Читать книгу Flames - Robert Hichens - Страница 16

Rather reluctantly, Julian acted on the advice of Doctor Levillier and went out of town for a week on the following day. He took his way to the sea, and tried to feel normal in a sailing-boat with a gnarled and corrugated old salt for his only companion. But his success was only partial, for while his body gave itself to the whisper of the ungoverned breezes, while his hands held the ropes, and his eyes watched the subtle proceedings of the weather, and his ears listened to the serial stories of the waves, and to the conversational peregrinations of his Ancient Mariner about the China Seas in bygone days, his mind was still in London, still busily concerned itself with the very things that should now undergo a sea change and vanish in ozone. Recent events oppressed him, to the occasional undoing of the old salt, well accustomed to the seasick reverence of his despairing clients on board the Star of the Sea. When the mind of a man has once fallen into the habit of prancing in a circle like a circus horse, it is difficult to drive it back into the public streets, to make it trot serenely forward in its ordinary ways. And Julian had with him a ring-master in the person of the ignorant Rip. Whenever his eyes fell on Rip, curled uneasily in the bottom of the swinging boat, he went at a tangent back to Harley Street, and the strange finale of his evening with the doctor.

It had been a curious tableau divided by a door. Levillier and he stood on one side tugging mightily at the intent mastiffs, which strained at their collars, dropping beads of foam from their grinning jaws, savages, instead of calm companions. On the other side, in the hall, Lawler and Valentine paused in amazement, and a colloquy shot to and fro through the wooden barrier. On hearing the name of Valentine mentioned by the butler, the doctor had cast an instant glance of unbounded amazement upon Julian. And Julian had returned it, feeling in his heart the dawning of an inexplicable trouble.

"Is anything the matter?" Valentine's voice had asked.

"No," said the doctor in reply. "But please go into the dining-room. We will come to you there. And Lawler—"

"Yes, sir."

"When you have shown Mr. Cresswell to the dining-room, be careful to shut the door, and to keep it shut till I come."

"Yes, sir."

The butler's well-trained voice had vibrated with surprise and Julian had found himself mechanically smiling as he noted this. Then the footsteps of servant and visitor had retreated. Presently a door was heard to shut. Lawler returned, and was passing discreetly by, to wonder, in his pantry, if his master had gone mad, when the doctor again called to him.

"Go downstairs, Lawler, and in a moment I shall bring the dogs to you."

"Yes, sir."

The butler's voice was now almost shrill with scarcely governable astonishment, and his footsteps seemed to tremble uneasily upon the stairs as he retired. Then the doctor went to a corner of the room and took down from a hook a whip with a heavy thong.

"I haven't had to use this since they were both puppies," he said, with a side glance at the dogs. "Now, Addison, keep hold of Mab and go in front of me down the servants' stairs. If the dogs once get out of hand we shall have trouble in the house to-night."

The door was opened, and then a veritable affray began. The animals seemed half mad. They tore at their collars, and struggled furiously to break loose, snarling and even snapping, their great heads turned in the direction of the dining-room. The doctor, firmest as well as kindest of men, recognized necessity, and used the whip unsparingly, lashing the animals through the door to the servants' quarters, and down the stairs. It was a violent procession to the lower regions. Julian could not get it out of his head. Entangled among the leaping dogs on the narrow stairway, he had a sense of whirling in the eddies of a stream, driven from this side to the other. His arms were nearly pulled out of their sockets. The shriek of the lash curling over and around the dogs, the dim vision of the doctor's compressed lips and eyes full of unaccustomed fire, the damp foam on his hands as he rocked from one wall to the other, amid a dull music of growls, and fierce, low barks, came back to him now as he trimmed the sails to catch the undecided winds, or felt the tiller leap under his hold. Each moment he had expected to be bitten, but somehow they all tumbled together unhurt into Lawler's pantry, where they found that factotum standing grim and wire-strung with anticipation. Beyond the pantry were the dogs' night quarters, and they were quickly driven into them and shut up. But they still bounded and beat against the door, and presently began to howl a vain chorale.

"Lord, Lord, sir! what's come to them?" Lawler exclaimed.

His fat face had become as white as a sheet, and the doctor was scarcely less pale as he leaned against the dresser, whip in hand, drawing panting breaths.

"I can't tell. They will be all right in a minute."

He pulled himself up.

"Go to bed now if you like, Lawler," he said, rather abruptly. "Come,

Addison."

They regained the hall, and made their way to Valentine. He was sitting by the dining-table in a watchful attitude, and sprang hastily up as they came in.

"My dear doctor," he said, "what a pandemonium! I nearly came to your assistance."

