Part 6

And still he looked at us, that remarkable old lecturer, his cudgel stayed in the air, his son at his feet; and his voice was the voice of a man who has drunk the vinegar of life, and his eyes were the eyes of a man who has seen Christ crucified. That is why we knew for certain, Tarlyon and I, that whatever that ancient man said was true and whatever he did was right. “Come away,” I whispered.

“You are right. It is your business,” cried Tarlyon across the sunlight--and, dear God, it was! For the thing happened then. We hadn’t noticed that the son had crawled from his father’s feet. And what we saw was a spade raised high in the sunlight, a spade crashing down and cleaving the patriarch’s head like an axe, so that the blood came out of it like the sap of a tight orange. Without a cry the old man fell, and red as his shirt were the stones of the yard beneath his head. The little old woman screamed. The son and his spade lay where Tarlyon’s right hand felled him, and Tarlyon knelt by the slaughtered old man. I couldn’t move. I took up the gored spade and held it, a silly gesture. My heart beat like a bell in my ears, and I remember there rose to my lips prayers that I thought I had forgotten.

“Quiet, for one moment,” I heard Tarlyon’s voice to the screaming old woman. I stared and wondered at my friend, kneeling there on the dyed stones and listening to the heart under the red shirt. I could not have done that. I hate a lot of blood.

Then he rose and came towards me. I hated the dark damp patches on his trouser-knees.

“Quite dead,” he said. “We must fetch the police.”

Of course, I thought. And together we looked down at the son on the ground. He was gibbering. He had gone mad. “Drat the boy!” said Tarlyon thoughtfully.

“I wonder,” I heard myself whisper, “what was the one sin the old man said was unpardonable?”

Tarlyon looked from the prostrate thing to me, and I saw that those slightly frozen blue eyes of his were as miserable as the eyes of a hurt girl. You see, that old man was a very remarkable old man, and he was dead....

“I don’t know,” he whispered back. “You and I, Ralph, and our friends, have become so civilised that we don’t know what the unpardonable sins are. We simply don’t _know_, old man! We are the world’s soft people, Ralph. We are so civilised that we pardon too much--both in ourselves and other people; and we call that being broad-minded, but it’s really being flabby. But that old man, I’m sure, was not “broad-minded,” he was as little “broad-minded” as Jehovah, and there was one sin he simply would not pardon. And we, who are civilised people, do not even know what it was....”

We stared silently at the poor gibbering thing at our feet.

“Better tie him up before leaving,” I suggested.

“Don’t you think,” said Tarlyon, “that one of us should stay here while----”

“I won’t stay here alone,” I said abruptly--and I meant it. Nothing would have induced me to stay alone in that ghastly sunlit spot, alone with that lunatic boy and the little old woman and the butchered patriarch. How she moaned, that little old woman kneeling on the blooded stones....

With a silk handkerchief for his ankles and one for his wrists, we trussed the poor boy against the kitchen door. He could not have been more than seventeen or so, and his young face was hideous with fear.

We left the place quickly; but I looked back just once at the scene, for it seemed to me very strange of the sun still to lie on it all like a carpet of gold. That is how I felt about it.

IV

Swiftly Tarlyon put the bonnet of his car to the direction from which we had come, where lay the town whose name is of no interest.

“How far is it, d’you think, Ralph?”

“About four miles,” I ventured; and Tarlyon proceeded to eat up those four miles as a conjuror eats up yards of ribbon. It perished beneath us, that road, and the roaring cut-out tore the silence of Carmion Wood into a million bits, and may it never have found them again! Neither of us spoke. I was feeling sick.

We reached the outskirts of the town, and a piece of luck saved us from inquiring for the police station; for, approaching us on a bicycle, we saw a blue, helmeted figure, and by the stripes on his arm we knew him for a sergeant of police. Tarlyon pulled up.

“Better leave the bicycle and come with us to Carmion Wood,” he said. “Explain as we go. Urgent.”

The sergeant looked closely into Tarlyon’s face.

“Right, sir,” said he, and quickly gave the custody of his bicycle to a gnarled-looking woman in the open doorway of a labourer’s dwelling.

