“Wine separates us from Nature. It frees us from sex. It sets us among the gods. It destroys—yes!—that’s what it does, it destroys our physiological fatality. With wine like this,” he raised his glass above his head, “we are no longer the slaves of our senses and consequently the slaves of matter. We have freed ourselves from matter. We have destroyed matter!”
“I’m not quite sure,” said Doctor Raughty, going carefully to the fireplace where, on the fender, he had deposited for later consumption, a saucer of brandied cherries, “I am not sure whether you’re right about wine obliterating sex. I’ve seen quite plain females, in my time, appear like so many Ninons and Thaises when one’s a bit shaky. Of course I know they may appear so,” he went on patiently and assiduously letting every drop of juice evaporate from the skin of the cherry he held between his fingers before placing it in his mouth, “appear desirable wenches, I mean, without our having any inclination to meddle with them but the impulse is the same. At least,” he added modestly, “their being there does not detract from the pleasure.”
He paused and, with his head bent down over his cherries, became absolutely oblivious to everything else in the world. What he was trying now was the delicate experiment of dipping the fruit, dried by being waved to and fro in the air, in the wine-glass at his side. As he achieved this end, his cheeks flushed and nervous spasmodic quiverings twitched his expressive nostrils.
“I am inclined to agree with the Doctor,” said Brand Renshaw. “It seems mere monkish nonsense to me to separate things that were so obviously meant to go together. I like drinking while girls dance for me. I like them to dance on and on, and on and on till they’re tired out and then—” He was interrupted by a sudden crash which made all the glasses ring and ting. Mr. Traherne had brought down his fist heavily upon the rosewood table.
“What you people are forgetting,” shouted the priest, “is that God is not dead. No! He’s not dead, even in Rodmoor. Nature, girls, wine, rats,—are all shadows in flickering water. Only one thing’s eternal and that is a pure and loving heart!”
There was a general and embarrassed hush after this and the priest looked round at the four men with a sort of wistful bewilderment. Then an expression of indescribable sweetness came into his face.
“Forgive me, children,” he muttered, pressing his hand to his forehead. “I didn’t mean to be violent. Baltazar, you must have filled my glass too quickly. No, no! I mustn’t touch a drop more.”
Stork leaned forward towards him.
“We understand,” he said. “We understand perfectly. You felt we were going a little too far. And so we were! These discourses about the mystery of wine and the secret of women always betray one into absurdity. Adrian ought to have known better than to begin such a thing.”
“It was my fault,” repeated Mr. Traherne humbly. “If you’ll excuse me I’ll get something out of my pocket.”
He rose and went into the passage. Brand Renshaw shrugged his shoulders and lifted his glass to his lips.
“I believe it’s his rat,” whispered Dr. Raughty softly. “He lives too much alone.”
The priest returned with Ricoletto in his hand and resuming his seat stroked the animal dreamily. Baltazar looked from one to another of his guests and his delicate features assumed a curious expression, an expression as though he isolated himself from them all and washed his hands of them all.
“Traherne refers to God,” he began in a flutelike tone, “and it’s no more than what he has a right to do. But I should be in a sorry position myself if my only escape from the nuisance of women was to drag in Eternity. Our dear Adrian, whose head is always full of some girl or another, fancies he can get out of it by drink. Brand here doesn’t want to get out of it. He wants to play the Sultan. Raughty—we know what an amorous fellow you are, Doctor!—has his own fantastic way of drifting in and out of the dangerous waters. I alone, of all of you, have the true key to escape. For, between ourselves, my dears, we know well enough that God and Eternity are just Hamish’s innocent illusion.”
The priest seemed quite deaf to this last remark but Brand turned his hatchet-shaped head towards the speaker.
“Shut up, Tassar,” he muttered harshly, “you’ll start him again.”
“What do you mean?” cried Sorio. “Go on! Go on and tell us what you mean.”
