Chapter IV

'TpRAGEDY and small ignominious infirmities -*• are, unhappily, not incompatible. If, on the one side, monumental sufferers could stride always in the limelight to the sound of muffled drums, without fear of the toothache or a cold in the head; or, on the other, if persons with the gout were immune from the great passions, the parts of both would be comparatively easy to play. But real difficulties begin to enter when the parts are mixed; when the gentleman with a bad liver loses his only son, and, still more, when the tragedy king breaks his bootlace. For the whole focus is in an instant changed; the bereaved invalid is crushed by a sound for whose magnitude he was not prepared, and the purple-robe hero becomes as irritable and peevish as anyone else.

Something of this kind happened to General Medd within a week of his son's return from Cambridge.

Now certainly General Medd was a sufferer on the large scale, and there was something magnificently pathetic and solemn about the way in which he bore himself. His very proper pride had been wounded in its most delicate spot; that which was the mainspring of his life, his central ideal, his most intimate and living gospel, had been smirched by his own son. It perhaps seems ridiculous to those who have not his ideals, yet it was a fact that, for him, however absurd it may appear to a democratic and common-sense age, the whole fabric of the whole of the nobility of life rested on honour and courage. It seemed that nothing was left that was worth having if these were gone. Austin, no doubt, was a consolation; he might be a prig (as his father secretly suspected), but he was a straightforward and courageous prig; yet, after all, Austin had only done that which it was his duty to do, and Val had failed in the first and most elementary obligation which a gentleman could have.

It was this sense of outrage, then, that he carried with him always; and though he observed the conditions which he himself had made as loyally as was possible, the very sight of Val brought the outrage up again to the raw and sensitive surface. If Val had not returned for six months or a year after his crime, perhaps his father would have learned to manage his emotions more adequately.

The first little outbreak came about in this way.

The successor to Jimbo was a Scotch collie, middle-aged when he arrived, and now approaching senility. Yet he was not so old as not still to attempt sometimes to go out with the riders, though he usually dropped behind discreetly after a mile or two and returned home at his own pace. And on a certain evening in June, feeling, I suppose, particularly buoyant, Laddie accompanied his master with a great deal of shrill barking and rather stiff careering all the long way round the woods as far as the further end of the village street, there intending, it appeared, to leave them unnoticed and to slip up home by the farm and the gardens. His master knew his little ways by now, and was too tactful to interfere with them.

Accordingly, as the three rode down by the school, intending to strike across the village and up into the wooded country beyond, Laddie began, with a show of intense absorption, to smell some palings which he knew perfectly by heart already.

" He's beginning to hedge," said May, smiling.

" Don't notice him. He's had quite enough exercise for to-day," said the General.

So Laddie smelt and smelt, edging nearer by every apparently unconsidered step to the route homewards, as the three passed on; and it was certainly his intention, upon their return an hour or two later, to greet them at the steps of the house with gestures and cries of mingled relief, love, and reproach. But they had hardly turned up the lane out of sight before a lamentable clamour broke out behind them, and May wheeled her mare round on the instant.

" It's that hateful retriever of Palmer's," she cried; " he's at him again."

Now the General had been aware when he awoke this morning of an evil taste in his mouth, and on examining himself in the glass had detected a certain tinge of yellow in his eyes which caused him to avoid ham at breakfast, and to take a little sharp walking exercise after breakfast, swinging a heavy stick. But the liver, even when treated so promptly as this, is not always submissive, and all day long the old man had found it necessary to curb his tongue on matters which seemed to him very significant and tiresome.

He too swung his horse round now sharply and irritably.

" Go and kill the brute! " he snapped.

Val had turned with May, for he was exceedingly tender to animals, and by the time that the other two had ridden up was already on the scene.

It was not a very pleasant sight.

The big retriever, who was a born bully, resenting, it would appear, Laddie's air of suspicion with respect to the railings within which he himself happened to live, had dashed violently out of the half-open garden gate and discharged himself, a thunderbolt of black hair, white teeth, and blazing eyes, against the collie, whom he had bitten badly once or twice before. Laddie had responded gallantly, but too late; and by the time that his master came up he was down on the ground shrieking and struggling, with the big black brute striding over him, endeavouring, to the sound of really terrifying snarls, to get his teeth firmly and deeply into the throat. Laddie was making great play with his frilled hind-legs, scratching and kicking upwards; but he was at least five years the senior, and had, besides, been taken at a disadvantage.

