XLII.

CASTOR AND POLLUX

Herr Kogl was in charge of the telephone and telegrams. He would come up and say to you with oracular pride: “A--telegram--is--on--the--way--to--you.” He articulated slowly, as if appreciating the necessity of talking distinctly to foreigners.

“How do you know?” Lord de Jones asked him.

“I know,” said Herr Kogl, turning to go. But he came back at once and explained:

“They--have--telephoned--from--the--post--office--to--say--so.”

The telegram arrived an hour later. De Jones opened it and read:

“_Lord Ottercove and Mr. Vernon Sprott arriving by chariot this evening. Reserve first class accommodation._

_Hannibal._”

In the afternoon while everybody was at tea--“_Jause_,” in the vernacular--Mrs. Hannibal and the telephone operator arrived in an aeroplane and installed themselves with the efficiency and celerity of a quartermaster. Mrs. Hannibal occupied the little reception room; the telephone operator, a graduate of the Royal College of Science, commandeered the telephone. Then, there being nothing for them to do till evening, they strolled down the hill into town to inspect the sights.

And Baby?

She was not at the gate, nor at the bandstand, nor in the by-ways of the park. Since his demise from the Pension Kogl, Frank lived in town, often meeting Baby when she came down to Innsbruck. And here she was, as fresh as May, beckoning to him from across the flower-bespangled field. That laughing, slanting look in her eyes stirred something in his frame as though a bird had suddenly flown into him. He was joy, his body the cage. Soon joy would fly out; and he fretted and flurried trying to lock the door of the cage, losing his happiness in the anxiety of losing it. That piquant blend of childish innocence on her face with a suggestion of ripening womanhood about her form, so irresistible to men, was no less irresistible to Frank. They took the funicular up the mountain slope and continued the acclivious ascent by foot, stopping now and then to look down at the town in the valley, when he would feel her lovely weight against him. They wound their way up the Schillerweg and stopped at a Gasthaus in the precincts of the Pension Kogl and had coffee and cakes amidst the beer and wine drinking peasants with goat beards like shaving brushes stuck in their coloured hats, and the women in Tyrolese peasant dress taken in tightly at the waist and showing off their figures to advantage, and sat still and looked down into the green folds of the valley and up at the jagged summits of naked rock. She gave him a look that came straight from the soul. Her eyes were as if they had just been sad, had understood all, and now chose to see only the heavenly, sunny side of your being. And looking at her eyes, you, too, felt but the sunny side of yourself, and wanted to dance and prance in the sunshine that emanated from those eyes. Fowls, chickens, strutted all over the place, jumped on the chairs. The little serving maid, bare-legged, would call them: “Chuck-chuck-chuck!”

They were screened from sight by a tree. He put his hand on her arm. Her look moistened. The sun, as if making a last effort, shone with a tragic brightness; then, unable to sustain the effort, diminished its light. The bare-legged maid had gone in. They kissed. When she came out she wore a pair of brown stockings: and they stopped kissing.

“Hello, hello!”

They turned round and saw Eva and Christopher de Jones. “Wherever have you been?” Eva turned on to her cousin. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere. Chris is anxious to begin.”

“There isn’t any time to waste. It’s coming our way now, spreading fast,” de Jones confirmed.

“Like creeping paralysis,” said Eva, “and Chris is going to vaccinate this hill.” Then, turning to Frank: “Let me see! Have you any hair left?” He quickly removed his hat. “Oh, lots and lots!” she exclaimed.

“It’s about the only thing I have.”

“It’s time I did it,” said de Jones. “Herr Kogl, can you oblige me with a little gasoline?”

“Yes, yes. We’ll see if we can get any,” said Herr Kogl politely. “Kindly follow me to the garage, and we shall see if we are lucky.”

Then in another tone: “Hey there! Herbert! Any gasoline! Any gasoline, I said! Come on and get about it, quick! I’m waiting. I said: _waiting_!”

Christopher de Jones returned with a mysterious air. “I have timed,” he said, “the explosion for 5:15.”

“What explosion is this?” Frank said with enquiring charm.

