Chapter VI

TTTHEN Val had peeped out to see whether his mother was listening, he had locked the door and gone back again to the writing-table.

Then he opened the blotting-book, slipped out three or four sheets, and sat back to read them over. He must not lose the run of the sentences. Then he leant forward again; and for nearly an hour wrote steadily, with many pauses, again leaning back from time to time to consider what phrases to use.

A little before twelve he finished. He folded the sheets, placed them in five envelopes, already directed, sealed them carefully, and then went and propped them in a row on the mantelpiece, just below Austin's paper of " Pop " rules, framed in light blue ribbon.

Then he sat down on the couch opposite, and looked at them a long time without moving.

Half an hour later he got up and went to the corner cupboard, and lifted out from it a big cardboard box full of old letters; and for the next hour, sitting on the floor, he went through these, reading some, tearing up some, laying some in a little pile to be replaced. Then he carefully tied up with tape those he meant to be kept, and emptied the wastepaper basket full of fragments into the fire-place. Then he set a light to these and watched them burn....

About two o'clock he got up again out of the long chair where he had been lying with his eyes closed, and stood a moment or two on the hearthrug. There was a long, low looking-glass below the " Pop " rules; he caught a glimpse of his collar and white shirt front in this; and he leant forward, his hands on the shelf, and for a minute or two stared steadily into his own reflected face. He saw there his eyes, unnaturally bright, rimmed with dark lashes, his compressed lips, the pallor of his skin. He was in a state of intense interior excitement by now, as the time he had fixed was very near; and he began to wonder, as people will in such moments, as to his own identity.... When he was quite a child, he remembered, he had been tormented by such thoughts. " It is I who am thinking," he had reflected, in childish wordless images, " but I think that I am thinking. Therefore the ' I ' is behind my thinking. But I think that I think that

I am thinking. Therefore the ' I ' is behind the thinking that I am thinking."... And so the " I " receded indefinitely, behind ring after ring, after consciousness.... Then what is the " I "? Is there anything behind all this? Is there more than a series of husks of consciousness? Is there any kernel at all?... So he pondered now, intent and maddened by his own intentness. Whatever " I " is, it is beneath the face whose reflection he stared at, beneath the convolutions of the brain, beneath the processes of the brain, beneath the pure thought that emerges from such processes, beneath even the infinite series of the consciousnesses of self. Or is there nothing behind all these? Is self merely the coincidence and sum of the whole?...

Then he tore himself away suddenly, as the intricate thought whirled in his brain with an almost physical vertigo, and leaned with his back to the glass, looking out over the familiar lighted room, perceiving that it was simultaneously more familiar and near than ever, and more infinitely apart and remote. It was the nearest expression of himself that he had ever made — of himself mingled with Austin. Right up from the little box of broken, dusty butterflies which he had collected before he went to school at all, to the new rook-rifle he had bought last Christmas — all resembled the case of a caddis-worm, sticks and pebbles gathered in a day of life. And now he was going to split the case and climb up through the dim and mysterious atmosphere to another state of existence — if, that is, there would be anything that could climb when the half-assimilated particles were dissolved....

The rain spattered suddenly against the shuttered windows, driving his thoughts instinctively to the safety and shelter he enjoyed here — the protected sleeping house, all at peace in bed, his parents, May, the servants; and out there the stables, the horses, the coachman's house, the grooms' lodgings. For an instant he looked down on it all, with the roof off, and in each little closed compartment lay a little body coiled up asleep. And his eyes suddenly filled with tears of self-pity. He was to leave all this — all the people who did not understand him, who had snubbed him and repudiated him.... He was going to show them whether, after all, he was such a coward as they thought; when the morning came, and all the little people awoke and came running in here, they would know whether he had been a coward or not. They would find his little caddis-case lying here; and they would find his last words too, his forgiveness of them all, his se^^nity, his sorrow — all written out and fas- *ened up carefully in those envelopes behind him — the envelopes addressed to his mother, to Austin, to May, to Benty, and to Gertie, but none to his father!... They would know in the village too, where they had discussed him and laughed at him; that new keeper would know, the one who gossiped about him, and was so respectful to him in his presence.... And Benty? What would Benty say and do?

