The swift hands, the soft bandages, passed back and forth, over and under – flashes of violet passed to and fro in the air, like the shuttle of a weaver through his warp. As the bandage clasped his knees, Roger moved.
‘For God’s sake, no!’ the doctor cried; ‘the time is so near. If you cease to submit it is death.’
With an incredible, accelerated swiftness he swept the bandages round and round knees and ankles, drew a deep breath – stood upright.
‘I must make an incision,’ he said – ‘in the head this time. It will not hurt. See! I spray it with the Constantia Nepenthe; that also I discovered. My boy, in a moment you know all things – you are as God. For God’s sake, be patient. Preserve your submission.’
And Roger, with life and will resurgent hammering at his heart, preserved it.
He did not feel the knife that made the cross-cut on his temple, but he felt the hot spurt of blood that followed the cut; he felt the cool flap of a plaster, spread with some sweet, clean-smelling unguent that met the blood and stanched it. There was a moment – or was it hours? – of nothingness. Then from that cut on his forehead there seemed to radiate threads of infinite length, and of a strength that one could trust to – threads that linked one to all knowledge past and present. He felt that he controlled all wisdom, as a driver controls his four-in-hand. Knowledge, he perceived, belonged to him, as the air belongs to the eagle. He swam in it, as a great fish in a limitless ocean.
He opened his eyes and met those of the doctor, who sighed as one to whom breath has grown difficult.
‘Ah, all goes well. Oh, my boy, was it not worth it? What do you feel?’
‘I. Know. Everything,’ said Roger, with full stops between the words.
‘Everything? The future?’
‘No. I know all that man has ever known.’
‘Look back – into the past. See someone. See Pharaoh. You see him – on his throne?’
‘Not on his throne. He is whispering in a corner of his great gardens to a girl, who is the daughter of a water-carrier.’
‘Bah! Any poet of my dozen decadents, who lie so still, could have told me that. Tell me secrets – the Masque de Fer.’
The other told a tale, wild and incredible, but it satisfied the teller.
‘That too – it might be imagination. Tell me the name of the woman I loved and –’
The echo of the name of the anaesthetic came to Roger; ‘Constantia,’ said he, in an even voice.
‘Ah,’ the doctor cried, ‘now I see you know all things. It was not murder. I hoped to dower her with all the splendours of the super-life.’
‘Her bones lie under the lilacs, where you used to kiss her in the spring,’ said Roger, quite without knowing what it was that he was going to say.
‘It is enough,’ the doctor cried. He sprang up, ranged certain bottles and glasses on a table convenient to his chair. ‘You know all things. It was not a dream, this, the dream of my life. It is true. It is a fact accomplished. Now I, too, will know all things. I will be as the gods.’
He sought among leather cases on a far table, and came back swiftly into the circle of light that lay below the green-shaded lamp.
Roger, floating contentedly on the new sea of knowledge that seemed to support him, turned eyes on the trouble that had driven him out of that large, empty studio so long ago, so far away. His newfound wisdom laughed at that problem, laughed and solved it. ‘To end that trouble I must do so-and-so, say such-and-such,’ Roger told himself again and again.
And now the doctor, standing by the table, laid on it his pale, plump hand outspread. He drew a knife from a case – a long, shiny knife – and scored his hand across and across its back, as a cook scores pork for cooking. The slow blood followed the cuts in beads and lines.
Into the cuts he dropped a green liquid from a little bottle, replaced its stopper, bound up his hand and sat down.
‘The beginning of the first stage,’ he said; ‘almost at once I shall begin to be a new man. It will work quickly. My body, like yours, is sane and healthy.’
There was a long silence.
‘Oh, but this is good,’ the doctor broke it to say. ‘I feel the hand of Life sweeping my nerves like harp-strings.’
Roger had been thinking, the old common sense that guides an ordinary man breaking through this consciousness of illimitable wisdom. ‘You had better,’ he said, ‘unbind me; when the hand of Death sweeps your nerves, you may need help.’
