CHAPTER I

HAIRPIN VISION

Stuart said: “Everything’s worth dying for, or else nothing would be worth living for.”

“You mean,” Peter queried, “that dying and living are of equal unimportance?”

“Equal importance.”

They were seated side by side upon a luggage-truck, in a deserted vaulty corner on the outskirts of Euston. In front of them were ranged battalions of empty luggage-trucks, standing stiffly at attention. From far away rolled in waves the hollow reverberating echoes that are part of a great terminus. All about them, enormous stone pillars stood sentinel, their tops presumably lost in a murky infinity; but robbed of majesty by the absurd fretwork of vine-leaves that encircled their base.

The occupants of this draughty suburb were not so much waiting for a train to convey Peter to Thatch Lane, as awaiting the moment they themselves should be seized by desire for a train; when, strolling forth to investigate, they usually found the very article just about to leave the platform. Such was the never-waning influence of Stuart’s star, in which, by dint of her proximity, Peter had assumed a share, with the same ease as she would have displayed coming under another’s umbrella.

--“Of equal importance,” Stuart maintained, reverting to their argument; “if death be essential for the completion of a moment, no person ought to let their rubbishy life stand in the way. The moment’s the thing. To walk about attaching such a tremendous weight to the value of the-breath-in-my-body, and none at all to the fun which can be extracted from ignoring it, is the unbalanced attitude of all people who have no sense of form.”

Peter was straining to follow him; she could almost hear her brain creak with the effort.

“If by the hairpin vision, you glimpse an act as needing for completion the sacrifice of your life, you’d give it?”

“Every time. By way of proving the vital importance of the act. And if all were to throw themselves more recklessly into the impersonal spirit of formation, we’d be done with age and illness, with fears and frets and muddle and blind gropings. Hanging-on is the evil. I’d like to make a pool, a Greatest Common Factor, into which each man is ready at all times to chuck his life for the sake of living, snap the thread for the sake of the pattern.”

“H’m. It’s superb, but does it hold water? The gift of supreme selflessness----”

“Supreme priggishness! ’Tisn’t that. It’s to a fellow’s personal advantage to see just where he’s going, where to stop, where to snap. The vision demands certain sacrifice, of course.” Stuart chuckled. “I’m pleased with the notion of offering myself as a burnt-offering to myself,” he declared; “such a compliment!”

Peter chanted: “And they could not find an ox nor an ass, nor a signpost nor a manservant, nor diamonds nor decanters, nor pork nor porridge, worthy to be sacrificed to the supreme master of all, son of the house of Heron. Then himself uprose, and stripped him of his braces and other adornments of the flesh----”

But the metaphysician was again in the ascendant; leprechaun had but drummed an instant with shaggy heels, to make sure of not being forgotten.

“Peter, we must know when to cut, you and I. There’ll come the moment, inevitably; and if we don’t act in time, it will be done for us, and just too late.”

“When the last juice is out of the orange,” she quoted.

“And the taste of the skin is already bitter in the mouth.” He considered her steadfastly: “I wonder if you are up to it,” he mused; “it would be rather a magnificent stunt, really and truly to cheat the gods of their aftermath. Could you, Peter? You devil, I believe you could ... I’m not sure that I want you defiant enough for that.”

Thus Stuart to the conception of Peter which he had built from his own desire and from the cavalier tilt of her head. And seeing clearly his Portrait-of-a-Lady; battle-eager and brain-clear and courageous; glorying in freedom from all bondage; a lady with mockery on her lips, and sudden moods of tenderness in her soul, as of mist veiling softly a shining sword; swift in recovery after defeat; tempered at all times to fine adjustment of the spirit to circumstance and adventure; and withal a lady mysterious and unexpected, but of bodily hardihood like to a man’s; and, above everything, able to stand alone and without him;--seeing all this, and finding the portrait attractive, she had played up to it; at first for fun; then because it came as natural to do so as not; then for his sake; finally, because she could no more extricate herself.

One effort indeed she had made in the latter direction: “Stuart, has it ever struck you that you have mixed the oranges in your basket? and when you think to be employed with mine, it is your own you are busily sucking all the while.”

He laughed, not grasping the significance of what she said. “What of it?”

“Well--no wonder you approve of the flavour!”

