And woman-like she was not content to let this interlude just pass for what it was. She must needs exploit it. When they were both ready to go down she suddenly took his head in her hands and kissed him on the forehead.
“You see how happy we are now?” she said; “and how everything is all right again? That’s because you’ve stopped writing that terrible book. Don’t write it any more, William! I beg you! See, I beg you on my knees, in my best white dress, not to write another word of it!”
She actually did sink on her knees before him, clinging to the front of his coat and throwing back her head.
He could not have known, had he been as wise as Hermes Trismegistus, that the caressing abandonment of this gesture—apparently directed toward himself alone, and isolating the two of them from all the world by a sort of magical circle—was in reality entirely due to the girl’s happy knowledge that she was going to see Rook Ashover that night. The power that all human nature has, of exploiting secret emotions in the interest of obvious emotions, is carried by women to a most delicate and extravagant excess. Even as she knelt before him with her head thrown back looking so provocatively and wistfully appealing, she was thinking of him and of his book with less than half her mind.
Had William Hastings possessed the cosmic clairvoyance of a Paracelsus he might still have been unable to fathom the motives of this thin figure, with bare shoulders, clinging so beseechingly to the buttons of his coat.
As a matter of fact, he made not the slightest attempt to fathom them. He replied to the unfairness of her woman’s weapon by the unfairness of his man’s weapon. He just pulled her up by physical force, and holding her more tightly and with more vicious concentration than he had done for many a long month, he took advantage of her instinctive, nervous yielding to snatch a moment of blind love-making, such as he might have snatched had they been complete strangers to each other.
The man had really been as much betrayed into their luckless marriage as had the girl. He had met her at her aunt’s, an old priest-ridden fanatic, who at once set herself to curry favour with Eternity by handing over to its representative, as a menaced city might hand over its fairest virgin to a sea monster, the body and soul of her niece.
The girl had amused him at first, both by her idealizing devotion and by her neurotic moods. To the former he had responded by an attenuated strain of absentminded tenderness; to the latter he had responded by an ironic indulgence, as if her girlish perversities and caprices were the gambols of a half-human kitten.
It was not until her moods, her fits of crying, her childish obstinacies, her cravings for romance, had thoroughly wearied him and got on his nerves that he began to treat her with a studied callousness, hardening his heart against her, in an unphilosophic anger with her, for having ever crossed the threshold of his monastic cell.
It was a shock to the girl from which only her encounter with Rook saved her, when she first realized how little of natural warmth there was in the awkward tenderness which was Hastings’s nearest approach to human passion; but even this new feeling, so satisfying to her suppressed craving for romance, did not obliterate the disastrous effect of that first revelation of what the sex instinct can sink into, in a personality dominated by the tyranny of thought.
It did make her cling, however, with a desperate and pathetic tenacity, to whatever romantic elements there were—and there were not many—in Rook’s response to her infatuation. It was doubtless the fact that what the girl had so far never encountered, either in Hastings or in Rook, was just warm natural human amorousness that led to the contentment and complaisance with which she had received the shameless advances of the invalid Lexie. Lexie, with whom she had no responsible link of any kind, seemed the only one whose erotic proclivities left behind them no poison, no sting, no regret.
The ill-timed embrace between these two remote and alien human beings was interrupted by the sound of the door bell. They pulled themselves together at once, the girl smiling, the man grave, and after opening the door and listening for a moment to the colloquy below, they went downstairs side by
It was a wonder to watch Nell’s little villager in cap and apron assume the airs of an experienced servant as she informed Cousin Ann and Netta that “Mrs. Hastings be expecting their ladyships; and please would they take off their cloaks and go straight into parlour.”
Nell’s dinner party, when it was once under way, proved successful beyond her utmost expectation. The thought that when it was over she was going to Lexie’s to meet Rook gave animation and freedom to her chatter and something almost approaching loveliness to her thin face.
William Hastings, too, was in excellent spirits, and all went smoothly till the time came for the sweets and nuts.
Perhaps it was a glass of the Vicar’s port wine that broke the spell and put mischief into the heart of Cousin Ann; for the little servant had scarcely retired to begin washing the dishes when that young woman said, turning to her host: “Have you got yet to the really exciting part of your book, Mr. Hastings?”
The look which the author of the work in question turned upon his guest startled even the daughter of Lord Poynings. It must have resembled the look with which the famous Dean Swift actually killed the unfortunate Vanessa.
“Has my wife been talking to you?” he asked in a tone that made Nell wish the ceiling would fall down on their heads. “Have you,” he went on, “got the slightest idea of what my book means?”
“Means?” stammered Cousin Ann. “I understood you to imply that it was slightly heretical. But beyond that—I—I have no notion, of course. I’ve never heard you read a line of it!”
The countenance of Mr. Hastings expressed the passing within him of a terrific struggle. The veins in the man’s neck stood out like whipcord. Beads of perspiration appeared on his forehead. His cheeks grew flushed and then very pale. His fingers, which were playing with the blade of a silver fruit knife, bent it back until it looked as though it would snap. He remained as if petrified in his seat; breathing heavily, like a person on the verge of some kind of fit.
