The Tower of Oblivion Part 71

But no, I have not finished yet. Let us take it a little further. The state of his memory at this point was a matter of the most urgent importance, since I now began to suspect that the whole of his chance of again going forward turned on it. So we now had:

Julia had taken his sin, but not His cry had been immediately his memory of it, since he had followed by an aching cry cried out upon my cowardice in for help and advice.

speaking of it at Le Port gap.

He had subsequently repeated He had vowed that books had a page from his book. never in the least interested him.

I had particularly questioned I had not had an opportunity him about his memory. of questioning him.

He had promised to take no He had taken a step without step without my knowledge. my knowledge.

I did not think that he would He had broken it.

knowingly break his word to me.

Do you see whither it leads? You do; but let me state it as it struck me, sitting there watching the shirley poppies in the east with St Sauveur dark among the limes behind me.

When you or I forget a thing our forgetting does not mean that that thing never was. Would to G.o.d it sometimes did! But you and I do not live backwards through our years, and we are dealing now with a man who did. Suppose, then, that this "A" memory were to go the way of his "B"

one? And suppose in addition that, instead of merely resting on an even keel, he _should_ presently begin to forge ahead again? In that case he would once more be advancing on the unknown. His future to him would be what your future is to you, mine to me. And it is a condition of a future's being a future that it _shall not already have been_. What other future than that is there? There was no man living, Derwent Rose or anybody else, who had _not_ a future. And when a thing has not been it has not been, and there is the end of it. He was, quite simply, and exactly as you once were, exactly as I once was, young with a single age again. With the disappearance of his last "A" recollection, past time itself was abolished. For him forty-five was not, and never had been.

And gone already was his memory of at least one event of hardly a week ago, namely, his promise to me. Nay, that must have gone before ever they fled, for nothing would have been easier for him than to send me a note demanding his release from his word. But gone how, and when?

Remember, my own last actual sight of him had been by Frehel's Light when we had stood by the Crucifix that overlooks St Briac harbour. My last direct word from him had been that note that Jennie had brought, in which he had rea.s.sured me that he was to be trusted, at any rate till I was out and about again. And my last news of him of any kind prior to their flight was that he had sat with Jennie among the sarrasin sheaves.

Therefore whatever had happened had happened during the few days between his writing his note and n.o.ble's discovery of them and speeding to Ker Annic with the tale.

I counted these days one by one.

On Wednesday he had written his note.

I had received it on Thursday.

On the following Sat.u.r.day Julia Oliphant had arrived.

On the Tuesday after, the day of my first walk abroad, n.o.ble had conspicuously failed to mind his own business, and we had all been set by the ears.

So far so good. His "A" memory might have broken down on any of these days.

And yet on the very next day he had greeted Miss Oliphant by name! He had not only remembered her when she had presented herself at his hotel, but had remembered her in the rather curious sense that, whereas she had formerly been "Julia" to him, she was now "Miss."

What in the name of the falling night was one to make of it all?

My hotel was the Poste, in the Place Duguesclin, and, though I remembered Dinan only imperfectly, it was for evenings such as this that I had come. It was a certainty that Derry and Jennie would never come to Dinan, where, when the tides served, half a dozen packet-boats a day might bring their loads of visitors from the very place from which they had fled. During the hours when the excursionists thronged the old town it was simple for me to get out into the surrounding country, to take an omelette at some inn or other, and to return to dinner. At other states of the tide the pa.s.sage by river was impracticable, and few strangers were to be seen.

The poppies went out of the sky almost suddenly. Over the parapet all was a soft violet vapour. But when I rose and turned slowly up the Place St Sauveur my thoughts still gave me their shadowy company.

But one shadow was spared me. This was the fear with which I had mounted the stairs of his lodging at St Briac. Had he not been living, she at any rate would have been heard of at Ker Annic before this. It was for this that poor Alec telegraphed, advertised, instructed agents. Not that he must not have him as well as her. Though he showed him the door immediately afterwards, this Arnaud must marry Jennie first.

And the chances of tracing him were now far different from those when I had fruitlessly sought him in London, only to have him put his hand on my shoulder in a Shaftesbury Avenue picture-house in the end. For he had been a middle-aged man then, with all the bolt-holes of his successive personal appearances to dodge fantastically in and out of. Then, a night, any night, might have made him unrecognisable, nameless, a ghost among living men. But between eighteen and sixteen is no very great difference. He might be a little less tall, a little less broad, but somewhere between those two years he was cornered. His description was circulated, hers did not vary. They had been gone four days. Probably a week at the outside would see him touched on the shoulder in this place or that, a "Pardon, M'sieu'" spoken in his ear, and back to Alec he would go.

And though I have said as a foolish figure of speech that on that magical Island of theirs they were unapproachably alone, that was the important thing from Alec's point of view.

