our little house. Here I had dug a little garden in imitation of the Kentish cottages I knew so well; just a few narrow beds in front of the house, where I had collected the many wild flowers that grew on the neighbouring hills. MacPherson took an odd, unexpected interest in my garden. He brought me contributions, rare orchids and cyclamen which my eyes had missed, brought them to me gravely, carrying them cupped in his hands with as much tenderness as a child carries a nest full of 250eggs. He stood by me silently watching when I put them in with my trowel in the cool of the evening. Of course we got terribly burnt up in the summer, but in the spring my garden was always merry, and, if it added to my homesickness, it also helped to palliate it.

“MacPherson had evidently never thought of making the place less dreary than it naturally was; I have no great idea of comfort myself, but I can’t live without flowers, and so my instinct, which began in a garden, produced itself into other improvements; I bought a mongrel puppy off a shepherd, and its jolly little bark of welcome used to cheer our home-coming in the evening; then I made MacPherson bring back some chickens from Smyrna, a suggestion which seemed to horrify him, but to which he made no objection; finally I grew some flowers in pots and stood them in the windows. Oh, I won’t disguise my real purpose from you: I was trying to make that rickety Turkish house as like a Kentish cottage as possible. I even paved a garden path—MacPherson examined every stone with the minutest care before I was allowed to lay it down—and 251finished it off with a swing-gate. Then it struck me that a swing-gate in mid-hill-side looked merely absurd, so I contrived a square of wooden fencing all round our little property. Lastly, I hung a horse-shoe, which was a mule-shoe really, over the door.

“I tell you, the more the resemblance grew, the more and the less homesick I got. It was at once a pain and a consolation. There were times when I almost regretted my enterprise, and wanted to tear up the path, destroy the garden, strangle the puppy, and throw away the flowers, letting the whole place return to the bleakness from which I had rescued it. I wanted to do this, because my efforts had been too successful, and as a consequence I expected to see Ruth appear in that doorway, white sewing in her hands, and a smile of welcome to me—to me!—in her eyes. I have often come home pleasantly tired from my day’s work, fully though sub-consciously confident that I should see her as I have described....

“That garden of mine had many narrow escapes. But I kept it, and I went on with my pretence, perfecting it here and there: I got a kennel for the puppy, and I got 252some doves that hung in a wicker-cage beside the door. At last the counterfeit struck MacPherson.

“‘Why,’ he said, stopping one evening, ‘it looks quite English.’

“‘Do you think so?’ I replied.

“‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but I tell you what, those flowers are wrong. An English cottage garden doesn’t have orchids; it has mignonette. How can we get some mignonette?’

“‘I might write home for some,’ I said slowly.

“It was true: I might write home for some. To whom? Mrs. Pennistan would send it me. Then it would have a sentimental value which it would lack coming from a seedsman. But I knew quite well that it was not to Mrs. Pennistan that I intended to write.

“After dinner I brought out a little folding table and set it by the door. MacPherson was there already, playing Patience as was his invariable habit.

“‘Going to write letters?’ he asked, seeing my inkpot.

“‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m going to write for the mignonette.’

253“I headed my letter, ‘Ephesus,’ an address which always gave me satisfaction; not that I often had an opportunity of writing it.

“‘My Dear Ruth,—I am writing to you from a hill-side in Turkey to ask you if you will send me some seeds of mignonette for my garden; it is very easy to grow, and I think would do well in this soil. You would laugh if you could see my house, it is not like anything you have ever seen before. Please send me the mignonette soon, and a line with it to tell me if you are well.’

“I addressed it, ‘Mrs. Rawdon Westmacott, Vale Farm, Weald, Kent, England,’ and there it lay on my table grinning and mocking at me, knowing that it would presently cross the threshold I was dying to cross, and be taken in the hands I was dying to hold again.

“‘Done?’ said MacPherson. ‘Where have you ordered the seeds from? Carter’s?’

“‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ve asked a friend for them,’ and some odd impulse made me show him the address on the envelope.

“He read it, nodded, and said nothing. I was disappointed, though really I don’t know what I should have answered had he questioned me.

