# The Mad Busman, and Other Stories/'To the Unknown—'

pp. 281–321. First published in Good Housekeeping, June 1924.

### VIII
#### "To the Unknown——"

I
LYN ROSCOE turned to look back at the room before he closed the door. It was a very beautiful room and a strange contrast to the dim landing and the chill stone stairs, sombrely lit by a gas-jet, and leading down, like the stairs of a prison, into a black well. It breathed out warmth, a rich fragrance, a conscious serenity. It was like a wealthy and lovely woman who is at peace with herself and the world because she is strong and unassailable and there is nothing that can be denied her. By the last glimmer of the fire he could see the stately mahogany writing-table and his books, shining a mellow golden brown and mounting in serried ranks high up into the shadow. The thick Turkey carpet, where the light caught it, glowed back luxuriously.
And yet, Roscoe thought, there was something lacking still. Enid and he had gone over it point by point the day before, and Enid had said in her low, comfortable voice, "It's quite perfect, Lyn," and he had agreed because, for the life of him, he could not have pointed out anything that was wrong. Besides, it would have seemed ungrateful. She had lavished such generous care over every detail that could minister to his comfort. She had foreseen every errant fancy as though his mind had been an open book to her. Her understanding had always been wonderful, a little laboured perhaps, and rarely reaching down into the final secret, but earnest and painstaking. It was as though she had said to herself, "He is a great man and all great men are queer," and she had set herself to learn the unexpected turns and twists of his temperament as a rider learns the tricks of a nervous thoroughbred. If he had suddenly demanded the moon she would have looked at him with her calm, pure eyes and said, "Yes, Lyn, if we can get it you shall have it, dear." But he felt she would not have understood why he wanted it. And he could never explain.
When he had told her of this room she had responded gallantly, without so much as a change of colour, though he knew how such a break in the rhythm of their lives would trouble her. She had nodded, smiling.
"I've often wondered how you could bear it, always at home, always in the same atmosphere. And then the children, they don't mean to be naughty. And it isn't naughty for children to be naughty, is it?"
And she had set out with him to find this ideal workshop, and when they had found it in the noble rat-haunted Adam's house overlooking the misty river she had thrown herself into the furnishing with all the energy of her orderly her mind. She had even astonished him with the opulence of her ideas. In the home a she was careful, a trifle cheese-paring, but for this nothing could be too rare. He fancied she liked things better if they cost more.
"I haven't forgotten how you used to write on cheap paper in that awful Bloomsbury attic. Poor Lyn! Now you shall have everything—everything you fancy, dear."
And he had been touched and somehow saddened by her air of calm, royal triumph.
It was a beautiful room. He closed and locked the door with a sigh. Queer that he had not been able to work there. He had come to it in the early morning, his heart thudding against his ribs for very hope. Perhaps now, he had thought, in the midst of such harmony, the old fires would re-kindle, the old torturing, glorious spirit of creation would come back to haunt him. (But at the bottom of his heart, curled up malevolently, had been a little cold fear. And all day long he had sat at the handsome table and looked out over the grey river, at the masts piercing the mists and the motor-launches scurrying like rats over the turgid water, and the tumbled pile of warehouses that had looked back at him with their air of sober romance. And from time to time he had set down a few sentences of the new book—perfectly adequate neat sentences, technically unexceptional, lifeless, colourless.
The little cold fear had uncurled itself. The very peace seemed to strip him naked so that for fear of what he should see he had got up to escape—to get back to Enid and the children and the beautiful Lutyens house (built out of the proceeds of his last success). In the midst of their cheerful warmth he would laugh at this attack of nerves, thinking, "Why, I'm the biggest novelist living. I can sell every line I write. I'm on the top of the crest." And he would sit down in his immaculate evening clothes to a well-ordered table, and the servants would fit decorously among the shadows of the softly lighted room. And over the fresh-cut flowers he would look across at Enid and meet her smile, so serene and gracious and content.
But he did not go straight home. Instead he turned into a sinister little alley which ran down-hill from the Strand and crossed the broad Embankment with its clanging trams and bustling traffic to the river's edge. There he stopped, leaning his elbows on the stone parapet as he had done once before when he had been a very young man, waiting for nightfall and a chance to curl up, undisturbed by prowling policemen, on one of the benches and go to sleep. He could remember everything he had felt and seen that night. He had not eaten for twenty-four hours, and his last decent pair of boots had just burst hopelessly across the instep. But he had been like a god. The idea of "The Last Adventurer" (afterwards it had run into thirty editions) had just come to him, and his mind was like a huge brilliantly lit stage on which the characters lived, apart from him, free-will creations of an omniscient creator. He had not known that his body was numb with cold and weak from hunger. Every inch of him blazed with light. He had been so happy that he had cried and he had bowed his starved young face in his hands and had poured out a humble, heaven—besieging prayer of praise and gratitude. Ludicrously happy. The long terrible night of germination was over. The seed had broken through the hard earth and now was to come fruition—harvest.
It had happened suddenly. He had gone, as a last hope, to a publisher who had once, years before, promised him a job, and the publisher had sent down a bored message that he was busy. Enid had brought the message. So he had seen her for the first time. He had looked into her quiet dear eyes and it had been done. Something had gone out of her to him and touched him with a transfiguring glory. So strong, so fine and steadfast she had seemed in her youth and goodness. She had spoken to him gently, with a sorrowful understanding for what must have been pitiably apparent, and the low full notes of her voice, with its hint of a brooding motherliness, had been like music in his ears, like soft rain on his hard heart. He had stammered some futile answer and had gone out. But now he loved. The crude youthful bitterness had melted like snow at the breath of spring. The world shone with warmth and colour and sunshine. He had become miraculously reconciled to life and man and the floodgates of inspiration were flung wide.
