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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
This eBook has been formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. Harkness is a timid American, who travels throughout Europe with his etchings as his only friends. While in London he meets a man who recommends that he visit a small, mystic town of Treliss during its festival time. His life is about to change completely as he meets a gentleman with red hair, rich and sadistic man who loves to exert power over others by hurting them.
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Portrait of a Man with Red Hair
(Horror Classic)
Published by
Books
Table of Contents
TO MY FRIENDS
ETHEL and ARTHUR FOWLER
Dedicatory Letter
Brackenburn,April 1925.
Dear Ethel and Arthur—
It is appropriate, in a way, that I should give you this book when so much of it was written under your roof. It is a romance, and this has not been, during the last twenty years, a favourable time for romances. But I like to give it to you because you know how it was written, in a very happy summer after a long and arduous lecture tour during which, more than ever before, I learned to love your country.
I wrote it as a rest and a refreshment, and I will tell you frankly that I have enjoyed writing it very much. But I do not know whether, in these stern days, stories are intended to be enjoyed either by the writer of them or the reader.
I have noticed sometimes that people speak rather scornfully of a story as “readable.” But if it be not first of all “readable” what afterwards can it be? Surely dead before it is born.
I hope then, and I believe, that this tale is “readable” at least. I know no more than that what it is—fancy, story, allegory, what you will. I might invoke the great names of Hoffmann and Hawthorne for its God-fathers. I might recall a story much beloved by me, Sintram and His Companions, did I not, most justly, fear the comparison!
But the word allegory is, in these days, a dangerous one, and some one will soon be showing me that we have, each one of us, his Sea-Fog, his White Tower, and that it is the fault of his own weakness if he does not fling out of the window his Red-Haired Man.
No, no, God forbid. This is a tale and nothing but a tale, and all I ask is that once beginning it you will find it hard to lay down unfinished—
and that you will think of me always as
Your affectionate friend
Hugh.
Part I The Sea Like Bronze . . .
I
You’re my friend: I was the man the Duke spoke to: I helped the Duchess to cast off his yoke too: So here’s the tale from beginning to end, My friend!
II
Ours is a great wild country; If you climb to our castle’s top, I don’t see where your eye can stop; For when you’ve passed the cornfield country, Where vineyards leave off, flocks are packed, And sheep-range leads to cattle-tract, And cattle-tract to open-chase, And open-chase to the very base Of the mountain where, at a funeral pace, Round about, solemn and slow, One by one, row after row, Up and up the pine trees go, Go, like black priests up, and so Down the other side again To another greater, wilder country. . . .
‘To another greater, wilder country . . . ‘To another greater . . .’
1
The soul of Charles Percy Harkness slipped, like a neat white pocket-handkerchief, out through the carriage window into the silver-blue air, hung there changing into a tiny white fleck against the immensity, struggling for escape above the purple-pointed trees of the dark wood, then, realising that escape was not yet, fluttered back into the carriage again, was caught by Charles Percy, neatly folded up, and put away.
The Browning lines—old-fashioned surely?—had yielded it a moment’s hope. Those and some other lines from another outmoded book:
‘But the place reasserted its spell, marshalling once again its army, its silver-belted knights, its castles of perilous frowning darkness, its meadows of gold and silver streams.
‘The old spell working the same purpose. For how many times and for what intent? That we may be reminded yet once again that there is the step behind the door, the light beyond the window, the rustle on the stair, and that it is for these things only that we must watch and wait?’
For Harkness had committed the folly of having two books open on his knee—a peck at one, a peck at another, a long, eager glance through the window at the summer scene, but above all a sensuous state of slumber hovering in the hot scented afternoon air just above him, waiting to pounce . . . to pounce . . .
First Browning, then this other, the old book in a faded red-brown cover, ‘To Paradise: Frederick Lester.’ At the bottom of the title-page, 1892—how long ago! How faded and pathetic the old book was! He alone in all the British Isles at that moment reading it—certainly no other living soul—and he had crossed to Browning after Lester’s third page.
He swung in mid-air. The open fields came swimming up to him like vast green waves, gently to splash upon his face, hanging over him, laced about the telegraph poles, rising and falling with them. . . .
The voice of the old man with the long white beard, the only occupant of the carriage with him, broke sharply in like a steel knife cutting through blotting-paper.
