Complete Novels of E Nesbit, page 585
The disappointment was bitter.
“But I’ll send a letter for you,” he tried to soften it with.
Sybil’s self-control almost gave way. A tear glistened on her veil.
“I do want to see him most awfully,” she said, “and I know he wants to see me. It was I who rode the goat in the book, you know — —”
She did not realise how much she was admitting, but the literary agent did.
“Look here,” he said smartly, “I’ll wire to him at once; and if he says I may, I’ll give you the address. Can you call in an hour?”
Sybil wandered on the Embankment for a conscientious hour, and then went back.
The literary agent smiled victory.
“The answer is ‘Yes,’” he said, and handed her a slip of paper —
“Three Chimneys,
Near Paddock Wood,
Kent.”
“Have you a time-table?” asked she.
The dusty, hired fly lumbered and jolted along the white roads, and in it, as in the train, Sybil read the novel, the book every one was talking about — the great book — and her heart was full to overflowing of joy and pride and other things.
The carriage shook itself fiercely and stopped, and she looked up from the last page of the book with eyes that swam a little, to find herself at the broken wooden gate of a low, white house, shabbily blindless, and a long way off its last painting and whitewashing.
She paid for the carriage and dismissed it. She would walk back to the station with him. She passed in at the rickety gate and up the flagged path, and a bell in answer to her touch jangled loudly, as bells do in empty houses.
Her dress was greeny, with lace about it of the same colour as very nice biscuits, and her hat seemed to be made entirely of yellow roses. She was not unconscious of these facts.
Steps sounded within, and they, like the bell, seemed to sound in an empty house. The door opened, and there was Rupert. Sybil’s lips were half-parted in a smile that should match the glow of gladness that must shine on his face when he saw her — Her — the unattainable, the unapproachable, at his very door. But her smile died away, for his face was grave. Only in his eyes something that was bright and fierce and like a flame leapt up and shone a moment.
“You!” he said.
And Sybil answered as most people do to such questions: “Yes, me.” There was a pause: her eyes wandered from his to the blank face of the house, the tangle of the untidy garden. “Mayn’t I come in?” she asked.
“Yes; oh yes, come in!”
She crossed the threshold — the doorstep was dank with green mould — and followed him into a room. It was a large room, and perfectly bare: no carpet, no curtains, no pictures. Loose bricks were arranged as a fender, and dead embers strewed the hearth. There was a table; there was a chair; there were scattered papers, pens, and ink. From the window one saw the neglected garden, and beyond it the round shoulders of the hills.
He drew forward the one chair, and she sat down. He stood with his back to the fireless grate.
“You are very, very pretty,” he said suddenly. And the explanation of his disappearance suddenly struck her like a blow between the eyes. But she was not afraid. When all a woman’s thoughts, day and night for a year, have been given to one man, she is not afraid of him; no, not even if he be what Sybil for one moment feared that this man was. He read the fear in her eyes.
“No, I’m not mad,” he said. “Sybil, I’m very glad you came. Come to think of it, I’m very glad to see you. It is better than writing. I was just going to write out everything, as well as I could. I expect I should have sent it to you. You know I used to care for you more than I did for any one.”
Sybil’s hands gripped the arms of the windsor chair. Was he really — was it through her that he was ——
“Come out,” she said. “I hate this place; it stifles me. And you’ve lived here — worked here!”
“I’ve lived here for eleven months and three days,” he said. “Yes, come out.”
So they went out through the burning July sun, and Sybil found a sheltered spot between a larch and a laburnum.
“Now,” she said, throwing off her hat and curling her green, soft draperies among the long grass. “Come and sit down and tell me — —”
He threw himself on the grass.
“Sure it won’t bore you?” he asked.
She took his hand and held it. He let her take it; but his hand did not hold hers.