The three women stared at him in dead silence. They all seemed to recognize that a chance spark might set off a terrific explosion. But, in their silence, their own whirling thoughts must have resembled, for any occult initiate, three differently coloured lighthouses, projecting upon a mysterious storm their divergent rays!
The enormous magnetism of the man, in the turmoil of his suppressed fury, stirred up all manner of latent emotions in these three feminine bosoms.
Cousin Ann thought to herself that if she were destined to conceive a child for Rook, she must be careful to avoid the risk of any more shocks of this kind.
Nell thought to herself how odd it was that when William’s madness was directed toward others instead of toward her, she felt a queer perverted pride in him and even sympathy for him.
Netta was swept out, beyond the little room, beyond the four candles, beyond the convulsed countenance of the man opposite, into the bleak country of her own bitter resolution. “I’ll do it to-night,” she thought. “I’ll drink to-night at Lexie’s all I can, so that he won’t be able to bear the sight of me when he comes!”
William Hastings rose from the table. He had got his emotion into control, and he held it down within him as a man holds a maddened horse with an iron bit.
“Well, young ladies,” he said with a benevolent smile, “I expect we’d better start, if we’re not going to disturb Mrs. Bellamy’s arrangements.”
A quarter of an hour later they were all four entering the village. The lamps from the cottage windows shone out upon the littered yards, with their pails and wood piles and pig troughs and chicken pens; out upon the disconsolate vegetable patches where forlorn potato stumps and melancholy cabbage stalks carried the crisp whiteness of the beginnings of a heavy hoar frost.
As they turned into the alley where Lexie’s cottage stood, they could see, at the end of the narrow lane, the dark-stretching expanse of the water meadows.
“Let’s go and see,” cried Cousin Ann.
“No, no,” said Nell. “We’re late already. Mrs. Bellamy begged me not to be late.”
“It’s no distance,” protested the other, “and it would be so wonderful to see it over the ditches! Let’s go, Mr. Hastings!”
“You go in with Miss Page, then, Nell,” said Hastings. “Lady Ann and I won’t be five minutes. You can tell them we are just coming.”
The young girl obeyed with alacrity. She felt in a state of complete psychic sympathy with Netta and it was more than she had dared to hope for to meet Rook without either her husband or Cousin Ann!
These two unwanted ones walked rapidly together down to the end of the little road.
In a softer humour than usual, because of the pressure upon mind and body of the oldest interrogation-mark in the world, Cousin Ann was less oblivious than might have been expected to the recondite magic of that place and that hour.
The dark flat surface of a tall house by the edge of the fields rose above them like the bastion of an ancient city. Perhaps just because she felt herself at that moment on the verge of becoming a living bridge by which the Past might go over into the Future, she experienced the feeling that long ago, and even many times, she had come to a road’s end like this, where was just such a dark-walled house, and just such a smell of muddy, reedy fens stretching away under the burden of hoar frost!
Coming round the corner of the wall they found themselves on the edge of a little deserted paddock, bordered by a fence of loose stones and extending clear down to the first of the ditches, over the dark surface of which hung, sideways and drooping, the heavy trunks of a couple of pollard willows.
“Look!” cried Cousin Ann. “There it is!” and she pointed to the extreme edge of the western horizon, above which, sure enough, floated the thinnest, frailest moon-sickle that she had ever seen!
Squadrons of vaporous clouds kept up a perpetual march across it; but there it was—“Astarte, Queen of Heaven, with crescent horns!”—and the power of its presence, like the presence of the youngest, most fragile daughter of an old tragic dynasty, reached them through the night and blended with the vague earthy smells that came floating up from the shadowy fens.
“I’m glad we came, aren’t you?” the girl whispered, aware of a great leap of power and strength in the very depths of her being. “You thought of coming, though. I should never have done it alone.”
She laid the tips of her fingers on her companion’s sleeve, and the effect of this slight contact was enough to enhance to a point of magnetic intimacy her feeling of power.
“Tell me, now, will you; now we’re alone here, what you really are saying in that book?”
William Hastings swung round as quickly as if he had been struck by an invisible arrow.
“What’s that?” he cried hoarsely. “Leave that, please, Lady Ann Poynings!”
But the girl watched the horned and crescented mystery, cutting its path through the clouds, like a fairy scimitar through a froth of soapsuds, and she remorselessly went on.
“Why should I leave that, William Hastings? I’m intelligent enough to know that what you’re doing is no trifle, is perhaps of the greatest importance to us all.”
“No trifle and of great importance!” he repeated mockingly. But she could see he was yielding a little, and she laid her hand again on his coat sleeve.
“Do tell me! Do take me into your confidence!”
He was evidently impressed by her words. He looked round furtively as if to make sure there was no one within hearing.
“May I ask you a question, Lady Ann?” he said.
Cousin Ann smiled in the darkness. “Why not? Especially since I’m asking you such terrific impertinences!”
“Well, then, would you be good enough to tell me what is your motive for going on living in this disgusting world?”
“You mean for not committing suicide?”
“Not at all! I mean for wishing your life to continue; for wishing the life of the world to continue; for wishing that life as life should conquer death as death.”