‘Pardon me, but there is a spider on your neck!’
Harkness started up. The two books slipped to the floor. He passed his hand, damp with the afternoon warmth, over his cool neck. He hated spiders. He shivered. His fingers were on the thing. With a shudder he flung it out of the window.
‘Thank you,’ he said, blushing very slightly.
‘Not at all,’ the old man said severely, ‘you were almost asleep, and in another moment it would have been down your back.’
He was not the old man you would have expected to see in an English first-class carriage, save that now in these democratic days you may see any one anywhere. But first-class fares are so expensive. Perhaps that is why it is only the really poor who can afford them. The old man, who was thin and wiry, had large shabby boots, loose and ancient trousers, a flopping garden straw hat. His hands were gnarled like the knots of trees. He was terribly clean. He had blue eyes. On his knees was a large basket and from this he ate his massive luncheon—here an immense sandwich with pieces of ham like fragments of banners, there a colossal apple, a monstrous pear—
‘Going far?’ munched the old man.
‘No,’ said Harkness, blushing again. ‘To Treliss. I change at Trewth, I believe. We should be there at 4.30.’
‘Should be,’ said the old man, dribbling through his pear. ‘The train’s late. . . . Another tourist,’ he added suddenly.
‘I beg your pardon?’ said Harkness.
‘Another of these damned tourists. You are, I mean. I lived at Treliss. Such as you drove me away.’
‘I am sorry,’ said Harkness, smiling faintly. ‘I suppose I am that if by tourist you mean somebody who is travelling to a place to see what it is like and enjoy its beauty. A friend has told me of it. He says it is the most beautiful place in England.’
‘Beauty,’ said the old man, licking his fingers—‘a lot you tourists think about beauty—with your char-a-bangs and oranges and babies and Americans. If I had my way I’d make the Americans pay a tax, spoiling our country as they do.’
‘I am an American,’ said Harkness faintly.
The old man licked his thumb, looked at it, and licked it again. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it,’ he said. ‘Where’s your accent?’
‘I have lived in this country a great many years off and on,’ he explained, ‘and we don’t all say “I guess” every moment as novelists make us do,’ he added, smiling.
Smiling, yes. But how deeply he detested this unfortunate conversation! How happy he had been, and now this old man with his rudeness and violence had smashed the peace into a thousand fragments. But the old man spoke little more. He only stared at Harkness out of his blue eyes, said:
‘Treliss is too beautiful a place for you. It will do you harm,’ and fell instantly asleep.
2
Yes, Harkness thought, looking at the rise and fall of the old man’s beard, it is strange and indeed lamentable how deeply I detest a cross word! That is why I am always creeping away from things, why, too, I never make friends—not real friends—why at thirty-five I am a complete failure—that is, from the point of view of anything real.
I am filled too with self-pity, he added as he opened To Paradise again and groped for page four, and self-pity is the most despicable of all the vices.
He was not unpleasing to the eye as he sat there thinking. He was dressed with exceeding neatness, but his clothes had something of the effect of chain armour. Was that partly because his figure was so slight that he could never fill any suit of clothes adequately? That might be so. His soft white collar, his pale blue tie, his mild blue eyes, his long tranquil fingers, these things were all gentle. His chin protruded. He was called ‘gaunt’ by undiscerning friends, but that was a poor word for him. He was too slight for that, too gentle, too unobtrusive. His hair was already retreating deprecatingly from his forehead. No gaunt man would smile so timidly. His neatness and immaculate spotless purity of dress showed a fastidiousness that granted his cowardice an excuse.
For I am a coward, he thought. This is yet another holiday that I am taking alone. Alone after all these years. And Pritchard or Mason, Major Stock or Henry Trenchard, Carstairs Willing or Falk Brandon—any one of these might have wished to go if I had had courage . . . or even Maradick himself might have come.