“I seem to remember,” he said, “the last time I saw you — you were going away, or something. You told me I ought to do something great; and I told you — or, anyway, I thought to myself — that there was plenty of time for that. I’d always had a sort of feeling that I could do something great whenever I chose to try. Well — yes, you did go away, of course; I remember perfectly — and I missed you extremely. And some one told me I looked ill; and I went to my doctor, and he sent me to a big swell, and he said I’d only got about a year to live. So then I began to think.”
Her fingers tightened on the unresponsive hand.
“And I thought: Here I’ve been thirty years in this world. I’ve the experience of twenty-eight and a half — I suppose the first little bit doesn’t count. If I’d had time, I meant to write another book, just to show exactly what a man feels when he knows he’s only got a year to live, and nothing done — nothing done.”
“I won’t believe it,” she said. “You don’t look ill; you’re as lean as a greyhound, but — —”
“It may come any day now,” he went on quietly; “but I’ve done something. The book — it is great. They all say so; and I know it, too. But at first! Just think of gasping out your breath, and feeling that all the things you had seen and known and felt were wasted — lost — going out with you, and that you were going out like the flame of a candle, taking everything you might have done with you.”
“The book is great,” she said; “you have done something.”
“Yes. But for those two days I stayed in my rooms in St James’s Street, and I thought, and thought, and thought, and there was no one to care where I went or what I did, except a girl who was fond of me when she was little, and she had gone away and wasn’t fond of me any more. Oh, Sybil — I feel like a lunatic — I mean you, of course; but you never cared. And I went to a house agent’s and got the house unfurnished, and I bought the furniture — there’s nothing much except what you’ve seen, and a bed and a bath, and some pots and kettles; and I’ve lived alone in that house, and I’ve written that book, with Death sitting beside me, jogging my elbow every time I stopped writing, and saying, ‘Hurry up; I’m waiting here for you, and I shall have to take you away, and you’ll have done nothing, nothing, nothing.’”
“But you’ve done the book,” said Sybil again. The larch and the garden beyond were misty to her eyes. She set her teeth. He must be comforted. Her own agony — that could be dealt with later.
“I’ve ridden myself with the curb,” he said. “I thought it all out — proper food, proper sleep, proper exercise. I wouldn’t play the fool with the last chance; and I pulled it off. I wrote the book in four months; and every night, when I went to sleep, I wondered whether I should ever wake to go on with the book. But I did wake, and then I used to leap up and thank God, and set to work; and I’ve done it. The book will live — every one says it will. I shan’t have lived for nothing.”
“Rupert,” she said, “dear Rupert!”
“Thank you,” he said forlornly; “you’re very kind.” And he drew his limp hand from hers, and leaned his elbows on the grass and his chin on his hands.
“Oh, Rupert, why didn’t you write and tell me?”
“What was the use of making you sad? You were always sorry for maimed things — even the worms the gardener cut in two with his spade.”
She was struggling with a growing desire to scream and shriek, and to burst out crying and tear the grass with her hands. He no longer loved her — that was the lesser evil. She could have borne that — have borne anything. But he was going to die! The intensity of her belief that he was going to die caught her by the throat. She defended herself instinctively.
“I don’t believe it,” she said.
“Don’t believe what?”
“That you’re going to die.”
He laughed; and when the echo of that laugh had died away in the quiet garden, she found that she could no longer even say that she did not believe.
Then he said: “I am going to die, and all the values of things have changed places. But I have done something: I haven’t buried my talent in a napkin. Oh, my Pretty, go away, go away! You make a fool of me again! I had almost forgotten how to be sorry that you couldn’t love me. Go away, go away! Go, go!”
He threw out his hands, and they lay along the grass. His face went down into the tangled green, and she saw his shoulders shaken with sobs. She dragged herself along the grass till she was close to him; then she lifted his shoulders, and drew his head on to her lap, and clasped her arms round him.
