Success
He began to walk: it was automatic, like much else; he did not know
he walked; he did not know where he went, nor whom he passed; he did
not know if people looked at him or if they did not. Likely they did
not: after all, a grey, drawn face is no unprecedented thing; and there
is not one person in a thousand who, looking through the eyes, gets a
glimpse of the soul behind. The rain was falling faster now, but he
did not turn up the collar of his coat, he was not aware of it; not
really aware of the jostle of the foot-passengers and the noise of the
traffic, though both, subconsciously, pressed painfully on his nerves.
His lips moved once to repeat some words—“My inventions,” and “I fear I
can do nothing for you in that matter”—his mind, oblivious of all else,
labouring round in one restricted circle.
Someone touched him. He stopped dead, like a vibrating balance arrested
by a sudden hand. A girl was at his elbow; a girl who looked up with
shy, comprehending eyes.
“Michael,” she said. “Cousin Michael, won’t you come home and have tea
with me?”
He heard her, and by an effort brought his mind to focus so that he
compelled himself to understand the drift of the words. “I am afraid,”
he said politely, with an odd patient politeness, “I cannot—I’m so
busy.”
She nodded, but—“It’s not far,” she said reassuringly, and rather as if
he had consented.
She had touched his arm when she first spoke to him, and she had not
let go; now, in the obscurity where they stood, some distance from a
light, she slipped her hand down till it touched his ungloved one. Hers
was ungloved too, and her fingers closed on his with a compelling touch.
“It is not far,” she said, and led the way to a side street, narrower
and quieter than the main one.
He came. It was automatic almost, as his former actions had been,
though with a difference; he had this much consciousness, he was aware
that the streets were quieter and less lighted, and there was relief
in it. She knew the neighbourhood well, leading the way by by-streets,
and he accepted her and her leading. They came to a short street where
there were tall old houses, but little lighted, and no foot-passengers
about; a momentary feeling passed over him as of an animal that has
escaped noisy pursuers, and is at the entrance of its hole.
She opened a door in one of the dark houses, and led the way in: across
a dusky hall, into a large, dim room, where a shaded light burned, and
a shadow moved above a desk screened from view. There was the sound of
faint scratching, pen on paper, nothing else, and no one looked out as
they entered. She crossed the room, and at the far side opened a small
door set in the panelling. Beyond, was a narrow staircase, lighted only
by a candle, set in an angle where stairs went up. She lifted it down,
and the door fell to behind.
“This way,” she said, and led up the stairs.
At the top, another door, masked as the first, in the woodwork, gave
on to the room above. This room, lighted only by firelight, was also
large and dim, and pervaded with an almost tangible sense of quiet; the
falling to of the door behind them seemed to shut out the world.
The girl crossed the room to the fireplace, where a kettle, ready to
boil, stood on the old-fashioned hob. “I’ll make the tea in a moment,”
she said. “Sit down.”
He sat, and she made tea.
It is uncertain when he had had his last meal; when he had it it was
only a sandwich in a refreshment-room, or lunch on a train, not a human
meal, with human companionship. No relation to this tea with the girl,
who spoke and was silent by turns harmoniously, making no demand on
him, yet allowing no obvious silence to call for explanation or speech.
After a time, food and quiet and the curious influence there was
present had so far restored balance, that he was consciously aware that
his hostess was Nan Barmister, a cousin with whom he had been so little
intimate in the past that his coming to her home, to which he had never
been before, must seem odd. It crossed his mind, as he turned from the
table, that his acceptance of the invitation, his presence at all in
town, needed explaining to her. The wounded animal’s instinct to hide,
one of the first of the natural instincts to reassert itself, inclined
him to explain as it inclined him to conceal his sodden and muddied
boots. But even as he pushed his feet into the greater darkness under
his chair, he felt her eye on them.
“One might think I had been on the tramp,” he apologised, with a
flickering effort to recover his ordinary manner.
“No,” she said; then added, “I don’t think that: I think the bottom of
the world has blown out.”
He looked at her, but hardly with surprise. When the horizon holds one
thing only, it is not surprising for others to know it; and, in spite
of some feeble stirrings of pride towards concealment, it does not seem
to matter much, amidst the general ruin, that they should.
She had knelt to rearrange the fire; she did not get up, but sat back
on her feet on the hearthrug, her face towards the blaze. “I think,”
she said, without looking round, “when that happens one does not notice
things; they aren’t really there; there is nothing there but the one
thing—I think that is Chaos.”
“How do you know?” he put the question faintly curious.
She moved her shoulders. “I don’t know,” she said, and she did not.
She did not know that the great knowledge—the knowledge that matters—is
divined, not known, of inspiration rather than experience.
“I suppose,” she said, still looking into the fire, and speaking
slowly—“I suppose when that happens—Chaos, I mean—after a great while
one touches solid again, something takes shape——”
“There is nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing,” he repeated.
