The Prisoner Part 22

XIII

Lydia did not think she dreaded seeing him next morning. The fabric they had begun to weave together looked too splendid for covering trivial little fears like that. Or was it strong enough to cover anything? Yet when he came into the room where they were at breakfast she could not look at him with the same unwavering eyes. She had, strangely, and sadly too, the knowledge of life. But if she had looked at him she would have seen how he was changed. He had pulled himself together. Whether what happened or what might happen had tutored him, he was on guard, ready--for himself most of all. And after breakfast where Anne and the colonel had contributed the mild commonplaces useful at least in breaking such constraints, he followed the colonel into the library and sat down with him. The colonel, from his chair by the window, regarded his son in a fond approval. Even to his eyes where Jeff was always a grateful visitant, the more so now after he had been so poignantly desired, he was this morning the more manly and altogether fit. But Jeff was not going to ingratiate himself.

"Father," said he, "I've got to get out."

Trouble of a wistful sort sprang into the colonel's face. But he spoke with a reasonable mildness, desirous chiefly of meeting his boy half way.

"You said so. But not yet, I hope."

"At once," said Jeffrey. "I am going at once. To-day perhaps. To-morrow anyway. I've simply got to get away."

The colonel, rather impatiently, because his voice would tremble, asked as Lydia had done:

"Have you seen Esther?"

This Jeff found unreasonably irritating. Bitter as the sight of her had been and unspeakable her repudiation, he felt to-day as if they did not pertain. The thing that did pertain with a biting force was to remove himself before innocent young sisterly girls idealised him to their harm. But he answered, and not too ungraciously:

"Yes, I've seen Esther. But that's nothing to do with it. Esther is--what she's always been. Only I've got to get away."

The colonel, from long brooding over him, had a patience comparable only to a mother's. He was bitterly hurt. He could not understand. But he could at least attain the only grace possible and pretend to understand.

So he answered with a perfect gentleness:

"I see, Jeff, I see. But I wish you could find it possible to put it off--till the end of the week, say."

"Very well," said Jeff, in a curt concession, "the end of this week."

He got up and went out of the room and the house, and the colonel, turning to look, saw him striding down the slope to the river. Then the elder man's hands began to tremble, and he sat pathetically subject to the seizure. Anne, if she had found him, would have known the name of the thing that had settled upon him. She would have called it a nervous chill. But to him it was one of the little ways of his predestined mate, old age. And presently, sitting there ignominiously shuddering, he began to be amused at himself, for he had a pretty sense of humour, and to understand himself better than he had before. Face to face with this ironic weakness, he saw beyond the physiologic aspect of it, the more deeply into his soul. The colonel had been perfectly sure that he had taken exquisite care of himself, these last years, because he desired to see his son again, and also because Jeff, while suffering penalty, must be spared the pain of bereavement. So he had formed a habit, and now it was his master. He had learned self-preservation, but at what a cost!

Where were the sharp sweet pangs of life that had been used to a.s.sail him before he anch.o.r.ed in this calm? Daring was a lost word to him. Was it true he was to have no more stormy risings of hot life, no more pa.s.sions of just rage or even righteous hate, because he had taught himself to rule his blood? Now when his heart ached in antic.i.p.atory warning over his son's going, why must he think of ways to be calm, as if being calm were the aim of man? Laboriously he had learned how not to waste himself, and the negation of life which is old age and then death had fallen upon him. He laughed a little, bitterly, and Anne, coming to find him as she did from time to time, to make sure he was comfortable, smiled, hearing it, and asked:

"What is it, Farvie?"

He looked up into her kind face as if it were strange to him. At that moment he and life were having it out together. Even womanly sweetness could not come between.

"Anne," said he, "I'm an old man."

"Oh, no, Farvie!" She was smoothing his shoulder with her slender hand.

"No!"

But even she could not deny it. To her youth, he knew, he must seem old.

Yet her service, her fostering love, had only made him older. She had copied his own att.i.tude. She had helped him not to die, and yet to sink into the ambling pace of these defended years.

"d.a.m.n it, Anne!" he said, with suddenly frowning brow, and now she started. She had never heard an outbreak from courtly Farvie. "I wish I'd been more of a man."

She did not understand him, and her eyes questioned whether he was ill.

He read the query. That was it, he thought impotently. They had all three of them been possessed by that, the fear that he was going to be ill.

"Yes," he said, "I wish I'd been more of a man. I should be more of a man now."

She slipped away out of the room. He thought he had frightened her. But in a moment she was back with some whiskey, hot, in a gla.s.s. The colonel wanted to order her off and swear his nerves would be as taut without it. But how could he? There was the same traitorous trembling in his legs, and he put out his hand and took the gla.s.s, and thanked her. The thanks sounded like the courteous, kind father she knew; but when she had carried the gla.s.s into the kitchen she stood a moment, her hand on the table, and thought, the lines of trouble on her forehead: what had been the matter with him?

