# Portrait of a Man with Red Hair/Part 2

pp. 87, 89–175.
Layout 2
PART II: THE DANCE ROUND THE TOWN
I — II — III — IV — V — VI — VII — VIII — IX — X
PART II
THE DANCE ROUND THE TOWN
I
Quarter of an hour later he left them, making his excuses, promising to return at half-past ten. He could not have stayed another moment, sitting there quietly in his wicker arm-chair looking out on the darkening garden, listening to Crispin's pleasure in Peter Breughel, without giving some kind of vent to his excitement.
He must get away and be by himself. Because—yes, he knew it, and nothing could alter the vehement pulsating truth of it—he was in love for the first time in his life.
As he threaded his way along the garden paths that was at first all that he could see—that he was in love with that child in the shabby frock who was married to that odious creature, that bag-of-bones, who had not opened his mouth the whole evening long—that child terrified out of her life and appealing to him, a stranger, in her despair, to help her.
In love with a married woman, he, Charles Percy Harkness? What would his two sisters, nay, what ​would the whole of Baker, Oregon, say did they know?
But, bless you, he was not in love with her like that—no hero of a modern realistic novel he! He had no thought in that first ecstatic glow, of any thought for himself at all—only his eyes were upon her, of how he could help her, how serve her, now—at once—before it was too late.
He was deeply touched that she should trust him, but he also realised that at that particular moment she would have trusted anybody. And yet she had waited, watching him through all the first part of that meal, making up her mind—there was some tribute to him at least in that!
It was a considerable time before he could fight his way behind his own singing happiness into any detailed consideration of the facts.
He was in touch with real life at last, had it in both hands like a magic ball of crystal, after which for so long he had been searching.
Where had he been all his life, fancying that this was love and that? That ridiculous touching of hands over a tea-cup, that fancied glance at a crowded party, that half uttered suggested exchange of gimcrack phrases? And this! Why, he could not have stopped himself had he wished! None of the old considered caution to which he had now grown so accustomed that it had seemed like part of his very soul, could have any say in this. He ​was committed up to his very boots in the thing, and he was glad, glad, glad!
Meanwhile he had lost his way. He pulled himself up short. He had been walking just in any direction. He was in a far part of the garden. A lawn in the twilight like dark glass beneath whose surface green water played, stretched between scattered trees and beds of flowers now grey and shadowy. Sparks of fire were already scattered across a sky that was smoky with coils of mist as though some giant train had but now thundered through on its journey to Paradise. Little whistles of wind stole about the garden making secret appointments among the trees. Somewhere near to him a fountain was splashing, and behind the lingering liquid sound of it he could hear the merry-go-round and the drum. He cared little about the dance now, but in some fashion he must pass the time until nine-thirty when he would see her friend and learn what he might do.
Her friend? A sudden agitation held him. Her friend? Had she a lover? Was that all that there was behind this—that she had married in haste, for money, luxury, to see the world, perhaps, and now that she had had a month of it with that miserable bag-of-bones and his painted, talkative father, discovered that she could not endure it and called to her aid some earlier lover? Was that all that his fine knight-errantry came to that he should assist ​in some vulgar ordinary intrigue? He stopped, standing beside a small white gate that led out from the garden into the road. It was as though the gate held him from the outer world and he would never pass through it until this was decided for him. Her face came before him as she had sat there on the other side of the table, as it had been when their glances met. No, he did not doubt her for an instant.
Whatever her experiences of the last month she was pure in heart and soul as some child at her mother's knee. She had her pride, her pluck, her resolve, but also, above all else, her innocent simplicity, her ignorance of all the evil in the world. And as though the most urgent problem of all his life had been solved, he gave the little white gate a push and stepped through it into the open road.
II
He was now in the country to the left of, and above, the town. He could see its lights clustered, like gold coins thrown into some capacious lap, there below him in the valley.
He struck off along a path that led between deeply scented fields and that led straight down the hill. He began now more soberly to consider the facts of the case, and a certain depression stole about him. He didn't after all see very well what he would be able to do. They were going, on the ​following morning, the three of them, abroad, and once there how was he to effect any sort of rescue?
The girl was apparently quite legally married and, although the horrible young Crispin had been silent and sinister, there were no signs that he was positively cruel. The deeper Harkness looked into it the more he was certain that the secret of the whole mystery lay in the older Crispin—it was of him that the girl was terrified rather than the son. Harkness did not know how he was sure of this, he could trace no actual words or looks, but there—yes, there, the centre of the plot lay.
The man was strange and queer enough to look at, but a more charming companion you could not find. He had been nothing but amiable, friendly and courteous. His attitude to his daughter-in-law had been everything that any one could wish. He had seemed to consider her in every possible way.
Harkness, with his American naïveté of conduct, was fond of the word "wholesome," or rather, had he not spent so much of his life in Europe, would have found it his highest term of praise to call his fellow-man "a regular feller!" Crispin Senior was not "a regular feller" whatever else he might be. There had, too, been one moment towards the end of dinner when a waiter, passing, had jolted the little man's chair. There had been for an instant a glance that Harkness now, in his general survey of the situation, was glad to have caught—a glance ​that seemed to tear the pale powdered mask away for the moment and to show a living moving visage, something quite other, something the more alive in contrast with its earlier immobility. Once, years before, Harkness had seen in the Naples Aquarium two octopuses. They lay like grey slimy stones at the bottom of the shining sun-lit tank. An attendant had let down through the water a small frog at the end of a string. The frog had nearly reached the bottom of the tank when in one flashing instant the pile of shiny stone had been a whirling sickening monster, tentacles, thousands of them it seemed, curving, two loathsome eyes glowing. In one moment of time the frog was gone and in another moment the muddy pile was immobile once again. An unpleasant sight. Were the etchings of Samuel Palmer Crispin's only appetite? Harkness fancied not.
III
Plunging almost recklessly down the hill he was soon in the town and, pushing his way through two or three narrow little streets, found himself in the market-place.
He caught his breath at the strange transformation of the place since his last view of it more than three hours before. He learnt later that this dance was held always as the Grand Finale of the Three Days' Annual Fair, and on the last of the days ​there is an old custom that, from four-thirty to six-thirty no trading shall be done, but that every one shall entertain or be entertained within their homes. This pause had its origin, I should fancy, in some kind of religious ceremony, to ask the good God's blessing on the trading of the three days, but it had become by now a most convenient interval for the purpose of drinking healths, so that when, at seven o'clock, all the citizens of the town poured out of their doors once again, they were truly and happily primed for the fun of the evening.
Harkness found, therefore, what at first seemed to be naked pandemonium and, stepping into it, crossed into the third room of his house of delivery. The old buildings—the town hall, the church, the old grey tower—were lit up as though by some supernatural splendour, all the lights of the booths, the hanging clusters of fairy lamps, and, in the very middle of the place, a huge bonfire flinging arms of flame to heaven.
In one corner there was the merry-go-round. A twisting, heaving, gesticulating monster screaming out "Coal Black Mammy of Mine," and suddenly whooping with its own excitement, showing so much emotion that it would not have been surprising to find it, at any moment, leap its bearings and come hurtling down into the middle of the crowd.
​The booths were thick with buyers and sellers, and every one, to Harkness's excited fancy, seemed to be screaming at the highest pitch of his or her strident voice.
Here was everything for sale—hats, feathers, coats, skirts, dolls, wooden dolls, rag dolls, china dolls, monkeys on sticks, ribbons, gloves, shoes, umbrellas, pies, puddings, cakes, jams, oranges, apples, melons, cucumbers, potatoes, cabbages, cauliflowers, broaches, diamonds (glass), rubies (glass), emeralds (glass), prayer books, bibles, pictures (King George, Queen Mary), cups, plates, tea-pots, coffee-pots, rabbits, white mice, dogs, sheep, pigs, one grey horse, tables, chairs, beds, and one wooden house on wheels. More than these, much more. And around them, about them, in and out of them, before them and beside them and behind them men, women, children, singing, crying, shouting, sneezing, laughing, hiccuping, quarrelling, kissing, arguing, denying, confirming, whistling, and snoring. Men of the sea bronzed with dark hair, flashing eyes, rings on their fingers and bells on their toes; men of the fields, the soil interpenetrated with the very soul of their being, bearded to the eyes, broad-shouldered, broad-buttocked, their Sunday coats flapping over their corduroyed thighs, their rough thick necks moving restlessly in their unaccustomed collars; women of the fair with eyes like black coals; gipsy women straight from the tents with ​crimson kerchiefs and black hair piled high under feathered hats; women of the town with soft voices, sidling eyes and creeping hands; women of the farm with gaze wondering and adrift, hands like leather, children at their skirts; women householders with their purses carefully clutched, their hands feeling the cabbages, pinching the cauliflowers, estimating the chairs and tables, stroking the china; young boys and girls, confidence in their gaze, timidity in their hearts, suddenly catching hands, suddenly embracing, suddenly triumphant on their merry-go-round, suddenly everything, conscious of the last penny burning deep down in the pocket, conscious of love, conscious of appetite, conscious of possible remorse, conscious of blood pounding in their veins. And the magicians, the wonder workers, the steal-a-pennies, the old men with white beards and trays of coloured treasures, the bold bad men with their thimble and their penny, the little stumpy fellow with his cards, the long thin melancholy fellow with his medicines, the thick jolly drunken fellow with his tales of the sea, the twisty turn-his-head-both-ways fellow with his gold watches and silver chains, the red wizard with his fortunes in envelopes, his magic on strings of coloured paper, his mysterious signs and countersigns whispered into blushing ears. And then the children that should have been in bed hours ago—little children, large children, young children, old children, fat children, ​thin children, children clinging-to-mother's-skirts, children running in and out, like mice, between legs and trousers, children riding on father's shoulder, children sticky with sweets and sucking their thumbs, children screaming with pleasure, shrieking with terror, howling with weariness—and one child all by itself on the steps of the town hall, curled up and fast asleep.
Away, to one side of the place, just as he had been there fifteen years ago when Maradick had been present, was a preacher, aloft on an overturned box, singing with hand raised, his thin earnest face illumined with the lights, his scant hair blowing in the breeze. Around him a thin scattering of people singing just as fifteen years ago they had sung:
So like little candles
We shall shine,
You in your small corner
And I in mine.
The same recipé, the same cure, the same key offered to the unlocking of the same mysterious door —and so it will be to the end of created life—Amen!
The hymn was over. The preacher's voice was raised. Children step to the edge of the circle, looking up with wondering eyes, their fingers in their mouths.
"And so, dear friends, we have offered to us here the Blood of the Lamb for our salvation. Can ​we refuse it? What right have we to disregard our salvation? I tell you, my dear friends, that Judgment is upon us even now. There cometh the night when no man may work. How shall we be found? Sleeping? With our sins heavy upon us? There is yet time. The hour is not yet. Let us remember that God is merciful—there is still time given us for repentance——"
The Town Hall clock stridently, with clanging reverberation, heard clearly above all the din, struck nine.
