Part 11

At night he made his own tea as usual, and walked up and down the room, often looking at the clock, until it was time to go across to the chapel. He saw the people passing his window on their way; some of them looked in, saw him, and nodded in a friendly manner. He looked again at the clock; now it was time for him to go, and he went into a corner of the room, knelt down, and prayed to God for strength to deny him. Then he walked rapidly across to the chapel.

The chapel was very full, it seemed to him oppressively hot, and he felt the blood flushing his forehead. Many of the people remembered afterwards that they had noticed something strange in his manner from the moment in which he set foot on the steps of the pulpit. They were quick to recognise the outward signs of a flame lighted within; and they anticipated a fine sermon. His first prayer was very short, but it was like a last confession. Each word seemed to live with a sharp, painful life of its own; the words cried out, and called down heaven for an answer. The text was a verse out of the twenty-fourth chapter of St. Matthew: 'Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not.' It was not the first time he had chosen a strange text. He began slowly, and with an unusual solemnity. It seemed to him that they were not understanding him aright. As he went on, his voice, which had at first been low, grew louder; he spoke as if he were hurrying through some message which had been laid upon him to deliver; yet with the calmness of one who has mastered his own fever. He was speaking the most terrible words they had ever heard, and they were at first too bewildered even to think. As he went on, they began to look at one another, wondering if he were mad or they; one or two women near the door got up quietly and went out; men stirred in their seats; a great shudder went through the whole congregation. Blasphemies such as they had never dreamed of filled their ears, dazed their senses; and Seaward Lackland stood there calmly, like a martyr, one of them said afterwards; the sweat stood out on his forehead, but he spoke in an even voice: was it Seaward Lackland or was it the devil who stood there denying God, denying the Holy Spirit? There were those who looked up at the ceiling above them, thinking that the roof would fall in and bury them with the blasphemer. But as heaven did not stir in its own defence, it was for them to assume the defence of heaven. An old class leader stood up in his pew, near the communion-rail, and turning his back on the preacher, said in a loud voice: 'I entreat you all to listen to this man no longer, but to go instantly home, and pray God Almighty to forgive you for what you have heard this day.' Lackland stood silent, and every one in the chapel got up and went quickly out, the old class-leader the last; and Lackland was left alone in the chapel, standing before the open Bible in the pulpit. He fell on his knees and covered his face with his hands: 'O God, forgive me,' he prayed, 'for what I have done for thee to-day.'

* * * * *

From that day Seaward Lackland was an outcast in the village. The mates with whom he shared the boat and the nets refused to go to sea in his company, lest they should share a judgment reserved for him, and all be drowned together. He accepted his fate without protest, and, as one thing after another slipped out of his hands, made no complaint. When there was nothing else for him to do, he drove a cart which used to carry the fish from the boats to the salting-cellars, and afterwards from the cellars to the railway station, where they were sent in barrels to the nearest port for Genoa and Leghorn. He was too poor now to live in his cottage, and housed with some others as poor as himself, in a half-fallen shanty on the way to Lelant. Even his housemates mocked him, and held themselves more decent folks than he. It was thought that his brain had weakened, for he became more and more eccentric in his ways, and got to talk with himself, for hours together, in a low voice, but with the gestures of one explaining something to an unseen disputant. One day as he was racing up the hill by the side of his cart, urging on the horses, his foot slipped, and he fell under the near wheel, which had crushed into his breast-bone before the horses could be stopped. He was carried back, and laid on his ragged bed; and was just able to ask those about him to fetch the minister from St. Ives. He was not quite dead when the minister came, and he said 'Amen,' simply, to the prayer which the minister offered up for him. Then, as he seemed anxious to say something, the minister stooped down, and, to help him, said: 'Perhaps you want to tell us why you sinned against God ...' he was going to add, 'and that you repent of it, and hope for salvation,' but the dying man, in a very faint but ecstatic voice, said: 'Because I loved God more than I loved myself'; and so died, with a great joy on his face. But the minister shook his head sorrowfully, not understanding what he meant.

EXTRACTS FROM THE JOURNAL OF HENRY LUXULYAN.

