Chapter 13
manage to set the fellow on his feet. Even there he does absolutely take one’s imagination. I shall never forget the thrill of picking him up in the Charing Cross Road. You see, I had known the queer old tombstone for years. He’s enormously vivid—quite beyond my feebleness to describe, with a kind of French verve and rapture. Unluckily we can’t get nearer than two years to his death. I shouldn’t mind guessing some last devastating dream swept over him, held him the breath of an instant too long beneath the wave, and he caved in. We know he killed himself; and perhaps lived to regret it ever after.
‘After all, what is this precious dying we talk so much about?’ Herbert continued after a while, his eyes restlessly wandering from shelf to shelf. ‘You remember our talk in the churchyard? We all know that the body fades quick enough when its occupant is gone. Supposing even in the sleep of the living it lies very feebly guarded. And supposing in that state some infernally potent thing outside it, wandering disembodied, just happens on it—like some hungry sexton beetle on the carcase of a mouse. Supposing—I know it’s the most outrageous theorising—but supposing all these years of sun and dark, Sabathier’s emanation, or whatever you like to call it, horribly restless, by some fatality longing on and on just for life, or even for the face, the voice, of some “impossible she” whom he couldn’t get in this muddled world, simply loathing all else; supposing he has been lingering in ambush down beside those poor old dusty bones that had poured out for him such marrowy hospitality—oh, I know it; the dead do. And then, by a chance, one quiet autumn evening, a veritable godsend of a little Miss Muffet comes wandering down under the shade of his immortal cypresses, half asleep, fagged out, depressed in mind and body, perhaps: imagine yourself in his place, and he in yours!’ Herbert stood up in his eagerness, his sleek hair shining. ‘The one clinching chance of a century! Wouldn’t you have made a fight for it? Wouldn’t you have risked the raid? I can just conceive it—the amazing struggle in that darkness within a darkness; like some dazed alien bee bursting through the sentinels of a hive; one mad impetuous clutch at victory; then the appalling stirring on the other side; the groping back to a house dismantled, rearranged, not, mind you, disorganised or disintegrated....’ He broke off with a smile, as if of apology for his long, fantastic harangue.
Lawford sat listening, his eyes fixed on Herbert’s colourless face. There was not a sound else, it seemed, than that slightly drawling scrupulous voice poking its way amid a maze of enticing, baffling thoughts. Herbert turned away with a shrug. ‘It’s tempting stuff,’ he said, choosing another cigarette. ‘But anyhow, the poor beggar failed.’
‘Failed?’
‘Why, surely; if he had succeeded I should not now be talking to a mere imperfect simulacrum, to the outward illusion of a passing likeness to the man, but to Sabathier himself!’ His eyes moved slowly round and dwelt for a moment with a dark, quiet scrutiny on his visitor.
‘You say a passing likeness; do you _mean_ that?’
Herbert smiled indulgently. ‘If one _can_ mean what is purely a speculation. I am only trying to look at the thing dispassionately, you see. We are so much the slaves of mere repetition. Here is life—yours and mine—a kind of plenum in vacuo_. It is only when we begin to play the eavesdropper; when something goes askew; when one of the sentries on the frontier of the unexpected shouts a hoarse “Qui vive?”_—it is only then we begin to question; to prick our aldermen and pinch the calves of our kings. Why, who is there can answer to anybody’s but his own satisfaction just that one fundamental question—Are we the prisoners, the slaves, the inheritors, the creatures, or the creators of our bodies? Fallen angels or horrific dust? As for identity or likeness or personality, we have only our neighbours’ nod for them, and just a fading memory. No, the old fairy tales knew better; and witchcraft’s witchcraft to the end of the chapter. Honestly, and just of course on that one theory, Lawford, I can’t help thinking that Sabathier’s raid only just so far succeeded as to leave his impression in the wax. It doesn’t, of course, follow that it will necessarily end there. It might—it may be even now just gradually fading away. It may, you know, need driving out—with whips and scorpions. It might, perhaps, work in.’
Lawford sat cold and still. ‘It’s no good, no good,’ he said, ‘I don’t understand; I can’t follow you. I was always stupid, always bigoted and cocksure. These things have never seemed anything but old women’s tales to me. And now I must pay for it. And this Nicholas Sabathier; you say he was a blackguard?’
‘Well,’ said Herbert with a faint smile, ‘that depends on your definition of the word. He wasn’t a flunkey, a fool, or a prig, if that’s what you mean. He wasn’t perhaps on Mrs Grundy’s visiting list. He wasn’t exactly gregarious. And yet in a sense that kind of temperament is so rare that Sappho, Nelson, and Shelley shared it. To the stodgy, suety world of course it’s little else than sheer moonshine, midsummer madness. Naturally, in its own charming and stodgy way the world kept flickering cold water in his direction. Naturally it hissed.... I shall find the book. You shall have the book; oh yes.’
‘There’s only one more question,’ said Lawford in a dull, slow voice, stooping and covering his face with his hands. ‘I know it’s impossible for you to realise—but to me time seems like that water there, to be heaping up about me. I wait, just as one waits when the conductor of an orchestra lifts his hand and in a moment the whole surge of brass and wood, cymbal and drum will crash out—and sweep me under. I can’t tell you Herbert, how it all is, with just these groping stirrings of that mole in my mind’s dark. You say it may be this face, working in! God knows. I find it easy to speak to you—this cold, clear sense, you know. The others feel too much, or are afraid, or—Let me think—yes, I was going to ask you a question. But no one can answer it.’ He peered darkly, with white face suddenly revealed between his hands. ‘What remains now? Where do _I_ come in? What is there left for _me_ to do?’
And at that moment there sounded, even above the monotonous roar of the water beyond the window—there fell the sound of a light footfall approaching along the corridor.
‘Listen,’ said Herbert; ‘here’s my sister coming; we’ll ask her.’