by Hugh Ealpole
‘As you’re frank, I’ll be frank too,’ I said. ‘I wonder that you haven’t left him years ago.’
‘Do you? I did once. But I came back. I was still in love with him, I think. For a long time he had a physical fascination for me. Now I hate him to touch me—or should if I hated anything. . . . All the same, I think I’ve had about enough of it at last—at last!’ she repeated, looking out to sea.
‘I’m years older than you are, Mrs Rollin,’ I said after a long pause. ‘It isn’t very wise of me to give advice—always a silly thing to do. But leave him. You are young, strong, attractive—if you won’t think me impertinent. You have plenty of time to make a new life and a fine one.’
‘Yes, I think you’re right,’ she said, getting up and brushing the grass off her dress.
And it was then, at that moment, that I had for a moment a sense of apprehension. Had Rollin been with us I could almost have called: ‘Look out!’
Mrs Rollin was very calm and resolute!
The next thing that occurred was that Rollin developed an almost passionate liking for me. He was a neurotic, and, like all neurotics, saw himself as the centre of a shaking, quivering world and its only nerve-centre himself! This perpetual apprehension meant that he must have perpetual reassurance, whether he found it in whisky, women, or in a character or two safer than himself. It was his sense of my safeness, I think, that made him cling to me.
‘Poor old Westcott,’ I could hear him saying to himself. ‘He’s one of those commonplace fellows too ordinary for fate to bother to attack.’
I was like a tree under whose branches he might shelter until the storm was over, but a tree forgotten the moment that the sun was out again. He had also something extremely feminine in his personality. That was one reason why he was not at all to be trusted. Men with feminine souls are often kind, generous, self-sacrificing and even noble—but trustworthy, never!
I cannot say how greatly I disliked this sudden affection of Rollin’s. Like Mrs Rollin, I hated him to touch me, and he began to develop a habit of laying his hand on my arm and pressing into the flesh. At the first excuse I would move, and at the first move I would see that startled look of suspicion flash into his eye.
It was the Misses Mailley who advanced all unwittingly our relationship a little further. The Misses Mailley were bright, bony and athletic. They swam, they played tennis, wore the minimum of clothing, talked incessantly and laughed a great deal. They were frightened of Rollin, and so, when he was there, they talked and laughed the more.
One morning, after breakfast, we were all of us—the Rollins, the Mailleys and myself—sitting on the veranda looking down the grassy slope towards a magnificent copper beech, under which an old white horse was whisking his ear at the flies and watching out of one eye for a possible lump of sugar.
‘The Silver Mines,’ said one of the Miss Mailleys. ‘That’s the place!’
‘The place for what?’ asked Mrs Rollin.
‘Oh, for an easy murder! Gladys has been reading some silly book in which a man was murdered and buried in a haystack—a ridiculous place! But the Silver Mines—they’re grand! No one would ever discover it.’
Rollin’s hand touched my shoulder.
‘The Silver Mines?’ he asked.
‘Yes. They’re down towards the sea—near Venus’ Bath. You ought to go and see them. They haven’t been worked, of course, for ages, but there they are, quite unprotected, not a fence or anything! All you have to do is to take your beloved for a walk, push him down, and then, next morning, say he’s left by the early boat. No one would know.’
‘No. But you’d be haunted,’ said the younger Miss Mailley. ‘It wouldn’t be worth it.’
‘It might be,’ said Mrs Rollin. ‘No ghost is so bad as some living people. One could deal with a ghost.’
That evening Rollin said to me:
‘Stroll out to the Point, Westcott? It’s a lovely evening.’
I did not want to go, but I went. We walked across the field, down the little path, climbed the hill and looked down at the sea.
‘Awful girls those Mailleys,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand them.’
‘They’re all right.’
‘Oh, you like everyone! It’s a type I hate, all cheerful and bony. Do them good to be pushed down that mine they were joking about.’ He pressed his hand into my arm. ‘Why have you never married, Westcott?’
