The Prisoner Part 38

"Is he actually speaking?" she asked, in a hoa.r.s.e whisper. "They say insects make noises with their hind legs. It's more like that than a voice. Take me round there, Jeffrey."

He was quite willing. With a good old pal like this to egg you on, he thought, there actually was some fun left. So he handed her out, and told Denny to wait for them, and they skirted the high board fence to the gap in the back. Madame Beattie, holding up her long dress in one hand and tripping quite nimbly, was clinging to his arm. By the gap they halted for her to recover breath; she drew her hand from Jeff's arm, opened her little bag, took out a bit of powder paper and mechanically rubbed her face. Jeff looked on indulgently. He knew she did not expect to need an enhanced complexion in this obscurity. The act refreshed her, that was all.

Weedon, it was easy to note, was battering down tradition.

"They talk about their laws," he shrilled. "I am a lawyer, and I tell you it breaks my heart every time I go back to worm-eaten precedent. But I have to do it, because, if I didn't talk that language the judges wouldn't understand me. Do you know what precedent is? It is the opinion of some man a hundred years ago on a case tried a hundred years ago. Do we want that kind of an opinion? No. We want our own opinions on cases that are tried to-day."

The warm rapid voice of the interpreter came in here, and Madame Beattie, who was standing apart from Jeffrey, touched his arm. He bent to listen.

"The man's a fool," said she.

"No," said Jeffrey, "he's not a fool. He knows mighty well what he's saying and how it'll take."

"If I had all the lawbooks in the world," said Weedon, "I'd pile them up here on this ground we've made free ground because we have free speech on it, and I'd touch a match to them, and by the light they made we'd sit down here and frame our own laws. And they would be laws for the rich as well as the poor. Columbus did one good thing for us. He discovered a new world. The capitalists have done their best to spoil it, and turn it into a world as rotten as the old ones. But Columbus showed us you can find a new world if you try. And we're going to have a new world out of this one yet. New laws, new laws, I tell you, new laws!"

He screamed it at the end, this pa.s.sion for new laws, and the interpreter, though he had too just an instinct to take so high a key, followed him with an able crescendo. Weedie thought he had his audience in hand, though it was the interpreter who really had it, and he ventured another stroke:

"I don't want them to tell me what some man taught in Bible days. I want to know what a man thinks right here in Addington. I don't want them to tell me what they thought in Greece and Rome. Greece and Rome are dead.

The only part of them that's alive is the Greece and Rome of to-day."

When the interpreter pa.s.sed this on, he stopped at a dissentient murmur.

There were those who knew the bright history of their natal country and adored it.

"Oh, the man's a fool," said Madame Beattie again. "I'm going in there."

She took up the tail of her gown, put her feather-crowned head through the gap in the fence and drew her august person after, and Jeffrey followed her. He had a gay sense of irresponsibility, of seeking the event. He was grateful to Madame Beattie. They went on, and as it was that other night, some withdrew to leave a pathway and others stared, but, finding no specific reason, did not hinder them. Madame Beattie spoke once or twice, a brief mandate in a foreign tongue, and that, Jeff noted, was effective. She stepped up on the running-board of the car and laid her hand on the interpreter's arm.

"You may go, my friend," said she, quite affectionately. "I do not need you." Then she said something, possibly the same thing, Jeff thought, in another language, and the man laughed. Madame Beattie, without showing sign of recognising Moore, who was at her elbow, bent forward into the darkness and gave a shrill call. The crowd gathered nearer. Its breath was but one breath. The blackness of the a.s.semblage was as if you poured ink into water and made it dense. Jeffrey felt at once how sympathetic they were with her. What was the cry she gave? Was it some international pa.s.sword or a gipsy note of universal import? Had she called them friend in a tongue they knew? Now she began speaking, huskily at first, with tumultuous syllables and wide open vowels, and at the first pause they cheered. The inky mult.i.tude that had kept silence, by preconcerted plan, while Weedon Moore talked to them, lost control of itself and yelled. She went on speaking and they crashed in on her pauses with more plaudits, and presently she laid her hand on Jeffrey's shoulder and said to him:

"Come up here beside me."

He shook his head. He was highly entertained, but the mysterious game was hers and Weedie's. She gave an order, it seemed, in a foreign tongue, and the thing was managed. The interpreter had stepped from the car, and now gentle yet forcible hands lifted down Weedon Moore, and set him beside it and other hands as gently set up Jeffrey in his place.

There he stood with her in a dramatic isolation, but so great was the carrying power of her mystery that he did not feel himself a fool. It was quite natural to be there for some unknown purpose, at one with her and that warmly breathing ma.s.s: for no purpose, perhaps, save that they were all human and meant the same thing, a general good-will. She went on speaking, and Jeffrey knew there was fire in her words. He bent to the interpreter beside the car and asked, at the man's ear:

"What is she saying?"

The interpreter turned and looked him in the face. They were not more than three inches apart, and Jeffrey, gazing into the pa.s.sionate black eyes, tasting, as it were, the odour of the handsome creature and feeling his breath, was not repelled, but had a sudden shyness before him, as if the man's opinion of him were an attack on his inmost self, an attack of adoring admiration.

"What is she saying?" he repeated, and for answer the interpreter s.n.a.t.c.hed one of Jeff's hands and seemed about to kiss it.

