The Freelands
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“Your
“Derek.”
The first sensation in Felix on reading this effusion was poignant recollection of the little lawyer’s look after Derek had made the scene at Tryst’s committal and of his words: ‘Nothing in it, is there?’ His second thought: ‘Is this the cutting of the knot that I’ve been looking for?’ His third, which swept all else away: ‘My poor little darling! What business has that boy to hurt her again like this!’
He heard her say:
“Tryst told me himself he did it, Dad! He told me when I went to see him in the prison. Honour doesn’t demand what isn’t true! Oh, Dad, help me!”
Felix was slow in getting free from the cross currents of reflection. “He wrote this last night,” he said dismally. “He may have done it already. We must go and see John.”
Nedda clasped her hands. “Ah! Yes!”
And Felix had not the heart to add what he was thinking: ‘Not that I see what good he can do!’ But, though sober reason told him this, it was astonishingly comforting to be going to some one who could be relied on to see the facts of the situation without any of that ‘flimflam’ with which imagination is accustomed to surround them. “And we’ll send Derek a wire for what it’s worth.”
They went at once to the post-office, Felix composing this message on the way: ‘Utterly mistaken chivalry you have no right await our arrival Felix Freeland.’ He handed it to her to read, and passed it under the brass railing to the clerk, not without the feeling of shame due from one who uses the word chivalry in a post-office.
On the way to the Tube station he held her arm tightly, but whether to impart courage or receive it he could not have said, so strung-up in spirit did he feel her. With few words exchanged they reached Whitehall. Marking their card ‘Urgent,’ they were received within ten minutes.
John was standing in a high, white room, smelling a little of papers and tobacco, and garnished solely by five green chairs, a table, and a bureau with an immense number of pigeonholes, whereat he had obviously been seated. Quick to observe what concerned his little daughter, Felix noted how her greeting trembled up at her uncle and how a sort of warmth thawed for the moment the regularity of his brother’s face. When they had taken two of the five green chairs and John was back at his bureau, Felix handed over the letter. John read it and looked at Nedda. Then taking a pipe out of his pocket, which he had evidently filled before they came in, he lighted it and re-read the letter. Then, looking very straight at Nedda, he said:
“Nothing in it? Honour bright, my dear!”
“No, Uncle John, nothing. Only that he fancies his talk about injustice put it into Tryst’s head.”
John nodded; the girl’s face was evidence enough for him.
“Any proof?”
“Tryst himself told me in the prison that he did it. He said it came on him suddenly, when he saw the straw.”
A pause followed before John said:
“Good! You and I and your father will go down and see the police.”
Nedda lifted her hands and said breathlessly:
“But, Uncle! Dad! Have I the right? He says – honour. Won’t it be betraying him?”
Felix could not answer, but with relief he heard John say:
“It’s not honorable to cheat the law.”
“No; but he trusted me or he wouldn’t have written.”
John answered slowly:
“I think your duty’s plain, my dear. The question for the police will be whether or not to take notice of this false confession. For us to keep the knowledge that it’s false from them, under the circumstances, is clearly not right. Besides being, to my mind, foolish.”
For Felix to watch this mortal conflict going on in the soul of his daughter – that soul which used to seem, perhaps even now seemed, part of himself; to know that she so desperately wanted help for her decision, and to be unable to give it, unable even to trust himself to be honest – this was hard for Felix. There she sat, staring before her; and only her tight-clasped hands, the little movements of her lips and throat, showed the struggle going on in her.
“I couldn’t, without seeing him; I MUST see him first, Uncle!”
John got up and went over to the window; he, too, had been affected by her face.
“You realize,” he said, “that you risk everything by that. If he’s given himself up, and they’ve believed him, he’s not the sort to let it fall through. You cut off your chance if he won’t let you tell. Better for your father and me to see him first, anyway.” And Felix heard a mutter that sounded like: ‘Confound him!’
Nedda rose. “Can we go at once, then, Uncle?”
With a solemnity that touched Felix, John put a hand on each side of her face, raised it, and kissed her on the forehead.
“All right!” he said. “Let’s be off!”
A silent trio sought Paddington in a taxi-cab, digesting this desperate climax of an affair that sprang from origins so small.
