The Education of Eric Lane Part 19

Once nerved to face the wet roads and penetrating chill, Eric decided to acquire merit by walking through the woods and meeting the church party on its return. Lady Lane had already shewn off her "sailor son" to the exiguous congregation; it was the turn of "my eldest son, the author, you know," to submit. He could hear all about Basil and generally popularize himself so that he would be allowed to leave that night without protest.

His mood was so radiant that he achieved his effect before the end of luncheon. As Geoff drove him to the station, he almost seemed to have enjoyed himself and to be leaving with regret. . . . Winchester, Basingstoke, Vauxhall, the river and the Houses of Parliament gave him successive thrills of pleasure, as though he had been away from England for years. Pride of possession seized him when he entered Ryder Street; as he shut the front door and looked at his black-framed prints and l.u.s.tre bowls, he felt like a miser locking himself within his treasure-house to feast his eyes on the signs of his material victory over fate. So many people allowed life to control them instead of controlling life. And, when they had failed through their own inertia, they invented an external destiny to save their faces. Man created G.o.d to have somewhere to put the blame. . . .

There was an average pile of letters on his library table. Lady Poynter hoped to get some rather amusing people to lunch on Thursday; could he bear to come again? _So_ sweet of him, if he would. Mrs. O'Rane wrote vaguely of a party which she had in prospect, without apparently knowing very much about it: "_a sort of house-warming. I'm not asking you to meet any one in particular, because I don't know who'll be there. It'll be a mob, I warn you. I'm inviting my friends, my husband's inviting his; they'll probably quarrel, and there's sure not to be room for all.

Whatever you do, have a good dinner before you come. It doesn't sound attractive, does it? But these things are often nothing like so bad as one fears beforehand. I propose to enjoy MYself._"

Eric was amused by her candour and decided to look in for a few minutes.

Lady Maitland, complaining that "_Margaret Poynter always ACCAPARER-s my nice young men_," invited him to shew his loyalty by coming to dine on Friday. "_Babs Neave is coming_," she added.

As he had intended to spend Sunday evening in the country, he was absolved from all work and could give undivided attention to the dinner which his cook had improvised. (But he must get an ice-safe capable of holding an adequate week-end supply. Dinner with only a choice of sherry and of gin and bitters, with no opportunity for a c.o.c.ktail suggested "roughing it" to his mind.) He dined with a book propped against its silver reading-stand leisurely and warm after his bath, comfortable in a soft shirt and wadded smoking jacket.

After dinner he unlocked a branded cedar-wood cabinet, the first that he had ever bought, and looked lovingly at the cigars, rich, dull-brown and ineffably fragrant, bundle pressed shoulder to shoulder with bundle. A new stock of wine had still to be entered in the cellar-book; and he had to find places on his shelves for Hatchard's last consignment. It was not yet easy to realize that, until the success of his play--six thousand pounds sterling in eight calendar months--a new book had been an event. . . .

For a happy hour he arranged and rearranged. At the end, surveying his handiwork with undisguised pleasure, he thought of the bizarre night when Babs Neave had forced her way in. He could still hardly believe that it had occurred. And yet, without shutting his eyes, he could almost see the child, deadly pale, tired, delighted and wholly unexplained, bending forward with her wonderful white arms outstretched to catch poor Agnes Waring's horse-shoe paper-weight, laughing one moment, crying the next, kissing him the moment after. And how she seemed to be in love with him. . . .

He took out a foot-rule and measured the s.p.a.ce under the windows for two possible new book-cases. He would need them soon; and they would make the room look better filled. It was a beautiful room, a beautiful flat.

From every point of view he was leading a very beautiful life. . . .

The clock struck eleven; and his parlour-maid came in with a syphon, decanter and gla.s.ses. He did not drink whiskey once a month, but the tray added a roundness and finish which the Spartans at Lashmar Mill-House were incapable of appreciating. Were they Spartans--or simply people without his instinct for life?

He filled a tumbler with soda-water and subsided into his deepest arm-chair, looking lazily round the room, drawing pleasurably at his cigar and wrapping himself in the softest down of contentment. His diary was within reach, and he thought over his abbreviated week-end. Agnes Waring had dropped out of his life; Barbara had never come into it.

There was nothing to record but the names of his mother's guests at dinner. . . .

"_There are few things so exhausting as the quiet of the country._"--From the Diary of Eric Lane.

CHAPTER FOUR

INTERMEZZO

What hadst thou to do being born, Mother, when winds were at ease As a flower of the spring-time of corn, A flower of the foam of the seas?