“What’s oop over ut Carmion?” asked she.

“You may well ask,” said Tarlyon.

No laggard was that sergeant of police. A grizzled man, with a reticent face. I sat behind and heard Tarlyon explain. The sergeant said nothing, listening intently, until the end.

“Where did you say the house was, sir?” he asked then.

“I’ve just been telling you, man! In a little clearing in the wood.”

“Very good, sir,” said the sergeant of police.

Silently we sped into Carmion Wood.

“You see, sir,” said the sergeant, “it’s a powerful long time since I’ve been here. Folk roundabout mislike the wood.”

“Don’t feel very attached to it myself,” grunted Tarlyon. “Ah, here we are!”

But it was not going to be as easy as that. For when we left the car, at the identical spot where, we were certain, the little old woman had stopped us, we somehow lost our way. We wandered about for some time, up little twisting lanes, down tangled untidy lanes, up no lanes at all: we ploughed through the growth and lush of the wood, like angry flies beating about a crypt to which the sun filtered in tortured patches of light. We perspired enormously--and Tarlyon lost his temper. He had had no luncheon, you understand, and it was now past five; and so he was fluent in the forbidden language. But the sergeant of police was a tough and silent man, he neither sweated nor spoke.

“Where did you say the house was, sir?” asked the sergeant at last: and very amiably, I thought, considering....

“Oh,” says Tarlyon. “So you’ve heard me mention a house, have you!”

We stood very still, the three of us, and Tarlyon glared.

“Look here, sergeant,” he snarled, “if you ask me again where that house is I shall get cross.... I’ve told you, man! Body of God, if----”

“_Please_, sir!” said the sergeant quickly.

“What d’you mean by ‘Please, sir?’” Tarlyon was well away. It was a very warm day, you understand.

“I mean, sir,” said the sergeant of police, “please don’t swear on the name or the body of God.”

V

Well, we went on ... and, at last, unmistakably hit the path up which we had followed the little old woman. We followed the path, Tarlyon first, then me, then the sergeant. And then we came upon the clearing, and the sun lay on it like a carpet of gold. We stared. Like idiots, we stared. For, except the sun, there was nothing in that clearing but the rust and bones of a long-ruined house.

You had, of course, suspected as much. You had known that all along. You know all about those silent woods and slaughtered men. You have been let in before, by better men. But it was curious, all the same....

“Is this where you said the house was, sir?” the sergeant’s voice came gently.

We turned and looked at him.

“Because,” he went on, “there’s been no house here for more than thirty year....”

“Ah!” said Tarlyon; that was about as much as any one _could_ say. And our eyes wandered over the clearing, and we saw, bright against the mouldy stones of the ruin, two silk handkerchiefs....

Even the law was at last affected by the heat, for he raised his helmet and passed a hand over his almost bald head.

“Yes,” said the sergeant of police. “There was a house here thirty year ago, but it was burnt down by the men of the neighbourhood because of a great crime that was done there. Parricide it was, but the boy was pardoned, being judged mad, and mad he must have been to kill the best and most God-fearing man in the county. Good-day, sirs. I’ll walk my way back. Yours was just an illusion, I make no doubt. The sun, maybe. But it’s always had a bad name, has Carmion.... Good-day, sirs.” And the sergeant of police went his way.

“Did you see him, did you see his face?” I gasped frantically. For the face of the sergeant of police was the grown face of the lunatic boy we had trussed up an hour before with our two silk handkerchiefs, and they lying where we must have dropped them, drooping over the ruins....

“And he has learnt his lesson,” said Tarlyon, and his face was as still as the grey water of a rock-pool. “He has learnt his lesson, Ralph--and has taught me one. For the one sin that the old man said was unpardonable by all men is blasphemy....”