‘I’m a widower,’ I said shortly. I had no desire to discuss my private affairs with Rollin.
‘Oh, sorry. I didn’t know.’
‘That’s all right. I was very happy.’
‘Oh, marriage is all right.’ He stood closer to me as though for protection. ‘I’ve been married twice, you know. Grace’—his present lady—‘has learnt my ways by this time. She took a bit of teaching, though. She’s devoted to me, and to tell you the truth, Westcott, it makes a man feel safe to have someone he can trust around. I can depend on her absolutely.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
He came still closer, pressing his body up against mine.
‘I haven’t been well lately. Get all sorts of ideas in my head. Afraid of my own shadow. Upon my soul, I believe my wife’s the one person in the world I’m not afraid of! It’s nerves, of course. I’m highly-strung and not so young as I was. I don’t sleep very well, and I’m a bit of a crank about my health. After all, you catch a cold and before you know where you are it’s pneumonia and in a day or two you’re gone.’ He shivered. ‘It’s getting cold. Let’s turn back.’
Before we reached the hotel he said:
‘Thanks for the walk. I think I shall sleep now.’
Next day we went, the three of us, to the pool in the rocks known as Venus’ Bath, and had our tea there. Mrs Rollin and I bathed off the rocks. She was a magnificent swimmer, the day was a glorious one, and just as we reached the rocks Mrs Rollin said to me:
‘I’m glad you were staying here, Mr Westcott. It’s made a difference.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m glad too.’
‘Oh, are you? You can’t be. We’re not an attractive pair.’
On the way back we passed the Silver Mines. There was a ruined tower about whose base flowers—crimson, yellow and blue—clustered. There was the black mouth of a shaft.
‘I wonder how deep that is,’ Mrs Rollin said.
‘Deep as hell,’ Rollin answered.
There comes for me now, as I approach the crisis of my relationship with these two, the difficulty of truth—truth in my story. I mean the truth of facts, as well as the truth of imagination. How soon in this affair did I begin myself to feel an apprehension that, after a time, began to obsess me, so that I was constantly aware of it, constantly shadowed by a sense of my own responsibility? Looking back now, I ask myself what I ought to have done: for it is one of my humiliations to remember that from beginning to end I did exactly nothing. Could I have done anything? Should I have tried to persuade Rollin to leave the island by the next morning’s boat? Should I have frankly asked Mrs Rollin certain questions? But, indeed, how could I ask her anything unless she gave me her confidence? That, she never gave me. Or did she? And did she invite me to take a step, or to force her to take a step, that would have saved both herself and him? Would it have been better if such a step had been taken? I don’t know. I shall never know. I give you the facts as honestly as I can remember them.
A day or two after our visit to Venus’ Bath the weather broke and rain swept the island. Standing, one afternoon, in my room wondering whether I should read, write, play bridge with the Mailley girls, or sleep till dinner, I heard my door open and, looking up, saw Mrs Rollin standing there. She was as composed, as quiet, as assured as she ever was. She came in, closing the door behind her.
‘I’m not going to stop,’ she said. ‘If I did the scandal would be, I suppose, terrific. But the trouble of this place is that you can’t be alone. I want to ask your advice, Mr Westcott.’
She sat down in a chair near the bed.
‘Tell me—’ She looked up at me, smiling. ‘How far is anyone justified in breaking a natural law?’
‘What do you mean by a natural law?’ I asked her.
‘Well . . . after thousands of years of living together men have decided that certain laws must be obeyed if society is to keep sane. On the whole the decisions they’ve come to have been wise ones. But once and again it is better that a law should be broken rather than kept.’
‘Yes,’ I said, feeling stupid under her quiet gaze.
‘Perhaps I am myself insane,’ she went on. ‘I don’t think so —but oneself one can never tell. I feel it right to take action in a certain direction—action that you, everyone, would absolutely condemn. I want, in fact, to take the law in my own hands. Is one ever justified in doing that?’
‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘If you are ready to face the consequences.’