“You’re a dentist, Peter!” he cried then, exasperated; “you bring forth the hidden molars of my mind, molars of which I myself am not even aware, and dangle them on your nasty little pincers, saying: ‘Look, this is yours!’ It’s a horrid, a most reprehensible trick.”

She abandoned the attempt at revelation; continued to respond to his conception of her: never to tell him when she was tired; never to own that she had need of him; never to let him see her afraid; never to ask his help in trouble. Herein lay the primary rules to be observed. And she had learnt from him actually to enjoy the utmost limits of strain; found exhilaration in the knowledge that after all, she was top-dog in the silent battle, since she had so successfully restrained her real nature from proclaiming to him its hidden wants and weaknesses. Top-dog--a pity that this superiority must be for ever kept secret, when one considered how he would be annoyed at the information.

Nevertheless, she doubted if her powers were capable of this final test, complete severance at the topmost summit of happiness, in avoidance of descent on the further side. This was super-girl he demanded now. Perversely, she experienced a hatred of his talk of evanescence and the separation to come; wished to hear the old foolish “for-ever-an’-ever” on his lips, the old mad belief in immortality of love, which her reason rejected so scornfully. Were they a pair of fools too clever for love? Peter questioned silently of the luggage-trucks. Beyond the fading rails, beyond the last red-eyed signal-box, a train-whistle hooted derisively.

“Stuart, if we went on without use of the shears, what do you see in store for us?”

Resting his chin on his hands, he gazed beyond the towering pillars, as if in the attempt to throw a loop around the future and pull it into his line of vision.

“Knowledge of each other, worst of all. Knowledge that is bound to widen, and each day lick up a little more of the unknown territory, till none remains. I shall fight hard not to know you, Peter; not to anticipate your attitude, or expect your unexpectedness, or follow too confidently and without trepidation your mental twists and turns. But it’s a losing fight. And one day we shall experience a sensation of things commonplace, the tingle gone from them.”

“We won’t tell....”

“No, we won’t tell; we’ll try and whip up by artificial means. I might marry you in that mood--from a sort of desperation at having pushed beyond desire. There are no hills and no stars in the country that lies beyond desire. I think, seeing it, one of us will make a half-hearted attempt to break. But too late to glory in the break; it will merely be odious and necessary, with the past already spoiled, and the future rather bleak; a break complicated by entanglements and--oh, other people! So we shall drift together again, as a matter of habit, somewhat ashamed of ourselves----”

Peter was seeing it now: “You will begin to take me for granted, and not strain to please me. And I--I might possibly become exacting----”

“That phase would pass as well. We should grow older, more comfortable, wonder what the uneasiness had all been about, and the sense of loss. Impulse would slip away and topsy-turvydom and conceit”--Stuart waxed pathetic at the contemplated loss of his insufferable bumptiousness,--“and, sane together, we will wonder we could ever have been mad together. If I must age to sanity, damn it! I’ll face the process alone.”

“You won’t remember ... but I shall, on anniversaries. I hate dates, but I can’t break them of their meaning--that’s my sex coming through. Anniversaries ... when I shall have known you a year--two years--three--Stuart, I’m frightened of the years; I want to be meeting you again for the first time.”

“We haven’t come to that yet. But when we do--the world may label me a brute or you a jilt; they may expect you to cling, or me to reproach; they may talk of the steady affection which grows and subsists upon a durable basis of mutton-fat,--but when we touch top, Peter, as we two shall do simultaneously, because we are level, then it’s: ‘Thanks for what you’ve given me, and good-bye,’ proudly and cleanly. I never thought I should meet the genius of life who could do that.” And he repeated softly his tribute: “You are a genius of life, Peter....”

Then, fearful of an imposed descent from the clear heights, he gave a rapid exhibition of his own unprompted skill at banister-sliding: “Eleven times two is twenty-two!” he recited, awestruck, catching sight of figures roughly scrawled in white chalk on the pillars opposite; “eleven times three is thirty-three! O, far-reaching hand of education----”

“Not so far,” laughed Peter, following him down with remarkable celerity; “eleven times eleven is _not_ a hundred and eleven, well, not usually! and our unknown mathematician seems himself to have had doubts on the subject, for he has broken off at that juncture of reckoning.”

