Gossamer Part 30

We drank tea, ate sandwiches, cheered our hearts with champagne cup, chattered loudly, and, the men of the party, stretched our legs for half an hour. Then we settled down again to gape at Tim's moving figures. The new mirrors were well worth the money I spent on them. The thing worked better, far better, than when I saw it in the barn. I think the audience was greatly pleased. Everybody said so to me when the time came for escape from the hall.

Mrs. Ascher and I drove back to Hampstead together. I told her how Ascher had left the hall and that it might be late before he got home.

She sat silent beside me and I thought that she was wondering what had happened to her husband. Just before we reached the house she spoke, and I discovered that she had all the time been thinking of something else, not Ascher's absence.

"I was wrong," she said, "in condemning the cinematograph and this new invention. It is--at present it is vile beyond words, vile as I thought it; but I see now that there are possibilities."

"May I tell Tim that?" I said. "It would cheer him greatly. The poor boy has never really got over what you said to him in New York, about blasphemy, you know."

"You may tell him," said Mrs. Ascher, "that his invention is capable of being used for the ends of art; that he has created a mechanical body and that _we_, the artists, must breathe into it the breath of life."

We reached the house.

"I am coming in, if I may," I said. "Mr. Ascher asked me to see him to-night if possible. I promised to wait for him even if he does not get home till very late."

"I shall not sit up with you," said Mrs. Ascher. "I want to be alone to think. I want to discover the way in which art is to take possession of mechanics, how it is to inspire all new discoveries, to raise them from the level of material things up and up to the mountain tops of beautiful emotion."

"I shall tell Tim that," I said. "He'll be awfully pleased."

Mrs. Ascher held my hand, bidding me an impressive good-night.

"There is a spirit," she said, "which moves among the mult.i.tudinous blind gropings of humanity. It moves all unseen and unknown by men, guiding their pitiful endeavours to the Great End. That End is Duty.

That spirit is Art. To recognise it is Faith."

The Irish bishop who attended my party is a liberal and highly educated churchman. He once told me about a Spirit which moves very much as Mrs.

Ascher's does. Its aim was goodness and the bishop called it G.o.d. His definition of faith was, except for the different object, precisely Mrs.

Ascher's.

Gorman propounds a somewhat similar philosophy of life, and occasionally talks about faith in the same rapt way. I do not suppose that he actually holds the faith he preaches, certainly not as Mrs. Ascher and the bishop hold theirs. No Irishman is, or ever can be, a Liberal after the English fashion; but Gorman does talk about the spirit of democracy and says he looks forward to its guiding Humanity to a great end, universal peace.

I made my way into Ascher's study, wondering how long I should have to wait for him.

I wondered where he was and what he was doing. Who sent Jack Heneage to search for Ascher? I could not remember whose private secretary Jack was. Mrs. Ascher was thinking of art and beauty, the bishop, no doubt about G.o.d and goodness. Gorman was turning over in his mind nice new phrases about democracy and peace. What was Ascher doing?

CHAPTER XVII.

Ascher's servant followed me into the study. He placed a little table beside the chair on which I sat. He set a decanter of whisky, a syphon of soda water and a box of cigars at my elbow. He brought a reading lamp and put it behind me, switching on the electric current so that the light fell brightly over my shoulder. He turned off the other lights in the room. He asked me if there were anything else he could do for me.

Then he left me.

A clock, somewhere behind me, chimed. It was a quarter to twelve. I poured out some whisky and lit a cigar. I sat wondering what Ascher was doing. The clock chimed again and then it struck. It was twelve o'clock.

It was a clock with a singularly mellow gong. The sounds it made were soft and unaggressive. There was no rude challenge in its a.s.sertion that time was pa.s.sing on, but the very gentleness of its warnings, a gentleness deeply tinged with melancholy, infected me with a strange restlessness. When for the third time its chiming broke the heavy silence of the room, I rose from my chair. The gloom which surrounded the circle of light in which I sat weighed on my spirits. I touched a switch and set the lights above the fireplace shining.

Over the mantelpiece hung a picture, a landscape painting. A flock of sheep wandered through a misty valley. There were great mountains in the background, their slopes and tops dimly, discernible through a haze. The haze and the mist wreaths would certainly soon clear away, dispersed by a rising sun. The whole scene would be stripped of its mystery. The mountain sides, the valley stream and the grazing sheep would be seen clear and bare in the merciless light of a summer morning. The painter had chosen the moment while the mystery of dawn endured. I felt that he feared the pa.s.sing of it, that he shrank from the inevitable coming of the hour when everything would be clear and all the outlines sharp, when the searching sun would tear away the compa.s.sionate coverings, when nature would appear less beautiful than his heart hoped it was. It was with this picture, with this and one other, that Ascher chose to live.

I moved round the room, turning on yet other lights. Over Ascher's writing desk hung a full length portrait of a woman, of Mrs. Ascher, but painted many years ago. I have no idea who the artist was but he had seen his sitter in no common way. The girl, she was no more than a girl when the picture was painted, stood facing me from the canvas. She was dressed in a long, trailing, pale green robe. Her hands were folded in front of her. Her head was a little thrown back, so that her neck was visible. Her skin, even then in the early days of her womanhood, was almost colourless. The red colour of her hair saved the picture from deathly coldness, contrasting sharply with the ma.s.s of pale green drapery and the pallid skin.