‘For myself you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, the consequences for myself—they’re nothing. I don’t care in the least what happens to me. I died long ago. But my ghost—or the ghost of my ghost—has a fragment of hesitation. An odd remnant of religious superstition, I suppose. I don’t mind breaking men’s laws, you know, but is there another law, something deeper, more permanent?’
I thought then, looking at her, that she was insane. Her composure, the thin shadow that lurked in her pale blue eyes, something marked her for me as a woman who had ceased to reason, because she had been driven beyond the bounds of reasoning.
She got up as abruptly as she entered.
‘I wanted to ask you,’ she said. ‘Do you believe in God?’
‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘I believe in a spiritual world.’
‘So do I.’ She nodded her head as though pursuing her own thoughts. ‘But not in eternal punishment, you know. That’s altogether too crude. Never mind—I’ll take what comes.’ And she went out.
I have said already that Sark is dangerous for the imaginative. One sees so much more than is really there. Every rock in Sark has a double meaning, and even the flowers know too well what they are about. The weather was bad and we were shut in upon ourselves. Rollin would not leave me alone. He cursed everything, the island, the hotel, the visitors, the natives and, behind my back, I do not doubt, myself.
‘Well, why don’t you go?’ I asked him. ‘There are two boats a day.’
‘I can’t make up my mind,’ he said. He looked ill. He said that he wasn’t sleeping. ‘I keep seeing things in this beastly place. It’s as though someone was always following one.’ He broke down all his reticences. He told me that he hated his wife, but that she was the only person in the world he could trust. ‘When I’m with her I’m safe,’ he said. ‘She’s like a wall at my back.’
I think it was true that he hated her, and he became quite intolerable in her company. He bullied her, snapped at her, ordered her about like a servant, was insufferably rude to her. Once, when he had been especially intolerable, I left him. He came after me to my room.
‘What did you go for?’ he asked. ‘You said you were coming for a walk.’
So, given the opportunity, I told him what I thought of him.
But he scarcely listened. ‘Oh, you don’t know,’ he said. ‘You’ve no idea how aggravating she can be. This weather gets on my nerves. I’ve got an idea I’m never going to leave this damned island. I shall die here, rot to pieces all amongst the ferns and stones.’
That same night I woke with a sudden start to be aware that someone was in the room. I struck a match, lit a candle (there was no electric light in the hotel), and woke up to find Rollin standing by my bed in his pyjamas, shaking from crown to heel. He sat down on the edge of the bed and caught my arm.
‘What’s up?’ I asked.
‘Let me stay here five minutes. I’ve had a fright.’
How I hated his pressure on my arm, his whole physical self with his pyjama-jacket open, his mottled complexion, the very colour of his red bedroom-slippers! And yet, even as I hated him, I was sorry for him. How could I be otherwise? He was a haunted man. He told me an incoherent story. He couldn’t sleep, then he dropped into deep slumber and dreamt—a horrible dream in which he was lying at the bottom of a deep, black pit in a pool of sluggish water. Scaly fishes swam across his eyeballs. His body was broken and his arms waggled in the water.
‘You’ve been eating something,’ I said.
‘I was dead—I was alive—I suffered. Good God, Westcott, what I suffered! But the worst moment was before I fell. I knew I was going to fall and I cried out to you, Westcott, to save me! I knew I was going to die—then—then—that moment!’
He lay down beside me on the outside of the bed. I said what I could, told him he’d been drinking too much (which he had).
‘I know you think I’m a fool,’ I said. ‘But I’ll give you some good advice. Go back to London. Try to take a decent view of things. Don’t curse everybody, and behave better to your wife.’
‘Oh, it’s all very well for you to talk, Westcott. You’re one of those damned optimists and well you may be. Everything’s always gone well with you.’
‘Well, it hasn’t,’ I answered shortly. ‘When I was a boy in Cornwall, there was an old fisherman had a motto—a sloppy, sentimental motto that men like you would laugh yourselves sick over. “It isn’t life that matters, but the courage you bring to it.” That will be a sort of maiden’s prayer to you,’ I added, yawning (for I was extremely sleepy), ‘but it meets your case all the same. You’re a coward, Rollin, frightened of your own shadow.’
