by Max Beerbohm
“You demean your cloth, sir,” the Duke would have said, “without cheating its disabilities,” had not his mouth been stopped by a loud and prolonged thunder-clap.
In the hush thereafter, came the puny sound of a gun-shot. The boats were starting. Would Judas bump Magdalen? Would Judas be head of the river?
Strange, thought the Duke, that for him, standing as he did on the peak of dandyism, on the brink of eternity, this trivial question of boats could have importance. And yet, and yet, for this it was that his heart was beating. A few minutes hence, an end to victors and vanquished alike; and yet …
A sudden white vertical streak slid down the sky. Then there was a consonance to split the drums of the world’s ears, followed by a horrific rattling as of actual artillery—tens of thousands of gun-carriages simultaneously at the gallop, colliding, crashing, heeling over in the blackness.
Then, and yet more awful, silence; the little earth cowering voiceless under the heavens’ menace. And, audible in the hush now, a faint sound; the sound of the runners on the towing-path cheering the crews forward, forward.
And there was another faint sound that came to the Duke’s ears. It he understood when, a moment later, he saw the surface of the river alive with infinitesimal fountains.
Rain!
His very mantle was aspersed. In another minute he would stand sodden, inglorious, a mock. He didn’t hesitate.
“Zuleika!” he cried in a loud voice. Then he took a deep breath, and, burying his face in his mantle, plunged.
Full on the river lay the mantle outspread. Then it, too, went under. A great roll of water marked the spot. The plumed hat floated.
There was a confusion of shouts from the raft, of screams from the roof. Many youths—all the youths there—cried “Zuleika!” and leapt emulously headlong into the water. “Brave fellows!” shouted the elder men, supposing rescue-work. The rain pelted, the thunder pealed. Here and there was a glimpse of a young head above water—for an instant only.
Shouts and screams now from the infected barges on either side. A score of fresh plunges. “Splendid fellows!”
Meanwhile, what of the Duke? I am glad to say that he was alive and (but for the cold he had caught last night) well. Indeed, his mind had never worked more clearly than in this swift dim underworld. His mantle, the cords of it having come untied, had drifted off him, leaving his arms free. With breath well-pent, he steadily swam, scarcely less amused than annoyed that the gods had, after all, dictated the exact time at which he should seek death.
I am loth to interrupt my narrative at this rather exciting moment—a moment when the quick, tense style, exemplified in the last paragraph but one, is so very desirable. But in justice to the gods I must pause to put in a word of excuse for them. They had imagined that it was in mere irony that the Duke had said he could not die till after the bumping-races; and not until it seemed that he stood ready to make an end of himself had the signal been given by Zeus for the rain to fall. One is taught to refrain from irony, because mankind does tend to take it literally. In the hearing of the gods, who hear all, it is conversely unsafe to make a simple and direct statement. So what is one to do? The dilemma needs a whole volume to itself.
But to return to the Duke. He had now been under water for a full minute, swimming down stream; and he calculated that he had yet another full minute of consciousness. Already the whole of his past life had vividly presented itself to him—myriads of tiny incidents, long forgotten, now standing out sharply in their due sequence. He had mastered this conspectus in a flash of time, and was already tired of it. How smooth and yielding were the weeds against his face! He wondered if Mrs. Batch had been in time to cash the cheque. If not, of course his executors would pay the amount, but there would be delays, long delays, Mrs. Batch in meshes of red tape. Red tape for her, green weeds for him—he smiled at this poor conceit, classifying it as a fair sample of merman’s wit. He swam on through the quiet cool darkness, less quickly now. Not many more strokes now, he told himself; a few, only a few; then sleep. How was he come here? Some woman had sent him. Ever so many years ago, some woman. He forgave her. There was nothing to forgive her. It was the gods who had sent him—too soon, too soon. He let his arms rise in the water, and he floated up. There was air in that over-world, and something he needed to know there before he came down again to sleep.
He gasped the air into his lungs, and he remembered what it was that he needed to know.
