XIII
I had on the way a horrible apprehension. What if the Duke, in hisagony, had taken the one means to forgetfulness? His room, I could see,was lit up; but a man does not necessarily choose to die in the dark. Ihovered, afraid, over the dome of the Sheldonian. I saw that the windowof the room above the Duke's was also lit up. And there was no reasonat all to doubt the survival of Noaks. Perhaps the sight of him wouldhearten me.
I was wrong. The sight of Noaks in his room was as dismal a thing ascould be. With his chin sunk on his breast, he sat there, on a ricketychair, staring up at the mantel-piece. This he had decked out as a sortof shrine. In the centre, aloft on an inverted tin that had containedAbernethy biscuits, stood a blue plush frame, with an inner rim ofbrass, several sizes too big for the picture-postcard installed in it.Zuleika's image gazed forth with a smile that was obviously not intendedfor the humble worshipper at this execrable shrine. On either sideof her stood a small vase, one holding some geraniums, the other somemignonette. And just beneath her was placed that iron ring which,rightly or wrongly, Noaks supposed to alleviate rheumatism--that sameiron ring which, by her touch to-night, had been charged for him with ayet deeper magic, insomuch that he dared no longer wear it, and had setit before her as an oblation.
Yet, for all his humility, he was possessed by a spirit of egoism thatrepelled me. While he sat peering over his spectacles at the beauteousimage, he said again and again to himself, in a hollow voice, "I am soyoung to die." Every time he said this, two large, pear-shapedtears emerged from behind his spectacles, and found their way tohis waistcoat. It did not seem to strike him that quite half ofthe undergraduates who contemplated death--and contemplated it in afearless, wholesome, manly fashion--were his juniors. It seemed to seemto him that his own death, even though all those other far brighterand more promising lives than his were to be sacrificed, was a thing tobother about. Well, if he did not want to die, why could he not have,at least, the courage of his cowardice? The world would not cease torevolve because Noaks still clung to its surface. For me the wholetragedy was cheapened by his participation in it. I was fain toleave him. His squint, his short legs dangling towards the floor, histear-sodden waistcoat, and his refrain "I am so young to die," werebeyond measure exasperating. Yet I hesitated to pass into the roombeneath, for fear of what I might see there.
How long I might have paltered, had no sound come from that room, Iknow not. But a sound came, sharp and sudden in the night, instantlyreassuring. I swept down into the presence of the Duke.
He stood with his head flung back and his arms folded, gorgeous in adressing-gown of crimson brocade. In animation of pride and pomp,he looked less like a mortal man than like a figure from some greatbiblical group by Paul Veronese.
And this was he whom I had presumed to pity! And this was he whom I hadhalf expected to find dead.
His face, usually pale, was now red; and his hair, which no eye had everyet seen disordered, stood up in a glistening shock. These two changesin him intensified the effect of vitality. One of them, however,vanished as I watched it. The Duke's face resumed its pallor. I realisedthen that he had but blushed; and I realised, simultaneously, that whathad called that blush to his cheek was what had also been the signal tome that he was alive. His blush had been a pendant to his sneeze. Andhis sneeze had been a pendant to that outrage which he had been strivingto forget. He had caught cold.
He had caught cold. In the hour of his soul's bitter need, his body hadbeen suborned against him. Base! Had he not stripped his body of itswet vesture? Had he not vigorously dried his hair, and robed himself incrimson, and struck in solitude such attitudes as were most congruouswith his high spirit and high rank? He had set himself to crushremembrance of that by which through his body his soul had beenassailed. And well had he known that in this conflict a giant demon washis antagonist. But that his own body would play traitor--no, this hehad not foreseen. This was too base a thing to be foreseen.
He stood quite still, a figure orgulous and splendent. And it seemed asthough the hot night, too, stood still, to watch him, in awe, throughthe open lattices of his window, breathlessly. But to me, equippedto see beneath the surface, he was piteous, piteous in ratio to thepretension of his aspect. Had he crouched down and sobbed, I should havebeen as much relieved as he. But he stood seignorial and aquiline.
Painless, by comparison with this conflict in him, seemed the conflictthat had raged in him yesternight. Then, it had been his dandihoodagainst his passion for Zuleika. What mattered the issue? Whicheverwon, the victory were sweet. And of this he had all the while beensubconscious, gallantly though he fought for his pride of dandihood.To-night in the battle between pride and memory, he knew from the outsetthat pride's was but a forlorn hope, and that memory would be barbarousin her triumph. Not winning to oblivion, he must hate with a fathomlesshatred. Of all the emotions, hatred is the most excruciating. Of allthe objects of hatred, a woman once loved is the most hateful. Of alldeaths, the bitterest that can befall a man is that he lay down his lifeto flatter the woman he deems vilest of her sex.
