The Paliser case

XXVI

When Cassy had gone, Jones went back to his rooms. He went absently, his mind not on her story, which was old as the Palisades, but on a situation, entirely new, which it had suggested.

"Nice girl," he remarked as he re-entered the workshop. "Suppose we go and have dinner."

Sombrely Lennox looked up. At the table where he sat, he had been fingering some papers. He threw them down.

"I am going to have a word with Paliser."

Jones cocked an eye at him. "See here, you are not a knight-errant. The age of chivalry is over." The novelist paused and exclaimed: "What am I saying! The age of chivalry is not over. It can't be. Last night, Verelst dined with a monster!"

Lennox pushed at the papers. "If I were alone concerned, I would thank Paliser. He has done me a good turn. He has set me straight."

Then, to the listening novelist, who later found the story very useful, Lennox repeated Cassy's version of the rhyme and reason of the broken engagement.

The tale of it concluded, Lennox flicked at a speck. "I am grateful to Paliser for that, but for the manner in which he treated her, I shall have a word with him. Just one."

Jones sat down. "A word, eh? Well, why not? Flipping a man in the face with a glove was fashionable in the days of Charles II. Tweaking the nose was Georgian. The horsewhip went out with Victoria. Posting your man was always rather coffee-house and a rough-and-tumble very hooligan. If I were you, which I am not, but if I were, I would adopt contemporaneous methods. To-day we just sit about and backbite. That is progress. Let me commend it to you."

With a wide movement, Lennox swept the papers, shoved them into a pocket and stood up.

Jones also stood up. "Got an appetite? Well, dining has the great disadvantage of taking it away. Come along."

Lennox put on his hat. "I am going first to Park Avenue."

No you're not, thought Jones, who, with an agility which for him was phenomenal, hurried to the door and backed against it.

Lennox motioned him aside.

Jones, without budging, lied. "They're out of town." It was very imbecile. He knew it was, knew, too, that Lennox knew it, and, for the imbecile lie, he substituted another. "I mean they are dining out."

"What the devil are you driving at?" Lennox asked, and not very civilly either.

"A windmill, I suppose. You look like one. I – "

Jones broke off. The expression on Lennox' face arrested him. The attempt at interference, the stupid evasions, the conviction which these things produced, that there was something behind them, something secreted, something about Margaret that Jones knew and which he was concealing, made him livid.

"Out with it."

Jones looked at him, looked away, adjusted his neckcloth, vacated the door, crossed the room and sat down. He did not know to what saint to vow himself. But realising that it was all very useless, that everything is, except such solicitude as one pilgrim may show to another, and that, anyway, Lennox would soon hear it, he gave it to him.

"She is engaged to Paliser."

Lennox, who was approaching, stopped short. "Miss Austen is?"

Jones nodded.

"To Paliser?"

But it seemed too rough and, to take the edge off, Jones added. "It may not be true."

"How did you hear?"

"Verelst told me. He dined there last night."

Lennox turned on his heel. Futilely in that hell to which one may look back and see that it was not hell but purgatory prior to paradise, futilely there he had sought the reason of his damnation. A few minutes before he had thought that Cassy's story revealed it. In the light of it he had seen himself condemned, as many another has been, for crimes which he had not committed. But he had seen, too, the order of release. He had only a word to say. He was going to Park Avenue to say it.

When Jones was below with Cassy so he had thought and not without gratitude to Paliser either. If the cad had held his tongue, enlightenment might have been withheld until to his spirit, freed perhaps in Flanders, had come the revelation. Personally he was therefore grateful to Paliser. But vicariously he was bitter. For his treatment of that girl, punishment should follow.

That girl! Obscurely, in the laboratory of the senses where, without our knowledge, often against our will, our impulses are dictated, a process, intricate and interesting, which Stendhal called crystallisation, was at work.

Unaware of that, conscious only of the moment, to his face had come the look and menace of the wolf.

Now – !

"There is a book over there," Jones, who was watching him, cut in. "It is Seneca's 'De animæ tranquilitate.' Take a peek at it. It will tell you, what it has told me, that whatever happens, happens because it had to happen and because it could not happen otherwise. There is no sounder lesson in mental tranquillity."

But for all Lennox heard of that he might then have been dead. Without knowing what he was doing, he sat down. Paliser, Margaret! Margaret, Paliser! Before him, on encephalic films, their forms and faces moved as clearly as though both were in the room. He saw them approaching, saw them embrace. The obsession of jealousy that creates the image, projected it. He closed his eyes, covered his face with his hands. The image got behind them. It persisted but less insistently. The figures were still there. It was their consistence that seemed to fade. Where they had been were shadows – evil, shallow, malign, perverse, lurid as torches and yet but shades. For the jealousy that inflames love can also consume it and, when it does, it leaves ashes that are either sterile with indifference or potent with hate. At the shadows that were torches Lennox looked with closed eyes. Obscurely, without his knowledge, in the laboratory of his senses, crystallisation was at work.

Jones, leaning forward, touched him. "I say, old chap!"