254“After that my days were filled with one constant thought. I calculated the nearest date, and then coaxed myself into the belief that there would be a delay after that date had come and gone; a long delay; perhaps a month. So many things might happen, Ruth might not be able to get the seed, she might put off writing, she might simply send the seed with no covering letter at all. This last thought was unendurable. It grew, too, in my mind: people of Ruth’s upbringing and education didn’t like writing letters, they didn’t like perpetuating their opinions so irrevocably as ink on paper perpetuated them, and anyway they always had a conviction that the letter once written, would not arrive, especially at an unheard-of-place like Ephesus. It was difficult enough to imagine the safe transit of a letter from one English county to another, but that a letter posted in the Weald of Kent should arrive in due course at a place out of the Bible was unthinkable.... I became daily more persuaded that she would not write, and daily my gloom deepened. MacPherson noticed it.

“‘Feel ill?’ he asked.

“‘No, thanks,’ I said, annoyed.

255“‘You’re not starting cholera?’ he suggested suspiciously.

“‘No, I tell you; I’m perfectly well.’

“‘Glad of that,’ he said, but I told myself peevishly that his gladness was based entirely on considerations of his own convenience.

“Ten days passed; a fortnight; three weeks; I was in despair. Then one morning, as I came out of our door with a basket in my hand to pick up a couple of eggs for breakfast, I saw a large magenta patch down below, on the hilly pathway which led from our house to the village. This, I knew, must be the old negro woman who brought our rare letters. I watched her; the morning was slightly misty, for it was very early, not long after sunrise, and I saw her black face emerge from the plum-coloured mashlak she wore. I started off to meet her. She came toiling up the hill, panting and blowing, for she was enormously fat, but an indestructibly good-humoured grin parted her lips over her gleaming teeth, and suddenly I fancied a grotesque resemblance to Mrs. Pennistan, and I laughed aloud as though a good omen had come to speed me.

“I came up to her. Her black skin was 256glistening with moisture, and her vast body rocked and swayed about inside her gaudy magenta wrapper; I suspected it of being her only covering. Still, I almost loved her as with a chatter of Turkish she produced a great black arm and hand out of the folds of her mashlak—a fat black hand so ludicrously like Mrs. Pennistan’s fat white one, holding a little packet which she tendered to me.

“I summoned my Turkish to thank her; this called forth a deluge of conversation on her part, with much shining of teeth and clattering of bangles, but I shook my head regretfully, and she, heaving her huge shoulders and displaying her palms in equivalent regret, turned herself round and started on the easier downward road to Ayasalouk. Could Ruth but have seen this voluminous magenta emissary! for the packet I held was indeed from Ruth and bore the Weald postmark.

“I sat down by the roadside to open it. The seeds were there, and a letter, written in a round, Board-school hand, accompanied them. I was suddenly unable to read; it was the first word, remember, that had come to me from her since that memorable day. I was more than moved; I was shaken, like a tree in the wind.

257“I read:—

“‘Vale Farm, Weald,

“‘15 IV. 22.

“‘Dear Mr. Malory—Yours to hand, and enclosed please find mignonette seeds as requested. I hope they will do well in your garden. Our garden was baked hard in the drowt last summer, but hope we will have more favourable weather this year. My husband and the boys are well, and send their respects. Well, must stop now as have no more news. Hoping this finds you well, I am,

“‘Yours obediently,

“‘R. Westmacott,’”

“That was her letter—I have it here to copy, old and worn and torn—and in its stiff conventionality, its pathetically absurd phraseology, it seemed to tear my heart into little fluttering ribbons. Anything less like her I couldn’t conceive, yet she was indescribably revived to me; I saw her bending, square-elbowed, over that bit of paper, hesitating when she came to the word ‘drought,’ deciding wrong, tipping up the octagonal, penny bottle of ink which hadn’t much ink left in it; I saw her getting the seeds, making up the parcel, copying ‘Ephesus’ conscientiously from my letter. You may think me sentimental; it was the only tangible thing I had of hers.

258“MacPherson met me at the top of the path.

“‘Letters?’ he said.

“‘Not for you, but I’ve got the mignonette seed.’

“He looked puzzled.

“‘The what?’ Heavens! the man has forgotten! ‘Oh, yes, I remember,’ he said; ‘let’s go and put it in.’

“I had got ready a prepared seed-bed, where I think I had broken up every lump of earth, however insignificant, with my own fingers, and here I sowed Ruth’s packet of seed. I sowed it with the solemnity of a priest sacrificing at the altar. MacPherson looked on as was his wont, unaware of anything special in the occasion, and rather impatient to get to breakfast.