Jeff, when he got out of the house, walked in a savage hurry down to the end of the lot, and there, feeling no more at ease with himself, skirted along the bank bordered by inlets filled with weedy loveliness, and came to the lower end of the town where the cotton mills were. He glanced up at them as he struck into the street past their office entrance, and wondered what the stock was quoted at now, and whether an influx of foreigners had displaced the old workmen. It had looked likely before he went away. But he had no interest in it. He had no interest in Addington, he thought: only in the sad case of Lydia thrown up against the tumultuous horde of his released emotions and hurt by them and charmed by them and, his remorseful judgment told him, insulted by them. He could not, even that morning, have told how he felt about Lydia, or whether he had any feeling at all, save a proper grat.i.tude for her tenderness to his father. But he had found her in his path, when his hurt soul was crying out to all fostering womanhood to save him from the ravening claw of woman's cruelty. She had felt his need, and they had looked at each other with eyes that pierced defences. And then, incarnate sympathy, tender youth, she had rested in his arms, and in the generosity of her giving and the exquisiteness of the gift, he had been swept into that current where there is no staying except by an anguish of denial. It was chaos within him. He did not think of his allegiance to Esther, nor was he pa.s.sionately desirous, with his whole mind, of love for this new Lydia. He was in a whirl of emotion, and hated life where you could never really right yourself, once you were wrong.

He kept on outside the town, and presently walked with exhilaration because n.o.body knew him and he was free, and the day was of an exquisite beauty, the topmost flower of the waxing spring. The road was marked by elms, aisled and vaulted, and birds called enchantingly. He was able to lay aside cool knowledge of the fight whereby all things live and, such was the desire of his mind, to partake of pleasure, to regard them as poets do and children and pitiful women: the birds as lumps of free delight, winged particles of joy. The song-birds were keen partic.i.p.ants of sport, killing to eat, and bigger birds were killing them. But because they sang and their feathers were newly painted, he let himself ignore that open scandal and loved them for an angel choir.

Coming to another village, though he knew it perfectly he a.s.sumed it was undiscovered land, and beyond it lay in a field and dozed, his hat over his eyes, and learned how blessed it is to be alone in freedom, even afar from Lydias and Esthers. Healing had not begun in him until that day. Here were none to sympathise, none to summon him to new relations or recall the old. The earth had taken him back to her bosom, to cherish gravely, if with no actual tenderness, that he might be of the more use to her. If he did not that afternoon hear the gra.s.s growing, at least something rose from the mould that nourished it, into his eyes and ears and mouth and the pores of his skin, and helped him on to health. At five he remembered his father, who had begged him not to go away, got up and turned back on his steps. Now he was hungry and bought rolls and cheese at a little shop, and walked on eating them. The dusk came, and only the robin seemed of unabated spirit, flying to topmost twigs, and giving the evening call, the cry that was, he thought, "grief! grief!"

and the following notes like a sob.

Jeffrey came into Addington by another road, one that would take him into town along the upland, and now he lingered purposely and chose indirect ways because, although it was unlikely that any one would know him, he shrank from the prospect of demanding eyes. At nine o'clock even he was no farther than the old circus ground, and, nearing it, he heard, through the evening stillness, a voice, loud, sharp, forensic. It was hauntingly familiar to him, a voice he might not know at the moment, yet one that had at least belonged to some part of his Addington life. The response it brought from him, in a.s.saulted nerves and repugnant ears, was entirely distasteful. Whatever the voice was, he had at some time hated it. Why it was continuing on that lifted note he could not guess.

With a little twitch of the lips, the sign of a grim amus.e.m.e.nt, he thought this might even be an orator, some wardroom Demosthenes, practising against the lonely curtain of the night.

"You have no country," the voice was bastinadoing the air. "And you don't need one. Your country is the whole earth and it belongs to you."

Jeff halted a rod before the nearer entrance to the field. He had suddenly the sense of presences. The nerves on his skin told him humanity was near. He went on, with an uncalculated noiselessness, for the moment loomed important, and since what humanity was there was silent--all but that one hateful voice--he, approaching in ignorance, must be still. The voice, in its strident pa.s.sion, rose again.

"The country for a man to serve is the country that serves him. The country that serves him is the one without a king. Has this country a king? It has a thousand kings and a million more that want to be. How many kings do you want to reign over you? How many are you going to accept? It is in your hands."

