Part 3

I had respected Bellingham ever since I had come to know him; and now, if I respected his intelligence less, I felt something more than admiration for the indomitable spirit of the man. His unshaken belief that he was defying his Creator made fidelity to Joan a piece of titanic courage. Beset by horrors unspeakable, conscious that the citadel of his very reason was being stormed, he yet held doggedly to his determination. Doggedly at first, and afterwards with a sublime pride that I could not witness without an answering pride, a flaming exultation in the splendour of the human soul. Maniac or not, he extorted willing homage from me. You may say what you like about hallucination and the rest of it, but I tell you that to me, an eye-witness, the battle was lifted into the realm of cosmic drama where everything takes on a significance past mortal understanding but not past mortal apprehension. I thought of Job; I thought of Prometheus; and I thought of Bellingham as no mean third, championing life against death, championing youth, beauty, and all frail humanity, against the cruel bogey of the mind that menaced them. It goes without saying that his terrors derived all their power from his belief in their reality. He was blind to the plain facts of real religion, deaf to my rationalizing explanations of the horror that haunted him, obstinate in his conviction that God, and none other, was the author and agent of his persecution. Equally convinced was he that he had but to cast Joan out and he would save his soul alive. Every week saw a change in his physical condition. That brief period of his second blooming, fostered by the sweet presence and the maternal care of Joan, seemed over for ever; it was as if the seven years of spiritual famine were now to follow. He grew more gaunt, more haggard; vitality shrunk into him like a pent prisoner and peered out through those fiery orbs, his eyes, as through the mean windows of a condemned cell. He was locked fast in an impregnable isolation, from which no one could rescue him, it seemed, certainly not I, either by force or guile. He distrusted his food; he distrusted the men and women who passed him in the street. There were only two human souls he did not distrust: Joan herself was one, and I, by the mercy of heaven, was the other. He began to see a vast and sinister significance in all sorts of trivial events, all sorts of minor disasters that did not in the least concern any one of us, seeing in them the beginning of a cosmic disintegration that should engulf him in perdition. He was afraid yet defiant of these fatalities. He was both egomaniacal and illogical in his conviction that God, his implacable adversary, would behave like the veriest villain of melodrama rather than let him escape: tear the universe to tatters in order to compass the death or the dishonour of this one rebellious spirit, like a man who should pull his own house about his ears in the pursuit of a solitary rat. I myself began to scan the papers anxiously for wars and rumours of wars. Different as were our intellectual convictions, there was the stark comradeship between us of those who face death together. He watched for signs of God; Joan and I, with equal vigilance, watched him. And the stronger grew my affection for Bellingham, the shakier my own nerves became. Finally, with a kind of exultation, I threw up all my work--I was a curate at the time--and flung myself body and soul into this holy war. I found lodgings near Bellingham’s, and visited him every day without fail. I felt that this fretting, this piling of horror upon horror, could not go on much longer. Sooner or later there would be a crisis; the increasing tension would snap. Mingled with my fear for Bellingham’s sanity was a fear for the safety of Joan, caged up with a maniac. For a week or more we worried and waited.

4

The end came with a sudden and sickening rush. And yet it was an end worth waiting and working for. In the street just outside his home, Bellingham was knocked down by a passing cab. Joan saw the accident from the window. By the sheerest chance he escaped with nothing worse than bruises and flesh wounds, but his excitement and terror reached their climax as he was helped back, limp and bleeding, to his rooms. The policeman, with a kindly word, handed him over to Joan’s care. She was all for summoning a doctor, but Bellingham would not hear of it. White-faced, hiding his rising tumult behind a mask of steely calm, he told her curtly to fetch me. She obeyed, poor child, in terror of her life and his own. I was with them ten minutes later.

‘Saunders,’ he greeted me, without preamble. ‘God has flung down His last challenge.’

‘You mean this accident!’ said I, scoffing gently.

‘Accident!’ retorted Bellingham. ‘Do you, a priest of God, talk to me of accident! Not a sparrow falls without God. No, it was no accident. It was the last warning. I feel in my bones that this is the end. At any moment now He will strike, and I shall burn in hell for ever more, where their worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.’ He had the true missioner’s flow of quotations, mostly misapplied; but I knew better than to cross him then. Something of his own passion infected me.

We were standing in the bedroom, where he was at last submitting, with the most complete indifference, to the medical ministrations of Joan. ‘Let’s go into the other room,’ I suggested, ‘and discuss this quietly and in comfort.’ I led the way, and they followed. The living-room, as I fancy they called it, was more cheerful by a long way. There was a fire in the grate, and a lamp like a great harvest moon glowed yellow on the table.

