The Dawn of Reckoning (14 page)

“No, she is living, and will, I think, recover. But the baby is dead…She
had a fall some weeks ago, if I remember rightly…”

“Well?”

“Undoubtedly that was the reason. Most unfortunate…Otherwise…”

When he went upstairs to her all he could do was to kneel
down at the bedside and press his lips to her outstretched hand.

“Stella—dear—Stella, my dearest darling—
What
a
shame!
What
a shame…”

She stroked his forehead, comforting him.

Yes, it seemed to him that he had failed. He sat in his
study during the long lonely hours of the early morning; the nurse had sent
him away from Stella’s room, not wishing her to be kept awake. He sat in his
old arm-chair, surrounded by the books he loved; he loved them, but they had
played him false; they had not taught him how to do the ordinary simple
things of the world that needed doing. Written up across almost everything he
had ever tackled he could read in his mind’s eye the verdict: This man did
the wrong thing, said the wrong word…meant well, poor fool, but made a hash
of everything…

Whereas others in their very blindness did right, and by their very
failures were made heroes.

Dawn found him still there in the quiet book-lined room, pondering on a
strange perverted twist in his soul. Some day, he told himself again and
again with unrelenting confidence—
some
day he would succeed,
would snatch victory, if need be, from the very jaws of death…

Ward was due to arrive in England at the beginning of the
following December. Many of his colleagues were Australians, and the English
contingent returned in an ordinary passenger liner with what seemed no doubt
to them the minimum of publicity. They had reckoned, however, without the
all-embracing activities of modern journalism. This return of Ward and his
companions, occurring as it did during the depth of a particularly lifeless
autumn, attracted the frenzied zeal of a half-desperate Fleet Street. For
weeks before the
Oruma
reached Tilbury the full orchestra of the great
“dailies” had been preparing for the event. “The physician Ward,” like a
popular novelist or actor, had somehow appealed to the capricious taste of
the public, with the added benefit that it was Fleet Street, and not the man
himself, who scored the financial advantage.

The story of Ward’s undoubtedly heroic exploit, meagre in its certified
details, had been so elaborated by people gifted with journalistic
imagination that the figure of Ward stood as that of a Siegfried, giving
vicarious disproof to the complaints that England was becoming altogether
decadent. School children were told of Ward in the same sentence as of Drake
and Florence Nightingale; during the two months of the rather slow homeward
voyage from Tasmania by way of Sydney, Ward’s fame grew and spread and became
fierce like a prairie fire fanned by a high wind.

What happened might, of course, have been expected. On the arrival of the
boat at Tilbury crowds of press-reporters and photographers gave the
returning adventurers some foretaste of what they might expect. A multitude
numbering at least five thousand surged round the cramped Fenchurch Street
Station when the boat train came in, and insisted on staying until they had
seen their hero. Their hero, however, escaped by a side exit and took a taxi
to his hotel, a quiet one in the neighbourhood of Bloomsbury, well-known only
to a few carefully selected families from the Provinces. In a few minutes the
sleuths of Fleet Street had tracked him down, and in a few hours the quiet
hotel in Bloomsbury was as well-known to the world as Claridge’s and the
Savoy.

Popular frenzy knew no bounds. The soberer journals, without in any way
disparaging Ward, deplored the extraordinary madness of the enthusiasm. No
foreign crowned head had ever been lionised on such a colossal scale. If Ward
went to a theatre the audience cheered him more than the play; if he walked
down Bond Street little knots of people followed him till as a last resort he
had to take a taxi back to his hotel. He gave interviews good-humouredly,
signed autographs for a solid hour every morning, and wrote several articles
to Sunday newspapers for almost incredible sums.

Then, towards Christmas, the enthusiasm died down almost as suddenly as it
had risen. By the beginning of the New Year, Ward was, in the journalistic
sense, quite “dead”; even the news that he had taken the post of surgeon at a
famous London hospital did not attract a great deal of attention. He had,
however, established himself permanently as a well-known personage, and both
the book he was writing and the lectures he was proposing to give were
certain of being popular successes.