The only companions, he reflected, that he had taken with him on this journey were his etchings, kinder to him, more intimate with him, rewarding him with more affection than any human being. His seven etchings—the seven of his forty—Lepère’s ‘Route de St. Gilles,’ Legros’ ‘Cabane dans les Marais,’ Rembrandt’s ‘Flight into Egypt,’ Muirhead Bone’s ‘Orvieto,’ Whistler’s ‘Drury Lane,’ Strang’s ‘Portrait of himself Etching,’ and Meryon’s ‘Rue des Chantres.’ His seven etchings—his greatest friends in the world, save of course Hetty and Jane his sisters. Yes, he reflected, you can judge a man by his friends, and in my cowardice I have given all my heart to these things because they can’t answer me back, cannot fail me when I most eagerly expect something of them, are always there when I call them, do not change nor betray me. And yet it is not only cowardice. They are intimate and individual as is no other form of graphic art. They are so personal that every separate impression has a fresh character. They are so lovely in soul that they never age nor have their moods. My Aldegrevers and Penczs, he was reflecting. . . . He was a little happier now. . . . The Browning and To Paradise fell once more to the ground. I hope the old man does not waken, he thought, and yet perhaps he will pass his station. What a temper he will be in if he does that, and then I too shall suffer!
He read a line or two of the Browning:
Ours is a great wild country; If you climb to our castle’s top, I don’t see where your eye can stop . . .
How strange that the book should have opened again at that same place as though it were there that it wished him to read!
And then To Paradise a line or two, now page 376, ‘And the Silver Button? Would his answer defy that too? Had he some secret magic? Was he stronger than God Himself? . . .’
And then, Harkness reflected, this business about being an American. He had felt pride when he had told the old man that that was his citizenship. He was proud, yes, and yet he spent most of his life in Europe. And now as always when he fell to thinking of America his eye travelled to his own home there—Baker at the portals of Oregon. All the big trains pass it on their way to the coast—three hundred and forty miles from Portland, fifty from Huntington. He saw himself on that eager arrival coming out by the 11.30 train from Salt Lake City steaming in at 4.30 in the afternoon, an early May afternoon perhaps with the colours violet in the sky and the mountains elephant-dusk—so quiet and so gentle. And when the train has gone on and you are left on the platform and you look about you and find everything as it was when you departed a year ago—the Columbia Café. The Antlers Hotel. The mountains still with their snow caps. The Lumber Offices. The notice on the wall of the café: ‘You can eat here if you have no money.’ The Crabill Hotel. The fresh sweet air, three thousand five hundred feet up. The soft pause of the place. Baker did not grow very fast as did other places. It is true that there had been but four houses when his father had first landed there, but even now as towns went it was small and quiet and unprogressive. Strange that his father with that old-cultured New England stock should have gone there, but he had fled from mankind after the death of his wife, Harkness’ mother, fled with his three little children, shut himself away, there under the mountains with his books, a sad, severe man in that long, rambling, ramshackle house. Still long, still rambling, still ramshackle, although Hetty and Jane, who never moved away from it, had made it as charming as they could. They were darlings, and lived for the month every year when their brother came to visit them. But he could not live there! No, he could not! It was exile for him, exile from everything for which he most deeply cared. But Europe was exile too. That was the tragedy of it! Every morning that he waked he thought that perhaps to-day he would find that he was a true European! But no, it was not so. Away from America, how deeply he loved his country! How clearly he saw its idealism, its vitality, its marvellous promise for the future, its loving contact with his own youthful dreams. But back in America again it seemed crude and noisy and materialistic. He longed for the Past. Exile in both with his New England culture that was not enough, his half-cocked vitality that was not enough. Never enough to permit his half-gods to go! But he loved America always; he saw how little these Europeans truly knew or cared about her, how hasty their visits to her, how patronising their attitude, how weary their stale conventions against her full, bursting energy. And yet——! And yet——! He could not live there. After two weeks of Baker, even though he had with him his etchings, his diary in its dark blue cover, Frazer’s Golden Bough, and some of the Loeb Classics, life was not enough. Hetty and Jane bored him with their goodness and little Culture Club. It was not enough for him that Hetty had read a very good paper on ‘Archibald Marshall—the modern Trollope’ to the inhabitants of Baker and Haines. Nevertheless they seemed to him finer women than the women of any other country, with their cheery independence, their admirable common sense, their warm hearts, their unselfishness, but—it was not enough—no, it was not enough. . . . What he wanted . . .
3
The old man awoke with a start.
‘And when you come to this Prohibition question,’ he said, ‘the Americans have simply become a laughing stock. . . .’