"For G.o.d's sake, don't do that," Jeff heard himself saying, and withdrew his hand and straightened at a safe distance from the adoring face, and he heard Madame Beattie going on in her fiery periods. Whatever she was saying, they loved it, loved it to the point of madness. They cheered her, and the interpreter did not check them, but cheered too. To Jeffrey it was all a medley of strange thoughts. Here he was, in the crowd and not of it, greatly moved and yet not as the others were, because he did not understand. And though the voice and the answering enthusiasm went on for a long time, and still he did not understand, he was not tired but exhilarated only. The moon, the drifting clouds, the dramatic voice playing upon the hearts of the mult.i.tude, their hot responses, all this gave him a sense of augmented life and the feel of his own past youth.

Suddenly he fancied Madame Beattie's voice failed a little; something ebbed in it, not so much force as quality.

"That's all," she said, in a quick aside to him. "Let's go." She gave an order, in English now, and a figure started out of the crowd and cranked the car.

"We can't go in this," Jeffrey said to her. "This is Moore's car."

But Madame Beattie had seated herself majestically. Her feathers even were portentous in the moonlight, like the plumage of some gigantic bird. She gave another order, whereupon the man who had cranked the machine took his place in it, and the crowd parted for them to pa.s.s.

Jeffrey was amused and dashed. He couldn't leave her, nor could they sail away in Weedon's car. He put a hand on her arm.

"See here, Madame Beattie," said he, "we can't do this. We must get out at the gate, at least."

But Madame Beattie was bowing graciously to right and left. Once she rose for an instant and addressed a curt sentence to the crowd, and in answer they cheered, a full-mouthed chorus of one word in different tongues.

"What are they yelling?" Jeffrey asked.

"It's for you," Madame Beattie said composedly. "They're cheering you."

"Me? How do you know? That's not my name."

"No. It's The Prisoner. They're calling you The Prisoner."

They were at the gate now, and turned into the road and, with a free course before him, the man put on speed and they were away. Jeffrey bent forward to him, but Madame Beattie pulled him back.

"What are you doing?" she inquired. "We're going home."

"This is Moore's car," Jeffrey reminded her.

"No, it isn't. It's the proletariat's car." She rolled the _r_ surprisingly. "Do you suppose he comes out here to corrupt those poor devils without making them pay for being corrupted? Jeffrey, take off your coat."

"What for?" He had resigned himself to his position. It was a fit part of the whole eccentric pastime, and after all it was only Weedie's car.

"I shall take cold. I got very warm speaking. My voice--"

To neither of them now was it absurd. Though it was years since she had had a voice the habit of a pa.s.sionate care was still alive in her.

Jeffrey had come on another rug, and wrapped it round her. He went back to his first wonder.

"But what is there in being a prisoner to start up such a row?"

Madame Beattie had retired into the rug. She sunk her chin in it and would talk no more. Without further interchange they drew up at her house. Jeffrey got out and helped her, and she stood for a moment, pressing her hand on his arm, heavily, as an old woman leans.

"Ah, Jeffrey," said she rapidly, in a low but quite a naked tone with no lisping ornament, "this is a night. To think I should have to come back here to this G.o.d-forsaken spot for a minute of the old game. Hundreds hanging on my voice--" he fancied she had forgotten now whether she had not sung to them--"and feeling what I told them to feel. They're capital people. We'll talk to them again."

She had turned toward the door and now she came back and struck his arm violently with her hand.

"Jeff," said she pa.s.sionately, "you're a fool. You've still got your youth and you won't use it. And the world looks like this--" she glanced up at the radiant sky. "Even in Addington, the moon is after us trying to seduce us to the old pleasures. You've got youth. Use it. For G.o.d's sake, use it."

Now she did go up the steps and having rung the bell for her, ignoring the grim knocker that looked as if it would take more than one summons to get past its guard, Jeff told the man to drive back for Mr. Moore.

The car had gone, and still Madame Beattie rang. She knew and Jeffrey suspected suddenly that Esther was paying her out for illicit roaming.

Suddenly Madame Beattie raised her voice and called twice:

"Esther! Esther!"

The sound echoed in the silent street, appallingly to one who knew what Addington streets were and what proprieties lined them. Then the door did open. Jeffrey fancied the smooth-faced maid had slipped the bolt.

Esther, from what he knew of her, was not by to face the music. He heard the door shut cautiously and walked away, but not to go immediately home. What did Madame Beattie mean by telling him to use his youth? All he wanted was to hold commerce with the earth and dig hard enough to keep himself tired so that he might sleep. For since he had come out of prison he was every day more subject to this besetment of recalling the past. It was growing upon him that he had always made wrong choices.

Youth, what seemed to him through the vista of vanished time a childhood even, when he was but little over twenty, had been a delirium of expectation in a world that was merely a gay-coloured spot where, if you were reasonably fit, as youth should be, you could always s.n.a.t.c.h the choicest fruit from the highest bough. Then he had met Esther, and the world stopped being a playground and became an ordered pageant, and he was the moving power, trying to make it move faster or more lightly, to please Esther who was sitting in front to see it move, and who was of a decided mind in pageants. It was always Esther who was to be pleased.

These things he had not thought of willingly during his imprisonment, because it was necessary not to think, lest the discovery of the right causes that brought him there should turn his brain. But now he had leisure and freedom and a measure of solitude, and it began to strike him that heretofore, being in the pageant and seeing it move, he had not enjoyed it over much. There had been a good deal of laughter and light and colour--there had to be, since these were the fruits Esther lived on--but there had been no affectionate converse with the world.

Strange old Madame Beattie! she had brought him the world to-night. She had taken strangers from its furthest quarters and welded them into a little community that laughed and shouted and thought according things.

That they had hailed him, even as a prisoner, brought him a little warmth. It was mysterious, but it seemed they somehow liked him, and he went into the quiet house and to bed with the feeling of having touched a hand.