At Chassingford, Philip and Stella found Ward looming even
larger and larger on their horizon.

Ever since the first cable containing news of him they had found it
impossible to keep him out of their words and thoughts. They talked of him
cordially and affectionately, as of a true and valued friend whom they were
both of them proud to know: And now, with Ward’s name shouted from all the
newspapers, and with everybody in Chassingford full of gossip about him, it
was small wonder that, without their noticing it, a legend of him came into
being and took habitation with them.

It was Philip who would say, after dinner during the long lamp-lit winter
evenings: “When I was at Cambridge Ward used to…” Some anecdote, pointed or
pointless, with Ward for the hero. And then Stella would take up the tale
with: “Did you ever notice when Ward used to come here how he…” The Legend
was all about them, wrapping them round, enchanting them somehow, and each in
a different way.

Sometimes they rebelled against it, as if the clouds lifted suddenly and
revealed to them the spell that had been cast over them. “Good God, we’ve
been talking about Ward for two solid hours!” Philip exclaimed once. “He
seems to be the only subject that makes us fluent.”

That was before the newspaper “boom.” When that came, it was easier for
Philip to explain the prominence that Ward held in their conversation; easier
also to let themselves talk frankly and endlessly about him. They were not
always in the mood for hero-worship. Sometimes they argued whether the sort
of bravery Ward showed deserved any special praise at all, since apparently
it was natural to him and required far less deliberate courage than Philip
had to expend every time he made a public speech. Sometimes, especially at
the height of the “boom,” they talked a little condescendingly of him, as of
a mere popular idol. And once Stella cried out furiously: “Oh, for Heaven’s
sake let’s stop talking about the fellow altogether. I’m sick to death of
hearing his name from early morning till late at night. Even when I’m asleep
I dream about him!”

Philip’s voice quickened curiously: “What’s that?—You dream about
him?
Do
you?”

“Yes, often. Last night I dreamed the house was on fire and he saved us
all from being burned to death.”

She laughed oddly, as if to throw doubt upon whether she were speaking
seriously or not.

They were rather surprised when weeks passed by and Ward did
not visit them. “He must know we’re here,” said Stella. “Perhaps, though, he
feels he’s too big for us now.” Philip shrugged his shoulders rather
irritably. “We’re as good as he is, Stella, and I can’t imagine him fool
enough to think otherwise. Most likely he’s afraid we should lionise him if
he came here.”

“Oh, but we wouldn’t, would we, Philip?
I’d
promise not to, anyway.
Do
write to him and ask him to come.”

That was one mood. At another time she would implore Philip not to ask him
to come. “He used to frighten me. Oh, don’t bother about him, Philip.”

Then one evening Philip returned to Chassingford after a day in town. “I
met Ward in the Strand this morning,” he said, observing Stella closely.

She started, and something sharp and strange flashed into her eyes. “You
did?—Really?—And what happened?”

“Oh, we talked. He insisted on lunching me at Simpson’s. And I asked him
to dinner.”

“Here?”

“Yes; why not?”

“But Philip, I told you why not…I don’t want him to come…I couldn’t
bear him—there’s something about him that—that oppresses me…And
you promised me you wouldn’t ask him…Oh, Philip, why
did
you when
you knew…?”

“It’s all right.” His voice was like a could douche upon her excitement.
“You needn’t get alarmed. He declined my invitation.”

“He couldn’t come?”

“Couldn’t…or wouldn’t.”

She gave a faint gasp of relief. “That’s lucky…isn’t it?” she said,
weakly. “But you oughtn’t to have asked him…”

Three hours later before going to sleep she said uneasily:
“Philip, I wonder why Ward wouldn’t come?…If he won’t accept an invitation
from you, I think I’ll write to him…myself…”

And she added, with careful slowness: “I’m—I’m not going to be silly
about him any more.”