It ceased, and another voice, lower but full of a suppressed pa.s.sion, took up the tale, though in a foreign tongue. Jeff knew the first one now: Weedon Moore's. He read at once the difference between Moore's voice and this that followed. Moore's had been imploring in its a.s.sertiveness, the desire to convince. The other, in the strange language, carried belief and sorrow even. It also longed to convince, but out of an inner pa.s.sion hot as the flame of love or grief. The moon, riding superbly, and coming that minute out of her cloud, unveiled the scene. An automobile had halted on a slight elevation and in it stood Moore and a taller man gesticulating as he spoke. And about them, like a pulsing carpet lifted and stirred by a breeze of feeling, were the men Jeff's instinct had smelled out. They were packed into a ma.s.s. And they were silent. Weedon Moore began again.

"Kill out this superst.i.tion of a country. Kill it out, I say. Kill out this idea of going back to dead men for rules to live by. The dead are dead. Their Bibles and their laws are dead. There's more life in one of you men that has tasted it through living and suffering and being oppressed than there is in any ten of their kings and prophets. They are dead, I tell you. We are alive. It was their earth while they lived on it. It's our earth to-day."

Jeff was edging nearer, skirting the high fence, and while he did it, the warm voice of the other man took up the exposition, and now Jeff understood that he was Moore's interpreter. By the time he had finished, Jeff was at the thin edge of the crowd behind the car, and though one or two men turned as he moved and glanced at him, he seemed to rouse no uneasiness. Here, nearer them in the moonlight, he saw what they were: workmen, foreign evidently, with bared throats and loosely worn hair, some, their caps pushed back, others without hats at all, seeking, it seemed, coolness in this too warm adjuration.

"Their symbol," said Moore, "is the flag. They carry it into foreign lands. Why? For what they call religion? No. For money--money--money.

When the flag waves in a new country, blood begins to flow, the blood of the industrial slave. Down with the flag. Our symbol is the sword."

The voice of the interpreter, in an added pa.s.sion, throbbed upon the climbing period. Moore had moved him and, forgetful of himself, he was dramatically ready to pa.s.s his ardour on. Jeff also forgot himself. He clove like a wedge through the thin line before him, and leaped on the running-board.

"You fool," he heard himself yelling at Moore, who in the insecurity of his tubbiness was jarred and almost overturned, "you're robbing them of their country. You're taking away the thing that keeps them from falling down on all-fours and going back to brute beasts. My G.o.d, Moore, you're a traitor! You ought to be shot."

He had surprised them. They did not even hustle him, but there were interrogatory syllables directed to the interpreter. Moore recovered himself. He gave a sharp sound of distaste, and then, a.s.suming his civilised habit, said to Jeff in a voice of specious courtesy, yet, Jeff knew, a voice of hate:

"These are mill operatives, Blake, labourers. They know what labour is.

They know what capitalists are. Do you want me to tell 'em who you are?"

Who you are? Jeff knew what it meant. Did he want Moore to tell them that he was a capitalist found out and punished?

"Tell and be d.a.m.ned," he said. "See here!" He was addressing the interpreter. "You understand English. Fair play. Do you take me? Fair play is what English men and American men work for and fight for. It's fair play to give me a chance to speak, and for you to tell these poor devils what I say. Will you?"

The man nodded. His white teeth gleamed in the moonlight. Jeff fancied his eyes gleamed, too. He was a swarthy creature and round his neck was knotted a handkerchief, vivid red. Jeff, with a movement of the arm, crowded Moore aside. Moore submitted. Used, as he was, to being swept out of the way, all the energies that might have been remonstrant in him had combined in a controlling calm to serve him until the day when he should be no longer ousted. Jeff spoke, and threw his voice, he hoped, to the outskirts of the crowd, ingenuously forgetting it was not lungs he wanted but a bare knowledge of foreign tongues.

"This man," said he, "tells you you've no country. Don't you let him lie to you. Here's your country under your feet. If you can't love it enough to die for it, go back to your own country, the one you were born in, and love that, for G.o.d's sake." He judged he had said enough to be carried in the interpreter's memory, and turned upon him. "Go on," said he imperatively. "Say it."

But even then he had no idea what the man would do. The atmosphere about them was not thrilling in responsive sympathy. Silence had waited upon Moore, and this, Jeff could not help feeling, was silence of a different species. But the interpreter did, slowly and cautiously, it seemed, convey his words. At least Jeff hoped he was conveying them. When his voice ceased, Jeff took up the thread.

"He tells you you've no country. He says your country is the world.

You're not big enough to need the whole world for your country. I'm not big enough. Only a few of them are, the prophets and the great dead men he thinks so little of. Dig up a tract of ground and call it your country and make it grow and bloom and have good laws--why, you fools!"

His patience broke. "You fools, you're being done. You're being led away and played upon. A man's country isn't the spot where he can get the best money to put into his belly. His country is his country, just as his mother is his mother. He can wors.h.i.+p the Virgin Mary, but he loves his mother best."