Lennox had been far away, on a journey from which some men return, but never as they went. At Jones' touch he dropped his hands. The innate sentiment of form repossessed him. He straightened, looked about and, after the manner of the deeply preoccupied, who answer a question ten minutes after it is put, said evenly:

"Suppose we do."

Do what? But Jones, getting it at once, stood up. "Come along, then."

On the way to the neighbourly Athenæum, the novelist talked endlessly about the disadvantages of not being born, which is a very safe subject. Talking still, he piloted Lennox to the dining-room where, the advantages of sedatives occurring to him, he ordered a bottle of Pommard, which is mother's milk.

But when it was brought Lennox would not touch it. He wanted brandy and soda and told Johnson, a captain, to see to it.

In the great high-ceiled room, other members were dining. From one of the tables Ogston sauntered over and, noting that Jones and Lennox had not dressed, which he had, and very beautifully, remarked brilliantly: "You fellers aren't going to the opera, are you? It's the last night."

It was another safe subject and Jones smiled falsely at him. "But you are, eh? Sit down."

Ogston put a hand on the novelist's chair. "No. I'm off to a theatre-party. But I have a ticket for the Metropolitan. You don't either of you want it, do you?"

"Let me see, what is it, to-night?" Jones, with that same false smile, enquired. "And where is the seat?"

"In Paliser's box. He's to be alone and left it here with a note asking me to join him."

Deeply, beneath his breath, Jones swore, but with the same smile, he tried to shift the subject. "You're quite a belle, aren't you?"

"See here, Ogston," Lennox put in, "let me have it."

Ogston, fumbling in his white waistcoat, extracted the ticket and handed it over.

"By the way, Lennox, do you mind my doing a little touting for Cantillon? He's with Dunwoodie. Give him your law business – some of it, anyhow."

"I'll give him some, when I have it," answered Lennox, who was to have some, and sooner and far more monumentally, than either he, or even Jones, suspected.

"Good for you, Lennox. Good-night, Jones." The brilliant and beautifully dressed young man nodded and passed on.

But now the captain was bearing down on them.

Jones looked at Lennox. "You will have to come back to my shop after dinner. There is a phrase in your will that I omitted. I forgot the 'seized and possessed.'"

Lennox drank before he spoke. Then he said: "After dinner, I shall do for Paliser."

Jones, waiting until the captain had gone, looked at Lennox again. "The greatest revenge is the disdain of any."

Lennox made no reply. A waiter put a plate before him and another before Jones. Members passed, going to their tables or leaving them. Occasionally one of them stopped, exchanged the time of day and then passed on. In each exchange Jones collaborated. Lennox said nothing. The food before him he tormented, poking at it with a fork, but not eating it.

Presently he asked for coffee, drank a cup and got up.

Jones, too, got up and, to stay him, put out a hand.

Lennox, treating it, and him, like a cobweb, went on.

Afterward, Jones thought of the Wild Women of whom Æschylus tells, the terrible Daughters of Hazard that lurk in the shadows of coming events which, it may be, they have marshalled.

Afterward he thought of them. But at the moment, believing that Lennox would do nothing and realising that, in any case, nothing can be more futile than an attempt to avert the inevitable, he was about to resume his seat, when something on the floor attracted him. He bent over, took it, looked at it and tucked it in a pocket.

Then, sitting down again, mentally he followed Lennox, whom later he was to follow farther, whom he was to follow deep in the depths where the Wild Women, lurking in wait, had thrown him.

XXVII

The Park that had taken Cassy and from which, at that hour, children and nursemaids had gone, was green, fragrant, quiet. Its odorous peace enveloped the girl who had wanted to cry. In hurrying on she had choked it back. But you cannot always have your way with yourself. The tears would come and she sat down on a bench, from behind which a squirrel darted.

Before her the grass departed, the trees disappeared, the path wound into nothingness. In their place was the empty vastness that sorrow is. The masquerade that had affected her physically, had affected her psychically and in each instance profoundly. It had first sickened and then stabbed. There had been no place for sorrow in the double assault. There had been no time for it either. Occupied as she had almost at once become with the misadventures of another, she had no opportunity to consider her own. Yet now the aspect that sorrow took was not that of disaster. What it showed was the loneliness of the soul, solitary as it ever is in that desert which, sooner or later, we all must cross. Vast, arid, empty, before her it stretched.

Nearby, on the bench, crouching there, eager, anxious, wary, a squirrel, its fluffy tail and tiny nostrils aquiver, watched her with eyes of bead. From the desert she turned and seeing the little gracious thing, stretched her hand. She would have liked to take it and pet it. It would have made her solitude less acute. At the movement, a ball of misty fur bounded. Where it had been, there was air.

The abrupt evaporation distracted her. Before her the desert lay, but in it now was her father. She had been going to him. Previously, she had thought that, when she did go, her hands would be filled with gifts. Instead they were bruised, bare to the bone. They would madden him and she wondered whether she could endure it. The long, green afternoon, that had been so brief, had been so torturesome that she doubted her ability. But he would have to be told. She could not lie to him and humanly she wished that it were to-morrow, the day after, the day after that, when it would be over and done for, put away, covered by woes of his own, though inevitably to be dragged out again and shown her, and shown her, too, with the unconscious cruelty that those who love you display.

