XII.
WHILE IT IS YET DAY
“And is it really true? Are you going to govern the Fortunate Islands?”
“I am, indeed—or rather, to be accurate, I am going to deputy-govern them—I mean, father is—for a year.”
“A whole year!” he said, looking down at her fan. “What will London do without you?”
“London will do excellently,” she answered—“and that’s my pet fan, and it’s not used to being tied into knots.” She took it from him.
“And what shall I do without you?”
“Oh! laugh and rhyme and dance and dine. You’ll go out to the proper number of dinners and dances, and make the proper measure of pretty little speeches and nice little phrases; and you’ll do your reviews, and try to make them as like your editor’s as you can; and you’ll turn out your charming little rondeaux and triolets, and the year will simply fly. Heigho! I’m glad I’m going to see something big, if it’s only the Atlantic.”
“You are very cruel,” he said.
“Am I? But it’s not cruel to be cruel if nobody’s hurt, is it? And I am so tired of nice little verses and pretty little dances and dainty little dinners. Oh, if I were only a man!”
“Thank God you’re not!” said he.
“If I were a man, I would do just one big thing in my life, even if I had to settle down to a life of snippets and trifles afterwards.”
Her eyes were shining. They always glittered, but now they were starry. The drifted white folds across her breast stirred to her quickened breath.
“If you loved me, Sybil, I could do something great!” said he.
“But I don’t,” she said—“at any rate, not now; and I’ve told you so a dozen times. My dear Rupert, the man who needs a woman to save him isn’t worth the saving.”
“What would you call a big thing?” he asked. “Must I conquer an empire for you, or start a new religion? Or shall I merely get the Victoria Cross, or become Prime Minister?”
“Don’t sneer,” said she; “it doesn’t become you at all. You’ve no idea how horrid you look when you’re sneering. Why don’t you? Oh! but it’s no good! By the way, what a charming cover Housman has designed for your Veils and Violets! It’s a dear little book. Some of the verses are quite pretty.”
“Go on,” said he, “rub it in. I know I haven’t done much yet; but there’s plenty of time. And how can one do any good work when one is for ever sticking up one’s heart like a beastly cocoanut for you to shy at? If you’d only marry me, Sybil, you should see how I would work!”
“May I refer you to my speech—not the last one, but the one before that.”
He laughed; then he sighed.
“Ah, my Pretty,” he said, “it was all very well, and pleasant enough to be scolded by you when I could see you every day; but now”
“How often,” she asked calmly, “have I told you that you must not call me that? It was all very well when we were children; but now”
“Look here,” he said, leaning towards her, “there’s not a soul about; they’re in the middle of the Lancers. Let me kiss you once—it can’t matter to you—and it will mean so very much to me.”
“That’s just it,” she said; “if it didn’t mean”
“Then it shan’t mean anything but good-bye. It’s only about eight years since you gave up the habit of kissing me on every occasion.”
She looked down, then she looked to right and left, then suddenly she looked at him.
“Very well,” she said suddenly.
“No,” he said; “I won’t have it unless it does mean something.”
There was a silence. “Our dance, I think?” said the voice of one bending before her, and she was borne away on the arm of the partner from whom she had been hiding.
Rupert left early. He had not been able to secure any more dances with her. She left late. When she came to think the evening over, she sighed more than once. “I wish I loved him a little less, or a little more,” she said; “and I wish—yes, I do wish he had. I don’t suppose he’ll care a bit for me when I come back.”
So she set sail for the Fortunate or other Isles, and in dainty verses on loss and absence he found some solace for the pain of parting with her. Yet the pain was a real thing, and grew greater, and life seemed to have no taste, even tobacco no charm. She had always been a part of his life since the days when nothing but a sunk fence divided his father’s park from her father’s rabbit-warren. He grew paler, and he developed a wrinkle or two, and a buoyant friend meeting him in Piccadilly assured him that he looked very much off colour, and in his light-hearted way the friend advised the sort of trip round the world from which yesterday had seen his own jovial return.
“Do you all the good in the world, my boy. ’Pon my soul, you have a tired sort of look, as if you’d got some of these jolly new diseases people have taken to dying of lately—appendi-what’s-its-name, you know, and things like that. You book your passage to Marseilles at once. So long! You take my tip.”
What Rupert took was a cab. He looked at himself in one of the little horseshoe mirrors. He certainly did look ill; and he felt ill—tired, bored, and nothing seemed worth while. He drove to a doctor friend, who punched and prodded him and listened with tubes at his chest and back, looked grave, and said: “Go to Strongitharm—he’s absolutely at the top. Twenty-guinea fee. But it’s better to know where we are. You go to Strongitharm.”
Rupert went, and Strongitharm gave his opinion. He gave it with a voice that trembled with sympathy, and he supplemented it with brandy-and-soda, which he happened to have quite handy.
Then Rupert disappeared from London and from his friends—disappeared suddenly and completely. He had plenty of money, and no relations near enough to be inconveniently anxious. He went away and he left no address, and he did not even write excuses to the people with whom he should have danced and dined, nor to the editor whose style he should have gone on imitating.
The buoyant friend rejoiced at the obvious and natural following of his advice.
“He was looking a little bit below himself, you know, and I said: ‘Go round the world; there’s nothing like it,’ and, by Jove! he went. Now, that’s the kind of man I like—knows good advice when he gets it, and acts on it right off.”
So the buoyant one spread the rumour that ran its course and died, and had to be galvanised into life once more to furnish an answer to Sybil’s questionings, when, returning from the Fortunate or other Isles, she asked for news of her old friend. And the rumour did not satisfy her. She had had time to think—there was plenty of time to think in those Islands whose real name escapes me—and she knew very much more than she had known on the evening when Rupert had broken her pet fan and asked for a kiss which he had not taken. She found herself quite fervently disbelieving in the grand tour theory—and the disbelief was so strong that it distorted life and made everything else uninteresting. Sybil took to novel-reading as other folks have in their time taken to drink. She was young, and she could still lose herself in a book. One day she lost herself most completely in a new novel from Mudie’s, a book that every one was talking about. She lost herself; and suddenly, in a breathless joy that was agony too, she found him. This was his book. No one but Rupert could have written it—all that description of the park, and the race when she rode the goat and he rode the pig—and—she turned the pages hastily. Ah yes, Rupert had written this! She put the book down and she dressed herself as prettily as she knew how, and she went in a hansom cab to the office of the publisher of that book, and on the way she read. And more and more she saw how great a book it was, and how no one but Rupert could have written just that book. Thrill after thrill of pride ran through her. He had done this for her—because of what she had said.
Arrived at the publisher’s, she was met by a blank wall. Neither partner was visible. The senior clerk did not know the address of the author of “Work While it is Yet Day,” nor the name of him; and it was abundantly evident that even if he had known, he would not have told.
Sybil’s prettiness and her charm so wrought upon this dry-as-dust person, however, that he volunteered the address of the literary agent through whom the book had been purchased. And Sybil found him on a first floor in one of those imposing new buildings in Arundel Street. He was very nice and kind, but he could not give his client’s name without his client’s permission.
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,
“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.