Then the clock struck the half -hour, and he started upright. It was time. It must all be over by three o'clock. That was the time he had fixed. He went straight out of the room and passed into his bedroom.

(n)

In the corner of his bedroom nearest his bed was a little badly carved oak cupboard. He unlocked this with a key on his watch-chain and took out a cash-box. Then again he unlocked this (his hands had suddenly begun to shake, so that the compartments clattered as he handled it), and opened one little lid. Then out of this he drew first a phial and then a small graduated medicine-glass.

He had bought both these this morning at East Grinstead. He had had a little trouble with the poison, and had been obliged to explain elaborately that his father wanted it for killing a horse. General Medd had sent him in on purpose, in order that there might be no difficulty; it was for an old horse, which they did not want to shoot in the usual way. It was quite a good lie; it ensured that the dose would be certainly fatal, and it had seemed so unusual as to be quite convincing. The chemist had let him have it then — arsenic or prussic acid, or something — he had forgotten — after making him sign his name in the book. And the graduated medicine-glass he had bought with a vague feeling that he would like all. his instruments to be new and unsullied and his own; he shrank a little from using a glass belonging to the house....

Of course other methods had occurred to him. He had contemplated jumping off the top of the house, or shooting himself with his new rook-rifle; but he had feared the noise and the uncertainty of the second, and his own nerve in the first. Poison was much better; surely no one, he had thought, so desperate as himself, could shrink from a little medicine-glass filled with colourless liquid.

With these in his hands then, he went back again on tiptoe into his sitting-room; again he locked the door; then he sat down on the sofa and contemplated the little dark blue phial with the staring label and the innocent little glass beside it. He thought the phial looked disagreeable; he would pour out the draught at once and put the bottle away. He had nearly half an hour yet, before all would be over. So he did this — the liquid did not come as far up the glass as he had expected, and he put the bottle behind one of his envelopes on the mantelpiece, where he could no longer see it. Then he sat down again, staring at the glass.

He started all over as the stable clock struck the quarter. For an instant he thought that it must be three, and simultaneously the idea crossed his mind that if it was three it was too late; he would have broken his resolution, and would no longer be obliged to keep it. But the six strokes sounded and were silent: his honour was still safe.

Then he suddenly reflected that there was no great hurry. The chemist had told him that the poison killed practically instantaneously as well as painlessly. He could have a good twelve or thirteen minutes yet. Yes, he would wait thirteen — no, fourteen minutes.... He took off his watch and chain and laid it on the table by the glass.... Fourteen minutes. It was no good staring at the glass. He would lean back and close his eyes....

Then began once more the conflict which he thought he had wholly finished with last night by the beehives, when Gertie and Austin had interrupted him. He had gone through it all then — had faced the two sides — life with its intolerable shame and death with its uncertainties. And he had just chosen death — coolly and consciously — when he had heard the voices, and started up just in time to escape being seen. He had known exactly what he was doing, and he had clenched the decision by a solemn resolution made, oddly enough, on his knees by his bedside. Since that time up to the present moment he had never wavered: the excitement of the plot, the going to East Grinstead, the explanations to the chemist, the careful and subtle buying of some rook-rifle targets in case he were questioned as to what he had bought, the keen sense of drama as he had seen himself sitting down to lunch for the last time, to tea, to dinner, his fierce outburst to his mother, his last good night to her, his deliberate avoidance of a good night to his father; and then, above all, the intense shuddering pleasure of the composition of his letters — his tender forgiveness of Gertie and the confession to her of his own weakness, his proud and manly farewell to Austin, his letter to his mother telling her that her sympathy had all but weakened him in his resolution, his little note to May, cheerful and resigned, his careful directions about his funeral — no flowers and no religious service unless it were very strongly wished by his mother — the doing of all these things had been so absorbingly exciting and inspiring that, with the exception of one or two bad moments, he had simply not been aware that there was any instinctive clinging to life at all. He seriously believed that the thing was settled.