For bitter thou wast from thy birth, Aphrodite, a mother of strife; For before thee some rest was on earth A little respite from tears A little pleasure of life; For life was not then as thou art, But as one that waxeth in years Sweet-spoken, a fruitful wife; Earth had no thorn, and desire No sting, neither death any dart; What hadst thou to do amongst these, Thou, clothed with a burning fire, Thou, girt with sorrow of heart, Thou sprung of the seed of the seas As an ear from a seed of corn As a brand plucked forth of a pyre, As a ray shed forth of the moon For division of soul and disease, For a dart and a sting and a thorn?

What ailed thee then to be born?

SWINBURNE: "ATALANTA IN CALYDON."

1

Moral delinquency in England, if of sufficiently ancient lineage, grows venial with the years and, if carried out with adequate ruthlessness or at least success, may quickly find itself invested with grandeur. No one boasts of his own illegitimacy, but most men like it to be known that an ancestress, whose memory is kept green, once enjoyed royal favour. No man tells his guests that they are eating stolen food from stolen plate in a stolen house; but many will admit, without imposing a bond of secrecy, that their great-great-grandfathers went to India to seek their fortune and apparently found it. "He that goes out an insignificant boy in a few years returns a great Nabob," said Burke, without dwelling on the intermediate stages. They will admit almost as readily that their grandfather reluctantly parted with land to the end that railways might be built, or that their fathers ran the blockade and supplied the South and the slave-owners, hazardously and romantically, with munitions of war.

The Neave fortunes had their origin in the character and position of Lord Chancellor Crawleigh; and history has dealt faithfully with him.

John, first baron, acquired the Abbey from a misguided supporter of the '15 and left it with sufficient means for its upkeep to his grandson William, the second baron and first viscount, who built on sure foundations. Common sense and a certain practical alertness in the halcyon days of the Enclosure Acts did nothing to diminish the patrimony of Charles, fourth baron, third viscount and first earl, though the estate came to be temporarily enc.u.mbered when the good fellowship of John, the second earl, won him the costly regard of the Regent. At a time when the House of Commons was pulling one of its long faces over a periodical schedule of the Prince's debts, a Garter became vacant; and His Royal Highness, with no other means of marking his affectionate grat.i.tude, secured it for his friend with a further step to the coveted rank of marquess. Thereafter the public life of the family was characterized by honour and integrity; and the Garter, re-bestowed as soon as surrendered, became a habit. The second marquess held a sinecure under Lord Aberdeen; another flitted to and fro in shadowy retirement as a Lord-in-Waiting; a third, exploring the United States for the broadening of his mind, married an American wife.

The union infused so much new blood into the declining, short-lived stock that there seemed no limit to the energy and success of the heir.

Charles, fifth marquess, was a member of parliament in his twenty-second year, an under-secretary when he was twenty-six and Governor-General of Canada before he was thirty-five. Thereafter, having got him abroad, succeeding governments vied with one another to keep him abroad. The vice-royalty of India followed almost automatically; he spent two years as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland to oblige his party leaders and was now in the full vigour of middle age with nothing to do. The House of Lords offered no opportunity to an incurably bad debater; and the radicals by destroying the const.i.tution, bullying the king and playing with revolution had made it a place of arid pomp, whose futility took away something of a man's dignity every time that he went there.

Nevertheless, once a viceroy, always a viceroy, as his daughter sometimes reminded him. Lord Crawleigh ruled Berkeley Square and Crawleigh Abbey as though he were still in India, as though, too, he were suppressing the Mutiny single-handed. "Once a mutineer, always a mutineer," Lady Barbara would occasionally say of herself.

This week-end she had irritated her parents by choosing a train convenient neither to family nor guests, by arriving speechless with fatigue and by retiring to her bedroom and announcing that she would probably stay there. Lady Crawleigh felt that prudence, after so long delay, might have timed its coming more opportunely; a houseful of young people could be trusted, in dealing with her sentences, to complete the ruin which her husband had begun; but late hours, excitement and the legacy of her illness had reduced Barbara's strength until Dr. Gaisford p.r.o.nounced that he could not answer for the result if any pressure were put upon her.

Though the windows were now thickly curtained and a bright fire was burning, Barbara could never come into her bedroom without a shiver. In the spring and summer of 1915, when Crawleigh Abbey was a military hospital, she had worked by night and lain awake by day, deliberately and with the sun shining on her face, for fear of dreaming. Madness or death could be no worse than the torture of being pitilessly and unceasingly watched when she knew that she was only dreaming but could not wake. Of late the form of her dreams had changed, growing less defined; there was no longer the old accusing pair of eyes to reproach and spy on her as soon as the room was in darkness, but she was conscious of vague presences which she could not clearly see. After fainting in the train a month before, she had heard Eric's voice in her sleep, though she could not recognize a face which she had never seen; none of her dream-faces had features. There was a shadow somewhere in all her visions of Eric; some day she feared that the shadow would take form, the eyes would return to watch her. . . .

