Chapter I

I

" ALGY, that's a beastly fluke/' remarked Nevill.

" Not at all! I tried for it; what more could I do? "

"Well, that's thirty all — isn't it, marker? "

" Yes, Sir Nevill," said a voice from the little sentry-box by the net. They changed over.

It was a high dropping shot off the wall into the dedans gallery. If it had not come precisely at that angle, it would have been a very poor " chase "; and Algy's play as a whole did not justify the belief that he could make such a stroke once in twenty times. However, he had certainly done it that time.

Tennis — the genuine game, not the bastard played on a lawn — is perhaps the most bewildering game, to the uninitiated spectator, that has ever been invented. So thought Aunt Anna on this September morning, as she had thought, indeed, very many times before on other mornings. Of nine out of every ten fine strokes, she understood nothing. There were things called " chases," she knew — which had something to do with the ball striking the ground for the second time; one changed over as soon as two had been made; there was a little netted partition called the " winning gallery " low down on one side; mysterious phrases were cried aloud from the sentry-box. But she cared nothing for these things; she loved, only, to watch the interplay — the strange mingling of an extraordinarily quick delicacy with an apparently slow deliberation. Above all she loved to watch Nevill when he got excited, on the far side, and sent ball after ball whacking straight at the net behind his opponent's head. She leaned her chin on her hand, and her hand on the rail of the gallery above the dedans, and began to watch Nevill receiving services.

On the whole she had been vastly relieved by the passing of the last three months. There had been nothing sensational, no reaction, no moods of despair. The Bessing-tons had gone again from the Hartley orbit as emphatically as they had come. Only, Nevill had never referred to them again, or told her one word more than he had told her at the beginning. It was finished, as he had said; and he was beginning again, as he had promised. The usual notice about " not taking place " had been sent to the papers.

But he was certainly a little quieter and more secretive. He went out by himself, a good deal, into the woods. (She had noticed, by the way, that the wooden seat by the marble monument in the woods had been removed; but she asked no questions.) He rode with Jim two or three times a week: he complained no more of his headaches. He had entirely refused, by the way, to go and see the specialist again: but he had promised definitely to do so if the pain came back. But it had not come back, it appeared. It seemed as if his last headache had been the end of them; as if the shock, and his heavy sleep, and his couple of hours of real physical agony had, so to speak, swept his head clean and purged his humours.

Meanwhile he would have no guests; or at least very few. It was understood that Aunt Anna might have down a female friend from time to time; that Mr. Morpeth dined with them occasionally; that a man, now and again, like

Algy, would come for a week-end. But Nevill refund to go away anywhere from Hartley; he had refused too, so far as she knew, every invitation to the north for the shooting; he lived a simple, ordinary kind of life, and appeared content with it.

It had all puzzled her a little: but she had come to see that it was probably the best thing he could do; that he was assimilating his new experience; and that such an assimilation would take time. Her only astonishment was that he did not seem in the least more religious than he had been before: he still dutifully heard Mass on Sunday; he abstained on Friday; he entertained Father Richardson to dinner once a fortnight. But he showed no sign of looking for any consolation in religion; he was not, in that respect at least, at all the broken-hearted lover of convention. He had not been to the Sacraments since his return.

Jim wriggled beside her on the seat.

" That was a good one," he said.

It was a good one. Even she could see that. Nevill, in the far court, had slashed suddenly and viciously at a fast ball: it had whacked into the side wall and thence thumped into the net.

" That's quits! " said Nevill. " That's as good as yours. And I really did try mine! "

Algy made an incoherent retort.

Aunt Anna loved to watch two males such as these, when they got worked up. They were so exceedingly rude and brusque to one another; they jeered so genially. It was so entirely unlike two females. She imagined a few of her women friends playing tennis; at least two or three of them would miss strokes on purpose, in order to please the other; or would give a little caress as they crossed over; they would be so very appreciative of their opponent's efforts, and so distressed at failure. But these two males snapped cheerfully; and one told the other that he was a blinking idiot; or triumphed loudly over the other's discomfiture; and bade him not to spread his great feet all over the balls. Certainly Nevill did not talk like this to anyone except Algy; but to him he was refreshingly frank; and Algy responded gallantly. She really did like Algy.

A resounding whack of a ball on the human frame recalled her from her meditations.