Such was the death that the Duke of Dorset saw confronting him. Mostmen, when they are at war with the past, have the future as ally.Looking steadfastly forward, they can forget. The Duke's future wasopenly in league with his past. For him, prospect was memory. Allthat there was for him of future was the death to which his honour waspledged. To envisage that was to... no, he would NOT envisage it! With apassionate effort he hypnotised himself to think of nothing at all. Hisbrain, into which, by the power Zeus gave me, I was gazing, became aperfect vacuum, insulated by the will. It was the kind of experimentwhich scientists call "beautiful." And yes, beautiful it was.
But not in the eyes of Nature. She abhors a vacuum. Seeing the enormousodds against which the Duke was fighting, she might well have stoodaside. But she has no sense of sport whatsoever. She stepped in.
At first I did not realise what was happening. I saw the Duke's eyescontract, and the muscles of his mouth drawn down, and, at the sametime, a tense upward movement of his whole body. Then, suddenly, thestrain undone: a downward dart of the head, a loud percussion. Thricethe Duke sneezed, with a sound that was as the bursting of the dams ofbody and soul together; then sneezed again.
Now was his will broken. He capitulated. In rushed shame and horror andhatred, pell-mell, to ravage him.
What care now, what use, for deportment? He walked coweringly round andround his room, with frantic gestures, with head bowed. He shuffled andslunk. His dressing-gown had the look of a gabardine.
Shame and horror and hatred went slashing and hewing throughout thefallen citadel. At length, exhausted, he flung himself down on thewindow-seat and leaned out into the night, panting. The air was full ofthunder. He clutched at his throat. From the depths of the black cavernsbeneath their brows the eyes of the unsleeping Emperors watched him.
He had gone through much in the day that was past. He had loved andlost. He had striven to recapture, and had failed. In a strange resolvehe had found serenity and joy. He had been at the point of death, andhad been saved. He had seen that his beloved was worthless, and he hadnot cared. He had fought for her, and conquered; and had pled with her,and--all these memories were loathsome by reason of that final thingwhich had all the while lain in wait for him.
He looked back and saw himself as he had been at a score of crucialmoments in the day--always in the shadow of that final thing. He sawhimself as he had been on the playing-fields of Eton aye! and in thearms of his nurse, to and fro on the terrace of Tankerton--always in theshadow of that final thing, always piteous and ludicrous, doomed. Thankheaven the future was unknowable? It wasn't, now. To-morrow--to-day--hemust die for that accursed fiend of a woman--the woman with the hyenalaugh.
What to do meanwhile? Impossible to sleep. He felt in his body thestrain of his quick sequence of spiritual adventures. He was dog-tired.But his brain was furiously out of hand: no stopping it. And the nightwas stifling. And all the while, in the dead silence, as
though his soulhad ears, there was a sound. It was a very faint, unearthly sound, andseemed to come from nowhere, yet to have a meaning. He feared he wasrather over-wrought.
He must express himself. That would soothe him. Ever since childhoodhe had had, from time to time, the impulse to set down in writinghis thoughts or his moods. In such exercises he had found for hisself-consciousness the vent which natures less reserved than his find incasual talk with Tom, Dick and Harry, with Jane, Susan, and Liz. Alooffrom either of these triads, he had in his first term at Eton taken tohimself as confidant, and retained ever since, a great quarto volume,bound in red morocco and stamped with his coronet and cypher. It washerein, year by year, that his soul spread itself.
He wrote mostly in English prose; but other modes were not infrequent.Whenever he was abroad, it was his courteous habit to write in thelanguage of the country where he was residing--French, when he was inhis house on the Champs Elysees; Italian, when he was in his villa atBaiae; and so on. When he was in his own country he felt himself free todeviate sometimes from the vernacular into whatever language were aptestto his frame of mind. In his sterner moods he gravitated to Latin,and wrought the noble iron of that language to effects that were, ifanything, a trifle over-impressive. He found for his highest flights ofcontemplation a handy vehicle in Sanscrit. In hours of mere joy it wasGreek poetry that flowed likeliest from his pen; and he had a specialfondness for the metre of Alcaeus.
And now, too, in his darkest hour, it was Greek that surged inhim--iambics of thunderous wrath such as those which are volleyed byPrometheus. But as he sat down to his writing-table, and unlocked thedear old album, and dipped his pen in the ink, a great calm fell on him.The iambics in him began to breathe such sweetness as is on the lips ofAlcestis going to her doom. But, just as he set pen to paper, his handfaltered, and he sprang up, victim of another and yet more violent fitof sneezing.