‘Listen to me, Saunders,’ cried Bellingham, refusing to sit down. ‘You are my best friend, my only friend; and Joan is my wife, the finest wife that any man had. The All-Seeing Eye is watching me now, as always; that street-accident, as you call it, was the plain speech of God telling me to desert this woman. I’m a doomed man, Saunders, and I can speak my mind now. I believe in God as firmly as ever I believed in Him, but I have learned something. He is not worth serving. I tell you, Saunders, that the God we have both worshipped is as evil as He is powerful. Almighty Evil sits upon the throne of the universe, and I will curse Him and die.’ Poor fellow, he could not believe me when I told him that it was the God in himself that was speaking those wild words, the God in himself that was fighting a heroic battle against the demon of fear that Joan by her woman’s tenderness had cast out.

There came, suddenly, a crash of something falling in one of the lower rooms of the house. It jarred our tense nerves horribly. And then, for the last time, the terror came to Bellingham, as if in answer to his taunt. He alone saw it, and you will quickly interpose that it was his mind alone that created it. And in a sense I believe you are right, but you’ll find it hard before I finish to maintain that the apparition was a purely subjective thing. Can an hallucination cause windows to rattle and doors to move? I believe for my part that in some unfathomable way the old Bellingham, or rather the riot of evil fancies about God that had victimized the old Bellingham, had woven for itself some external form. Language is crude and clumsy, crushing the truth at which it grasps; but it seems to me that in some sense--and a sense not too metaphorical--the man was, as I said before, cloven in twain, divided against himself. But your face warns me that I’m boring you.

‘There it is,’ shouted Bellingham, pointing towards a corner of the room. Joan, afraid of her lover, rushed to me, and my arms closed round her instinctively. We stared and saw nothing. ‘The same evil eyes,’ said Bellingham, more quietly, ‘the same accusing finger.’ And then began an uncanny one-sided colloquy. Bellingham conversed with his invisible mentor. ‘I will not leave her, God,’ said Bellingham. ‘I despise your dirty counsels. Kill me, damn me, burn me. Send me to hell, where I may see your hateful staring face no more.’

The windows began unaccountably to rattle. Joan clung to me, sobbing, on the verge of hysteria. Bellingham strode towards the table and with one swift gesture put out the light. ‘I am not afraid of your darkness,’ he flung out.

For a moment, silence; and a darkness made ghastly by bright moonlight. Then the windows rattled again, and then, quite without warning, Bellingham collapsed and fell against me. My body had broken his fall, and I now released Joan in order to turn my attention to her lover. The sight of him prostrate restored her to courage. She was always ready when needed. I left Bellingham to her care for a moment and turned again to that haunted corner. I have never known fear such as I knew at that moment, and yet I felt infinitely braced by the dramatic significance of this conflict with an unknown terror. It was as if hell had invaded earth, and that God had left me as His sole witness. At such crises a man with religion turns to it. Your old-fashioned agnosticism will be shocked by my method of exorcising evil.

‘In the Name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, I charge you to leave this man in peace!’ I made the sign of the cross.

And still I stared, and still I saw nothing. Joan was busy with Bellingham, who was beginning to shew signs of returning consciousness. I could not move my eyes away from the corner by the door. And while I stared, something at last happened. Thank Heaven that I alone saw it! The door leading to the bedroom, which had been left half-open, began closing. It closed, pulled to from the other side, and the knob moved and the catch clicked, as though released from the hand of the Unseen. I ran to it, opened it, and looked out. And saw--nothing at all.

SLEEPING BEAUTY

SLEEPING BEAUTY

1

Harriet leaned across the scullery sink, where dirty plates were soaking, in order to get a better view of the moon. Her sleeves were turned up to the elbow. Her right hand grasped a ball of dishcloth from which slimy water oozed between her red fingers to float, in black spots, upon the surface of the water. Upon that water, through which projected a tureen, like the bows of a wrecked ship, the moonlight fell. The three and elevenpenny alarum clock in the kitchen began striking nine.

All Harriet’s spiritual crises had had for their _mise-en-scène_ this scullery, or so it seemed to Harriet herself. Seven years earlier she had stood where she was now standing and had wrestled with overmastering fear, to the accompaniment of that same ticking clock and to the drip-drip from the plate-rack upon already washed spoons. She had leaned then across the sink, as she was leaning now, and stared in terror at an unearthly glow in the sky that could scarcely fail to mean the end of the world and the coming of God in judgment. She shuddered to picture the dead bodies, putty-coloured, rising in their shrouds to confront--with her and Mamma and Alice and Maud--an implacable Creator. ‘O God, don’t come yet!’ It had been the most spontaneous of all her prayers. She had heard too much of this God to trust herself readily to His mercy; and she, the most wicked of girls, had little enough to hope from mere justice. She had too often deceived her teacher and been unsympathetic with her poor mother; and far too often had she resented having to drudge in the house--sweep and dust, make beds, empty slops, and wash dirty dinner-things--while still at school, and to the neglect of her home-lessons.