Then years of fine work and clean-limbed, clear-eyed austerity—hard years of grinding poverty and rich happiness. Then the war. He had fought and written. He had renounced life, like other men, with the simple gesture that ennobled him and gave him dignity and peace. There was a night in the trenches before that last onslaught when he had written the finest lines of his work, and had felt serene and ineffably joyous as though he had broken through into the presence of God.
He remembered it all as one remembers an old story. But the spirit of it was lost to him. It concerned some one else—a young fellow, lean and ardent, burning like a tall white-hot flame.
From where he stood he could see Blackfriars Bridge, spanning the gulf in a golden arch, and the buses running across like anxious fireflies. Somewhere in the mist Westminster lifted a proud, watchful shadow. Beneath were the lightless hulks of ships, asleep after their long voyage. One of them he could distinguish—scarcely more than a trawler, slender and over delicate, which to-morrow with its handful of a crew was to set out for the frozen ends of the earth, seeking knowledge but most of all the old glory of living—danger, suffering and perhaps death.
He closed his eyes and listened to the footfalls of the passers-by. They came out of silence and grew loud and clear and died into silence again. And in each sound was a mystery—a universe. He seemed to be standing on a lonely rock in the midst of life, looking down into its magic waters in which romance floated like seaweed, spreading itself in lustrous golden pattern against the stony bottom, moving softly with the tide. But when he caught it out into the air and light it fell dead and colourless in his hands.
He thought: "I'm old." But he knew that that was absurd. He was not forty yet. It was the fire that had gone—the splendid authentic fire that blazing down upon each lifeless incident made it to glow and live.
"It's my soul," he thought. "My soul's grown fat. If it ever grows thin again it'll be because it has withered." And suddenly the little fear be came monstrous and closed down on him like a cold hand. And he turned, shivering, away.
It held him until the moment when he heard his key turn in the lock. Then, in the soft, warm light of the hall it let him go. But he had a queer conviction that this time it had slunk into the house and lay in wait, watching him.
A prettily uniformed housemaid fitted across the passage into the dining-room. The familiar fragrance of a gracious refinement and meticulous order laved him like a narcotic. It stupefied unrest and dissatisfaction. He caught a glimpse of himself in the hall glass as he passed and saw the handsome, calm face of a successful man. Enid called him from the drawing-room and he went in. A clean bright fire was burning. The silver rose-bowl on the Sheraton table flickered with its dancing reflections. There were flowers everywhere. All the crude flamboyant expression of his youthful taste had long since been weeded out and there was not a picture or ornament in the room that was not exquisitely right.
Enid had been sitting by the fire. Now with a slow strong movement she rose to meet him. She was tall and once she had been slender but she had broadened out into a lovable matronliness. Her crown of fair hair was as thick as it had ever been, and if there were lines on her pleasant face they were the ennobling and beautiful lines of some one who has never thought basely or unkindly.
He liked the simple black dress she wore. He always like the way she dressed. Step by step, without a stumble, she had kept pace with him.
She put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him softly on both cheeks.
"Late, Lyn!"
"A little, dear. I'm sorry."
"It doesn't matter a bit. I warned cook. Don't change. Just run up and say good night to the children."
He went up into the dark sleepy nursery. He had always loved this moment—so touchingly intimate and tender—but to-night an odd sense of unreality lamed him. These two drowsy scraps of life whose hot fingers twined themselves into his, were they really his children? He felt like a cold unsubstantial shadow of himself.
Afterwards he sat opposite Enid, just as he had foreseen, and the prettily dressed parlourmaid stood by the sideboard, motionless and watchful for his slightest need. It struck him for the first time as odd that a friendly human being should be in the room and that they should not speak to her. There was a time—on the Embankment, for instance when she would not have spoken to him but shrunk away.
He looked up and met Enid's smiling eyes.
"Did you have a good day, Lyn?"
He laughed ruefully.
"Not very, I'm afraid. I stuck fast."
"I knew you would." She nodded to herself, with a look of tender happy wisdom. "It's all so new—too new. I could see you, you know—like a boy with a roomful of new playthings—moving about, picking them up, spreading yourself in lordly possession before the fire. But after you have worked a little it will grow warm and familiar. It will get a heart. And you will settle down."
"That's it," he said, smiling back at her understanding.
He knew that his fear grinned cynically, and he thought how strange it was that two people should live together, day in, day out, for years, loving each other, knowing each other's moods and fancies, and yet know nothing of the dark secret places of each other's lives. He looked at her stealthily. How calm and satisfied she was! Of course they loved one another. No serious cloud had ever overshadowed their married life. She was everything that a woman could be—generous and brave and loyal. as She would die for him and the children—he would die for her—taking it as a matter of course—gladly.
And yet——
That first meeting—those few days of wooing—those first months of divine intimacy. Was it true that then to have been in her presence had been to live in the light that was not of this earth—that her touch had had the power to lift him above the reach of pain or sickness or despair? He had walked Paradise like a humble god because of her kiss.
And then——
Something insidious had happened. Their first child had come. It had been born in anguish and amidst all the hideous squalor of their grinding poverty. For a few days she had been unrecognisable—a shattered human personality, wrecked, helmless, and his love and pity had risen to intolerable heights. But afterwards something had gone, the golden glory, the ecstasy of worship. He had become suddenly the leader—the bearer of burdens, the protector who could look in future to nothing higher than his own strength. He noticed that when she sang to herself she sang a little out of tune. And she had an annoying trick, when she was thinking, of drumming with her fingers on the table. But he had always been very gentle and tolerant because he was just and because he loved her deeply.