“Wait one moment,” intervened Dr. Raughty, “talk of something else for one moment. I must cool my head.”
He put down his pipe by the side of his saucer of cherries, arranging it with exquisite care so that its stem was higher than its bowl. Lifting his chair, he placed it at a precise angle to the table, returning twice to add further little touches to it before he was half-way to the door. Finally, laying down his tobacco pouch, lightly as a feather upon the seat of the chair, he rushed out of the room and up the stairs.
“When the Doctor gets into the bathroom,” remarked Brand, “we may as well put him out of our minds. The last time he dined with me at Oakguard he nearly flooded the house.”
Mr. Traherne pressed his rat to his cheek and grinned like a satyr.
“None of you people understand Fingal,” he burst out, “it’s his way of praying. Yes, I mean it! It’s his way of saying his prayers. He does it just as Ricoletto does. It’s ritual with him. I understand it perfectly.”
The conversation at this point seemed to have a peculiarly irritating effect upon Sorio. He fidgeted and looked about him uneasily. Presently he made an extraordinary gesture with one of his hands, opening it, extending the fingers stiffly back and then closing it again. Baltazar, watching him closely, remarked at last,
“What’s on your mind now, Adriano? Any new obsession?”
They all looked at the Italian. His heavy “Roman-Emperor” face quivered through all its muscles.
“It’s not ritual,” he muttered gloomily, “you’d better not ask me what it is for I know!”
Brand Renshaw smiled a cruel smile.
“He means that it’s madness,” he remarked carelessly, “and I dare say he’s quite right.”
“Fingal Raughty’s not mad,” protested Mr. Traherne, “I tell you he bathes himself just as my rat does—to praise God and purge his sins!”
“I wasn’t thinking about the Doctor,” said Brand quietly, the same cruel gleam in his eyes. “Mr. Sorio knows what I meant.”
The Italian made a movement as if he were about to leap upon him and strike him, but the reappearance of Fingal, his cheeks shining and his face softly irradiated, distracted the general attention.
“You’d begun to tell us, Stork,” said the Doctor, “what your escape is from the sting of sensuality. You wipe out, altogether, you say, God and Eternity?”
Baltazar’s feminine features hardened as if under a thin mask of enamel. Brand shot a malignant glance at him.
“I can answer that,” he said, with venomous bitterness. “Tassar thinks himself an artist, you know. He despises the whole lot of us as numbskulls and Philistines. He’ll tell you that art’s the great thing and that critics of art know much more about it than the damned fools who do it, all there is to be known, in fact.”
Baltazar’s expression as he listened to his half-brother’s speech was a palimpsest of conflicting emotions. The look that predominated, however, was the look of a woman under the lash, waiting her hour. He smiled lightly enough and gesticulated with his delicate hand.
“We all have our secret,” he declared gaily. “Brand thinks he knows mine but he’s as far from knowing it as that new moon over there is from knowing the secret of the tide.”
His words caused them to glance at the window. The clouds had vanished and the thin ghostly crescent peered at them from between the curtains.
“The tide obeys it,” he added significantly, “but it keeps its own counsel.”
“And it has,” put in Sorio fiercely, “depths below depths which it were better for no corpse-world to interfere with!”
Dr. Raughty, who had cleared his throat uneasily
several times during the last few moments, now called the attention of the company to a scorched moth which, hurt by one of the candles, lay shuddering upon the edge of the table.
“Hasn’t it exquisite markings?” he said, touching the creature with the tip of his forefinger, and bending forward over it like a lover. “It’s a puss-moth! I wish I had my killing-bottle here. I’d keep it for Horace Pod.”
Sorio suddenly leapt from his seat and made a snatch at the moth.
“Shame!” he cried, addressing indiscriminately the Doctor, Horace Pod and the universe. “Poor little thing!” he added, seizing it in his fist and carrying it to the window. When, with some difficulty and many muttered imprecations he had flung it out, “it tickled me,” he remarked gravely. “Moths flutter so in your hand.”
