Part 7

But his fickle intelligence received a sharp admonitory nudge on the following evening when he espied her sitting in the same place at church for all the world as if she had not deserted it on the evening before. Then he remembered that of course she couldn’t hear a thing--idiot he was to have invited her. Again she left the church before the close of the service. This for several days, the tantalized lover beholding her figure always hurrying from his grasp.

He pursued the practice of the deaf and dumb alphabet with such assiduity that he became almost apt in its use; the amount of affection and devotion that he could transcribe on finger and thumb was prodigious, he yearned to put it to the test. When at last he met her again in the hall he at once began spelling out things, absurd things, like: “May I beg the honour of your acquaintance?” She watched this with interest, with excitement even, but a shadow of doubt crept into her lovely eyes. She moved her own fingers before him, but in vain; he could not interpret a single word, not one. He was a dense fool; O how dense, how dense! he groaned. But then he searched his pockets and brought out the note he had scribbled in church. It was a little the worse for wear but he smoothed it, and standing close by her side held it for her perusal. Again his hopes were dashed. She shook her head, not at all conclusively but in a vague uncomprehending way. She even with a smile indicated her need of a pencil, which he promptly supplied. To his amazement what she scribbled upon the page were some meaningless hieroglyphs, not letters, though they were grouped as in words, but some strange abracadabra. He looked so dismally at her that she smiled again, folding the paper carefully ere she passed on up the stairs.

Hardross was now more confounded than ever. A fearful suspicion seized him: was she an idiot, was it a mild insanity, were those marks just the notation of a poor diseased mind? He wished he had kept that letter. God, what a tragedy! But as he walked into the town his doubts about her intellect were dispelled. Poof! only an imbecile himself could doubt that beautiful staring intelligence. That was not it; it was some jugglery, something to do with those rooms. Nothing was solved yet, nothing at all; how uncanny it was becoming!

He returned in the afternoon full of determination. Behold, like a favourable augury, the door by the console table stood open, wide open. It did occur to him that an open door might be a trap for unwary men but he rapped the brass knocker courageously. Of course there was no response--how could there be--and he stepped inside the room. His glance had but just time to take in the small black piano, the dark carpet, the waxed margins of the floor, the floral dinginess of the walls brightened by mirrors and softened by gilt and crimson furniture, when the quiet woman, his Diana, came to him joyfully holding out both her hands. Well, there was no mystery here after all, nothing at all, although the elder lady was out and they were apparently alone. Hardross held her hands for some moments, the intensity of which was as deeply projected in her own eyes as in the tightness of his clasp. And there was tea for him! She was at her brightest, in a frock of figured muslin, and sitting before her he marvelled at the quickness of her understanding, the vividness of her gestures, the gentleness with which she touched his sleeve. That criminal suspicion of her sanity crowned him with infamy. Such communication was deliciously intimate; there came a moment when Hardross in a wild impulsive ecstasy flung himself before her, bowing his head in her lap. The quiet woman was giving him back his embraces, her own ardour was drooping beautifully upon him, when he heard a strange voice exclaim in the room: “God is my help! Well then!” A rattle of strange words followed which he could not comprehend. He turned to confront the elder woman, who surveyed them with grim amusement. The other stood up, smiling, and the two women spoke in finger language. The newcomer began to remove her gloves, saying:

“It is Mr. Hardross then. I am glad to meet. There is a lot of things to be spoken, eh?”

She was not at all the invalid he had half expected to find. She removed her hat and came back a competent-looking woman of about fifty, who had really an overwhelming stream of conversation. She took tea and, ignoring the girl as if she were a block of uncomprehending ornament, addressed herself to the interloper.

“You do not know me, Mr. Hardross?”

“It is a pleasure I have but looked forward to,” he replied, in the formal manner that at times irresistibly seized him, “with the keenest possible anticipation and....”

“No, I am Madame Peshkov. We are from Odessa, do you know it? We go back to our Russia tomorrow; yes, it is true.”

His organs of comprehension began to crackle in his skull, but he went on stirring his fresh cup of tea and continued to do so for quite a long time.