IV
Even as the strokes sounded in the air the wide doors of the Town Hall unfolded and a tall stout man, dressed in the cocked hat and the cape and cloak of a Dickensian beadle, appeared. Flaming red they were, and very fine and important he looked as he stood there on the steps, his legs spread, holding his gold staff in his hands. He was attended by several other gentlemen who looked down with benignant approval upon the crowd, and by a drum, a trumpet, and a flute, these last being instruments rather than men.
A crowd began to gather at the foot of the steps and the beadle to address them at the top of his voice, but unlike his rival, the preacher, his voice did not carry very far.
And now the Fair, having only five minutes more ​of life before it, lifted itself into a final screaming manifestation. Now was the time for which the wise and the cautious had been waiting throughout the three days of the Fair—the moment when all the prices would tumble down with a rush because it was now or never. The merry-go-round shrieked, the animals bellowed, lowed, mooed and grunted, the purchasers argued, quarrelled, shouted and triumphed, the preacher and his followers sang and sang again, the bells clanged, the gas-jets flared, the bonfire rose furiously to heaven. But meanwhile the crowd was growing larger and larger around the Town Hall steps; they came with penny whistles and horns and hand-bells and even tea-trays. Then suddenly, strong above the babel, carried by men's stout voices, the song began:
Now, gentles all, attend this song,
Tra-la, la-la, Tra-la,
It is but short, it can't be long,
Tra-la-la-la, Tra-la,
How Farmer Brown one summer day
Was in his field a-gathering hay,
When by there came a pretty maid
Who smiling sweetly to him said,
Tra-la-la-la-Tra-la.
Then Farmer Brown, though forty year,
Tra-la, la-la, Tra-la,
When he that pretty voice did hear,
Tra-la-la-la, Tra-la,
He threw his fork the nearest ditch
And caught the maiden tightly, which
Was what she wanted him to do,
And so the same would all of you,
Tra-la-la-la-Tra-la,
But she withdrew from his embrace,
Tra-la, la-la, Tra-la,
And mocked poor Farmer to his face,
Tra-la-la-la, Tra-la,
And danced away along the lane
And cried 'Before I'm here again
Poor Farmer Brown you'll dance with Pain,"
Tra-la-la-la-Tra-la,
And that was true as you shall hear,
Tra-la, la-la, Tra-la,
Poor Farmer Brown danced many a year,
Tra-la-la-la, Tra-la,
But never once that maid did see,
He grew as aged as aged could be.
And danced into Eterni-tee,
Tra-la-la-la-Tra-la.
The red-flaming beadle moved down the steps, and behind him came the drum, the trumpet and the flute. The drum a stout fellow with wide spreading legs, had from the practice of many year, and his father and grandfather having been drummers before him, caught the exact measure of the tune. Along the market-place went the beadle, the drum, the trumpet and the flute.
For a moment a marvellous silence fell.
To Harkness this silence was exquisite. The myriad stars, the high buildings, their façades ruby-coloured with the leaping light, the dark piled background, the crowd humming now with quiet, like ​water on the boil, the glow of rich suffused colour sheltering everything with its beautiful cloak, the rich voices tossing into the air the jolly song, the sense of well-being and the tradition of the lasting old time and the spirit of England eternally fresh and sturdy and strong; all this sank into his very soul and seemed to give him some hint of the deliverance that was, very soon, to come to him.
Then the procession definitely formed. All the voices—men's, women's and children's alike—caught it up. One—two—three, one—two—three. The drum, the trumpet and the flute came to them through the air:
How Farmer Brown one summer day
Was in his field a-gathering hay,
When by there came a pretty maid
Who smiling sweetly to him said,
Tra-la-la-la-Tra-la.
He was never to be sure whether or no he had intended to join in the dance. He was not aware of more than the colour, the lights, the rhythm of the tune when a man like a mountain caught him by the arm, shouting, "Now we're off, brother—now we're off," and he was carried along.
There had always been a superstition about the dance that to join in it, to be in it from the beginning to the end, meant the best of good luck, and to miss it was misfortune. There was, therefore, now a flinging from all sides of eager bodies into the ​fray. No one must be left out and as the path between the line of bodies and houses was a narrow one, every one was pressed close together, and as there had been much friendly swilling of beer and ale, every one was in the highest humour, shouting, laughing, singing, ringing their bells and blowing their whistles.
Harkness was crushed in upon his enormous friend so completely that he had no other impression for the moment but of a vast expanse of heaving, leaping, corduroy waistcoat, of a hard brass button in his eye, and of himself clutching with both hands to a shiny trouser that must hold himself from falling. But they were off indeed! Four of them now in a row and the song was swinging fine and strong. One—two—three, one—two—three. Forward bend, one leg in air, backward bend, t'other leg in air, forward bend again, down the market-place and round the corner voices raised in one tremendous song.
He was easier now and able more clearly to realise his position. One arm was tightly wedged in that of his companion, and he could feel the thick welling muscles taut through the stuff of the shirt. On the other side of him was a girl, and he could feel her hand pressing on his sleeve. On her side, again, was a young man—her lover. He said so, and shouted it to the world.
He leaned across her and cried out her beauties ​as they moved, and she threw her head back and sang.
The giant on the hitherside seemed to have taken Harkness into his especial protection. He had been drinking well, but it had done him no order of harm. Only he loved the world and especially Harkness. He felt, he knew, that Harkness was a stranger from "up-along." On an average day he would have resented him, been suspicious of him, and tried "to do him out of some of his blasted money." But to-night he would be his friend and protect him from the world.
He would rather have had a girl crooked there under his arm, but the girl he had intended to have had somehow missed him when the fun began—but it didn't matter—the beer made everything glorious for him—and after all he had two daughters "nigh grown up," and his old missus was around somewhere, and it was just as good he didn't slip into any sort of mischief which it was easy to do on a night like this—and his name was Gideon. All this he confided to Harkness while the procession halted, for a minute or two, at the corner of the market-place to pull itself straight before it started down the hill.
He had his arm around Harkness's neck and words poured from him. Gideon what or something Gideon? It didn't matter. Gideon it was ​and Gideon it would be so long as Harkness's memory remained.
All the soil of the English country, all the deep lanes with their high dark hedges, the russet cornfields with their sudden dips to the sea, the high ridges with the white cottages perched like birds resting against the sky, the smell of the earth, the savour of the leaves wet after rain, the thick smoke and damp of the closed-in rooms, the mud, the clay, the running streams, the wind through the thick-sheltering trees, all these were in Gideon's speech as he stood, close pressed, thigh to thigh with Harkness.
He was happy although he knew not why, and Harkness was happy because he was in love for the first time in his life and tingled from head to foot with that knowledge. And up and down and all around it was the same. This was the night of all the nights of the year when enmities were forgotten and new friendships made. As Maradick once had felt the current of love running strong and true through a thousand souls, so Harkness felt it now, and, as with Maradick once, so with Harkness now, it seemed strange that life might not be simply run, that the lion might not lie down with the lamb, that nations might not be for ever at peace the one with another, and that the Grand Millennium might not immediately be at hand.
All beer you say? Maybe, and yet not al​together so. Something anxious and longing in the human heart was rising, free and strong, that night, and would never again entirely leave some of the hearts that knew it.
Harkness for one. There were to be many years in the future when he was to feel again the beating of Gideon's heart under his arm. Something of Gideon's was his, and something of his was Gideon's forevermore, though they would never meet again.
V
And now the procession was arranged. Harkness looking back could see how it stretched, a winding serpent black in the shadows of the leaping bonfire, through the square. They were off again. The drum had started. Down the hill they went, all packed together, all swinging with the tune. A kind of divine frenzy united them all. Young and old, men and women, married and single, good and evil, vicious and virtuous, all were together bound in one chain. Harkness was with them. For the first time in all his life restraint was flung aside. He did not smell the beer nor did the sweat of the perspiring bodies offend his sensitive nostrils, nor the dung from the fields, nor the fishy odours of the sea. With Gideon on one side and a young man's girl on the other, he swung through the town.
Details for a time eluded him. He was singing the song at the top of his voice, but what words he ​was singing he could not have told you; he was dancing to the measure, but for the life of him he could not have afterwards repeated the rhythm.
They swung down into the heart of the town. The doors of all the houses were crowded with the very aged and the very young who stood laughing and crying out, pointing to their friends and acquaintances, laughing at this and cheering at that.
And always more were joining in, pushing their way, dancing the more energetically because they had missed the first five minutes. Now they were down on the fish-market all sprinkled with silver under the little moon and the cloth of stars. Here the wind from the sea came to meet them, and through the music and the singing and the laughter and the press-press of the dancing crowd could be heard the faint breath of the tide on the shore "seep-seep-sough-sough," wistful and powerful, remaining for ever when they all were gone. The sheds of the fish-market were gaunt and dark and deserted. For one moment all the naked place was filled with colour and movement. Then up the hill they all pressed.
It was difficult up the hill. There were breaths and pants and "Eh, sirs," and "Oh, the poor worm," and "But my heart's beating," and "I cannot! I cannot!" One woman fell, was picked up and planted by the side of the road, a young man staying ​with melancholy kindness beside her. The rest passed on.
Soon they were at the top of the hill before they turned to the left again back into the town. And this was Harkness's greatest moment. For an instant the dance paused, and just then it happened that Harkness was at the highest point of the climb.
Catching his breath, his hand to his heart, for he was out of training, and the going had been hard, he looked about him. Below him to the right and to the left and to the farthest horizon the sea, a grey silk shadow, hung, so soft, so gentle, that the stars that crackled above it seemed to be taunting it with its lethargy. On the other side of the hill was all the clustered town, and before him and behind him the dark multitudes of human beings. Pressed close to Gideon, who was drinking something out of a bottle, he was unconscious of any personality—only that time had found for him, it seemed, a solution to the whole problem of life. The sea-wind fanning his temples, the salt snap of the sea, the pounding of his own heart in union with that other heart of his companion who was with him—all these things together made of him who had been always afraid and timorous and edged with caution, a triumphant soul.
And it was good that it was so because of all that he would be called upon to do that night.
​Gideon put his arm around him, pressing him close to him, and pushed the bottle up to his lips. "Drink, brother," he said. "Drink, then, my dear." And Harkness drank.
Now they were starting down the hill into the town once more, and the dance reached the height of its madness.
He threw his fork the nearest ditch
And caught the maiden tightly, which
Was what she wanted him to do— And so the same would all of you
Tra-la-la-la-Tra-la.
They screamed, they shrieked, they tumbled on to one another, they held on where they could, they swung from side to side. The red beadle himself caught the frenzy, flinging his fat body now here, now there. The very houses and the cobbles of the streets seemed to swing and sway as the lights flashed and flared. All the bells of the town were pealing. In the market-place they were setting off the fireworks, and the rockets, green and red and gold, streaked the purple sky and fought for rivalry with the stars. All the sky now was scattered with sparks of gold. From the highest heaven to the lowest of man's ditches the world crackled and split and sang.
Now was the moment when all enemies were truly forgotten, when love was declared without fear, ​when lips sought lips and hands clasped hands, and heaven opened and all the human souls marched in.
Tra-la-la-la-Tra-la Tra-la-la-la-Tra-la.