" Good Gad! he's killing him," cried the General. " Separate them, Val... quick."

Val 'was off his horse in. an instant, even before his father had finished speaking; but it was not easy to see exactly what to do. The retriever was leaping from side to side, snarling like a demon, pivoted, as it were, by his teeth in the other's ruff. Laddie was shrieking, as only a collie can; and a cloud of dust rolled and bellied out, now hiding, now revealing the twisting, tearing bodies beneath. Mrs. Palmer herself had run out of the cottage, and was lamenting with upraised hands the unseemly spectacle. The noise and confusion were bewildering.

" Get at them, Val," roared the General, with the note of anger very audible.

Yet still the boy hesitated. Honestly and sincerely he did not quite know what to do. To seize the retriever would not be easy, and he did not know where to seize him; to snatch at Laddie might only make matters worse.

Then, as he hesitated, came a roar from the General:

" You damned coward! "

And a hatless figure rushed past the boy with upraised hunting-crop. Whack followed whack, now on the retriever, now on the unhappy Laddie; but the fury of the onset was so great, and its general moral effect so stupendous, that the retriever suddenly dropped his hold and fled with a howl of pain and dismay. Laddie leaped to his feet, and, with his tail between his legs, fled in the opposite direction, his shrill, hysterical bark dying away at last in the friendly shelter of the Home Farm gate.

The General turned on his son in a flare of rage.

" Afraid of a couple of dogs, are you? "

Val looked at him, white as a sheet. If he had been conscious of deliberate cowardice he would have felt it less; but, on the contrary, as he had sprung off his horse, he had driven down by an act of the will the perfectly natural hesitation that every living being would have to interfere too suddenly; and he had not thrown himself into the fray simply because he was honestly doubtful of what was best to do.

And, on the other hand, his father, brooding (as he had) day after day on the cowardice of his son, was perfectly certain that here was one more instance of it; and his excitement and the state of his liver had compelled him to express his opinion with a force which he would otherwise have avoided. So the two, father and son, eyed one another, both alight writh emotion and hostility. May looked at them both with dismay, and Mrs. Palmer went discreetly indoors again.

Then Val went to his horse, mounted, and rode homeward after Laddie, leaving the two silent.

The next incident of importance with regard to the development of Val took place in July.

The father and son had never mentioned the dogfight affair to one another. The General had discussed it with his wife, and had come to the conclusion that possibly he had been a little hasty in expressing an undeniable truth; for he entirely rejected the mother's theory that perhaps Val had really not known what to do. And Val discussed it with nobody. May had attempted it, but he had silenced her.

His mother had passed on Father Maple's suggestion as if it came from herself. She had told him, after a good deal of hesitation, that promises of silence (she specified nothing further than this) did not apply to spiritual advisers (wondering at her own Jesuitry as she said it); and that if Val cared to talk over his affairs with Mr. Arbuthnot or... or with anyone else, she was sure that he would not be breaking any pledges he had ever made. Val had met her suggestion with a polite air of interest and silence.

Then, about the middle of July, the second incident took place.

There was a week-end party in the house. This year the Medds had not taken a house in town, as they usually did — the doctor had said that the General would be better in the country — and instead they entertained people from Fridays to Tuesdays about twice a month.

At this week-end th^re were several old friends, among whom, as an intellectual giant, towered Professor Macintosh. The Merediths too were here; Austin; and finally Miss Marjoribanks, who, having steadily refused to come before, for reasons not given, consented at last to visit May, on condition that there were plenty of other guests. May imagined, very naturally, that her hesitation rose from her remembrance of the Rome affair.

It was actually on the first Friday evening that the thing happened.

The smoking-room at Meclhurst opened out of the billiard-room in the north wing; and hither, when the ladies had gone to bed, proceeded Professor Macintosh, in all the glory of his velvet and frills and skull-cap. He found the Merediths, father and son, already there — the father, with his hands behind his back, circling slowly round the room, looking at the pale-coloured sporting engravings; and Tom, seated in a long chair, earnestly and silently smoking a briar pipe. (Tom was one of those people who only do one thing at a time, and do it very seriously. )

Sir James Meredith privately thought Professor Macintosh an ass, and at the same time a rewarding ass. He enjoyed, in fact, helping him to say characteristic things, which he would recount to his friends afterwards. This time, however, the Professor needed no assistance.

"Sad thing about this boy, isn't it?" he began briskly, even before he sat clown. " And got very interesting. It's a case of what we scientific gentle-men call a freak."

