All Hallows' Eve (6 page)

They had all been silent; suddenly they all began to speak. Richard said recklessly, “At least the coloring's superb.” Betty said, “Oh Jon,
need
you?” Jonathan said, “It's a trick of this light. Don't cry, Betty. I'll do something else.” Lady Wallingford said, “We won't keep you, Mr. Drayton. If that's serious, we have very little in common. If it's not serious, I didn't expect to be insulted. We'll go, Betty. My daughter will write to you, Mr. Drayton.”

“This is quite absurd,” Jonathan said. “Ask Mr. Furnival, and he'll tell you that it wasn't in the least like that until you talked us into believing it. I'm extremely sorry you don't like it and I'll do something different. But you can't think that I meant to show you a painting of a madman and a mass of beetles as a portrait of your Father Simon. Especially when I know what you think about him. Is it likely?”

“It appears to be a fact,” said Lady Wallingford. She had turned her back on the canvas and was looking bitterly at Jonathan. “If we are nothing more than vermin to you—Betty!”

Betty was still holding on to Jonathan. It seemed to give her some strength, for she lifted her head and said, “But, Mother, Jonathan is going to alter it.”

“Alter it!” said Lady Wallingford. “He will alter it to something still more like himself. You will have nothing more to do with him. Come.”

Jonathan interrupted. “Lady Wallingford,” he said, “I've apologized for something I never thought or intended. But Betty's engagement to me is another matter. I shan't accept any attempt to interfere with that.”

“No?” Lady Wallingford said. “Betty will do what I tell her and I have other plans. This pretended engagement was always a ridiculous idea and now it is finished.”

“Mother——” Betty began. Lady Wallingford, who had been looking at Jonathan, turned her eyes slowly to her daughter. The slight movement of her head was so deliberate that it concentrated a power not felt in that room till then. Her eyes held Betty as in the painting behind her the outstretched hand held the attentive congregation; they summoned as that summoned. Jonathan was thwarted, enraged and abandoned. He stood, helpless and alone, at the side of an exchange of messages which he could not follow; he felt Betty flag in his arm and his arm was useless to her. He tightened it, but she seemed to fall through it as a hurt dove through the air by which it should be supported. Richard, as he saw that slow movement, was reminded suddenly of Lester's way of throwing up her hand; the physical action held something even greater than the purpose which caused it. It was not only more than itself in its exhibition of the mind behind it, but it was in itself more than the mind. So killing, though it may express hate, is an utterly different thing from hate. There was hate in the room, but that particular hate was not so much hate as killing, as pure deliberate murder. As a man weak from illness might try to wrestle with a murderer and fail, he thought he heard himself saying sillily, “Lady Wallingford, if I may speak, wouldn't it be better if we talked about this another time? There's no need to murder the girl at once, is there? I mean, if Jonathan did something different, perhaps we could avoid it? or we might look at it—at the portrait—in a different light? and then you might see her in a different light? Sometimes a little attention …”

He was not quite sure how much of this he had actually said, but he stopped because Jonathan was speaking. Jonathan was speaking very angrily and very quickly, and he was talking of Betty's father the Air Marshal, and of his own aunt who would put Betty up for a few days, and how they would get married almost tomorrow, and how all the paintings and all the parents and all the prophets under heaven could not interfere. He spoke close above Betty's ear and several times he tried to get her to turn and look at him. But she did not; she had gone even paler than she had been before, and as Lady Wallingford took the first step towards the door she too began to turn towards it. She twisted herself suddenly out of Jonathan's arm and she said nothing in reply to the entreaties, persuasions and commands which he continued to address to her. Richard thought her face as she did so was very like another face he had seen; the identification of that other troubled him for a moment and then was suddenly present—it was Lester's when he had last seen it, Lester's when she was dead. The common likeness of the dead was greater than any difference between their living faces; they were both citizens of a remoter town than this London, and the other town was in this room. He saw beyond Betty, Lady Wallingford, who had walked across the room and was looking back at Betty from the door, and her face, though it was not that of the dead, was like a hard cliff in the world of the dead, or like a building, if the dead had buildings, a house or a temple of some different and disastrous stone. The whole ordinary room became only an imitation of a room; Jonathan and he were ghosts in a ghostly chamber, the realities were the man in the cleft of the rock and the rising beetles, and the dead face of Betty, and the living face—but in what way living?—of her tyrant. Even while he shivered in a sudden bleakness, Betty had disengaged herself from Jonathan and gone over to her mother. Lady Wallingford opened the door. She said to Betty, “We will go to Holborn.” She motioned her daughter before her; they went out. The two men heard the shutting of the outer door.

