The Tower of Oblivion Part 70

"So he's the same, and the same thing will happen all over again--except for what _I_ do," she added wickedly.

"And that will be?"

She shook her head and pursed her mouth.

"No, no. I won't marry you, George, but I will be your friend. I'm not going to tell you that. You must wait. I see how difficult your position is, and it will be much, much better if you're able to say afterwards that you didn't know anything at all about it."

"Isn't it already a little late to say that?"

"Well, least said's soonest mended anyway. Got an Officers' Woodbine about you?"

"A what?"

She laughed. "You must get used to us young things, George. An Officers'

Woodbine's a Gasper, otherwise a Gold Flake, otherwise a Yellow Peril, and therefore any sort of a cigarette. _He'll_ know what I mean, and he'll laugh. He went through the war, you see. Oh, I shall be able to make him laugh all right!"

So she would reap a profit even out of the war. I could not deny her thoroughness. I gave her a cigarette, and as I held the match for her I saw that she made a note of my care for the brim of her hat. She would pa.s.s that too on to Derry as part of his education--that expensive hats must not have holes burned in them.

There were fewer bathers on the diving-stage now but the beach was as crowded as ever. Julia noted hats, shoes, costumes; she noted men too, but no young figure in beret and vareuse appeared in the rainbow-coloured coming and going below. Then the hum of an aeroplane was heard, and "Look, that's rather amusing," she remarked as there broke out from the machine, twinkling against the blue, a tiny cirrus-cloudlet of white that slowly dissolved and was borne away--leaflets for the races probably, or advertis.e.m.e.nts for something or other at the Casino.

We ceased to talk. For all I know she was revolving projects that included a new free-wheel bicycle, fresh from its crate, with packing round its saddle and string and paper about its bright parts. Together we watched the fluttering of paper melt away. A minute later you could hardly have imagined that it had ever been there. There seemed no reason why it ever should have been there. There seemed so little reason for any of our activities. Not one of those leaflets had fallen over the land, and had they done so, what then? A litter of paper from an aeroplane, a little of petty acts from a person, and the immensity of the blue persisting exactly as before. For the humming of that plane had reminded me of another humming. I remembered a Tower, with a horse-gin threshing at an adjacent farm. In that Tower too things had happened, so mighty-seeming at the time, so hushed in the empty cells of its stone heart now. I watched the plane out of sight.

There seemed so little difference between a handful of leaflets scattered over the sea and a handful of gra.s.ses seeded on that circular coping, as long as the eternal Oblivion of the Blue brooded overhead.

Late that night, in the garden of Ker Annic, there kissed me a young woman who had never kissed me before. She kissed me, and then with a sob fled past the dark auracaria into the house. The young woman was Jennie Aird.

The next morning she had gone.

PART IV

THE DESERT ISLAND

I

The Island is deserted only in that none but they come there; for them, just those two, it blossoms as the rose. Its story is the oldest story of all, and the newest. It is told an infinitude of times, and yet, like that first story of the cycle of a thousand, we do not remember to have heard it before. Let us listen to it just once again.

No coral-reef breaks its ceaselessly-thundering rollers into surf, no palms wave their dark fronds in the blue. Only a holiday-coast, with the London and South Western Company's steamers pa.s.sing daily, and the known and familiar trees of oak and ilex and lime. No garments of skins and necklaces of sh.e.l.ls, but a white summer frock, a grey raincoat over it, and a bundle that can be carried in the hand. No shelter of stones and branches that he who is with her toils to make with his own hands, but French slates, French tiles, French thatching, whichever it may be.

And no wreck. Only the wreck of a home.

Yet it is a Desert Island none the less; a Desert Island with pleasure-steamers running, and cars full of tourists coming and going, and the Rate of Exchange quoted daily, and the sound of a familiar and friendly tongue everywhere. A Desert Island with guide-books and time-tables, chars-a-bancs, the vedettes up the Rance, the excursions to Mont St Michel. A Desert Island with cameras and picture-postcards and greetings at every corner: "I didn't know you were over here! The So-and-Sos have just gone to Quimper. We're off to Concarneau on Tuesday. Where are you staying, and did you ever know anything like the price of golf-b.a.l.l.s over here?" All over Haute Bretagne the same, all over Northern France the same; and somewhere among it all a Desert Island _a deux_. Probably a moving one, on four bicycle-wheels. But where look for it? In Dol? Lamballe? Rennes? In what arrondiss.e.m.e.nt, canton, commune? There are many bicycles in France, but there is only one Island precisely like that one. For there is only one man who has been forty-five years of age and is now eighteen, only one woman who, embracing him, has made her fate commensurate with his own. They are apart, unapproachable, unidentified, not to be communicated with though you look into their faces and speak to them. Their nonent.i.ty is lost in the mult.i.tudinousness of everything else. They keep no signal-fires burning day and night for your ship or mine that pa.s.ses. They are marooned in their own bliss, angelic castaways who will not return to us.

