Across the Stream Part 14

On one such day, some weeks after his mother and Helena had gone back to England, he felt himself fit to burst with all that he had stored within him, ready for expression. As they drank their coffee he had employed himself in sharpening a couple of pencils (for the work of transcription into ink came later in the day), so as not to interrupt, by any physical intrusion, the flow of all he knew was ready to be crystallized into words. Sometimes the least distraction broke some kind of thread when he was in communication with the sea... It may be added that no one was ever less pompous about his aspirations.

To-day Harry observed the sharpening of the pencils, and commented.

"So a masterpiece is signalled, Archie," he said.

Archie blew the lead-dust from his finger.

"Quite right, old boy," he said. "Lord! I'm full of great thoughts. Do go to bed, and then I'll begin."

Jessie joined in.

"Archie, do let me hold your pencils for you," she said, "like Dora in _David Copperfield_. I shall feel as if I was doing something."

Archie laughed.

"You would be," he remarked. "You would be making an uncommon nuisance of yourself."

"You are polite."

"No, I'm not, I'm rude. I'm being rude on purpose. I want you to be offended and go away. I want Harry to go away too. I want you both to lie on your beds and snore like hogs."

"I was thinking of getting a book and reading out here," said Jessie. "I feel it's unsociable to leave you alone."

"When you've finished being funny," remarked Archie, "you may go to bed.

You may get down at once. Say your grace and get down. You, too, Master Harry. Oh, Harry, do you remember how you used to come to tea in the nursery and Blessington made us behave properly till tea was over?"

"Then did you behave improperly?" asked Jessie.

"I don't think we did really. Once we went into the shrubbery and changed clothes. At least I put on yours, but you couldn't put on mine because they were too small. That's what Browning calls 'Time's Revenges.' I couldn't put on yours now, could I? The Italian authorities would prosecute me for indecency. Lord! what a little fellow you are, Harry! Time for a little fellow to go to bed. Oh, don't rag; I never said you weren't strong. Yes, Jessie, you're strong too, and it's like a girl to pull my hair. Ah, do shut up."

Archie had reasonable cause for complaint. Jessie had suddenly come behind him, and taken a great handful of touzled hair into her grasp, so that Archie's head was held immovable, while Harry tickled his ribs. You can do nothing with your arms if your head is held quite still.

Presently the wicked ceased from troubling, and Archie was left alone.

But after Jessie had gone to her room she stood still a moment before making herself comfortable for her nap, and then she laid across her nose and mouth the outspread hand that had grasped Archie's hair. In her fingers there remained some faint odour of warm sea-salt, and, as by a separate memory of their own, there remained in them the sense of their closing over that brown, bright, springy handful.

CHAPTER VI

Archie thought no more either of his tickled ribs or his outraged hair when his friends had definitely removed themselves, and with a sigh of delight he took up a sharpened pencil and a block of scribbling paper.

He had grasped something, he thought, this morning, that must instantly be committed to words, before he even read over his last page or two, for his hand starved and itched to be writing. There was an odd trembling in his fingers, and his conscious brain was full of what he wanted to say. But when he put his pencil on to the block, and concentrated his mind on that liquid message of the sea that had reached him to-day, he found that his hand had nothing to write. His brain was full of what he wanted to write, but his hand disowned the controlling impulse. Again and once again he cast the thought in his brain into reasonable language, but there his hand still stayed, as if some signal was against it. Simply it would not proceed.

Archie had known similar obstacles before, though they had never been so strong as this. Probably the thought was not yet clarified enough, and for that the usual remedy was a stroll about the garden, a look at the sea from the parapetted wall. He tried this, returning again with a conviction that now he would be able to give words to the impression that was so strong in his conscious brain, and, as he took up his pencil again, again his hand seemed to be yearning to write. There was that coral-lipped anemone at the edge of the water, there was a shoal of little fishes which, as they turned, became a sheet of dazzling silver, ... all that was ready for the hand that twitched in expectancy. But again his hand would have nothing to say to that: the brain-signal showed itself to an uncomprehending instrument.

Suddenly, and with distaste, Archie perceived what was happening, and, divorcing from his mind the message that his brain was tingling to convey, he let his mere hand, untroubled by a fighting consciousness, do what it chose. It was no longer in his own control: something, somebody else possessed it. But it was with conscious reluctance that he resigned this mechanism to the controlling agent who was not himself. He watched with absolute detachment the words that came on his paper in a firm, upright handwriting quite unlike his own.

