Unknown (106 page)

The quiet doctor actually jerked himself forward to the edge of his arm-chair, till, with only the tip of his buttocks—where his erect and angry tail would have been switching if he had possessed one—resting upon its very verge, he drew with his forefinger a crucial outline upon the air—“such a Cancer,” he cried, “as would keep him Alive and Howling for a Million Years!”

“I went through Paradise yesterday,” remarked Barter. “The poverty's pretty bad down there still, in spite of all this new work that Crow's been giving people.”

The doctor, who had now relapsed panting into the depths of his chair, took up the subject with a groan. “I should think it ivas pretty bad! It's few of the natives who get this work. He's brought in a lol of new men from Bristol and Bath, a stronger, better-fed type, and more docile too! There'll be another rioi before our folk expect it, and a much more serious one than that little affair at the Pageant, when they mobbed Lord P.”

“What do you think. Doctor, will really come of all these diggings and buildings out at that well? Do you think GeaTd will get a steady crowd down here every year—or only just on the day he opens the tiling? John was telling me it would be opened between Christmas and the first of January.”

“My good friend,” said Charles Montagu Fell, pointing at Barter with the stem of his cherry-wood pipe, “what people forget is thisl In all these improvements, whether Geard brings them in or Crow, the real pain of mind and body goes on where people haven't the heart or the health to get the benefit of such things. That's the point that's always forgotten. I'm a doctor, and a doctor's profession's naturally with the unfit rather than the fit. And I tell you the tragedy of life is in the rubbish heap. People talk of the sufferings of the strong, and how you ought to help 'the strong rather than the weak, as if the weak were a type of animal that didn't feel. I tell you suffering is like a fungus that the strong can carry about with them, and still bustle and strut, whereas with the weak the fungus is too heavy. They can't hold it up. It pulls 'em down. But it don't numb their feeling! They're nothing else but feeling—feeling and fungus!”

"But aren't the poor used to itV* protested the man from Norfolk.

Dr. Fell sank back in his chair and pushed his fingers through the stubbly grey hairs that stuck out from his low forehead.

“He's one of the ugliest chaps I've ever seen,” thought Barter, “but he has good ideas and good drink.”

“No, Barter, no, no! that's another pretty, comforting, easy lie! The human consciousness is not confined to what you can see of the body, or of the habits of the body. We all carry about with us something distinct from the body, the thing that says, 'I am L' This something, this soul, never gets used to any human situation! It finds itself 'landed' or ?t finds itself riding the waves. It's never used to anything.”

At this point in the conversation both the men started up straight in their chairs and glanced at each other.

“Someone's moving about, up there,” said Mr. Barter grimly.

Dr. Fell's countenance expressed savage loathing. He listened intently. Then he gave a sigh of relief. “It's the rats, Barter. It must be the rats. They become lively in the Autumn.”

“I hope so,” remarked the other.

They both listened again. No! that was the sound—to the doctor's ears quite unmistakable—of heavy woollen slippers, a little too large for the feet that wore them, stumping, plockety-plock . . . plockety-plock, along the landing above.

“It's her!” whispered the doctor. “My God! It's Bibby!”

They listened again and once more there was silence. Everything in the house was as still as the centre of a wood covered with new-fallen snow. And then the sound began again—plockety-plock . . . plockety-plock . . . above their heads.

Mr. Barter was not easily disturbed, but he was shocked to see a man he liked as he liked the doctor, give way to his nerves as he did now.

Charles Montagu Fell leapt to his feet and began hitting that low forehead of his with his two fists, hitting it quite hard and repeating as he did so, over and over again, an expressive if not ancient English word of one syllable, which the propriety of learned taste has excluded from the Oxford Dictionary. .

“Sorry, Barter,” he murmured, with a shame-faced grimace, when this manifestation was over, “but you've never known what it is to live with someone who . . . with someone who . • . gets on your nerves to such a pitch.” He came up close to his friend now and laying a finger on the man's sleeve, whispered in his ear: “You don't know what the word loathing means, do you, Barter? Loathing . . . loathing . . . loathing! It's much worse than hatred. I can tell you that, anyway!”