There is a little cafe tucked away in an angle of the Rue de l'Apport, called, if I remember rightly, the Cafe des Porches. If it is not called that it ought to be, for these Porches stride out over the pavement on their ancient legs of stone and wood as if to knock together the overhanging brows of their fantastic upper stories. Indeed one would say that the stalls and shops and barrows tunnelled beneath them had but a moment before been flush with those ancient facades, and that at a call the whole house had suddenly advanced a pace, and the next moment might advance another. And if you take a chest of drawers, and draw the bottom drawer out a little, and the one above a little more, and the one above that a little more still, and then set opposite to it another chest of drawers to which you have done the same, you will have the appearance of those carved and corbelled and enriched and decaying frontages. I pa.s.sed under their trampling legs and sought my cafe.

I don't remember ever actually entering that cafe in my life. I preferred either of the two tiny round pavement-tables that stood one on either side of its low doorway. There was just room to squeeze in between the two portable hedges of privet that stood in long wooden boxes on the kerb; and from this seat, unless they happened to be coming towards you under the Porches or going directly away, little more than a glimpse of pa.s.sers-by could be had through the narrow opening. If they happened to pa.s.s on a bicycle it was the merest zoetrope-flicker and they were gone.

I sat down, called for coffee and a _fine_, and watched the shopkeepers opposite putting up their shutters for the night.

One thing at any rate seemed now to be over and done with, and that was poor Julia Oliphant's desperate adventure. Poor woman, it was as much for her sake as theirs that I had left the Airds for a few days. Could she have done the same and have gone back to England it might have been as well, but that would have been to leave Madge insupportably alone. A single day in that daughterless house had been enough for me. The next morning I had made my explanation, had promised to return, had made a few purchases, and had packed my bag. Any news was to be wired or telephoned to me at the Poste. That briefly-concluded arrangement had been practically the whole of my conversation with Madge.

With Julia I had had even fewer words; for what was there to say? Even to Madge one could hardly have committed the grossness and superfluity of saying that one was sorry; what then of Julia? Was I sorry? For herself my heart bled; but was I sorry for the miscarriage of her vehement and tremendous attempt?

Yet how remember her as I had found her in the salon on the morning of the discovery, and be glad for Derwent Rose and his irregular bridal?

She had worn a hat and frock of white pique, but the pique had not been whiter than her face nor the auracaria darker than her sombre lashes and ringed eyes.

"You've heard?" she had said.

"Alec's just told me."

"Of course----" The unuttered words were "with him."

"It looks terribly like it."

"Had you any idea?" This with a look so imperious that I was thankful to be able to reply truthfully.

"None. Is there anything--any little thing--we may do?"

"Settle that with Alec. I must be with her."

And that had been about all. I had not dared to ask her whether there was anything I could do for herself.

But if not because she had failed, at least because of this all-at-once dropping of the bottom out of everything for which she had lived, one heart in Dinan resumed its ache for her that night. Stratagems learned of any man, though she broke his heart with a laugh in the learning--and then to have her own broken! Arms to provoke the world--and no world to be provoked now that he, her world, had failed her! Nothing had been too little for her, nothing too great. Officers' Woodbines and her adoration of his painting, his years of war and a hat that hid one eye! What were those arms and shoulders of hers but his own gesture, ready to be given back to him, when he had shown himself in my swimming-pond, in that studio in Cremorne Road? How she had dreamed to glory in herself; what glories, for all I knew, had she not planned for the very next day! And all, all to have gone in the seeming security of that very moment when she had thought her rival out of the way! "New bicycles for old," she had planned, a new free-wheel with packing about its saddle and string and paper round its polished parts; but not a wheel would any bicycle ever turn now to help her. The last she had seen of this man whose destiny she had so arrogantly made her own was when he had shown her a picture--a picture of her young victress, lying among white masonry as ruined as Julia Oliphant's hope.

And even that she had had to ask to see.

The greengrocer under the Porche to the left was putting up his last shutter, the seller of hardware and Breton pottery across the way had already done so. Elsewhere from under the houses' bellies dim gleams of light showed as if through horn. In the upper stories window shone into window across the street--half Dinan is in bed by half-past nine. A priest in soutane and pancake hat hurried past, glancing into my retreat as he did so. Presently there was little light except that that streamed from the doorway behind me, yellowing the artificial hedge and showing the elephantine feet opposite--still where they were. Even this light was darkened as a couple of _convives_, with a "Bonsoir, Madame,"

blocked the doorway for a moment, gave me also a muttered "Bonsoir," and mingled with the shadows down the street. I watched them disappear.

But before they were quite lost among the trampling Porches there cut across my opening, quick as a zoetrope-flicker, and with the single little "ting" of an ill-adjusted bell, a bicycle.

My eyes function quite normally; but they are not an instantaneous camera. In the tenth part of a second I had turned my head to the right inside my little screen of privet. Alas! Round tubs, with more privet, blocked either end. I sprang up, but the round table was in my way. I extricated myself just one moment too late. I stood looking down the dark Rue de la Cordonnerie.

But she had vanished.

She--not he; for even in that momentary flash there had been no mistaking that uncovered red-gold head. But nothing else had been familiar. A black shawl had enwrapped her shoulders, a green plaid skirt had made an irregular rhomboid from the saddle downwards. Her stockings were black, and white canvas shoes with jute soles covered her feet. On the handle-bar had swung a basket, with parcels in it and a baton of bread sticking out.

They were in Dinan after all.

III

In Dinan after all, and risking the visitors who arrived by the boat!