“In a few weeks’ time the plants began to show; I watered them, and cherished them, thinned them out, put wire round them, treated them as never was hardy annual treated before. Soon the fragrant thing was all round our doorstep. I felt like a prisoner tending the plant between the flag-stones of his prison, or like Isabella with her pot of Basil. I laughed at myself, but still I continued my cult, and the nightly 259watering of the flowers throughout the hot summer became to me a species of ritual.

“You used to call me a pagan; that’s as it may be, but anyway I dedicated my whole garden to Ruth, growing my flowers in her honour, enlarging my plot, planting the hill-side outside the fence with broom and wild things, till the whole place was rich and blooming. This labour gave me the greatest satisfaction. My dreadful hungry craving for her living presence was momentarily lulled and I returned to that happier frame of mind when, as I described to you, I was content to live in the imagination. I could set her up now as a kind of idealised vision of all that was beautiful, all that was desirable. She was the deity of my garden, almost the deity of the great temple where I laboured. I should think MacPherson would have half killed me had I hinted this to him.

“I was happy again, and in the next spring I got Ruth to send me out some more seeds from her own garden. With them came another stilted little note, but this time there was a postscript: was I ever coming back to England? That disturbed me terribly; I knew it contained no double 260meaning, for I knew perfectly well that Ruth would never leave her children to come away with me, but at the same time it stirred up my sleeping desire to see England again. I analysed this, and found that I didn’t in the least want to see England; I only wanted to see Ruth. This frightened and distressed me; I had been so calm, so comparatively happy, and here a few idle words had thrown me into a state of emotional confusion. The ruins seemed odious to me that day, my garden seemed a mockery, and in the evening I said to MacPherson,—

“‘I am afraid I must go away.’

“He said, ‘Oh?’ less in a tone of dismay than of polite inquiry, and, as usual, of acceptance.

“‘I am getting restless here,’ I said, ‘but if I go and stretch my limbs a bit I shall be better; I will come back.’

“‘All right,’ he answered, as though there were no more to be said on the matter.

“‘That is, if you want me,’ I added, provoked.

“‘Naturally I shall be glad to see you whenever you choose to come back,’ he said, without a trace of emotion or cordiality in his tone.

261

IV

“Before I left I made arrangements with the Albanian to look after my garden during my absence; much as I hated leaving it to other hands I felt that I must get away or I should begin to scream upon the hills of Ephesus. I went down to Smyrna without much idea of what I should do after that, but when I got there I found a ship bound for Baku, so, thinking I might as well go there as anywhere else, I got on board and we sailed that night. I don’t want to give you a tedious account of my journey; I will only tell you that it did me all the good in the world, and that I walked up to Ephesus one evening in the late autumn with my toothbrush in my pocket and real home-coming excitement in my heart. There was the little house; there was my garden, showing quite a fair amount of colour for the time of year; there was MacPherson sitting outside, gravely playing his interminable Patience. The puppy—puppy no longer, but 262a dog of almost inconceivable ugliness—rushed out barking, and seized the ankle of my trousers in its joy. MacPherson looked up.

“‘Hallo,’ he said. ‘Evening.’

“‘Evening,’ I replied, and sat down.

“‘I believe this Patience is coming out,’ he said presently.

“‘Is it?’ I answered, vastly amused.

“‘Yes,’ said MacPherson, ‘if I could only get the three I should do it. Ah!’ and he made a little pounce, and shifted some cards. ‘Done it,’ he announced in a tone of mild triumph, adding regretfully, ‘now it won’t come out again for at least a week.’

“‘That’s a pity,’ I said.

“‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘I reckon it comes out about once in every hundred times. Garden’s all right, isn’t it?’

“‘Splendid,’ I said; ‘I was just looking at it. How’s your digging?’

“‘That’s all right, too. Glad you’re back.’

“I was surprised at this and gratified, but my gratification was damped when his obvious train of thought had occurred to me.

“‘Ready to work to-morrow?’ he asked, confirming my suspicion.

263“‘Rather.’

“‘That’s all right,’ he said again.

“He did not ask me where I had been, and I thought I would not volunteer it, but after a day or two I did.

“‘I went to the Caucasus,’ I said.