" Sorry, old man," said Algy. " But you shouldn't get in the light."

Nevill turned a venomous face upon his friend; and stopped to rub his thigh; because real tennis balls are hard and solid.

" 'Vantage to me," said Algy, determined to miss no point that he could make.

" Who's Lord Maresfield? " asked Jim suddenly. " And why is he coming here? "

She explained that Lord Maresfield was a friend of Cousin NevilTs; and that he was coming because he had been asked. (That was the only way to deal with Jim.)

" How long will he stay? "

" Till Tuesday, I think."

"Oh! Will he ride?"

" Yes; I should think so; but lie won't ride with you."

" Oh! " said Jim; and took no further interest.

" Game and set," observed the hidden watcher from the sentry-box, dispassionately.

" Well; you've surpassed even yourself in fluking today," said Nevill. " I'll bet you five to one in anything you like that you won't do that again in ten shots."

" That's right, old man. Take it out in temper."

Nevill strolled towards the exit, trailing his heavy racquet. Then he turned to the gallery.

" Come on, Jim, for your lesson; clear out, Algy.... Going, Aunt Anna? "

" Yes, my dear. It's just gone twelve. I must go and do my letters."

Ill

Half an hour later Nevill and the boy emerged from the passage that led from the dressing-room, into the garden. Algy had disappeared ten minutes before.

" And now shall we go and quest for the Holy Grail again? " asked indefatigable Jim. " There's an hour before lunch."

Nevill looked at him.

" By George, we will," he said. " We haven't done that for — for ages. But we won't mount till we get to the garden-gate."

"Will that do?"

" Certainly. I'm not a horse till then. I'm... I'm Sir Gawain; and you're Sir Galahad."

" But Sir Gawain didn't find it. He... he stayed at a pavilion with — with merry * maidens," explained Jim, still a little breathless from tennis, yet quoting gallantly.

Nevill winced, ever so slightly.

" Yes; but you see I shan't be Sir Gawain when I get to the garden-gate. I shall be your horse then. And if Sir Galahad found the Grail, I suppose his horse did too."

" But perhaps his horse couldn't see it."

" That's true.... Well, this one must, anyhow."

By a kind of fatal instinct, Sir Galahad insisted on going to the monument. The horse made inviting suggestions that a small black pond with mud promontories running into it, all under the beech-trees, was a far more likely spot for the attaining of the Vision; but his rider would not hear of it.

" No. The monument was where you talked about it last time. I want the monument, please."

Obviously Sir Galahad entertained views of sitting down on the seat when he got there; for he uttered a cry of dismay when he arrived.

" But where's the seat? "

" It's gone," said the horse, which was an answer, but no explanation. " We'll sit down on the ground instead."... (He paused.) " Perhaps we shall see better if we're lower down."

So they sat on the dry powdery soil, and leaned their backs against the marble.

It was a clear September day. The world had had its rain in August as usual; and, once more, as usual, September had brought a mellowed summer back again. The high beech-roof hung motionless to right and left, still green, yet with that tinge that heralds dissolution; as clear yet as indescribable as the purple flush that, on the bare branches of March, promises the renewal of spring. So too with the vista that opened down the valley. At first sight it might have been July; yet, as one looked, it was certain that there was no further reserve of strength. The last word of life had been said; and the end must begin. The trees stood, patient and full-blown, waiting for their sleep once more. The picture was painted, down to the last stroke. Let it be looked at then, in silence, before it is carried away.

" Do you see it anywhere? " asked Jim.

" Oh! — the Grail " said Nevill, who was meditating about something entirely different. " I think so. Don't you remember that we agreed last time that it's really here all the while? "

" No; I don't/' said Jim frankly.

Sentimentality obviously would not do with this child. Nevill braced himself up a little. Besides he really wanted to know what he himself did think.

" Well; I believe it is here, you know. But don't you remember my saying that the thing that the Grail means is here all the time? It's — it's the whole thing, don't you know? "

(He felt he was doing it very feebly: but he really did not quite know what he thought.)

Jim looked at him, with an air of disappointment.

" I don't understand a word you're saying, Cousin Nevill."

" Well; to be honest — I don't understand myself."

Jim sniffed a little. This was really rather tiresome.

