The Tower of Oblivion Part 79

"----by the boat, I think ... ever so much ... delightful...."

She shook hands with them and crossed over to us. She looked straight into Derry's face. We were all standing. The five or six words she spoke were as if she was telling those beads again. Each one was isolated, bright, lingering yet relentlessly pa.s.sing, a thank-offering, a prayer----

"So--long--Derry--dear ... all--the--best," she said, her hand in his.

"Good-bye--Julia," he said, smiling.

She walked away.

I caught her up in front of the hotel. Little groups of people moved across the lime-shaded Square, all in one direction, seeking the Porches and the Lainerie, leaving themselves comfortable time for the vedette.

We followed them. She did not take my arm, neither did any word pa.s.s between us.

Under the Porches, past the Convent we went. The groups of people became more frequent as they concentrated from various luncheon-places. We dropped down the steep astounding street that is called Jerzual. We were nearly at the Porte, of which the twelfth-century portion is the modern part, before she opened her lips.

"I hate people who cry," she said suddenly.

Then she closed her lips again.

I supposed she meant Jennie. I didn't answer.

She only spoke once more. This was at the embarcadere, as she stepped on to the vedette.

"Don't wait," she said. "I suppose I shall be seeing you in London some time."

Obediently I turned away.

IV

Alec had had nothing new to say to Madge. Only the variations had been a little more elaborate. The thing was as lunatic to him as ever, and it all came of not stopping in one's own country. Things like that never happened at his office in Victoria Street or on the Rectory Ground at Blackheath.

"You can stay on here if you like, but I'm off back," he said. "And the next time you catch me in France or anywhere else foreign you can tell me about it. And you can let me know when they're married.

Does that three-eighteen run to-day, or is that another of their Sundays-and-week-days excepted?"

"The waiter will tell you," said Madge.

"d.a.m.n the waiter," said Alec.

So there were four of us at the Hotel de la Poste.

I don't know what happened to letters during those early September days in Dinan. Somebody told me they went on to Paris to be sorted; I only know that it took an unconscionable time to get an answer from a place I could have got to and back again in a couple of days. And as three, and then four days pa.s.sed, I think I could have written a Guide Book to Dinan, so familiar with it did I begin to come. And always it was a laughing, buoyant, affectionate and extraordinarily clever Derry who conducted us everywhere.

Then, when finally my letter did arrive, it was inexplicit, and I had either to go to London myself or write again. It was Madge who entreated me to stay. So I wrote my second letter.

Often we went out into the surrounding country as a change from the town. Derry never touched a brush, never once mentioned painting.

Occasionally he and Jennie went off together somewhere, but for the most part we kept together. So far I had to admit that there was no sign of his young G.o.dhead being too much for his simple white-hearted Semele.

She adored him with every particle of herself, from the feet that ran to meet him to the eyes that continually thanked his face for being what it was. And never Bayard nor Du Guesclin nor Beaumanoir of them all had served his lady with a gentler love than young Derwent Rose had for Jennie Aird.

One morning at a little before ten we went up into the Clock Tower in the Rue de l'Horloge. This tower, together with the belfry of St Sauveur, is the highest point of the ancient town that crowns Dinan's rock. Up and up inside the turret we mounted, through lofts and empty chambers and timbered garrets, till the stone gave way to slate and wood and lead, and the soft tock-tocking of the clock itself began to sound.

The clock is in a room with a locked and gla.s.s-panelled door, a machine of bra.s.s on an iron table, with a slow escapement, compensated pendulums, and the white hemp ropes of the weights disappearing through a hole in the floor to the stories below. On the iron table stood an oilcan, and the small indicator-clock showed a few minutes to ten. A circular piercing in the wall gave us light, and light also streamed down through the opening where the wooden ladder rose to the upper platform. We peered through the gla.s.s door, while "Tock-tock, tock-tock"

spoke the unhurrying clock....

Then on the verge of ten a large vane slipped and dissolved itself into a mist, to the murmur of moving wheels. Four times on an open third sounded the warning tenor bell overhead; and then the twin vane slipped and dissolved. There was a clang that shook the timbers inside their skin of lead....

"Come along, Jennie!" cried Derry, making a dash for the belfry, while again the bell thundered out....

It was two short flights up, but Madge and I were after them in time to hear the last two strokes. The structure still trembled with an enormous humming. This lasted for minutes, wave succeeding wave, crests and troughs of lingering sound, diminishing but seeming as if they would never quite cease. Our eyes sought one another's eyes expectantly as we waited for the last murmur of the hymning metal....

Then light voices floated up from the street again, and the noises of the town could be heard once more.

"Just look at the view!" said Derry, hanging half over the rail.

But I wanted a rope round my waist before I approached that rail. A head for heights is not one of the things of which I boast.