“My darling, my dear, my own!” she said. “You’re tired, and you’ve thought of nothing but your hateful book — your beautiful book, I mean — but you do love me really. Not as I love you, but still you do love me. Oh, Rupert, I’ll nurse you, I’ll take care of you, I’ll be your slave; and if you have to die, I shall die too, because there’ll be nothing left for me to do for you.”
He put an arm round her. “It’s worth dying to hear that,” he said, and brought his face to lie against her waist.
“But you shan’t die. You must come back to London with me now — this minute. The best opinion — —”
“I had the best,” he said. “Kiss me, my Pretty; oh, kiss me now that it does mean something! Let me dream that I’m going to live, and that you love me.”
He lifted his face, and she kissed him.
“Rupert, you’re not going to die. It can’t be true. It isn’t true. It shan’t be true.”
“It is; but I don’t mind now, except for you. I’m a selfish beast. But this is worth it all, and I have done something great. You told me to.”
“Tell me,” she said, “who was the doctor? Was he really the best?”
“It was Strongitharm,” he said wearily.
She drew a long breath and clasped him closer. Then she pushed him away and sprang to her feet.
“Stand up!” she said. “Let me look at you!”
He stood up, and she caught him by the elbows and stood looking at him. Twice she tried to speak, and twice no voice obeyed; then she said softly, huskily: “Rupert, listen! It’s all a horrid dream. Wake up. Haven’t you seen the papers? Strongitharm went mad several months ago. It was drink. He told all his patients they were going to die of this new disease of his that he’d invented. It’s all his madness. You’re well — I know it. Oh, Rupert, you aren’t going to die, and we love each other! Oh, God is very good!”
He drew a long breath.
“Are you sure? It’s like coming back from chloroform; and yet it hurts, and yet — but I wrote the book! Oh, Sybil, I shall never write another great book!”
“Ah yes, you will — you shall,” she said, looking at him with wet eyes.
“I have you,” he said. “Oh, thank God, I have you! but I shall never write another great book.”
And he never has.
But he is very happy. And Sybil cannot see that his later works are not in the same field with the first. She thinks the critics fools. And he loves her the more for her folly.
ALCIBIADES
“Oh, do let me have him in the carriage with me; he won’t hurt any one, he’s a perfect angel.”
“Angels like him travels in the dog-box,” said the porter.
Judy ended an agonised search for her pocket.
“Would you be offended,” she said, “if I offered you half-a-crown?”
“Give the guard a bob, Miss.” The hand curved into a cup resting on the carriage window, answered her question. “It’s more’n enough for him, being a single man, whereas me, I’m risking my situation and nine children at present to say no more, when I — —”
The turn of a railway key completed the sentence.
Judy and the angel were alone. He was a very nice angel — long-haired and brownly-black — his race the Aberdeen, his name Alcibiades. He put up a respectful and adoring nose, and his mistress kissed him between the eyes.
“How could they try to part us,” she asked, “when there’s only us two left?”
Alcibiades, with swimming eyes, echoed in a little moan of true love the question: “How could they?”
The question was put again by both later in the day. Judy was to stay with an aunt while her mother sailed to Madeira to meet there the father returning from South Africa, full of wounds and honour, and to spend on the Island what was left of the winter. Now it was December.
A thick fog covered London with a veil of ugliness; the cabman was aggrieved and aggrieving — Alcibiades had tried to bite him — and Judy was on the verge of tears when the fog at last lifted, and allowed her to be driven to her aunt’s suburban house, yellow brickish, with a slate roof and a lean forecourt, wherein cypresses, stunted and blackened, spoke eloquently of lives more blank than the death whose emblem they were.
Through the slits of the drab Venetian blinds, gaslight streamed into the winter dusk.
“There’ll be tea, anyhow,” sighed Judy, recklessly overpaying the cabman.
Inside the house where the lights were, the Aunt was surrounded by a dozen ladies of about her own age and station; “Tabbies” the world might have called them. All were busy with mysteries of many coloured silks and satins, lace and linen; at least all held such in their hands. The gathering was in fact a “working party” for the approaching bazaar. But the real work of bazaars is not done at parties.