“He answered, ‘Oh.’ I was not offended, only greatly amused; he was a perpetual joy to me, that man.

“I took up my life again very much where I had left it, and now again a change came about in my thoughts; they were constantly occupied with Ruth and with that examination I had so long put off, of her relations with her husband. As the story which I shall presently tell you will make them quite clear to you—if anything so involved can ever be made quite clear—I shall not bore you now with my own conjectures. It is quite bad enough that I should bore you with my own life, but you will agree that I couldn’t say to you, ‘Now ten years passed,’ without giving you the slightest idea of my movements during those ten years. Those ten years, you see, are my little Odyssey; I look back on them now, and I see them in that light, but while they lasted 264I naturally didn’t look on them as a poetic spell out of my life; no, I looked on them as a sample of what my life would be till it came to the simplest of all ends: death. I supposed that I should stay at Ephesus with MacPherson till he got tired of excavating, which I knew would never happen, or till I got tired of excavating, which I thought was much more likely, or till the authorities turned us out. After that I didn’t know what I should do, but I thought, so far as I ever thought about it at all, that something would turn up in much the same way as the boat at Smyrna had turned up to take me to Baku. What did occasionally exercise my mind was the question whether I should ever see England again? If I couldn’t have Ruth I didn’t want to go to England; it would be a torment to know her so near; but on the other hand I foresaw that as an old man of seventy I should not want to be still knocking about the world or excavating at Ephesus. The ravens would have to provide. Why make plans? Fate only steps in and upsets them. How angry I used to make you by talking about Fate, do you remember?

265“Meanwhile my Odyssey continued, and I found that every year my restlessness returned to me, so that sooner or later the moment always came when I said to MacPherson,—

“‘I am afraid I shall have to go away to-morrow,’ and he replied invariably,—

“‘Oh? All right.’

“I went to all manner of places, but never to England, and always in the autumn I returned to Ephesus to find MacPherson there unchanged, always glad to see me because of my help in his work, and in all those years he never once asked me where I had been to. I forget now myself where I went, except that I never once went anywhere near England, much as I wanted to go, because I knew the temptation would be too strong for me. This journey of mine became thus an annual institution. There was another annual institution of which MacPherson knew only the outer and less important part; this was the arrival of seeds from England, with Ruth’s little letter attached; I came to know all her phrases, which revolved with the years in a cycle: she hoped the seeds would do well with me; her garden 266had been dried up, or washed out, as the case might be, the previous summer—there is never a perfect summer for a gardener, just as there is never a perfect day for a fisherman; her children were well and sent their respects, varied by love; her husband was well too; she must stop as she had no more news, or, as the post was going. Occasionally she ended up, ‘In great haste,’ though what the haste could be in that leisurely life I failed to imagine.

“I came to look for this letter in my year as the devout man looks for a feast-day; it was, so to speak, my Easter. My little packet grew, that much-travelled little packet, which went with me on all my pilgrimages. I wondered whether she cherished my letters, over in England, as I cherished hers at Ephesus? In the meantime she was there, in the house I knew, living through these years in a calm monotony which was a consolation to me, because I could so well imagine it; I could call up a picture of her, in fact, at practically any moment of the day, for what variation could there be to her quotidian round of cooking, housework, washing, sewing? This was, I say, a pleasant 267reflection to me, though I was enraged to think that her care and labour should be expended upon another man and another man’s children. A placid existence, broken only by the calving of cows, the farrowing of swine, the gathering in of crops.... And I at Ephesus!

“MacPherson never spared me my share of the work, and a hard taskmaster he was, as hard to himself as to me. In the summer we breakfasted soon after the dawn had begun to creep into the sky, then with pick and mattock we trudged to the ruins, there to toil until the heat of the sun glaring upon the quantities of white marble which lay about drove us indoors until evening. MacPherson was always very grudging and resentful with regard to this enforced siesta. In fact he would not admit it as a siesta, but affected to consider it merely as a variation of work, and would remain below in our little sitting-room, turning over for the thousandth time his scraps and fragments of glass, pottery, and other rubbish, while I lay on my bed upstairs damning the mosquitoes and trying to go to sleep. No sooner had I dozed off than I would be 268aroused by MacPherson’s remorseless voice calling up to know if I was ready. Evening in the ruins I did not mind so much; a little breeze often sprang up from the sea, and I had the prospect of an hour’s gardening immediately in front of me. On the whole I was happy in those hours of toil. Living in my thoughts, and sparing just the bare requisite of consciousness to the needs of my tools, I became almost as taciturn as my companion. Yet I never came to look on Ephesus as a home; I was only a bird of passage—a passage lasting ten years, it is true, but still only a passage. I didn’t see how it was going to end, but my old friend Fate stepped in at last and settled that for me.