In Felix, contemplating his daughter’s face, there was profound compassion, but also that family dismay, that perturbation of self-esteem, which public scandal forces on kinsmen, even the most philosophic. He felt exasperation against Derek, against Kirsteen, almost even against Tod, for having acquiesced passively in the revolutionary bringing-up which had brought on such a disaster. War against injustice; sympathy with suffering; chivalry! Yes! But not quite to the point whence they recoiled on his daughter, his family, himself! The situation was impossible! He was fast resolving that, whether or no they saved Derek from this quixotry, the boy should not have Nedda. And already his eyes found difficulty in meeting hers.
They secured a compartment to themselves and, having settled down in corners, began mechanically unfolding evening journals. For after all, whatever happens, one must read the papers! Without that, life would indeed be insupportable! Felix had bought Mr. Cuthcott’s, but, though he turned and turned the sheets, they seemed to have no sense till these words caught his eyes: “Convict’s tragic death! Yesterday afternoon at Worcester, while being conveyed from the assize court back to prison, a man named Tryst, sentenced to three years’ penal servitude for arson, suddenly attacked the warders in charge of him and escaped. He ran down the street, hotly pursued, and, darting out into the traffic, threw himself under a motor-car going at some speed. The car struck him on the head, and the unfortunate man was killed on the spot. No reason whatever can be assigned for this desperate act. He is known, however, to have suffered from epilepsy, and it is thought an attack may have been coming on him at the time.”
When Felix had read these words he remained absolutely still, holding that buff-colored paper before his face, trying to decide what he must do now. What was the significance – exactly the significance of this? Now that Tryst was dead, Derek’s quixotic action had no meaning. But had he already ‘confessed’? It seemed from this account that the suicide was directly after the trial; even before the boy’s letter to Nedda had been written. He must surely have heard of it since and given up his mad idea! He leaned over, touched John on the knee, and handed him the paper. John read the paragraph, handed it back; and the two brothers stared fixedly at each other. Then Felix made the faintest movement of his head toward his daughter, and John nodded. Crossing to Nedda, Felix hooked his arm in hers and said:
“Just look at this, my child.”
Nedda read, started to her feet, sank back, and cried out:
“Poor, poor man! Oh, Dad! Poor man!”
Felix felt ashamed. Though Tryst’s death meant so much relief to her, she felt first this rush of compassion; he himself, to whom it meant so much less relief, had felt only that relief.
“He said he couldn’t stand it; he told me that. But I never thought – Oh! Poor man!” And, burying her face against his arm, she gave way.
Petrified, and conscious that John at the far end of the carriage was breathing rather hard, Felix could only stroke her arm till at last she whispered:
“There’s nobody now for Derek to save. Oh, if you’d seen that poor man in prison, Dad!”
And the only words of comfort Felix could find were:
“My child, there are thousands and thousands of poor prisoners and captives!”
In a truce to agitation they spent the rest of that three hours’ journey, while the train rattled and rumbled through the quiet, happy-looking land.
CHAPTER XXXV
It was tea-time when they reached Worcester, and at once went up to the Royal Charles Hostel. A pretty young woman in the office there informed them that the young gentleman had paid his bill and gone out about ten o’clock; but had left his luggage. She had not seen him come in. His room was up that little staircase at the end of the passage. There was another entrance that he might have come in at. The ‘Boots’ would take them.
Past the hall stuffed with furniture and decorated with the stags’ heads and battle-prints common to English county-town hotels, they followed the ‘Boots’ up five red-carpeted steps, down a dingy green corridor, to a door at the very end. There was no answer to their knock. The dark little room, with striped walls, and more battle-prints, looked out on a side street and smelled dusty. On a shiny leather sofa an old valise, strapped-up ready for departure, was reposing with Felix’s telegram, unopened, deposited thereon. Writing on his card, “Have come down with Nedda. F. F.,” and laying it on the telegram, in case Derek should come in by the side entrance, Felix and Nedda rejoined John in the hall.