" Shall we go on a little? "

" No," said Nevill. " Let's sit here without speaking one word for five minutes, and look hard. Then, if we don't see anything, we'll go on and look somewhere else."

" Very well," said Jim resignedly. (This was a stupid kind of game — almost as stupid as the blind-man game they had played once after bathing.)

It was beginning to appear to Nevill that he was being driven from stronghold to stronghold. About five years ago, during his last year at Stonyhurst, he had really been rather religious.... He had even consulted his confessor as to whether it were not just conceivable that he might have a vocation to the Society of Jesus; and had been considerably taken aback by that priest's emphatic opinion that he had nothing of the kind; and that his obvious duty was to live in the world, to marry, and to establish a Catholic family as speedily as possible.

From that day his lukewarmness had begun. God did not want him in any peculiar or intimate manner. Very well then. This mood had grown swiftly; and, by the time that he went to Rome, he had begun to rest his centre of gravity on human persons. He still held to his religion in the manner that has been described; but it appeared to him not interesting.

Then, as if to corroborate his mood, had come Enid; 'and in her, he believed, he had found precisely that which he needed — someone sufficiently like himself to be loved, and sufficiently sublime to be adored. Well, then, just as everything seemed settling down into perfect adjustment, there had come an earthquake, and his life, he thought, had tumbled to pieces. He had picked up the bits, so soon as he could do anything at all, and regarded them carefully. It was hopeless....

Very well then. God had repudiated him — in the only way in which he had seriously thought of serving Him; and now Humanity had repudiated him — in the only way in which he seriously thought he could serve Humanity. Of course in both realms he still did his conventional duties: he heard Mass on Sundays, and said his prayers; he was very fond of Aunt Anna, took pleasure in pleasing Jim, and did his duty to his tenants. But where was his centre of gravity to rest? He had played tennis; he had walked or ridden in the woods; he had looked after his estate — all to mark time.

And it was here, sitting for five minutes in silence with Jim, that he thought he began to see light — to see the Grail; or if not the Grail, at any rate his Grail. God would not do; man would not do — not, that is to say, as

Objects of Passion. What would do? Was it conceivable that Nature would do; and that he would find in it, as poets find, that there is a real Spirit that can beloved?

He regarded the landscape again, as if he scanned the face of a person.

Surely there must be some Unity in this perfection! Above him towered the beeches, like a dim temple-roof; here was the clean floor of earth; there was the wide window that looked across the world. And here — here, above all, was the worshipper: here he himself sat, sound again, so far as he knew, in bodily health; alert with vigour. Why had his health come back so radiantly, if not for this?... Jim had said that God was the proper Person who made one happy: he himself, in this very place, had thought it to be Enid. Both alike had sought to enshrine a foreign deity. What if there were a deity here all the while, in a house not made with hands — sweet and virile Spirit that breathed now in the scent of the bracken, that whispered in the rustle of the undergrowth; that pulsated in his own strong limbs and heart? Might he not try here, at least? — plunge himself in this heavenly spirit of earth; and find in it his rest? Besides, there really seemed nothing else.

" Come on, Jim. Time's up."

" Do you see it? " asked Jim rather wearily.

" I think so; but I'm not sure."

"Well; I don't," said Jim.

The smoking-room at Hartley is on the left of the staircase that leads down into the garden. It is a charming room. From the walls look down monstrous heads of stag and pig and buffalo. There is an abundance of little coloured prints; there are three large sensible tables, and six large sensible chairs. There is a wide mantelpiece of oak on which stand cigar boxes, match boxes, pine-wood spills in bronze jars; a honey-coloured bowl of tobacco; and mounted hoofs of horses. There is a clock set always five minutes in advance of the house time. There is a thick carpet, not too new, and a rug of Siberian wolf before the fireplace; and there is just the gentlest possible aroma in the air, that comforts the carnal senses with an infinite and suggestive delicacy. There are also bookshelves, low enough to be within reach of a man sitting back in a deep chair, filled with the proper kind of volumes, and a complete leather-bound set of Punch.

Here, then, the three men sat, after Aunt Anna had gone to bed. The new guest had been exceedingly easy and pleasant, and it was plain that he was not going to be an interruption. He had professed himself entirely pleased to dawdle; also he would be delighted to shoot on Monday if he were wanted; in fact, he had brought his gun as he had been told. On the other hand, nothing could be more to his taste than to sit about generally. These things he had conveyed in that staccato fashion of his that was more convincing than the most luxuriant eloquence.