“No, you ... are ... Russian! I did not know.” Amid his musing astonishment that fact alone was portentous; it explained so much, everything in fact, but how he could ever contrive to learn such a language was the question that agitated him, so fearfully difficult a language, and on his fingers too! Then that other thunderclap began to reverberate: they were going, when was it? Tomorrow! All this while Madame Peshkov ran on with extravagant volubility. She had the habit of picking one of the hairpins from her hair and gently rubbing her scalp with the rounded end of it; she would replace the pin with a stylish tap of her fingers. It was a long time before Hardross extracted the pith from her remarks, and then only when the hypnotism induced by the stirring of his tea suddenly lapsed; he became aware of the dumb girl’s gaze fixed piercingly upon him, while his own was drawn away by the force of the other’s revelations. What he had already taken in was sad and strange. Her name was Julia Krasinsky. She was not at all related to Madame Peshkov, she was an orphan. Madame’s own daughter had been deaf and dumb, too, and the girls had been inseparable companions until two years ago, when Natalia Peshkov had died--O, an unspeakable grief still. He gathered that Madame was a widow, and that since Natalia’s death the two women had lived and travelled together. Madame talked on; it was tremendously exciting to Hardross crouching in his chair, but all that echoed in his mind were the words Julia Krasinsky, Julia Krasinsky, until she suddenly asked him:

“Do you love her?”

He was startled by this appalling directness; he stammered a little but he finally brought out:

“I adore her. Beyond everything I deeply deeply love her.” He then added: “I feel shameful enough now. I rage inwardly. All these many weeks I have dallied like a boy, I did not understand the situation. I have wasted our chances, our time, and now you are going.”

“You can’t waste time”; retorted the abrupt lady. “Time deals with you no matter how you use his hours.”

“I suppose so,” he agreed quite helplessly, “but we might have been extraordinary friends.”

“O, but you are, eh! She is bewitched, you cannot speak to her, she cannot speak to you, but yet you love. O, she is vairy vairy fond of you, Mr. Hardross. Why not? She has the best opinions of you.”

“Ah, she will change her opinion now. A fool like me?”

“No one ever changes an opinion. Your opinions govern and guide and change you. If they don’t they are not worth holding. And most of them are not, eh, do you see, we are such fools but God is our help.”

She talked confidently, intimately and quickly, but Hardross wished she would not do so, or use her hairpins in that absurd distracting way. He himself had no confidence; he was reserved by nature, irrevocably, and the mask of deliberation was necessary to him.

“Madame Peshkov, I shall take her out for a walk in the town, now, at once!” he cried.

“Ah, so?” Madame nodded her head vigorously, even approvingly. He had sprung up and approached the quiet woman. All her gentle nearness overcame him and he took her audaciously into his arms. Not less eagerly she slid to his breast and clung there like a bird to the shelter of its tree. Julia turned to Madame Peshkov with a smiling apologetic shrug, as much as to say: “What can one do with such a fellow, so strong he is, you see!” Madame bade him bring Julia later on to the café where they always dined.

His happiness was profound. He had never had an experience so moving as the adorable dumb woman by his side: yet so unsurprising, as if its possibility had always lain goldenly in his mind like an undreamed dream, or like music, half-remembered music. There was nothing, of course, just nothing they could talk about. They could look into shop windows together rather intimately, and they were a long time in a shady arcade of the park, full of lime-browsing bees, where they sat watching a peacock picking the gnats off the shrubs. It was the pleasantest possible defeat of time. Then there was the handsome girl crossing the yard of a weaving mill as they passed. She was carrying a great bale of bright blue wool and had glanced at them with a friendly smile. Her bare white arms encircled the wool: she had big gilt rings in her ears, and her fine shining chestnut-coloured hair was disarrayed and tumbled upon the bale. Julia had pressed his arm with joy. Yes, she delighted in the things he delighted in; and she felt too that sense of sorrow that hung in the air about them.