Only to see her, only to hear her voice----

Only on a fatal day to tell her his name, the name of that prisoner in the Tower that may not be spoken----

Only to send back a bicycle to a shop (but to trust her to guess that where a bicycle would be left a letter would also be left, and an appointment made at some secret hour between a _the dansant_ and bedtime that night).

Only to cut the knot that no power on earth could untie, to fetch that free-wheel back from the shop under cover of the darkness, and to be off and miles away before the sun rose again.

Was it well or ill that they had ever set eyes on one another?

And what the better now is Alec Aird if he does find them? The times have changed since Madge sat in her mother's carriage waiting until this servant, and not that one, opened the door. It is no good telling Madge he told her so. He can disown Jennie or he can take her back, but there is no middle way. The consul in the Rue St Philippe at St Malo cannot help him, and at the Mairie at St Briac they will run through the files of the _permis de sejour_ in vain. He can whisper--he has whispered--in the ears of the police, and they may run the pair to earth, but it will not be to the earth of that magical island of theirs. And let Alec agonise in Agony Columns as much as he will. He can forgive her, or she can go unforgiven. All else is out of his hands.

And yet it need be no long voyage to that Isle. It is to be found in the near and dear heart. But only by those who envy not and vaunt not, who suffer long and are kind. If sin there has been it must have been taken away again--en souffrance, en esperance, avant qu'il est venu le jour.

But then, when that day comes, it comes as it were with a smile through the lashes of its opening eye. It looks up with the mounting rays, and its eyebrow becomes the arch of heaven. C'est efface, l'horrible pa.s.se.

Il est venu le jour.

II

On a clear evening in the last days of August I found myself sitting in the Jardin des Anglais in Dinan, alone. The Airds were still at Ker Annic, Julia Oliphant still with them; but I, although their guest and under promise to return to them, had absented myself for a few days. I had done this as much for their sake as for my own. Alec was out all day, or if not out hardly to be seen by the rest of us. Julia and Madge were better together without me. So I had made no falsely delicate excuse. I had told them exactly what I am saying at this moment. And I think they had been grateful.

The garden looks east over the viaduct of Lanvallay, and above the misty violet that enshrouded the land a trail of pale shirley poppies was strung out over the sky--the leagues of cloud-tops caught by the last of the sun. The parapet in front of me hid all else as I sat. One or two people stood against it, looking out over the abyss; a few others moved slowly along the ramparts. The limes above me were already benighted, the dark ma.s.s of St Sauveur hidden behind them. The crowded vedettes had long since departed, and the comparatively few visitors who stay in Dinan were probably at the Cafe de Bretagne at the other side of the town.

The dark tangle, that for the hundredth time I was trying to unravel, is almost impossible of statement, so little of the solid was there to support it, such mazes of spiritual conjecture did it open up. Once more I will do the best I can with it. Understand, to begin with, that he had now repeated what I had better call the "experience of the flash-lamp."

Formerly it had been Julia; now it was Jennie. Therefore this, if anything, seemed to follow:

THAT OTHER TIME THIS TIME

Julia ... Jennie ...

The approach of the lamp ... The approach of the lamp ...

He had been greatly loved. He was greatly loved.

He had not loved. She was his very heart.

He had remembered nothing. I knew nothing whatever about it.

But he had woke up younger I knew nothing whatever about by eleven years. it.

Had ended in fluctuations of I knew nothing whatever about his "B" memory. it.

But, save for that "flash-lamp" I knew nothing whatever about gap, his "A" memory had it.

been unimpaired.

He had therefore attained a I knew nothing whatever about duality of (approximately) it.

eighteen and forty-five.

But did he still retain it? It was precisely that that I wanted to know.

In other words, the problem that had confronted me when he had disappeared from his rooms in Cambridge Circus, when he had left Trenchard's rooms in South Kensington and had got to France by swimming the Channel, leaped upon me again on the ramparts of that ancient French town.

How old was he now?