The Folly Of Eustace Part 3

"Well, but------" She hesitated.

"I've got one--a beauty, a monster! I noticed the wind was getting up yesterday. Come!"

He pulled at her hand; she obeyed him, not quickly. She put on her hat, a plain straw, a thick jacket, gloves. Kite-flying in London seemed an odd notion. Was it lively and entertaining, or merely silly? Which ought it to be?

Eustace shouted to her from the tiny hall.

"Hurry!" he cried.

The wind yelled beyond the door, and Winifred ran down, beginning to feel a childish thrill of excitement. Eustace held the kite. It was, indeed, a white monster, gaily decorated with fluttering scarlet and blue ribbons.

"We shall be mobbed," she said.

"There's no one about," he answered. "The gale frightens people."

He opened the door, and they were out in the crying tempest. The great clouds flew along the sky like an army in retreat. Some, to Winifred, seemed soldiers, others baggage-waggons, horses, gun-carriages, rushing pell-mell for safety. One drooping, tattered cloud she deemed the colours of a regiment streaming under the stars that peeped out here and there--watching sentinel eyes, obdurate, till some magic pa.s.sword softened them.

As they crossed the road she spoke of her cloud army to Eustace.

"This kite's like a live thing," was his reply. "It tugs as a fish tugs a line."

He did not care for the tumult of a far-off world.

They entered the Park. It seemed, indeed, strangely deserted. A swaggering soldier pa.s.sed them by, going towards the Marble Arch. His spurs clinked; his long cloak gleamed like a huge pink carnation in the dingy dimness of the startled night. How he stared with his unintelligent, though bold, eyes as he saw the kite bounding to be free.

Eustace seemed delighted.

"That man thinks us mad!" he said.

"Are we mad?" Winifred asked, surprised at her own strange enjoyment of the adventure.

"Who knows?" said Eustace, looking at her narrowly. "You like this escapade?"

"Yes," she answered.

"My mask!" he thought, secretly longing to be quietly by the fire sipping tea and reading _Punch_. "She loves that."

They were through the trees now, across the broad path, out on the open lawns.

"Now for it!" he shouted, as the wind roared in their faces.

He paid out the coils of the thin cord. The white monster skimmed, struggled near the ground, returned, darted again upward and outward, felt for the wind's hands, caught them and sprang, with a mad courage, star-wards, its gay ribbons flying like coloured birds to mark its course. But soon they were lost to sight, and only a diminished, ghost-like shadow leaping against the black showed where the kite beat on to liberty.

Eustace ran with the wind, and Winifred followed him. The motion sent an exultation dancing through her veins, and stirred her blood into a ferment. The noises in the trees, the galloping music of the airs on their headlong courses, rang in her ears like clashing bells. She called as she ran, but never knew what words. She leaped, as if over glorious obstacles. Her feet danced on the short gra.s.s. She had a sudden notion: "I am living now!" and Eustace had never seemed so near to her. He had an art to find why children are happy, she thought, because they do little strange things, coupling mechanical movements, obvious actions that may seem absurd, with soft flights of the imagination, that wrap their prancings and their leaps in golden robes, and give to the dull world a glory. The hoop is their demon enemy, whom they drive before them to destruction. The kite is a great white bird, whom they hold back for a time from heaven. Suddenly Winifred longed to feel the bird's efforts to be free.

"Let me have it!" she cried to Eustace, holding out her hands eagerly.

"Do let me!"

He was glad to pa.s.s the cord to her, being utterly tired of a prank which he thought idiotic, and he could not understand the light that sprang into her eyes as she grasped it, and felt the life of the lifeless thing that soared towards the clouds.

For the moment it was more to her--this tugging, scarce visible, white thing--than all the world of souls. It gave to her the excitement of battle, the joy of strife. She felt herself a Napoleon with empires in her hand; a Diana holding eternities, instead of hounds, in leash. She had quite the children's idea of kites, the sense of being in touch with the infinite that enters into baby pleasures, and makes the remembrance of them live in us when we are old, and have forgotten wild pa.s.sions, strange fruitions, that have followed them and faded away for ever.

How the creature tore at her! She fancied she felt the pulsings of its fly-away heart, beating with energy and great hopes of freedom. And suddenly, with a call, she opened her hands. Her captive was lost in the night.

In a moment she felt sad, such a foolish sorrow, as a gaoler may feel sad who has grown to love his prisoner, and sees him smile when the gaping door gives him again to crime.

"It's gone," she said to Eustace; "I think it's glad to go."

"Glad--a kite!" he said.

And it struck her that he would have thought it equally sensible if she had spoken, like Hans Andersen, of the tragedies of a toy-shop or the Homeric pa.s.sions of wooden dolls.

Then, why had he been prompted by the wind to play the boy if he had none of the boy's ardent imagination?

They reached Deanery Street, and pa.s.sed in from the night and the elements. Eustace shut the door with a sigh of relief. Winifred's echoing sigh was of regret.

It seemed a listless world--the world inside a lighted London house, dominated by a pale butler with black side-whiskers and endless discretion. But Eustace did not feel it so. Winifred knew that beyond hope of doubt as she stole a glance at his face. He had put off the child--the buffoon--and looked for the moment a grave, dull young man, naturally at ease with all the conventions. She could not help saying to herself, as she went to her room to live with hairpins and her lady's-maid: "I believe he hated it all!"

From that night of kite-flying Winifred felt differently towards her husband. She was of the comparatively rare women who hate pretence even in another woman, but especially in a man. The really eccentric she was not afraid of--could even love, being a searcher after the new and strange, like so many modern pilgrims. But pinchbeck eccentricity--Brummagem originalities--gave to her views of the poverty of poor human nature leading her to a depression not un-tinged with contempt.

And the fantasies of Eustace became more violent and more continuous as he began to note the la.s.situde which gradually crept into her intercourse with him. London rang with them. At one time he pretended to a strange pa.s.sion for death; prayed to a skull which grinned in a shrine raised for it in his dressing-room; lay down each day in a coffin, and asked Winifred to close it and scatter earth upon the lid, that he might realize the end towards which we journey. He talked of silence, long and loudly--an irony which Winifred duly noted--sneered at the fleeting phantoms in the show of existence, called the sobbing of women, the laughter of men, sounds as arid as the whizz of a cracker let off by a child on the fifth of November.

"We should kill our feelings," he said. "They make us absurd. Life should be a breathing calm, as death is a breathless calm."

The calm descending upon Winifred was of the benumbing order.

Later he recoiled from this coquetting with the destroyer.

"After all," he said, "which of us does not feel himself eternal, exempt from the penalty of the race? You don't believe that you will ever die, Winifred?"

"I know it," she said.

"Yes, but you don't believe it."

"You think knowledge less real than belief? Perhaps it is. But I, at least, hope that some day I shall die. To live on here for ever would be like staying eternally at a party. After all, when one has danced, and supped, and flirted, and wondered at the gowns, and praised the flowers, and touched the hand of one's hostess, and swung round in a final gallop, and said how much one has enjoyed it all--one wants to go home."

"Does one?" Eustace said. "Home you call it!"

He shuddered.

"I call it what I want it to be, what I think it may be, what the poor and the weary and the fallen make it in their lonely thoughts. Let us, at least, hope that we travel towards the east, where the sun is."

"You have strange fancies," he said.

"I! Not so strange as yours."

She looked at him in the eyes as she spoke. He wondered what that look meant. It seemed to him a menace.