"It's very lucky you didn't, Cresswell," the doctor answered, almost grimly.

"Why?"

"Because if you had you might chance to be a dead man by this time."

Out on the sea, under the streaming clouds that fled before the wind, Julian recalled the strange terseness of that reply, and the perhaps stranger silence that followed it. For Valentine had made no comment, had asked for no explanation. He had simply dropped the subject, and the three men had remained together for a few minutes, constrained and ill at ease. Then the doctor had said:

"Let us go back now to my room."

Valentine and he assented, and got upon their feet to follow him, but when he opened the door there came up from the servants' quarters the half-strangled howling of the mastiffs. Involuntarily Dr. Levillier paused to listen, his hand behind his ear. Then he turned to the young men, and held out his right hand.

"Good-night," he said. "I must go down to them, or there will be a summons applied for against me in the morning by one of my neighbours."

And they let themselves out while he retreated once more down the stairs.

The drive home had been a silent one. Only when Julian was bidding

Valentine good-night had he found a tongue to say to his friend:

"The devil's in all this, Valentine."

And Valentine had merely nodded with a smile and driven off.

Now, in the sea solitude that was to be a medicine to his soul, Julian went round and round in his mental circus, treading ever the same saw dust under foot, hearing ever the same whip crack to send him forward. His isolation bent him upon himself, and the old salt's hoarse murmurings of the "Chiney" seas in no way drew him to a healthier outlook. Why Valentine returned for him that night he did not know. That might have been merely the prompting of a vagrant impulse. Julian cursed that impulse, on account of the circumstances to which it directly led; for there was a peculiar strain of enmity in them which had affected, and continued to affect, him most disagreeably. To behold the instinctive hostility of another towards a person whom one loves is offensively grotesque to the observer, and at moments Julian hated the doctor's mastiffs, and even hated the unconscious Rip, who lay, in a certain shivering discomfort and apprehension, seeking sleep with the determination of sorrow. There are things, feelings, and desires, which should surely be kicked out of men and dogs. Such a thing, beyond doubt, was a savage hatred of Valentine. What prompted it, and whence it came, were merely mysteries, which the dumbness of dogs must forever sustain. But what specially plunged Julian into concern was the latent fear that Dr. Levillier might echo the repulsion of his dogs and come to look upon Valentine with different eyes. Julian's fine jealousy for his friend sharpened his faculties of observation and of deduction, and he had observed the little doctor's dry reception of Valentine after the struggle on the stairs, and his eager dismissal of them both to the street door on the howling excuse that rose up from the basement. Such a mood might probably be transient, and only engendered by the fatigue of excitement, or even by the physical exhaustion attendant upon the preservation of Valentine from the rage of Rupert and Mab. Julian told himself that to dwell upon it, or to conceive of it as permanent, was neither sensible nor acute, considering his intimate knowledge of the doctor's nature, and of his firm friendship for Valentine. That he did continue most persistently to dwell upon it, and with a keen suspicion, must be due to the present desolation of his circumstances, and to the vain babble of the blue-coated Methuselah, whose intellect roamed incessantly through a marine past, peopled with love episodes of a somewhat Rabelaisian character.

At the end of five days Julian abruptly threw up the sponge and returned to London, abandoning the old salt to the tobacco-chewing, which was his only solace during the winter season, now fast drawing to a close. He went at once to see Valentine, who had a narrative to tell him concerning Marr.

"You have probably read all about Marr in the papers?" he asked, when he met Julian.

The question came at once with his hand-grasp.

"No," Julian said. "I shunted the papers, tried to give myself up entirely to the sea, as the doctor advised. What has there been?"

"Oh, a good deal. I may as well tell it to you, or no doubt Lady Crichton will. People exaggerate so much."

"Why—what is there to exaggerate about?"

"The inquest was held," Valentine answered. "And every effort was made to find the woman who came with Marr to the hotel and evaporated so mysteriously, but there was no one to identify her. The Frenchman had not noticed her features, and the housemaid, as you remember, was a fool, and could only say she was a common-looking person."

"Well," Julian said, rather eagerly, "but what was the cause of death?"

"That was entirely obscure. The body seemed healthy—at least the various organs were sound. There was no obvious reason for death, and the verdict was, simply, 'Died from failure of the heart's action.'"

"Vague, but comprehensive."

"Yes; I suppose we shall all die strictly from the same cause."

"And that is all?"

"Not quite. It appears that a description of the dead man got into the papers and that he was identified by his wife, who read the account in some remote part of the country, took the train to town, and found that Marr was, as she suspected, the man whom she had married, from whom she had separated, and whose real name was Wilson, the Wilson of a notorious newspaper case. Do you remember it?"