Had he risen in mid-stream, the keel of the Magdalen boat might have killed him. The oars of Magdalen did all but graze his face. The eyes of the Magdalen cox met his. The cords of the Magdalen rudder slipped from the hands that held them; whereupon the Magdalen man who rowed “bow” missed his stroke.
An instant later, just where the line of barges begins, Judas had bumped Magdalen.
A crash of thunder deadened the din of the stamping and dancing crowd on the towing-path. The rain was a deluge making land and water as one.
And the conquered crew, and the conquering, both now had seen the face of the Duke. A white smiling face, anon it was gone. Dorset was gone down to his last sleep.
Victory and defeat alike forgotten, the crews staggered erect and flung themselves into the river, the slender boats capsizing and spinning futile around in a melley of oars.
From the towing-path—no more din there now, but great single cries of “Zuleika!”—leapt figures innumerable through rain to river. The arrested boats of the other crews drifted zig-zag hither and thither. The dropped oars rocked and clashed, sank and rebounded, as the men plunged across them into the swirling stream.
And over all this confusion and concussion of men and man-made things crashed the vaster discords of the heavens; and the waters of the heavens fell ever denser and denser, as though to the aid of waters that could not in themselves envelop so many hundreds of struggling human forms.
All along the soaked towing-path lay strewn the horns, the rattles, the motor-hooters, that the youths had flung aside before they leapt. Here and there among these relics stood dazed elder men, staring through the storm. There was one of them—a grey-beard—who stripped off his blazer, plunged, grabbed at some live man, grappled him, was dragged under. He came up again further along stream, swam choking to the bank, clung to the grasses. He whimpered as he sought foothold in the slime. It was ill to be down in that abominable sink of death.
Abominable, yes, to them who discerned there death only; but sacramental and sweet enough to the men who were dying there for love. Any face that rose was smiling.
The thunder receded; the rain was less vehement: the boats and the oars had drifted against the banks. And always the patient river bore its awful burden towards Iffley.
As on the towing-path, so on the youth-bereft rafts of the barges, yonder, stood many stupefied elders, staring at the river, staring back from the river into one another’s faces.
Dispeopled now were the roofs of the barges. Under the first drops of the rain most of the women had come huddling down for shelter inside; panic had presently driven down the rest. Yet on one roof one woman still was. A strange, drenched figure, she stood bright-eyed in the dimness; alone, as it was well she should be in her great hour; draining the lees of such homage as had come to no woman in history recorded.
XX
ARTISTICALLY, THERE IS A GOOD DEAL TO BE SAID for that old Greek friend of ours, the Messenger; and I dare say you blame me for having, as it were, made you an eyewitness of the death of the undergraduates, when I might so easily have brought some one in to tell you about it after it was all over … Some one? Whom? Are you not begging the question? I admit there were, that evening in Oxford, many people who, when they went home from the river, gave vivid reports of what they had seen. But among them was none who had seen more than a small portion of the whole affair. Certainly, I might have pieced together a dozen of the various accounts, and put them all into the mouth of one person. But credibility is not enough for Clio’s servant. I aim at
truth. And so, as I by my Zeus-given incorporeity was the one person who had a good view of the scene at large, you must pardon me for having withheld the veil of indirect narration.
“Too late,” you will say if I offer you a Messenger now. But it was not thus that Mrs. Batch and Katie greeted Clarence when, lamentably soaked with rain, that Messenger appeared on the threshold of the kitchen. Katie was laying the table-cloth for seven o’clock supper. Neither she nor her mother was clairvoyante. Neither of them knew what had been happening. But, as Clarence had not come home since afternoon-school, they had assumed that he was at the river; and they now assumed from the look of him that something very unusual had been happening there. As to what this was, they were not quickly enlightened. Our old Greek friend, after a run of twenty miles, would always reel off a round hundred of graphic verses unimpeachable in scansion. Clarence was of degenerate mould. He collapsed on to a chair, and sat there gasping; and his recovery was rather delayed than hastened by his mother, who, in her solicitude, patted him vigorously between the shoulders.