Her appearance in the café stirred everybody like a wave of sweet air. Hardross was filled with pride. He felt that it was just so that she would enrich the world wherever she wandered, that things would respond to her appearance in astonishing mysterious ways. Why, even the empty wine glasses seemed to behave like large flowers made miraculously out of water, a marvel of crystal petals blooming but for her; certainly the glasses on other tables didn’t look at all like these. He drank four glasses of wine and after dinner they all sat together in the flat until the half darkness was come. And now Madame Peshkov too was very silent; she sat smoking or scratching her head with her pins. It was nine o’clock, but there remained a preposterous glare in the west that threw lateral beams against the tops of tall buildings, although the pavements were already dim. It made the fronts of the plastered houses over the way look like cream cheese. Six scarlet chimney pots stood stolidly at attention--the torsos of six guardsmen from whom head and limbs had been unkindly smitten; the roof seemed to be rushing away from them. Beyond was an echo of the sunset, faint in the northern sky. How sweet, how sad, to sit so silently in this tremulous gloom. It was only at the last when they parted at her door that the shadow of their division became omnipresent. Then it overwhelmed them.

Hardross crept upstairs to his own rooms. In such plights the mind, careless of time present and time past, full of an anguish that quenches and refills like a sponge, writhes beyond hope with those strange lesions of demeanour that confound the chronicler. Tra-la-la, sang the distracted man, snapping his sweating fingers in time with a ribald leering ditty, Tra-la-la. He dropped plumb to Atlantean depths of grief, only to emerge like a spouting whale with the maddening Tra-la-la tugging him, a hook in his body, from despair to dementia. He was roused from this vertiginous exercise by a knocking at his door. The door was thrust open, and Madame Peshkov asked if he was there. He rose up and switched on a light.

“What is to be done now?” cried the lady. If her silence below had been complete, as complete as poor Julia’s, she was now fully audible and not a little agitated. “What is to be done? I cannot believe it of her but it is true, as true as God!”

Hardross beheld her sink, stricken with some trouble, into an armchair, beating her hands together.

“I have no influence, gone it is, no power over her, none whatever. What is to be done? Assist us please. She has been so.... O, for days, and now it comes, it comes....”

“What has come?” he interrupted sharply.

“I cannot believe it of her, but it is true ... as God. She is like a vast ... cold ... stone, a mountain.”

“Is this about Julia?”

“She will not go. Of course she will not go! She declines, she will not come back to Odessa. She says she will not come. I have to tell you this, Mr. Hardross, I cannot move her. She is like a vast ... cold ... stone. What then?”

Madame’s appeal seemed pregnant with a significance that he but dimly savoured. He asked: “What is she going to do then?”

“To stop in this England, here, in this very place! But our passages are booked, tomorrow it is--pooh, it does not matter!--I am to leave her here in this place, here she will stay, in a foreign land, without speech or understanding. But what is to be done, I ask of you?”

He was delirious himself; he kept whispering Julia, Julia, but he managed to ask with a lugubrious covering of propriety:

“What? I don’t know. Shall I go to her?”

“But can you not see? Do you comprehend, you Hardross? O, it is a madness, I want to explain it to you but it is all so gross, so swift, like a vulture. You see it is impossible for me to remain an hour longer, an hour in England impossible absolutely; there are reasons, lives perhaps, depending on my return. Yes, it is true; we live in Russia, do you see, and in Russia ... ah, you understand! But how shall I leave this woman here?”

Madame stared at him with curious inquisitiveness, beating her hands upon the arm of the chair as if she expected an answer, a prompt one:

“Of course she will not go away from you now, of course, of course, she has never had a lover before--how could she, poor thing. I understand it, she is not a child. And you Mr. Hardross you are a generous man, you have courage, a good man, a man of his honour, O yes, it is true, I see it, I feel it, and so she will not be torn away from you now. I understand that, she is no longer a child.”

Madame rose and took him by the arm. “Marry her, my friend! Do not you see? I can leave her to you. Marry her at once, marry her!” She stood as if it were something that could be done on the spot, as easy as giving one a cup of tea. But he did not hesitate.

“Why, I would give my soul to do it!” he cried, and rushed away down the stairs to Julia.

And surely she was as wise as she was beautiful, and as rich as she was wise.