They looked at each other. With that departure the room became again a room, and no more the outskirts of another world. Richard drew a breath and glanced again at the painting. It seemed to him now impossible to miss its actuality. Seen as human beings, those shapes had been motionless; seen as beetles, they were already in motion and on the point of flight. The painting lived, as the
Mona Lisa
does, in the moment of beginning, in the mathematical exactitude of beginning. Yet now Richard uncertainly felt more; there was an ambiguity in it, for the shapes might be either. That was its great, apparently unexpected, and certainly unwanted, success: men who were beetles, beetles who were men; insects who had just been men, men who had just become insects. Metamorphosis was still in them. But could he then, he wondered, still gazing, think of them the other way, insects who had just become men, men who had just been insects? why not? Could humanity be living out of them?—some miracle in process? animality made newly rational? and their motion the rising into erect man? and the stretched arm the sign and power that called them?

He looked along the arm; his eyes rose to the face that ruled and called them? He saw it was impossible. That blank face could never work miracles; or if it could, then only miracles of lowering and loss. He could not persuade himself that it was growing into power; the metempsychosis there, if any had been, was done. The distance in the cleft behind, which he now clearly saw, as if the walls of it palely shone with their own light, held no promise of a lordlier change. There was no life there but that of rock—“
tutto di pietra di color ferrigno
—all iron-hued stone.” What other life that stone might hold in itself, the life in the woman's face by the door, the life that had seemed to impinge on the room, could not be known by a face that had lost understanding. And then he remembered that this was but the backward-looking, the false, the devised face. What might the true face be that looked away down the cleft, between the walls, to the end of the corridor, if there was an end? That indeed might know more, much and very terribly more.

He made an effort and turned his eyes away. Jonathan was moving towards him; he said as he came, “What a mother!”

“But didn't you guess anything of this?” Richard asked, almost with curiosity.

“Oh I don't know,” Jonathan answered irritably. “I thought perhaps while I was doing it that there was something odd about it, and then I thought there wasn't and that I was imagining things. One gets confused and can't judge. And I certainly thought she wouldn't notice it, or want to notice it. Nor would she, but she doesn't mean me to marry Betty.”

Richard said, “But supposing to destroy it was the only way? Suppose Miss Wallingford asked you to?”

“Well, she hasn't,” said Jonathan. “It'll be time enough, when she does. I don't know—probably I should. It'd be tiresome, but if it eased things … She doesn't care for this Simon herself; she only goes because her mother makes her.”

“I'd like to see him for myself,” Richard said. “Where is he? What was that remark about Holborn?”

“You go,” said Jonathan. “It's a place just between Holborn and Red Lion Square—you'll easily find it. Go and hear him speak. He doesn't do it often, but you'll find out when he's going to. Go and see, and tell me the result.”

“Well, I think I will,” said Richard. “Tomorrow. I'm very sorry about all this. What do you think you'll do?”

“Just think first,” Jonathan answered. “Shall I stick out or shall I try and come to terms? I don't believe Sir Bartholomew'll be much good, even when he does get back from Moscow, but at least I could see him, and it's going to be damned difficult to keep in touch with Betty. She might be a novice or a nun, the way her mother keeps her. I believe she even reads her letters and I'm sure she watches her telephone calls. Come round tomorrow, will you, if it's not a bother? I shall want to talk to you.”