“Most things flutter,” remarked Brand, “when you try to get rid of them. Some of them,” he added in a significant tone, “don’t confine themselves to fluttering.”
The incident of the moth seemed to break up, more than any of the preceding interruptions, the harmony of the evening. Dr. Raughty, looking nervously at Sorio and replacing his pipe in his pocket, announced that he intended to depart. Brand Renshaw rose too and with him, Mr. Traherne.
“May I walk with you a little way?” said the priest.
The master of Oakguard stared at him blankly.
“Of course, of course,” he replied, “but I’m afraid it’ll take you out of your road.”
It was some time before they got clear of the house as Baltazar with a thousand delicate attentions to each of them and all manner of lively speeches, did his best, in the stir of their separation, to smooth over and obliterate from their minds the various little shocks that had ruffled his entertainment. They got away, however, at last and Brand and the priest, bidding the rest good night, took the road to the park. The sky as they entered the park gates was clear and starry and the dark trees of the avenue up which they walked, rose beside them in immovable stillness.
Mr. Traherne, putting his hand into the pocket of his ulster to derive courage from contact with his pet, plunged without preamble into the heart of the perilous subject.
“You may not know, Renshaw,” he said, “that Miss Herrick and her sister are leaving Dyke House and are going to live in the village. Nance has got work at Miss Pontifex’ and Linda is going to play the organ regularly for me. I believe there’s been something —lately”—he hesitated and his voice shook a little but, recovering himself with a tremendous effort, “something,” he went on, “between Linda and yourself. Now, of course, in any other case I should be very reluctant to say anything. Interference in these things is usually both impertinent and useless. But this case is quite different. The girl is a young girl. She has no parents. Her sister is herself quite young and they are both, in a sense, dependent on me as the priest of this place for all the protection I can give. I feel responsible for these girls, Renshaw, responsible for them, and no feelings of a personal kind with regard to any one,” here he squeezed Ricoletto so tightly that the rat emitted a frightened little squeal, “shall interfere with what I feel is my duty. No, hear me out, hear me out, Renshaw!” he continued hurriedly, as his companion began to speak. “The matter is one about which we need not mind being quite open. I want you, in fact, to promise me—to promise me on your word of honour—that you’ll leave this child alone. I don’t know how far things have gone between you. I can’t imagine, it would be shameful to imagine, that it has gone beyond a flirtation. But whatever it has been, it must stop now. It’s only your word of honour I want, nothing but your word of honour, and I can’t believe you’ll hesitate, as a gentleman, to give me that. You’ll give me that, won’t you, Renshaw? Just say yes and the matter’s closed.”
He removed his hand from his pocket and laid it on his companion’s wrist. Brand was sufficiently cool at that moment to remark as an interesting fact that the priest was trembling. Not only was he trembling but as he removed his hat to give further solemnity to his appeal, large drops of perspiration, known only to himself, for darkness dimmed his face, trickled down into his eyes. Brand quietly freed himself and moved back a step.
“I’m not in the least surprised,” he said, “at your speaking to me like this, and strange as it may seem it does not annoy me. In fact it pleases me. I like it. It raises the value of the girl—of Linda, I mean—and it makes me respect you. But if you imagine, my good Mr. Traherne, that I’m going to make any such promise as you describe, you can have no more notion of what I’m like than you have of what Linda’s like. Talk to her, Hamish Traherne, talk to her, and see what she says!”
The priest clenched his fingers round the handle of his oak stick. He felt rising in him a tide of natural human anger. Mentally he prayed to his God that he might retain his self-control and not make matters worse by violence.