This was a very promising beginning, thought the lawyer. It was always amusing when the Professor spoke for his supposed colleagues. But he had not an idea to what he referred; so it pleased him to rally him on his absentmindedness. ( Sham geniuses always respond to that, as flowers to the sun.)

He turned from his coloured engravings and sat down.

" You thinkers and students always begin in the middle," he said, with an air of humorous respect. " May I ask what you happen to be talking about? "

The Professor beamed. (He found this rallying line very pleasant.)

" Why, about young Valentine. One of the keepers was telling me about it before dinner. A new man, I think. I haven't seen him before."

"What's young Valentine been doing?" asked the lawyer. (He glanced, as a mere precaution, at the billiard-room double doors. They appeared to be closed.)

The Professor told him, fitting his fingers together as he had once seen Dr. Huxley do, and wearing an air of intense and yet detached scientific interest. It was especially interesting to him, as a sociological student, he said. Here were the Medds — good old family, with medieval instincts; the strain was very pure; and here, suddenly, had appeared a freak — a boy with the heart of a rabbit. He wondered whether the alien characteristic had come from Lady Beatrice's side. He would look into Lady Beatrice's ancestry. Of course he said, too, some kind things; he remarked how distressing it all was — particularly as it had got out somehow into the village, probably through a servant's talking — some servant who had known of Austin's wound and had, perhaps, overheard something he should not. At any rate, the new keeper had told him a story that hung together very well, and it seemed to him to fit in perfectly with little things he had noticed. Of course the General knew nothing of the talk of the village; and

At this moment the General came in from the corridor, with Austin; and the lawyer instantly remarked:

:< Yes, I think these engravings are originals.... I've just been looking at your engravings. They seem to me capital."

The General made a suitable remark. Then Sir James got up.

" Excuse me. May I shut this door? "

He went to the billiard-room doors and closed them. But he first glanced into the room. It was empty. And yet just before he spoke there had been a sudden vibration of the doors, as if the further one, opening into the corridor, had been opened. But the room was empty. Therefore someone had left the billiard-room immediately after the General had come into the smoking-room. This was logic.... But of course it might have been a servant.

The lawyer sat down, and was rather silent. And Val did not appear.

(m)

The Professor, of course, was a great deal too much emancipated to go to church. When you have reached a position in the scientific world sufficiently eminent to justify your wearing a crimson skull-cap and a frilly shirt, you need no longer consider conventions; and there is, of course, no reason, beyond that of convention, why you should go through the wearisome form of addressing a Being whose lowest form is a kind of jelly on the seashore and whose highest development is yourself. Self-communing becomes the only intelligent method of adoration.

But the Professor observed the Sabbath, for all that. He said that the instinct of those old nomads was remarkable; and that the brain and body were none the worse for one day's rest in seven, and that he, for one, deplored the modern rush and lack of repose.

So when the party assembled in the hall on Sunday to walk down to church — Sir James, as usual, presenting a perfect model of a God-fearing English gentleman — the Professor took occasion to pass through in leather slippers, with a thin, voluminous grey plaid over his shoulders, and to announce that he proposed to go and sit in the summer-house above the cedars until worship was done. He also displayed a green-covered work on Parasites, which he intended to study.

At about twelve o'clock he closed his eyes, the better to think over what he had been reading. The summer air was hot and enervating, the splash of the fountain at the foot of the slope was soothing, the hum of the flies about him almost somniferous: so it was possible that he dozed. He had not read a great deal about Parasites, for he had been rash enough to take with him as well, after the church-party had gone, a number of the Pall Mall Magazine which he had not previously read, and this now lay, face down and opened, upon his knees, upon a fold of the grey plaid....

The next thing of which he was aware was that the door of the summer-house was darkened, and with the natural genius of a great mind he concluded that someone was standing in it. So he opened his eyes, simultaneously snatching away the Pall Mall Magazine.

Then he saw that it was Val.

" Can you give me ten minutes? " asked the boy, who seemed breathless, as if he had been running. (He appeared to pay no attention to the Pall Mall Magazine. )

The Professor sprang up.

" Why, certainly/' he said.

" Do you mind just coming up into the woods? I think the others may be coming here."

The Professor ingeniously enfolded the magazine, which he had been holding out of sight, under the grey plaid, presenting only for view the green book on Parasites, and the two went together through the little swing-gate by the summer-house, up into the fringe of the woods, that here encroached right down on the garden fence. Then they sat down, oddly enough in the very place where Val three or four years ago had lain and dreamed of prowess and nobility.