“Let him alone, Mother, do,” cried Katie, wringing her hands.
“The Duke, he’s drowned himself,” presently gasped the Messenger.
Blank verse, yes, so far as it went; but delivered without the slightest regard for rhythm, and composed in stark defiance of those laws which should regulate the breaking of bad news. You, please remember, were carefully prepared by me against the shock of the Duke’s death; and yet I hear you still mumbling that I didn’t let the actual fact be told you by a Messenger. Come, do you really think your grievance against me is for a moment comparable with that of Mrs. and Miss Batch against Clarence? Did you feel faint at any moment in the foregoing chapter? No. But Katie, at Clarence’s first words, fainted outright. Think a little more about this poor girl senseless on the floor, and a little less about your own paltry discomfort.
Mrs. Batch herself did not faint, but she was too much overwhelmed to notice that her daughter had done so.
“No! Mercy on us! Speak, boy, can’t you?”
“The river,” gasped Clarence. “Threw himself in. On purpose. I was on the towing-path. Saw him do it.”
Mrs. Batch gave a low moan.
“Katie’s fainted,” added the Messenger, not without a touch of personal pride.
“Saw him do it,” Mrs. Batch repeated dully. “Katie,” she said, in the same voice, “get up this instant.” But Katie did not hear her.
The mother was loth to have been outdone in sensibility by the daughter, and it was with some temper that she hastened to make the necessary ministrations.
“Where am I?” asked Katie, at length, echoing the words used in this very house, at a similar juncture, on this very day, by another lover of the Duke.
“Ah, you may well ask that,” said Mrs. Batch, with more force than reason. “A mother’s support indeed! Well! And as for you,” she cried, turning on Clarence, “sending her off like that with your—” She was face to face again with the tragic news. Katie, remembering it simultaneously, uttered a loud sob. Mrs. Batch capped this with a much louder one. Clarence stood before the fire, slowly revolving on one heel. His clothes steamed briskly.
“It isn’t true,” said Katie. She rose and came uncertainly towards her brother, half threatening, half imploring.
“All right,” said he, strong in his advantage. “Then I shan’t tell either of you anything more.”
Mrs. Batch through her tears called Katie a bad girl, and Clarence a bad boy.
“Where did you get them?” asked Clarence, pointing to the ear-rings worn by his sister.
“He gave me them,” said Katie. Clarence curbed the brotherly intention of telling her she looked “a sight” in them.
She stood staring into vacancy. “He didn’t love her,” she murmured. “That was all over. I’ll vow he didn’t love her.”
“Who d’you mean by her?” asked Clarence.
“That Miss Dobson that’s been here.”
“What’s her other name?”
“Zuleika,” Katie enunciated with bitterest abhorrence.
“Well, then, he jolly well did love her. That’s the name he called out just before he threw himself in. ‘Zuleika!’—like that,” added the boy, with a most infelicitous attempt to reproduce the Duke’s manner.
Katie had shut her eyes, and clenched her hands.
“He hated her. He told me so,” she said.
“I was always a mother to him,” sobbed Mrs. Batch, rocking to and fro on a chair in a corner. “Why didn’t he come to me in his trouble?”
“He kissed me,” said Katie, as in a trance. “No other man shall ever do that.”
“He did?” exclaimed Clarence. “And you let him?”
“You wretched little whipper-snapper!” flashed Katie.
“Oh, I am, am I?” shouted Clarence, squaring up to his sister. “Say that again, will you?”
There is no doubt that Katie would have said it again, had not her mother closed the scene with a prolonged wail of censure.