Back into the market-place they all tumbled, then, standing in a serried mass as the beadle and his followers mounted the Town Hall steps, they shouted:
"All together: One—two—three. One—Two—Three.
On. Two. Three.
Hurray! Hurray! Hurray!
The dance of all the hearts was, for one more year, at an end.
VI
Every one was splitting up into little groups, some to look at the fireworks, some to have a last drink together, some to creep off into the dark shadows and there confirm their vows, some to drive home on their carts and waggons to their distant farms, some to sit in their homes for a last chatting about all the news, some to go straight to their beds—the common impulse was over although it would not be forgotten.
Harkness looked around to find Gideon, but that giant was gone nor was he ever to see him again. ​He paused there panting, happy, forgetting for an instant everything but the fun and freedom that he had just passed through. Then, as though it would forcibly remind him, the Town Hall clock struck half-past nine.
He spoke to a man standing near him:
"Can you kindly tell me where a hotel called the 'Feathered Duck' is?" he asked.
"Certainly," said the man, wiping the sweat from the hair matted on his forehead. "It's out on the sea-front. Go down High Street—that'll take you to the sea front. Then walk to your right and it's about five houses down."
Harkness thanked him and hurried away. He had no difficulty in finding the High Street, but there how strange to walk so quietly down it, hearing your own foot tread, watched by all the silent houses, when only five minutes ago you had been whirling in Dionysian frenzy! He was on the sea front and two steps afterwards was looking up at the quiet and modest exterior of "The Feathered Duck."
The long road stretched shining and sleek. Not a living soul about. The little hotel offered a discreet welcome with plants in large green pots, one on either side of the door, a light warm enough to greet you and not too startling to frighten you, and the knob gleaming like an inviting eye.
Harkness pushed open the door and entered. The ​hall was anæmic and dark, with the trap to catch visitors some way down on the right. There seemed to be no one about. Harkness pushed open a door and at once found himself in one of those little hotel drawing-rooms that are so peculiarly British, compounded as they are of ferns and discretion, convention and an untuned piano. In this little room a young man was sitting alone. Harkness knew at once that his search was over. He knew where it was that he had heard the name Dunbar before—this was his young man of the high road, the wandering seaman and the serious appointment, the young man of his expectant charge.
There was yet, however, room for mistake and so he waited standing in the doorway. The young man was bending forward in a red plush armchair, eagerly watching. He recognised Harkness at once as his friend of the afternoon.
"Hullo!" he said, and then hurriedly, "why, what has been happening to you?"
Harkness stepped forward into the room. "To me?" he said.
"Why, yes. You're sweating. Your collar's undone. You look as though you had run a mile."
"Oh, that!" Harkness blushed, fingering his collar that had broken from its stud. "I've been dancing."
"Dancing?"
​"Yes. All round the town. Like the lion and the unicorn."
"Oh, I heard you. On any other night——" He broke off. During this time he had been watching Harkness with a curious expression, something between eagerness, distrust, and an impatience which he was finding very difficult to conceal. He said nothing more. Harkness also was silent. They stared the one at the other, and could hear beyond the door the noises of the little hotel, a shrill female voice, the rattle of plates, some man's laughter.
At last Harkness said: "Your name is Dunbar, isn't it?'
The young man, instead of answering, asked his own question. "Look here, what the devil are you after? I don't say that it is or it isn't, but anyway why do you want to know?"
"It's only this," said Harkness slowly, "that if your name is Dunbar, then I have a message for you."
"You have?"
He started out of his chair, standing up in front of Harkness as though challenging him.
"Yes, a friend of yours asked me to come here, to meet you at half-past nine and tell you that she agrees to your proposal——"
"She does?... At last!"
Then his voice changed to suspicion. "You seem to be a lot in this. Forgive my curiosity. I don't ​want to seem rude, but meeting me on the hill this afternoon and now this.... I've got to be so damn careful——"
"My name is Harkness. It was quite by chance that I was walking down the hill this afternoon and met you. As I told you then, I was on my way to the 'Man-at-Arms.' This evening I offered my help to a lady there who seemed to be in distress, and asked her whether there was anything that I could do. She asked me to bring you that message. There was no one else for her to ask."
Dunbar stared at Harkness, then suddenly held out his hand. "Jolly decent of you. I won't forget it. My name is Dunbar as you know, David Dunbar."
"And mine Harkness, Charles Harkness."
"I can't tell you what you've done for me by bringing me that message. Here, don't go for a minute. Have something, won't you?"
"Yes, I think I will," said Harkness, conscious of a sudden weariness.
"What shall it be? Whisky? Large soda?"
They sat down. Dunbar touched a bell and then, in silence, they waited. Harkness was humorously conscious that he seemed to be the younger of the two. The boy had taken complete command of the situation.
The older man was also aware that there was some very actual and positive situation here that ​was developing under his eyes. As he sat there, sticking to the plush of his chair, listening to the ridiculous chatter of the marble clock, staring into the Wardour Street Puritans of "When did you see father last?" he felt urgency beating in upon them both. A shabby waiter looked in upon them, received his order and departed.
Dunbar suddenly plunged. "Look here, I know I can trust you, I'm sure of it. And she trusted you, so that should be enough for me. But—would you mind—telling me exactly how it happened that you got this message?"
"Certainly," Harkness said. "I——"
"Wait," Dunbar interrupted, "forgive me, but drop your voice, will you? One doesn't know who's hanging round here."
They drew their chairs closer together and Harkness, sitting forward, continued. "I had dressed for dinner early. A friend of mine in London had told me that there was a little old room at the top of the hotel that was well worth seeing. I guess, like most Americans, I care for old-fashioned things, so I got to the top of the house and found the room. I was up in a little gallery at the back when two people came in, a man and a girl. They began to talk before I could move or let them know I was there. It was all too quick for me to do anything. The girl begged the man, to whom she was apparently married, to let her go home for ​a week before they went abroad, and the man refused. That was all there was, but the girl's terror struck me as extreme——"
"My God!" Dunbar broke in, "if you only knew!"
"Well, I was touched by that and I didn't like the man's face, either. They went out. I came down to dinner. While I was waiting in the garden an extraordinary man spoke to me—extraordinary to look at, I mean. Short, fat, red hair—"
"You needn't describe him," Dunbar interrupted, "I know him."
"He came and asked me for a match. He was very polite, and finally invited me to dine with him, his son and daughter-in-law. I accepted. Of course the son and daughter-in-law were the two that I had overheard upstairs. I saw that throughout dinner she was in great distress, and at the end as we were leaving the room I let her know that I had overheard her inadvertently before dinner, and that I was eager to help her if there was any way in which I could do so. We had only a moment, Crispin and his son were close upon us. She was, I suppose, at the end of her endurance and snatched at any chance, so she told me to do this—to find you here and give you that message—that's all—absolutely all."
"The door opened, making both men turn apprehensively. It was only the shabby little waiter ​with his tray and the whiskies. He set down the glasses, split the soda, and stared at them both as Dunbar paid him.
"Will that be all, gentlemen?" he asked, scratching his ear.
"Everything," said Dunbar abruptly.
"Gentlemen sleeping here?"
"No, we're not. Good-night."
"Good-night, sir." With a little sigh the waiter withdrew. The door closed, and instantly the ferns in the pots, the plush chairs and sofa closed round as though they also wanted to hear.
"It's an extraordinary piece of luck," Dunbar began. Then he hesitated. "But I don't want to bother you with any more of this. It isn't your affair. You've come into it, after all, only by accident——"
He hesitated as though he were making an invitation to Harkness. And Harkness hesitated. He saw that this was his last opportunity of withdrawal. Once again he could hear the voice of the Imp behind his shoulder: "Well, clear out if you want to. You have still plenty of time. And this is positively the last chance I give you——"
He drank his whisky and, drinking, crossed his Rubicon.
"No, no, I am interested, tremendously interested. Tell me anything you care to and if I can be of any help——"
​"No, no," Dunbar assured him, "I'm not going to drag you into it. You needn't be afraid of that."
"But I am in it!" Harkness answered, smiling; "I'm going back with Crispin to his house this evening!"
VII
The effect of that upon Dunbar was fantastic. The young man jumped from his chair crying:
"You're going back?"
"Yes."
"To the house?"
"Why, yes!"
"And to-night!"
He stared down at him as though he could not believe the evidence of his ears nor of his eyes nor of anything that was his. Then he finished his whisky with a desperate gulp.
"But what's pushing you into this anyway?" he cried at last. "You don't look like the kind of man And yet there you were on the hill this afternoon, and then at the hotel and overhearing what Hesther said, and then dining with the man and his asking you—— He did ask you, didn't he?"
"Of course he asked me," Harkness answered. "You don't suppose I'd have gone if he didn't."
"No, I don't suppose you would," agreed Dunbar. ​"I bet he offered to show you his jewels and his pictures, his collections."
"Yes," said Harkness, "he did."
"Well, that's just a miracle of good luck for me, that's all. You can help me to-night, help me marvellously. But I don't like to ask you. Things might turn out all wrong and then we'd all be in for a bad time and that wouldn't be fair to you." He paused, thinking, then he went on. "I'll tell you what I'll do. You saw that girl to-night and talked to her, didn't you?"
Harkness nodded his head.
"You saw that she was a damned fine girl?"
Harkness nodded again.
"Worth doing a lot for. Well, I'll put the whole story to you—let you have it all. We've got nearly three-quarters of an hour. I can tell you most of it in that time, and then you can make up your mind. If, when I've told you everything, you decide to have nothing whatever to do with it, that's all right. There's no obligation on you at all, of course. But if you did help me, being in the house at that very time, it would make the whole difference. My God, yes!" he ended with a sigh of eagerness, staring at Harkness.
Harkness sat there, thinking only of the girl. His own personal history, the town, the dance, Crispin and his son, all these things had faded away from his mind; he saw only her—as she had been ​when turning her head for a moment she had spoken to him with such marvellous self-control.
He loved her just as she stood there granting him permission to help her. His own prayer was that it might not be long before he was allowed to help her again. He was recalled to the immediate moment by Dunbar's voice:
"You'll forgive me if I go back to the beginning of things—it's the only way really to explain. Have you ever heard of Polchester, a town in Glebeshire, north of this? There's a rather famous cathedral there."
"Yes," said Harkness, "I thought I might go there from here."
"Well," Dunbar went on, "out of Polchester about ten miles there's a village—Milton Haxt. I was born there and so was Hesther. Her name was Hesther Tobin, and she was the only daughter of the doctor of the place—she had two brothers young- er than herself. We've known one another all our lives."
"Wait a moment," Harkness interrupted; "are you and she the same age?"
"No. I'm thirty, she's only twenty."
"You look younger than that, or you did this afternoon, I'm not so sure now." Indeed the boy seemed to have acquired some new weight and responsibility as he sat there.
"No," he went on. "When I said that we'd ​known one another always I mean that she's always known about me. I used to take her on my knee and toss her up and down. That was where all the trouble began. If she hadn't been always used to me and fancied that I was years older than she—a kind of grandfather—she'd have married me."
"Married you!" Harkness brought out.
