The Way Home (38 page)

Chief of these, and most tiresome of all, was the idea that he could not -- or must not -- sleep of a night, as long as his father and mother were out. Did they attend an evening party, he tossed restless till their return. And if in spite of himself he dozed off, it was only to start up with the cry: "Is my Papa and Mamma come home yet?" Nannan was at her wits' end what to do with him; and more than once boldly transgressed her instructions about absolute truth in the nursery. For it was not as if Master Cuffy really wanted his parents, or even wanted to see them. No sooner did he know they were back, under the same roof with him again, than he turned over and slept like a top.

The mischief was: they were out almost every night. For, in violent contrast to the hermit's life he had been leading, Mahony was now never happy unless he was on the go. An itch for distraction plagued him; books and solitude had lost their charm; and an evening spent in his own society, in this large, dark, heavily furnished house, sent his spirits down to zero. They had brought many an excellent letter of introduction with them; a carriage-and-pair stood at their disposal; and so, except for an occasional party of their own, they went out night after night, to dinners, balls and card-parties; to soirées, conversaziones and lectures; to concerts and plays. They heard Tietjens sing, and Nilsson, and Ilma di Murska; Adelina Patti with Nicolini; and a host of lesser stars. Richard said they must make the most of their time; since it was unlikely they would ever be on this side of the world again. To which, however, Mary now secretly demurred: or not till the children are grown up. For, though foreign travel meant little to her, she was already determined that her children should not miss it -- it, or anything else in life that was worth having.

In the beginning, she was heartily glad of the change in Richard's habits, and followed him without a grumble wherever he wished: he wouldn't budge a step without her. But, as week after week went by, she did occasionally long for an hour to herself; to prowl round the shops; see something of the children; write her letters in peace. As things stood, it was a ceaseless rush from one entertainment to another, not to mention all the dressing and re-dressing this implied. Done, too, with Richard standing irritable and impatient in the hall, watch in hand, calling: "Now do come along, Mary! -- can't you hear, my dear? We shall certainly be late."

She comforted herself with the thought that it was not for long: they had taken the house only for a twelvemonth; and there was talk, as soon as the weather improved, of a trip to Ireland to see Richard's sisters, and to the Midlands to visit Lisby, now Headmistress of a Young Ladies' Seminary. So, in the meantime, Mary went without her tea to sit through interminable political debates; or struggled to keep her eyes open at meetings of learned societies, where old greybeards droned on by the hour, without you being able to hear the half of what they said. "I suppose it does somebody some good!" thought she. Richard, for instance, who had read so many clever books and enjoyed teasing his brains. Herself, she felt a very fish out of water.

Nowhere more so than at the spiritualist seances, which, for peace' sake -- and also because everybody was doing it -- she now regularly attended. London was permeated with spiritualism; you hardly met a person who was not a convert to the craze. The famous medium Home had already retired, on his marriage, into private life, much to Richard's disappointment, but he had left scores of imitators behind, who were only too well versed in his tricks and stratagems. The miracles you could see performed! Through the ceiling came apports of fresh flowers with the dew on them, or roots with the soil still clinging; great dinner-tables rose from the floor; lights flitted; apparitions appeared, spoke to you, took you by the hand. But nothing that happened could shake Mary's convinced unbelief. She was of those who maintained that so-called "levitation" was achieved by standing on your toes; the "fire-test" by your having previously applied chemicals to the palm of your hand; while the spirits that walked about were just so much drapery on a broomstick. And it invariably riled her anew, to see Richard sitting solemnly accepting all this nonsense as if it heralded a new revelation. Of course, many clever men besides him were the dupes of their own imagination. Learning and common sense did not seem to go together. She preferred, thank you, to trust the evidence of her own eyes and ears.