But it happened that when she wrote a note to Ward asking
him to come to a dinner-party at the Hall, he replied to her as he had done
to Philip—by a courteous refusal. He was too busy; his work at the
hospital would not allow of his going so far out of town and so on. She wrote
back immediately a sharp, extremely feminine letter that she would probably
have torn up on a second reading, “I don’t believe that your work prevents
you from visiting your friends,” she wrote. “You can choose your own
evening—or make it lunch if that suits you better. There are good late
trains from Chassingford to town, and in any case we should be able to put
you up for the night. If you don’t come, Philip, I know, will be both hurt
and disappointed…” She posted the letter in hot haste, as if aware that a
delay would probably result in its being torn up.

By return an answer came, not to her but to Philip, stating that although
he (Ward) was very busy, he would try to look them up some time in the near
future if they would fix on a suitable evening.

“So now,” said Philip, as he handed her the letter, “you’ve got what you
want, or else what you don’t want. Which is it?
I
don’t know.”

“And neither do I,” replied Stella. Then she gave him a look
half-imploring, half-defiant, and returned the letter without glancing at it.
“An acceptance, I suppose?”

“Yes. Shall I ask him for next week?”

“To-morrow if you like,” she replied instantly. “It makes no difference to
me.”

In the end Philip selected and Ward agreed to an evening
about a week later. When the day came the weather was wild and
rainy—one of those fierce January days that die fighting, with
twilight, calm as death, to give an awful quietus to the roaring of winds and
rain. The darkness, when it crept over the mist-hung lawns, drew with it a
pall of silence, more terrible by far than the storm that had raged all day.
Philip was away in a neighbouring town on business, and Stella took tea alone
amidst the sombre cosiness of the library.

There were times in her life, and this was one, when she felt that all her
years in England and in an English household had meant nothing to her; that
deep down in her was a heart-beat still untamed by the colder northern clime.
Something, she felt, was on the verge of happening; something that would
resolve her out of uncertainty into a sharp tumultuous confidence. The Hall,
with its breathings of distant days and traditions which she did not and
could not share, appeared cold and foreign to her; she was an interloper, and
the old walls, by their very calmness, were telling her so. Only yesterday,
it seemed, she had sat on the floor against Philip’s knees and had listened
to him expounding to her all the small accurate things that were not worth
knowing. How kind and good he was to her, and had been, ever since their
first meeting. He loved her, she knew, with a love that was like the rest of
him, tireless and at times tiresome; a love that never flagged and never
rioted; that was at once patient and profound; intellectual without romance
and physical without passion.

She poked up the fire and lit an Egyptian cigarette. The hours crawled on;
the night was very dark and still. Something, she was sure, was going to
happen…A strange thing was already in her heart that had never been there
before; a fear of the house itself, of the long dark corridors and the black
windows with the blinds yet undrawn. Almost in panic she climbed the stairs
to her bedroom and began to dress for dinner.

Ward came.

The first thing she noticed was the merely physical change in him. Somehow
she had never reckoned on his coming back any different. He had been ill, she
knew, but it had never occurred to her that his illness would alter his
appearance.

Now she stood almost aghast as Venner ushered him into the drawing-room.
She drew in her breath tightly, as if facing an apparition; but she perceived
the truth subtly and at once; he had gone out to the Antarctic a boy and had
come back a man. There was manliness in every line and furrow of his face;
the old winsome, almost unearthly boyishness had grown into a grim and
passionate virility. He did not look so young as he was, but had instead a
deep half-tragical maturity that seemed perfectly in accord with the touches
of iron-grey hair round his temples.

She felt, as she met him and as he gave her hand a quick indefinite
pressure, a sudden leaping up of something within her, as at a new and
decisive contact. The twinkling electric lights of the drawing-room swam
together into a dim opaque mist in which Ward, grim and dinner-jacketed, was
the heroic centre-piece; a curious columnar immensity about him seemed to
dwarf and obscure all else for the time being, so that she had no presence of
mind to do anything but smile weakly and avoid his eyes.