For an hour and longer she lay in the unnameable state between waking and dozing, sometimes forgetting her half-will to have that monastery stone again in her hand, at other times revolving still, but very feebly, its supports and oppositions—long spells of drowsy whim and doubt, broken by occasional passing spasms of impulse nearly amounting to a realising leaping from bed once more. Then her customary time for rising approached, and nothing yet need be determined though she should anticipate it by a few minutes. Accordingly, getting into dressing-gown and slippers, she opened the door, to put out her head and listen—as she had listened that hour and a half ago, but this time for noises in the house. No one stirred and there was a heavy silence.
Should she go forward? for this chance would never come her way again. He could scarcely be back for half an hour yet. His room was only a few steps along the same passage. She ought not to be such a coward. And so she glided out, and found his door, and passed in.
The bed clothes were all heaped together and dragging on the floor, from which she understood, with a sigh, how much worse his night had been than even hers. She began to search in turn the drawers of his chest.
The japanned tin box was rather wedged at the back of one of them, preventing her from getting at it without taking it out altogether. When she had it free in her hand, the lid lifted; Hugh hadn't locked it. That probably meant it was empty but no, the stone like a broken flint was there. Illogically she blamed his remissness. He must have been perturbed on going to bed, as a result of their talk. It was silly in him to make such an ogress of her, she was very willing to fill the place of elder sister to him, if he would only whole heartedly consent. Meanwhile, however, she must be on guard against the surprising of her by the others in the house; so it would be wisest to carry the box off to her own room, keeping her ear and a corner of her eye to the window, for Hugh's return.
Thus she bore away her prize. But the door of her bedroom being locked behind her and the box set down ready to her hand on the dressing-table before the window, she stood for a moment longer to quell a rather pronounced hurrying of her heart, that annoyed her by its resemblance to the protest of a conscience. And when this moment too was passed, and now her thumb was actually once more on the box's lid, still another postponement arose. Indeed, the intervention was of the most singular and unexpected kind, for, quite unaccountably, the whole floor of the room shook violently, just as though a procession of heavily loaded motor-lorries were passing down their lane outside—only, worse than that, for the sustained tremor was being accompanied by the wholesale swinging of the picture frames against the walls, and the musical dancing of her pretty ewer inside its bowl on the wash-stand.
"Here we have an earthquake!" was her inward declaration, while she forgot the box, in trying to see all things in the room at once.
A yet ruder shock confirmed the sagacity of her guess, for it was succeeded with the briefest pause by a hubbub of clattering pans and the disastrous smashing of crockery, ascending evidently from the kitchen downstairs. She darted to the door, turned the key like lightning, flew out to the landing, and was about to call to the maids, but then, recollecting that if they had been up she must have heard them before, she decided to hasten down the stairs to investigate the mischief at first hand.
Ingrid as well limped from her room, to peer uncertainly over the banister. The noises had ceased, however, and there was no repetition of the shaking of the house, so she turned back to her mother's room, intending to acquaint her with the incident if she were asleep still, or discuss it with her if she were awake and already aware of it. But the room was vacated, and for a few seconds she continued standing hesitating by the door.
Her idly-wandering eye rested on the tin box lying on the dressing-table, which she failed to identify. It never occurred to her imagination that her mother could have a secret from her, so, less out of inquisitiveness than for the sake of occupying herself while waiting, she moved across the room; and, with that lowest possible degree of curiosity, opened the box to look wide-eyed in.
Wonderingly she took the fragment of apparently common flint in her hand, whereupon the cheap metal lid fell back with a clash. By so extraordinary a chain of small whims and accidents was it fated that Hugh Drapier's own proper treasure must be lost to him, and he not know it. For just as she edged to the window to get a better light for the stone, a crunching footstep on the gravel outside and below persuaded her to thrust her head out, the sash being already up, and lo! advancing upon the porch—Peter! ... in knickerbocker tweeds and soft hat, a thin suit-case in his hand, his cheeks pale with the unnatural life of London; the inevitable cigarette glued to his lips. …
Heedlessly dropping the flint into her dressing-gown pocket, that she never used, and making of her ankle-sprain an occasion for the display of her spirit's superiority, she came away quickly from the window, to re-seek her own room. She would hail him from the window there. … She was exactly in time to intercept him before he reached the porch.
"Peter, look up!"
Very little taken aback, Copping cocked his eye aloft, located the familiar soft voice, and raised his free arm in salutation, but deferred returning the spoken greeting until he was right against the wall beneath her. Then but a quite small interval divided their two faces, his looking up, hers down. A third person might have thought it odd that neither smiled. Peter indeed was not of the smiling sort, but Ingrid seemed to herself to be full of the strangest emotions, that were not far removed from tears.
He was a rather slight, rather short young man, of cool carriage, with a sharp darkish face, decorated by a diminutive artist's beard, that seemed in curiously perfect keeping with his eyes. They were green-grey, contemplative, noticing, and habitually lit by a light that rebuked complacency and was not of the crowd. A man having such eyes should be upon a spiritual journey. The journey being necessarily in art in Copping's case, since art was his medium, he might well possess the fundamental requirement at least of genius, namely, the distrust of existing principles.