Stuart evoked a touching image of the Self-Improving Porter, hoping one day to be a County Councillor; and stealing away from his soulless burden of trundling, to practise his tables in stillness and solitude upon the props of Euston.

“Euston more than any other place will be a home of ghosts, after we have finally torn ourselves asunder,” remarked Peter, as they strolled through dim archways into the circular booking-hall. “You, of course, can avoid the building; but unless I contrive to alight always at Kilburn, which will be inconvenient, my raw wounds will be kept well salted.” She glanced down at the sprawling silent figures from which the wooden benches were never free; phantom figures for ever waiting for some phantom train; never moving, never asking,--indissoluble adjuncts to the mystery of Euston. “I will not consent to have my feelings lacerated in chance fashion,” she declared; “I’m going to take you now, and solemnly lay you, as a hen lays eggs, in different portions of the building; so that in years to come I shall know exactly at what points to wince with a sudden pain. If we arrange our own exists, we will also premeditate our own agonies.”

Peter had not yet learnt to refrain from playing at God.

So thrice they sought to trespass in the gallery which, close up to the smoke-black ceiling, ringed the hall. And were twice ejected by a sympathetic stoker; and once by a policeman, who smiled not nor scowled when Stuart quoted to him art and Lucullus in argument against the law, but said simply and stolidly, “Maybe, sir, but them’s my orders,” which is the essential condition of mind for a policeman, and one to be encouraged, ranking him in excellence beside the Self-Improving Porter. And they sought for the elusive platform, from which trains are rumoured to depart on Sundays, but which on all other days lies beyond platform nine, and beyond the world, and beyond space; drifting formless platform to which the evil familiars of Euston occasionally lure a harmless passenger-train, then to chuckle at the bewildered victims of their devilry. And they found also the platform of a thousand milk-cans; and a model steamship in a glass case, reported to perform marvellous feats at the insertion of one penny, but which, clutching Stuart’s penny to its iron breast, stirred not from tranced sleep; thinking doubtless: he is a millionaire and can well spare it. And they planned to hold a Roman feast on a great scale, in the bathroom at Euston; weary sooty travellers to be lured inside and plunged forthwith into cooling floods of water, and given stale sandwiches to eat, and a third-class ticket to Willesden, gratis with every bar of soap. Finally, they entered Euston through seven different portals, beheld it from seven different aspects, all fearsome with the clankings and throbbings of metal, and the oblique approach of red goblin eyes from the outside glooms.

And Peter said that her train was due, and that the premises were now quite sufficiently imbued with sad sweet memories hereafter as ghosts to haunt her.

“It would be rather funny if my aching heart should turn inartistic and refuse to perform.”

“Oh, if we can’t cheat Ladye Art, at our age!” he leant against the door of the carriage, and lit a cigarette; “she belongs to the first stages of consciousness. I put out my tongue at Art. A man with the artistic sense of things, would never again take you home by train to Thatch Lane, after having once done it so successfully; ‘for fear of spoiling things,’ he would say.”

The guard passed along the line of doors, his passage punctuated by heavy slams.

“But you----” she mocked.

“But I, Peter, can be artistic, and also cheat Art by being inartistic;” he placed a tentative foot upon the step, and she anticipated his evident intentions by a careless: “I don’t need you with me to-night.”

--“And then cheat myself by being re-artistic!” he ran alongside the moving train, and secured the door-handle by a deft turn of the wrist. “And I had no intention of coming with you, Peter. Good night!”

... Peter hated him. It struck her that the most poignant ghost of all, and one where she had no hand in the manufacture, would run for ever abreast of a moving train; leap on to the footboard: “I told the man to drive like Hell!”... leap from the footboard: “I had no intention of coming with you----”

And here were the ends of Euston, where the trio had chanted their triumphant ritual; where Peter had once taken her tiger a-walking, and Merle had followed her. Merle....

Blackness now, save for a few splashed lights among a dark huddle of roofs. Then open country.

Yes, she hated Stuart. He might have known that she did rather want him to come. He _had_ known----

Peter smiled. She was mentally framing a letter to him, of which this was the opening phrase: “If you had no intention of coming, why, oh why, did you hold in your hand _two_ first-class tickets to Thatch Lane, when you returned from the booking-office?”

It was just as well, Peter decided, to keep cultivated and alert one’s powers of observation.