"What, an action against a husband for gross cruelty, for incredible, unspeakable inhumanity—some time ago?"

"Yes. The wife got a judicial separation."

"And that is the history of Marr?"

"That is, such of his history as is known," Valentine said in his calm voice.

While he had been speaking his blue eyes had always been fixed on

Julian's face. When Julian looked up they were withdrawn.

"I always had a feeling that Marr was secretly a wretch, a devil," Julian said now. "It seems I was right. What has become of the wife?"

"I suppose she has gone back to her country home. Probably she is happy. Her first mate chastised her with whips. To fulfil her destiny as a woman she ought now to seek another who is fond of scorpions."

"Women are strange," Julian said, voluptuously generalizing after the manner of young men.

Valentine leaned forward as if the sentence stirred some depth in his mind and roused him to a certain excitement.

"Julian," he exclaimed, "are you and I wasting our lives, do you think? Since you have been away I have thought again over our conversation before we had our first sitting. Do you remember it?"

"Yes, Valentine."

"You said then I had held you back from so much."

"Yes."

"And I have been asking myself whether I have not, perhaps, held you back, held myself back, from all that is worth having in life."

Julian looked troubled.

"From all that is not worth having, old boy," he said.

But he looked troubled. When Valentine spoke like this he felt as a man who stands at a garden gate and gazes out into the world, and is stirred with a thrill of anticipation and of desire to leap out from the green and shadowy close, where trees are and flowers, into the dust and heat where passion hides as in a nest, and unspoken things lie warm. Julian was vaguely afraid of himself. It is dangerous to lean on any one, however strong. Having met Valentine on the threshold of life, Julian had never learned to walk alone. He trusted another, instead of trusting himself. He had never forged his own sword. When Siegfried sang at his anvil he sang a song of all the greatness of life. Julian was notably strong as to his muscles. He had arms of iron, and the blood raced in his veins, but he had never forged his sword. Mistrust of himself was as a phantom that walked with him unless Valentine drove it away.

"I thought you had got over that absurd feeling, Val," he said. "I thought you were content with your soul."

"I think I have ceased to be content," said Valentine. "Perhaps I have stolen a fragment of your nature, Julian, in those dark nights in the tentroom. Since you have been away I have wondered. An extraordinary sensation of bodily strength, of enormous vigour, has come to me. And I want to test the sensation, to see if it is founded upon fact."

He was sitting in a low chair, and as he spoke he slowly stretched his limbs. It was as if all his body yawned, waking from sleep.

"But how?" Julian asked.

Already he looked rather interested than troubled. At Valentine's words he too became violently conscious of his own strength, and stirred by the wonder of youth dwelling in him.

"How? That is what I wish to find out by going into the world with different eyes. I have been living in the arts, Julian. But is that living at all?"

Julian got up and stood by the fire. Valentine excited him. He leaned one arm on the mantelpiece. His right hand kept closing and unclosing as he talked.

"Such a life is natural to you," he said. "And you have made me love it."

"I sometimes wonder," responded Valentine, "whether I have not trained my head to slay my heart. Men of intellect are often strangely inhuman. Besides, what you call my purity and my refinement are due perhaps to my cowardice. I am called the Saint of Victoria Street because I live in a sort of London cloister with you for my companion, and in the cloister I read or I give myself up to music, and I hang my walls with pictures, and I wonder at the sins of men, and I believe I am that deadly thing, a Pharisee."

"But you are perfectly tolerant."

"Am I? I often find myself sneering at the follies of others, at what I call their coarsenesses, their wallowing in the mire."

"It is wallowing."

"And which is most human, the man who drives in a carriage, or the man who walks sturdily along the road, and gets the mud on his boots, and lets the rain fall on him and the wind be his friend? I suspect it is a fine thing to be out unsheltered in a storm, Julian."

Julian's dark eyes were glowing. Valentine spoke with an unusual, almost with an electric warmth, and Julian was conscious of drawing very near to him tonight. Always in their friendship, hitherto, he had thought of Valentine as of one apart, walking at a distance from all men, even from him. And he had believed most honestly that this very detachment had drawn him to Valentine more than to any other human being. But to-night he began suddenly to feel that to be actually side by side with his friend would be a very glorious thing. He could never hope to walk perpetually upon the vestal heights. If Valentine did really come down towards the valley, what then? Just at first the idea had shocked him. Now he began almost to wish that it might be so, to feel that he was shaking hands with Valentine more brotherly than ever before.

