The golden journey of Mr. Paradyne
crystallization. With such mental qualities, is it to be wondered at
that, at forty-two, he was one of the leaders of the Chancery Bar?
‘What a judge the little devil will make when he’s sick of making
money!’ said his brethren.
On his previous visit therefore to the Cathedral of Chartres, Cosmo
Paradyne, drawing from the vast stores of his learning, gave his
wife an accurate account of the history of the fabric. He showed her
that portion which dated from the middle of the thirteenth century,
the stained glass of the same period, the Renaissance screen, the
difference between the one twelfth-century spire and the other of the
sixteenth century. The Cathedral was, to him, an agglomeration of
fascinating facts. Martha had listened distractedly and eventually had
replied:
‘Yes. That’s very interesting; but I think it’s rather pretty, all the
same.’
Having nothing to do, he strolled through the rising ground from which
the stupendous edifice commands the plain whose horizon is as vast as
that of mid-ocean. Suddenly the tricksy memory that had been playing
the devil with him of late captured, unsummoned, the air of the silver
flageolet. He hummed it, and somewhat impatiently dismissed it from his
thoughts, as he entered the wonder of heaven-seeking piers and shafts
of vast spaces and of stained colours of glass through which the sun
of the September afternoon streamed ineffably.
He sat on a rush-bottomed chair near the font and drank the glory
in like a man parched by a lifelong thirst. He went out very tired,
hanging his head, feeling half-drunken. He sat on the low parapet of
the parvis and remembered words of long ago flitted through his brain:
‘You see that masonry--restored after the fire----’ and so on, and so
on; and Martha’s acid voice: ‘Rather pretty, all the same.’
He spread out his hands drunkenly and rushed into the cathedral again
and gave himself up to the immensity of its loveliness.
Later he called at the Post Office seeking the answer to a long,
explanatory telegram which he had sent to Martha from the village where
he had learned the date. He must obtain news of her before starting on
his homeward journey.
In the cathedral he had been so happy; drenched in a sensuous
envelopment of beauty. In the crude hall of the Post Office, before
the wire-surrounded pigeon-hole, existence shrivelled into sordidness.
As a piece of identification he handed his hawker’s licence through the
aperture and waited, while search was made, with a grim smile on his
face. Cosmo Paradyne, K.C., was developing a sense of humour. A scrubby
official in a dirty brown holland smock handed him a gummed-up bit of
blue paper.
He read:
‘In view previous telegrams cannot believe loss of memory story.
Conduct disgraceful. Have kept up fiction of nervous breakdown and
foreign holiday for the family’s sake. To avoid scandal am willing
to receive you. Wire date arrival so that I can announce beforehand.
Martha.’
He reeled out of the Post Office. What were the telegrams to which she
alluded?
However, his deduction had been exact. Martha had known where he
was. There had been no mysterious disappearance to make a newspaper
sensation. All that was to the good. Martha had also saved his
face. Doubtless, the excellent Gregson had returned his briefs with
satisfactory explanations. He could go back and take up his work in the
most natural way in the world. He could go back and take up Martha who
was ‘willing to receive’ him.
He noted that the telegram bore the place name Paddington. It was
characteristic of Martha not to trust to the Ealing Post Office, but to
take the train in order to send the message from the London Terminus.
Martha was not sympathetic. Obviously she distrusted him; and, her mind
being on the track of an imaginary paramour, she would add a rasp to a
life that only mutual indifference had kept smooth. Well, he certainly
had suffered some mental disturbance, and, if he had followed anybody
it was not a woman, but must have been the easy young man with the
silver flageolet. But Martha would never believe it, even though he
showed her the instrument and played the bewitching tune.
It was dusk when he reached his caravan by the wayside of the
plane-tree avenue. His neighbours courteously informed him of their
jealous care of his possessions. They had watered and fed the horse,
and had guarded the vehicle as though it had been the Ark of the
Covenant. Paradyne again bestowed largess on the shock-headed boy.
The family sprawled on the grass eating their evening meal. The
sight reminded him of his own healthy hunger. He unlocked his door
and produced his rough store of food, the main part of which was
his sturdy twelve inches of sausage and a bottle of red wine which
he discovered with two others, wrapped up for safety’s sake in his
golfing knickerbockers. He sat on the steps and ate his supper with
an enjoyment that, in his memory, had never attended physical things.
He had despised the men who wasted their time and talk on flavours
of food and wine. He could not tell old port from new, nor had it
mattered to him whether he drank it with walnuts or with mackerel. But
that evening a great truth dawned on him. The salty, pungent, garlicky
sausage and the new coarse wine were predestined for each other in
Heaven’s Buttery. He ate and drank with an almost palpitating joy.
He filled his pipe with cheap French tobacco and the first puff or two
fell into harmony with the wine and the sausage. Its perfume mingled
with that of dust and beasts and the warm September smell that arose in
the gathering night from the near city and the vast, environing plain.
‘My God,’ said he, ‘it’s good to be alive.’
And as he said it, his memory flashed back to the inexplicable words
of Martha on the night of Viola’s wedding: ‘----it isn’t funny looking
after a dead man.’