VII: THE CAVALIER OF THE STREETS

I

It would not have occurred to you that Mrs. Avalon was a discontented woman. It would not even have occurred to you that she could be, for what had she not? She was, of course, the wife of John Avalon, K.C. But she was more than that, she was Fay Avalon. Now of the lovely, the gracious Fay Avalon, what shall be said that has not already been said? She was a figure of the world, and in it most centrally situated. She had not pushed, but she was _there_. More, she was a figure of legend, remote and courteous. Every one knew about her, but of nothing against her, and this was so because she was a lady who never by any means sought any publicity but that which the love and respect of her wide acquaintance spread for her. She was, in fact, a darling. It was the fashion to speak well of Fay Avalon, and it is only shallow people who say that all fashions are shallow because they change. There is nothing in the world that does not change, and if fashions change oftener than most that is because--well, it is difficult to say exactly why that is, and anyway that is not the place for it.

Now why are people like sheep? But perhaps it would be better to ask: “Why, in nearly all novels and conversations, is there one law for the rich and another for the poor?” For in nearly all novels and conversations there is a sort of asinine implication that among the rich, the social, there is no real friendship, but that real friendship exists only among the poor. For years and years and years England has been living under a tyranny, a silly tyranny: it is called the middle-class, and it is belauded by all because nearly all belong to it. Now if a writer writes of the middle-class he is said to have a sense of the Reality of Life, but if he writes of the poor wretches who continue to eke out a miserable existence on their capital in Mayfair, it is said of him that he is writing of people who do not matter, people who are not worth writing about, people among whom none of the real emotions exist, and so on. The patricians never protest, for a gentleman is one who can take abuse properly, the same, of course, applying to a lady. But the others, the Backbone of England! Oh, what a Backbone that is, and how swiftly it becomes a jawbone when it is scratched by a well-aimed bit of contumely! But what does all that matter, particularly when we were talking of Fay Avalon, and how charming she was. She had many real friends, and these confided much in her, but in them she did not confide. Fay Avalon was not capable of telling even the least of her troubles to any one, for she was shy. Beneath her polish, her wit, her grave courtesy--a rare enchantment, that--her supreme ability as a hostess at whose table enemies were notably changed to friends, she was as shy as a girl. Never, never, in all her brilliant life, and it really was a very brilliant life, had she been able to exclude the idea that she might very easily bore people, that, in fact, she was not nearly so clever and amusing as other people. That is why she never confided: she only seemed to....

One of the many secrets that Fay Avalon hid within herself was that she was romantic, deeply. She had always been romantic. John Avalon, K.C., had never been romantic, and never knew anything of his wife’s trouble. He loved his wife jealously, but being a great K.C. is, of course, a very tiring way of life, and so he spent most of his time with her in sleeping.

Romance came into the life of Fay Avalon at a time when she would sometimes say: “I am older than most women.” She was thirty-eight years old, and so she was sorry for herself, and then romance came. It was Prince Nicholas Pavlovitch Shuvarov who brought it. He was, of course, a refugee from Bolshevy, and it was said that before the Revolution his people had owned half of Petrograd, as was only natural, for there are countless Russians of the old order in London and Paris whose people once owned halves of Petrograd, not to speak of the Grand Dukes who made such a mess of all of it. But Prince N. P. Shuvarov was charming, and he was an artist. You knew that because people went about saying he was charming and an artist. You were asked to respect him because he earned his living, and of course you did what you were asked, although you were not aware of any particular esteem instantly alight in the eyes of those to whom you volunteered the information that you worked in the City. But life is different for Russians, they look so tragic, even when drunk, and so one went on respecting old Shuvarov for earning his living. He did this amazing feat by going about doing ghastly drawings of his friends Lady This and Lady That, which he somehow sold to the illustrated journals of the week, where they appeared in all sorts of colours under headings like “The Third of Five Lovely Sisters” or “Popular Daughter of a Great American,” and boldly signed “Shuvarov.”

He was everywhere, in a quiet and pleasant way. Sometimes he was at Fay Avalon’s, but only sometimes at Fay Avalon’s. Superior people who had read Dostoeffsky called him Nicholas Pavlovitch, which is of course the proper way to address a Russian gentleman; while others just called him Shove-off, though not as though they meant it, for every one liked him. Women found him attractive. These Russians, they said, are so Sombre. Mrs. Mountjenkins said he had Magnetism. “One can feel it,” she said, “when he comes into a room.” Lady Carnal said he was charming and so _sound_.