"Extremes are wrong, desolate, abominable, I begin to think," Valentine went on. "Angel and devil, both should be scourged—the one to be purged of excessive good, the other of excessive evil, and between them, midway, is man, natural man. Julian, you are natural man, and you are more right than I, who, it seems, have been educating you by presenting to you for contemplation my own disease."

"Well, but is natural man worth much? That is the question! I don't know."

"He fights, and drinks, and loves, and, oftener than the renowned philosopher thinks, he knows how to die. And then he lives thoroughly, and that is probably what we were sent into the world to do."

"Can't we live thoroughly without, say, the fighting and the drinking,

Val?"

Valentine got up, too, as if excited, and stood by the fire by Julian's side.

"Battle calls forth heroism," he said, "which else would sleep."

"And drinking?"

"Leads to good fellowship."

This last remark was so preposterously unlike Valentine that Julian could not for a moment accept it as uttered seriously. His mood changed, and he burst out suddenly into a laugh.

"You have been taking me in all the time," he exclaimed, "and I actually was fool enough to think you serious."

"And to agree with what I was saying?"

Valentine still spoke quite gravely and earnestly, and Julian began to be puzzled.

"You know I can never help agreeing with you when you really mean anything," he began. "I have proved so often that you are always right in the end. So your real theory of life must be the true one: but your real theory, I know, is to reject what most people run after."

"No longer that, I fancy, Julian."

"But, then, what has changed you?"

Valentine met his eyes calmly.

"I don't know," he said. "Do you?"

"I? How should I?"

"Perhaps this change has been growing within me for a long while. It is difficult to say; but to-night my nature culminates. I am at a point, Julian."

"Then you have climbed to it. Don't you want to stay there?"

"No mere man can face the weather on a mountain peak forever, and life lies rather in the plains."

Valentine went over to the window and touched the blind. It shot up, leaving the naked window, through which the gas-lamps of Victoria Street stared in the night.

"I wish," he said, "that we, in England, had the flat roofs of the East."

He thrust up the glass, and the night air pushed in.

"Come here, Julian," he said.

Julian obeyed, wondering rather. Valentine leaned a little out on the sill and made Julian lean beside him. It was early in the night and the hum of London was yet loud, for the bees did not sleep, but were still busy in their monstrous hive. There was already a gentleness of spring among the discoloured houses. Spring will not be denied, even among men who dwell in flats. The cabs hurried past, and pedestrians went by in twos and threes or solitary; soldiers walking vaguely, seeking cheap pleasures, or more gaily with adoring maidens; tired business men; journeying towards Victoria Station; a desolate shop-girl, in dreary virtue defiant of mankind, but still unblessed; the Noah's ark figure of a policeman, tramping emptily, standing wearily by turns, to keep public order. Lights starred here and there the long line of mansions opposite.

"I often look out here at night," Valentine said, "generally to wonder why people live as they do. When I see the soldiers going by, for instance, I have often marvelled that they could find any pleasure in the servants, so often ugly, who hang on their arms, and languish persistently at them under cheap hats and dyed feathers. And I gaze at the policeman on his beat and pity him for the dead routine in which he stalks, seldom varied by the sordid capture of a starving cracksman, or the triumphant seizure of an unmuzzled dog. The boys selling evening papers seem to me imps of desolation, screaming through life aimlessly for halfpence; and the cabmen, creatures driving for ever to stations, yet never able to get into the wide world. And yet they are all living, Julian; that is the thing: all having their experiences, all in strong touch with humanity. The newspaper-boy has got his flower-girl to give him grimy kisses; and the cabman is proud of the shine on his harness; and the soldier glories in his military faculty of seduction, and in his quick capacity for getting drunk in the glittering gin-palace at the corner of the street; and the policeman hopes to take some one up, and to be praised by a magistrate; and in those houses opposite intrigues are going on, and jealousy is being born, and men and women are quarrelling over trifles and making it up again, and children—what matter if legitimate or illegitimate?—are cooing and crying, and boys are waking to the turmoil of manhood, and girls are dreaming of the things they dare not pretend to know. Why should I be like a bird hovering over it all? Why should not I—and you—be in it? If I can only cease to be as I have always been, I can recreate London for myself, and make it a live city, fearing neither its vices nor its tears. I have made you fear them, Julian. I have done you an injury. Let us be quiet, and feel the rustle of spring over the gas-lamps, and hear the pulsing of the hearts around us."