“It was July, and my annual restlessness had been creeping over me for some time; besides, it was getting unpleasantly hot at Ephesus, and I panted for the cold air of the mountains. So I said to MacPherson at breakfast,—

“‘I think the time for my yearly flitting has come round again; in fact, I think I’ll be off to-day.’

“I waited for the, ‘Oh? All right,’ but it 269didn’t come. Instead of that, he said after a little pause,—

“‘I wonder if you would put off going until to-morrow?’

“It was the first time I had ever heard him raise an objection to any suggestion of mine, and I was faintly surprised, but I said,—

“‘Of course I will. One day’s just as good as another. Got a special job for me?’

“‘No,’ he said, ‘it isn’t that.’

“I did not question him; I had long since followed his lead, and we never questioned one another.

“Still, I wondered to myself, as one cannot help wondering when anything unusual, however slight, occurs to break a regularity such as ours. A stone thrown in a rough sea falls unperceived, but thrown into a pond of mirror-like surface it creates a real disturbance. So all the morning I observed MacPherson as closely as I dared; I saw him go to get his things, and I detected a slight weariness in his walk; still he said nothing. It was glaringly hot at the ruins. I thought of suggesting that we should go home earlier than usual, and, turning round 270to look for MacPherson, I saw him at a little distance, sitting on a boulder, with his head in his hands. This was so unusual that I immediately crossed over to him.

“‘I say, aren’t you feeling well?’

“He raised to me a livid face.

“‘I shall be all right presently.... A touch of the sun.’

“‘You must come indoors at once,’ I said firmly. ‘You must be mad to sit here in this heat. Can you walk?’

“He rose with infinite weariness, but without a word of complaint, and attempted to lift his pick.

“‘I’ll take that,’ I said, taking it from him, and he gave it up without a word. ‘Is there anything else to bring?’

“He shook his head, and began to stumble off in the direction of the house. Long before we had reached home, I knew what was the matter with my companion. The sun was not responsible. He was in the grip of cholera.

“The Albanian, who was splashing cold water from a bucket over the tiled floor of our little sitting-room when we arrived, stared at us in astonishment. MacPherson, 271his face faded to the colour of wood-ashes, had his arm round my neck for support, and already the terrible cramps of the disease were beginning to twist his body as he dragged one leaden foot after the other. I called to Marco, and between us we half carried him upstairs and laid him on his bed, where he lay, silent, but drawing his breath in with the long gasps of pain, and with his arm flung across his eyes so that we should not observe his face.

“I drew Marco out on to the landing. I bade him saddle the mule and ride straight to the station, where he must take the train for Smyrna and return without delay with the English doctor. I did not think, in my private mind, that the doctor could arrive in time, or that he could do more than I could, who had some experience of cholera, but still I was bound to send for him. Marco nodded violently all the time I was speaking. I knew I could trust him; he was an honest man. I went back to MacPherson.

“I had never been into his bedroom before. The Venetian blinds were lowered outside the windows, and the floor and walls were barred with the resulting stripes of shade 272and sun. A plaid rug lay neatly folded across the foot of the bed. On the dressing-table were two wooden hair-brushes and a comb, on the wash-stand were sponges, but no possessions of a more personal nature could I discover anywhere. The man, it seemed, had no personal life at all.

“He was lying where I had left him, still breathing heavily; his skin was icy cold, so I covered him over with the quilt from my own room, knowing that it was no use attempting to get him into bed, and feeling, in a sympathetic way, that he would prefer to be left alone. I went to get what remedies I could from our medicine-chest downstairs, and as I was doing this my eye fell on his little cupboard where behind glass doors he kept his precious shards, all labelled and docketed in his inhumanly neat handwriting, and I wondered whether, in a week or so, I should see him sitting down there, fingering his treasures with hands that, always thin, would surely be shrunken then to the claws of a skeleton.