"Yes. I can't remember a time when I wasn't in love with her. I always was, and she never was with me. She liked me—she likes me now—but she's always been so used to the idea of me. I've always been David Dunbar—and that's all. A friend who was always there but nothing more. There was just a moment when I was missing for six months in the middle of the war, I think she really cared then—but soon they heard that I was safe in Germany and it was all as it had been before."
"Were her father and mother living?" Harkness asked.
"Her father. Her mother died when her youngest brother was born, when she was only six years old. The mother's death upset the father, and he took to drink. He'd always been inclined that way I expect. He was too brilliant a doctor to have landed in that small village without there being some reason. Well, after Mrs. Tobin's death there was simply one trouble after another. Tobin's patients deserted him. The big house on the hill ​had to be sold and they moved into a small one in the village. He had been a big, jolly, laughing, generous man before, now he was always quarrelling with everybody, insulting the few patients left to him, and so on. Hesther was wonderful. How she kept the house together all those years nobody knew. There was very little she didn't know about life by the time she was ten years old—ordinary life, I mean, not this damned Crispin monstrosity. She always had the pluck and the courage of the devil, and you can fancy what I felt just now when you told me about her asking young Crispin to let her off. That swine!"
He paused for a moment, then went on hurriedly:
"But we haven't much time. I must buck ahead. I was quite an ordinary sort of fellow, of course, but there was nothing I wouldn't do for her if I got a chance. I helped her sometimes, but not so much as I'd have liked. She was always terribly proud. All the things that happened at home made her hold up her head in a kind of defiance.
"The odd thing was that she loved her father, and the worse he got the more she loved him. But she loved her young brothers still more. She was mother, sister, nurse, everything to them, and would be still if she'd been let alone. They were nice little chaps too, only a lot younger, of course—one three years, one six. One's in the Navy—very de​cent fellow—and if he'd been home he'd never have allowed any of this to happen.
"Well, the war came when she was quite a kid. I was away most of that time. Then in 1918 my father died and left me a bit of property there in Milton. I came home and asked her to marry me. She thought I was pitying her, and anyway she didn't love me. And I hadn't enough of this world's goods to make the old man keen about me.
"Then this devil came along," Dunbar stopped for a moment. They both listened. There was not a sound in the whole house.
"What brought him to a village like yours?" asked Harkness, lowering his voice. "I shouldn't have thought that a man like that——"
"No, you wouldn't," said Dunbar. "But that's one of his passions apparently, suddenly landing on some small village where there's a big house and bossing every one around him.... I shall never forget the day I first saw him. It was just about a year ago.
"I had heard that some foreigner had taken Haxt, that was the big house in Milton that the Dombeys, the owners, were too poor to keep up. Soon all the village was talking. Furniture arrived, then lots of servants, Japs and all sorts. Then one evening going up the hill I saw him leaning over one of the Haxt gates looking into the road,
"It was a lovely July evening and he was without ​a hat. You've spoken of his hair. I tell you that evening it was just flaming in the sun. It looked for a moment like some strange sort of red flower growing on the top of the gate. He stopped me as I was passing and asked me for a match."
"That's what he asked me for," murmured Harkness.
"Yes, his opening gambits are all the same. He offered me a cigarette and I took one. We talked for a little. I didn't like him at first, of course, with his hair, white face, painted lips, but—did you notice what a beautiful voice he has?"
"I should think I did," said Harkness.
"And then he can make himself perfectly charming. The beginning of your acquaintance with him is exactly like your introduction to the villain of any melodrama—painted face, charming voice, cosmopolitan, delightful information. The change comes afterwards. But I must hurry on, I'll never be done. I'm as bad as Conrad's Marlowe. Have another whisky, won't you?"
"No, thanks," said Harkness.
"Well, it wasn't long before he was the talk of the whole place. At first every one liked him. Odd though he looked you can just fancy how a man with his wealth and knowledge of the world would fascinate a country-side if he chose to make himself agreeable, and he did choose. He gave parties, he went round to people's houses, sent his motors to ​give old ladies a ride, allowed people to pick flowers in his garden, adored showing people his collections. I happened to be in Milton during the rest of that year looking after my little property, and he seemed to take to me. I was up at Haxt a good deal.
"Looking back now I can see that I never really liked him. I was aware of my caution and laughed at myself for it. I liked pretty things, you know, and I loved his jade and emeralds, and still more his prints. And he knew so much and was never tired of telling me and never seemed to laugh at one's ignorance.
"He was, as I have said, all the talk that summer. It was 'Mr. Crispin' this and 'Mr. Crispin' that—Mr. Crispin everything. The men didn't take to him much, but of course they wouldn't! They had always thought me a bit queer because I liked reading and played the piano. The first thing that people didn't like about him was his son. That beauty arrived at Haxt somewhere in September, and everybody hated him. I ask you, could you help it? And he was the exact opposite of his father. He didn't try to make himself agreeable to anybody—simply went about scowling and frowning. But it wasn't that that people disliked—it was his relation to his father. He was absolutely in his father's power—that is the only way to put it—and there was something despicable, some​thing almost obscene, you know, almost as though he were hypnotized, the way he obeyed him, listened to his voice, slaved away for him."
"I noticed something of that myself this evening," said Harkness.
"You couldn't help it if you saw them together. Somehow the son turning up beside the father made the father look queer—as though the son showed him up. People round Milton are not very perceptive, you know, but they soon smelt a rat, several rats in fact. For one thing the people in the village didn't like the Jap servants, then one or two maids that Crispin had hired abruptly left. They wouldn't say anything except that they didn't like the place, that old Crispin walked in his sleep or something of the kind.
"It was just about this time, early in October or so, that Crispin became friendly with the Tobins. Young Crispin had a cold or something and Tobin came up and doctored him. Crispin gave him the best liquor he'd ever had in his life so he came again and then again. That was the beginning of my dislike of Crispin. It seemed to me rotten of him, when Tobin was already going as fast downhill as he could, to give him an extra push. And Crispin liked doing that. One could see it at a glance. I hated him from the moment when I caught him watching with amused smiles Tobin fuddled in his chair. You can imagine that Tobin's ​drunkenness, having cared for Hesther as I had for so long, was a matter of some importance for me. I had tried to pull him up, without any sort of success, of course, and it simply maddened me to see what Crispin was doing. So I lost my temper and spoke out. I told him what I thought of him. He listened to me very quietly, then he suddenly threw his head up at me like a snake hissing. He said a lot of things. That was the first time I heard all his nonsensical stuff about sensations. We haven't time now, and anyway it wasn't very new—the philosophy that as this was our only existence we had better make the most of it, that we had been given our senses to use, not to stifle, and the rest of it. Omar put it better than Crispin.
"He had also a lot of talk about Power, that if he liked he could have any one in his power, and so could I if I liked. You had only to know other people's weaknesses enough. And more than that. Some stuff about its being good for people to suffer. That the thing that made life interesting and worth while was its intensity, and that life was never so intense as when we were suffering. That, after all, God liked us to suffer. Why shouldn't we be gods? We might be if we only had courage enough.
"It was then, that morning, that it first entered my head that there was something wrong with him—something wrong with his brain. It had never occurred to me during all those months because he ​had always been so logical, but now—he seemed to step across the little bridge that separates the sane from the insane. You know how small that bridge is?" Harkness nodded his head.
"Then all in a moment he took my arm and twisted it. I can't give you any sort of idea how queer and nasty that was. As he did it he peered into my face as though he didn't want to miss the slightest shadow of an expression. Then—I don't know if you noticed when he shook hands with you—his fingers haven't any bones in them, and yet they are beastly powerful. He ought to be soft all over and he isn't. He twisted my arm once and smiled. It was all I could do to keep from knocking him down. But I broke away, told him to go to hell and left the house. From that moment I hated him.
"It was directly after this that I noticed for the first time that he had his eye on Hesther, and he had his eye upon her exactly because she hated him and wouldn't go near him if she could possibly help it. I must stop for a moment and tell you something about her. You've seen her, but you cannot have any kind of idea how wonderful she really is.
"She has the most honourable loyal character you've ever seen in woman. And she's never been in love—she doesn't know what love is. Those are the two most important things about her. That ​doesn't mean that she's ignorant of life. There's nothing mean or sordid or disgusting that hasn't come into her experience through her beauty of a father, but she's stood up to it all—until this, this Crispin marriage. The first thing in her life she's funked.
"She's been saved all along by her devotion to one thing, her family—her father and two brothers. She must have given her father up pretty completely by now, seeing that it was hopeless; but her small brothers—why, they are the key to the whole thing! If it weren't for them she wouldn't be where she is to-night, and, as I have said, if the elder one had known anything about it he wouldn't have allowed it, but he's away on a foreign station and Bobby's too young to understand.
"She was always very independent in the village, keeping to herself. Not being rude to people, you understand, but making no real friends. She simply lived for those two boys, and she had to work so hard that she had no time for friends. She knew that I loved her—I had told her often enough. She saw more of me than of any one else, and she would allow me to do things for her sometimes, but even with me she kept her independence. To-night is the very first time in both our lives that she has begged me to do anything!"
"He stopped for a moment. "By God!" he ​cried, "if I can't help her to-night I'll finish myself; there'll be nothing left in life for me!"
"We will help her," Harkness said. "Both of us. But go on. Time's advancing. I mustn't miss my appointment."
"No, by Jove, you mustn't," said Dunbar. "Everything hangs on that. Well, to get on. It didn't take me very long to see what Crispin was doing to her father, and one day she went up to see him alone and begged him to be merciful. She says that he was charming to her and that she hated him worse than ever.
"He promised her that he would stop her father's drinking, and, of course, he didn't keep his promise, but made Tobin drink more than ever.
"It was round about Christmas that these things happened, and just about this time all sorts of stories began to circulate about him. He suddenly left, came over to Treliss, and took the White Tower where you're going to-night. After he had gone the stories grew in volume—the most ridiculous things you ever heard, about his catching rabbits and skinning them alive and holding witches' Sabbaths with his Japs—every kind of fantastic thing. And all the women who had gone to see his pretty things and raved about him when he first came said they didn't know how they 'ever could have seen anything in him,' and that he deserved imprisonment and worse.
​"It was now that I discovered that Hesther was desperately worried. I had known her all my life and had never seen her worried like this before. She lost her colour, was always thinking about other things when one spoke to her, and, several times, had been crying when I came upon her. Naturally I couldn't stand this, and I bullied her until I got the truth out of her. And what do you think that was? Why, of all the horrible things, that the younger Crispin had asked her to marry him, and that all the time her blackguard of a father was pressing her to do it.
"You can imagine what I felt like when I heard this I I cursed and swore and blasphemed and still couldn't believe that she was in any way taking it seriously until, when I pressed her, I found that she was!
"She was always as obstinate as sin, had her own way of looking at things, made up her own mind and stuck to it. She didn't hate the son as she hated the father, although she disliked the little she'd seen of him well enough; but, remember, she knew very little about marriage. All her thoughts were on those two boys, her brothers.