Ingrid had come to hate that term genius, so cheapened as it was by misapplication to the merely clever, but the soul behind Peter's eyes which suggested its application to him as well, this it was that she could very easily love. Neither was she particularly interested in painting, which for her possessed not the immensity of architecture, not the frozen purity of sculpture, and not the fluvial might and darkness of music, but seemed essentially based on the exact life-like imitation of existing limited forms; yet this his choice of a mode of expression could never pain or vex her. Her faith was that the supernatural fire was sufficient in itself, and that all these arts were merely its temporal pastime. The living soul surely was immortal, but its thrown-off works on earth must be very grand indeed to last a few thousands of years.
And Peter found her nature as full of nonsense, and as wonderful. For a girl, she was so abnormally idealistic and occupied with the myths of the past. These barbaric personifications of chaotic and cosmic nature, these nondescript shapes and half-meanings, these male and female gods, demigods, eponyms, heroes and monsters, of the ancient twilight world, they loaded her brains with uselessness, and falsified for her everything modern. Sometimes, even, he had fancied that it would be a tremendous step forward and new link between them, if he could surrender to her will in the matter by painting some of those antique allegories and reachings-out of the human heart. But it was impossible. He could never bring himself down to tell literary stories in paint. He was for years past experimenting with pure symbolism, as the always unattainable height of his art. He was a scornful and reticent exponent in words, so that Ingrid, made duller by her indifference, was hitherto still ignorant how paintwork could forsake the likeness of real things in order to show their soul. … It appeared not to matter. In unvarying fineness of temper and all that was most opposite to the frivolity, affectation and selfishness of the generality of the modern girls and women of his acquaintance, she shone a jewel. Not in any case did
the inspiration of his art need a second.
So this subtle and as yet undeclared sex affinity of theirs could quietly override the menace of a future intellectual discord. Nor would Copping, turned twenty-seven, haughty, dogged, and a rebel by nature, have permitted financial considerations to obstruct what he deemed his blessedness. His father had left him the equivalent of six hundred a year, which he lived easily within. The estate firm itself had gone to his less imaginative, more practical elder brother, who was a married man with children. Thus Peter had nothing additional to expect in that quarter, while his work was unlikely to sell for many a long year; nevertheless his certain six hundred remained. Then the temporary upset of his career—his engagement to a girl living in the provinces, the finding a house and furnishing it, the damnable wedding arrangements, the honeymoon, the sacrifice of all his working hours for God knew how long to a new bride, however fondly loved—and afterwards the children—and more children, and worries and distresses of all sorts—this mental nightmare, in certain moods, ready to hurl itself at his throat so soon as he should propose to Ingrid, and be accepted: neither was it the obstacle, or he must have felt shame. It was another reason that to the present had tied his tongue with her, though for a couple of years past now their intimacy seemed to have reached a stage when it could only miserably mark time or translate itself to the definite understanding.
Some mysterious painter's instinct, going upon a thousand caught glimpses of a peculiar calm foreign power and aristocracy of her mien, with lookings-away of her eye and strange intonations of her voice that had nothing to do with her other romantic idealism, for very much longer than those two years had been warning him that he must not be in haste to assume that she was entirely his; or, in the broader view, his at all. Her affection, and dearness, and simplicity, and nobleness, and human imperfections—they were his; but if she possessed a second soul, and that second soul were for another man not yet appeared, then rashness might be tragical. Was he unequipped to live with and satisfy that deeper self of hers? The question stated the problem inexactly. So far as he was concerned he had no apprehensions, but was prepared to attempt it. She might not even be aware of the existence within herself of another nature—she could not be, for already he had her love in all but words. This, however, made it but the more disquieting, as showing that she had as yet overcome nothing of it. The true and more bewildering problem was, was that other self representative of some motherhood instinct in her, urging her, against her own knowledge, towards a special physical type of man, that the right children of her destiny might be produced?
For long before she had ever begun to attract him by her sex, the same idea must unconsciously have furnished him with the subject for his portrait of her as the young Mary. That was five years ago. Even so far back, he meant, she must have struck him as being a girl who was not to wed whom she pleased, but the man alone who could give her what she required. The picture hadn't put happiness into her face; the look on it was of expectancy and dread, as well it might be. But it was the long persisting of the intuition, as evidenced by the date of that portrait, that served to prove the genuineness of its correspondence to a real character of Ingrid's. No mere fancy could have lasted those five years and more.
Not its endurance, however, but its psychological rank, mattered. And just because the insight belonged to the great general family of his artistic dumb recognitions, and beginnings of inspiration, and emotions at variance with present realities, and the indistinct rising and forming of new truths, he was not permitted to abandon it as a probable misreading of personal idiosyncrasies of no special importance, but on the contrary was compelled to pay it the high honour experience had long since taught him to pay to all these dim workings of his spirit. In his art they constituted the one thing of value, never disappointing him, though often surprising him by their metamorphosis; so in life, the identical groping and obscurity, and deep-down sense and certainty of having encountered the real, must needs give him the longest pause.