Whether in answer to her prayer, or from come other cause, God had stayed His coming on that occasion, and to-night, within a week of her twentieth birthday, she was thinking of quite other things: not of God, but of the moon. There was something placid and sisterly to-night about that celestial presence, and Harriet was deliciously aware of a bond between them, ‘Because Geoff likes us both,’ she said in her heart. What had been his phrase, the phrase that had astonished her first to gladness? ‘Gentle as moonlight, soft and gentle as moonlight.’ The words haunted her memory like singing birds. Geoff’s liking was in itself strange enough: the degree of his liking was scarcely credible. Why had he no eyes for Alice, the acknowledged beauty of the family?--or for Maud, with her brains? ‘Cinderella and the Ugly Sisters,’ Geoff had said. But Cinderella had been a pretty girl, and she, Harriet, was all too plain. It could only have been kindness or perverse obstinacy that had made him deny that. She glanced into the tiny mirror that hung from a nail on the pink distempered wall, and examined with some distaste the oval olive face, the fair hair, and the large brown eyes that looked out at her. Tears began to form in those eyes. ‘Now don’t start that silliness!’ she admonished herself. And she returned to the practical world and to the washing of the things dirtied at supper. ‘I do wish mamma wouldn’t leave all her fat,’ she thought, as with her scullery knife she sped three quivering fragments into the waste-pail.

There remained the undeniable fact that Geoff wanted to marry her: that is, he liked her so much that he wished her to share his home, when he acquired one, and wash his dishes instead of her mother’s. She could cook, too: she could make him nice things; and she would indeed have cheerfully slaved for his comfort in gratitude for that pity which, as she supposed, had made his glance linger in kindness upon her. But that was not to be. Even in that wonderful moment when he praised her gentleness she had realized how impossible it was that she should leave mamma; and her sisters had been not slow to emphasize that impossibility. ‘Boy and girl flirtation,’ said Alice with genial contempt--unaccountably, since Geoff was twenty-six and considered to be rather a clever young man. He was a poet--a bank-clerk in his spare time--and his knack of finding rhymes should alone have earned him some respect. To Geoff himself Alice had always been conspicuously friendly; and as for Maud--he had been her friend in the first place (she had met him in the city), and it had always been assumed that it was Maud whom he came to see. But about Geoff’s intentions now there could be no doubt at all. He had even wanted, the dear silly, to help Harriet wash up, but she had not dared to allow that, and he, making a virtue of necessity, was at this moment closeted with the family, perhaps urging once more his extravagant claim.

The last dish dried, the last fork placed in its proper section of the plate-basket, she returned, rather shamefaced, to the sitting-room. As the door closed behind her an ominous hush fell. A smile upon the proud plump face of Alice froze hard and thawed suddenly. Maud swung round upon the revolving music-stool and began turning the pages of Mendelssohn’s _Lieder_. Her mother, perched insecurely on the edge of her chair, visibly suffered. She was always visibly suffering.

‘Girls!’ said mamma plaintively.... It was enough. Harriet’s sisters rose without a word and left the room. Mamma looked at the young man, but he made no movement. ‘Geoffrey!’ she said, a world of pathos in her voice. But Geoffrey was deaf to it. ‘This concerns me too,’ he said. ‘May I smoke?’

‘Very well. Stay, if you wish to be cruel....’ But this man, lost to all sense of humanity, only replied: ‘I’m vulgarly persistent, no doubt, but you see I happen to want Harry.’

Harry’s mother turned twin orbs of suffering upon her daughter, and began reciting the speech she had prepared.

‘I’m sorry, Harriet, to disappoint you. I understand your desire to get away from a troublesome invalid mother and your two bread-winning sisters. But you are God’s charge to me and I must protect you.’

‘From me?’ inquired Geoffrey.

She did not heed the interruption.

‘I say nothing against Geoffrey, but I can’t consent to anything in the shape of an engagement between you. For one thing you are as yet a mere girl; you know nothing of life and nothing of marriage. And that isn’t all. Geoffrey has told me something very sad. He has been very open and frank with me: I _will_ say that for him. We all like Geoffrey. But he’s told me that he would wish to be married in an office. He has queer views, my dear. He even tells me that he only goes to church to please his mother and father. I’m afraid he’s let go of the Saviour’s hand altogether. After that, I need hardly say more. I know my little Harriet too well to believe that she can wish to give mother pain. I already have my Cross to bear.’

‘Very well, mamma.’ Harriet’s eyes were luminous with tears.

At that Geoffrey rose. ‘Then I’d better clear off home at once.’

‘My dear Geoffrey,’ protested his hostess, ‘I know you are thinking to spare my feelings after this upset. You’re very good to me always. But you’ll please stay your week-end. We mustn’t part in unfriendliness--and you know how I should hate you to travel on Sunday.’