Another day, this time in the afternoon, we pulled in a skiff a mile or two down the Rance, where men were fishing with the "balance"--the net on the crossed bough-like arms that made a dripping bag while the rope ran over the pulley of the pry-pole. Men used the same machine in the days before Moses, they are using it to-day on the Rance and the Yang-tse-Kiang. It was this vast antiquity that seemed to strike Derry, even more than the fortifications had struck him, even more than that clock that tried to measure with its "tock-tock" something that had no beginning and can have no end. Several times he seemed on the point of speaking, but each time desisted. There was nothing to be said, no word that, like the clock, was more than "tock-tock, tock-tock." And I fancied that for a day or more past he had talked much less, that he was ceasing to talk, as he had ceased to write, as he had ceased to paint.

He sat for long spells thinking, as if measuring that which was himself against all that was not himself and coming to his understanding about it.... He and Jennie had the oars. Suddenly he gave a little laugh, very musical, and took the oar again.

"Stroke," he said.

We set off back up the stream.

We landed at the Old Bridge and began the ascent to the town; but near the Arch of Jerzual, almost on the very spot where Julia had said she hated people who cried, he stopped again. From a dark interior on our left had come the knocking of a hand-loom. We entered, and Madge translated his questions into French.

Once more he seemed to find the same fascination--the spell of the oldest and of the newest, the first primitive principle of which our modern inventions are but elaborated conveniences, man measuring his strength and pitting his wit against all that is not man. So men had fished, so they did fish. So they had woven, so they did weave. They had fought in steel caps with hand-grenades in the past, they fought in steel caps with hand-grenades still. And nothing to be written, painted or said. As it had been in the beginning it would be until the end. A momentary life was not meant for the expression of these things. They were for contemplation, perfect understanding, and--silence.

That was on a Sat.u.r.day evening. After dinner we strolled to the Jardin des Anglais again and stood looking over the ramparts. There were no shirley poppies in the sky now, but a serene unbroken heaven, a tender blue fading to the still tenderer peaches and greys that merged into the darkening land. The cypresses below us were inky black, the river where the fishermen had fished a soft thread of inverted sky. Folk again took their evening stroll round the walls. None of us spoke. I was wondering what Julia Oliphant was doing in London.

Suddenly Derry broke the silence. He did so in these words.

"It's all right for Lehon and the Chateau de Beaumanoir to-morrow morning, I suppose?"

"Yes, dear boy," said Madge.

How was she to have known, how was I to have known, how "all right" it was for Lehon, the Chateau de Beaumanoir and--to-morrow?

V

The chateau stands a bare mile out of Dinan, and we had been there half a dozen times before; but Derry loved those crumbling old towers on their upstanding rock. It rises almost sheer, b.u.t.tressed round with the broken works, and from the talus to the plateau on the top is a network of precipitous paths. You ascend it very much as you can, and the view that is blocked as you approach it breaks on you from the summit--first the sickening gulf of air at your feet, then the three or four miles of the southward plain, and the ca.n.a.lised Rance parting company with its attendant road to Tressaint, ecluse after ecluse, until it picks it up again towards Evran. That is when you look south. To the north, peering down through oak and beech as you might peer over the edge of a nest, are glimpses of white ribbon--the road along which you have pa.s.sed. And on the level plateau in the middle, enclosed by oak and beech and lime, rubble-built but with dressed stone b.u.t.tresses, stands the tiny modern Chapel of St Joseph of Consolation.

Jennie and Derry waited at the top of the last zigzag for Madge and myself, and then gave us time to recover our breath. It was eleven o'clock of a Sunday morning, and Dinan's bells sounded lightly in the distance. They languished almost like human voices as, instead of quickening for the final summons, they delayed, with longer and longer intervals until, when you expected just one more sweet note, all was silence.

I think that what gives that chateau-crowned rock its air of lightsome s.p.a.ce is that you come to it from Dinan, where everything crowds upon you, the Porches trample you, and the people across the street go to bed practically on the sill of your window. True, from the ramparts you have sweep enough, but unless you go there very early you get a mediocre, unbroken illumination, with every shadow hidden behind the face that is turned towards you, and two tones paint all, the pale blue of the sky and the average of the lighted land. So there is little to be seen from the Chateau de Beaumanoir to the north.

But turn your face south, and--ah! That is where the brightness lies!

That flat average of greens and browns disappears, and you are looking, not at colour, but at Light itself! And yet every shadow points directly at you. All the sun that there is is on your own face--there, and graving as if on a tarnished silver plate a glittering outline round every object you see. Not a green, not a brown; all is grey; but twinkles with a silver edge every tree of Rance's valley, and fuming silver is every thread of house-smoke that ascends. That stretch of lock that is lost again towards Tressaint is a needle-flash, and you see the summer clouds only as you see the poplar-sheddings that float over the gulf in June--as if save for their edges they did not exist.

Then, turning your back on the glitter, you see the heavy browns and greens and ochres of the ruins once more.