“Shut the gate and come in, Mr. Hastings,” called Cousin Ann from the doorstep. She had already rung the bell and had heard Mrs. Bellamy approaching from the kitchen.
CHAPTER XI
THERE was about half an hour more of the old year to tick itself away on Lexie’s clock. The company had arranged itself by a kind of selective felicity such as rarely emerges from the shuffling of the chance movements in a group of friends.
Nell Hastings, in a mood of radiant excitement, was seated by Rook’s side, talking with a reckless abandonment that was probably the result of the ritualistic bowl of punch, mixed and stirred with exquisite care by their host’s hand, which stood in the centre of the room.
Lexie himself seated on a hard-backed chair was reading aloud in a murmuring, chanting voice, from the Oxford Book of English Verse, while Cousin Ann and Mr. Hastings, from opposite ends of the rug-covered sofa, listened to him with an attention that was at once entranced and wandering; the sort of attention that strangers in a foreign temple might offer to an alien liturgy.
Netta, isolated from the rest even more than Cousin Ann was isolated from Mr. Hastings, sat in Lexie’s especial armchair watching Rook and Nell with an inscrutable smile.
Every now and then, unnoticed by any of the others except Lady Ann, she moved across to the table and replenished her glass from the deep nutmeg-scented bowl, whose silvery depths seemed as misty as her own cloudy thoughts.
By degrees the intent look with which she regarded her protector and his young companion changed its character. Her fixed mysterious smile degenerated into a fatuous stare and that again into an expression which resembled the ostentatious restraint of a burst of silly giggling.
The clock on the mantelpiece had now reached a point indicative of there being only fifteen minutes left of the year that was sinking into the gulf.
Lexie was reading Shakespeare’s “The Phœnix and the Turtle.” One by one the richly cadenced quatrains of the mysterious poem, thrown into a solemn relief by the unction of his voice, accompanied by the slow swaying of his heavy head as the music of the words took possession of him, even as the Delphic vapours were wont to intoxicate the Oracular priestess, fell grandly and fatally upon the rushing surface of that tidal ebb of the river of time, so soon to be swallowed up:
Let the bird of loudest lay
On the sole Arabian tree
Herald sad and trumpet be,
To whose sound chaste wings obey.
…….
Here the anthem doth commence:—
Love and constancy is dead;
Phœnix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence.
…….
So they loved, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none;
Number there in love was slain.
Like the corpses of royal children, slain in some religious holocaust, wrapped up in cerements of gold, the slow, gnomic, litany-sad syllables, murmured in Lexie’s deep hieratic voice, sank down into that flowing stream and disappeared for ever.
What planetary mystery, beyond the death dirge of human love, beyond the annihilation of human faith, had the great poet in his mind as he composed these extraordinary strophes?
The clock on the mantelpiece had reached the point of three minutes to midnight now; and though Nell’s low eager voice talking to Rook had not ceased, one could note that it kept breaking and hesitating, as if the girl has been spiritually aware, without being mentally conscious, that the death and birth of time itself were interchanging their unfathomable secrets above her head.
The poet’s stanzas seemed actually to be trailing their black and golden vestments to the measure of “a defunctive music” whose full significance was deeper, wider, more beautiful, more tragic, than anything that was passing between those four walls.
Before the two hands of the clock had come together under the sign of twelve, Lexie had reached the “Threnos” of this mysterious Shakespearean psalmody:
Death is now the phœnix’ nest
And the turtle’s loyal breast
To eternity doth rest,
Leaving no posterity:
’Twas not their infirmity,
It was married chastity.
Directly the clock began to strike they all lifted their eyes and remained motionless, staring at one another. There was a hush in the room when the thin reverberation died away, out of the heart of which it almost seemed as if they could hear the death rattle of some enormous winged creature, some huge space-moth, whose soft-feathered body was even then crumpling up, contorted and rigid, to sink down into the pools of Nothingness, a vast, lamentable, empty husk!
It was William Hastings who broke the silence.
“It’s curious to think,” he said, “that Time is a mere human invention, a mere illusion, without reality or substance beyond the fantastic and arbitrary interference of man.”
“Nonsense!” broke in Rook. “Time moves at a different rate for different types of consciousness. But it isn’t an illusion. It’s the very essence of reality! It pours forth, like the water of life, from every shape and form into which Space is divided. You can’t think of Space without Time, but sometimes I almost feel as if I could think of Time without Space.”
“How do you think of Time, Rook?” enquired Lexie, anxious as he always was to encourage his taciturn brother to express himself.
“I think of it as a great gray Serpent, perpetually uncoiling itself from a pile of coils that has no end and no beginning.”
“You mean that it always comes round again, having swallowed its tail?” said Nell with a little self-conscious, youthful laugh at her own audacity.
“No, no—I don’t mean that at all. I mean that it just uncoils itself and goes off into darkness; scale after scale of gray silveriness; and then lost to sight! I can see those coils uncurling their endless length independently of Space altogether.”
William Hastings looked at him with the Weary indifference with which professional philosophers regard the utterances of ordinary persons.