So they had come down from their Pisgah, slowly, hand in hand, with no ugly falls by the wayside. And ever since they had walked the pleasant plains together and the less fortunate had marvelled at their serene happiness.
Their love was like those sentences he had written—balanced, unexceptional.
"Lyn, Mrs. Carruthers called this afternoon. She asked after you. I could see how disappointed she was to find only the author's wife at home. She said how she loved your last book."
He had started guiltily. (What did it matter about his last book? Why couldn't people understand that a creator cares nothing for what he has created but only for the thing that he is to create—for that other chance of complete fulfilment?)
"It's very kind of her." Then he exploded with a good-natured laugh, "The woman's an ass."
"Yes, I know, dear. But I like her."
"Because she likes my books?"
She blushed girlishly.
"It may be that."
They smiled into each other's eyes. He knew that the parlourmaid was thinking in her vernacular, "Aren't they sweet on one another?"
And then suddenly there broke out of his heart a withering, terrible cry:
"Shall I never feel like that—never, never love again like that? Never—in all my life?"
II
It was a strange place to find in a great city. In the midst of the restless clamour and movement was this cavern of silence—enormous, reaching up into unlimited obscurity, bounded by invisible mysterious barriers. Though it was early in the afternoon it was full of a yellow darkness. The many-eyed lamps that struggled against the fog stared but gave no light. The great pillars were like monster trees, looming out of the night and spreading vast sable branches overhead. Stray footfalls sounded loud and solemn down their avenues. An occasional verger fluttered, black-winged, from one shadow to another.
Lyn Roscoe had come here, following an errant fancy. There seemed nowhere else to go. He had not been able to work in the beautiful room overlooking the river. And he did not want to go home because of Enid's sympathy and understanding. She would have been so gentle with him, humouring what would have seemed only another of those unhappy sterile moods from which genius suffered. Then, as the low door of the Abbey had swung to behind him, he had been aware of an instant dramatic change. He seemed to have left his listless disillusioned maturity behind in the noisy street. Even his success had dropped from him. The statues of the great dead that in the daylight dwarfed and deformed the transept were now living ghosts who communed silently with one another. They shone above him with some pale inner radiance. Among them he felt suddenly young and unsophisticated and humble. He went forward with baited breath like an adventurer on the verge of an undiscovered land. And from step to step he became more aware of tension—of a tightening of all his faculties to an acute sensitiveness, a stirring of the torpid blood.
The fog made it seem that he was passing from one half-lit cave to another. In the circumscribed orbit of yellow light were pews, and here and there a bowed faceless figure of some other traveller resting by the wayside. He came suddenly into a clearing. It was as though the trees of this strange wilderness had been cut away to make place for a great camp or for some stupendous ceremonial. The light from the great window overhead was like the last glimmer of an unearthly sunset. It confused him. He stumbled against something and drew back quickly, almost afraid, as though the obstacle had been a living thing—helpless and tender—which he had hurt. He bent down and touched it and petals of dead flowers fell from his fingers. Then he knew. Of course. He knew, too, though he could not read, what was written on the sodden crumpled card:
"To the Unknown——"
He remained there, arrested. The sense of some great impending event was strong on him. It was as though a door were about to be flung open, and again, as in the old days, he should feel and see poignantly.
So great was that suspense that he held his breath, waiting. Then he knew that he was not alone. Some one was standing on the other side of the grave, a slender, shadowy figure. A woman. She was so still that he did not know how long she had been there. She did not seem quite real. Her face was bowed. She might have been some sorrowful revenant. And then through the yellow dusk his astonished eyes gathered the reassuring humanness of her dress—the graceful fur cap set on the dark hair, the austere lines of her coat and skirt, the muff in which her hands hung loosely clasped. There was an unexpected poise and confidence in her bearing because somehow he knew already that she was quite young
With a flash of the old imaginative vision he thought, "She is still a girl. But she has lost some one she loved and has suffered a great deal."
He felt that it was not decent to look at her or wonder at her. He bent his eyes to the ground again. Neither of them moved. It seemed a long but not a painful waiting in which they were both groping towards one another with just the grave between them.
Suddenly she looked up. The pale oval face was like a faint light through the gloom. Her dark steadfast eyes met his and the strange intimacy that had been conceived in the silence and emptiness broke into life.
"We three," she said, "three unknown people who will never know each other's names, or where we are going, or whence we come."
It did not seem in the least strange that she should speak to him and in these terms. The place was set apart from the rest of the world and here humanity met stripped of its conventions and its insincerities. To the end of time whatever was spoken or thought here would have to be true, and the thought that she had expressed was inevitable. It had been in his mind, too, so that her voice with its faint foreign inflection was like an echo.
"Yes, it's strange," he said, "and very pitiful."
"You too were a soldier?" she asked simply.
"Yes."
"You might have been here."
He nodded, and then without premeditation, as though his sub-consciousness had broken through his guard, he said:
"A great deal of me does lie buried there, a great deal of every one who survived—faith, enthusiasm."
"Romance," she said.
He started a little. That was somehow a releasing word. It had been as though she had touched a note that vibrated through all his nerves. He answered gravely:
"I hadn't thought of that, but it is true."
"People will always come here," she went on in the same remote way, "people who have lost no one and will gaze down and dream and wonder. Who was it? Some simple boy who didn't think much about anything, too simple to be even afraid perhaps. A fearless fellow who didn't suffer at all, a coward who went into it shrinking, a brave man who was horribly frightened, a lover, a genius, a coarse young man who kissed his girl and got drunk on Saturday nights. And all of them, if they had been told they were to lie here would have joked about it, the poet most of all, because he was English, and you English laugh when other people cry."