When Henry Luxulyan died in Venice, a few years ago, he left a written request that all his papers should be sent to me under seal. He was a townsman of mine, and that, I think, had been almost the only link between us, though I had known him from childhood, and we used to meet, more or less accidentally, and at long intervals, all through his life. As a boy he had few friends; he did not seek them; and I was never sure that he looked upon me as in any real sense a friend. It was always vaguely supposed that he was very clever, and as he took part in no boyish games, and did not ride, or swim, or even walk much, but seemed to brood, and linger, and be thinking, it was supposed that he had interests of his own, and would one day be or do something remarkable. He was never communicative about anything, but once or twice in later years, he spoke to me of his historical studies, and I gathered that he was making researches (for a book, I supposed) into the life of Attila: a subject remote and gloomy enough, I thought, to be naturally attractive to him. For some years I lost sight of him altogether, and then, to my surprise, met him at the house of a German Baron and his wife, who were settled in London, where they entertained lavishly. It was the last house at which I had ever expected to meet him; though indeed the Baroness was a woman of considerable learning, and very intelligent and sympathetic. I found that he had become her librarian, and was living in the house. He looked ill and restless. Whenever I dined at the house, he was always there. I noticed that the Baroness treated him more like a friend than a librarian; appealing to him on every occasion as if he had the management of the whole household. I never had much private talk with him, but he seemed glad to see me, and referred sometimes, but never very definitely, to his work, which I encouraged him to persevere with. He seemed almost pathetically alone; but I remembered that he had never cared to be otherwise. The nervous restlessness which I had observed in him was more marked every time that I saw him; and it was with no surprise that I heard he had broken down, and was in Venice, trying to recover. But it was in Venice that he took the fever of which he died.

I never knew why he left that strange request that his papers should be sent to me; nor was there any message among them, or the least indication of what he wanted me to do with them. Most of them were concerned with the life of Attila, but there were not three properly finished chapters; and the mass of fragments, quotations, references, tentative notes, mutually destructive and unresolved conjectures, baffled my utmost endeavours, and remained for me, and I fear must always remain, so much lost labour, like an enigma of which the key is missing. But in the midst of these papers, thrust as if hurriedly into one of the bundles, so that the string had cut into the outer leaves of loose manuscripts, there was a thin book bound in parchment, almost filled with Luxulyan's close, uneasy writing. It was a journal, many times begun and relinquished, ending with a date not many days before his death. Between the pages were two letters, in a woman's handwriting. I burnt the letters without reading them; then I read the journal.

What I print here is printed with but few omissions; only I have changed the names, and not left any allusion, as far as I know, to circumstances which it is likely that any one could easily identify. For the omissions I make myself wholly responsible; as, indeed, for the printing of the journal at all. It seems to me a genuine document; odd, disconcerting, like the man who wrote it; profoundly disconcerting to me, on reading it, as I discovered the real subterranean being whom I had known, during his lifetime, only by a few, scarcely perceptible outlines on the surface. Such as it is, I give it here, reserving till afterwards something more which I shall have to say by way of comment or epilogue.

* * * * *

April 5.--I have been talking with the doctor to-day, and he tells me that my nerves are seriously out of order. There, of course, he is quite right, and he tells me nothing I did not know already. Only, why tell me? That is just what it does me no good to think about. If I am to keep in even so shaky an equilibrium as this, which at least might be worse, it is essential for me to forget there is any danger. What folly, to be a doctor and honest!

For my part, I was quite frank with him. I told him it was terrible, to be alone and to think about death every day of one's life. He put out a soothing hand professionally, and began to say something about 'with care' and 'I see no reason why,' and so forth; 'no reason why, with care, you should not live, well----' 'How long,' I interrupted him, as he hesitated. 'Thirty years, forty years,' he said confidently, 'why not? I tell you there is no reason why you should not die an old man.' And he thought he was comforting me! I only said, 'It is horrible.' 'In heaven's name,' he said, with real amazement, 'what is horrible?' I told him: this dwindling away, this continual losing of all the forces that hold one to life, this inevitable encroachment of the other thing, the darkness; and the uncertainty of it all, except the ending. 'Come now,' he said, as if he were arguing with a child, 'be reasonable; you don't expect to live for ever?' 'That is just it,' I said; and then I put it to him: 'don't you find it horrible to think of?' 'I never think of it,' he said. 'I have to see to it every day. One accustoms oneself to the things one sees every day. You brood over it because it is hidden away from you.'

He said that as if he was saying something fine, courageous, even intelligent.

I shivered as he spoke so lightly of seeing people die every day, and I said, 'You think nothing of it!' 'To me,' he said, more seriously, 'it is the one quite natural thing in the world. One is tired, one lies down, one sleeps. And even if one isn't conscious of being tired, there is nothing so good as sleep.' It struck me that he was quoting from Marcus Aurelius, in a sort of roundabout way, and I let him go on talking; but when he looked at me and said: 'I have never met any one before who worried over the thought that he would have to die when he was seventy, eighty, ninety: how do you know you won't live to be ninety?' the simplicity of the man struck me as being laughable; a child could have reasoned better, and I said: 'If I live to be ninety I shall never have passed a day without thinking about death, and I know that I am logically right in never losing sight of the only thing in the world which is of infinite importance. You call it morbid, but what if only I am wide awake, after all, and you others are walking straight into a pit with your eyes shut?' It was then that he repeated that my nerves were seriously out of order. He told me that I must find distraction. In other words, I must shut my eyes from time to time. Well, there is no doubt about it. That is what I must try to do. But how?