“But it never can completely conquer death, can it?”
It was his turn now to snatch hold of her wrist in the darkness.
“Never completely. No; never completely! But it can conquer it very far. It can conquer it so far as to encourage men, beasts, birds, fishes, to go on with the huge stupidity! It can conquer it so far as to encourage intelligent women still to persist in bearing children!”
Ann Poynings extricated her wrist from his unconscious clutch. Was all this a mere bookworm’s eccentricity, or was the man actually out of his wits?
“Well?” she pursued. “And your idea is to analyze the motives that make people go on living when they are sick of life? Is that it, Mr. Hastings?”
He suddenly threw out both his arms toward her, so that she started back with considerable alarm; but he laid his hands on her shoulders and spoke thick and fast.
“I’ve always known you weren’t quite like the rest. I’ve always known I could tell you about it,” he began. “The Ashovers are enslaved by their sensations. They live for their sensations. But you’re different. You live for something else. They are all nothing to me, I tell you. No one is anything to me except as a proof of my discovery! It’s like this. What I’ve found out is the original secret of Life-Destruction; the great anti-vital energy, the death energy! What I’ve found out is the thing that one of the old poets symbolized once as the Breath of Demogorgon. It is just as much an organic force, an actual magnetic force, as radium or electricity. But it is more powerful than these because it belongs to the soul.”
He paused breathlessly and dropped his hands from her shoulders.
“I know,” he began again, after another anxious glance round, to make sure they were alone, “that what I’ve discovered is not a mere metaphysical theory. Do you know how I know it?”
His voice became lower and more furtive and he leaned close to her in the darkness.
“I know it by actual evidence here in Ashover! No—don’t run away. They can wait. You must hear me out now I’ve begun to speak. Ever since I came to this place I have been conscious of the power the dead have to preserve something of themselves alive in the world! Old families, like these Ashovers, have this power; just as old planets, like Saturn and Uranus, have it. Now do you know what I am doing? I am thwarting these dead! I am driving them back. I say this to you so that you can bear witness to the truth. There’ll be no more Ashovers born into Frome-side. Rook and Lexie are the last!”
Lady Ann instinctively pressed her hands against her body as if to assure herself of its material substantiality. There was something so sinister and ghastly in the man’s tone, and something so formidable in the perverse power that emanated from him, that she felt for a moment actually weak and faint. What horrible instinct of a distorted brain made him say these things to her rather than to any one else?
She glanced across the hushed empty fields, lying dim and vague before them. She searched for that “miraculous crescent”, but while they had looked away, it had been swallowed up by the clouds. Alone with this sombre figure of negation, hovering there like a great gray owl in front of her, in starched shirt and woolly overcoat, her mind clouded and darkened, she felt as if she were struggling with some hideous sort of nightmare. The whole scene—the blank wall, the dark forms of the willows, the hoar frost on the grass—all seemed unreal, fantastic, like something that must be broken to pieces by an effort of the will!
That she—Ann Poynings—should be spending New Year’s Eve with a human being dominated by such woe-begotten fancies, rumoured out of the remote heathen Past with “Gorgons, Hydras, and Chimæras dire,” seemed to suggest some mad hallucination. It must be, she thought, the troubled expectation in her nerves a
s to what might come of the affair with Rook that exposed her so to this lunatic’s chatter. She would throw the crazy enchantment off, break it up, return to her normal vision!
With a gallant effort of all the forces of her strong and cynical youth she did turn upon him now with a forced lightness of tone that would have changed the whole temper of the conversation with any one but William Hastings.
“But what about the book, Mr. Hastings? The question as to whether it is better for old families to die out or not to die out does not seem to require a whole volume.”
The change in her tone seemed quite lost upon him in his excitement, but he had built up such an edifice of secrecy about his thoughts that to express himself with any clearness had become impossible.
“My book?” he muttered. “My book? I can’t explain it to you now. It goes too far, too deep. Some day all the world will know. When I am dead, Lady Ann; when I am dead! But I have written it all down; step by step I have made it all plain. Every page has that breath upon it which the old poet talks of, the breath of Demogorgon! And when I am dead and they understand what I’ve discovered, what a power I shall have put into the souls of men! I shall have given man the power to counteract the creativeness of God. And Man shall say, ‘Let there be Darkness!’ and there shall be Darkness.”
His voice died away over the frozen meadows. “Let us go back. Let us go in,” he said after a pause. “I don’t suppose that any human creature has ever felt the disgusting loathsomeness of life more than I have. Too many horrible things! Too many horrible thoughts! Oh, what a day—what a day—when it is all absolutely wiped out!”
They turned back together up the lane and stopped at Lexie’s house. They could see the illuminated figures of their friends between the curtains of the room upstairs.
Mr. Hastings opened the gate into the little garden for his companion to pass in before him.
“Look at that!” he whispered, pointing to the window above. “It’s all futility and disgustingness. Poison and ratsbane! Nettles and snakes! Frog spawn and fœtus! And it’s the same up in the sky as in that silly room!” And he turned his accusing face toward the three stars of Orion’s Belt, which were all of the celestial luminaries at present visible through the overhanging clouds.
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