It would be crucifying, but there was no help for it. Reaching for the bundle, she stood up and went her way, across the Park, to the subway, from which she got out in Harlem.

The loveliness of that land of love seemed to have changed, though the change, she then recognised, was in herself. But at least the walk-up was unaltered. In the grimy entrance was Mrs. Yallum, a fat Finn, who looked like a dirty horse, and who yapped at her volubly, incomprehensibly, but with such affection that Cassy, yapping back, felt less lonely as she ascended the stair.

The comfort was mediocre. In the afternoon she had gone from a ruin. Now she had the sensation of entering another, one from which she had also gone, but to which she was returning and with a spirit so dulled in the journey! Had she, she wondered, any spirit left at all? At least enough remained to prevent any wish for the reconstruction of the ruin behind her. About the fallen walls were forms of filth; in the crevices there were vermin, and though, before her, the desert stretched, it was clean. However arid, it was wholesome.

But now she was at the door. She let herself in, hurried to the living-room, where, with the feigned cheerfulness of the unselfish, she beamed at her father and bent over him.

"Here I am to look after you again! How well you look. I am so glad and oh! where is your sling?"

In speaking she stroked him. His skin was clearer, she thought, and the abandoned sling was a relief.

He looked up at her. "You got married without me. I ought to have been there. Why didn't you tell me? It was for me to give you away. Who did?"

"Who did what?"

"Who gave you in marriage?"

With the mimic of gaiety, Cassy laughed. "Why, you old dear, all that has gone out. Hereabouts, nowadays, a father never goes to a wedding – only to funerals."

She paused and, with the idea of breaking it to him in bits, resumed: "Besides, it was all done in a hurry, in too much of a hurry."

He took it in, but at the wrong end. "Sick of him already, eh? Well, it isn't because I did not warn you. Where is he?"

Cassy moved back. Should she give it to him then or later? But the question, repeating itself, followed her.

"Where is your husband?"

Now for it, she thought. But at once he switched. "There was nothing in the papers. Why is that? What is that package?"

Cassy looked at the bundle which she still held. It gave her courage.

"I am not married."

For a second he stared. It was obvious that he had not got it. "Where have you been, then?"

Cassy fingered the bundle. Always she had hated to explain and of all possible explanations what could be more hateful than this? If only he would guess it, flare up, stamp about, get it over, let it go. But the cup was there and she drank it.

"I thought I was married. I am a fool."

For the awaited curse, she braced herself. The explosion did not come, but his eyes had widened. They covered her. Then, with an intake of the breath and of understanding, he lowered them. Apparently he was weighing it and Cassy thought he was trying to restrain himself, and she blessed him for it. It was less terrible than she had feared. But immediately it occurred to her that instead of trying to restrain himself, he was seeking the strength wherewith to rend her. And I am so innocent, she despairfully thought.

Her eyes were upon him and he looked up into hers.

"Why did you think you were married?"

"I told you, because I am a fool. There was a clergyman and a ceremony. Afterwards I found that the clergyman was not a clergyman and that the ceremony was a sham."

"When was that?"

"This afternoon."

"What did you do?"

"What was there for me to do? I left him."

"Where is he now?"

Cassy put down the bundle. She had no idea. But she said: "This evening we were to go to the opera. I hardly fancy he will miss it on my account." She paused and with a little catch in her voice continued: "I know it is all my fault, I ought to have known better and I shall be so unhappy if you mind. Won't you try not to?"

As she spoke, he stood up and she thought that the delayed volcano of his wrath was about to burst. To smother it, she touched him. "Of course you will mind. But I would not have been such a fool if I had not believed that everything would be so much nicer for you. Can't you see that and, if you do, can't you forgive me?"

He had moved from her to the piano; there he turned and looked. "There is nothing to forgive, Cassy. You have been a good girl always. I am sorry, of course I am sorry, but you are not to blame."

Understanding instead of maledictions! Sympathy in lieu of abuse! Such things are affecting. The tears swam to her eyes and wretchedly and yet thankfully she wept.

He did not seem to notice. In the narrow space he was moving about, shifting things on the piano, displacing and replacing a score, which, finally, he let fall. He stooped for it. As he raised it, Cassy saw through her tears that his hand was shaking. He, too, may have seen it. He left the room and she heard him pottering in the kitchen.

She wiped her eyes. Across the court was another kitchen in which were a woman and a child. Often she had seen them there, but if she had seen them elsewhere she would not have recognised them. They were but forms, the perceptions of a perceiver, and though Cassy had never read Fichte and was unacquainted with Berkeley, the idea visited her that they had no real existence, that, it might be, she had none either, that all she had endured was a dream drifting by, with nothing past which to drift.

It was her father's attitude that had induced these metaphysical hysterics. She had expected that some demon within him would spring out and gibber. Instead of which he had told her, and so gently, that she was not to blame. It is words like these that bring tears swiftest. The tears had come, but the words had also sufficed to reduce the people across the way into baseless appearances, in which, for the moment, she included herself.