I have never thought of Mrs. Ascher as a beautiful woman or one who at any time of her life could have been beautiful. But the artist, whoever he was, had seen in her a singular alluring charm. I cannot imagine that I could ever have been affected by her even if I had seen her as the artist did, as no doubt Ascher did. I like normal people and common things. I should have been afraid of the woman in the picture. I am in no way like Keats' "Knight at Arms." I should simply have run away from the "Belle Dame sans merci," and no amount of fairy songs or manna dew would have enabled her to have me in thrall. But I could understand how Ascher, who evidently has a taste for that kind of thing, might have been fascinated by the morbid beauty of the girl in the picture. I could understand how the fascination might become an enduring thing; a great love; how Ascher would still be drawn to the woman long after the elfishness of girlhood pa.s.sed away. The soul would still remain gleaming out of those narrow eyes.

The clock chimed close beside me. It was a quarter to one. I sat down again, poured out more whisky and lit a fresh cigar. I left all the lights in the room shining. I was determined to drag myself back to the commonplace and to cheerfulness.

I took a book from the table beside me. It was evidently a book which Ascher had been reading. A thin ivory blade lay between the pages, marking the place he had reached. The book was a prophetic forecast of the State of the future, a record of one of those dreams of better, calmer times, which haunt the spirits of brave and good men, to which cowards turn when they are made faint by the contemplation of present evil things. I read a page or two in one part of the book and a page or two in another. I read in one place a whole chapter. I discerned in the author an underlying faith in the natural goodness of man. He believed, his whole argument was based on the belief, that all men, but especially common men, the manual workers, would gladly turn away from greed and l.u.s.t and envy, would live in beauty and peace, naturally, without effort, if only they were set free from the pressure of want and the threat of hunger. The evil which troubles us, so this dreamer seemed to hold, is not in ourselves or of our nature. It is the result of the conditions in which we live, conditions created by our mistakes, not by our vices. I wondered if Ascher, with his wide knowledge of the world, believed in such a creed or even cherished a hope that it might be true.

Do men, in fact, become saints straightway when their bellies are full?

It is strange how childish memories awaken in us suddenly. As I laid down Ascher's book there came to me a picture of a scene in my old home.

We were at prayers in the dining-room. My father sat at a little table with a great heavy Bible before him. Ranged along the wall in front of him was the long line of servants, the butler a little apart from the others as befitted the chief of the staff. My governess and I sat together in a corner near the fire. My father read, in a flat, unemotional voice, read words which he absolutely believed to be the words of G.o.d. "Except a man be born again he cannot see the Kingdom of G.o.d."

Well, that is a different creed. To me it seems more consonant with the facts of life. Man as he is can neither enter into nor create a great society nor enjoy peace which comes of love. Hitherto the new birth of the Spirit, which bloweth where it listeth, has been for a few in every generation. The hour of rebirth for the ma.s.s of men still lingers. Will it ever come--the time when all the young men see visions and all the old men dream dreams?

I stirred uneasily in my chair and looked up. I had not heard him enter the room, but Ascher stood beside me.

"I am glad you are here," he said. "I hoped you would be; but I am very late."

"Yes," I said, "you are very late. It is long after midnight. Where have you been? What have you been doing?"

Ascher sat down opposite to me, and for some time he did not speak. I made no attempt to press my questions. If Ascher wanted to talk to me he would do so in his own time and in the way he chose. I supposed that he did want to talk to me. He had asked me to his house. He had bidden me wait for him.

"I have no right," said Ascher at last, "to trouble you with my difficulties. I ought to think them out and fight them out for myself; but it will be a help to me if I can put them into words and feel that you are listening to me."

He paused for so long that I felt I must make some reply to him, though I did not know what to say.

"I don't suppose I can be of any use to you," I said, "but if I can----"

"Perhaps you can," said Ascher. "You can listen to me at least. Perhaps you can do more. It is a large call to make upon your friendship to treat you in this manner, but--I am in some ways a lonely man."

I have always, since the day I first met him, liked and respected Ascher. When he spoke about his loneliness I felt a sudden wave of pity for him. It seems a strange thing to say, but at that moment I had a strong affection for the man.

"What I partly foresaw and greatly dreaded has come," he said. "I am certain now that war is inevitable, a great war, almost perhaps in the end quite worldwide."

"And England?" I said, "is England, too----?"

"Almost inevitably."

"Germany?" I said.

Ascher nodded.

I was throbbing with excitement. For the moment I felt nothing but a sense of exultation, strangely out of harmony with the grave melancholy with which Ascher spoke. I suppose the soldier instinct survives in me, an inheritance from generations of my forefathers, all of whom have worn swords, many of whom have fought. We have done our part in building up the British Empire, we Irish gentlemen, fighting, as Virgil's bees worked, ourselves in our own persons, but not for our own gain. There is surely not one battlefield of all where the flag of England has flown on which we have not led men, willing to fall at the head of them. It seems strange now, looking back on it, that such an emotion should have been possible; but at the moment I felt an overmastering sense of awful joy at Ascher's news.

"I cannot tell you where I have been to-night," said Ascher, "nor with whom I have been talking. Still less must I repeat what I have heard, but this much I think I may say. I was sent for to give my advice on certain matters connected with finance, to express an opinion about what will happen, what dangers threaten in that world, my world, the world of money."

"There'll be an infernal flurry on the Stock Exchange," I said. "Prices will come tumbling down about men's ears. Fellows will go smash in every direction."

"There will be much more than that," said Ascher. "The declaration of war will not simply mean the ruin of a few speculators here and there.

You know enough about the modern system of credit to realise something of what we have to face. There will be a sudden paralysis of the nerves and muscles of the whole world-wide body of commercial and industrial life. The heart will stop beating for a short time--only for a short time I hope--and no blood will go through the veins and arteries."

Ascher spoke very gravely. Yet, though I had spent months watching the workings of his machine, I could not at the moment share his mood. The war fever was in my blood.