Part 26

Frederic's interview with Herbert Fry had seemed to him a direct triumph of right over wrong. It was the first time he had ever found himself in the van of the big battalions, and it gave him a feeling of confidence that was almost exhilarating. He returned to his wife, to find that her suspicion of him was not abated, and convinced himself that she was cruel and unjust. He gambled in marriage more recklessly than ever, and if before she had been anxious, now she was filled with dread as she saw that she was playing a losing game. Sooner or later he would have cleared her out and the last tie between them would be broken. Her dread paralysed her. Only mechanically could she keep the cards fluttering and the pot a-boiling.

* * *

Frederic lost his drawn look. He was winning, and was sure that the luck would never turn again. Feeling immeasurably superior to Fry, who had committed the unpardonable folly of being found out, and morally on a different plane from Minna and the world of illicit love which had spewed her out to the scorn of all men (except men of the world, who could wink at these things), he fell back upon the cushion of middle-class prosperity, thrust aside happiness as a thing to be desired, and concentrated all his energies on money. He began to speculate--successfully at first, then unsuccessfully. In his early days of practice it had hardly been worth while to keep his accounts separate, and, as his business grew, he never troubled to reorganise his books.

Mrs. Bradby-Folyat died. She had taken a dislike to Gertrude and left Streeten Folyat only a thousand pounds. Frederic received twenty-five pounds to buy a mourning ring. That did not fret him. There was the estate to be wound up, and the pickings of the process would be rich.

The executors asked to see the accounts. Frederic made them up, but they were found so slovenly and unsatisfactory that further inquiry was instituted and an accountant was called in--a precise, mincing little man who spoke with a strong north-country accent, sniffed, and walked in and out of the office as though he were treading the aisle of a chapel. He exasperated Frederic so that he went out of his way to be rude to him. The accountant sniffed and smugly turned the other cheek. He was a week in the office and went away without saying a word.

Frederic received a letter from one of the executors requesting him to hand over all papers and securities to another larger firm of solicitors. Without comment a statement of account was enclosed, showing a deficit in the Bradby-Folyat estate of six thousand pounds. Every nerve in Frederic's body quivered and went hot and dry. He locked the statement away and gave orders for the Bradby-Folyat deed-box to be handed over to the representatives of the nominated solicitors upon their giving a receipt for it. Mechanically, with a fevered concentration upon the figures as an occupation to keep himself from thinking, he went into his banking account. He had three hundred pounds in cash. His shares, which would have to be sold at a loss, would realise another thousand. Outstanding debts amounted to not two hundred. . . . His wife's money was hers upon trust for her children, or, failing her children, for her nephews and nieces. All the Clibran-Bell money was trust money. His father had none, only enough to make a small provision for his old age and his wife and Mary.

The executor called. He was polite--a barrister by profession, with the most suave and urbane brow-beating manner. He supposed that the numerous mistakes could be rectified, and that where losses had occurred through incompetent investment the deficiency would be made good. Frederic said not a word. He twiddled a little piece of paper between his fingers and his face was as white as the paper. The executor drew his own conclusions and said:

"It is misappropriation and embezzlement. I have tried to persuade Batson's not to take proceedings, but they insist that it must go before the Law Society. . . . You will be lucky if you get no worse than being struck off the rolls."

The words bit into Frederic's brain and went trickling down his spine. The executor took his hat and left him sitting by his table still twiddling the little piece of paper, with his face as grey as a goose-feather. He sat very still for a long time staring at the piece of paper in his hand. Presently he let it fall, but still he sat staring. . . . He heard his clerks go. The cashier brought the key of the safe. He said good-night. Frederic said good-night, and was startled at the sound of his own voice. The silence had seemed to him so inevitable, so final, surely eternal.

One thought sprang to life in his brain: "No one must know." That gave him a purpose and brought him to the need of action. At home he forced an amiable mood upon his wife. In the evening they called at Burdley Park and took Mary to the theatre. They saw her home after a merry evening, and, in the highest spirits, they called on the Clibran-Bells and invited some of the family to come and play whist on the morrow. Frederic smoked a cigar with his father-in-law and discussed the new waterworks scheme and the police scandal which had lately set all the town by the ears, a whole division having been discovered to be drawing large profits from organised prostitution in a certain district. Many droll stories were in circulation of constables caught _in flagrante delicto_, and Frederic and his father-in-law laughed heartily over them. At certain moments Frederic had a crazy desire to pick his father-in-law up by the scruff of the neck and shake him: there was something in his manner so ridiculous and undignified, and his jocularity was so trivial and pointless. However, Frederic continued to laugh, and old Clibran-Bell patted him on the shoulder and told him he was a good fellow, a very good fellow.