However, she kept these thoughts to herself, patiently doing all that was required of her in the way of linking hands in dark rooms, hymn-singing and the rest, with only an occasional silent chuckle at the antics of the believers. But then came an evening when circumstances forced her hand. Well, yes . . . that was partly true. They were at a sitting with a medium of whom she had long had her doubts; and, on this night, the evidence for fraud seemed to her so glaring that she determined to put it to the test. For once, Richard was not beside her. Instead, on her right, she had a lady who fell into raptures at each fresh proof of the "dear spirits'" presence. Stealthily bringing her two hands together (as Tilly had long ago instructed her), Mary freed one from this person's hold; and, when "spirit-touches" were again proclaimed by her neighbour (they never visited her!) she made a grab, and just as she expected, found the medium easily recognisable by her bulk -- crouched on her knees inside the circle, with a long feather whisk in her hand. In the dark, and in utter silence, a struggle went on between them, she holding fast, the medium wriggling this way and that, and ultimately, by lying almost flat on the floor, contriving to wrench herself free. Not a word did Mary say. But at the end, when the lights were turned up, it was announced that the "spirits" complained of an unsympathetic presence in the circle; and after some hocus-pocus with slate-writing, etc., she, Mary, was designated and asked to withdraw.

Richard, pale and extremely haughty, made the best of the situation in face of all these strangers, none of whom but eyed Mary as if she were a moral pariah. Inwardly he was raging; and he freely vented his anger in the carriage going home.

"There you have it! Your mulish obstinacy . . . your intolerable lack of imagination. . . your narrow, preconceived notions of what can and cannot happen!" Till Mary, too, lost her temper, and blurted out the plain facts of the case. "I knew her by her figure. What's more, I distinctly felt the big wart she has on the side of her chin."

But with this, it seemed, she merely displayed her ignorance. For the spirit body, in manifestation, was but the ethereal shadow cast by the physical, and its perfect duplicate. Richard also went on to crush her with St. Paul's "terrestrial and celestial"; harangued her on the astounding knowledge of the occult possessed by the early Christians. It was no good talking. Everything she said could be turned against her.

As she brushed her hair for the night, however, she could not resist remarking, in a final tone: "Well! all I know is, if these really are spirits who come back, it doesn't make me think much of heaven. That the dead can still take an interest in such silly, footling things!"

"Quite so, my dear. You keep your traditional fancy picture of semi-birds and harps and crowns. It best suits a mind like yours to make its heaven as remote and unreal as possible. For the truth is, you no more believe in it than you do in the tale of Cinderella."

"Really, Richard! . . . what next, I wonder? -- Though I must say, I don't think there's much to choose between harps and things, and playing concertinas and tilting tables. One's as stupid as the other."

"Well, how else . . . can you perhaps suggest a better way for a discarnate being to make its presence known? Every beginning is crude -- and always has been. Though, for that matter, what is the Morse alphabet they use on the electric telegraph, but a series of transmitted raps?"

"Oh, I'm not clever enough to argue about these things. But I know this: if I go to heaven, I hope at least to find there'll be something something really useful -- to do."

But when the light was out and they lay composing themselves for sleep, she heard Richard mutter to himself: "There may be . . . there probably is . . . fraud. And why not? . . . do not rogues ofttimes preach the gospel? But that there's truth in it -- a truth greater than any yet dreamed of -- on that I would stake my soul. Ours the spadework. . . God alone knows what the end will be."

The result of this affair was that Mary no longer frequented seances. On such nights Richard went out alone, and she sat comfortably by the fire, her feet on the fender, her needlework or the children at hand.

But not for long. As suddenly as Richard had thrown himself into the whirl, so suddenly he tired of it, and at the first hint of spring -- it was early February; birds had begun to twitter in the parks, the spikes of the golden crocus to push up through the grass, and Richard petulantly to discard his greatcoat -- on one of these palely sunny days he came home restless to the finger-tips, and before the evening ended was proposing to start, then and there, for the Continent. Why should they not shut up the house, send the children to the seaside, and jaunt off by themselves, hampered only by the lightest of luggage, and moving from place to place as their fancy led them?

Why not? There was, nowadays, no practical reason why he should scruple to satisfy any and every whim. And so his roughly sketched plan was carried out. With the sole difference that they took Cuffy with them. For, as soon as Nannan heard what was in the wind, she marched downstairs and said bluntly, she did not choose to shoulder the entire charge of Master Cuffy. The child was anyhow but poorly, what with the colds and things he had had since getting here; a walking mass of the fidgets besides; and if now his papa and mamma were going away as well, she guaranteed he'd worry himself, and everybody else, into a nervous fever. Mahony cut short the argument that followed by saying curtly: "We'll take the youngster with us," and pooh-poohed Mary's notion that travelling would be bad for the child. Much less harmful, said he, than staying behind and fretting his heart out. Besides, Ann would be there. Ann could look after him.