He smiled gently across at her.
"You know us very well."
But she seemed intent on her own thought.
"They should have written: 'Here lies the most romantic thing that ever happened in the world.'"
"And the most tragically ironical."
"If we had known his name—'Thomas Atkins, the representative of the common man'—it would have been different, wouldn't it? We should have known who he was. His picture would have been in the papers and we should have paid him one visit of respect. But to the Unknown, we shall come back to him for ever. It's the unknown that we seek, that makes it possible for us to live. It's like a high mountain that no one has ever climbed, or an untravelled country, or"—she stammered a little as though all at once she had realised how strange it was that she should be thinking aloud—"or like some one one loves for the first time."
He did not answer. Her voice with its faint mysterious accent and its eager sincerity touched him deeply. He felt that it was very wonderful that she should speak so openly of what was in her heart. He felt oddly gentle and humble towards her.
She turned away a moment later and he turned with her and walked beside her. The unearthly yellow darkness was growing grey with the onset of evening. A hurrying verger peered at them admonishingly.
"Hurry out, please. Closing time."
But even he spoke in an undertone.
"We're going back into the world," she said.
It made him realise what had happened.
"When I came in, I don't know even now why I came, it was the fog and—well, the dreariness of going home to a comfortable home and a good dinner, and I was feeling inert, utterly blank. Now I feel as though I'd lived through some sort of experience."
"I think only some one with a dead soul could come in here and not be changed," she said with her quaint air of wisdom.
"Then my soul's not dead." He smiled wistfully. "Do you know, I almost thought it was. I couldn't feel anything, and I was scared, terribly frightened. I could have cried with relief because my heart jumped when you said, 'Romance. Here lies the Greatest Romance——'"
She was silent. They went down the transept side by side. The door swung back behind them and the spell which had made their odd companionship seem so natural was broken. They were plunged in a chill reality. And yet something fantastic and faërie still lingered about them like a faint cloud of incense. They looked at one another. It seemed to him that he saw her for the first time. She had been a sort of spirit with whom his spirit had spoken. Now she was a stranger—a woman. He saw her lifted face in the light of a street lamp—a pale, girl's face, elfishly beautiful, ardent and proud and candid.
She held out her hand.
"Shall we? Because we both understood?"
He stammered, half laughing.
"Why, that doesn't seem a reason, does it? For saying good-bye like that. Wouldn't you let me see you safe through the fog? I'm awfully, horribly respectable."
"I don't know that I am. I think I'm an adventuress. That isn't respectable, is it? But if you want to, my rooms aren't far from here."
"You're—you're not English, are you?"
"I'm a Russian."
"A Russian."
"Does that frighten you? Not a Bolshevik."
"A princess," he said whimsically.
"I was one. A princess in exile. It doesn't matter. Now there are only princesses in fairy stories."
"I write fairy stories for grown-up people. I used to live in one. I'd almost forgotten what it was like. I'm beginning to remember."
The fog swirled around them in a yellow cloud. From the side street into which they had turned they could hear the sullen roar of traffic and see the lights groping their way through like stupefied fireflies. But they themselves walked alone. Their footsteps rang out like the steps of survivors in a desolate city.
"You're Lyn Roscoe, aren't you?"
He came out of his reverie. He had been imagining, wondering. A princess. Why, he might have known it. That indescribable air of race, of ancient familiarity with the highest and best in life which gave her that subtle poise and dignity. A princess. Some one who had lost everything—and nothing.
"Yes, I'm Lyn Roscoe," he said stupidly, "whoever he may be."
"I was sure. Not in the Abbey, but outside. I'd seen your picture. But you looked older in the picture. You seem too young."
"For what?"
"To have written like that."
"How do you know?"
"I read a book of yours. It's upstairs in my room now. I bought it when I was very poor and I read it when I didn't know whether I could live. I had memories, you see, which made living very difficult. I couldn't drive them away for a moment. Then I began reading and suddenly I found that I had forgotten—for a whole hour."
"I'm glad," he said unsteadily, "I'm glad I helped, princess."
She shook her head.
"Oh, no. Not that. That's over. I'm Marie Barenoff, an artist who makes an honest living painting dishonest portraits here."
She had stopped and he stood hat in hand before her in the dripping darkness. He felt oddly young and gallant and light-hearted.
"We're not the Unknown any more, he said. "We've been introduced. We know each other."
She answered with her queer gravity.
"We know each other's names, Mr. Roscoe."
That night Enid came out to meet him. Perhaps she had been anxious. She put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him. But he was busy getting out of his coat and her lips just brushed against his face.
"You're late, darling."
"I suppose I am; I'm sorry."
"I'm not. I'm glad. It means you've had a good day's work, doesn't it?"
"Work? Yes, it began to come—for the first time." He wondered why he lied to her. He had never lied to her before. He was excited. His hand shook a little. "How did you know?"
She laughed. Was it only his fancy or was there something puzzled and seeking in her tranquil eyes.
"Because—because you look as though something wonderful had happened to you."
III
He took her his first book and read it to her. As he read he was astonished that he could ever have written anything so beautiful. Surely somebody else had written it. And at first he was full of anguish because of all that had happened to him. He seemed to be looking down on the grave of a young man and thinking, "If only you could have been spared and I taken." But gradually he began to remember. It was as though in secret some one were blowing softly on dying embers and that they began to glow and kindle.