* * * * *

THE TRUMPETERS

* * * * *

THE TRUMPETERS

They were crossing the Irish Sea. It was night, blowing a moderate gale, but the moon, aloft on the port bow with a wind, was chock full of such astounding brightness that the turmoil of the dark waves was easy and beautiful to see. The boat was crowded with soldiers on leave; the few civilian passengers--mechanics, labourers, and a miner going to his home in Wexford, who had got drunk at the harbour inn before coming aboard--were congregated in the angles on the lee-side of the saloon bunks and trying to sleep amid the chill seething, roaring, and thudding. The miner, young, powerful, and very much at his ease, sprawled among them intoxicated. He sang, and continued to sing at intervals, a song about “The hat that my father wore,” swaying, with large dreamy gestures, to and fro, round and about, up and down upon the unfortunate men sitting to right and left of him. Close at hand sat another young man, but smaller, who carried a big brass trumpet.

“Throw him in the sea, why not, now!” the trumpeter shouted to the drunken man’s weary supporters. “Begad I would do it if he put his pig’s face on e’er a shoulder of me!” He was a small, emphatic young man: “Give him a crack now, and lay on him, or by the tears of God we’ll get no repose at all!”

His advice was tendered as constantly and as insistently as the miner’s song about his parent’s headgear, and he would encourage these incitements to vicarious violence by putting the brass trumpet to his lips and blowing some bitter and not very accurate staves. So bitter and so inaccurate that at length even the drunken miner paused in his song and directed the trumpeter to “shut up.” The little man sprang to his feet in fury, and approaching the other he poured a succession of trumpet calls close into his face. This threw the miner into a deep sleep, a result so unexpected that the enraged trumpeter slung his instrument under his arm and pranced belligerently upon the deck.

“Come out o’ that, ye drunken matchbox, and by the Queen of Heaven I’ll teach ye! Come now!”

The miner momentarily raised himself and recommenced his song: “’Tis the Hat that me Father wore!” At this the trumpeter fetched him a mighty slap across the face.

“Ah, go away,” groaned the miner, “or I’ll be sick on ye.”

“Try it, ye rotten gossoon! ye filthy matchbox! Where’s yer khar_kee_?”

The miner could display no khaki; indeed, he was sleeping deeply again.

“I’m a man o’ me principles, ye rotten matchbox!” yelled the trumpeter. “In the Munsters I was ... seven years ... where’s your khar_kee_?”

He seized the miner by the collar and shook that part of the steamer into a new commotion until he was collared by the sailors and kicked up on to the foredeck.

Nothing up there, not even his futile trumpeting, could disturb the chill rejoicing beauty of the night. The wind increased, but the moonlight was bland and reassuring. Often the cope of some tall wave would plunge dully over the bows, filling the deck with water that floundered foaming with the ship’s movement or dribbled back through the scuppers into the sea. Yet there was no menace in the dark wandering water; each wave tossed back from its neck a wreath of foam that slewed like milk across the breast of its follower.

The trumpeter sat upon a heap of ropes beside a big soldier.

“The rotten matchbox, did ye ever see the like o’ that? I’ll kill him against the first thing we step ashore, like ye would a flea!”

“Be aisy,” said the soldier; “why are ye making trouble at all? Have ye hurt your little finger?”

“Trouble, is it? What way would I be making trouble in this world?” exclaimed the trumpeter. “Isn’t it the world itself as puts trouble on ye, so it is, like a wild cat sitting under a tub of unction! O, very pleasant it is, O ay! No, no, my little sojee, that is not it at all. You can’t let the flaming world rush beyant ye like that....”

“Well, it’s a quiet life I’m seeking,” interjected the soldier, wrapping his great coat comfortingly across his breast, “and by this and by that, a quiet night too.”

“Is that so? Quiet, is it? But I say, my little sojee, you’ll not get it at all and the whole flaming world whickering at ye like a mad cracker itself. Would ye sleep on that wid yer quiet life and all? It’s to tame life you’d be doing, like it was a tiger. And it’s no drunken boozer can tame me as was with the Munsters in the East ... for seven holy years.”

“Ah, go off wid you, you’ve hurt your little finger.”

“Me little finger, is it?” cried the trumpeter, holding his thin hands up for inspection in the moonlight, “I have not then.”