“It’s bad enough to see any man in extreme agonies of pain, but when the man is an uncommunicative, efficient, self-reliant 273creature like MacPherson it becomes ten times worse. I felt that a devil had deliberately set himself to tear the seals from that sternly repressed personality. MacPherson, who had always assumed a mask to disguise any human feelings he may have had, was here forced, driven, tortured into the revelation of ordinary mortal weakness. I believe that, even through the suffering which robs most men of all vestiges of their self-respect, he felt himself to be bitterly humiliated. I believe that he would almost have preferred to fight his disease alone in the wilderness. Yet I could not leave him. He was crying constantly for water, which I provided, and besides this there were many services to render, details of which I will spare you. I sat by the window with my back turned to him whenever he did not need me, glad to spare him what observation I could, and glad also, I confess, to spare myself the sight of that blue, shrivelled face, tormented eyes, and of the long form that knotted and bent itself in contortions like the man-snake of a circus.... His courage was marvellous. He resolutely stifled the cries which rose to his throat, hiding his 274face and holding his indrawn breath until the spasm had passed.

“I knew that this stage of the disease would probably continue for two or three hours, when the man would collapse, and when the pain might or might not be relieved. The sun was high in the heavens when I noticed the first signs of exhaustion. MacPherson sank rapidly, and the deadly cold for which I was watching overcame him; I covered him with blankets—this he feebly resisted—and banked him round with hot water bottles, of which we always kept a supply in case of emergency. It was now midday, and I had continually to wipe the sweat from my face, but I could not succeed in bringing much warmth to poor MacPherson. He lay quiet and silent now, save when the fearful sickness returned, as it did at short intervals. I sat beside him, ready with the water for which he was continually asking.

“He was, as I have said, always thin, but by this time his face was cavernous; I could have hidden my knuckles in the depression over his temples, and my fist in the hollow under his cheek-bones. His scant, reddish 275hair, always carefully smoothed, lay about his forehead in tragic wisps. His pale blue eyes showed as two smears of colour in their great sockets. His interminable legs and arms stirred at unexpected distances under the pile of blankets. He was very weak. I feared that he would not pull through.

“When the merciless sun was beginning to disappear round the corner of the house, MacPherson, who had been lying for the last hour or so in a state of coma, spoke to me in a low voice. I was staring in a melancholy way from my chair by his side, across the bed, between a chink of the Venetian blind; I don’t know what I was thinking of, probably my mind was a blank. I started when I heard him whisper my name, and bent towards him. He whispered,—

“‘I don’t think I’m going to recover.’

“Neither did I, and seeing that he had made the remark as a statement of fact, in his usual tone, though low-pitched, I waited for what he should say next. He said,—

“‘I am sorry to be a bore.’

“This was a hard remark to answer, but I murmured something. He went on, still in that hoarse whisper,—

276“‘I must talk to you first.’

“I saw that he was perfectly lucid in his mind, and thinking that he wanted to give me some necessary instructions I encouraged him to go on, but he only shook his head, and I saw that he had fallen back into the characteristic apathy. I sat on, expecting the arrival of Marco and the doctor at any moment.

“Towards night, MacPherson roused himself again. He was so much weaker that I could barely make out the words he breathed.

“‘It is time you went to water your garden.’

“I shook my head. A distressed look came over his face, and to comfort him I said,—

“‘Marco has promised to do it for me.’

“He was content with that, and lay quiet with his long, long arms and thin hands outside the coverlet. I thought that he wanted to speak again, but had not the energy to begin, so, to help him, I suggested,—

“‘Was there anything you wanted to say to me?’

“He nodded, more with his eyelids than 277with his head, then, bracing himself with pain for the effort, he whispered,—

“‘You won’t stay on here?’

“I answered, ‘No,’ feeling that to adopt a reassuring, hearty attitude would be an insult to the man.

“After a long pause he said,—

“‘I want to be buried up here. By the ruins. I don’t care about consecrated ground.’

“An appalling attack of sickness interrupted him, after which he lay in such complete exhaustion that I thought he would never speak again. But after about half an hour, he resumed,—

“‘Give me your word of honour. They will try to prevent you.’

“I swore it—poor devil.

“‘Bury me deep,’ he said with a grim, twisted smile, ‘or some one will excavate me.’