Richard promised and left. He came out into the London streets about the time when everyone else was also going home, and after a glance at the crowded transport he determined to walk. There was about the general hubbub something that eased and pleased him. He relaxed his spirit a little as he moved among them. He thought of Jonathan and Betty, and he thought also, “I wish Lester were here; she'd know what to do and she knows Betty.” It would be very convenient now if Lester could call on Betty; he wished for Jonathan's sake that she could. A little of Lester's energy and Lester's style and even Lester's temper might be of a good deal of use to Betty now.

It occurred to him, with a light surprise, that he was thinking quite naturally of Lester. He was sincerely sorry, for Jonathan's sake, that her strong femininity was lost—for Jonathan's sake, not at that moment for his own. It was what she was that was needed. What she was—not what she was to him. It occurred to him then that he had on the whole been in the habit of thinking of Lester only in relation to himself. He saw suddenly in her the power that waited for use, and he saw also that he had not taken any trouble about that power; that he had, in fact, been vaguely content to suppose it was adequately used in attending to him. He said, almost aloud, “Darling, did I neglect you?” It was no ordinary neglect that he meant; of that certainly he had not been guilty—and of this other perhaps she had been as guilty as he. No—not as guilty; she knew more of him in himself than he had ever troubled to know of her in herself. It was why her comments on him, in gaiety or rage, always had such a tang of truth; whereas his were generally more like either cultured jesting or mere abuse. The infinite accuracy of a wife's intelligence stared out at him. He acknowledged what, in all his sincere passion, he had been unwilling to acknowledge, that she was often simply right, and the admission bound him to her the closer, dead though she might be. He thought how many chances he had missed of delighting in her entire veracity instead of excusing, protesting, denying. The glowing splendor of her beauty rose, and it was a beauty charged with knowledge. It was that, among much else, that he had neglected. And now they all needed her and she was not there.

She was. It was along Holborn that he was walking, for he had half thought of going that night to look for Simon's hall or house or whatever it was. And there, on the very pavement, the other side of a crossing, she stood. He thought for the first second that there was someone with her. He was held by the appearance as motionless as in their early days he had thought he must be—though in fact in those early days he had never actually stopped. Now he did. It was as if that shock of her had at last compelled him to acknowledge it outwardly—at last, but as he had always almost believed he did, perhaps more in those days at the beginning when the strangeness was greater and the dear familiarity less. But the strangeness, for all the familiarity, had never quite gone, nor was it absent now; it was indeed, he felt, the greater, as well it might be. They stood on either side that Holborn by-way, and gazed.

He felt, as he gazed, more like a wraith than a man; against her vigor of existence he hung like a ghost and was fixed by it. He did not then remember the past hour in Jonathan's room, nor the tomb-like image of Lady Wallingford. Had he done so, he would have felt Lester's to be as much stronger than that woman's as hers had seemed stronger than his own. Lester was not smiling any recognition; the recognition was in her stillness. The passionate mouth was serious and the eyes deep with wonder and knowledge: of him? certainly of him. He thought almost he saw her suspire with a relief beyond joy. Never, never again would he neglect. The broken oaths renewed themselves in him. One hand of hers was raised and still almost as if it rested on some other arm, but the other had flown to her breast where it lay as if in some way it held him there. They made, for those few seconds, no movement, but their stillness was natural and not strange; it was not because she was a ghost but because she was she that he could not stir. This was their thousandth meeting, but yet more their first, a new first and yet the only first. More stable than rock, more transient in herself than rivers, more distant-bright than stars, more comfortable than happy sleep, more pleasant than wind, more dangerous than fire—all known things similies of her; and beyond all known things the unknown power of her. He could perhaps in a little have spoken; but before he could, she had passed. She left him precisely the sensation of seeing her go on; past him? no; up the by-way? no; but it was not disappearance or vanishing, for she had gone, as a hundred times she had, on her proper occasions, gone, kissing, laughing, waving. Now she neither kissed nor laughed nor waved, but that which was in all three lingered with him as he saw she was no longer there.