"I found out that old Crispin had offered Tobin any amount of money if he'd give his daughter up, and that Tobin had put this to Hesther, telling her that he was desperately in debt, that he'd be put in prison if the money didn't turn up from somewhere, ​and, above all, that the boys would be ruined if she didn't agree, that he'd have to take the younger boy away from school and so on.
"I did everything I could. I went and saw Tobin and told him what I thought of him, and he was drunk as usual and we had a scuffle, in the course of which I unfortunately tumbled him over. Hesther came in and saw him on the floor, turned on me, and then said she'd marry young Crispin.
"I begged, I implored her. I said that if she would marry me I'd give her everything that I had in the world, that we'd manage so that Bobby shouldn't have to be taken away from school and the rest of it. Then Father Tobin got up from the floor and asked me with a sneer how much I'd got, and I tried to bluster it out, but of course they both of them knew that I hadn't got very much.
"Anyway Hesther was angry with me—ashamed, I think, that I'd seen her father in such a state, and her pride hurt that I should know how badly they were placed. She accepted young Crispin by the next mail. If the Crispins had actually been there in the flesh I don't think she would have done it, but some weeks' absence had softened her horror of them, and she could only think how wonderful it was going to be to do all the marvellous things for the boys that she was planning.
"I'm sure that when young Crispin did turn up ​with his long body and cadaverous face she repented and was frightened, but her pride wouldn't let her then back out of it.
"I had one last talk with her before her marriage. I begged her to forgive me for anything that I had done that might seem casual or insulting, that she must put me out of her mind altogether, but just consider in a general way whether this wasn't a horrible thing that she was doing, marrying a man that she didn't love, taking on a father-in-law whom she hated.
"She was very sweet to me, sweeter than she had ever been before. She just shook her head and let me kiss her. And I knew that this was a final good-bye."
VIII
"She married Crispin and came to Treliss. I wasn't at the wedding. I heard nothing from her. And then a story came to my ears that, after I had once heard it, gave me no peace.
"It was an old woman—a Mrs. Martin. She had, months before, been up at Haxt doing some kind of extra help. She was an old mottled woman like a strawberry—I'd known her all my life—and a grandmother. She suddenly left, and it was only weeks after Crispin went that I found out why. She was very shy about it, and to this day I've never discovered exactly what happened. Something one ​evening when she was alone in the kitchen preparing to go home. The elder Crispin came in followed by one of his Japs. He made her sit down in one of the kitchen chairs, sat down beside her, and began to talk to her in his soft beautiful voice. What it was all about to this day she doesn't know—some of his fine stuff about Sensation, I daresay, and the benefit of suffering so that you could touch life at its fullest! I shouldn't wonder—anyway an old woman like Mrs. Martin, who had borne eight or nine children of her husband who beat her, knew plenty about suffering without Crispin trying to teach her. Anyway he went on in his soft beautiful voice, and she sat there bewildered, fascinated a bit by his red hair which she told me "she never could get out of her mind like," and the Jap standing silent beside her.
"Suddenly Crispin took hold of her old wrinkled neck and began stroking it, putting his face close to hers, talking, talking, talking all the time. Then the Jap stepped behind her, caught the back of her head and pulled it.
"What would have happened next I don't know had not the younger Crispin come in, and at the sight of him the older man instantly got up, the Jap disappeared—it was as though nothing had been. Old Mrs. Martin got out of the house, then tumbled to pieces in the shrubbery. She was ill for days afterwards, but she kept the whole thing quiet with ​a kind of villager's pride, you know—'she wasn't going to have other folks talking as they did anyway when they saw how quickly she had left.'
"But she told one of her daughters and the daughter told me. There was almost nothing in the actual incident, but it told me two things, one, that the older Crispin really is mad—definitely, positively insane, the other that the son, in spite of his seeming so submissive, has some sort of hold over him. There is something between the two that I don't understand.
"Well, that decided me. I went to Treliss to find out what I could. I had to hang about for quite a time before I could learn anything at all. Crispin was going on at Treliss just as he had done at Milton. He's taken this strange house outside the town which you'll see to-night. Quite a famous place in a way, built on the sea-cliff with a tangled overgrown wood behind it and a high white tower that you can see for miles over the country-side. At first the people liked him just as they had done at Milton and were interested in him. Then there were stories and more stories. Suddenly, only a week ago, he said he was going abroad, and to-morrow he's going.
"Now the point I want to make clear to you is that the man's mad. I'm not a clever chap. I don't know any of your medical theories. I've never had any leaning that way, but I take it that the ​moment that any one crosses the division between sanity and insanity it means that they can control their brain no longer, that they are dominated by some desire or ambition or lust or terror that nothing can stop, no fear of the law, of public shame, of losing social caste. Crispin is mad, and Hesther, whom I love more than anything in this world and the next, is in his hands completely and absolutely. They go abroad to-morrow morning where no one can touch them.
"The time's been so short, and I've not been suffciently clever to give you any clear idea of the man himself. I've got practically no facts. You can't say that his stroking an old woman's neck is a fact that proves anything. All the same I believe you've seen enough yourself to know that it isn't all imagination, and that the girl is in terrible peril. My God, sir," the boy's voice was shaking, "before the war there were all sorts of things that didn't seem possible, we knew that they couldn't exist outside the books of the story-tellers. But the war's changed all that. There's nothing too horrible, nothing too beastly, nothing too bad to be true—yes, and nothing too fine, nothing too sporting.
"And this thing is quite simple. There are those two madmen and my girl in their hands, and only to-night to get her out of them.
"I must tell you something more," he went on more quietly. "I've been making desperate at​tempts to see her, and at the same time to prevent either of those devils from seeing me. I saw her twice, once in the grounds of the White Tower, once on the beach below the house. Neither time would she listen to me. I could see that she was miserable, altogether changed, but all that she would say was that she was married and that she must go through with what she had begun.
"She begged me to go away and leave Treliss. Her one fear seemed to be lest Crispin should find out I was there and do something to me.
"Her terror of him was dreadful to witness—but she would tell me nothing. I hung about the place and made a friend of a fisherman he had up there working on the place—Jabez Marriot—you saw him on the hill to-day.
"He's a fine fellow. He's only been working on the grounds, had nothing to do with inside the house, but he didn't love the Crispins any better than I did, and he had lost his heart to Hesther. She spoke to him once or twice, and he would do anything for her. I sent letters to her through him: she replied to me in the same way, but they were all to the same effect, that I was to go away quickly lest Crispin should do something to me, that she wasn't being badly treated and that there was nothing to be done.
"Then, about a week ago, Crispin saw me. It was in one of the Treliss lanes, and we met face to ​face. He just gave me one look and passed on, but since then I've had to be terribly careful. All the same I've made my plans. All that was needed was her consent to them, and that, until to-night, she has steadily refused to give. However, something worse than usual has broken her down. What he has been doing to her I don't know, I dare not think—but to-night I've got to get her out. I've got to, or never show my face anywhere again. Now I've told you this as quickly as I could. Will you help me?"
Harkness stood up holding out his hand: "Yes," he said, "I will."
"It can be beastly, you know."
"That's all right."
"You don't mind what happens?"
"I don't mind what happens."
"Sportsman."
The two men shook hands. They sat down again. Dunbar spread out a paper on the little green-topped table.
"This is a rough plan of the house," he said. "I can't draw, but I think you can make this out.
"Please forgive this childish drawing," he said again. "It's the best I can do. I think it makes the main things plain. Here's the house, the tower over the sea, the wood, the garden, the high road.
"Now look at this other plan of the second floor.
"You'll see from this that Hesther's room is at the very end of the house and her husband's room next to hers. The two guest rooms are empty, and there are no other bedrooms on that floor. The ​picture gallery runs right along the whole floor. The small library is a rather cheerful bright room. Crispin has put his prints in there, some on the walls, the rest in solander boxes. The large library is a gaunt, dusty deserted place hung with heads of many animals that one of the Pontifexes (the real owners of the place) shot at some time or other. No one ever goes there. In fact this second floor is generally deserted. Crispin spends his time either in the tower or on the ground floor. He is in the small library playing about with his prints some of the time though.
"Now, my plan is this. I have told Hesther everything to the very tiniest detail, and all that she had to do was to send word at any moment that she agreed to it. That she has now done.
"To-night at one o'clock I am going to be up the high road under the shadow of the wood at the back of the kitchen garden with a jingle and pony——"
"A jingle?" asked Harkness.
"Yes, a jingle is Cornish for a pony trap. The obvious thing for me to have had was a car, but after thinking about it I decided against it for a number of reasons. One of them was the noise that it makes in starting, then it might easily stick over the ground that we shall have to cover, then I fancy that it will be the first thing that Crispin will look for if he starts in pursuit. We have only to go ​three miles anyway, and most of it over the turf of the moor."
"Only three miles?" Harkness asked.
"Yes, I'll tell you about that in a moment. Crispin Senior is pretty regular in his movements, and just about one o'clock he goes up to his bedroom at the top of the tower with his two Japs in attendance. That is the only time of the day or night that one or another of those Japs isn't hanging about somewhere. They are up there with him on exactly the opposite side of the house from Hesther's room at just that time. That leaves only young Crispin. We shall have to chance him, but, according to Jabez, he has the habit of going to bed between eleven and twelve, and by one o'clock he ought to be sound asleep.
"However, that is one of the things we ought to look out for, one of the things indeed that I want your help about. Meanwhile Jabez is patrolling in the grounds outside."
"Jabez!" Harkness cried, startled.
"Yes, that is our great piece of luck. Crispin has had some fellow of his own in the grounds all this time, but three nights ago he sent him up to London on some job and Jabez has taken his place. I don't think he trusts Jabez altogether, but he trusts the others still less. He is always cursing the Cornishmen, and they don't love him any the better for it."
​"Well, when you've got safely to your pony cart what happens next?"
"We drive up Shepherd's Lane, down across the moor until we reach the cliff just above Starling Cove. Here I've got a boat waiting, and we'll row across that corner of the bay to another cove—Selton—and just above Selton is Selton Minor where there's a station. At four in the morning there's the first train, local, to Truro, and at Truro we can catch the six o'clock to Drymouth. In Drymouth there are an uncle and aunt of hers—the Bresdins—who have long been fond of her and wanted her often to stay with them. Stephen Bresdin is a good fellow and will stand up for her, I know, once she's in his hands. Then we can get the law to work."
"Won't Crispin be after you before you reach the Truro train "
"Well, I'm reckoning first that he doesn't discover anything at all until he wakes in the morning. They are making an early start for London that day, but he shouldn't be aware of anything until six at least. But secondly, if he does, I'm calculating that first he'll think she's catching the three o'clock Treliss to Drymouth, or that she's motored straight into Truro. If he goes into Truro after her or sends young Crispin I'm reckoning that he won't have the patience to wait for that six o'clock or ​won't imagine that we have, and will be sure that we will have motored direct into Drymouth.
"He'll post after us there. I don't think he knows about the Bresdins in Drymouth. He may, but I don't think so. Of course it's all chance, but I figure ithat is the best we can do."
"And what's my part in this?" asked Harkness.