“You can’t see anything without using both the great illusions, Ashover,” he remarked drily. “But I sympathize with you in your condemnation of Space. Space has too much in it. But then, so has your Time! The whole business has gone too wide and far. The hour has struck for striking a blow at these miserable illusions, at this disgusting spectacle!”
He rose from the sofa as he spoke and began walking up and down the room. Lexie, who had been watching the face of Netta with a certain anxiety, left the mantelpiece and drew up a chair by her side, slipping his hand into hers as if to establish between them a warm human barrier against these desolate speculations. “I tell you,” went on Hastings, “the time has come to unwind the clock, to unravel the woof!”
“Mr. Hastings has some very interesting thoughts,” said Cousin Ann, clipping her words like a youthful undergraduate anxious to prove his sobriety.
“Netta and I don’t know what the devil he’s talking about, do we, Netta?” put in Lexie. Netta made no answer. With a blank fatuous smile and wavering steps she moved across to the punch bowl and refilled her glass.
When she had reseated herself, Lexie once more possessed himself of her hand. He did this with a grave protective gesture while his corrugated, seamed, and leathery countenance, full of a formidable Cæsarean dignity, turned toward the excited ecclesiastic a quizzical and hostile eye.
“You mean, I suppose,” said Rook, filling his own glass again, while Nell watched him from her corner with big, infatuated eyes, “that your thoughts have hurt themselves against the ultimate walls; and you want a world without walls? You’d better wait for death, Hastings. That’s simpler than trying to change the universe.”
William Hastings paused in his monotonous walk and drummed with one of his hands on the table.
“Death is no good!” he shouted. “What we want is to stop death from breeding life! What we hav
e to do is to go behind both life and death and get our hands on the mainspring.”
Netta began to laugh at this, an unpleasant tipsy laugh that drew Rook’s attention to her for the first time that night.
“What’s the matter, Netta?” he said brusquely. “Let her alone, Lexie.”
Netta’s laugh died away in a series of suppressed giggles.
“Let her alone yourself,” replied the younger Ashover, glancing almost angrily at his brother.
“Come and sit down again,” came in Nell’s faint voice from the corner of the room. It was difficult to decide whether the young girl’s appeal referred to Rook or to her husband, or to both of them. Neither of the men, however, paid the least attention to her.
“What are you laughing at, Netta?” said Rook, standing in front of the unhappy woman and staring at her as if she had been an entire stranger to him.
A complicated expression, difficult to analyze, flitted across her face. There was in it the hunted look of an animal at bay. There was in it a sullen obstinate look, as of a child who is bent on mischief. And in addition to these things there was a curious coarsening process observable there, as if another Netta were dragging and tugging at her consciousness.
“I’ve—got—to—laugh,” she gasped out. “It’s—all—so funny!”
There was a dead silence in the room. Everyone looked at the two of them. Everyone seemed to be conscious, in a sudden suspension of all other interest, that a fatal and epoch-making event was taking place.
Lexie rose from his chair at her side and moved back again to the fireplace.
“What’s so funny? I don’t know what you mean,” said Rook sternly.
His voice seemed to come from such a region of cold, sober detachment that all the company, fuddled a little, as they all were, by the fumes of that silver bowl, experienced an uncomfortable and disturbing shock.
Rook had, as a matter of fact, drunk less than the rest; but, in any case, his tough, phlegmatic nature was not easily affected by liquor.
Netta stopped giggling and pointed at William Hastings, who now sat, gloomy and abstracted, on the sofa.
“He said the mainspring,” she cried huskily. “Yes, you did. You can’t deny it. You said the mainspring!”
Lexie intervened at this point.
“It’s one of his metaphysical symbols, Netta dear. He could easily have said gammon and spinach. It’s what these philosophers always do—use some havering jargon that might mean anything! You’re perfectly right, Netta. It’s the devil’s own silliness.”
“What do you say to that, Hastings?” cried Rook, turning away from the bewildered face in front of him and glaring at the clergyman.
“I leave you to answer your little brother,” retorted the other.
“That’s not fair,” cried Cousin Ann in her rich flute-like voice. “Rook and Lexie are two different people. Aren’t you, Rook? You’re much nearer Mr. Hastings in your ideas. In fact, I’ve heard you say much the same sort of thing; only you never stay in the same mood long and you love contradicting yourself.”
She looked around as if seeking for corroboration of her words. Her eyes caught those of Nell fixed upon her with a sort of frightened wonder.
“You understand what I mean, don’t you, Nell?” she murmured.
“I certainly do,” cried the young girl in eager excitement, Her mouth quivering and her cheeks flushed. “I’ve always known that the real opposite to William was Lexie Ashover and not Rook Ashover.”
Netta’s voice at this point rang out thickly and discordantly.
“Opposite? Opposite? What do you know about Rook? Rook’s a deep one; that’s what Rook is—a deep one; and I’m the one to know it.”
Her tone had that peculiar emphasis in it of a tipsy person who grows quarrelsome.