‘No,’ the doctor said, ‘and no, and no, and no many times. I am afraid of you. You know all things, and even in your body you are stronger than I. When I, too, am a god, and filled with the wine of knowledge, I will loose you, and together we will drink of the fourth drug – the mordant that shall fix the others and set us eternally on a level with the immortals.’
‘Just as you like, of course,’ said Roger, with a conscious effort after commonplace. Then suddenly, not commonplace any more – ‘Loose me!’ he cried; ‘loose me, I tell you! I am wiser than you.’
‘You are also stronger,’ said the doctor, and then suddenly and irresistibly the pain caught him. Roger saw his face contorted with agony, his hands clench on the arm of his chair; and it seemed that, either this man was less able to bear pain than he, or that the pain was much more violent than had been his own. Between the grippings of the anguish the doctor dragged on his watch-chain; the watch leapt from his pocket, and rattled as his trembling hand laid it on the table.
‘Not yet,’ he said, when he had looked at its face, ‘not yet, not yet, not yet.’ It seemed to Roger, lying there bound, that the other man repeated those words for long days and weeks. And the plump, pale hand, writhing and distorted by anguish, again and again drew near to take the glass that stood ready on the table, and with convulsive self-restraint again and again drew back without it.
The short May night was waning – the shiver of dawn rustled the leaves of the plant whose leaves were like red misshaped hearts.
‘Now!’ The doctor screamed the word, grasped the glass, drained it and sank back in his chair. His hand struck the table beside him. Looking at his limp body and head thrown back, one could almost see the cessation of pain, the coming of kind oblivion.
3
The dawn had grown to daylight, a poor, grey, rain-stained daylight, not strong enough to pierce the curtains and persiennes; and yet not so weak but that it could mock the lamp, now burnt low and smelling vilely.
Roger lay very still on his couch, a man wounded, anxious, and extravagantly tired. In those hours of long, slow dawning, face to face with the unconscious figure in the chair, he had felt, slowly and little by little, the recession of that sea of knowledge on which he had felt himself float in such content. The sea had withdrawn itself, leaving him high and dry on the shore of the normal. The only relic that he had clung to and that he still grasped was the answer to the problem of the trouble – the only wisdom that he had put into words. These words remained to him, and he knew that they held wisdom – very simple wisdom, too.
‘To end the trouble, I must do so-and-so and say such-and-such.’
But of all that had seemed to set him on a pinnacle, had evened him with the immortals, nothing else was left. He was just Roger Wroxham – wounded, and bound, in a locked house, one of whose rooms was full of very quiet people, and in another room himself and a dead man. For now it was so long since the doctor had moved that it seemed he must be dead. He had got to know every line of that room, every fold of drapery, every flower on the wall-paper, the number of the books, the shapes and sizes of things. Now he could no longer look at these. He looked at the other man.
Slowly a dampness spread itself over Wroxham’s forehead and tingled among the roots of his hair. He writhed in his bonds. They held fast. He could not move hand or foot. Only his head could turn a little, so that he could at will see the doctor or not see him. A shaft of desolate light pierced the persienne at its hinge and rested on the table, where an overturned glass lay.
/> Wroxham thrilled from head to foot. The body in the chair stirred – hardly stirred – shivered rather – and a very faint, far-away voice said: ‘Now the third – give me the third.’
‘What?’ said Roger, stupidly; and he had to clear his throat twice before he could say even that.
‘The moment is now,’ said the doctor. ‘I remember all. I made you a god. Give me the third drug.’
‘Where is it?’ Roger asked.
‘It is at my elbow,’ the doctor murmured. ‘I submit – I submit. Give me the third drug, and let me be as you are.’
‘As I am?’ said Roger. ‘You forget. I am bound.’
‘Break your bonds,’ the doctor urged, in a quick, small voice. ‘I trust you now. You are stronger than all men, as you are wiser. Stretch your muscles, and the bandages will fall asunder like snow-wreaths.’
‘It is too late,’ Wroxham said, and laughed; ‘all that is over. I am not wise any more, and I have only the strength of a man. I am tired and wounded. I cannot break your bonds – I cannot help you!’