* * * * *

April 6.--I suppose it is only because I am nervous, and because the doctor told me I must not live so much by myself, but I am beginning to think again about Clare, and I had not thought of her for a long time. When one has lived with a woman, in the same house with her, every day and every night for three years: think, there are one thousand and ninety-five days in three years! well, something remains, in the very look and touch of the furniture, in the treacherous blank of the mirrors, which forget nothing, and hide so much, something that will never wholly go; and I must not expect to release my senses, as I have released my mind and my will, from the power of that woman.

Only, the less I think about her the better; and there is no danger of my wanting her back again. That would be singularly inconvenient, if, as I can but suppose, she is perfectly happy with that ordinary person whom she had the curious taste to prefer to me. One must guard against being ridiculous, even when one is alone with oneself, and I am content to seem no hero to this serviceable valet, my journal; but it is partly the incapacity of good taste in them that makes women so intolerable. There are men of whom I have said to myself: Now, if Clare fell in love with this man, or that man, it would seem to me so natural, so legitimate; I could almost despise her for not submitting to a fascination which is insensitive not to feel. But a poseur, a fop, a cad; one of those men whom every man sees through at the first hand-shake; a sleek flatterer, whose compliments are vulgarities; the shopman air of 'inquire within upon everything'; yes, that is the man who takes his choice of women. Is vulgarity a curable thing? and will the vulgarity of women ever be cultured out of them?

I once tried to believe that there are women and women; but I have never found that the 'and' meant anything essential.

* * * * *

April 7.--I dined out at night, with my Jew friends, the Kahns, whom I have not cared to see for so long; and the distraction has done me good. They were charming, sympathetic, not obtrusively anxious about me; they welcomed me as if I were really a friend; and there were some pleasant people at the dinner-table. Only, I do not understand how they could ask to dinner a certain Baroness von Eckenstein who was there. One should preserve a certain decency in intercourse; there are things one should be spared! I sat opposite to her, and she talked to me a good deal across the table; she seemed intelligent; she might be all that is admirable. Her figure was firm, ample, almost majestic, and the face had once been not less finely designed, but over the whole left side, from the forehead to the neck, there was a great white scar, shapeless, horribly white, and scored as with deep cuts, which had formed cicatrices of a yet more ghastly white. The bloodless and livid skin, ploughed and wrinkled with these raised cicatrices, was drawn tightly over the cheek-bone. The eyelid, strangely misshapen, was alone the natural colour of flesh, but this eyelid looked as if it were artificially attached to the underpart of the eyebrow, and on the forehead above the eye there was a white scar, as if the flesh had been cut away to form the eyelid. I dared not look at her, and yet, in spite of myself, my eyes kept seeking her face. A death's head would be a more agreeable companion at table. They tell me she is newly come to London, very rich, very hospitable; Mrs. Kahn, with her intolerable indulgence, means to make a friend of her; if I go there again I am sure to meet her, and only the thought of that disgrace of nature makes me shiver. Must I cut myself off again from just what had promised to be a real distraction? I will stay at home, work, not think, bury myself in my books.

* * * * *

April 8.--I realise, on thinking it over in a perfectly calm mood, without any sort of nervous excitement, that I have always been afraid of women; and that is one reason, the chief perhaps, why I have always been so lonely, both when Clare was with me, and before and after it. Just as I cannot get out of my head that there is some concealed conspiracy against me, in earthly things, so there seems to be, in the other sex, a kind of hidden anger or treachery, which makes me uneasy. I was never really happy when a woman sat on the other side of the table, at the other corner of the fireplace. Vigny was right:

'Toujours ce compagnon dont le coeur n'est pas sûr.'

I will quote no more: the verse becomes Biblical; and indeed it is of Samson and Delilah. Just what attracts me in a woman revolts me: the 'love strong as death,' which is no more than 'la candeur de l'antique animal,' raised to the power of self-expression. It bewilders, distracts yes, terrifies me. That women are better and worse than we think them, I am certain; and no doubt nature was wise in setting us on our knees before the enigma. To be so mysterious and so contemptible! Merely for us to think that, shuts us away from them, our possible friends, as by a great wall, outside which there can be only enemies. We capitulate, perhaps, but it is the enemy who has conquered.