In the office next day Frederic teased and pestered his clerks and kept them all bustling, finding errands for them to go, requiring books from the Law Library, discovering papers that were long overdue and had to be fetched. Seized with a wild, hilarious impulse, he made out a whole series of bogus writs and sent them to be stamped and delivered. . . . When all the clerks had gone he sat down and wrote to Batson's, saying that he had made further inquiries and had many papers and much information to lay before them which had previously been overlooked, and he added that such deficiency as might remain after final examination would be paid in full. This letter he posted himself. He returned to his office, wrote a cheque for each of his clerks, repaid his articled clerks their premiums, laid an envelope containing them on each desk, looked round to make sure he had forgotten nothing, locked the outer door, walked down to the bridge by the Collegiate church and threw the key into the river.

At night, after the whist-party had dispersed, he pretended that he had papers to look into and sent Jessie to bed. He sat by the fire staring into the glowing coals. It died down, but he made no effort to keep it alight. He was exhausted. The assumed hilarity of the evening had been too great a strain, and yet not strain enough. He was driving himself to a collapse, but was fearful lest it should come too soon.

It was very cold. He shivered and crouched over the black grate. He heard his wife's voice calling him:

"Aren't you coming up to-night?"

"Presently . . . presently."

When he judged that she would be asleep he crept upstairs, and in the dark, to avoid waking her and also to avoid seeing her, he slipped into the bed by her side. All night he lay awake, cold, throbbing, straining and starting at all the small noises of the house.

At breakfast he chattered gaily over the newspapers. There was a school board election toward, and a woman had offered herself as a candidate for their division. He chaffed Jessie and said he supposed she would soon be wanting to vote for Parliament. Jessie was to spend the day in town shopping with her mother. He asked her to make sundry small purchases for him, and they agreed that they would have a crab for supper.

He was rather a long time packing the little handbag he always took with him to town. She went to remind him that it was getting late and found him with his hand in a drawer. He shut it hastily and asked her to fetch his tobacco-pouch from upstairs. When she came down again he was waiting for her at the front door. She walked to the little iron gate with him and they kissed. As he reached the kerb he turned to look at her and saw the old ladies and gentlemen at their windows, and he felt with a twinge of shame that for years he had been a spectacle without knowing it. . . . He thought Jessie looked rather ill, tired, old, and bony. It was absurd for them to kiss in public. . . . Everything seemed absurd, fantastical, and unreal. The world was presented to his eyes in sharper outline than he had ever seen it before. It was bathed in a cold grey light. It had nothing to do with him. It was going on. He felt stationary. That his body was moving was nothing. His thoughts were not moving. Everything was absurd. The new sharply outlined world, with its curious interwoven activities (he saw how they were dovetailed), was moving on. The world with which he had been concerned--the world in which he had been miserable, elated, crestfallen, amused, disgusted--the world in which he had known affection and companionship and spite and jealousy--was moving backward, sinking from under his feet while he himself stood on the verge of a nonsensical dawn that had its light from a setting sun. Away from him, backward and forward, everything moved faster and faster, making him dizzy, intolerably dizzy, sick and cold with it.

He had intended to go to London, but at the station he saw a sign indicating a train for Plymouth. The name started out of the blurred past and relieved him, a little restored his balance, and he saw clearly the scenes of his boyhood--the grimy little office where he had been articled, the ships, the Hoe and the Sound. Then all that too slipped away from him.

He took the train for Plymouth, and had a carriage all to himself as far as Crewe. He sat stupidly staring out of the window. The train was going so fast. Why did everything move so fast? . . . He was very tired. At Crewe a man entered the carriage. He had not thought of that. He must change. He must be alone. The train moved on before he could bring himself to stir. . . . With the presence of the man at the other end of the carriage his mood changed. Out of the cold mists that were upon him a desire rose and took possession of him. He did not know what desire it was but it took the form of an itch to speak to the man. He stole glances at him but his lips would not obey him. The man said:

"It's a fine day."

Frederic agreed that it was a fine day, and the desire in him fell back into the void. The man was part of the absurd world that had nothing to do with him, the world that went on, the trivial, silly world. How trivial and silly everything was: the train was silly, movement was silly; absurd and grotesque was the man's voice and his idiotic comment on the day, and that was silly too. A day was but the passage out of night into night. The whole world was nothing, moving out of nothing into nothing. Some things were clear because they did not matter; other things were blurred because they had mattered to him, Frederic, who mattered no longer because he was standing still and everything else was moving. . . . His eyes mechanically read the legend--"To Stop the Train Pull Down the Cord Outside the Window. Penalty for Improper Use, £5."

"I could stop it," he thought, "but it would only move on again. Everything moves on again."

With that slight movement in his mind old habit reasserted itself and he began to crave for self-pity, but the unfamiliar presence of the man made that impossible. That habit of mind needed the co-operation of other habits. It was isolated and fell away again. . . . There had been so much clear-cut action in the last few hours, action for a purpose, action that could not be recalled and therefore drove him on to the fulfilment of the purpose.