“You ought to be thinking of ME, you wicked girl,” said Mrs. Batch. Katie went across, and laid a gentle hand on her mother’s shoulder. This, however, did but evoke a fresh flood of tears. Mrs. Batch had a keen sense of the deportment owed to tragedy. Katie, by bickering with Clarence, had thrown away the advantage she had gained by fainting. Mrs. Batch was not going to let her retrieve it by shining as a consoler. I hasten to add that this resolve was only sub-conscious in the good woman. Her grief was perfectly sincere. And it was not the less so because with it was mingled a certain joy in the greatness of the calamity. She came of good sound peasant stock. Abiding in her was the spirit of those old songs and ballads in which daisies and daffodillies and lovers’ vows and smiles are so strangely inwoven with tombs and ghosts, with murders and all manner of grim things. She had not had education enough to spoil her nerve. She was able to take the rough with the smooth. She was able to take all life for her province, and death too.
The Duke was dead. This was the stupendous outline she had grasped: now let it be filled in. She had been stricken: now let her be racked. Soon after her daughter had moved away, Mrs. Batch dried her eyes, and bade Clarence tell just what had happened. She did not flinch. Modern Katie did.
Such had ever been the Duke’s magic in the household that Clarence had at first forgotten to mention that any one else was dead. Of this omission he was glad. It promised him a new lease of importance. Meanwhile, he described in greater detail the Duke’s plunge. Mrs. Batch’s mind, while she listened, ran ahead, dog-like, into the immediate future, ranging around: “the family” would all be here to-morrow, the Duke’s own room must be “put straight” to-night, “I was of speaking” …
Katie’s mind harked back to the immediate past—to the tone of that voice, to that hand which she had kissed, to the touch of those lips on her brow, to the door-step she had made so white for him, day by day …
The sound of the rain had long ceased. There was the noise of a gathering wind.
“Then in went a lot of others,” Clarence was saying. “And they all shouted out ‘Zuleika!’ just like he did. Then a lot more went in. First I thought it was some sort of fun. Not it!” And he told how, by inquiries further down the river, he had learned the extent of the disaster. “Hundreds and hundreds of them—all of them,” he summed up. “And all for the love of her,” he added, as with a sulky salute to Romance.
Mrs. Batch had risen from her chair, the better to cope with such magnitude. She stood with wide-spread arms, silent, gaping. She seemed, by sheer force of sympathy, to be expanding to the dimensions of a crowd.
Intensive Katie recked little of all these other deaths. “I only know,” she said, “that he hated her.”
“Hundreds and hundreds—all,” intoned Mrs. Batch, then gave a sudden start, as having remembered something. Mr. Noaks! He, too! She staggered to the door, leaving her actual offspring to their own devices, and went heavily up the stairs, her mind scamp
ering again before her … If he was safe and sound, dear young gentleman, heaven be praised! and she would break the awful news to him, very gradually. If not, there was another “family” to be solaced; “I’m a mother myself, Mrs. Noaks” …
The sitting-room door was closed. Twice did Mrs. Batch tap on the panel, receiving no answer. She went in, gazed around in the dimness, sighed deeply, and struck a match. Conspicuous on the table lay a piece of paper. She bent to examine it. A piece of lined paper, torn from an exercise book, it was neatly inscribed with the words “What is Life without Love?” The final word and the note of interrogation were somewhat blurred, as by a tear. The match had burnt itself out. The land-lady lit another, and read the legend a second time, that she might take in the full pathos of it. Then she sat down in the arm-chair. For some minutes she wept there. Then, having no more, tears, she went out on tip-toe, closing the door very quietly.
As she descended the last flight of stairs, her daughter had just shut the front-door, and was coming along the hall.
“Poor Mr. Noaks—he’s gone,” said the mother.
“Has he?” said Katie listlessly.
“Yes he has, you heartless girl. What’s that you’ve got in your hand? Why, if it isn’t the black-leading! And what have you been doing with that?”
“Let me alone, Mother, do,” said poor Katie. She had done her lowly task. She had expressed her mourning, as best she could, there where she had been wont to express her love.
XXI
AND ZULEIKA? SHE HAD DONE A WISE THING, AND was where it was best that she should be.
Her face lay upturned on the water’s surface, and round it were the masses of her dark hair, half floating, half submerged. Her eyes were closed, and her lips were parted. Not Ophelia in the brook could have seemed more at peace.
“Like a creature native and indued
Unto that element,”