The hell was that he was debarred by decency from talking this thing out with Ingrid herself. He would surely pain and offend her thereby, and as surely she must attempt warmly to reassure him concerning her singleness of heart; and, unfortunately, it would not depend upon her sincerity, for her self-ignorance also must be allowed for. Thus it seemed that for an indefinite period they must go drifting hopelessly and helplessly on, while he, for his part, must confine himself to the churlish retardation of the steady natural swelling to sweetness and torment of their friendship. If he did speak, it would end all at a blow. He would weakly be persuaded that this his instinct, a thing belonging to the whole foundations of his manner of truth, was no more than a fantasy of his brain. And meanwhile his supposed cowardice must be appearing so inexplicable to her and her mother. His character as a man must be wholly misrepresenting itself.
Yet standing as he did for an advanced type of the twentieth century, the finest love of which has acquired compassion, protectiveness, sacrifice, delicacy of consideration, and suchlike virtues, as a more than equivalent exchange for the lost hunger and half devilish passion of past ages; also comprehending as he did how the violent native cravings of humanity, being frustrated, inevitably breed degeneration and vice; he could not indeed find the necessary iron within him peremptorily to cut the acquaintance as improper, but still would not adopt the easy alternative of suddenly releasing his pent will to prefer his suit. Suffering, he was sure, she was. Their bond, in spite of his long absences, already had the unbreakable strength of an invisible magic hair-cable. It was not in the least strange that he could summon no smile to his face, while he stood there looking up at her.
A very trifling accident that morning had already brought it about that his troubles were to end.
Never before in his life had he seen Ingrid's serious and anxious long, pale features appear so strong and lovely. From such beauty he knew he could not by sheer force of will alone wrench his existence, but only if it were for her own sake; and that must be shown. Especially he loved her for this unsmiling welcome, which displayed the terms they were on, raising the intimacy at a stroke, in the way of faultless taste, from the traditions of the world they both knew to the skies. And the extraordinary importance to her of his coming declared itself in the searching of her eyes, that now were like the skies. It declared itself still more essentially in her being at this window at all. She had never looked abroad for him on any other of his early morning arrivals.
It was out of his power to go on longer treating her so shamefully. He must speak to her—not now, but to-day. One couldn't foresee everything, and it was a bare possibility that she might throw another light on what was agonising him. So he planned a sudden. … But unless Ingrid had shown herself to him thus, the plan would not have been; and unless she had previously been handling Hugh's stone by her mother's window, she could not have seen him from it, to be in time to greet him. Neither afterwards guessed how precariously suspended on that slender thread of chance had been the closer intermingling of their two lives.
Peter found no word as yet to say, and therefore, pushing back the hair from her forehead, she addressed him again.
"I am so glad to see you, Peter! I suppose you have been travelling through the night and have made the détour, to declare your arrival, as usual?"
His silence and gravity had begun to appear unnatural to her, although she dared not recognise them in distinct thought. Increasingly during the last twelve months, the dread was frequent with her that one day in the near future their parting would be altogether. He would meet some girl in town, or get tired of their dullness down here, or make Continental plans—she neither knew nor seemed to care how it would be; it would be the fact itself that would rob her of—what? He had never said that there was anything between them. He had a perfect moral right to close down the Belhill studio if he pleased. He might be hesitating to announce it even at this minute. The moment would be cynically appropriate, for she felt that o
n no former visit of his would she have taken it so much to heart. A dark something, not yet a conception, was in her mind, that she particularly needed since yesterday to cling to every particle of the warmth and love in her life, if she would escape this great shadow... hanging over her. … And still the shadow was centred and had its doorway in her vision on Devil's Tor; and that mighty dead one had been supremely beautiful—supremely good. … She hoped that Peter was to announce no disaster, but talk to her of sane London matters, and his egoisms, and his eternal warfare with democracy in art.
He, however, was afterwards to talk of something else, and till then of nothing, or as little as he might in securing that interview without alarming her. He returned a preoccupied affirmative answer to her two or three questions in one. By the absent wandering of his eye past her, and the unfriendly dry carelessness of his tone, she became still more chilled. She would not lose her courage for that.
She told him of the earthquake only a few minutes since. His raised eyebrows responded that it was intelligence for him. "When was this?" he asked.
"Just now, Peter."
"I saw some hedge sparrows rather agitated."
She went on to relate her adventure on the Tor with Hugh the evening before, and its consequence of the injury to her ankle. She concealed from him her supernatural overtaking, which could only puzzle him. She felt that, delicate instrument of sensation though he was, even above the vast majority of others, he was somehow too rudely constructed ever to have the least communication with a different existence, that should be the source of ultra-sensations in men and women. He was none the less dear to her because he should be lower and coarser-fibred in this one respect.
Devil's Tor Page 12