To wait in anxiety is perhaps the hardest thing in life; tea, tobacco, and hot baths perhaps the only anodynes. These, except the baths, they took. Without knowing what had happened, neither John nor Felix liked to make inquiry at the police station, nor did they care to try and glean knowledge from the hotel people by questions that might lead to gossip. They could but kick their heels till it became reasonably certain that Derek was not coming back. The enforced waiting increased Felix’s exasperation. Everything Derek did seemed designed to cause Nedda pain. To watch her sitting there, trying resolutely to mask her anxiety, became intolerable. At last he got up and said to John:
“I think we’d better go round there,” and, John nodding, he added: “Wait here, my child. One of us’ll come back at once and tell you anything we hear.”
She gave them a grateful look and the two brothers went out. They had not gone twenty yards when they met Derek striding along, pale, wild, unhappy-looking. When Felix touched him on the arm, he started and stared blankly at his uncle.
“We’ve seen about Tryst,” Felix said: “You’ve not done anything?”
Derek shook his head.
“Good! John, tell Nedda that, and stay with her a bit. I want to talk to Derek. We’ll go in the other way.” He put his hand under the boy’s arm and turned him down into the side street. When they reached the gloomy little bedroom Felix pointed to the telegram.
“From me. I suppose the news of his death stopped you?”
“Yes.” Derek opened the telegram, dropped it, and sat down beside his valise on the shiny sofa. He looked positively haggard.
Taking his stand against the chest of drawers, Felix said quietly:
“I’m going to have it out with you, Derek. Do you understand what all this means to Nedda? Do you realize how utterly unhappy you’re making her? I don’t suppose you’re happy yourself – ”
The boy’s whole figure writhed.
“Happy! When you’ve killed some one you don’t think much of happiness – your own or any one’s!”
Startled in his turn, Felix said sharply:
“Don’t talk like that. It’s monomania.”
Derek laughed. “Bob Tryst’s dead – through me! I can’t get out of that.”
Gazing at the boy’s tortured face, Felix grasped the gruesome fact that this idea amounted to obsession.
“Derek,” he said, “you’ve dwelt on this till you see it out of all proportion. If we took to ourselves the remote consequences of all our words we should none of us survive a week. You’re overdone. You’ll see it differently to-morrow.”
Derek got up to pace the room.
“I swear I would have saved him. I tried to do it when they committed him at Transham.” He looked wildly at Felix. “Didn’t I? You were there; you heard!”
“Yes, yes; I heard.”
“They wouldn’t let me then. I thought they mightn’t find him guilty here – so I let it go on. And now he’s dead. You don’t know how I feel!”
His throat was working, and Felix said with real compassion:
“My dear boy! Your sense of honour is too extravagant altogether. A grown man like poor Tryst knew perfectly what he was doing.”
“No. He was like a dog – he did what he thought was expected of him. I never meant him to burn those ricks.”
“Exactly! No one can blame you for a few wild words. He might have been the boy and you the man by the way you take it! Come!”
Derek sat down again on the shiny sofa and buried his head in his hands.
“I can’t get away from him. He’s been with me all day. I see him all the time.”
That the boy was really haunted was only too apparent. How to attack this mania? If one could make him feel something else! And Felix said:
“Look here, Derek! Before you’ve any right to Nedda you’ve got to find ballast. That’s a matter of honour, if you like.”
Derek flung up his head as if to escape a blow. Seeing that he had riveted him, Felix pressed on, with some sternness:
“A man can’t serve two passions. You must give up this championing the weak and lighting flames you can’t control. See what it leads to! You’ve got to grow and become a man. Until then I don’t trust my daughter to you.”
The boy’s lips quivered; a flush darkened his face, ebbed, and left him paler than ever.
Felix felt as if he had hit that face. Still, anything was better than to leave him under this gruesome obsession! Then, to his consternation, Derek stood up and said:
“If I go and see his body at the prison, perhaps he’ll leave me alone a little!”
Catching at that, as he would have caught at anything, Felix said:
“Good! Yes! Go and see the poor fellow; we’ll come, too.”
And he went out to find Nedda.
By the time they reached the street Derek had already started, and they could see him going along in front. Felix racked his brains to decide whether he ought to prepare her for the state the boy was in. Twice he screwed himself up to take the plunge, but her face – puzzled, as though wondering at her lover’s neglect of her – stopped him. Better say nothing!