And so it came about that Cuffy journeyed in foreign parts, bearing with him, snail-like, all that stood to him for home.

Of these early travels, the most vivid memory he retained was, oddly enough, the trifling one of being wrapped in an opossum-rug and carried in some one's arms from a train to a ship, and back to a train. But in those buried depths of his mind to which he had normally no access, a whole galaxy of pictures lay stored; and, throughout his life, was the hidden spring that released them touched, one and another would abruptly flash into consciousness. As a small boy they put him in many an awkward fix; for he could never prove what he said, or even make it sound probable; and, at school, among companions whose horizon was bounded north, south, east and west by the bush, they harvested him a lively crop of ridicule and opprobrium. ("A tarnation liar . . . that young Cuffs Mahony!") But there were houses built in water -- somehow he knew it -- and bridges with shops on them. Boats with hoods, too, and men who stood up in them to row with a single oar. There was a statue so big that you could climb into its nose and sit there, and look out of its eyes: rivers, not red and muddy but apple green; a tower that leaned right over to one side; long-legged birds that built their nests on chimney-tops. -- But then again, on the heel of such bold assertions, a sudden doubt would invade the speaker; a doubt whether he had not, after all, only dreamt these things. With no one to whom he could turn for confirmation, with every object that related to them lost or destroyed, Cuffy, throughout his later boyhood, swung like a pendulum between fact and dream, and was sadly torn in consequence.

For, the Channel behind them, Richard's restlessness broke out in a new form: it seemed impossible for him to be content in any place they visited for more than a day or two on end. In vain did Mary protest: "But, Richard, we're not seeing anything!" Within a few hours of his arrival in a town, he had had enough of it, sucked it dry; and was fidgeting to be off to the next on their line of route. Nor was this itch for movement all. The strange food did not suit him: he either liked it too well and ate too heartily of it, or turned from it altogether. Then the noisiness of foreign cities -- the cobbled streets, the rattling of the loosely hung vehicles, the loud foreign voices, the singing, the tambourining -- got on his nerves, and, together with the unshaded windows of hotel bedrooms, kept him awake half the night: him spoilt, for how many a year, by the perfectly darkened sashes, the ordered silence of his sleeping-room at "Ultima Thule." And all the beauties in the world could not make up to Richard for lack of sleep. Or, to turn it round: rob him of his sleep, and you robbed him of all power to enjoy fine scenery or handsome monuments. And so they sometimes arrived at a place and left it again, without having really seen very much more of it than the four walls of a room.

Before they had got any distance, it became clear to Mary that Richard's travelling-days were . . . well, one could hardly say over, when they had only just begun. The truth was, they had come too late. He was no longer able to enjoy them.

It was not the physical discomforts alone that defeated him. The fancies he went in for, as soon as he set foot on foreign soil, made his life a misery to him. In Paris, for instance, he was seized by a nervous fear of the street traffic; actually felt afraid he was going to be run over. If he had to cross one of the vast squares, over which vehicles dashed from all directions, he would stand and hesitate on the kerb, looking from side to side, unable to resolve to take the plunge; and wasn't he angry with her, if she tried to make a dash for it! His own fears rendered him fussy about Cuffy and the maid's safety, too. He wouldn't hear of them going out alone; and insisted every morning on shepherding them to their walk in the Public Gardens. If he was prevented, they must drive there in a fiacre. Which all helped to make the stay in Paris both troublesome and costly. Then there was that time in Strasbourg, when they set out to climb the tower of the cathedral. It was certainly a bad day to choose, for it had rained in the night and afterwards frozen over, and even the streets were slippery. But Richard was bent on seeing the Rhine, and the Vosges, and the Black Forest from the top of the steeple; so up they went. As far as the platform, it was plain sailing. But on the tower proper, when they were mounting the innumerable stone steps -- all glassy with ice, and very tricky to keep a footing on -- which led to the spire, he turned pale, and confessed to giddiness . . . it was true you looked through the wide-open stonework right down to the street below, where people crawled like ants. And after another bend in the stair, he clinging fast to the iron hand-rail, he had ignominiously to give in and descend again: backwards, too! "I felt I should either fall through one of the openings or throw myself out. Great heights are evidently not for me."