‘But if you cannot help me – it is death,’ said the doctor.
‘It is death,’ said Roger. ‘Do you feel it coming on you?’
‘I feel life returning,’ said the doctor; ‘it is now the moment – the one possible moment. And I cannot reach it. Oh, give it me – give it me!’
Then Roger cried out suddenly, in a loud voice: ‘Now, by God in heaven, you damned decadent, I am glad that I cannot give it. Yes if it costs me my life, it’s worth it, you madman, so that your life ends too. Now be silent, and die like a man, if you have it in you.’
Only one word seemed to reach the man in the chair.
‘A decadent!’ he repeated. ‘I? But no, I am like you – I see what I will. I close my eyes, and I see – no – not that – ah! – not that!’ He writhed faintly in his chair, and to Roger it seemed that for that writhing figure there would be no return of power and life and will.
‘Not that,’ he moaned. ‘Not that,’ and writhed in a gasping anguish that bore no more words.
Roger lay and watched him, and presently he writhed from the chair to the floor, tearing feebly at it with his fingers, moaned, shuddered, and lay very still.
Of all that befell Roger in that house, the worst was now. For now he knew that he was alone with the dead, and between him and death stretched certain hours and days. For the porte cochère was locked; the doors of the house itself were locked – heavy doors and the locks new.
‘I am alone in the house,’ the doctor had said. ‘No-one comes here but me.’
No-one would come. He would die there – he, Roger Wroxham – ‘poor old Roger Wroxham, who was no one’s enemy but his own.’ Tears pricked his eyes. He shook his head impatiently and they fell from his lashes.
‘You fool,’ he said, ‘can’t you die like a man either?’
Then he set his teeth and made himself lie still. It seemed to him that now Despair laid her hand on his heart. But, to speak truth, it was Hope whose hand lay there. This was so much more than a man should be called on to bear – it could not be true. It was an evil dream. He would wake presently. Or if it were, indeed, real – then someone would come, someone must come. God could not let nobody come to save him.
And late at night, when heart and brain had been stretched to the point where both break and let in the sea of madness, someone came.
The interminable day had worn itself out. Roger had screamed, yelled, shouted till his throat was dried up, his lips baked and cracked. No-one heard. How should they? The twilight had thickened and thickened, till at last it made a shroud for the dead man on the floor by the chair. And there were other dead men in that house; and as Roger ceased to see the one he saw the others – the quiet, awful faces, the lean hands, the straight, stiff limbs laid out one beyond another in the room of death. They at least were not bound. If they should rise in their white wrappings and, crossing that empty sleeping chamber very softly, come slowly up the stairs –
A stair creaked.
His ears, strained with hours of listening, thought themselves befooled. But his cowering heart knew better.
Again a stair creaked. There was a hand on the door.
‘Then it is all over,’ said Roger in the darkness, ‘and I am mad.’
The door opened very slowly, very cautiously. There was no light. Only the sound of soft feet and draperies that rustled.
Then suddenly a match spurted – light struck at his eyes; a flicker of lit candle-wick steadying to flame. And the things that had come were not those quiet people creeping up to match their death with his death in life, but human creatures, alive, breathing, with eyes that moved and glittered, lips that breathed and spoke.
‘He must be here,’ one said. ‘Lisette watched all day; he never came out. He must be here – there is nowhere else.’
Then they set up the candle-end on the table, and he saw their faces. They were the Apaches who had set on him in that lonely street, and who had sought him here – to set on him again.
He sucked his dry tongue, licked his dry lips, and cried aloud: – ‘Here I am! Oh, kill me! For the love of God, brothers, kill me now!’
And even before he spoke, they had seen him, and seen what lay on the floor.
‘He died this morning. I am bound. Kill me, brothers; I cannot die slowly here alone. Oh, kill me, for Christ’s sake!’
But already the three were pressing on each other at a doorway suddenly grown too narrow. They could kill a living man, but they could not face death, quiet, enthroned.