"Of course you're not to do a thing more than you want to," said Dunbar. "But this is where you could be of use. The thing that we're mainly afraid of is young Crispin. Hesther can get out of her room easily enough. It is only a short drop on to an outhouse roof, and then a short drop from there again, but if young Crispin is moving about, coming into her room and so on, it may be very difficult. What I suggest is that you stay with the older Crispin looking at his collections and the rest until half-past twelve or so, then bid him a fond good-night and go. Wait for a quarter of an hour in the grounds. Jabez will be there, and then at about a quarter to one he will let you into the house again. Crispin Senior should be up in the tower by then, but if he isn't you can pretend that you have lost something, take him back into the small library where the prints are and keep him well occupied until after one. If he has gone up to his tower, Hesther will leave a small piece of white paper under her door if Crispin junior is in the way and hanging about. In that case I should knock ​on his door, apologise, say that you lost your gold match-box, had to come back for it as they are all leaving early the next day, think it must be in the small library; he goes back with you to look for it and—you keep him there. Do you think you could manage that?"
"I will," said Harkness.
"There's more than that. One of the principal reasons that Hesther refused to consider any of this was—well, running off alone with me in the middle of the night. But if you are with us—some one, if I may say so, so entirely——"
"Respectable," Harkness suggested as Dunbar hesitated.
"Well, yes—if you don't mind that word. It alters everything, don't you see. Especially as you've never seen me before, aren't in love with her or anything."
"Exactly,";said Harkness gravely.
"There you are. The thing's full of holes. It can fall down in all sorts of places, and if Crispin catches us and knows what we are up to it won't be pleasant. But there's nothing else. No other plan that seems any less dangerous. Are you for it, sir?"
"I'm for it," said Harkness. At that moment the little marble clock struck the half-hour.
"My God!" Harkness cried, "I should be at the ​hotel this very minute. If I miss them there's our plan spoiled."
He gripped Dunbar's hand once and was off.
IX
He went racing through the darkness, the two thoughts changing, mingling, changing incessantly over and over in his brain—that he must catch them at the hotel before they left it, and that he loved, he loved her, he loved her with an intensity that seemed to increase with every step that he ran.
In some way, although Dunbar had said so little about her, his picture of her was infinitely clearer and stronger than it had been before. He saw her in that small village of hers struggling with that drunken father, with insufficient means, with the individualities and rebellions of her two brothers who, however deeply they loved her (and normal boys are not conscious of their deep emotions), must have kicked often enough against the limitations of their conditions, sneering servants, spying neighbours, jesting and scornful relations, the father in his cups abusing her, insulting her and for ever complaining—and yet she, through all of this, showing a spirit, a hardihood, a pluck and, he suspected, a humour that only this last fatal intercourse with the Crispin family had broken down.
Harkness was the American man at his simplest and most idealistic, and than this there is nothing ​simpler and more idealistic in the whole of modern civilisation. The Englishman has too much common sense and too little imagination, the Frenchman is too mercenary, the Southern peoples too sensuous to provide the modern Quixote. In the United States of America to-day there are as many Quixotes as there are builders of windmills to be tilted at—and that is saying much.
So that, with his idealism, his hatred of cruelty and abnormality, Harkness saw far beyond any personal aggrandisement in this pursuit. He was not thinking now of himself at all, he had danced himself that night into a new world.
In the market-place he had to pause for breath. He had run all the way down the High Street, meeting no one as he went; he had already had considerable exercise that evening, and he was in no very fine condition of training. The market-place was quiet enough, only a few stragglers about; the Town Hall clock told him it was twenty-eight minutes to eleven.
He started up the hill, he arrived breathless at the hotel gates, the sweat pouring down his face. He stopped and tried to arrange himself a little. It would be a funny thing coming in upon them all with his tie undone and lines of sweat running down his face. But, after all, he could make the dance account for a good deal. He pushed his stud through the two ends of his collar and pulled ​his tie up, finding it difficult to use his hands because they were so hot, wiped his face with his handkerchief, pushed his cap straight on his head.
His face wore an expression of grim seriousness as though he were indeed Sir George off to rescue his Princess from the Dragon.
His heart gave a jump of relief when he saw that the Dragon was still there, standing quite unconcernedly in the main hall of the hotel, his son and daughter-in-law quietly beside him. Harkness's first thought at view of him was that Dunbar's story was built up of imagination. The little man was standing, a soft felt hat tilted a little on one side of his head, a dark thin overcoat covering his evening clothes. Because his hair was covered and his face shaded there was nothing about him that was at all startling or highly coloured. He simply looked to be a nice plump little English gentleman who was waiting, a smile on his face, for his car to arrive that it might take him home. Nor was there anything in the least exceptional in the pair that stood beside him, the man, thin, dark, immobile; the girl, her head a little bent, a soft white wrap over her shoulders, her hands at her side. At once it flashed into Harkness's brain that all the scene with Dunbar had been imagined; there had been no "Feathered Duck," no melodramatic story of madness and tyranny, no twopence-coloured plan for a midnight rescue.
​He was about to drive a mile or two to see some beautiful things, to smoke a good cigar and drink some admirable brandy—then to retire and sleep the sleep of the divinely worthy.
The girl raised her head. Her eyes met his, and he knew that whatever else was true or false his love for her was certain and resolved.
Crispin looked extremely pleased to see him. He came towards him smiling and holding out his hand:
"Why, Mr. Harkness, this is splendid," he said. "We were just wondering what we should do about you. We were giving you up."
Harkness was conscious that, in spite of his attempts outside, he was still in considerable disorder. He fingered his collar nervously:
"I'm sorry," he began. "But I'm so glad that I've caught you after all."
"Were the revels in the town amusing?" Crispin asked.
Harkness had a sudden impulse, whence he knew not, to make the younger Crispin speak.
"Why didn't you come down?" he asked. "You'd have enjoyed it."
The man was astonished at being addressed. He sprang into sudden life like any Jack-in-the-Box:
"Oh I," he said, "I had to go with my father, you know—yes, to see some old friends."
​He was looking at Harkness as though he were wondering why, exactly, he had done that.
"Are you still willing to come and see my few things?" Crispin asked. "It's only half-an-hour's drive and my car will bring you back."
"I shall be delighted to come," Harkness said quickly. "I would have been deeply disappointed if I had missed you. But you must not think of sending me back. I shall enjoy the walk greatly."
"Why, of course not!" said Crispin. "Walk back at that time of the night! I couldn't allow it for a moment."
"But I assure you," Harkness pressed, laughing, "I infinitely prefer it. You probably imagine that Americans never move a step unless they have a car to carry them. Not in my case. I won't come if I feel that during every minute that I am with you I am keeping your chauffeur up."
"Well, well—all right," said Crispin, laughing. "Have it your own way. You're a very obstinate fellow. Perhaps you will change your mind when the time really arrives."
They moved out to the doorway, then into the car.
Mrs. Crispin sat in one comer. Harkness was about to pull up the seat opposite, but Crispin said:
"No, no. Plenty of room on the back for three of us. Herrick doesn't mind the other seat. He's used to it."
They sat down. Harkness between the elder ​Crispin and the girl. The night was black beyond their windows. Crispin pressed the button. The interior of the car was at once in darkness, and instantly the night was no longer black but purple and threaded with wisps of grey lavender that seemed to hold in their spider filigree all the loaded scent of the summer evening. Again, as the car turned into the long ribbon of the dark road, Harkness was conscious through the open window of the smell of innumerable roses, the late evening smell when the heat of the day is over and the flowers are grateful.
Then a curious thing happened. Through the darkness, Harkness felt one of the fingers of Crispin's left hand creeping like an insect about his knee. They were sitting very closely together inside the car's enclosure. Harkness was conscious that Hesther Crispin was pressed, almost crouching, against the corner of the car, and although the stuff of her dress touched him he was aware that she was striving desperately that he should not be aware of her proximity, and then directly after that, of why she was so striving—it was because she was shivering—shivering in little spasms and tremors that shook her from head to foot—and she was wishing that he should not realise this.
And even as he caught from her the consciousness of her trembling, at the same moment he was aware of the pressing of Crispin's finger upon his ​knee. He was so close to Crispin, and his leg was pushed so firmly against Crispin's leg, that this movement might have been accidental had Crispin's whole hand rested there. But there was only the finger, and soon it began its movement, staying for an instant, pressing through the cloth on to the bone of the knee, then moving very slowly up the thigh, the sharp finger-nail suddenly pushing more firmly into the flesh, then the finger relaxing again and making only a faint tickling creeping suggestion of a pressure. Half-way up the thigh it stopped; for an instant the whole hand, soft, warm and boneless, rested on the stuff of Harkness's trousers, then withdrew, and the fingers, like a cautious animal, moved on.
When Harkness was first conscious of this he tried to move his knee, but he was so tightly wedged in that he could not stir. Then he could not move for another reason, that he was transfixed with apprehension. It was exactly as though a gigantic hand had slipped forward and enclosed him in its grasp, congealing him there, stiffening him into helpless clay—and this was the apprehension of immediate physical pain.
He had known all his days that he was a coward about physical pain, and that was always the form of human experience that he had shrunk from observing, compelling himself sometimes because he so deeply hated his cowardice, to notice, to listen, ​but suffering after these contacts acute physical reactions. Only once or twice in his life had pain actually come to him. He did not mind it so deeply were it part of illness or natural causes, but the deliberate anticipation of it—the doctor's "Now look out; I am going to hurt," the dentist's "I may give you a twinge for a moment," these things froze him with terror. During the war, when he had offered his service, this was the thing that from the clammy darkness of the night leapt out upon him. He had done his utmost to serve at the front, and it was in no way his own fault when he was given clerical work at home. He had tried again and again, but his poor sight, his absurd inside that was always wrong in one fashion or another, these things had held him back—and behind it all was there not a faint ring of relief, something that he dared not face lest it should reveal itself as cowardice? There had been times at the dentist's and one operation. That operation had been a slight one, but it had involved for several weeks the withdrawing of tubes and the probing with bright shining instruments. Every morning for several hours before this withdrawing and probing he lay panting in bed, the beads of sweat gathering on his forehead, his hands clutching and unclutching, saying to himself that he did not care, that he was above it, beyond it ... but closer and closer and closer the animal came, and soon he was at his bedside, and soon ​bending over him, and soon his claws were upon his flesh and the pain would swoop down, like a cry of a discoverer, and the voice would be sharper and sharper, the determination not to listen, not to hear, not to feel weaker and weaker, until at length out it would come, the defeat, the submission, the scream for pity.
The creeping finger upon his knee had the same sudden warning of imminent physical peril. The swiftly moving car, the silence, these things seemed to bear in upon him the urgency of the other—that it was no longer any game that he was playing but something of the deadliest earnest. Once again the soft hand closed upon his thigh, then the finger once more like a creeping animal felt its way. His body was responsive from head to foot. He was all tingling with apprehension. His hand resting firmly on his other knee began to tremble. Why was he in this affair at all? If Crispin were mad, as Dunbar declared, what was to stop him from taking any revenge he pleased on those who interfered with him?