So easy, then, was the atmosphere, that Nevill, strolling out into the hall, through the door set open to make a good draught with the windows, and thence strolling on to the top of the steps to look at the moon, finally went down the steps without hesitation to take a turn in the garden. The voices of Maresfield and Algy went on intermittently above.

When the faint crunch of the host's footsteps had died away, Algy glanced at the other man. " Suppose you heard all about his trouble, eh? "

" Saw it in the papers, eh? Jilted him, didn't she? What? "

Algy nodded.

" He's a good chap, Fanning, you know. I was at school with him."

" One of the Papist lot too, eh? "

" That's it. You knew the girl rather well, didn't you? "

" Met her once or twice. Not my sort, you know. I could have told him if he'd asked me. Eh? "

" Why did she chuck him? D'you know? "

" Just a fad. Full of em. Art and literature and that. Knows nothing about it, either. Comes and jaws in my little painting-room. Too damned positive about everything. Not my sort. Eh? Had enough of her."

"Oh! that's it, is it?" said Algy, looking interested. " Couldn't make it out, you know. Good chap; nice place; everything, you'd have thought."

Then Lord Maresfield summed up his views of Miss Bessington quite as adequately as her own mother; in about one thousandth part of her words.

" Selfish sort, eh? Thinks about nothing but her own damned self. Gives her mother hell, I should think. What? Not my sort. Like the old lady though. Though she does talk above a bit. Eh? "

He blew meditatively down his pipe; and reached for the tobacco jar.

" Can't make out Fanning, though," resumed Algy. " Hasn't said a word about her, good or bad. And he's not the sort of man you'd begin it with."

' ' Mind your own business? Damn your eyes? ' Eh? "

" Exactly," said Algy.

Meanwhile the great yellow moon rode high above the cedars; and the air was full of those late summer smells in which only the most pessimistic of persons can detect the real autumn flavour. The garden was one scheme of greys and blacks — grey on the lawns; silver grey on the paths and stonework; black beneath the cedars and where the shrubberies stood with their backs to the great shining shield in the heavens.

He turned by the path to the tennis court and came round, along the very same way by which he had led Enid when the lawns were alight with the sunlit rainfall, to the low wall beyond which ran the swift river. He stopped at the top of the water steps and looked down at the shadowed molten stream that talked to itself as it ran, down past the pavilion, past the bridge where he and Jim had missed the big trout, down to the bathing-pool where he and Jim had bathed. As he stood, a couple of thunderous plunges out of sight announced that the trout were excited — perhaps joyful in the moonlight; perhaps, less ethereally, greedy of their meal.

He scarcely knew, when first he came down the steps, why he had come. He was beginning to know now; for there ran through his veins a faint tingle of pleasure at the touch of this naked night of moon and water, at the sweet and chilly breath of hers that he breathed. As he glanced back at the house, hearing some word come through the lighted windows of the smoking-room, he thought how stuffy and confined all that seemed. There they were, those two pleasant fellows, jawing away at one another, and breathing hot tobacco smoke — (he threw away the end of his own cigarette into the stream, as he thought of it, and listened for the delicious spit with which water welcomes and quenches fire) — breathing hot tobacco-smoke, and refreshing themselves with just one more whisky and soda. It all seemed rather stuffy and rather disconnected. The real thing seemed out here.

He stretched himself and breathed another deep lung-filling draught of night air.... How perfectly glorious a swim would be! Why should he not go down there beyond the bridge?... and let his whole body drink its fill?...It would not take ten minutes. No; he wouldn't want a towel.

The two men looked up as he came in, a quarter of an hour later.

" Lord! your hair's all wet," said Algy. " Is it raining? "

" Had a bathe," said Nevill — " while you chaps have been frowsting in here! "

Algy regarded him with concern.

"Bathe? '•"

Nevill sat down: he desired to say no more. But Algy would not let him alone.

" What did you want to do that for? " he asked.

Nevill felt a little surge of impatience. He had been thinking just now how apart from him these men in the smoking-room really were.

" Came into my head," he said shortly. Algy lit a last cigarette.