" Look here," said Val abruptly, " I must ask you two or three questions. Do you mind? I don't believe any more in all that down there " — (he jerked his head towards the village and the squat Norman tower) — " and I want to know what scientists think."

" But, my dear young man " began the Professor reprovingly.

Val turned a white face on him.

" Please don't jaw about that," he said. " I know you don't believe it either.... Well, but this is what I want to ask you about. You know I heard everything you said in the smoking-room on Friday night."

" Eh " began the Professor.

" I was in the billiard-room. I heard my name, and then I listened on purpose."

" You did very wrong," exclaimed the Professor energetically. " And I'm not at all sure "

" You can't tell my father, anyhow," said Val. " You see, he thinks nobody knows except himself and the rest of us. So let's leave all that. What I want to know is whether it's my fault, and whether I could ever get over it? "

The Professor's mind whirled wildly a moment or two. He was not accustomed to human problems, and knew nothing whatever about them. He was accustomed to treat of human beings merely as a development of protoplasm, and to consider that which was not protoplastic, so to speak, as negligible. He was a kindly old man in his way, very complacent and positive. But even without those qualities he could see that the boy was badly upset. So he attempted to soothe him.

" Look here, my boy," he said. " Better leave all those problems alone. Just do your best; don't be too hard on yourself, and don't think too much about it all. We've all got our flaws somewhere, and it's no good taking them too hardly."

' You mean that these flaws are incurable then? That we can't change ourselves? That's just what I want to know. I'm born flawed, and I can't alter it?"

" Of course we can do something by effort," said the Professor judicially; "always supposing that there's sufficient impetus from outside forces. But weVe all got our limitations, and it's far wiser to recognise them. No one can possibly blame you for being what you are — no philosopher, that is; I think none the worse of you, I assure you, my boy, for not... not having as much nerve as your brother, for instance. We're all the creatures of our descent, our education, and so on. Scientists are beginning to think that we're practically formed when we're two or three years old. Every year that passes after that makes us less and less plastic. At least that's what Science tells us."

" That's exactly what I wanted to know," said Val quietly — " what Science says. Then... then I must make the best of myself? I can't be blamed for what I do? "

" Not by a philosopher," said the Professor. "Of course uninstructed people "

The boy jerked his head. The look of strain in his eyes became more set and fixed each instant.

" I don't mind about them," he said. " I want to know the facts.... And then there's one more thing...."

" Yes, my boy," said the Professor encouragingly. He was delighted to find so apt a pupil.

" It's about the life after death. What does Science say about that? "

The Professor paused. He wished to be perfectly fair.

" If there is a life after death," he said at last, " it falls outside the purview of Science. Science deals with physical phenomena; with the body, the mechanism of the brain, and so on. She knows nothing of the soul; she deals only with that which, if there is a soul, is merely its instrument."

"She knows nothing of the soul," repeated the boy. " That means that Science does not recognise it as a fact; that there is nothing to show that there is such a thing. Is that right? "

The Professor bowed his head.

" That is so," he said. " Certainly there are certain claims made by non-scientific people which, if they are facts, cannot at present be explained by Physical Science. But that does not prove that they will not be explained some day; if, that is to say, they really are facts."

Val lifted his head impatiently. He had been staring steadily down, frowning, with pressed lips, at the moss and dead leaves beside him. He had been quite quiet and quite business-like throughout.

" Well," he said, " to be short — Science says that there's no evidence that there's a soul, or a life after death. Is that right? "

:( That, I think," said the Professor solemnly " is a fair summary. But "

The boy got up, heavily, but with a determined, final kind of air.

" Thanks, very much," he said. " That's all I wanted to know.... I think the others are coming."

(iv)

It was a curiously trying week-end for Gertie Marjoribanks. But she had seen that she must face sometime a meeting with Val on their new footing, and had determined to get it over. To have delayed much longer would have been to have aroused suspicion; and if there was one thing of which she was vehemently and energetically ashamed, it was of that boy-and-girl engagement into which she had so sentimentally entered last Christmas, and so courageously broken off again at Easter. She had quite decided by now never to tell anyone about it — not even May.

Her feelings towards Val were remarkably keen, and their sharpness when she had first set eyes on him after her arrival had surprised even herself. She hated, as she confessed to herself when she went upstairs to dress for dinner, after shaking hands with him in the hall, the very sight of him. It seemed to her that he belonged now to a part of her life for which she had nothing but resentment and shame. It was abominable to her to remember that they had kissed one another....