And now it came back like a thunderstorm; and the figure round which it centred was Benty — Benty in her room over the fire; Benty hearing the news next morning; Benty as she had stood at the door just now after wishing him good night.

Up to three minutes ago he had really been unaware that it would. He had enjoyed keenly, though he did not know it, the contemplating of himself awake in the sleeping house, bent on his desperate act; he had enjoyed, though he did not know it, the formal and judicial deliberation by which he had proceeded to his bedroom and unlocked the instruments of his death, the slow pouring out of the poison and the setting of it before him on the table.... But now that all was done, now that no act remained except that to which all his other acts led up, without which they would all be silly and theatrical mockeries, the intoxication of drama and action was gone, and he faced the facts....

If he kept his resolution he would be dead in ten minutes — dead.... Medhurst would have reeled off from him and vanished for ever — Med-hurst, Cambridge, his horse, his family, this room

— every one of those things by which he assured himself of his own identity and in which he expressed it; his own heart which he could hear drumming in his ears, his wet hands that now were knitted tightly one about the other, the pulses in his body — all those things by which he knew self — these would be gone; and he?...

And, on the other side, he could just go to bed and pour this silly stuff out of the window, take off his clothes as usual and put on his pyjamas and go to be~d, and awake to-morrow with Charles in the room and the morning light on the floor... and begin again.

And no one would ever know.

But he would have broken his resolution! — that resolution he had made so deliberately, that resolution by which he had demonstrated to himself so forcibly that all the world was wrong about his cowardice and he right.

But no one would ever know.

Besides, had he not already proved that he was no coward? What coward would have done all this — bought the poison, faced death for over twenty-four hours unflinching, made his last dispositions so tranquilly and sincerely? Surely he had conquered interiorly, and that was all that mattered! He had meant to die, had done all things necessary for death. He had proved himself to himself! And if he was no coward interiorly and really, what would it matter what the world thought? Would it not be braver?... And Benty!... Was it kind to Benty? Would it not be far finer to live?...

He sat up as this brilliant light broke on him. For a moment or two he saw himself as magnificent and transfigured — a heart of steel and fire within, yet misunderstood and misrepresented without; a man desperately courageous in all that mattered, of whom the world was not worthy... a soul of infinite tenderness as well as of courage.

Then down on him again came a sense that he was more of a sham than ever — a braggart, a liar, who posed splendidly when there was no danger, who failed miserably always when the point came. He had swaggered about his boxing at Eton, and had refused a fight; he had talked big about his riding, and had funked Quentin; he had swung his ice-axe and rehearsed his dramas of Switzerland, and had cried out like a woman at the bad place; he had galloped after Gertie and saved her, but had meant to draw off if the edge of the quarry came too near; he had slapped a blackguard's face on the Pincian, and had let Austin go to the duel in his place. And now he had written his letters and poured out his poison... and... and was not going to drink it.

Then the clock began to chime the four quarters of three.

He started up from the sofa where he had lain writhing and seized the glass.... His brain and heart whirled together in inextricable confusion; his visions of himself came and went like flashing light and darkness on a wall. It was three o'clock, and he must do something. It would be too late in a minute. Three o'clock was the time appointed by Destiny and himself.

He ran to the door and unlocked it, sobbing gently to himself; ran out, still carrying the glass carefully, into his bedroom.... He must be quick, or he might drink it... it had not yet finished striking three. The window was open, according to orders, and the blind hung over it; he tore this aside with his left hand, carefully, lest he should spill what he carried in his right, and then he flung the contents of the glass far out into the shrubbery.

He drew back, still shaking all over; consumed with shame, yet desperately intent; plunged the glass again and again into his water-jug, dried it, and set it among some bottles on a shelf above the washhand-stand. Then back through the open doors he ran, snatched the letters from the mantelpiece, tore them into fragments, still sobbing, and flung the pieces among the ashes in the grate — those letters which he had taken two hours to write last evening.

And then, with a sudden wail, he ran back into his bedroom, leaving the lights burning, tore off his clothes, and crept naked into bed; blew out the candle, and crouched down under the clothes, sobbing and moaning aloud.

He was only a boy still.