“Oh, perfectly harmless in itself. But it will frighten away all the rest, and leave this mountain top for our little party.”

“Is this discrimination not perhaps a little heartless?”

“Surplus, surplus. One must always get rid of the surplus.”

He took out his watch and held it in his palm. Three minutes elapsed.

There was a mild crash. Then several faces were thrust enquiringly out of the windows of the Pension Kogl. Next, the word “earthquake” passed from mouth to mouth, and a thin stream of visitors trickled down the narrow mountain path into Innsbruck which stretched below them, sunning itself in the valley. Herr Kogl, Frau Kogl, the policeman and the Frau Policeman with her quicksilver of a little boy, the apoplectic Baron, and some others, made light of Lord de Jones’s warning and refused to budge.

They stood with Frank and Eva and Baby and de Jones in a group on the terrace and watched the other visitors trot down the hill: the Grand Duke, the Frau Professor with the dachshund, the Herr Pastor, the Frau Pastor, Herr and Frau Nikulitsch, the two Scottish old maids, Herr Spatz, Frau Spatz, and their son Willy, the Frau Doktor Wirt, the Frau Direktor Bödingen, the Frau Oberst von Kaisar, and Frau von Endte. There lived among others in the annexe of the Pension Kogl an effeminate-looking young artist from Vienna who was kept by a poor, pale consumptive German girl who paid for him and cooked his meals, whereas he, tired of her love, powdered his face and, adjusting his tie before the mirror, went to town every day to distract himself with her money. On the fatal day he, adjusting his tie, went to town and did not come back. And she, going down the hill to the grocer’s to get him his supper, did likewise.

Frank remembered this afterwards. Now he stood between Eva and de Jones and watched his erstwhile enemies from the _pension_ go down, never to return. It was a warm Sunday afternoon. Far away, a train whistled and then coiled below, like a serpent, on its long journey to Vienna. It will not reach Vienna, Frank thought, not in eternity! All the peasants, save for one old man, had already vanished down the hill. He drank his big mug to the bottom, smacking his lips. Having paid for the beer and lighted his pipe, he rose, and at once there came the sounds of his jolly accordion, as, with twinkling eye, he strode to his own happy tune out of the courtyard. Fresh and alert, he went down the road making his own music, till his long curved pipe, and his knapsack, and the plume in his hat ducked by the hill, and only the jolly tune spoke of his fresh onward strides.

The sun had long ago set behind the hills. It was very still: the empty spell which hangs over the world before twilight.

“And what’s that?” Baby exclaimed, pointing to an approaching dot in the sky. Eva peered at the clouds. An airplane was speeding towards them.

“It’s the chariot,” said Frank.

“It’s Rex! It’s Rex!” she cried. “Hurrah! it’s Rex!”

They could see them now with the naked eye, Lord Ottercove and Mr. Vernon Sprott, seated side by side, puffing at their cigars.

One moment it seemed as if Lord Ottercove’s winged chariot would land safely and gracefully in the courtyard of the Pension Kogl. The next, it looked as though it would do no such thing.

The two occupants of the chariot suddenly looked at each other. They were both, in their different ways, strong men, and said nothing. They were, they knew it, subject to immediate dissolution. And there was method in it. First, Mr. Vernon Sprott began to disintegrate (his eighty-five volumes of fiction and _belles-lettres_ in the British Museum having already preceded him). Mr. Sprott realised with his usual imperturbable objectivity that he, who had always been one for whom the visible world existed, was on the point of no longer existing for the visible world. Now Lord Ottercove also began to get diffuse. He was not aware of any pain or discomfort: he only felt that he was becoming less and less homogeneous. This master of a million voices yielded inaudibly to extinction, his last conscious feeling, one of sorrow not of anger, being a profound regret that Lord de Jones had not remained a Genius of the Untried. Soon their fabric melted into air, into thin air. Their insubstantial pageant faded and left no rack behind.

But in the growing twilight the tips of their cigars, fiery particles immune from dissolution, two beacons of light, two golden stars in the sky, twin brothers, Castor and Pollux, shone for ever and ever.