"I must be alone," thumped Frederic's mind, and the train-wheels took it up, "alone, alone, alone."

He became exasperated with the presence of the other man. What right had he in the world where there was nothing but Frederic, nothing at all, an empty world where a man must at last make sure, make very sure, that he is nothing?

The man got out at Bristol. It seemed to Frederic that he had come and gone like a shadow. So little time, the emptiness of the world moving so swiftly, and through it Plymouth coming nearer and nearer to him. Plymouth appeared to him as a sort of monster, a dogging shadow that had run after him for a long time, terrifying him, to spring ahead and come to meet him. And yet it was still behind. Everything was two things, behind and in front; the contradiction made it nothing. . . .

He was frozen with terror. Back, back, this way; no, that; now the other. . . . "It will have me! It will have me! Why? I am nothing. I am nothing. It doesn't believe that I am nothing. . . . No, no. There is nothing but myself, myself, myself. . . ."

He drew the revolver from his pocket.

"No, no. I will go back. I will go back."

He sat absolutely numbed for a long time. Suddenly he thought of his wife, coldly, clearly. He saw himself in her. She was stronger than he. He must show her that he was the stronger.

He thought of his father and passed into a golden stream of peace. He would go to his father. . . "I will arise and go to my father and say unto him, 'Father, I have sinned against Heaven and before thee and am no more worthy to be called thy son.' . . ." His father would understand as he had understood before. . . . But then he knew that all that his mother had thought of him would be sponged away from her mind, and he remembered with what bitterness she had spoken of Minna.

"Too difficult," he thought. "Too many people."

The train gathered speed down an incline. Faster and faster. His terror lest the journey should come to an end clutched him back into the present. He must make haste. He must be the quicker.

He had dropped the revolver into his pocket again. Now he fumbled for it. It caught in the lining, and he tugged at it with feverish impatience. . . . His heart leaped on the report, which seemed to come from far away. . . . He felt nothing; less and less; out of the swiftly moving world he was sinking downward, downward, gathering speed, falling, falling into nothing.

* * *

In the small hours of the morning Mr. Clibran-Bell rang furiously at the bell of the house in Burdley Park. After many minutes Francis came down in his dressing-gown with a candle in his hand. Mr. Clibran-Bell stepped into the hall.

"Frederic," he said, "has not been home all night. Jessie is at my house. . . . My dear friend, my dear old friend . . ."

"Has . . . something happened?"

"He's . . . he's at Plymouth. Dead. They found him in the train, shot in the side."

Francis stood very still, his mind slowly grasping this new appalling fact. Tears trickled down his cheeks into his beard.

"I shall go to Plymouth by the first train," said Mr. Clibran-Bell, "I must get at the truth for Jessie's sake."

"Yes. It is very good of you."

It was a long time after Mr. Clibran-Bell had gone before Francis went upstairs again. The candle burnt itself out. His thoughts see-sawed up and down.

"Frederic--dead. Frederic--dead."

When he had groped his way back to his own existence, burdened with this new catastrophe, he said to himself:

"I can't go on. . . . I can't go on."

He saw Frederic lying huddled in the corner of a railway carriage, strangers to whom he was nothing finding him. . . . Then he thought of that other dead body that he had seen long, long ago, the woman lying in the little dark house, under the guttering light of the tallow candle and the clement light of the moon. Death violent, death insistent, death that would not be shrouded away or softened or made seeming blessed with words or tears. Tears! Death was too harsh. And yet it mattered nothing how it came about. It was always the same: bitter, the bitter end to bitterness. All life was salt with the savour of death. Vain, vain the endeavour to sweeten it. Sweetness and corruption, were they not yoke-fellows? . . . Words from the Bible passed through Francis Folyat's mind: "I am the resurrection and the Life," and again: "For behold, the days are coming in which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck," and again in his bitter grief he turned to the Book of Job:

"My days are past, my purposes are broken off, even the thoughts of my heart.

"They change the night into day: the light is short because of darkness.

"If I wait, the grave is mine house; I have made my bed in the darkness.

"I have said to corruption, Thou art my father: to the worm, Thou art my mother and my sister.

"And where is now my hope? As for my hope, who shall see it?

"They shall go down to the base of the pit where our rest together is in the dust."

XXXIII

THE CONCLUSION OF THE MATTER

_The vision of Christ that thou dost see Is my vision's greatest enemy. Thine has a great hook nose like thine Mine has a snub nose like to mine._ THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL.

TWELVE middle-class Englishmen and an official sat in inquest on the body of Frederic. They gazed shyly and uninterestedly upon it and then heard the evidence to the effect that he was most happily married and was without financial worry of any kind. . . . The verdict, in view of the fact that the revolver was in the deceased's overcoat pocket, was one of death by misadventure.

