Читать книгу The Secret Sanctuary (Historical Novel) - Warwick Deeping - Страница 6

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The car dropped them on Ockham Common, and Stretton turned straight from the black road to the heather.

"Let's get off the track," he said.

They made for a great knoll covered with Scots firs. A soft autumnal sunset was very near, and the level rays of the sun lay gently on these splendid trees, lighting up the rust-red and orange of their throats and powdering their green tops with gold. There was no wind moving. The slopes of the hillock were slippery with fallen fir needles. The place had an intense stillness, and Beal—very sensitive to all impressions—felt that when they passed in among the tree trunks a curtain of mystery fell behind them. The road was less than a hundred yards away, and full of the haste and hootings of many cars heading Londonwards after the Saturday rush somewhere out and somewhere home. And yet the road and its machine-made life did not seem to matter. On the knoll with its soaring trees life was on a different plane, and these hooting hurrying things belonged to a cruder and a more material world.

They sat down among the firs. Stretton, with his arms about his knees, seemed interested for the moment in watching the stampede upon the road. Cars of every type and colour went by, like shuttles attached to a black thread, and shot mechanically from one point to another. Motor-bicycles detonated and buzzed among and between the larger beasts of the herd. The whole road seemed to flow from nowhere to nowhere. And yet this stream of restlessness had a fascination, an ironical suggestiveness, the haste of people escaping from something. And what was that something? Themselves, boredom, the thoughts that might come to them in a solitary place? Did they drive, or were they driven?

"Do you notice anything, doctor?"

Stretton's face was tilted, and there were faint lines about his eyes.

"It is all profile," said Beal.

"That's the very word. I have been watching those people, and I have seen only one face turned this way. They look straight up the road. Do you think they see anything else?"

"Perhaps not. Most people are in such a hurry."

"Speeding up the Deity, what, till he becomes an Ike in a forty horse-power car! I wonder what pleasure they get out of it?"

"Oh, something," said Beal; "tree philosophy isn't fashionable. That's the crowd's idea of progress."

Stretton stood up. He leant against the trunk of a fir, and his eyes went to the tree tops, while one hand moved to and fro with a caressing motion, the figures rubbing against the bark. His face was very much softer; it had lost its expression of strain and of fierce bafflement, and to Beal his slim, tallish figure became one with the trees.

"I feel that I want to get away from that sort of crowd, Beal, from the whole machine-made show. And yet I am tied up in it."

"How?"

His eyes left the tree tops and met Beal's.

"Well, you see, I haven't a shilling. Even my tobacco comes out of the governor's pocket. Pretty humiliating after four years of war, and I am still rather proud. We were proud out there."

"Why do you say 'still'?"

"Doesn't pride wear rather thin when the world rubs you to the bone? I've been told so. And I have seen it pretty threadbare—men turned spongers for the sake of someone else."

"Oh, it depends," said Beal; "I remember a poor devil telling me he couldn't afford to be proud; but he had pride of a sort; he shot himself. You are not going to do that."

Stretton looked at him, and his eyes held a challenge.

"How do you know?"

"I don't know. There are two sorts of suicide, the reasoned considered suicide, and the suicide of impulse. But—bosh, my dear chap, life's too good; fill up your pipe."

He brought out his own pipe, and standing up stood looking towards the further woods with the glow of the sunset upon them. His face seemed to grow luminous in sympathy.

"Just that," he said, pointing with the stem of his pipe, "and dozens of things like that. We talk such a lot of drivel at times, but get down to bedrock. There are things that matter, and matter so deucedly, that they won't let us alone. We simply can't chuck in our hands. Don't you believe that there is something behind it all?"

"I don't know, Beal. Do you?"

Beal was filling his pipe. He lit a match, and holding the flame to the tobacco, sucked steadily.

"Just as much as I believe my tobacco will burn."

"I thought no scientific people would allow—Of course, there are exceptions."

"Pretty good exceptions. What about Pasteur, for instance? Was ever a man more thorough as a scientist? Was there ever a man who helped humanity as he did? Look here, Jack, about fifty years ago the scientific school got swelled head; it was bumptious and aggressive, and it had excuses, but that swelled headedness has been coming down. Now we are allowed to mention a thing called intuition. I believe in intuition. I believe some of the older people used to call it faith."

"Faith in what?" said Stretton with a slightly defiant lift of the chin; "that we are the best sort of people in the best sort of world!"

Beal stood a moment with the bowl of his pipe gripped in one hand.