Just as they reached the prison she put her hand on his arm:
“Look, Dad!”
And Felix read on the corner of the prison lane those words: ‘Love’s Walk’!
Derek was waiting at the door. After some difficulty they were admitted and taken down the corridor where the prisoner on his knees had stared up at Nedda, past the courtyard where those others had been pacing out their living hieroglyphic, up steps to the hospital. Here, in a white-washed room on a narrow bed, the body of the big laborer lay, wrapped in a sheet.
“We bury him Friday, poor chap! Fine big man, too!” And at the warder’s words a shudder passed through Felix. The frozen tranquillity of that body!
As the carved beauty of great buildings, so is the graven beauty of death, the unimaginable wonder of the abandoned thing lying so quiet, marvelling at its resemblance to what once lived! How strange this thing, still stamped by all that it had felt, wanted, loved, and hated, by all its dumb, hard, commonplace existence! This thing with the calm, pathetic look of one who asks of his own fled spirit: Why have you abandoned me?
Death! What more wonderful than a dead body – that still perfect work of life, for which life has no longer use! What more mysterious than this sight of what still is, yet is not!
Below the linen swathing the injured temples, those eyes were closed through which such yearning had looked forth. From that face, where the hair had grown faster than if it had been alive, death’s majesty had planed away the aspect of brutality, removed the yearning, covering all with wistful acquiescence. Was his departed soul coherent? Where was it? Did it hover in this room, visible still to the boy? Did it stand there beside what was left of Tryst the laborer, that humblest of all creatures who dared to make revolt – serf, descendant of serfs, who, since the beginning, had hewn wood, drawn water, and done the will of others? Or was it winged, and calling in space to the souls of the oppressed?
This body would go back to the earth that it had tended, the wild grass would grow over it, the seasons spend wind and rain forever above it. But that which had held this together – the inarticulate, lowly spirit, hardly asking itself why things should be, faithful as a dog to those who were kind to it, obeying the dumb instinct of a violence that in his betters would be called ‘high spirit,’ where – Felix wondered – where was it?
And what were they thinking – Nedda and that haunted boy – so motionless? Nothing showed on their faces, nothing but a sort of living concentration, as if they were trying desperately to pierce through and see whatever it was that held this thing before them in such awful stillness. Their first glimpse of death; their first perception of that terrible remoteness of the dead! No wonder they seemed to be conjured out of the power of thought and feeling!
Nedda was first to turn away. Walking back by her side, Felix was surprised by her composure. The reality of death had not been to her half so harrowing as the news of it. She said softly:
“I’m glad to have seen him like that; now I shall think of him – at peace; not as he was that other time.”
Derek rejoined them, and they went in silence back to the hotel. But at the door she said:
“Come with me to the cathedral, Derek; I can’t go in yet!”
To Felix’s dismay the boy nodded, and they turned to go. Should he stop them? Should he go with them? What should a father do? And, with a heavy sigh, he did nothing but retire into the hotel.
CHAPTER XXXVI
It was calm, with a dark-blue sky, and a golden moon, and the lighted street full of people out for airing. The great cathedral, cutting the heavens with its massive towers, was shut. No means of getting in; and while they stood there looking up the thought came into Nedda’s mind: Where would they bury poor Tryst who had killed himself? Would they refuse to bury that unhappy one in a churchyard? Surely, the more unhappy and desperate he was, the kinder they ought to be to him!
They turned away down into a little lane where an old, white, timbered cottage presided ghostly at the corner. Some church magnate had his garden back there; and it was quiet, along the waving line of a high wall, behind which grew sycamores spreading close-bunched branches, whose shadows, in the light of the corner lamps, lay thick along the ground this glamourous August night. A chafer buzzed by, a small black cat played with its tail on some steps in a recess. Nobody passed.
The girl’s heart was beating fast. Derek’s face was so strange and strained. And he had not yet said one word to her. All sorts of fears and fancies beset her till she was trembling all over.
“What is it?” she said at last. “You haven’t – you haven’t stopped loving me, Derek?”
“No one could stop loving you.”
“What is it, then? Are you thinking of poor Tryst?”
With a catch in his throat and a sort of choked laugh he answered:
“Yes.”
“But it’s all over. He’s at peace.”