In Prince Nicholas Pavlovitch Shuvarov, then, Mrs. Avalon found romance. No breath of scandal had even been breathed against her, and no such breath was breathed now. Her purity and her lovely aloofness were landmarks of London society in the second decade of this century. Colonel Repington, you will remember, remarked them in particular. During the period of the war alone he sat beside her thirty-eight times for luncheon, twenty-eight times for dinner, not to speak of the innumerable times when he said “Good-evening” to her in such a way that she not only heard him but answered him. He reports a conversation in which Fay Avalon was distinctly heard to say to the Home Secretary that she detested all secret vices like drugs and love, especially middle-aged love.

“One should live in public,” said Mrs. Avalon. “It is the private life that has ruined so many great lives and rotted so many good brains.”

“Quite,” said the Home Secretary. “Quite.” But in a few days he had to resign owing to liver trouble--so it was said--and Mrs. Avalon fell in love with Prince N. P. Shuvarov. Her one lapse, you understand. All her life she had longed for this one thing, romance; and at last it had come, in the sombre eyes of a stranger.

Mrs. Avalon did not know much about that Kind of Thing--the “private life”--but she knew a good deal about her friends, and that was a good deal more than she intended they should know about her. She organised her life to suit her love. It sounds beastly, that, but then you do not know Fay Avalon and I do, and that is why I know that nothing she did could ever be so beastly as if any one else did it, for she was a darling. As for Prince Shuvarov, he was Russian all the way and could organise nothing. She adored that....

II

Never, never, did they go anywhere, together: neither to the play, nor to a restaurant, nor to a ball; and only very seldom was he at her house, a guest among many. But every afternoon Fay Avalon would steal to her lover’s studio in a quiet street in Hampstead. Not, of course, in her car, but in a taxi.

And what a relief it was, to enter the dim, bare silence of that studio! The clatter of the voices of the luncheon-party she had just left faded instantly from her mind, a lovely mist came in between the unquiet delight of her heart and the usual labours of her life. She rested on a divan in a corner of that secret studio, while Shuvarov would pace about in his feverish way. It was a very bare studio, but it would not have remained so bare if she had had her way. Though, indeed, Fay Avalon, she who had so despised “the private life,” would have been shocked, she simply could not have helped being shocked, if he had not impatiently dismissed her offer to make of the studio a pavilion worthy of Babylonian lovers. “I make just enough money not to starve,” said Shuvarov. “And that is enough for any man.”

They were, of course, quite often unhappy, for Russians are like that. There were scenes, introspective and bitter, there were accusations, quarrels, reconciliations. It was some time before Mrs. Avalon realised that it is in the Slav Temperament to make violent scenes about nothing and then to yield adorably to passionate reconciliations. It was rather wearing for the nerves, she protested. “You have lived smoothly for too long,” he retorted in a harsh moment. “You have known no wretchedness, Fay, because you have _felt_ nothing! God, you Englishwomen! In Russia our women _live_, they _feel_....”

But Fay Avalon only sighed at that, certain that no woman anywhere could feel so much as she ... and she was a little afraid for herself, the way this thing she had not known before, this thing called love, had taken hold of her.

One day their privacy suffered a shock. Mrs. Avalon had just left the studio, in the evening, and had turned the corner into a more frequented street in search for a taxi, when a tall, shabby young man confronted her. He stood before her so that she could not pass, and his face mocked her, a lean face made very sinister by his nose, perhaps a fine nose once but now broken so that it inclined noticeably to one side. He examined her with a sneer in his eyes. She did not at first know it for a sneer, for no man had ever sneered at Fay Avalon before. He swept off his hat, a sardonic gesture, and he replaced it. It was a soft, dirty, dilapidated hat of the rakish sort, such as has been worn by every pirate that has ever been heard of.

“Good-evening, Mrs. Avalon,” said the shabby young man.

“I am afraid ...” doubtfully began Fay Avalon.

“Not at all!” said the shabby young man. He smiled graciously.