"No; that we are here to learn, that we have been here before, and that we shall be here again. But come on, reincarnation or no reincarnation, I want a walk."

He plunged down the hill, carrying his hat in his hand, and Stretton went after him.

"I say, doctor, one moment."

Beal paused on the low bank surrounding the mound. His face still had its luminous distant look.

"Do you really believe that we are here to be taught?"

"I do. It is the only belief which explains things, pain, and disease, and poverty, and wars, and love, and that something in us which is always reaching out to that which is felt but not seen."

"You mean, that if we go on being vulgar and beastly and selfish, and refuse to learn, we are bunged back into life until we do?"

"Exactly."

"But that's mysticism!"

"One of your father's labels! What's behind, beyond? Come along."

He had one glimpse of Stretton's face as they turned together towards the further woods where the yellow bracken foamed at the feet of the trees. It was a face which seemed to flash out at life like a suddenly uncovered lamp. The man had a look of swiftness, of the runner suddenly leaping forward towards a new horizon which a lifting fog had uncovered. He seemed to hold his breath for a moment, and then to breath more deeply.

"Beal, I was going to ask you a question, but now I am wondering whether I ought to ask it."

"I should ask it."

"Do you think it is ever going to happen again?"

He did not look at his companion, but walked straight forward with his eyes on the woods, nor did he see the contraction of Beal's forehead, or realize the other man's struggle with a sudden temptation. Beal believed in suggestion, but there were occasions when suggestion might be a dangerous lie.

"It may."

He spoke quietly, but quickly, a deft surgeon doing what he had to do and knowing that he was inflicting pain.

"It may, and it may not. I don't want to use a lot of technical language. Supposing I say that you came out of the war with a mental wound, and that the wound has not quite healed, but that there is no reason why it should not be healed."

"I see," said Stretton, still looking into the distance and brushing the bracken with his hands.

They were moving slowly up the slope of a hill with their backs to the sunset, and at the top of the hill they turned and looked back. The knoll across the valley stood outlined against the sky, its black trees rising in a sheaf with the red sun in their midst. The stretches of faded heather were full of reds and purples.

"Yes, it does matter," said Stretton very softly.

They walked on under the autumnal trees, and for a while Stretton had a silent fit upon him; he was feeling things, not thinking about them; the mood was intuitive, much as Rollin Beal had wished it to be. There are some problems that cannot be reasoned out, others that can be argued about till they become dead and formal. Life is otherwise; it strikes a sudden blow on the hot iron, it comes with a rush of spring sunlight from behind a cloud.

Stretton began to talk. At first he seemed to be groping his way, but in a little while he saw life clearly, and his voice grew stronger and more assured.

"It seems to me that I have got to break away on my own. You have to sail your own ship on your own sea. I feel that I want to get right away—in among a lot of trees. I don't need people; people irritate me, but if I have to have people I should like them to be people who do things, simple things."

"Yes, I see all that," said Beal.

They emerged upon a sandy lane, and Stretton turned to the right.

"I know a quiet way back, away from those cars."

He walked with his head up, and with a new air of elasticity.

"Machines seem to pick up the personalities of the people who use them. They cease to be things. Do you know what I mean? Yes, of course you do. People get on my nerves, Beal, the modern people who rush about and who can't sit still. Things don't, things like trees and plants and tools. I like to look at them, handle them. They seem to give you something which a lot of chattering, newspaper humans never do."

And then he stretched out his hands, arms stiff, fingers extended. His spread fingers closed upon his palms.

"I feel that I want to use my hands, hold things, you know, work with them. It's as though I had a crave in me for that sort of life. Do you understand?"

"Perfectly. It's somewhere in your blood and marrow."

Dusk fell upon them in the lane as it went from woodland to meadow and from meadow to woodland, the autumn colouring of the hedgerows growing dim like the colours in an old and faded picture. The sky, streaked with red under a shelf of purple cloud, changed to pale gold. Stretton's face seemed to stand out from it with a glowing meditative seriousness. Even when the darkness came his face retained a suggestion of light.

"Well, that is the idea, that is the feeling I have. It is not that I am funking my fellow men. I had plenty of solitude in jail, and I am not afraid of solitude; in fact, I think I want it. I'm strong, physically, and pretty hard. I don't get worried about the weather."

He laughed.

"That's a good sign, isn't it? Now where does all this lead to, doctor? There must be a particular sort of life which would help me to make good. Do you agree?"