Disbuskined, dangerous. The spirit of Juvenal woke in him. He wouldflay. He would make Woman (as he called Zuleika) writhe. Latinhexameters, of course. An epistle to his heir presumptive... "Vae tibi,"he began,
"Vae tibi, vae misero, nisi circumspexeris artes Femineas, nam nulla salus quin femina possit Tradere, nulla fides quin"--
"Quin," he repeated. In writing soliloquies, his trouble was tocurb inspiration. The thought that he was addressing hisheir-presumptive--now heir-only-too-apparent--gave him pause. Nor, hereflected, was he addressing this brute only, but a huge posthumousaudience. These hexameters would be sure to appear in the "authorised"biography. "A melancholy interest attaches to the following lines,written, it would seem, on the very eve of"... He winced. Was it reallypossible, and no dream, that he was to die to-morrow--to-day?
Even you, unassuming reader, go about with a vague notion that in yourcase, somehow, the ultimate demand of nature will be waived. TheDuke, until he conceived his sudden desire to die, had deemed himselfcertainly exempt. And now, as he sat staring at his window, he saw inthe paling of the night the presage of the dawn of his own last day.Sometimes (orphaned though he was in early childhood) he had even foundit hard to believe there was no exemption for those to whom he stood inany personal relation. He remembered how, soon after he went to Eton,he had received almost with incredulity the news of the death of hisgod-father, Lord Stackley, an octogenarian.... He took from the tablehis album, knowing that on one of the earliest pages was inscribed hisboyish sense of that bereavement. Yes, here the passage was, written ina large round hand:
"Death knocks, as we know, at the door of the cottage and of the castle.He stalks up the front-garden and the steep steps of the semi-detachedvilla, and plies the ornamental knocker so imperiously that the panelsof imitation stained glass quiver in the thin front-door. Even thefamily that occupies the topmost story of a building without a lift ison his ghastly visiting-list. He rattles his fleshless knuckles againstthe door of the gypsy's caravan. Into the savage's tent, wigwam, orwattled hut, he darts unbidden. Even on the hermit in the cave he forceshis obnoxious presence. His is an universal beat, and he walks it witha grin. But be sure it is at the sombre portal of the nobleman that heknocks with the greatest gusto. It is there, where haply his visit willbe commemorated with a hatchment; it is then, when the muffled thunderof the Dead March in 'Saul' will soon be rolling in cathedrals; itis then, it is there, that the pride of his unquestioned power comesgrimliest home to him. Is there no withstanding him? Why should he beadmitted always with awe, a cravenly-honoured guest? When next he calls,let the butler send him about his business, or tell him to step round tothe servants' entrance. If it be made plain to him that his visits arean impertinence, he will soon be disemboldened. Once the aristocracymake a stand against him, there need be no more trouble about theexorbitant Duties named after him. And for the hereditary system--thatsystem which both offends the common sense of the Radical, and woundsthe Tory by its implied admission that noblemen are mortal--a seemlysubstitute will have been found."
Artless and crude in expression, very boyish, it seemed now to itsauthor. Yet, in its simple wistfulness, it had quality: it rang true.The Duke wondered whether, with all that he had since mastered in thegreat art of English prose, he had not lost something, too.
"Is there no withstanding him?" To think that the boy who uttered thatcry, and gave back so brave an answer, was within nine years to goseek death of his own accord! How the gods must be laughing! Yes,the exquisite point of the joke, for them, was that he CHOSE to die.But--and, as the thought flashed through him, he started like a manshot--what if he chose not to? Stay, surely there was some reason whyhe MUST die. Else, why throughout the night had he taken his doom forgranted?... Honour: yes, he had pledged himself. Better death thandishonour. Was it, though? was it? Ah, he, who had come so near todeath, saw dishonour as a tiny trifle. Where was the sting of it? Nothe would be ridiculous to-morrow--to-day. Every one would acclaim hissplendid act of moral courage. She, she, the hyena woman, would be thefool. No one would have thought of dying for her, had he not set theexample. Every one would follow his new example. Yes, he wouldsave Oxford yet. That was his duty. Duty and darling vengeance! Andlife--life!
It was full dawn now. Gone was that faint, monotonous sound which hadpunctuated in his soul the horrors of his vigil. But, in reminder ofthose hours, his lamp was still burning. He extinguished it; and thegoing-out of that tarnished light made perfect his sense of release.
He threw wide his arms in welcome of the great adorable day, and of allthe great adorable days that were to be his.
He leaned out from his window, drinking the dawn in. The gods hadmade merry over him, had they? And the cry of the hyena had made nighthideous. Well, it was his turn now. He would laugh last and loudest.
And already, for what was to be, he laughed outright into the morning;insomuch that the birds in the trees of Trinity, and still more theEmperors over the way, marvelled greatly.
Zuleika Dobson Or, An Oxford Love Story Page 13
