CHAPTER II
CYRIL HANDS REDUX
FOR the first two weeks after Hands's return he was utterly bewildered by the rush of events in which he must take part and had little or no time for thought.
His days were filled by official conferences with his chiefs at the Exploring Society, from which important but by no means wealthy body he had suddenly attained more than financial security.
Meeting succeeded meeting. Hands was in constant communication with the heads of the Church, Government, and Society. Interviewers from all the important papers shadowed him everywhere. Despite his protests, for he was a quiet and retiring man, photographers fought for him, and his long, somewhat melancholy face and pointed fair beard stared at him everywhere.
He had to read papers at learned societies, and afterwards women came and carried him off to evening parties without possibility of escape.
The Unitarians of England started a monster subscription for him, a subscription which grew so fast that the less sober papers began to estimate it day by day and to point out that the fortunate discoverer would be a rich man for life.
Everywhere he was flattered, caressed, and made much of. In fact, he underwent what to some natures is the grimmest torture of a humane age — he became the MAN OF THE HOUR. Even by Churchmen and others most interested in denying the truth of the discovery, Hands was treated with consideration and deference. His own bona fides in the matter was indubitable, his long and notable record forbade suspicion.
Of Gortre Hands saw but little. Their greeting had been cordial, but there was some natural restraint, one fearing the attitude of the other. Gortre, no less than Hands, was much away from the chambers, and the pair had few confidences. Hands felt, naturally enough under the circumstances, that he would have been more comfortable with Spence. He was surprised to find him absent, but all he was able to glean was that the journalist had suddenly left for the Continent upon a special mission. Hands supposed that Continental feeling was to be thoroughly tested, and that the work had fallen to Spence.
Meanwhile the invitations flowed in. The old staircase of the inn was besieged with callers. In order to escape them. Hands was forced to spend much time in the chambers on the other side of the landing, which belonged to a young barrister, Kennedy by name, who was able to put a spare sitting-room at his disposal. This gentleman, briefless and happy, was somewhat of the Dick Swiveller type, and it gave him intense pleasure to reconnoitre the opposite "oak" through the slit of his letter-box, and to report and speculate upon those who stood knocking for admission.
How he loathed it all!
The shock and surprise of it was not one of the least distressing features.
Far away in the ancient Eastern city he had indeed realised the momentous nature of the strange and awful things he had found. But of the consequences to himself he had thought nothing, and of the effects on the world he had not had time to think.
Hands had never wished to be celebrated. His temperament was poetic in essence, retiring in action. He longed to be back under the eye of the sun, to move among the memorials of the past with his Arab boys, to lie upon the beach of the Dead Sea when no airs stirred, and, suddenly, to hear a vast, mysterious breaker, coming from nowhere, with no visible cause, like some great beast crashing through the jungle.
And he had exchanged all this for lunches at institutions, for hot rooms full of flowers and fools of women who said, "Oh, do tell me all about your delightful discovery," smiling through their paint while the world's heart was breaking. And there was worse to come. At no distant date he would have to stand upon the platform at the Albert Hall, and Mr. Constantine Schuabe, M.P., Mrs. Hubert Armstrong, the writing woman — the whole crowd of uncongenial people — would hand him a cheque for some preposterous sum of money which he did not in the least want. There would be speeches —
He was not made for this life.
His own convictions of Christianity had never been thoroughly formulated or marked out in his brain. All that was mystical in the great history of Christ had always attracted him. He took an æsthetic pleasure in the beautiful story. To him more than to most men it had become a vivid panoramic vision. The background and accessories had been part of his daily life for years. It was as the figure of King Arthur and his old knights might be to some loving student of Malory.
And although his life was pure, his actions gentle and blameless, it had always been thus to him — a lovely and poetic picture and no more. He had never made a personal application of it to himself. His heart had never been touched, and he had never heard the Divine Voice calling to him.
At the end of a fortnight Hands found that he could stand the strain no longer. His nerves were failing him; there was a constant babble of meaningless voices in his ear which took all the zest and savour from life. His doctor told him quite unmistakably that he was doing too much, that he was not inured to this gaiety, and that he must go away to some solitude by the sea and rest.
The advice not only coincided with his own wishes, but made them possible. A good many engagements were cancelled, a paragraph appeared in the newspapers to say that Mr. Hands's medical adviser had insisted upon a thorough rest, and the man of the moment disappeared. Save only Gortre and the secretary of the Exploring Society, no one knew of his whereabouts.
In a week he was forgotten. Greater things began to animate Society — harsh, terrible, ugly things. There was no time to think of Hands, the instrument which had brought them about.
The doctor had recommended the remotest parts of Cornwall. Standing in his comfortable room at Harley Street, he expatiated, with an enthusiastic movement of his hand, upon the peace to be found in that lost country of frowning rocks and bottle-green seas, where, so far is it from the great centres of action, men still talk of "going into England" as if it were an enterprise, an adventure.
Two days found him at a lonely fishing cove, rather than village, lodging in the house of a coast-guard, not far from Saint Ives.
A few whitewashed houses ran down to the beach of the little natural harbour where the boats were sheltered.
On the shores of the little "Porth," as it was called, the fishermen sat about with sleepy, vacant eyes, waiting for the signal of watchmen on the moor above — the shrill Cornish cry of "Ubba!" "Ubba!" which would tell them the mackerel were in sight.
Behind the cove, running inland, were the vast, lonely moors which run between the Atlantic and the Channel. It is always grey and sad upon these rolling solitudes, sad and silent. The glory of summer gorse had not yet clothed them with a fleeting warmth and hospitality. As far as the eye could reach they stretched away with a forlorn immensity that struck cold to Hands's heart. Peace was here indeed, but how austere! quiet, but what a brooding and cruel silence!
Every now and again the roving eye, in its search for incident and colour, was caught and arrested by the bleak engine-house of some ancient deserted mine and the gaunt chimney which pointed like a leaden finger to the stormy skies above. Great humming winds swept over the moor, driving flocks of Titanic clouds, an Olympian army in rout, before their fierce breath.
Here, day by day. Hands took his solitary walk, or sometimes he would sit sheltered in a hollow of the jagged volcanic rocks which set round about the cove a barrier of jagged teeth. Down below him a hard, green sea boiled and seethed in an agony of fierce unrest. The black cormorants in the middle distance dived for their cold prey. The sea-birds were tossed on the currents of the wild air, calling to each other with forlorn, melancholy voices. This remote Western world resounded with the powerful voices of the waves; night and day the gongs of Neptune's anger were sounding.
In the afternoon a weary postman tramped over the moor. He brought the London newspapers of the day before, and Hands read them with a strange subjective sensation of spectatorship.
So far away was he from the world that by a paradox of psychology he viewed its turmoil with a clearer eye. As poetry is emotion remembered in tranquillity, as a painter often prefers to paint a great canvas from studies and memory — quiet in his studio — rather than from the actual but too kinetic scene, so Hands as he read the news-sheets felt and lived the story they had to tell far more acutely than in London.
He had more time to think about what he read It was in this lost comer of the world that the chill began to creep over him.
The furious sounds of Nature clamoured in his ears, assaulting them like strongholds; these were the objective sounds.
But as his subjective brain grew clear the words his eyes conveyed to it filled it with a more awful reverberation.
The awful weight grew. He began to realise with terrible distinctness the consequences of his discovery. They stunned him. A carved inscription, a crumbling tomb in half an acre of waste ground. He had stumbled upon so much and little more. He, Cyril Hands, had found this.
His straining eyes day by day turned to the columns of the papers.