“Peace!” Then, in a queer, dead voice, he added: “I’m sorry, Nedda. It’s beastly for you. But I can’t help it.”
What couldn’t he help? Why did he keep her suffering like this – not telling her? What was this something that seemed so terribly between them? She walked on silently at his side, conscious of the rustling of the sycamores, of the moonlit angle of the church magnate’s house, of the silence in the lane, and the gliding of their own shadows along the wall. What was this in his face, his thoughts, that she could not reach! And she cried out:
“Tell me! Oh, tell me, Derek! I can go through anything with you!”
“I can’t get rid of him, that’s all. I thought he’d go when I’d seen him there. But it’s no good!”
Terror got hold of her then. She peered at his face – very white and haggard. There seemed no blood in it. They were going down-hill now, along the blank wall of a factory; there was the river in front, with the moonlight on it and boats drawn up along the bank. From a chimney a scroll of black smoke was flung out across the sky, and a lighted bridge glowed above the water. They turned away from that, passing below the dark pile of the cathedral. Here couples still lingered on benches along the river-bank, happy in the warm night, under the August moon! And on and on they walked in that strange, miserable silence, past all those benches and couples, out on the river-path by the fields, where the scent of hay-stacks, and the freshness from the early stubbles and the grasses webbed with dew, overpowered the faint reek of the river mud. And still on and on in the moonlight that haunted through the willows. At their footsteps the water-rats scuttled down into the water with tiny splashes; a dog barked somewhere a long way off; a train whistled; a frog croaked. From the stubbles and second crops of sun-baked clover puffs of warm air kept stealing up into the chillier air beneath the willows. Such moonlit nights never seem to sleep. And there was a kind of triumph in the night’s smile, as though it knew that it ruled the river and the fields, ruled with its gleams the silent trees that had given up all rustling. Suddenly Derek said:
“He’s walking with us! Look! Over there!”
And for a second there did seem to Nedda a dim, gray shape moving square and dogged, parallel with them at the stubble edges. Gasping out:
“Oh, no; don’t frighten me! I can’t bear it tonight!” She hid her face against his shoulder like a child. He put his arm round her and she pressed her face deep into his coat. This ghost of Bob Tryst holding him away from her! This enemy! This uncanny presence! She pressed closer, closer, and put her face up to his. It was wonderfully lonely, silent, whispering, with the moongleams slipping through the willow boughs into the shadow where they stood. And from his arms warmth stole through her! Closer and closer she pressed, not quite knowing what she did, not quite knowing anything but that she wanted him never to let her go; wanted his lips on hers, so that she might feel his spirit pass, away from what was haunting it, into hers, never to escape. But his lips did not come to hers. They stayed drawn back, trembling, hungry-looking, just above her lips. And she whispered:
“Kiss me!”
She felt him shudder in her arms, saw his eyes darken, his lips quiver and quiver, as if he wanted them to, but they would not. What was it? Oh, what was it? Wasn’t he going to kiss her – not to kiss her? And while in that unnatural pause they stood, their heads bent back among the moongleams and those willow shadows, there passed through Nedda such strange trouble as she had never known. Not kiss her! Not kiss her! Why didn’t he? When in her blood and in the night all round, in the feel of his arms, the sight of his hungry lips, was something unknown, wonderful, terrifying, sweet! And she wailed out:
“I want you – I don’t care – I want you!” She felt him sway, reel, and clutch her as if he were going to fall, and all other feeling vanished in the instinct of the nurse she had already been to him. He was ill again! Yes, he was ill! And she said:
“Derek – don’t! It’s all right. Let’s walk on quietly!”
She got his arm tightly in hers and drew him along toward home. By the jerking of that arm, the taut look on his face, she could feel that he did not know from step to step whether he could stay upright. But she herself was steady and calm enough, bent on keeping emotion away, and somehow getting him back along the river-path, abandoned now to the moon and the bright, still spaces of the night and the slow-moving, whitened water. Why had she not felt from the first that he was overwrought and only fit for bed?
Thus, very slowly, they made their way up by the factory again into the lane by the church magnate’s garden, under the branches of the sycamores, past the same white-faced old house at the corner, to the high street where some few people were still abroad.