‘For the love of Christ,’ Roger screamed, ‘have pity! Kill me outright! Come back – come back!’
And then, since even Apaches are human, one of them did come back. It was the one he had flung into the gutter. The feet of the others sounded on the stairs as he caught up the candle and bent over Roger, knife in hand.
‘Make sure,’ said Roger, through set teeth.
‘Nom d’un nom,’ said the Apache, with worse words, and cut the bandages here, and here, and here again, and there, and lower, to the very feet.
Then this good Samaritan helped Roger to rise, and when he could not stand, the Samaritan half pulled, half carried him down those many steps, till they came upon the others putting on their boots at the stair-foot.
Then between them the three men who could walk carried the other out and slammed the outer door, and presently set him against a gate-post in another street, and went their wicked ways.
And after a time, a girl with furtive eyes brought brandy and hoarse, muttered kindnesses, and slid away in the shadows.
Against that gate-post the police came upon him. They took him to the address they found on him. When they came to question him he said, ‘Apaches’, and his late variations on that theme were deemed sufficient, though not one of them touched truth or spoke of the third drug.
There has never been anything in the papers about that house. I think it is still closed, and inside it still lie in the locked room the very quiet people; and above, there is the room with the narrow couch and the scattered, cut, violet bandages, and the thing on the floor by the chair, under the lamp that burned itself out in that May dawning.
The Pavilion
There was never a moment’s doubt in her own mind. So she said afterwards. And everyone agreed that she had concealed her feelings with true womanly discretion. Her friend and confidante, Amelia Davenant, was at any rate completely deceived. Amelia was one of those featureless blondes who seem born to be overlooked. She adored her beautiful friend, and never, from first to last, could see any fault in her, except, perhaps, on the evening when the real things of the story happened. And even in that matter she owned at the time that it was only that her darling Ernestine did not understand.
Ernestine was a prettyish girl with the airs, so irresistible and misleading, of a beauty; most people said that she was beautiful, and she certainly managed, with extraordinary success, to produce the illusion of beauty. Quite a numb
er of plainish girls achieve that effect nowadays. The freedom of modern dress and coiffure and the increasing confidence in herself which the modern girl experiences, aid her in fostering the illusion; but in the sixties, when everyone wore much the same sort of bonnet, when your choice in coiffure was limited to bandeaux or ringlets, and the crinoline was your only wear, something very like genius was needed to deceive the world in the matter of your personal charms. Ernestine had that genius; hers was the smiling, ringleted, dark-haired, dark-eyed, sparkling type.
Amelia had blonde bandeaux and kind, appealing blue eyes, rather too small and rather too dull; her hands and ears were beautiful, and she kept them out of sight as much as possible. In our times the blonde hair would have been puffed out to make a frame for the forehead, a little too high; a certain shade of blue and a certain shade of boldness would have made her eyes effective. And the beautiful hands would have learned that flowerlike droop of the wrist so justly and so universally admired. But as it was, Amelia was very nearly plain, and in her secret emotional self-communings told herself that she was ugly. It was she who, at the age of fourteen, composed the remarkable poem beginning:
I know that I am ugly: did I make
The face that is the laugh and jest of all?
and goes on, after disclaiming any personal responsibility for the face, to entreat the kind earth to ‘cover it away from mocking eyes’, and to ‘let the daisies blossom where it lies’.
Amelia did not want to die, and her face was not the laugh and jest, or indeed the special interest, of anyone. All that was poetic licence. Amelia had read perhaps a little too much poetry of the type of ‘Quand je suis morte, mes amies, plantez un saule au cimetière’; but really life was a very good thing to Amelia, especially when she had a new dress and someone paid her a compliment. But she went on writing verses extolling the advantages of The Tomb, and grovelling metrically at the feet of One who was Another’s until that summer, when she was nineteen, and went to stay with Ernestine at Doricourt. Then her Muse took flight, scared, perhaps, by the possibility, suddenly and threateningly presented, of being asked to inspire verse about the real things of life.