Marie Barenoff sat opposite him in the firelight and listened, and each time that he lifted his eyes to her he received the impression of her like a red hot brand upon the heart, so that he caught his breath in a kind of exquisite pain. Fine and keen and beautiful as a Damascus blade she seemed, strong and infinitely delicate.
He loved the room in which she was set like a jewel. It was different from anything he had ever seen. It was an attic that was a studio by reason of its northern skylight and led into another attic that was her bedroom. The walls sloped so that it was like a magic cave full of treasure. Everything in it was rare and beautiful and unconscious of its beauty. An ikon of faded gold and rich dark colours, mellowed with age, hung where the light fell upon its austere and mystic piety. There were strange stuffs too, falling in gracious lines, into which antiquity had woven an inexpressible pathos. Everything had suffered and seen suffering but none of them had known indignity.
She was like that too. Even as he read his subconscious self was busy with her. Behind the reserve which guarded the life from which she came he visioned Horror itself. There must be blood on many of those relics. She said that she had been poor and fugitive, but she did not know what ugliness was—the ugliness of quiet respectable homes and fumed oak furniture and passionless virtue. He thought of his own home with its order, its spruce second-hand perfection, the fluttering white-aproned maids, the shining modern silver, the too great cleanliness. And Enid—Enid, so tranquil and assured and gracious in her black dress, so eminently right.
And his heart contracted with a kind of nausea, of satiety, of disgust.
He closed the book and let it drop scornfully on the floor beside him.
"It's great," he said. "I can say it now, because I shall never write like that again."
He put his face down in his hands, hiding from her.
"Yes—yes."
"You don't understand," he went on dully. "I'm a successful man. I've got everything, a comfortable home and money and reputation. I've got two lovely children and a wife who is the finest woman in the world, who is faithful to me and to whom I have been faithful to my last thought. No, it is all finished, the adventure is over. I'm safe in port. Nothing happens there."
"One takes on cargo," she said dreamily. "One awaits the tide."
Her voice, metallic and sweet, shook his heart. He looked up at her with a faint smile.
"What do you know of life?"
It was a question, asked not in mockery but in wonder. She was leaning forward now and colour had come up under the pallor of her skin like light shining behind ivory. Mysterious and alien she was, young and infinitely old. He felt that those grey eyes had seen countries and strange things that had gone under in a world cataclysm. She was a sort of exquisite survival of something that was lost for ever but which he could still remember, more and more vividly, like a slow return to consciousness from a deep narcotic, the life which he had once lived so ardently, which he had said farewell to with so young and gallant a gesture, marching at the head of his men to the song of the drums.
"I used to be like you," she said. "It was a sort of prison and I looked through the bars, wondering if they would ever melt and let me out. I had so much, so many people to love and be loved by, such pretty dresses, such swift, beautiful horses, servants who bowed to me when I passed. And then, in one night, all gone."
"Marie Barenoff," he murmured. It was as though he had seen it all, the magic splendour, the secret gathering together of evil, desperate forces, an explosion, the wild rush of flames striking at the stars, dark flying figures, a red-hot molten mass, sinking to a sullen smouldering darkness.
"Then I came here," she said more lightly, "like a strange migratory bird flying from storm into all this peace, taking refuge for a while till it has preened its wings for another flight."
"Couldn't you be content?" he asked hurriedly.
She shook her head.
"Like you?"
He made a gesture of resignation.
"No—no, I wouldn't have you like that. I want to think of you always, princess, living and growing."
"Mr. Roscoe, why do you call me 'princess'?"
"Mayn't I? Since I think of you as one. am such a plain fellow—a bit of a snob, perhaps. I've never known a princess before. It's like a bright patch of colour somewhere in my mind. I shall always say to myself, 'I knew a princess once, a real princess who set out on the great adventure which I have missed.'"
"There are all sorts of adventures, Mr. Roscoe. Wasn't that an adventure too, there in the Abbey?"
He felt his heart leap against his ribs. He could not lift his eyes above her hands, slender, beautiful hands lying loosely clasped on her knees and shining like alabaster in the firelight.
"Yes, something happened."
Now he looked up and their eyes met. It was an accident which left them both stunned and for a moment incapable of action, as though their eyes had been wrestlers who had suddenly fallen into a deadly grip from which neither could escape. Swiftly she stood up.
"There is a picture I wanted to show you before you go, some one you know."
He followed her as in a dream. His arm brushed against hers. There was a cloud about her laden with magic. He could see her walking, as she moved now, with that unconscious dignity of inheritance, through barbaric halls of state, trailing the train of her golden robes. He could see the crown on her dark hair and the servants bowing before her and he himself.
It was crazy, unreal, and yet, when he forced himself to think coolly, not so unreal as Enid and the children had become. When he tried to visualise them they appeared pale and static figures, lifeless as waxworks. He could not make them live. He thrust them out of his mind.
She held a sketch for him to see. It was himself as he had been. He stood behind her and like a humble passionate thief he let his mouth brush against her hair. She could not have seen or felt him, and yet for a moment they both stood so still that they could hear each other's breath.
Then he drew back. He spoke in a loud conventional voice.
"It's splendid. I'd like Enid to come to see it, for you to get to know each other, but I'm afraid. Enid's so English. Our home would stifle you. You wouldn't understand."
She followed him to the door.
"It's as you think best," she said tranquilly.
Her hand rested in his. He held it lightly, yet it was as though they could not free themselves. He felt her warmth steal up his arm to his heart. The half-light in which they stood enveloped them in a mysterious isolation.
"Marie Barenoff," he murmured again as though the name were a spell. "Princess."
He bent and kissed her hand.