For the reaction was complete. She had taken him on a certain valuation, and in the enthusiasm of his service to her in the woods between here and Penshurst, had, so to speak, abandoned herself altogether to her feelings. He had stood to her for her perfect knight; he was to be her defender, her Percival, her king. The blow he had struck for her in Rome, on the steps of the Pincian, had been magnificent in her eyes; and it had reached a transfiguration when, to the gaiety of the hidden band in the hotel, she had raised to him- her tiny glass of Chartreuse. So far she had flung the whole of her schoolgirl idealism into the fire, and it had blazed into glory, filling her world with flame.. He had been to her Lohengrin in silver armour, Caruso in tights — her gentle, perfect knight. And then, with a crash, her world had tumbled; and to her rather theatrical but sincerely passionate nature, it seemed that the intolerable shame had enveloped not him only, but herself. Exactly at that moment when heaven should have opened, the earth had opened instead; and there, in the pit, lay she and he.

So she had set herself during these two months to climb out. It was a consolation that someone had fought for her; but she could not allow herself to dwell on this until she was again on safe ground. It was not until she had built up her world once more, until she had scoured by resentment and interior fury the last remnants of Val from her soul, that she could dare to see him again, or to talk even with Austin. And when she had seen Val again, in the hall at Medhurst, standing a little apart from the others as he ought, and had taken his hand and let go of it again, it required all her powers of will and energy not to show her loathing for the boy who had failed her so cruelly.

It was a terrible pleasure to her to notice his isolation: she saw that he had no place in his home; that the deliberate kindness of his mother emphasised his loneliness all the more; that the silent overlooking of him by his father must surely keep the wound open. She took a certain pleasure even, when she had recovered herself after the first shock (for she had distinctly a touch of tiger-blood in her nature), in talking to him rather ostentatiously, in a very clear and distinct voice, in order to show to him and to herself her sure, supreme detachment.

This lasted for forty-eight hours; and then on the Sunday evening, for the first time, compassion made itself felt — a little cloud of it, like a man's hand.

Sunday evening in summer has a peculiarly sentimental effect upon young persons, especially if they have been to church; and Gertie, who was a little devote sometimes, had not only been to church with May, but had assisted in the singing of "Hark! hark, my soul! " after the sermon, and had been played out of church to the strains of " O rest in the Lord."

Then she had come up to cold supper, and had drunk a little Moselle. Then she had put a filmy wrap about her head, and gone out with Austin into the gardens at the back of the house. (Austin, she had noticed, was quite polite always to Val; but occasionally did not seem to notice that he was there.)

It was a delicious evening, warm and perfumed, and a belated nightingale (perhaps the same that had sung to Val and the priest three weeks ago) was recalling fragments of his old early-summer song. Again, too, the stars were dim and soft — a whole vault of them, set in grey velvet. The tall trees were motionless, and the flower-beds gave off the cool reflex perfume that comes from such after a hot day.

They went across the lawn under the cedar and down upon the first of the terrace walks that fall towards the village; and there they stood presently, leaning on the stonework, without speaking. Behind them, beyond the huge cedar, glowed the tall windows of the house, open to catch the evening air, and now and then a spoken word or two came to them.

This was a most fitting scene for the close of Sunday: the emotional effect of the evening service was not yet exhausted in the girl's mind; everything seemed to her to-night very holy and peaceful and complete....

Presently she lifted her arm from the cool stone and began to go slowly up towards the end of the terrace furthest from the house, and Austin went with her. Their thin shoes made hardly any sound at all on the paved walk; but just as they got near the end Austin made a remark. She answered it; and at this instant reached the end, just in time to see Val, perfectly recognisable in the twilight, moving quickly away from a seat just below the balustraded end of the terrace. He was going with quick, noiseless steps on tiptoe, obviously unaware that they were so close, and, equally obviously, intending to get away round the shubbery before he was seen.

It was then, for the first time, that compassion laid a finger-tip on her heart. The boy had slipped out, she saw, immediately after supper, and had come out here alone, to brood. He had found, he thought, a safe refuge; and there he was now, stealing away into the dark for fear that he should interrupt or be interrupted.

She said nothing; nor did Austin till they reached again the further end of the terrace.

Then —

"That was Val, wasn't it?" she said.

" I think so," said Austin indifferently.

" Does he... does he feel it all very much? "

"He's got to," said Austin briefly. "It's his best chance, poor brute."