His hands hung on either side of his chair, there was a slackness,
a relaxing about his whole figure. It was as if the collapse,
which had approached before and had been staved off by will, by a
despairing flicker of hope and the frenzied chase of it, and later by
the automatic capacity in man to go on a while even after the final
stroke—as if it had come at last. Strength, even the strength to resent
or conceal, was gone.
“They have taken everything,” he said apathetically, “my reputation,
my good name, my daily work and daily bread, and”—his voice quivered a
little—“my invention.”
She nodded; she was not looking at him now; she looked away just before
his voice quivered for the invention. She knelt, staring at the fire
again a long time without speaking. At last she said, though more as
if addressing herself, “Don’t you think sometimes, after a long time,
something takes shape where nothing, less than nothing, has been left?”
“You do not understand,” he said wearily; “you do not know what I am up
against.”
“No,” she admitted, “that is true. But”—she turned earnest eyes on
him—“surely there is something?”
“No.” He spoke indifferently, with the indifference of a brain beyond
feeling or caring, one to which nothing matters.
Nevertheless, in a while he began to talk fitfully, induced thereto one
does not know by what, possibly by something in the girl who crouched
dark and inconspicuous by the fire and watched him covertly.
He did not rehearse facts straightly, or speak at all as to one who
knew little of his life and nothing of what had happened; he forgot his
listener was in that case, he forgot her actual physical personality
altogether. It was no narrative of the catastrophe he made, nor of
what, so far as he knew, had led up to it; it was not even a plain
statement of his losses; certainly no clear account of the last two
days. Much that had occurred in them, much altogether was temporarily,
at least, blotted from the shaken brain. Yet what he did say, with
its omissions and reiterations, its harping on unessential detail and
curious, and seemingly reasonless, digressions gave the kernel of the
matter. Gave it, perhaps more completely, and presented a truer and
clearer picture of the real soul of the thing to this listener than any
mere statement of facts.
At half-past eight someone opened the door at the far end of the
room. It was a heavy door of old mahogany, and gave on to the landing
and beautiful main staircase of the house. An old woman in a large
white apron and black cap pushed it open now and came in, exclaiming
about the darkness. The room was still only lighted by the fire; the
windows had long been a dim blur, beyond the old woman the landing and
staircase, poorly lit though they were, showed brightly illuminated by
contrast.
“Why, you haven’t got a light!” she said, setting a tray on the corner
of the table.
“No,” Nan answered, “we didn’t want one.”
The old woman said something about spoiling the eyesight, and proceeded
to light candles in curiously wrought silver candlesticks. Then
she quickly collected the tea-things—she must have been out all the
evening, or they would have been collected before—and set a simple
supper in their place.
It was a very simple meal, cold meat and cheese, the remains of a tart,
little more. It was set for one only, but Nan took it as a matter of
course that Michael would remain and share it with her.
He hesitated, then accepted, and soon they sat down together.
“My father is out,” she explained; “he won’t be back to-night. He had
to go out of town to see a customer who has a very precious chair she
wants matched. She would not send it here to be looked at, so he had to
go to see it. When he has to go any distance he usually travels one way
by night; it saves time.”
Michael said “Yes,” and recollected that he himself must spend the
night somewhere.
She appeared to remember it too. “Are you going to Hurstbury?” she
asked.
A vision of Hurstbury, the substantial suburban villa there, and of his
father and stepmother and the family flashed up into his mind. “No,” he
said, “they don’t know I’m in town.”
There was much else they did not know; some they would have to know
sooner or later, the realisation came with a jar; some they would
never, could never know, that realisation would come later with a grim
bitterness of perception. For the present one thing was enough, they
knew nothing of what had overwhelmed him, and in his present state he
could not face their ignorance or their inquiries.
“I shall go to an hotel,” he said.
Nan acquiesced, as if it were the best thing. “Unless you stayed here?”
she suggested tentatively. “I suppose you would not stay? I would be
rather glad if you did; a little Italian casket has come to-day; it
is small and very valuable, and it is known that my father has bought
it. There is no one in the house but Mrs. Bidden and me, few but old
caretakers in any house in the street.”
It did not occur to him to question if this ostensive reason were
the real one for the invitation; he did not think about it. He was
easily persuaded to stay, utter exhaustion gave him curiously little
inclination to resist any proposal she made, even while it almost
instantly effaced impressions not connected with the one great matter
on his mind. He forgot about the casket almost so soon as he heard of
it; though, by some chance, he recalled it, or that there was something
he ought to do, about bedtime.
“That thing you spoke of,” he said vaguely, “shall I take it with me?”
“The casket? No, it is as well where it is.”
“I’ll take it, if you like, I am not in the least likely to sleep. It
really hardly seems worth going to bed.”
Nevertheless, he did sleep; gradually exhaustion overcame him and
stupefaction stole upon his brain. The endless, hopeless thinking
and planning, asking questions of the past, contriving wild plans
for the future, grew dimmer. Dimmer the scene at Galhardy’s which he