The lights in the hall were out, all but one high up in the roof, as they went upstairs; and the great dim spaces looked mysterious and cool. Yet even there he felt pressed upon and confined. It was the night outside that seemed to him the reality.

As he came back from seeing that Maresfield was all right in his room, again he paused outside the door of the west-room that was now his own. Yes; that was the great hearth-rug below, with the chairs grouped confidentially in a big half circle, where he had talked with Enid. It looked dark and deserted now in the half light. Well; he had done with all that kind of thing now. With the vivid memory of the night outside, and the caress of the breeze and the water, human relationships appeared feverish and distracting. He seemed apart even from the two men to whom he had just bidden good-night. He felt at once lonely and exhilarated.

When he got into his room and shut the door, the first thing he did was to set back the loosely closed shutters, and to raise the sash of both the windows still higher. Then, drawn again by the night, he rested there, his arms on the sill, staring out into the dark.

This was the more sombre side of the house. A great wide space lay open before him, cut in the foreground by the jutting porch, closed to right and left by the set shrub-beries; on the right, over the low wall, trooped the black cypresses of the churchyard. But the lawns, cut by the drive that ran straight westwards, lay in the full moonlight, grey and dew-soaked....

To the eyes of the body it was an empty and rather desolate space; but, to his perceptions, all awakened by the touch of the water in which he had swum just now, fructified by his meditations beside the monument — those meditations in which, it had seemed to him, he had begun to discover that for which his heart craved — it seemed rather a stage all alert for sensation. It satisfied his desire for room and serenity; it met his instincts to push away human beings and clear a space in which his spirit might expand.... The thought of people in the house; of his two guests whom he must entertain to-morrow; of Aunt

Anna and Jim; of all those servants, so necessary, apparently, if one was to live as was expected of one — all this seemed to him rather oppressive and interrupting. It was something, at any rate, that they were all shut up for the night, while he leaned here and drank in the night air.

There, then, as he leaned on the window-sill, life seemed to be smoothing itself out from its creases and complications. He was as one who, after initiation, has bathed in lustral water, and become illuminated by the god.

He undressed, got between the sheets at last, and lay there with his head on the high pillow looking out dreamily through the wide-flung window at the pale moonlit sky and the low far-away horizon. Long ago he had got over the slight discomfort which the associations of this room had at first given him. His first night or two here, with the four chintz-hung posts about him between which his father had died; the sight, beyond the foot of the bed, of the dressing-table and the engraved portrait between the windows, on which those dying eyes had last rested, the solemn shining dark furniture that had witnessed that death — those things, at first, had been to him the occasion of a little super-' stitious uneasiness: it was, in fact, to overcome that uneasiness that he had insisted on sleeping here.

But it was all gone now.

His body glowed with the reaction from the water; his mind with its memory. How delicious had been that plunge into the mystery of its troubled moonlit surface! As he rose to the surface, he had seen the vapour-wraiths go floating by; had seen, as from a new point of view, the black shrubberies on the one side, and the post and rails on the other, whence the bullocks had watched himself and Jim only three or four months ago. How marvellously different the world had been then! It had been morning then, with colours and lights; it was the morning on which he had, later, gone up to London to meet Enid. It was night now, and all colours were gone — sucked back into the infinitely simple greys and blacks from which all colours come and to which they must return. His mind had been active and imaginative then; it was passive and receptive now.

He asked himself whether he were Happy; and he did not know the answer. But he was sure that there were possibilities of peace in his new point of view that had been absent from the old. Five years ago he would have looked for God, in such a mood — in those days when he had madly thought to be a Jesuit — and would have tried to centre those sensations and experiences round the Divine Personality. Five months ago he would have thought of Enid; would have imagined her as his centre, as indeed he had imagined her — the secret and meaning of all that he saw and felt. And now, again, as in the woods this afternoon, it appeared to him that he had sought to enshrine a foreign deity in a temple that was not his — in a temple that had been built by other hands and already held its creator.

So he lay and dreamed; and the glow of his body passed into the sheets and reacted again, soothing and quieting him; and his eyes drooped and opened again upon the solemn oblong of sky and moonlight. He felt superbly well and vigorous....

When he slept at last, the night-breeze had risen a little; the blind flapped softly; even the chintz curtains round that bed of death creaked and rustled; and a tassel somewhere tapped and tapped again; as if the room itself lived and was stirring itself to action.