"What do you mean?"
"I mean that whether you go or stay you"ll kill her. But go, for G.o.d"s sake! It"s the kindest way."
CHAPTER XX
A MAN AND A SPHINX
The idea of leaving England had occurred to Tyson more than once before.
In Stanistreet"s rooms it took its first vague shape. But Louis"s parting words had a sting in them; they were at once a shock to his feelings and a challenge to his will.
Stanistreet had read him thoroughly. In plain language he had entertained serious thoughts of deserting Mrs. Nevill Tyson. Desertion? It was an ugly word. He dismissed his idea. He would dree his weird. He wasn"t going to funk the thing--not he! The New Life had been found impossible.
No matter. _Certum quia impossibile_. Nothing like a big thumping paradox when you were about it. Impossibility had the smile and lure of haunting deity, the glamor of the arcana. That night he dedicated himself with more promises and vows.
He was in that state of mind when men look out for miracles to save them.
There was no reason why miracles should not happen, here and now. Those fellows must have been in a bad way who had to go out into deserts and places to find G.o.d and their unconquerable souls. No doubt queer things have happened in Africa, in Asia, things which the Western mind--Pending the miracle, his Western mind would seek peace in an office. He would try anything, from a Government appointment to a clerkship in the Bank. After all they do not manage things so very differently in the East. If you come to think of it, there is not much to choose between bending yourself double over a desk and sitting with your head in the pit of your stomach, meditating on Brahma. The effect on the liver must be pretty much the same.
He went to bed thinking of Upanishads, with the result that he dreamed of tiger-shooting in the jungle.
Ah, yes, in the cold light of intellect, between doing and not doing a thing there is but the difference of a word. That colorless negative does nothing to alter the salient image of the thing. The fervency of his resolve not to leave England called up as in a calenture the lands that he was not to travel, the freedom that was not to be his.
The idea he had dismissed came back to him. He flew and it followed; he veered and it waylaid him at every turn. An intolerable restlessness took possession of him. He spent his days and a great part of his nights in furious walking about the streets. The idea hounded him on; it stared at him now from newspaper placards, it was whispered and murmured and shrieked into his ears.
There was war in the Soudan.
He saw his idea illuminated, transfigured. It was Glory, a stern wingless Victory, beckoning him across a continent. It no longer pursued him. It had changed its tactics. It was coming to meet him; there was no escaping.
He met it face to face on the Embankment somewhere between Charing Cross and the Temple. A light fog had set in from the river, blurring the outlines of things. He had been walking up and down for about an hour, walking for walking"s sake, with his eyes fixed on the pavement. Suddenly he found himself standing still, staring at one of the sphinxes that guard Cleopatra"s Needle. The monster rose up out of the fog as out of a sea; its body glistened with an oily sooty moisture, a big drop had gathered in one of its huge eyelids like a tear.
Obelisk and sphinx--what were they doing by this gray river, under this gray sky? They were exiles here, they belonged to the Desert. So did he.
To leave London to its mob of journalists and stock-brokers, and to the demons of the pavement; to go there where there are none of these things, where miracles are sometimes allowed to happen; where G.o.d and Nature are more, not less, than man, and where courage, even in these days, counts as a virtue. If, indeed, as sometimes he feared, the brute in him was supreme and indestructible, London was not the place for him.
London! Every stone of its pavement marked the grave of a human soul.
But he would still be good for something out there. There were things there that wanted doing; things that he could do; things that men died in doing.
Reason said: Why not go and do them? And if he died! Well, what can a man do more than die for his country?
And if Molly died?
Molly would not die. Something told him that. But he might break her heart if he went. Yes; and he would certainly break his promises if he stayed. Stanistreet was right there.
Her words came back to him: "It"s all over and done with now." Was it?
Was it?
Reason said: It was better to risk a possibility than face a certainty.
Reason? Ah, no! It was Nature rather, the inscrutable Sphinx, repeating her stale old riddle, the answer to which is Man.
A sound of laughter roused him from his communings with Reason.
The lights were going up one by one along the Embankment. In an embrasure of the parapet a woman was leaning back against the low wall; she was looking at him, and laughing open-mouthed. She stood near a gas-standard, on the outer edge of an illuminated disc. Her face, painted and powdered, flushed faintly in the perishing light. He thought her magnificently beautiful.
He came forward and was about to speak to her. The woman moved quickly into the bright center of the disc; she turned her face sideways as she moved, and he saw in it a sudden likeness to Molly. The likeness was fugitive, indefinable; something in the coloring, the line of the forehead, the sweep of the black hair from the cheek; it might have been a trick of the gaslight or of his own brain. But it was there; he saw it, an infernal reincarnation of his wife"s dead beauty.
And as he swerved out of her path the woman"s laughter went after him, with a ring in it of irony and triumph.
CHAPTER XXI
OUT OF THE NIGHT
That evening as he sat in his wife"s bedroom--the perfunctory sitting, lasting usually about a quarter of an hour--the thought took complete possession of him. What if he went out to the Soudan? Other fellows were going; they could never have too many. Men dropped off there faster than their places could be filled. And if he died, as other fellows died?
Well, death was the supreme Artist"s G.o.d from the machine, the simplest solution of all tragic difficulties.
A gentle elegiac mood stole over him. He looked on at his own death; he saw the grave dug hastily in the hot sand; he heard the roll of the Dead March, and the rattling of the rifles. In all probability these details would be omitted, but they helped to glorify the dream. He was a mourner at his own funeral, indifferent to all around him, yet voluptuously moved. So violently did the hero and the sentimentalist unite in that strange composite being that was Nevill Tyson.
He drew his chair a little nearer to her bed. "Molly--supposing I wanted to go abroad again some of these days, would you very much mind?"
There was a slight quivering of the limbs under the bedclothes, but Mrs.
Nevill Tyson said nothing.
"You see, going back to Thorneytoft is out of the question for you and me. I think we made the place a bit too hot to hold us. And you hate it, don"t you?"
She murmured some a.s.sent.
"And if I stick here doing nothing I shan"t be able to stand things much longer; I feel as if I should go off my head. I oughtn"t to be doing nothing, a great hulking fellow like me."
"No, no; it would never do. But why must you go--abroad? Aren"t there things--"
He felt that his only chance was to throw himself as it were naked on her sympathy. "I must go--sooner or later. I can"t settle--never could.
Traveling is in my blood and in my brain. I"m home-sick, Molly--home-sick for foreign countries, that"s all. I shall come back again. You don"t think I want to leave you, surely?"
He looked into her eyes; there was no reproach there, only melancholy intelligence. She knew the things that are impossible.
"No. I think you"d rather stay with me--if you could. When shall you go?"
He turned aside. "I don"t know. I mayn"t go at all. I don"t want to talk about it any more."
It was hopeless to talk about it.