Once more they drew apart and stood listening. And once more those flopping steps inside those loose, soft slippers became audible.

Mr. Barter was of an unimaginative disposition, but even he became aware of something rather horrible in the sound of those steps, combined with its effect upon the nerves of his friend.

“I don't like going off/5 he said, looking round uneasily, ”and leaving you like this."

“Oh, she'll quiet down as soon as we open the door,” returned the doctor. “You note how she does. It's really rather funny; but the joke, as Heine said of something else, is somewhat stale.”

He moved to the door as he spoke and opened it, making a sign to the other man to listen. It was exactly as he had said. The steps in the loose slippers retreated, with that peculiarly unpleasant sound, a little accelerated, as they caught the vibration of the closing of a door*

“Gone to earth,” said the doctor grossly, and he proceeded to open the street door. They stood together on the doorstep. The rain had ceased, and there was upon the night a faint taste, like a thin, diffused chemical salt, of that early hour of the morning.

Suddenly there was uplifted into the silence of the sleeping town a premature cock-crow. At once, though it was really just as dark, both of the men seemed to feel the approaching dawn, feel it like the smell of some kind of sea-breath brought up on the winding tidal ditches, from Bridgewater Bay. The absolute stillness of the wet pavements and clammy cobblestones and slippery roofs and drenched eaves had a curious effect upon the two men. They both had the same feeling although neither told the other. They both felt as if Glastonbury, at least, in her sleep, were an actual, living Creature!

Barter turned round before he descended the dripping steps to the silent pavement and shook hands with his friend. Very tightly did he grasp the man's fingers.

“Finish the bottle before you go up!” he said, and the words seemed to fall upon the wet nakedness of Glastonbury like a rattle of shot from a boy's catapult.

“One of these days I'll murder her,” returned Charles Montagu. “Would you come to the Taunton Jail to see me, Barter?”

“Shut up, you fool, and finish that bottle!” But when he glanced back, before he went down Northload Street towards High Street, he saw that the doctor was standing there still, watching him go. “Maybe I ought to have stayed all night with him,” he thought. He waited for a minute watching his figure at that door and wishing it would go into the house. Something seemed to be holding Thomas Barter back on that spot, and not allowing him to depart and forget Dr. Fell. No situation between human beings is more curious than when, after a separation, two people look back at each other. It is especially curious when, as now, they both seem unable to stop looking at each other, clinging to each other with their eyes! Barter had the feeling that it was not he who was going off—but his friend. He felt as if the doctor were standing on the deck of a liner, and as if he had just one more chance of running down the gangway. But no! The bridge was up now, and a widening gap of wickedly dark water was separating its hull from the wharf!

He waved his hand. He could not resist the impulse to do this. It was indeed the merest chance that he resisted the urge to run back. But the figure on the steps turned now without making any sign and went into the house and the door was shut.

Mr. Barter proceeded slowly down Northload Street. He walked a little faster when he reached the centre of the town, directing his steps towards his George Street room, but, for all the good whiskey he had drunk, his thoughts were heavy, cold and stiff, like a load of staring-eyed dead fish on a blood-stained wheelbarrow. He met no one—not even the old Glastonbury policeman, not even a prowling cat. All the shops had their shutters fast closed. All the houses had their blinds down. He cast an indifferent lack-lustre eye upon these houses as he went along. Here was one a little bigger than the others and even more obstinately closed up. There were iron railings with spikes upon them in front of it and along these railings rows and rows of minute raindrops hung. The whole place was so silent, under the chilly darkness before dawn, so motionless and sepulchral, that these little quivering rain-drops catching specks of faint light from a pallid street-lamp seemed more alive than such water-drops usually are. Barter, however, cast an unseeing, unapprecia-tive eye upon them. It would be hard to say what natural object at that moment—short of a falling meteorite—would have arrested his attention. Probably even his foreman at the Municipal, an artist in his showing off before Sally Jones, had more of what is called aesthetic appreciation than Mr. Barter. But he did observe one object with a faint interest in connection with this )articular house, as he moved along by these pallid raindrops, uid that was a massive gilded plate, which was also illuminated )y the neighbouring lamp, and upon which he read the words 'John Beere, Solicitor.“ He had often been nudged by a loquacious waitress in the Pilgrims' dining-room—this was in Clarissa's lay—and told to observe the passionate gluttony of this shortsighted old gentleman. ”I'll buy whiskey in future,“ he thought, ”and keep the bottle at the restaurant. That girl would look after it for me. The woman at home would drink it"