He put his arm through Julian's as they leaned out on the sill of the window, and to Julian his arm was like a line of living fire, compelling that which touched it to a speechless fever of excitement. Was this man Valentine? Julian's pulses throbbed and hammered as he looked upon the street, and he seemed to see all the passers-by with eyes from which scales had fallen. If to die should be nothing to the wise man, to live should be much. Underneath, two drunken men passed, embracing each other by the shoulders. They sang in, snatches and hiccoughed protestations of eternal friendship. Valentine watched their wavering course with no disgust. His blue eyes even seemed to praise them as they went.

"Those men are more human than I," he slowly said. "Why should I condemn them?"

And, as if under the influence of a spell, Julian found himself thinking of the wandering ruffians as fine fellows, full of warmth of heart and generous feeling. A boy and girl went by. Neither could have been more than sixteen years old. They paused by a lamp-post, and the girl openly kissed the boy. He sturdily endured the compliment, staring firmly at her pale cheeks and tired eyes. Then the girl walked away, and he stood alone till she was out of sight. Eventually he walked off slowly, singing a plantation song: "I want you, my honey; yes, I do!" Valentine and Julian had watched and listened, and now Valentine, moving round on the window-ledge till he faced Julian, said:

"That is it, Julian, put in the straightforward music-hall way. People are happy because they want things; yes, they do. It is a philosophy of life. That boy has a life because he wants that girl, and she wants him. And you, Julian, you want a thousand things—"

"Not since I have known you," Julian said.

He felt curiously excited and troubled. His arm was still linked in Valentine's. Slowly he withdrew it. Valentine shut down the window and they came back to the fire.

"You know," Valentine said, "that it is possible for two influences to work one upon the other, and for each to convert the other. I begin to think that your nature has triumphed over mine."

"What?" Julian said, in frank amazement. The Philistines could not have been more astounded when Samson pulled down the pillars.

"I have taught you, as you say, to die to the ordinary man's life,

Julian. But what if you have taught me to live to it?"

Julian did not answer for a moment. He was wondering whether Valentine could possibly be serious. But his face was serious, even eager. There was an unwonted stain of red on his smooth, usually pale cheeks. A certain wild boyishness had stolen over him, a reckless devil danced in his blue eyes. Julian caught the infection of his mood.

"And what's my lesson?" Julian said.

His voice sounded thick and harsh. There was a surge of blood through his brain and a prickly heat behind his eyeballs. Suddenly a notion took him that Valentine had never been so magnificent as now—now when a new fierceness glittered in his expression, and a wild wave of humanity ran through him like a surging tide.

"What's my lesson, Valentine?"

"I will show you, this spring. But it is the lesson the spring teaches, the lesson of fulfilling your nature, of waking from your slumbers, of finding the air, of giving yourself to the rifling fingers of the sun, of yielding all your scent to others, and of taking all their scent to you. That's the lesson of your strength, Julian, and of all the strength of the spring. Lie out in the showers, and let the clouds cover you with shadows, and listen to the song of every bird, and—and—ah!" he suddenly broke off in a burst of laughter, "I am rhapsodizing. The spring has got into my veins even among these chimneypots of London. The spring is in me, and, who knows? your soul, Julian. For don't you feel wild blood in your veins sometimes?"

"Yes, yes."

"And humming passions that come to you and lift you from your feet?"

"You know I do."

"But I never knew before that they might lift you towards heaven. That's the thing. I have thought that the exercise of the passions dragged a man down; but why should it be so? I have talked of men wallowing in the mire. I must find out whether I have been lying when I said that. Julian, this spring, you and I will see the world, at any rate, with open eyes. We will watch the budding and blossoming of the souls around us, the flowers in the garden of life. We will not be indifferent or afraid. I have been a coward in my ice prison of refinement. I keep a perpetual season of winter round me. I know it. I know it to-night."

Julian did not speak. He was carried away by this outburst, which gained so much, and so strange, force by its issue from the lips and from the heart of Valentine. But he was carried away as a weak swimmer by a resistless torrent, and instinctively he seemed to be aware of danger and to be stretching out his arms for some rock or tree-branch to stay his present course. Perhaps Valentine noticed this, for his excitement suddenly faded, and his face resumed its usual expression of almost cold purity and refinement.

"I generally translate this sort of thing into music," he said.

At the last word Julian looked up instinctively to the wall on which the picture of "The Merciful Knight" usually hung. For Valentine's music was inseparably connected in his mind with that picture. His eyes fell on a gap.

"Val," he exclaimed, in astonishment, "what's become of—"

"Oh, 'The Merciful Knight'? It has gone to be cleaned."

"Why? It was all right, surely?"

"No. I found it wanted cleaning badly and I am having it reframed. It will be away for some time."

"You must miss it."

"Yes, very much."

The last words were spoken with cutting indifference.