He thought the motto very comic, and that did him good.
‘You ought to take Sunday-school class, Westcott. Was your father a clergyman?’
‘My father,’ I answered, ‘was the rottenest, most drunken old swine ever a son had. That’s why I found that motto useful.’
He was calmer, and at last, thank God, he left me.
But that night was enough for him. He told me, next morning, that they were leaving for London on the following day.
What a morning that was! Shall I ever forget it? The whole island was veiled in a wet, creeping mist. You couldn’t see a yard in front of you, and a tree jumped out at you as though it were an American gangster bidding you hold your hands up. I’m not a nervous man—or no more than most—but I woke in a state of fear and consternation. Those are the only words that I can use. I must do something—but what? I couldn’t leave Rollin out of my sight. All afternoon I played bridge with him and the Mailley girls.
‘What a day for a murder,’ one of them said brightly. ‘Three hearts . . .’
I looked up and saw Mrs Rollin standing at the window watching the wet mist as it coiled like a snake against the pane. I was dummy, and I got up and went over to her.
‘You’re leaving tomorrow, I hear,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said, turning round and smiling at me.
She stood there, motionless, scarcely breathing, but her eyes stared into mine. It was as though she said: ‘Well—what are you going to do about it?’
Then she did an odd thing. She pushed with her bare palms at the window-pane as though she would break it. I was sure then that she was not sane. . . .
At about half-past six that evening I came on to the veranda and saw the two Rollins in mackintoshes.
‘Hallo!’ I cried. ‘Where are you two off to?’ It was odd, but it was as though I had known that they would be there.
‘We are going for a walk,’ said Mrs Rollin.
‘A walk—in this weather?’
‘Yes. It’s been so stuffy all day. We want a little exercise, don’t we, Will?’
‘I’ll come too,’ I said.
‘No. Don’t,’ she answered. ‘You’d hate it.’
Rollin said not a word.
‘Where are you going?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Over the Coupée to Little Sark. Down by Venus’ Bath, perhaps.’
‘Don’t fall into the Silver Mines,’ I said.
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br /> She did not answer. We none of us spoke. I shall never forget Rollin. He was like a hypnotised man, like a man in a dream. Her eyes never left his face.
I longed to cry out: ‘Rollin, don’t go! Don’t go!’ But it was as though I were hypnotised too. I only stood and stared at them. They moved off into the mist, he following her like a dog.
They were not in their places at dinner. I watched and watched the door to see them enter. At about nine o’clock I thought I heard Rollin’s voice calling just outside the window: ‘Westcott! Westcott!’ I ran out, but the wet mist was so thick that I could see nothing. I ran a little way down the road calling: ‘Rollin! Rollin!’
But, of course, there was no answer, only the distant murmur of the sea. I slept brokenly, waking again and again. . . .
And at breakfast Mrs Rollin was there, eating very quietly her bacon and eggs.
I went over to her.
‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid you must have got very wet last night.’
‘Yes, we did.’
‘Where’s Rollin?’ I asked.
‘Oh, he went by the seven-thirty boat. He had some business in Guernsey. I’m following by the ten o’clock.’ Then she held out her hand, smiling. ‘Goodbye,’ she said.
‘Goodbye,’ I answered.
Field With Five Trees
I WAS asked not long ago, at one of those dinner-parties where people ask such questions, to describe for my fellow-guests the oddest and queerest experience of my life. When one looks back, one discovers so many queer experiences, and then at the same time one realises that most of them refuse not only description but analysis—so I suppose with this one that I am about to relate.
I went to keep an appointment—five trees barred the way, and that was all there was to it. You can believe it or not, as you please.
It happened years and years ago before the war. I am now between sixty and seventy years of age, a widower with two grown-up children, on the whole content, although I have achieved so little—on the whole tranquil, even in this frantically disturbed world. It wasn’t so disturbed then.