Afterwards, in the street, he saw how foolish and romantic he had been. How young.
He wandered the streets blindly, he did not know for how long. But presently he telephoned home. His voice in the hot, evil-smelling box sounded calm and commonplace.
"Yes, I'll be very late. Don't sit up for me. I'm in the vein. I want to keep going." He caught his breath. He could see her in her black evening dress, and the maid in the passage waiting to know if dinner was to be kept back any longer. He went on deliberately. "I don't like disturbing you. It worries me. Have the bed made up in my dressing-room."
It was such a natural thing for him to have suggested. He was so sure that nothing in his voice had betrayed him. And yet that pause, that perceptible pause, as though she had started and shrunk back. It was his imagination, his heated, quivering imagination.
"Of course, Lyn. I quite understand. I'm so glad. Good night, my darling."
"Good night."
He hung up the receiver, trembling with relief and thankfulness, like an escaped prisoner.
IV
In the days that followed strange things happened to Lyn Roscoe. He had loved Tony and Lynette, his children. His feeling for them had seemed to be the one vital emotion left him. Their littleness, the thought that their individual, mysterious life should have risen, like twin springs, from his and from Enid's love, had thrilled him with pity and wonder and an aching tenderness which once or twice had rekindled passion only to die almost at once under the stifling commonplaceness of their daily life.
But he had always loved them.
And now he did not love them at all.
They knew it. Whilst Enid remained confident and quiet in her dangerous wisdom they knew. They fell silent when custom drove him to their nursery. They dropped their games, looking at him shyly and distrustfully as at a stranger.
"I told them how deep you are in your work," Enid said. "It's wonderful how they understand. The minute you come into the house they are as quiet as mice."
She smiled happily at him and he turned away, impatient and yet unmoved. He simply could not realise her. He could not remember what he had ever felt for her. But once, seated before the fire, he had looked up from out of a formless fierce coloured reverie and had seen her opposite him, so composed and immaculate, and an anger against her, terrifying in its black hideousness, leapt like a tiger out of his secret life. For one shattering moment he knew how it was that wicked men could kill the thing that stood across their way.
And the strangest thing of all was that he who had thought and reasoned as a civilised man, dealing subtly and finely with the intricacies of life, could now only demand with the primitive directness of a savage. Once indeed he had told himself, "I must not see her again," but that had been only a conventional gesture. His heart and brain had scorned it with high laughter.
"You shall—you will!"
He was working brilliantly now, without effort, hardly knowing what it was he wrote. He had become the will-less instrument of a creative force outside himself. His mind, even as his hand set down the things that were to lift him high above his previous levels, was straining like a passionate captive towards the hour of release when he could go to her. And when that hour came he was like a man carried on a frail raft on the breast of a headlong torrent. He could look about him and see the world in splendour and fire melt past him from one vivid pulsating picture into another. The hearts of men were opened in their breasts for him to gaze into, and he thought in his dizzy sense of power how he would make their lives live for ever. Most splendid of all, the old spiritual deafness was gone. He heard, with the intoxicating clearness of those whose lost hearing has been miraculously restored, the song of the river with its burden of high romance and great adventure—but as yet, only in the far distance, the thunder of the cataract towards which he was being borne, faster and faster.
He reached its brink almost in a moment. That day he was not to have seen her. She had made some excuse. Perhaps his instinct, goaded by desire, had warned him. He came upon her in the chaos of a prepared and desperate flight.
It was a queer interview—brief, terrible in its mounting ecstasy. All around her were the uprooted symbols of her life. He felt that his own life was threatened, that he was being torn out of his soil, bleeding, withering.
He asked:
"You were going away?" And she laughed with defiance in her eyes.
"Migratory birds fly with the seasons. My season here is over."
"Migratory birds do not fly alone," he retorted, laughing back at her. "They have their mates, princess."
They had been standing, facing each other like enemies. Now she sat down, as though her strength had gone from her, and the next instant he was at her feet, his arms about her, his face pressed against her breast. It was no mastering, possessive passion. It was adoration and surrender. He gave himself to her. He lost himself in her mystery. He had ceased to be the strong self-sufficient man, arid of emotion and faith. He was the dreamer kneeling against the feet of the inspiration which had given him re-birth. The warmth and sweetness of it enveloped him in a cloud of incense. He felt her kiss upon his head, her hands on his bowed shoulders.
Then they were silent, motionless. He dared not move lest the unearthly wonder of the moment should be broken. Like a song of praise his heart and brain re-echoed, "I love—I love again."
Her hands tightened. He heard her speak, her low voice with its faint, exotic inflections that gave her simplest words the charm of a strange music.
"I've suffered, Lyn, unspeakable things. Yet I have been a spoilt woman too. I've taken whatever I desired of life and held it with all my strength. But I will not steal—I will not steal."
"Take what is yours!" he answered.
"Your wife—your children."
"They are not mine any more. I've lost them. I've left them behind. We were travellers together for a time, but I can't travel their road with them any more. I've got to get back to the high places where it is hard and dangerous to live—to you."
"Your wife," she repeated urgently. "What suffering we should make for her!"
He tried to think of Enid. He could not see her save as a dim, unreal figure, stolid, worthy.
"She won't suffer—not as we suffer. She will be shocked. But she has the home—the children. That is her world. I was stilling, dying in it, and I have a right to live. You have given me everything I am—take me—keep me."
Strange wooing, humble, irresistible, dominating and ruthless as the instinct of self-preservation. Suddenly with all her strength she held him close to her.
"If we go it must be now, for always, far from the things to which you belong."
He answered in triumph:
"I belong to you."