* * * * *

April 9.--I have been working hard, going nowhere, and I suppose staying indoors too much. I begin to be restless again. The Kahns have written asking me to dine with them on Sunday: will that woman be there? Hans Greger is coming with his old music, and I should like to hear the viols and harpsichord again. I think I must go.

Meanwhile some rumours of war which I read on the newspaper placards have set me puzzling over one of my favourite enigmas. Is it not incredible that there should be people in the world who will kill one another, and even themselves, for any one of a multitude of foolish reasons? As if life was not short enough at the longest, and one's bodily pains troublesome enough without even the added risk of accidents; and yet we must do our best to aid the enemy of us all; we must make ourselves lieutenants of death; and for what? The thing begins in our fantasies of honour, precedence, patriotism, or by whatever name, big or small, we choose to christen the tiny germ of unreason. War reduces to an absurdity, with its pompous mortal emphasis, the whole argument. I have been thinking out a theory of this disease of humanity, to which scientific people should have given a name. It might be studied, in cellars, as they study bacilli.

* * * * *

April 10.--To-day has been one of those days in which London becomes intolerable. The dust-carts in the street, the reek of chop-houses, the unwashed bodies in frowsy clothes, stink on the air, and the air is too heavy to drain off this odious foulness, and one breathes it, and seems to sicken. I am sure some loathsome gas is rising up out of the canal under my windows; my head turns if I lean out and look over; and now it is between two lights, almost too dark to see by daylight and not dark enough to draw the curtains and turn on the electric light. It is the time of day that I hate most; it is the only time of the day when I actively want to be doing something, and when I am acutely miserable because I have nothing to do.

The last half-hour, since I wrote these words, has been as miserable a half-hour as I remember spending in my life. And yet there is nothing to account for it, except this absurd sensitiveness which is growing upon me. Why is it that one clings to life when it bores one in this manner? I am not sure that I have ever felt what people call the joy of living: life has always seemed to me a more or less ridiculous compromise; and yet there is nothing I dread so much as any sort of truth, the truth which might put an end, once and for all, to this compromise. Was there ever any one so illogical? I hate life, and yet I want to go on living for ever. Sometimes, coming back at night, after a concert in which some great music has struck one into a profound seriousness, a strange and terrifying sensation takes hold of me as the cab turns suddenly, out of a tangle of streets, into a broad road between trees and houses: one enters into it as into a long dimly lighted alley, and at the end of the road is the sky, with one star hung like a lantern upon the darkness; and it seems as if the sky is at the end of the road, that if one drove right on one would plunge over the edge of the world. All that is solid on the earth seems to melt about one; it is as if one's eyes had been suddenly opened, and one saw for the first time. And the great dread comes over me: the dread of what may be on the other side of reality. And it seems as if all the years of the longest life, measured out into days and hours, would not be long enough to hold me back from the horror of that plunge.

* * * * *

April 11.--She deceived me: all women deceive. I have no right to condemn her any more than I condemn my doctor for deceiving me when I am ill. He tells me: You will be better to-morrow; knowing that the only way to make me better is to make me think I am going to be so. It would be worse for us if women did not deceive us.

She was vain, selfish, sensual: should I have cared for her if she had not been all three? To almost everybody she seemed gentle and modest: was it really that I knew her better, or did everybody else know something about her which I had never discovered? That is the odd thing which I am beginning to wonder. She lived with me for three years, and then left me. Whose fault was it that she left me after three years? In this wholly unusual state of humility in which I find myself at present, I cannot say that the fault was not partly mine, and partly that she was a woman. What a thing it is to be a woman, and how perplexing are even their virtues! They are not made, as we are, all of a piece; they are not made to be consistent; they think so little of what we think so much of; even sex is a light, simple, and natural thing to them, to which they attach none of our morbid valuations. It is for all this that, when I am not in this particular mood, I hate and fear them; but to-day it all seems so natural, and women themselves seem so pardonable. Think of the daily habits of their life: how many times a day they dress and undress themselves, and all it means. With each new gown a woman puts on a new self, made to match it. All day long they are playing the comedian, while we do but sit in the stalls, listen, watch and applaud. At least the play is for our entertainment; we pay them to act it: let us be indulgent if the acting is not always to our taste.

* * * * *

April 13.--I have just come from the Kahns'. Certainly there is no music like this old, tinkling, unwearied music of Greger's for giving one a sort of phantom or ghostly peace, as if the present faded into the distance, and life became a memory, half sad and half happy, and above all not too poignant. I can no longer allow myself to hear Wagner, much less Tschaikowsky: music made to make people suffer.