The tale was no longer one of pleasant romantic colour, the rescuing of a distressed damsel from an enchanted castle, but rather something quite real and definite, as real as the car in which they were sitting or the clothes that they were wearing. He, suddenly feeling that he could endure it no longer—in another moment he would have cried out ​aloud—jerked his knee upwards. The hand vanished, and at the same moment Crispin's voice said: "We are almost there. We are going through the gates now."
Lamps flashed upon their faces and Crispin's eyes seemed to have vanished into his fat white face. He had, in that sudden illumination, the most curious effect of blindness. His lids were closed over his eyes, lying like little pieces of pale yellow parchment under the faint red eyelashes.
"Here we are!" he cried. "Out you get, Herrick." And as Harkness stepped out of the car something deep within him whispered: "I am going to be hurt. Pain is coming——"
Before him swung a cavern of light. It swung because on his stepping from the car he was dizzy, dizzy with a kind of poignant thick scent in the soul's nostrils, deep deep down as though he were at the edge of being spiritually anæsthetised. He paused for a moment looking back into the night piled up behind him.
Then he walked in.
X
It was an old house. The long hall was panelled and hung with the heads of animals. A torn banner of faded red and yellow with long tassels of gold hung above the stone fireplace. The floor was of stone, and some dim rugs of uncertain colour lay ​like splashes of damp here and there. The first thing of which he was aware was that a strong cold draught blew through the hall. It seemed to come from a wide oak staircase on his right. There were no portraits on the panelled walls. The house gave a deep sense of emptiness. Two Japanese servants, short, slim, immobile, their hair gleaming black, their faces impassive, waited. The outer door closed. The banner fluttered, the only movement in the house.
"Come in here, Mr. Harkness," Crispin said. "It is more comfortable."
His little figure moved forward. Harkness followed him, but he had had one moment with the girl as he entered the hall. The two Crispins had been for an instant back by the car. He had said, his lips scarcely moving:
"I gave him the message. He is coming," and she had answered without turning her head or looking at him: "Thank you."
Only as he walked after Crispin he wondered whether the Japanese could have understood. No. He was sure that no one could have heard those words, but he turned before leaving the hall, and he had a strange impression of the bare, empty, faded place, the staircase running darkly up into mystery, and the four figures, the two servants, Hesther and the younger Crispin, at that moment ​immobile, waiting as though they were listening—and for what?
The room into which Crispin led him was even shabbier than the hall. It was a large ugly place with dim cherry-coloured paper, and a great glass candelabrum suspended from the ceiling. The walls had, it seemed, once been covered with pictures of all shapes and sizes, because the wall-paper showed everywhere pale yellow squares and ovals and lozenges of colour where the frames had been. The wall-paper had indeed leprosy, and although there were still some pictures—a large Landseer, an engraving of a Millais, a shabby oil painting of a green and windy sea—it was these strange sea-sick evidences of a vanished hand that invaded the air.
There was very little furniture in the place, two shabby arm-chairs, a round shining table, a green sofa. The draught that had swept the hall crept here, now come now gone, stealing on hands and feet from corner to corner.
"You see," said Crispin, standing beside the empty fireplace, "I am here but little. I have pulled down the pictures from the walls and then left it all shabby. I enjoy the contrast." At the far end of the room were long oak cupboards. Crispin went to them and pulled back the heavy doors, and instantly in the shabby place there were blazing such treasures as Harkness had never set eyes on before.
​Not very many as numbers went—some dozen shelves in all—but gleaming, glittering, shining, flinging out their flashes of purple and amber and gold, here crystalline, now deeply wine-coloured, pink with the petals of the rose, white with the purity of the rising moon. There was jewelry here that seemed to move with its own independent life before Harkness's eyes—Jaipur enamel of transparent red and green, lovely patterns with thick long strips of enamel on a ground of bright gold, over which, while still soft from the furnace, an open-work pattern of gold had been pressed; large rough turquoises set in silver; Chinese work of carved ivory and jade, cap ornaments exquisitely worked, a cap of a Chinese emperor with its embroidered gold dragon and its crown of pearls. Then the inlaid Chinese feather work, and at the sight of these tears of pleasure came into Harkness's eyes, cells made as though for cloisonné enamel, and into these are daintily affixed tiny fragments of king-fisher feather. Colours of blue, green and mauve here blend and tone one into another miraculously, and the effect of all is a glittering sheen of gold and blue. There was one tiny fish, barely half an inch long, and here there were thirty cells on the body, each with its separate piece of feather. Chinese enamel buttons and clasps, nail-guards beautifully ornamented, Japanese hair combs marvellously ​wrought in lacquer, horn, gold lac on wood, wood with ivory appliqués, and stained ivory.
Then the Netsukes! Had any one in the world such lovely things! With the ivory and its colour richly toned with age, the metal ones showing a glorious patina. The sword guards—made of various metals and alloys and gold and silver, the metal so beautifully finished that it had the rich texture of old lace.
There was then the Renaissance jewelry, pieces lying like fragments of sky, of peach tree in bloom, of cherry and apple, a lovely pendant parrot enamelled in natural colours, a beautiful ship pendant of Venetian workmanship, an Italian earring formed of a large irregular pear-shaped pearl, in a gold setting a Cinquecento jewel—an emerald lizard set with a baroque pearl holding an emerald in its mouth.
Eighteenth-century glory. Gold studs with little skeletons on silk, covered with glass and set in gold. Initials of fine gold with a ground of plaited hair, this edged with blue and covered with faceted glass on crystal and the border of garnets. A pair of earrings, paintings in gouache mounted in gold. A brooch set with garnets. A French vinaigrette enamelled in panels of green on a gold and white ground.
Loveliest of anything yet seen, a sixteenth-century cameo portrait of Lucius Verius cut in a dark onyx. The enamel was green with little white ​"peas" and small diamonds were set in each pod.
"Ah this!" said Harkness, holding it in his hand. "This is exquisite!"
But Crispin was restless. The eyes closed, the short body moved to another part of the room leaving all the treasures carelessly exposed behind him. "That is enough," he said—"enough of those, I bore you. And now," turning aside with a deprecatory child-like smile, as though he had been exhibiting his doll's house, "you must see the prints."
Harkness turning back to the room saw it as even shabbier than before. It was lit by candle-light, and in the centre of the round shining table there were four tall amber-coloured candlesticks that threw around them a flickering colour as the draught ruffled their power. To this table Crispin drew two chairs. Then he went to a handsome old oak cabinet carved stiffly with flowers and fruit. He stayed looking with a long lingering glance at the drawers, then sharply up at Harkness. Seen there in the mellow light, with the coloured glory of the open cabinets dimly shining in the far room, with the pleasant timid smile that a collector wears when he is approaching his beloved friends, he might have stood to Rembrandt for another "Jan Six," short and stumpy though he be.
"Now what will you have? Dürer, Whistlers, Little Masters, Meryons, Dutch seventeenth cen​tury, Callot, Hollar? What you will.... No, you shall have only a few, and those not the most celebrated but perhaps the best loved. Now, here's for your pleasure...."
He came to the table bearing carefully, reverentially, his treasures. He set them down. From one after another he withdrew the paper, there gleaming between the stiff white shining mats they breathed, they lived, they smiled. There was the Rembrandt "Landscape with a flock of sheep," there the Muirhead Bone "Orvieto," the Hollar "Seasons," Callot's "Passion," Meryon's "College Henri Quatre," Paul Potter's "Two Horses," a sea-scape of Zeeman, Cotman's "Windmill," Bracquemond's "Teal Alighting," a sea-scape of Moreau, and Aldegrever's "Labour of Hercules" to close the list. Not more than thirty in all, but living there on the table with their personal glow spontaneity. He bent over them caressing them, fondling them, smiling at them. Harkness drew near and, looking at the tender wistfulness of the two old Potter's horses, bravely living out there the last days of their broken forgotten lives, he felt a sudden friendliness to all the world, a reassurance, a comfort.
Those glittering jewelled things had had at their heart a warning, an alarm; but no one, he was suddenly aware, who cared for these prints could be bad. There are no things in the world so kindly, so simple, so warm in their humanity....
​The little man was near to him. He put his hand on his knee.
"They are fine, eh? They know you, recognise you. They are alive, eh?"
"Yes," said Harkness, smiling. "They are the most friendly things in art."
The door opened and one of the Japanese servants came in with liqueurs. They were put on the table close to Harkness, and soon he was drinking the most wonderful brandy that it had ever been his happy fortune to encounter.
He was warm, cosy, quite unalarmed. The prints smiled at him, the dim room received him as a friend.
Crispin was talking, leaning back now from the table, his fat body hugged up like a cushion into his chair.
His red hair stood, flaming, on end. Harkness was, at first, only vaguely conscious that Crispin was speaking, then the words began to gather about him, to force their way in upon his brain; then, as the monologue continued, his comfort, his cosiness, his sense of security slowly slipped from him. His eyes passed from the "Two Horses" to the high sharp cliffs of the "Orvieto," to the thick naked Hercules of the Aldegrever. Then, he was aware that he was frightened, as he had been on the road, in the hotel, in the car. Then, with a flash of awareness, like the sharp contact with unexpected steel, ​he was on his guard as though he were standing alone with his back to the wall against an army of terrors.
".... And so as I like you so much, dear Mr. Harkness, I feel that I can talk to you freely about these things and that you will understand. That has always been my trouble—that I have not been understood sufficiently, and if now I go my own way and have my own fashion of dealing with life I am sure that it is comprehensible enough.
"I was a very lonely child, Mr. Harkness, and mocked at by every one who saw me. No, I have not been understood sufficiently. The colour of my hair has been a barrier. I realise that I am, and always have been, absurd in appearance, and from the very earliest age I was aware that I was different from other human beings and must pursue another course from theirs. I make no complaint about that, but it justifies, I think, my later conduct."
Here, as though some wire had sprung taut inside him he sat forward upright in his chair, staring with his little pale eyes at Harkness, and it was now that Harkness was abruptly aware of his conversation.
"I am not boring you, I trust, but I have taken a sympathetic liking to you, and it may interest you to understand my somewhat unusual philosophy of life.
​"My mother died when I was very young. My father was a surgeon, a very wealthy man, money inherited from an uncle. He was a strange man, peculiar, odd. Cruel to me. Very cruel to me. He hated the sight of me, and told me once that it was a continual temptation to him to lay hands on me and cut my heart out—to see, in fact, whether I had a heart. He liked to torment and tease me, as indeed did every one else. I am not telling you these things, Mr. Harkness, to rouse your pity, but rather that you should understand exactly the point at which I have arrived."
"Yes," said Harkness, dragging his eyes with strange difficulty from the pursed white face, the red hair, and glancing about the dim faded room and the farther spaces where the jewels flashed in the candle-light.
"Many people would have called my father insane, did not hesitate to do so. He was a large, extremely powerful man, given to violent tempers. But, after all, what is insanity? There are cases—many I suppose—where the brain breaks down and is unable to perform any longer its ordinary functions, but in most cases insanity is only the name given by envious persons to those who have strength of character enough to realise their own ideas regardless of public opinion. Such was my father. He cared nothing for public opinion. We led a strange life, he and I, in a big black house in Bloomsbury. ​Yes, black, that's how it was. I went to Westminster School, and they all mocked me, my hair, my body, my difference. Yes, my difference. I was different from them all, different from my father, different from all the world. And I was glad that I was different. I hugged my difference. Different...."