V
Though he left her then it was late that night when he turned the key of his house. All the lights had been turned out save the one that burnt at the foot of the stairs, and he stopped short at sight of it with a strange check of the heart. Was it the artist in him, wrought up to an intense perceptiveness, which recognised a symbol? Sanctuary light. A little fire that burnt steadily and patiently as a reminder of something that endured for ever beyond the fret and fever of man's desires. He closed the door softly. It was as though he were afraid of waking more than the quiet sleepers of the house. So long as he could remember he had never seen his home as he saw it now. Its gently bustling well-being had dropped from it like a formal dress. It greeted him in silence and shadow. Silence and shadow veiled his possessions with a mysterious dignity. Their loveliness stood free from the dross of his success. And there was pathos, too, about them, as there is pathos in all things that sleep, in all inanimate things that have fallen from tired human hands. Enid's work-box, neatly closed, stood on the round table by the fire. He could see her sitting there, working and listening, and then when it grew too late she had got up, sighing quietly, and slipped her needle and scissors to their place and closed the box with her gentle air of setting a seal upon another day honourably lived.
Now she was asleep. He crept past her door, past the children's room. Something touching, too, in the thought of all the defenceless mystery of life that lay in these dark silences so near akin to death. He felt like a thief slinking through a holy place steeped in innocence and mild-eyed goodness. He was thankful to reach the shelter of his own room and to switch on the brazen lights which freed him from the spell of that hushed twilight.
A little bunch of violets stood in the vase upon his dressing-table. He saw them first. His eyes focused themselves upon them as upon something blazingly salient. She had put them there—silent and eloquent. He felt for a moment that he was on the edge of some stupendous realisation, like a man living in a dream who by one final effort of the will could burst through into reality.
But he did not want to wake. Would not. This was the truth—the greater reality. He thrust the violets out of sight and listened to the pounding of his blood.
"To-morrow—to-morrow!"
VI
He let Enid kiss him good-bye. He kissed his shy children. He did not realise them at all. He said to himself, "This is my wife who has been my loyal comrade, and these are my children whom I am deserting without thought or pity." But it meant nothing to him. His reason had ceased to function, and emotionally an explanation, even a warning, would have seemed as superfluous as an explanation to complete strangers.
He felt nothing when the door of his home closed behind him.
He spent the day buying what he required for the immediate journey. Nothing was to be carried over from the past. A new beginning—a new youth.
It had been arranged that he should fetch Marie Barenoff from her rooms in time to catch the night boat-train, so that there remained at the end of his feverish shopping two hours to wait. He returned to his room to pick up a favourite book and his manuscript. There too he would write to Enid. His literary genius would have to lend him the required expression of affectionate regret and decent remorse, to give life to that extraordinary deadness.
The door of the room was unlocked. The lamp on his writing-table had been switched on, and just beyond its shaded circle of light he saw Marie Barenoff waiting for him. His heart leapt to his throat at sight of her and there was fear in that suffocating joy. She stood there so very still, just as she had done on the other side of the grave, her body relaxed, her hands clasped loosely in her muff. She looked like some dark wild bird that had beaten its way into his room and might again take flight.
"Marie, how—why did you come?"
He closed the door sharply as an involuntary expression of his dread, and she smiled, a little ruefully, in understanding.
"It's all right. I knew you would come here first. Your caretaker let me in when she found me waiting. I—I wanted to see your room, Lyn."
He breathed a sigh of deep relief.
"I am glad you came. It was so long to wait. I meant just to fetch my manuscript."
"It's here. I've been reading it. It's better than anything you have ever done."
"You gave me the power."
Her eyes lifted to his with a dark tenderness.
"Oh, Lyn, if I could believe that."
"It's true. I was dead until you came." He stood close to her but he did not touch her. Some instinct reined in his mounting eagerness. This was Enid's room. For the first time they had met in Enid's presence, and though he was without regret and could face the thought of her indifferently there were decencies to which they must pay homage. "You are like my mother, too," he said brokenly, "for you have given me life."
She turned away, hiding her face from him, and he sat down at his table for the last time.
"I have a letter to write," he said. "Then we can go together."
He began to write.
"My dear Enid," and then sat with his pen in his hand waiting for the first well-balanced sentence as he waited for the first sentence of a new novel. It was difficult to write when one did not care. And he did not want to care.
Marie Barenoff stood by the fire. He could feel her presence as something holy in its mysteriousness. Suddenly she spoke.
"I've seen your wife, Lyn."
He sat quite still, not looking at her, grown deadly cold.
"I don't understand."
"I called on her. I wanted to see her for myself. I made some excuse, a foreign interviewer whose appointment you had forgotten. She laughed. She said you were so absorbed you were forgetting everything, even your own family. She made me come in and have tea with her, so that she could tell me how wonderful you are."
He stood up. He knew now of what he had been afraid. His instinct had warned him. She was a woman and could not rest till she had stirred up the nethermost depths of their emotions. There was to be battle between them before the final attainment, his will against her conscience, her will abetting him. And yet as he saw her face he became aware of something deeper, more subtle.
"You shouldn't have gone," he said with forced calm, it was not fair to you or to her or me. You are not the woman to come at the last with morbid doubts."
"No," she answered. "I am not. You need not be afraid of that. What is worth having is worth sinning for. I have my own morality. I am my own judge."
She was silent for a moment. And yet he stood and waited. A new tension had come into the atmosphere. He had a sudden urgent need to escape from this room quickly before it became unbearable. The room was a power, passive, immeasurably patient, working its will on him. Marie Barenoff had moved away from the fireside. She came opposite him, her hand resting on the table.