"Certainly. Put your inclination into words."

"I feel that I would like to own a bit of land, a bit of rather wild land, with some wood and heather. There might be a cottage, or I would put up a shack of my own. I would teach myself to grow things and to make things. In time I would learn to farm in a small way. Do you see the sort of life I mean?"

Beal walked for fifty yards before answering him.

"Well, why not?" And then he added: "But it is not going to be an easy life."

Stretton understood him at once.

"You think that a man who has been used to knocking about town would be bored, that he could not tackle a quiet life like that?"

"It depends on the man. I would back nine men out of ten to fail."

"Doesn't it depend on what is inside the man?"

"He has got to be extraordinarily interested in things, and not very interested in people."

"Yes, that's true. But I am extraordinarily interested in things, Beal. I have found that out. It is part of my temperament."

"And it is an extraordinarily happy one, and a rather rare one. Well, why not?"

Stretton was silent for some seconds. Even in the darkness Beal felt a recrudescence of his spirit of defiance.

"There is one big obstruction."

"Money?"

"Yes, money."

Somehow Beal had expected this, and was not unprepared for it.

"Supposing your father financed you, bought you a little place and settled so much capital on you?"

"Isn't that sponging? I don't think that I could swallow it."

"Your medicine, my dear chap, your medicine!"

"But isn't it a rotten sort of thing to do?"

"Well, you can include me among the rotters. Do you know that my dear old dad gave me a hard-earned five thousand and gave it me when he was alive. 'Look here, Roll,' he said to me, 'here's a stepping-stone. I am pretty sure you will know how to use it.' I did use it. And it saved me ten years of useless drudgery and waiting. What I have managed to do in the years I have had would have been halved, Jack, without that precious freedom, the power to work, to think, to investigate, to follow one's own inspiration. It was a gift of the gods. And do you think I forget it? That, and the memory of the man who gave it are solid facts under one's feet."

Stretton had a quick answer to this, a generous answer with the edge of it against himself.

"Yes, but look at the difference. You had a career; I'm a cracked pot to be put carefully in a corner."

"Stretton," said Beal, swinging round on him and catching him by the arm, "get away from self-pity; it's the very devil. It's the beginning of a man's decadence. Now I'll give you a straight choice."

They stood in the dark lane, looking at each other in one of those swift silences.

"Your father is a rich man."

"I suppose so."

"I take it that you expected to inherit something? Well, if he offers to give it you now—why be over-squeamish and difficult about it? Money is not dirty. We—the users of it—are either clean or dirty."

Stretton's head dropped slightly.

"Thanks, Beal," he said; "but do you mind if I make one stipulation? I should like someone in the family to say yes or no to it. Do you understand me?"

"Supposing we put it to Car?"

"Yes; I will take Car's verdict. He's straight and he understands."

They walked on into the darkness, while some five miles away John Stretton's father, the happy conqueror of some old bunny like himself, came out into the soft autumn night and found Smith ready with his motoring coat. The light from the doorway fell on Bartholomew's chubby face, his grey sports coat, yellow cardigan and baggy breeches. In one pocket bulged the three-shilling ball he had won; he always took such trophies home and showed them to his wife.

A voice came out of the vestibule:

"What about to-morrow, Stretton? My revenge, you know."

Bartholomew's face crumpled a little.

"Sorry; I've got a visitor; I'm afraid I can't desert him."

"That's all right. What about next Saturday at two-thirty?"

"Right you are. It's a fixture."

Smith helped him on with his coat.

"Dr. Beal arrive all right, Smith?"

"Yes, sir. He's out for a walk with Mr. John."

"Oh, is he?"

"I ran them to Ockham, sir, and they are walking home."

Bartholomew Stretton got into the car, and Smith wrapped a rug round his legs. Old Stretton's right hand felt the golf ball in his coat pocket. The car was swinging round across the drive, the light from its headlights flashing on the leaves of the laurels and the rhododendrons. Stretton stared straight ahead. His mind flickered with a patchwork of very human reflections.

"If only we can settle the boy's future! So disturbing! Anyhow, I beat Lambrick—three and two. That's the fifth ball I've won off him. He thought he had me cold at the thirteenth! Yes, I had John on my mind there. I wonder if Beal has any idea? Very sound man, Beal. Three and two! Not so bad when I was down at the thirteenth! I must show Lavie the ball; she'll be pleased. She has been so upset about John. Now, what the devil are we to do? We must do something."