His mind called up the alternatives, and he tried to weigh them against each other. The cosiness, the good cooking, the ale, on the one hand, but with hostile wenches, set on to bait him by Clarissa; and on the other, a filthy, dreary little chop house, with wretched cooking, but with a buxom, nice girl, to bring him his bottle, carefully guarded by herself, and with hot water and lemon gratis if he wanted them!

The importance of this dilemma had brought his steps to a momentary stand in front of Lawyer Beere's house, and before going on he glanced up at its mellow Queen Anne fagade. There was a night-light, at any rate, some extremely faint lamp-light, burning behind the closed blinds of one of the upper rooms.

“That awful Angela!” he said to himself with a little shudder, as he went on down the street. To a nympholept, of Barter's pragmatic complex, the mere fact of a feminine creature being unresponsive to his advances relegated her to a worse than undesirable category.

Angela Beere, as a matter of fact,—far Barter was right about it being her room—-always put out her light when she went to bed, but today, because of the terrific storm of rain that had descended upon the close of her party, she had pressed her friend Persephone to stay the night with her and not to attempt to return to Dickery Cantle's unappealing place, and to this proposal Percy had consented, making the stipulation, however— for she never slept in total darkness—that there should be at least a night-light in the room. At the very moment Mr. Barter was going by, the younger of the two girls, excited and restless, was whispering to the other.

“I can't read enough of those books about it,” Angela was saying. “He's got the most thrilling ones—every one that's been written, I should think!” She was referring to the heathen Grail of the old Celtic mythology and to her new friend, Mr. Evans.

There was something weird about this whispered conversation in those last hours of that night, before the faint, cold dawn-breath—more like a sigh of something dying than a cry of something newly born—crept over the wel. hills, stole along the tow-paths, touched the gateposts and the dams and the stone bridges and the floating weeds in the ditches with its silent approach. Both the girls were sensitised and spiritualised to an unusual pitch of feeling, but nothing could have been more different than the way they felt.

“I love to hear you, Angela! Go on, go on! Tell me more!” Thus did Percy reply; thus did Percy encourage her, but in her heart she drew away. Why was it that nothing seemed to satisfy her, to hold her, to cast a spell upon her that could last? A curious and subtle weariness weighed upon her now. There seemed something mysteriously sad about everything in life, as she saw things now, in the deep silence, only broken by this feverish voice at her ear.

Had Mr. Evans been permitted—like Iachimo in Shake-spear's play—to pass a vigil in that chamber, his Druidic imagination would certainly have been stirred to the depths by the sight of those two lovely heads under the faint illumination of that flickering night-light in its small crimson glass. How white was the complexion of the younger! How gipsy-brown that of the other! Persephone's dusky curls lay against her pillow like autumn leaves upon snow, and her face had a far-away, weary look, as if the enchantment she sought were not here . . . not anywhere in this rain-drenched, silent town . . . not anywhere in all this Gwlad-yr-Hav of Somerset . . . perhaps not anywhere in all the round earth! The soft hair of the other head, on the contrary, under that dim light, looked like a heap of scattered autumn crocuses, but her cold eyes and her smooth white cheeks were alive with feverish excitement as she narrated, in her passionate, furtive whispers, the story of the Cauldron of Ceridwen. “That Cauldron was the real Grail, you know, and it was that that made Taliessin young!” Then, without a second's pause, catching her breath in a particular way she had, she plunged into the tale of Math, Son of Mathonwy, which Mr. Evans had shown her in the Mabinogion. “Arianrod—which means Silver Circle—laid a destiny upon her son Llew,*' she whispered, ”that he shall never have a wife of the race that now inhabits this earth. 'Well,' said Math, 4we will seek, thou and I, by charms and illusion, to form a wife for him out of flowers.' So they took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and produced from them a maid, and they baptised her and gave her the name of Blodenwedd."