“Yes,” the Aunt was saying, “so nice for dear Julia. I’m truly glad that she should begin her visit with a little gaiety. In parting or sorrow we should always seek to distract the mind, should we not, dear Mrs Biddle?”
“The young are all too easily distracted by the shows of this world,” said dear Mrs Biddle heavily.
And several ladies murmured approval.
“But you can’t exactly call a church bazaar the shows of this world, can you?” urged the Aunt, sitting very upright, all black and beady.
“It’s the thin end of the Rubicon sometimes,” said Mrs Biddle.
“Then why — —” began the youngest Tabby — and then the door bell rang, and every one said: “Here she is!”
The prim maid announced her, and she took two steps forward, and stood blinking in the gaslight with her hat on one side, and no gloves. Every one noticed that at once.
“Come in, my dear,” said the Aunt, rustling forward. “I have a few friends this afternoon, and — Oh, my gracious, what has happened!”
What had happened was quite simple. In her rustling advance some wandering trail of the Aunt’s black beadiness had caught on the knotted fringe of the table-cloth, and drawn this after her. A mass of silk and lace and ribbon lay sprinkled along the edges of the table where the Tabbies sat; a good store of needles, scissors, and cotton reels mingled with it. Now all this swept to the floor on the moving table-cloth, at the very instant when a rough brownly-black, long-eared person with a sharp nose and very muddy paws bounded into the room, to the full length of his chain. His bound landed him in the very middle of the ribbon-lace-cotton-reel confusion. Judy caught the dog up in her arms, and her apologies would have melted my heart, or yours, dear reader, in an instant. But Tabbies are Tabbies, and a bazaar is a bazaar. No more sewing was done that day; what was left of the afternoon proved all too short for the disentangling, the partial cleansing of the desecrated lace-cotton-reel-silk-muddle. And Alcibiades was tied up in the back-kitchen to the wheel of the patent mangle; he howled without ceasing.
“My dear,” said the Aunt, when tea was over, and the last Tabby had found her goloshes and gone home in them, “you are most welcome under any roof of mine, but — (may I ask you to close the baize door at the top of the kitchen stairs — thank you — and now this one — I am obliged. One cannot hear oneself speak for that terrible animal) — you must get rid of the cur to-morrow.”
“Oh, Aunt! he’s not a cur — he’s pure-bred.”
“Thank you,” said the Aunt, “I believe I am as good a judge of dogs as any lady. My own dear Snubs has only been dead a year and two months last Tuesday. I know that a well-bred dog should have smooth hair, at any rate — —”
The mother of Snubs had been distantly related to a family of respectable middle-class fox-terriers.
“I am very sorry,” said Judy. She meant apology, but the Aunt took it for sympathy, and softened somewhat.
“A nice little smooth-coated dog now,” she said, “a fox-terrier, or an Italian greyhound; you see I am not ignorant of the names of various patterns of dog. I will get you one myself; we will go to the Dogs’ Home at Battersea, where really nice dogs are often sold quite cheap. Or perhaps they might take your poor cur in exchange.”
Judy began to cry.
“Yes, cry, my dear,” said the Aunt kindly; “it will do you a world of good.”
When the Aunt was asleep — she had closed her ears to the protests of Alcibiades with wadding left over from a handkerchief sachet — Judy crept down in her woolly white dressing-gown, and coaxed the kitchen fire back to life. Then she sat in front of it, on the speckless rag carpet, and nursed Alcibiades and scolded him, and explained that he really must be a good dog, and that we all have something to put up with in this life.
“You know, Alby dear,” she said, “it’s not very nice for me either, but I don’t howl and try to upset mangles. Don’t you be afraid, dear: you shan’t go to the Dogs’ Home.”
So kindly, yet strongly, did she urge her point that Alcibiades, tied to the leg of the kitchen table, consented to sleep quietly for the rest of the night.