The fire was so bright that the room grew no darker when she turned off the light; and, though she placed a coloured handkerchief over her eyes, it gave her no protection. When she pulled it impatiently away, the glare was so fierce that she could not see the familiar bookcases and chairs. Gradually the whole room was enveloped in a sheet of flame, and in the midst she saw a gigantic figure on a throne.

"G.o.d," she whispered--and knew that she was dead and had come to be judged.

The throne was familiar from an old picture in Siena; G.o.d was the Ancient of Days, drawn by Blake for the Book of Job. Strange that, after all, these stories were true. . . . She wondered why He was old or, being old, why He was no older. . . . The white flame beat mercilessly upon her eyes, and she could see that they were alone in s.p.a.ce.

G.o.d was waiting for her to confess. . . .

It was idle to confess when G.o.d was omniscient, and she kept her lips obstinately closed.

But G.o.d and she were alone in Time. He had sat for an eternity before she came to the judgement-seat; He would wait for an eternity and condemn her for an eternity. . . .

"Vanity. . . . I suppose that's what you want me to say." She wondered whether her voice would carry through s.p.a.ce; she was no bigger than G.o.d's right hand . . . alone . . . and naked. "I've always been spoiled, and that makes any one vain. Some allowance . . ."

It was idle to excuse herself when G.o.d was omniscient.

"I _didn't_ realize what I was doing." (G.o.d must know that she was speaking the truth now.) "He never missed an opportunity of hurting me--quite unfairly; I've nothing to be ashamed of before I met him. I made up my mind to shew him I wasn't quite as bad as he thought. He . . .

fell in love with me and wanted to marry me. . . . I was taken by surprise . . . mad. . . . I didn't know what I was saying, I told him I couldn't marry any one who wasn't a Catholic. . . ."

Catholic . . .

Barbara stopped short to wonder what G.o.d must think of all the jarring sects which laid claim to His exclusive revelation. The Ancient of Days, G.o.d the Father, Jehovah, Allah. . . . She had always wondered what He would make of His fratricidal followers. Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox.

. . . What must Christ make of the bitter fanatics who swam through blood to a world of universal love?

She had lost her way in the confession; and G.o.d brooded in silence over s.p.a.ce and Time, ignoring her, forgetting her. She sank to the ground, hiding her face in her hands and wondering when she had died. Perhaps G.o.d had waited until Jack Waring was killed, so that he might testify against her. . . .

"I know it was a lie," she broke out suddenly, "but I _didn't_ realize what I was doing. The next thing . . . Is this h.e.l.l? I always felt I was going through h.e.l.l on earth. That night . . . I didn't see or hear from Jack for three months; I thought he'd given me up. I was happy for the first time since I'd met him. Then he followed me into the country and asked me again if I'd marry him. He said he _was_ a Catholic now. He'd believed me, he'd done this for me, perjured himself. . . . I remember saying to myself "If there _is_ a G.o.d . . ." I didn't know. . . . "If he _has_ a soul to lose. . . ." I couldn't undo it. I did what I could for him, I wrote and said I'd marry him, I swore it by the sign of the Cross. . . . He went out to the war, he never answered; he's killed now.

. . . I don't know what you're going to do with me. I've _been_ punished. It can't be any satisfaction to you to send me out of my mind.

For a year I've been tortured. Now I was just beginning to forget and to be happy. I suppose you want to take _that_ away. . . . I _didn't_ realize. . . . Why _shouldn't_ I be happy?"

The dim figure on the throne made no answer, and Barbara began to crawl forward. Perhaps G.o.d had not heard. . . . But she would spend years crawling through s.p.a.ce. . . .

"I want to get it over. No punishment's as bad as this suspense. _You_ know that. . . . Won't you tell me what I'm to do . . .?"

She crawled forward again, though her knees were aching. Above her loomed G.o.d's foot-stool; and she touched it reverently, then beat upon it furiously in the hope that G.o.d might rise and kill her again . . .

for ever. . . . The sheet of flame marched nearer until it scorched her eyes. s.p.a.ce and Time shrank and were consumed until she found herself kneeling upright, staring wildly at the fire and beating with open palms on the wooden end of the bed.

Barbara fell backwards, pulling the clothes up to her chin.

"Another second . . . and I should have gone mad," she whispered.

Downstairs some one had thrown open a window, some one was playing a piano. She turned on the light and rang for her maid.