‘What the devil did she mean by that?’ he had asked himself.
Now came a glimmering of the answer in the form of another question:
was he so sure that then, and, indeed, all his life before, he hadn’t
been a dead man?
The phrase worried him for a while. He had a dim, uneasy feeling that
he had used it, as Viola’s and the young man’s remark about Ealing, in
the forgotten telegrams. Well, well. He shrugged his shoulders. What
did it matter? In a day or two he must inevitably learn their purport.
Sufficient for the night was the beauty thereof. A damned queer thing,
beauty. He mused. He had known it, of course, as an intellectual
conception. But now, it was an emotional matter. It plucked at things
within his inmost being and swept unimagined chords. The Cathedral.
This dreamy fruitful plain, panting for the soon-coming swell of
moonlight.
Yes, he must go back. But things would never be quite the same.
The friendly neighbours in the red-and-yellow-striped caravan busied
themselves with preparations for departure. They must take up early
position in the fair-ground, according to police regulations. They
advised Monsieur to do the same. Monsieur, smoking contentedly, replied
that he had plenty of time before him, and watched them start. They
made polite farewells.
The last to do so was the obvious sister of the shock-headed boy, a
half-gipsy wench in the early twenties, artlessly clad in soiled and
scanty raiment, but superb in the flowing contours of her lithe youth,
and in her coarse loveliness.
‘_A demain, Monsieur._’
‘_A demain et bonsoir, Mademoiselle_,’ said he with a smile and a bow.
She lingered a few instants holding him with eyes half-mocking,
half-alluring. Then, with an ironical toss of her head, she turned
and faded into the dusk. Only when she had gone, did he realize that,
during his meal, his gaze had rested pleasurably and conjecturingly
upon her; and now her startling picture was imprinted on his mind. She
was but a slatternly wild thing, unwashed, unkempt; the only external
note of the picturesque about her being a flaming orange neckerchief;
living on the fringe of civilization, with possibly no morals to speak
of. But, God! She was alive!
For the first time in his cramped existence, he grew vehemently aware
of the wonder of woman as magnificent woman, of her wonder as elemental
complement of man. It had been only the flash of a dark-eyed drab
across his vision. But the flash awakened him, so that he gasped,
to the mighty potentialities of life. God! That girl was alive in
all her sensuous and animal mystery. And he--he smote his brow--he,
too, was alive. Lustily alive.... The thought stole into his brain:
Martha--Martha who had twitted him with being a dead man--had she ever
been anything else but a dead woman? What of the physical mystery of
the flesh, which this girl of naught had suddenly proclaimed, had
he ever dreamed of conjecturing from the cold and acid woman whose
lips conventionally kissed had been as unresponsive as the hem of her
garment? Nothing. As woman, newly revealed, Martha was dead. And she
loved her living death, gloried in it, strove to maintain all who came
near her within the sphere of its blight.
His ears heard the roar, and his eyes beheld the welter of the vast
waters of strange emotions and fierce passions and intolerable joys
that had ever beaten against the arid fortress in which he had been
content to have his bleak and indifferent being.
He wiped the sweat from his brow and leaned dejected against the
jamb of the caravan door. What a mighty and dreadful power was Fate.
No wonder the Greeks made their gods bow down before its supremacy.
The irony of it. Again a Greek conception. The Greeks were right.
How otherwise could he explain the staggering situation in which he
found himself? What but the relentless cruelty of Fate compelled
him, at that moment when the world revealed itself in terms of vital
beauty and infinite meaning, to return as return he must, to the old
withered life of Ealing and the blight of Martha, and the routine
of brain-exhausting, nerve-atrophying, soul-killing, meaningless
drudgery in the Court of Chancery? What single hour’s happiness had he,
intellectual automaton, ever got out of it? What had his brain-cramped
life held that could compare with that morning’s thrill of intense
physical fitness, with that evening’s leap towards the Unknown of
Passion?
‘Oh, damn!’ he said despondently.
According to his duty as husband and man of grave responsibilities, he
ought even now to be on his way to Paris. But he had been too weary of
spirit to make the effort; at any rate too much in love with the day’s
strange freedom. Besides, how could he leave caravan and horse adrift?
The caravan he might have abandoned. Its value was of no account to
a man of his fortune. But the horse was a living thing, a creature of
responsive sentiment, like a dog. It rubbed its muzzle against his arm
as though to manifest fondness. He must make fair and square provision
for the horse. To-night’s friendly encounter had showed him the way.
To-morrow, at the fair, would he sell for a song the whole outfit to
his late kindly neighbours; and then the stern and relentless journey
back to England.
The gradual traffic going fair-wards passed him by. But he did not hear
it, wrapped in his despairing thoughts. The night wore on. The full
moon arose, and, shining through the over-arching vault of foliage,
fantastically diapered the white road.
From his breast pocket, at last, he drew the silver flageolet and
looked at it in wistful perplexity. He put it to his lips, at first
idly and then with a quivering sense of mastery. And lo! he played the
whole of the melody through from beginning to end with its song of
birds and its elfin laughter and its longings and haunting mockery
just as the young man had played it in the starlight of his garden.