He could not keep bitterness out of his smile, but he replied cheerfully enough:

‘Well, Mrs. Mason, since Harry is not to be engaged to me there’ll be no harm in my taking her out for half an hour before bed? Would you care to come, Harry?... Thanks awfully.’

2

Harriet went to her room in a trembling ecstasy, struggling against odds to believe that she was indeed beautiful, as he had said. While she moved about, within the pink beflowered walls of her very own room (as in her heart she was wont to call it), his voice still made music in her memory.

‘Why will you submit to be boxed up in that prison? Can’t you understand how I want you? Can’t you understand how lovely you are?’ He had never before been so passionate in his iterations. And she could only shake her head, elated, yet with secret misgiving. He had very queer ideas, mamma had said. Was this obsession by the thought of beauty perhaps one of them? But there was worse to follow.

‘Harry, are you determined to give me up?’

She replied miserably: ‘I can’t go against mamma. You wouldn’t have me go against mamma. Oh, Geoff, I would do anything else for you.’

The words were like a match dropped in dry stubble. ‘Then you do love me? You do! You do!’

His violence frightened and braced her. ‘You know I like you tremendously,’ she said, grappling with the unknown, ‘better than anyone else in the world.’

‘Except your mother,’ he retorted bitterly, and then added in a changed tone: ‘Harry darling, we’ve never kissed. Do you like me enough for that? We may never have another moment alone.’

‘Of course, you funny boy!’

He bent towards her, and she kissed him, in friendly fashion, on the cheek. ‘Happy now?’ she asked, almost merrily, hoping to drive away his tragic air.

He smiled. ‘Not exactly.’ An odd smile it was. And at the bend of the road, under the shadow of Mrs. Lavender’s lime trees, he took her face suddenly between his hands and kissed her mouth. Something stirred in her but did not awake. She could not understand his emotion.

‘Harry, you said you’d do anything for me. Did you mean it?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ll think me strange. Perhaps you’ll be shocked. It’s this: let me see you. If I’m to go away from you, as I must, let me see you just once, as you really are. Give me a memory to take with me.’

Was he indeed mad? Poor Geoff! ‘But, dear, you can see me now.’

‘Your face, your clothes. Let me see _you_, all your beauty. Venus Anadyomene....’

She burned with shame as something of his meaning dawned on her ... and now, as she stood in her bedroom re-living the scene, the plan he had unfolded seemed both wild and wicked. Wild and wicked, yes: yet shot through with a flash of poetry. An illuminated ‘Thou God seest me’ gleamed at her from one wall, and a pledge to abstain by God’s help from all intoxicating liquors as beverages, signed in childish caligraphy _Harriet Mason_, accused her from another. Wild and wicked; but in a passion of gratitude for being loved, and for the spark kindled within her, she had yielded her promise.

‘Thou God seest me.’ Blushing hotly, very conscious of that inquisitive eye, she took down her hair. With a miniature clatter the pins fell from nerveless fingers on to the glass surface of the dressing-table. Slowly she undressed; paused a moment, shyly stroking her slim nude body; and then with a gesture of resolve slipped into her kimono. The eye of God was still upon her, but she had given her word.

Her woolly slippers made no sound on the oilcloth floor. She opened her door and stepped into the passage. Opposite her was Geoff’s door, left purposely ajar. Tremblingly, but swiftly lest fear should make her false, she crossed and entered. Geoff made no sound. She stood, too ashamed to look up, pushing his door to with a nervous backward movement of the hand. It closed, not without noise.

Her lips moved, as in prayer. She lifted her arms high, and her garment, slipping from white shoulders, fell and clustered at her feet, a diaphanous shimmering mass.

‘Lovely, lovely ... O God!’ The scarce-heard whisper made her heart leap in exultation. She raised her head and looked steadfastly at her love. He sat up in bed, still as an image of adoration, the moonlight making visible the worship in his eyes. She stooped, gathered up her gown, and went out into the passage ... into the arms of Alice.

‘I heard a door slam,’ said Alice. ‘What’s the matter? Why, you’ve---- That’s Geoff’s room!’

Alice became pale and for a moment speechless with anger. When she recovered her tongue it was to use a language strange to the ears of Harriet.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ cried Harriet, starry-eyed, ‘and I don’t care. He loves me, Alice, because I am so beautiful, beautiful. Why didn’t you tell me I was beautiful?’

She pushed past Alice and locked herself in her bedroom. Those bitter reproaches had no sting for her. Even had she understood them they would have been less than a feather’s weight against the joy now born in her heart. For her the world was made new, clean and new. With beauty, seen hitherto through a glass darkly, she was now face to face. She fell asleep exhausted with happiness, and when in the morning mamma came to her room and sobbed, and raved, she could understand not a word of it.