“I’m not arguing with you, Netta dear,” cried Nell, rising from her seat and then sinking back again with a weary indecision. “I’m not arguing with her, am I, Rook? Perhaps I’m stupid and childish, but I judge things differently than by just the words people say. And you can judge things like that, can’t you, Rook? Judge them by something in the air, I mean?”
She grew self-conscious and embarrassed when she felt the silence round her and the concentrated attention of the whole room. But her embarrassment only drove her on to further self-exposure.
“What I mean is this: There’s something hateful in William—something wicked and cruel—that wants to destroy things. Rook doesn’t want to destroy anything. He only wants to escape, to get away, to let everything go. Things are only half real to Rook; and people, too. They’re real to William; and that’s why he wants to blot them out.”
She stopped, trembling and exhausted, and gazed at Netta like a child begging for shelter and comfort. Netta nodded her head with solemn approbation.
“Half real,” she murmured. “Half real. That’s what it is! Isn’t she clever to have found that out about him? I never could have thought that out for myself.”
Lexie left the fireside where he had been silently listening to all this, and going to the window pulled the curtains back and pushed down the sash.
“Come and look here, Nell,” he said, almost commandingly. The girl cast a quick questioning look at her husband and at Rook and crossed the room to her host’s side.
“Have you ever seen that before?” Lexie said.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“The whole look of everything,” he replied ambiguously, taking her wrist and making her lean out of the window with him, while Cousin Ann with gestures of exaggerated chilliness threw an antimacassar round her shoulders and moved up close to William Hastings as if to include him in the somewhat perilous intimacy into which the company showed signs of drifting.
Nell was not long in realizing what Lexie meant. By reason of some peculiar thinness in the atmosphere, following upon the precipitation into glittering hoar frost of every particle of vapour, the stars shone down upon the earth with extraordinary brilliance. So brilliant were they, and so large and clear, that the most casual observer, that night, could hardly have failed to be reduced to some kind of amazement. The startling fact that these remote suns were not all of the same simple luminosity but were red and green and orange, and even faintly blue, gave to their appearance a palpable reality, brought their identity home to human senses as a measurable wonder, in a way that could never have happened if they had all of them been just monotonous points of shining whiteness.
But the phenomenon which had struck Lexie and was now holding his companion spellbound was not the fact that the stars were red and orange and blue as well as white; it was the fact that certain atmospheric conditions, connected with the hoar frost, had given to the diffused starlight a quality that properly belonged to moonlight; in other words, had thrown into pallid and phantasmal emphasis objects and distances that were normally obscured by darkness.
“What’s the matter, you two?” called out Rook at last.
“Nothing, my dear,” answered Lexie, pulling the girl back into the room and closing the window.
“Nothing,” echoed William Hastings hoarsely, removing his clasped hands and lifting up his face with an expression like that of an opium-eater returning miserably to normal consciousness.
Netta burst into a peal of plebeian laughter. Her countenance in its convulsed state was not pretty to look upon and Rook after one glance turned away with a shiver of repugnance.
“Nothing—nothing—” gasped Netta at last. “It’s like a game. It’s like hunt-the-slipper. It makes a person laugh.” And once more a peal of merriment more suitable to a Southsea bar-room than to the sedate bookshelves of Lexie’s classical retreat rang through the room.
“Look at Rook’s face!” she gasped out, when her fit subsided. “He’s angry with me. He’s furious at me! And doesn’t it make him look funny?” And she laughed again.
The discordant note had sunk so deeply by this time into the consciousness of them all that an uncomfortab
le silence filled the room; a silence that was more than a mere negation of sound; a brutal, malignant, positive silence, such as seemed to possess a tangible though an invisible body of its own.
The fire on the hearth was almost extinct; the great silver punch bowl was empty; most of the candles had guttered down till nothing but flimsy blue flames hovered like shapeless astral lights over the prostrate wicks and liquid grease.
The window curtains had been left open; and Lexie Ashover, who alone of them all retained his habitual alertness, was aware of the contrast between that shining galaxy of many-coloured worlds out there and these abashed, disordered representatives of the race who had dared to divide the universal flux, the motions of those immense orbits, into days and weeks and months and years.
He moved the empty bowl from the centre of the room and replaced it by a vase containing some sprigs of untimely born yellow jasmine that had, without rule or reason and by the haphazard of accident alone, started budding under his eaves.
It had pleased him to see these wayward children of life and chance, and he bent over them now and smelt them as if to draw from their unfrustratable sap encouragement and strength for himself.
Cousin Ann, seeing him thus employed, threw off the antimacassar from her neck and moved up to his side.
Rook had resumed his original place by Nell in the corner of the room, but he was not speaking to her; in fact, he seemed unconscious of her presence. He was staring in front of him with the expression of one who, in place of a vague undetermined future, finds himself suddenly confronted by the hooked horns of an implacable dilemma.
A mysterious flickering smile kept crossing the lips of Cousin Ann as she stood by Lexie’s table, caressing the jasmine buds with her fingers and murmuring little mischievous nothings. She felt at that moment & sudden wave of exultant assurance, beyond all rational scrutiny, that she was already upon the path of becoming the mother of Rook’s child.
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