“If it interests you to know,” Brand continued, “I may tell you that it’s quite possible I shall marry Linda. She attracts me, I confess it freely, more than I could possibly explain to you or to any one. I presume you wouldn’t carry your responsibility so far as to make trouble about my marrying her, eh? But that’s nothing. That’s neither here nor there. Married or unmarried, I do what I please. Do I convey my meaning sufficiently clearly? I—do—what—I—please. Let that be your clue henceforth, Mr. Hamish Traherne, and the clue of everybody else in Rodmoor, in dealing with me. Listen to me, sir. I do you the honour of talking more openly to you to-night than I’m ever likely to talk again. Perhaps you have the idea that I’m a mere commonplace sensualist, snatching at every animal pleasure that comes my way? Perhaps you fancy I’ve a vicious—what do you call it?—‘penchant’—for the seduction of young girls? Let me tell you this, Mr. Hamish, a thing that may somewhat surprise you. I’ve walked these woods till I know every scent in them by night and day—do you catch that fungus-smell now? That’s one of the smells I love best of all!—and in these walks, absolutely alone,—I love being alone!—I’ve faced possibilities of evil—faced them and resisted them, mind you!—compared with which these mere normal sexual lapses we’re talking about are silly child’s play! Linda does me good. Do you hear? She does me good. She saves me from things that never in your wildest dreams you’d suppose any one capable of. Oh, you priests! You priests! You shut yourselves up among your crucifixes and your little books, and meanwhile—beyond your furthest imagination—the great tides of evil sweep backwards and forwards! Listen! I needn’t tell you what that sound is? Yes—you can hear it. In every part of this place you can hear it! I was born to that tune, Traherne, and I shall die to that tune. It’s better than rustling leaves, isn’t it? It’s deeper. It’s the kind of music a man might have in his head when doing something compared with which such little sins as you’re blaming me for are virtues! Did you see that bat? I’ve watched them under these trees from midnight to morning. A bat in the light of dawn is a curious thing to see. Do you like bats, Mr. Traherne, or do you confine yourself to rats?
“Bah! I’m talking like an idiot. But what I want you to understand is this. When you’re dealing with me, you are dealing with some one who’s lost the power of being frightened by words, some one who’s broken the world’s crust and peeped behind it, some one who’s seen the black pools—did you guess there were black pools in this world?—and has seen the red stains in them and who knows what caused those stains! Damn it all—Hamish Traherne—what did you take me for when you talked to me like that? A common, sensual pig? A vulgar seducer of children? A fellow to be frightened back into the fold by talk of honour and the manners of gentlemen? I tell you I’ve seen bats in the dawn—and seen them too, with images in my memory that only that sound—do you hear it still?—could equal for horror.
“It’s because Linda knows the horror of the sea that I love her. I love to lead her to it, to feel her draw back and not to let her draw back! And she loves me for the same reason! That’s a fact, Mr. Hamish, that may be hard for you to realize. Linda and I understand each other. Do y
ou hear that, you lover of rats? We understand each other. She does me good. She distracts me. She keeps those black pools out of my mind. She keeps Philippa’s eyes from following me about. She takes the taste of funguses out of my mouth. She suits me, I tell you! She’s what I need. She’s what I need and must have!
“Bah! I’m chattering like an idiot. I must be drunk. I am drunk. But that’s nothing. That’s one of the vices that are my virtues. I’ll tell you another thing, while I’m about it, Hamish Traherne. You’ve wondered sometimes, I expect, why I’m so good to Baltazar. Quite Christian of me, you’ve thought it, eh? Quite noble and Christian—considering what he is and what I am? That just shows how little you know us, how little you know either of us! Tassar can no more get away from me than I can get away from him. We’re bound together for life, my boy, bound together by what those black pools mean and what that sound—you wouldn’t think you could hear it here, would you?—never stops meaning.
“Bah! I’m drunk as a pig to-night! I’ve not talked like this to any one, not for years. Listen, Traherne! You have an ugly face but you’re not a fool. Wasn’t it Saint Augustine who said once that evil was a mere rent in the cloak of goodness? The simple innocent! I tell you, evil goes down to the bottom of life and out beyond! I know that, for I’ve gone with it. I’ve seen the bats in the dawn.
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