Francis learned the truth from Mr. Clibran-Bell. Mrs. Folyat was not told, neither was Jessie. Queer things were rumoured, however, and Mrs. Folyat began to feel--not absolutely without foundation--that she was looked upon askance. She went into deep mourning and raised Frederic to sainthood, and surrounded herself with relics from among his personal belongings. She brooded over the past and began to piece together her scattered memories. Nothing took clear shape except, what she had not seen at the time, the long coolness between her husband and her son, and she began to charge and reproach Francis with it. By vilifying Francis she had the illusion that she was exalting Frederic. She kept insisting that Francis must be sorry now that her poor angel was dead. Francis was remorseful. He was probing deeper and deeper into the unillumined past, groping his way through tortuous mole-galleries. The perpetual false deification of Frederic bothered him, his wife's voice, lachrymose and thin, dinning in his ears, was an exasperation. He was busy, frantically busy, forcing his way with all the strength of his nature out of the slough of despond into which he had fallen, and she seemed intent on thrusting him out of the slough into a sea of treacly mud. At length, one day, when she had raised Frederic a peg higher in her idolatrous beatification, suddenly the truth was wrenched from him:

"Can you not see that he meant to kill himself?"

"Oh! Frank . . . !"

He could despitefully have bitten his tongue out for having said it, but, having done so, he owed it to her to go on. It might prove her salvation. It might bring her back to him so that together they might perceive and win to the ways of brightness.

"He took the pistol with him in his pocket. He had no luggage with him. He had locked the door of his office and paid up his clerks' wages and the premiums of his pupils."

"Oh! Frank . . . Oh! Frank!"

And Francis hoped that she would turn to him and understand, but her very anguish of sorrow she must turn to self-indulgence, and she moved from the luxury of worship to the luxury of self-accusation:

"We drove him to it. All of us. We never understood him."

She told Jessie, who was prostrated by the knowledge, and Mr. Clibran-Bell refused ever to enter the Folyats' house again.

Francis passed through the very blackest hours of all after that. He prayed to his God but was not comforted; his mind would run only in the harshest channels of the faith he had spent his life in teaching. The God he found was a jealous God, a God of cruelty and vengeance and punishment. In vain he told himself that this was the just visitation of sins. He could not believe it. All his spirit craved for the belief in mercy, the living eternity, the life everlasting. He was hemmed in by the habit of years, and long familiarity with things sacred, all the vocabulary of paradox that had flowed so easily from his lips week in, week out, year after year. He wanted the truth of it, but it was all words, words, words, a rain of fine dust falling upon his intelligence, blinding his eyes. He needed that in his religion which could square with and illuminate the facts of his existence, but ever the darkness grew more impenetrable.

For three weeks he went on mechanically with his work, going blindly through the ritual which he had fought so hard to establish, but always when he came to the Benediction and commended the congregation to the Peace of God, he knew, could not away with the knowledge, that there was no peace in his own heart, and he rebuked himself and called himself Hypocrite.

He could not take refuge in self-torment. His need was too great. He told himself that he no longer believed, and prayed for help in his unbelief. But there had always been faith in him. Nothing had ever shaken it. His necessity lay in the fact that the symbols he had always used were cheapened, worn, debased. His mind could not change. It was definitely cast in the story of the Godhead in Man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, born of the Virgin birth, persecuted and slain by the Jews to rise again in glory to the eternal salvation of souls. . . . The teaching of this gospel should, if it had any purpose, lead to noble life, a superb preparation for eternity. But whither had it led himself? To the smallest of small lives, to the ruin of two of his children, fallen into the very snares against which they had been warned with all the threats of eternal punishment and Hell fire at the command of an appointed minister of the Christian religion. . . . He tried to look beyond his own family, to see what effect the Gospel had had upon his parishioners and he could not disguise from himself the pitifulness of their condition. To consider the effect of the Christian religion upon the history of the world was too large an undertaking for him.

Serge had said that he was of those who believe that understanding is not vouchsafed to us. What did he mean? . . . Words haunted him:--"To justify the works of Man to God," or was it "To justify the works of God to Man"? Surely the last. The works of Man could not be justified. He felt himself to be near the clue he was seeking, but the effort to follow it was beyond him. For him the only tie between Man and God was Jesus Christ.

He read the Gospels, and soon gave up trying to unravel the hard sayings, but he read again and again every passage in which the words Love and Mercy occurred. They soothed him, and, reading over and over the gentleness of Jesus under persecution, he became softened and very tender, and sought the company of children, his grandchildren.

He rested for a fortnight and then took up his work, for one Sunday only. All the old business of threatening and hectoring and denouncing and holding the wrath of God back with prayer, and piling up mountains upon mountains of sin to teach the love and mercy of the Gospel through and after punishment, everlasting and relentless, was empty, all sound and fury.