He lent forward, tapped Harkness's knee with his hand, staring into his face.
"Different, Mr. Harkness, different. Different...."
And the long draughty room echoed "Different ... different ... different."
"My father beat me one night terribly, beat me so that I could not move for pain. For no reason, simply because, he said, he wished that I should understand life, and first to understand life one must learn to suffer pain, and that then, if one could suffer pain enough, one could be as God—perhaps greater than God.
"It was to that night in the Bloomsbury house that I owe everything. I was fifteen years of age. He stripped me naked and made me bleed. It was terribly cold, and I came in that bare room right into the very heart of life, into the heart of the heart, where the true meaning is at last revealed—and the true meaning——"
He broke off suddenly, then whispered:
"Do you believe in God, Mr. Harkness?" and ​the draught went whispering on hands and feet round the room, "Do you believe in God, Mr. Harkness?"
"Yes," said Harkness.
"Yes,"said Crispin, in his lovely melodious voice; "but in a good God, a sweet God, a kind beneficent God. That is no God. God is first cruel, terrible, lashing, punishing. Then when He has punished enough, and the victim is in His power, bleeding at His feet, owning Him as Lord and Master, then He bends down and lifts the wounded brow and kisses the torn mouth, and in His heart there is a great and mighty triumph.... Even so will I do, even so will I be ... and greater than God Himself!"
There was silence in the room. Then he curled up in his chair as he had done before, and went on with his friendly air:
"Dear Mr. Harkness, it is good indeed of you to listen to me so patiently. Tell me at once when I bore you. My father died when I was seventeen and left me all his wealth. He died in a Turkish bath very suddenly—ill-temper with some casual masseur, I fancy.
"I realised that I had a power. The realisation was very satisfactory to me. I married and during the three years of my married life I collected most of the things that I have shown you this evening. I married a woman whom I was unfortunately unable to make happy. She could have been happy, ​I am sure, could she have only understood, a little, the philosophy that my father had taught me. My father was a very remarkable man, Mr. Harkness, as perhaps you have perceived, and he had, as I have told you, shown me the real meaning of this strange life in which we are forced, against our wills, to take part. It was foolish of my wife not to benefit by this knowledge. But she did not, and died sooner than I had anticipated, leaving me one child.
"A widower's life is not a happy one, and you will have undoubtedly perceived how many widowers marry again."
He paused as though he expected some comment, so Harkness said yes, that he had perceived it. Crispin sat forward looking at him inquisitively, and making, with his fingers, a kind of pattern in the air as though he were tracing there a bar of music.
"Yes. I did not marry again, but rather gave myself up to the continuation of my father's philosophy. The philosophy of pain as related to power one might perhaps term it. God—of Whose existence no thinking man can truly permit himself to doubt—have you ever thought, Mr. Harkness, that the whole of His power is derived from the pain that He inflicts upon those less powerful than Himself? We conceive of Him as a beneficent Being, and from that it follows that He must have deter​mined that pain is, from Him, our greatest beneficence. It is plainly for our good that He torments us. Should not then we, in our turn, realising that Pain is our greatest happiness, seek, ourselves, for more pain, and also teach our fellow human beings that it is only through pain that we can reach the true heart and meaning of life? Through Pain we reach Power.
"I test you with pain, and as you overcome the pain so do you climb up beside me, who have also overcome it, and we are in time as gods knowing good and evil.... A concrete case, Mr. Harkness. I slash your face with a knife. You are so powerful that you take the pain, twist it in your hand and throw it away. You rise up to me, and suddenly I, who have inflicted the pain on you, love you because you have taken my power over you and used it for your soul's advantage."
"And do I love you because you have slashed my face?" asked Harkness.
Crispin's eyes narrowed. He put out his hand and laid it on Harkness"s knee.
"We would have to see," Crispin murmured. "We would have to see. I wonder—I wonder...."
They were silent. Harkness's body was cold, but the room was very hot. The candles seemed to throw out a metallic radiant heat. Harkness moved his knee.
​"It would not do to prove your theory too frequently," he said at last.
"No, no, of course it would not. It is, you understand, only a theory that I have inherited from my father. Yes. But I will confess that when an individuality comes close to me and remains entirely outside my influence I am tempted to wonder.... Well, to speculate.... I like to see how far one personality will surrender to another. It is interesting—simply as a speculation. For instance, you have noticed my daughter-in-law?"
"Yes," said Harkness, "I have. A charming girl."
"Charming. Exactly. But independent, refusing to make the most of the advantages that are open to her. Like my poor late wife, for instance. Unfortunate, because she is young and might benefit so much from my older and more experienced brain.
"But she refuses to come under my influence, remains severely outside it. Now, my son is almost too willing to understand my meaning. Were I to plunge a knife into his arm no blood would flow. I am speaking metaphorically of course. After a very slight training in his early youth he was all that I could wish. But too submissive—oh yes, altogether too submissive.
"His wife's independence, however, is quite of another kind. It might almost seem as though during these last weeks she had taken a dislike both ​to myself and my son. However, she is very young and a little time will alter that, I have no doubt. Especially as we shall be in foreign countries and to some extent alone by ourselves."
Harkness pressed his hands tightly together. A little shiver ran, as though it responded to the draught that blew through the room, up and down his body. He was anxious that Crispin should not notice that he was shivering.
"Have you any idea where you will go?" he asked—and his voice sounded strangely unlike his own, as though some third person were in the room and speaking just behind him.
"We have no idea," said Crispin, smiling. "That will depend on many things. On Mrs. Crispin herself of course amongst others. A young wife must not show too complete an independence. After all, there are others whose feelings must be considered——" He was smiling as it were to himself and as though his thoughts were pleasant ones.
Suddenly he sprang up and began to walk the room. The effect on Harkness was strange—it was as though he were suddenly shut in there with an animal. So often in zoological gardens he had seen that haunting monotonous movement, that encounter with the bars of the cage and the indifferent acceptance of their inevitability, indifferent only because of endless repetition. Crispin, padding now up and down the long room, reminded Harkness of one of ​the smaller animals, the little jaguars, the half-wolf, half-fox; his head forward, his hands crossed behind his short thick back, his eyes, restless now, moving here, there about the room, his movements soft, almost furtive, every instinct towards escape. As he moved in the room half-clouded with light, the soft resolute step pervaded Harkness's sense, and soon the thick confined scent of a caged animal seemed to creep up to his nostrils and linger there.
Furry—captive—danger hanging behind the plodding step, so that if a sudden release were to come.... And he sat there fixed in his seat as though nailed to it while the sweet voice continued: "And so, my dear Mr. Harkness, I have devoted my later years to the solution of this problem.
"I feel, if I may say so, without too much arrogance, that I am intending to help poor human nature along the road to a better understanding of life. Poor, muddled human nature. Defeated always by Fear. Yes, Fear. And if they have surmounted Fain and stand with their foot on its body, what remains? It is gone, vanished. I myself am increasing my power every day. First one, then another. First through Pain. Then through Love. I love all the world, yes, everything in it, but first it must be taught, and it is so reluctant—so strangely reluctant—to receive its teaching. And I myself suffer because I am too tender-hearted. I should myself be superior to ​the suffering of others because I know how good it is for them to suffer. But I am not. Alas, no. It is only where my indignation is aroused, and aroused justly, that I can conquer my tenderness, and then—well then... I can make my important experiments. My daughter-in-law, for instance...."
He paused, not far from Harkness, and once again his hands made a curious motion in the air as though he were transcribing a bar of music. He stepped close to Harkness. His breath, scented curiously with a faint odour of orange, was in Harkness's face. He leaned forward, his hands were on Harkness's shoulders.
"For instance, I have taken a fancy to you, my friend. A real fancy. I liked you from the first moment that I saw you. I don't know when, so suddenly, I have taken a fancy to any one. But to care for you deeply, first—yes, first—I would show you the meaning of pain...." Here his body suddenly quivered from the feet to the head. "... And I could not, liking you so much, do that unless you were seriously to annoy me, interfere in any way with my simple plans"—the hands pressed deeply into the shoulders—"yes, only then could we come really to know one another ... after such a crisis what friends we might be, sharing our power together! What friends! Dear me! Dear me!"
​He moved away, turning to the table, looking down on the prints that were spread out there.
"Yes, yes, I could show you then my power." His voice vibrated with sudden excitement. "You think me absurd. Yes, yes, you do. You do. Don't deny it now. As though I couldn't perceive it. Do you think me so stupid? Absurd, with my ridiculous hair, my ugly body. Oh! I know! You can't hide it from me. You laugh like the rest. Secretly, you laugh. You are smiling behind your hand. Well, smile then, but how foolish of you to be so taken in by physical appearances. Do you know my power? Do you know what I could do to you now by merely clapping my hands?
"If my fingers were at your throat, at your breast, and you could not move but must wait my wish, my plan for you, would you think me then so absurd, my figure, my hair, ridiculous? You would be as though in the hands of a god. I should be as a god to you to do with you what I wished....
"What is there that is so beautiful that I, ugly as I am, cannot do as I wish with it? This——" Suddenly he took up the "Orvieto" and held it forward under the candle-light. "This is one of the most beautiful things of its kind that man has ever made, and I—am I not one of the ugliest human beings at whom men laugh?—well, would you see my power over it? I have it in my hands. It ​is mine. It is mine. I can destroy it in one instant——"
The beautiful thing shook in his hand. To Harkness it seemed suddenly to be endued with a human vitality. He saw it—the high sharp razor-edged rocks, the town so confidingly resting on that strength, all the daily life at the foot, the oxen, the peasants, the lovely flame-like trees, the shining reaches of valley beyond, all radiating the heat of that Italian summer.
He sprang to his feet. "Don't touch it!" he cried. "Leave it! Leave it!"
Crispin tore it into a thousand pieces, wrenching it, snapping at it with his fingers like an animal. The pieces flaked the air. A white shower circled in the candle-light then scattered about the table, about the floor.
Something died.
A clock somewhere struck half-past twelve.
Crispin moved from the table. Very gently, almost beseechingly, he looked into Harkness's face.
"Forgive me my little game," he said. "It is all part of my theory. To be above these things, you know. What would happen to me if I surrendered to all that beauty?"
The eyes that looked into Harkness's face were pathetic, caged, wistful, longing. And they were mad. Somewhere deep within him his soul, caught in the wreckage of his bodily life like a human ​being pinned beneath a ruined train, besought—yes, besought Harkness for deliverance.
But he had no thought at that moment of anything but his own escape. To flee from that room—from that room at any cost! He said something. Crispin did not try to keep him. They moved together into the hall.
"And you won't allow my chauffeur to drive you back"
"No, no thank you, I shall love the walk."
"Well, well. It has been delightful. We shall meet some day again I have no doubt...."
Silence flooded the house. Once more Harkness's hand touched that other soft one. The door was open. The lovely night air brushed his face, and he had stepped into the dim star-drenched garden. The door closed.