"Lyn, what lies beyond this for us both?"
He shook his head.
"I don't understand."
"Beyond this mystery. We feel now that we have got to solve it at all costs. But when it is done, when I have found out that you are just a man with a man's sins and follies, when you have found that I am just another faulty woman, what will remain to us?"
The answer sprang triumphantly to his lips.
"Love!"
It was as though he had said something extraordinary, had flung open a locked door through which passed a figure of grave immeasurable power. He saw Marie Barenoff's face, its whiteness, its look of tense recognition, as though she too had seen.
"You love your wife."
"Marie!"
He would have caught her in his arms, pressed her close to him so that she should not see. But a shrill clamour checked him. He stood stock still, lamed by a sense of an invisible disaster. It was like a hideous implacable voice. It jeered and threatened him.
He watched Marie Barenoff go to the instrument and take down the receiver. The stillness was almost as terrible, a pit of emptiness on the brink of which his mind reeled. He heard her voice at last, subdued, urgent.
"Yes, yes, he is here. What is it?"
A little far-off ghost answered. Suddenly she stood upright, looking at him.
"Lyn, it's terrible. Mrs. Roscoe."
He knew then. Instantly. He had known from the first moment. Enid. Something frightful. Enid. An accident. Death, perhaps. And he had forsaken her. She who had never forsaken him, never failed him. He had killed her, his comrade, his love. It was as though a hammer blow had smashed through the gaudy walls of the fantastic palace in which he had been living and a ruthless hand had dragged him out into the bitter wind of truth. He staggered, drunk with the fumes that had befooled him, but sane, knowing himself. He sprang across the intervening space.
"What is it? What has happened? Why did you ring off? Oh, God!"
He was aware then, even in the midst of his hatred of her, of her pregnant quiet. She was not looking at him but past him, and her face, deadly white, was still and watchful like the face of a spectator.
He turned. It was Enid standing in the open doorway.
Very strange she seemed in that room. Very big. She wore the sables that he had given her on her last birthday, and there was something royal about her. She made them both foolish and a little like children who have been caught in the midst of some petty struggle. He thought, "All our lives we shall seem to ourselves squalid and bedraggled.
"I—I hoped I'd find you, Lyn. I asked the caretaker to ring up. I wanted to see the room, since——"
She had been a little dazzled by the light. Now she saw them both. There was nothing outward to betray them but their naked pain. The room was disrupted, shattered by it. Very slowly she came forward and sat down, looking from one to the other.
"Oh, I'm sorry—I'm sorry. Oh, Lyn."
She sat so upright, so splendid still, so good, with no reproach. Her gloved hand resting on the table began to move in the little unconscious tattoo which had once exasperated him. Now it seemed only infinitely pathetic. It completed her reality. It spoke to him of their life together. It pleaded for toleration as she gave forgiveness. He met her eyes for an instant, those generous, quiet eyes that had never hardened against him, never narrowed in cruelty or baseness. He saw in them the old familiar look.
"I understand. I must understand. He is different. He must have his heart's desire."
And beyond that he saw her suffering. He had said that she could not suffer as he suffered. This confounded him. It made everything that he had endured or written of endurance petty and insignificant. Yet it was so quiet. She did not break under it. She faced it as she had faced poverty and would face death, with her head up, thinking of how others might be spared. She was bigger than he would ever be.
"My wife!" he thought.
He could think of nothing else. An infinite thankfulness, humble and unreasoning, possessed him. A moment before he had thought of her as dead, beyond the reach of his love and his repentance. She was there. His heart knelt before her. Whether she forgave or not she should believe that he had loved once and for ever. She would know, as he knew now, that like trees that stand apart, stirred by strange winds, lifting a different foliage to the sky, their roots, in secret and in darkness, had been woven together for all time.
"You—you are going away together? You love one another, don't you?"
He said, "Yes," simply, mechanically. He gave no sign of the realisation that had fallen in a blasting stroke upon the moment's exultation. He had smashed his life and hers. Truth must be sacrificed to a lie. Honour demanded it. Honour demanded that he should lie dishonourably to his days' end. He could not look at her. He was the sinner on whom she was to pass judgment and there must be no defence.
"No," Marie Barenoff said. "That is not true. I love him. But he was only in love with a memory. He wanted to re-live something that can never be re-lived."
She came forward into the light. It seemed odd that he should have ever thought of her as a princess. The mystery that had enveloped her personality like a gaily coloured cloud was gone. He did not love or hate her. She was some one who pitied him and whom he pitied, a fellow-traveller, neither very wise or strong, not splendid at all but rather shabby and pathetic.
But she was trying to lift him out of his shame so that he could think hereafter of her and of this moment without bitterness.
"He will want to go away with me still because he is a man of honour and it is me he has wronged, not you. But I am a woman of honour too, in my own way. I do not take what is not mine." She looked at Enid. "You will understand."
She passed him quickly, going towards the door. But Enid stretched out her hand. It was taken and held for a long moment. They did not seem to be thinking of him, but of each other and of something that they both knew—at once a little laughable and very sad like a child's grief.
Then Marie Barenoff was gone.
Long after they still sat by the dying fire, his hand in hers. And what one human being can tell another he had told her. Presently, worn out, he knelt beside her, his head against her breast, and she spoke, almost for the first time, brokenly, like some one whose thought has been torn out of their very depths, who has always found it difficult to speak.
"It may be that it is God we seek so hungrily in one another," she said, "something unknown and greater than we. But we are just human beings who can only love one another. I am just the woman who loves you."
He answered humbly.
"It is enough."
And she held him close to her, looking into the fire and smiling a little through her tears.
THE END