“He seemed a little stronger, but I knew the recovery could only be fictitious. Then he went on,—

“‘Will you do something else for me?’

“‘Of course I will,’ I answered, ‘anything you ask.’

“‘My wife ...’ he murmured.

“‘Your wife?’ I said.

278“‘She’s in London,’ he whispered, and he gave me the address, dragging it up out of the depths of his memory.

“In London! Even in that dim room, with the dying man there beneath my hand, I felt my heart bound with a physical sensation.

“‘Just tell her,’ he added; ‘she won’t mind. She won’t make you a scene.’

“He was silent then, but drank a great draught of water.

“‘Is there any one else?’ I asked.

“His head moved very feebly in the negative on the pillow.

“‘And what am I to do with your things?’ I asked lastly.

“‘Look through them,’ he breathed; ‘nothing private. Give the fragments to the British Museum. I’ve made a will about money.’

“‘And your personal things? Would you like me to give them to your wife?’

“‘Oh, no,’ he said wearily, ‘’tisn’t worth while.’ Then after a long pause in which he seemed to be meditating, he said, with evidently unconscious pathos, ‘I don’t know.... Better throw them away.’

279

V

“MacPherson died that night about an hour before the doctor came; Marco and the doctor had missed each other, and had missed the trains, but the doctor reassured me that I had done all that was possible, and that had he arrived by midday he could not have saved MacPherson’s life.

“‘I suppose you will want to bring him down to the English cemetery at Smyrna?’ he said, with an offer of help tripping on the heels of his remark. He looked horrified when I told him of MacPherson’s wish and of my intention of carrying it out.

“‘But no priest, I am afraid, will consent to read the burial service over him under those conditions,’ he said primly.

“‘Then I will read it myself,’ I replied in a firm voice.

“‘You must please yourself about that,’ said the doctor, giving it up. His attitude towards me, which had started by being sympathetic, was now changing subtly to a slight impatience. He took out his watch. ‘I am 280afraid I ought to be going,’ he remarked, ‘if I am to catch the last train down to Smyrna, and there seems to be nothing more I can do for you here. There will have to be a certificate of death, of course; I will send you that. And if you like I will stop in the village on the way, and send some one up to you; you understand me—a layer-out.’

“I said that I should be much obliged to him, and, accompanying him as far as the front door, I watched him go with Marco and a lantern, the little parallelogram of yellow light criss-crossed with black lines, swaying to and fro in the night.

“I could not go to bed, and as I was anxious to leave Ephesus as soon as possible, I thought I would employ my time in going through poor MacPherson’s few possessions. As he said, there was nothing private. I sat downstairs in the sitting-room we had shared, with his tin box open on the table before me, shiny black, and the inside of the lid painted sky-blue. It was pitifully empty. His will was in a long envelope, a will making provision for his wife, and bequeathing the remainder of his income to an archæological society; there was also a codicil directing 281that his Ephesian fragments were to go, as he had told me, to the British Museum. The box also contained a diary, recording, not his life, but his discoveries; and a few letters from men of science. For the rest, there were his books, his clothes, his wrist-watch, his plaid rug, and a little loose cash in Turkish coins. And that was all. There was absolutely nothing else. Not a photograph, not a seal, not even a bunch of keys. Nothing private! I should think not, indeed.

“I sat there staring at the bleak little collection when Marco came in to say that he had returned with the layer-out. I went into the passage, and there I found our old negro post-woman, grinning as usual in her magenta wrapper; it seemed that she combined several village functions in her own person. I felt an instinctive horror at the thought of those black hands pawing poor MacPherson, but the thing was unavoidable, so I took her upstairs to where he lay in a repose that appeared to me enviable after the brief but terrible suffering he had undergone, and left her there, bending over him, the softer parts of her huge body quivering as usual under her mashlak. I went downstairs again, and 282stood outside to breathe the clean, cool air; the sky hung over me swarming with stars; I tried not to think of the old negress exercising her revolting profession on MacPherson’s body.

“Next day two men in baggy trousers and red sashes came up to the house carrying the hastily-made coffin. Then we set out, Marco, myself, and the two men with the coffin and MacPherson inside it. Providentially there were no tourists that day at Ephesus. Marco and I had been hard at work all the morning digging the grave, and as I drove my pick I reflected that this was, humanly speaking, the last time I should ever break up the flinty ground of Ephesus. After ten years! With regard to myself and my future, I dared not think; my present preoccupation was to have finished with MacPherson and his widow.

