Читать книгу The Gateless Barrier - Lucas Malet - Страница 5

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Laurence leaned his arms upon the broad wooden hand-rail of the bulwarks. The water hissed away from the side. Immediately below it was laced by shifting patterns of white foam, and stained pale green, violet, and amber, by the light shining out through the rounds of the port-poles. Further away it showed blue black, but for a glistening on the hither side of the vast ridge and furrow. The smoke from the funnels streamed afar, and was upturned by a following wind. The great ship swung in the trough, and then lifted—as a horse lifts at a fence—while the seas slid away from under her keel. As she lifted, her masts raked the blue-black night sky, and the stars danced in the rigging.

This was the first time since his marriage, nearly two years before, that Laurence found himself alone and altogether his own master. His marriage was a notable success—every one said so, and he himself had never doubted the fact so far. Yet this solitary voyage, this temporary return to bachelorhood, possessed compensations. He reproached himself, as in duty bound, for being sensible of those compensations. He excused himself to himself. He gave reasons. Doubtless his present sense of freedom and content took its rise not in his enforced absence from Virginia, from her bright continuous talk, her innumerable and perfectly constructed dresses, her perpetual and skilful activities; but in his escape from the highly artificial and materialised society in which she lived and moved and had her being. Laurence had certainly no ostensible cause of complaint against that society. Its members had recited his verses, given a charming performance of his little comedy—in the interests of a deserving charity—quoted his opinions on literature and politics, and waxed enthusiastic over his strokes at golf and his style at rackets and polo. He had, in fact, been the spoilt child of two New York winters and two Newport summers. No Englishman, he was repeatedly assured, had ever been so popular among the "smart set" of the great republic. It had petted and fêted him, and finally given him one of its fairest daughters to wife. And for all this Laurence Rivers was sincerely grateful. His vanity was most agreeably flattered. His natural love both of pleasing and of pleasure was well satisfied. Yet—such is the perversity of human nature—the very completeness of his success tended to lessen the worth of it. He even questioned, at moments, whether that success did not offer the measure of surrounding immaturity of taste and judgment, rather than of the greatness of his personal talent and merit. He was haunted by the conviction that he had never yet given his best, the highest and strongest of his nature, either in thought, or art, or adventure, or even—perhaps—he feared it—in love. The demand had been for a thoroughly presentable and immediately marketable article; and the Best is usually far from marketable, often but doubtfully presentable either. It followed that Laurence had, almost of necessity, kept the best of himself to himself—kept it to himself so effectually that he had come uncommonly near forgetting its existence altogether, and letting it perish for lack of air and exercise.

Now leaning his arms upon the hand-rail of the bulwarks, while the stars danced in the rigging, and the great ship ploughed her way eastward across the mighty ridge and furrow of the Atlantic, gratified vanity ceased to obtain in him. His thoughts travelled back to periods of his career at once more obscure and more ambitious—to the few vital raptures, the few fine failures, the few illuminating aspirations which he had known. The bottom dropped out of the social side of things, so to speak. He looked below superficial appearances into the heart of it all. Life put off its cheap frippery of fancy dress, Death its cunningly devised concealments and evasions. Backed by the immensities of sea and sky, both stood before him naked and unashamed, in all their primitive and eternal vigour, their uncompromising actuality, their inviolable mystery; while, with a sudden and searching apprehension of the profound import of the question, Rivers asked himself—

"What shall it profit a man—what in good truth—if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"

He had been summoned to England by the illness of an uncle whose estates and considerable wealth he would inherit. That illness had been pronounced incurable; but the approaching death of this near relation made small demand upon his intimate feelings. A decent seriousness of thought and speech, concerning the impending event, were all that could reasonably be required of him; for the elder Mr. Rivers was both morose and eccentric, and had given his nephew a handsome allowance on the express understanding that he saw as little of him as possible. A declared misogynist, he had received the announcement of Laurence's proposed marriage with an exasperating mixture of contempt and approval.

"I am sincerely sorry for you," he had written on this occasion. "The more so that you appear to labour under the impression that the step you have in contemplation is calculated to secure your happiness. This, you must pardon my remarking, is obviously absurd. I grant that you are under a moral obligation to perpetuate our family and secure the succession to our estates in the direct line. I cannot, therefore, but be glad that you should adopt the recognised means to attain the above ends. I should, however, respect both your motives and your intelligence more highly had you done this in a rational and scientific spirit, without indulgence in sentimental illusions which every sane student of human history has long since perceived to be as pernicious to the moral, as they are enervating to the mental health. I could say much worthy of your attention upon this point; but, in your present condition of emotional inebriation, it would be a waste of energy on my part—I might add, a throwing of pearls before swine. Still, justice, my dear Laurence, compels me to own that, even so, I must ever consider myself in a measure your debtor, since the fact of your existence, your remarkably sound physical condition, your normal and slightly unintelligent outlook on life, have combined to relieve me of the odious necessity of sacrificing my time and my personal liberty to the interests of our family, by entering into those domestic relations, which you appear to regard with as much thoughtless complacency as I with reasoned repulsion and distrust."

This being the attitude of the elder Mr. Rivers's mind, it followed that when, by his request, Mr. Wormald, the family solicitor, summoned his nephew and heir to attend his deathbed, the young man's wife was not included in that gloomy invitation. And this Laurence could not by any means honestly regret. Virginia at a disadvantage was an idea almost inconceivable. Yet so immediate and concrete a being would not, he felt, shade quite gracefully into the mortuary landscape. She would not suit it, neither would it suit her. For she was almost amazingly in harmony with her modern, mundane environment; and, save in the way of costly mourning costumes, it seemed incredible that death should have any dominion over her. It struck him, moreover, that if he gauged the position aright, Virginia, notwithstanding her many charms and much cleverness, would have to take a back seat in his eccentric uncle's establishment. And Virginia in a back seat was again an idea almost inconceivable. So he said—

"It's an awful nuisance to have to leave you like this, but this is going to be a pretty dismal bit of business anyhow. I'd much better just worry through it alone. You'll join me later when it's all over, and we are free to take possession and knock the place in shape. Stoke Rivers is really rather delightful, though it is not very large. There used to be some good pictures and books and things in it I remember. I believe my uncle is a virtuoso in his way, though he is such a cross-grained old chap. You'll enjoy the place, at all events for a few months every year, I think, Virginia. And you can have all your own people over in turn, you know; and show them how the savage English do it in their savage little island. You'll make the neighbourhood sit up, I fancy. It'll be amusing."

But as Laurence leaned his arms upon the broad hand-rail of the bulwarks, in the chill of the March night, while the water hissed away from the side, and the engines drummed and pounded, and the bows of the great ship lifted against the far, blue-black horizon, he began to wonder whether he had not been somewhat over hasty in proposing chronic invasion of Stoke Rivers by all Virginia's smart friends in turn. They were well-bred, hospitable, amusing, very much up-to-date. He owed them thanks for a most uncommonly good time. But they seemed a trifle thin, a trifle superficial and ephemeral just now, in face of the immensities of ocean and sky, and of the ancient mysteries of Life and Death.