"Archie, you have had a warning," his hand wrote. "Now you must manage for yourself. I shall watch, but I mayn't do more. You have got to do your best and your highest. That's the root of probation. But I am always your most loving brother. When you were a child I could reach you... (Then followed some meaningless scribbles). But it's Martin."

The pencil gave a great dash across the paper, and instantly Archie knew that his hand had returned to its normal allegiance. At once the sea-thoughts that had occupied him seethed and roared in his brain, and his hand was straining to put them down. He tore off the involuntary message from his block, and, laying it aside, plunged with all the force of his conscious self into this ecstasy of conveying, with black marks on white paper, all that had obsessed him this morning as he swam out to sea, and lay between sun and water, the happiest of earthly animals, and the nearest to the key of the symbol. Then, after a half-hour of pure interpretation, that was finished too, and he lay back in his chair and picked up the Martin-message again. It seemed a nonsensical affair when he so regarded it. What was his warning, after all? What did that mean?

He had had no warning of any sort. But it was strange that, after all those years of silence, Martin should come to guide him again, though at the self-same time he told him not to look for further guidance.

Archie put the paper with its well-remembered, upright handwriting back on the table again, lay back in his long chair, drowsy, and fatigued after his spell of fiery writing. Almost at once sleep began to invade him; the outline of the stone-pine, etched against the sky, grew blurred as his eyelids fluttered and closed. And then, without pause or transition, he saw a white statue standing close to him, on the neck of which there wriggled the tail of a worm, protruding from the fair white surface, and instantly his forgotten dream leaped into his mind, with a pang of horror. That was what his dream had been: there had been a statue standing just there, white in the moonlight, and even as he wors.h.i.+pped and adored it with love and boundless admiration, those foul symbols of decay had wreathed about it. Next moment he plucked himself from his dozing, and there was no statue there at all, but the far more comfortable figure of Jessie, standing in its place, with laughter in her eye.

"Oh, that's what you do, Archie," she said, "when you pretend to come out into the garden to work, and despise Harry and me for sleeping."

Archie jumped up from his chair and brandished in her face the pages of his consciously written ma.n.u.script. The leaf on which the message from Martin was written still lay apart from those on the table.

"I may have closed my eyes for one second," he said. "But I've written all that since lunch. Oh, it's got the sea in it, Jessie; I really believe there's the sea there. I'll read it you this evening, if you'll apologize for saying that I go to sleep instead of writing."

She picked up the other leaf.

"Yes, I apologize," she said, "though you were asleep when I came out.

But I want to hear what you've written, so I apologize for having thought so. And there's this other page as well."

Archie took it from her.

"That doesn't belong," he said. "That--"

He paused a moment.

"Do you remember what I told you about the messages I used to have from Martin when I was a child?" he asked.

Jessie nodded.

"Yes; and they have ceased altogether for years, haven't they?" she said quickly.

"Until to-day. Just now, half an hour ago, I had another. But I can't make anything out of it. He tells me that I've had a warning. I don't know what it means."

Jessie felt all the habitual contempt of the thoroughly normal and healthy mind for anything akin to psychical experiences. All ghosts, in her view, were to be cla.s.sed under the headings of rats or lobster-salad; all such things as table-tappings and the doings of mediums under the heading of trickery. But, knowing what she did of Archie's childish experiences, she could not put them down as trickery, and so was unable exactly to despise them as fraudulent. For that very reason she rather feared them; they made her feel uncomfortable.

She glanced at the paper he held out to her, but without taking it.

"Oh, Archie I distrust all that," she said. "I was really very glad when you told me that for all these years you had had no communication from him. Please don't have any more."

He laughed. They had talked about this before.

"But you don't understand," he said. "It has nothing to do with my wanting or not; it just comes. This afternoon I couldn't help writing any more than--than one can help sneezing."

"You can if you rub your nose the wrong way," said Jessie flippantly.

"No amount of rubbing my nose either the right way or the wrong way would have the slightest effect," said Archie. "The thing is imperative: if Martin wants me to write, I must write. But he says here that he's not going to guide me; I must look after myself. I'm sorry for that."

"I'm not," said Jessie quickly. "There's something strange and uncanny about it. I'm not sure that I think it's right even."

She paused a moment.

"Archie, do you really believe that it is the spirit of Martin that makes you write?" she said. "Are you sure--"

He interrupted her.