“Well, I buried him up there, and may I be hanged if I don’t think the man was better and more happily buried in the place he had loved, than stuck down in a corner of some unfriendly cemetery he had never seen. For myself—such is the egoism of our nature—I was thinking all the while that I would 283leave behind me a written request to be buried within sight of Westmacott’s farm in Kent. And after I had buried him, and had got rid of Marco and the two men over a bottle of raki in the kitchen, I took all the flowers from my garden and put them on his grave, and I dug up some roots of orchid and cyclamen and planted them at his head and at his feet; but I don’t suppose they ever survived the move, and probably to this day the tourists who wander far enough afield to stumble over the mound, say, ‘Why, some one has buried his dog out here.’

“A week later I was in London, on a blazing August day which seemed strangely misty to me, accustomed as I was to the direct, unmitigated rays of the sun on the Ephesian hills. I still hadn’t thought about my future, and I was resolved not to do so until, my interview with Mrs. MacPherson over, I could look upon the whole of the last ten years as an episode of the past. I had tried to forget that I was in the same country as Ruth; but this had been difficult, for the train from Dover had carried me through the heart of Ruth’s own county, a cruel, unforeseen prank 284of fortune; I had pulled down the blinds of my railway carriage, greatly to the annoyance of my fellow-travellers, but these good people, who might have been involved with Fate in a conspiracy against me, had their unwitting revenge and defeated my object utterly by saying, as we flashed through a station, ‘That was Hildenborough; now we have to go through a long tunnel.’

“Hildenborough! After ten years, during which I had consistently kept at least fifteen hundred miles between us, I was at last within two miles of her home. I nearly sprang out of the train at the thought. But I resolutely put it away, so resolutely that I found myself pushing with my hands and with all my force against the side of the railway carriage.

“It was too late, when I reached London, to do anything that day. I slept at my old club, where everybody started at the sight of me as of a ghost, and the following morning I went to the address MacPherson had given me. It was in a block of flats, a long way up. I was left stranded upon the tiny landing by the lift-boy, who, with his lift, fell rapidly down through the floor as though pulled from below by a giant’s hand. I rang 285the bell. It tinkled loudly; I heard voices within, and presently a woman came to open the door, with an expression of displeased inquiry on her face; a middle-aged woman, wearing a dingy yellow dressing-gown which she kept gathering together in her hand as though afraid that it would fall open.

“‘Can I see Mrs. MacPherson?’ I asked.

“She stared at me.

“‘There’s no Mrs. MacPherson here.’

“I heard a man’s voice from inside the flat,—

“‘What is it, Belle?’

“She called back over her shoulder,—

“‘Here’s a party asking to see Mrs. MacPherson.’

“‘Who is it?’ asked the voice.

“‘Who are you, anyway?’ said Belle to me.

“‘I have been sent here by Mr. MacPherson, Mr. Angus MacPherson, with a message for his wife,’ I said, ‘but as I have evidently made a mistake I had better apologise and go away.’

“She looked suddenly thoughtful—or was it apprehensive?

“‘No, don’t go away,’ she said. ‘You haven’t made a mistake. Come in.’

“I went in, and she closed the door behind 286me. I followed her into the sitting-room where, amid surroundings at once pretentious and tawdry, a man, also in a dressing-gown, lay stretched on the sofa smoking cigarettes. He was handsome in a vulgar way, with black wavy hair and a curved, sensuous mouth.

“‘Now,’ said Belle, ‘let’s hear your news of Mr. Angus MacPherson?’

“‘First of all,’ I answered, ‘may I know who I am talking to?’

“Belle and the man exchanged glances.

“‘Oh, well,’ she said then, I am Mrs. MacPherson all right enough. If you have really got a message for me, let’s hear it.’

“There was anxiety in her tone, and she edged nearer to the handsome man, and surreptitiously took possession of his hand.

“I did not think that the news of MacPherson’s death was likely to cause much grief to his widow. I therefore said without preamble,—

“I have come to tell you that he died a week ago of cholera. I was with him at the time, and I have brought you the certificate of his death, also his will. He left no other papers.’

“‘Angus dead?’ said Angus’s widow. ‘You don’t say! Poor old Angus!’