“It is my misfortune,” he said, “that we have not been introduced. I have not been going about very much in society lately, because of one thing and another. And I called you by your name merely to show you that I know who you are. I also know where you have been. I can’t, of course, say that I know exactly what you have been doing, but I can’t help thinking that your husband would have no doubt about it. Husbands are like that, madam. Juries are also like that. I wonder, Mrs. Avalon, if you will think me very boorish if I, well, insist on your lending me fifty pounds?”

The young man was very shabbily dressed, but he was so very unpleasant, so entirely and symmetrically unpleasant, that, she thought, he must once have been a gentleman. She stared at him, and she shivered a little. Perhaps, she thought, this is the first man I have ever met who has simply no desire to please me. Perhaps most men are only possible because they desire to please women. This one is unaffectedly foul....

“You are blackmailing me, then?” she asked him: and her voice did not tremble more than ever so little.

“Yes,” said the shabby young man. “And I am doing it as unpleasantly as I know how. I am sure, Mrs. Avalon, that you had rather I was unpleasant than that I made love, like the greasy blackmailers one meets in books. And, anyhow, I could not possibly compete with Prince Nicholas Pavlovitch Shuvarov. These foreigners, I am told, have the technique....”

She stared at him with unbelieving eyes. Could there be men such as this, so foul! To what awful depths of bitterness must this revolting man have sunk, that he could so wantonly and cruelly insult a stranger!

“I realise you dislike me very much,” said the young man with the broken nose. “But, even so, I should prefer that that matter of the fifty pounds should engage your attention more or less immediately.”

Mrs. Avalon shivered a little.

“Don’t, please, speak any more!” she breathed at last. “You seem to know so much that I am sure you know the address of my house. The telephone-book will, however, provide you with any details that may have escaped your attention. If you will call at noon to-morrow you will be given an envelope at the door. May I pass now, please?”

“Why, of course!” said he, and stood aside.

But somehow she did not pass immediately. She stared into his face with very wide, childish eyes, and there was a queer sort of hurt smile crucified in their depths.

“I have never been spoken to like this before,” she said. “Who are you?”

“I am the cavalier of the streets, madam,” said the tall shabby man with the broken nose. She stared at him very thoughtfully.

“And is that a good thing to be?”

The cavalier of the streets smiled curiously.

“I had thought, Mrs. Avalon, that it was I who was detaining you....”

“You see,” said Mrs. Avalon gently, “you are the vilest man I have ever met. You are probably the vilest man in the world, and so I am curious. You will have your fifty pounds. Or would you not prefer a hundred?”

But the ice of Fay Avalon did not freeze the cavalier of the streets.

“I do not accept presents from ladies,” he said. “Fifty is business, but the extra fifty is an insult to a gentleman.” He smiled right into her face. “You may pass, Mrs. Avalon.”

“You are a gentleman? You were, perhaps, you mean?”

“A gentleman,” said the shabby young man, “is a man who is never _unintentionally_ rude to any one. I am a gentleman.”

He stood aside, and swept off his dilapidated hat. She took one step, two, three....

“I do hope,” she murmured swiftly, “that I will never see you again.”

The lean, weathered face with the fantastic nose mocked her. Fay Avalon had never been mocked before.

“Didn’t I tell you,” he said, “that I was the cavalier of the streets? I am alone, the solitary supporter of chivalry and all manner of outdoor manliness. Thus, it will be very difficult to resist the pleasure of seeing you again, Mrs. Avalon, for you are, without a doubt, a darling. But I will try to resist it, really I will....”

“Please,” said Mrs. Avalon, and went swiftly.

III

The next afternoon Mrs. Avalon had promised to appear at a charity _matinée_ in a playful duologue between Cleopatra and a hearty gentleman alleged to be Mark Antony’s valet; and as she had never gone to the trouble of acquiring a reputation as unreliable--in fact, Fay Avalon was born with “careless habits of accuracy”--and though she was feeling less like Cleopatra than she had ever felt in her life, it was only after she had done her duty by the charity _matinée_ that she set out for the quiet street in Hampstead.