“You surprise me,” the soldier said, gazing at him with sleepy amused tolerance. “Did you never hear of Tobin the smith and Mary of Cappoquin?”

“I did not then,” snapped the other. “Who was they?”

“He was a roaring, fatal feller, a holy terror, a giant. He lived in the mountains but he went over the country killing things--a tiger or two at an odd time, I’m thinking--and destroying the neat condition of the world. And he had a nasty little bit of a bugle....”

“Was it the like o’ that?” demanded the other, holding out the trumpet and tapping it with his fingers.

“‘A bugle,’ I said,” replied the soldier sternly, “and every time he puffed in its tubes the noise of it was so severe the hens in the town fell dead....”

“The hens!”

“Yes, and the ducks on the ponds were overcome with emotion and sank to the bottom. One day he was in his forge driving a few nails into the shoe of an ass when he hit his little finger such a blow, a terrible blow, that it bled for a day. Then he seared the wound with his searing iron, but it was no better, and it bled for a night. I will go--says he--to the physician of Cappoquin and be sewn up with some golden wire. So he drove into Cappoquin, but when he was in it the physician was gone to a christening; there was only his daughter Mary left to attend to him, a bright good girl entirely, and when she saw the finger she said to Tobin: ‘I declare on my soul if I don’t chop it off it’s not long till you have your death.’ ‘Chop it off, then,’ says Tobin, and she did so. He came back the next day and this is how it was; the physician was gone to a wake. ‘What’s your need?’ asked Mary. He showed her his hand and it dripping with blood. ‘I declare to my God,’ said Mary, ‘if I don’t chop it off it’s short till you have your death.’ ‘Chop it off,’ says Tobin, and she struck off the hand. The day after that he drove in again, but the physician was gone to an inquest about a little matter concerning some remains that had been found. ‘What is it today, Tobin?’ and he showed her his arm bleeding in great drops. ‘I declare by the saints,’ says she, ‘that unless I chop it off you’ll die in five minutes.’ ‘Chop it off,’ says Tobin, and she struck off his arm. The next day he was back again with the stump of his arm worse than before. ‘Oh, I see what it is,’ said Mary, and going behind him she struck off his head with one blow of her father’s sharp knife and gave it to the cat.”

“That is a neat tale,” said the trumpeter. “Did you hear the story of the dirty soldier and the drummer?”

“No--” The soldier hesitated reflectively. “No, I never heard it.”

“Well, this is how it was....”

But just then the steamer began to approach the harbour, and in the hurry and scurry of preparations to land the two friends were separated and the tale was never told.

At the disembarkation passengers and soldiers crowded on the pier awaiting the boat train. The harbour was full of lights; the moon was still high in the heavens, but her glory faded as the sun began to rise. The thick densities of the night sky quivered into frail blues, violet and silver were mingled in the sea, the buildings on the wharf looked strange; icily, bitterly grey. The trumpeter ran about in the bleak air seeking the “rotten matchbox,” but he could not find him. He comforted himself by executing some castigating blares upon his instrument. The hollow wharves and the pier staging echoed with acrid sound that pleased his simple heart. He blew and blew and blew until he was surrounded by people watching him strain his determined eyes and inflate his pale cheeks--all of them secretly hoping that the ones might fall out or the others might crack. Suddenly he caught sight of the now-sobered miner, quite close to him, almost touching him! The call he was blowing faded with a stupid squeak. The world began to flame again ... when an officer burst into the circle, demanding to know who he was, where from, and what in all the realm of blasphemous things he meant by tootling in that infernal manner on that infernal thing.

The trumpeter drew himself proudly to attention and saluted.

“Discharged I am, sir, it’s with the Munsters I was, seven years, sir, with the Munsters, in the east.”

“You disgrace the Army! If I hear another tootle on that thing, I ... I’ll have you clapped in irons--I will! And ... and transported ... damn me if I don’t! You understand?”

The trumpeter meekly saluted as the captain swaggered away. At that moment the miner laid his hand upon his arm.

“What, my little man,” said he, “have you lost your teeth? Give it me now!”