Harkness picked up the Browning firmly. ‘If you don’t mind,’ he remarked, ‘I have a piece of work here of some importance and I have but little time. Pray excuse me. . . .’
4
How had he dared? Never in all his life had he spoken to a stranger so. How often had he envied and admired those who could be rude and indifferent to people’s feelings. It seemed to him that this was a crisis with him, something that he would never forget, something that might alter all his life. Perhaps already the charm of which Maradick had spoken was working. He looked out of his window and always, afterwards, he was to remember a stream that, now bright silver, now ebony dark, ran straight to him from the heart of an emerald green field like a greeting spirit. It laughed up to his window and was gone.
He had asserted himself. The old man with the beard was reading the Hibbert Journal. Strange old man—but defeated! Harkness felt a triumph. Could he but henceforward assert himself in this fashion, all might be easy for him. Instead of retreating he might advance, stretch out his hand and take the things and the people that he wanted as he had seen others do. He almost wished that the old man might speak to him again, that he might once more be rude.
He had had, ever since he could remember, the belief that one day, suddenly, some magic door would open, some one step before him, some magic carpet unroll at his feet, and all life would be changed. For many years he had had no doubt of this. He would call it, perhaps, the coming of romance, but as he had grown older he had come to distrust both himself and life. He had always been interested in contemporary literature. Every new book that he opened now seemed to tell him that he was extremely foolish to expect anything of life at all. He was swallowed by the modern realistic movement as a fly is swallowed by an indifferent spider. These men, he said to himself, are very clever. They know so much more about everything than I do that they must be right. They are telling the truth at last about life as no one has ever done it before. But when he had read a great many of these books (and every word of Mr. Joyce’s Ulysses), he found that he cared much less about truth than he had supposed. He even doubted whether these writers were telling the truth any more than the naïve and sentimental Victorians; and when at last he read a story all about an American manufacturer of washing machines whose habit it was to strip himself naked on every possible occasion before his nearest and dearest relations and friends, and when the author told him that this was a typical American citizen, he, knowing his own country people very well, frankly disbelieved it. These realists, he exclaimed, are telling fairy stories quite as thoroughly as Grimm, Fouqué, and De la Mare; the difference is that the realistic fairy stories are depressing and discouraging, the others are not. He determined to desert the realists and wait until something pleasanter came along. Since it was impossible to have the truth about life anyway let us have only the pleasant hallucinations. They are quite as likely to be as true as the others.
But he was lonely and desolate. The women whom he loved never loved him, and indeed he never came sufficiently close to them to give them any encouragement. He dreamt about them and painted them as they certainly were not. He had his passions and his desires, but his Puritan descent kept him always at one remove from experience. He never, in fact, seemed to have contact with anything at all—except Baker in Oregon, his two sisters, and his forty etchings. He was so shy that he was thought to be conceited, so idealistic that he was considered cynical, so chaste that he was considered a most immoral fellow with a secret double life. Like the hero of ‘Flegeljahre,’ he ‘loved every dog and wanted every dog to love him,’ but the dogs did not know enough about him to be interested; he was so like so many other immaculately dressed, pleasant-mannered, and wandering American cosmopolitans that nobody had any permanent feeling for him—fathered by Henry James, uncled by Howells, aunted (severely) by Edith Wharton—one of a million cultured, kindly, impersonal Americans seen as shadows by the matter-of-fact, unimaginative British. Who knew or cared that he was lonely, longing for love, for home, for some one to whom he might give his romantic devotion? He was all these things, but no one minded.
And then he met James Maradick.
5
The meeting was of the simplest. At the Reform Club one day he was lunching with two men, one a novelist, Westcott, whom he knew very slightly, the other a fellow-American. Westcott, a dark, thick-set man of about forty, with a reputation that without being sensational was solid and well merited, said very little. Harkness liked him and recognised in him a kindly shyness rather like his own. After luncheon they moved into the big smoking-room upstairs to drink their coffee.
A large, handsome man of between fifty and sixty came up and spoke to Westcott. He was obviously pleased to see him, putting his hand on his shoulder, looking at him with kindly, smiling eyes. Westcott also flushed with pleasure. The big man sat down with them and Harkness was introduced to him. His name was Maradick—Sir James Maradick. A strange, unreal kind of name for so real and solid a man. As he sat forward on the sofa with his heavy shoulders, his deep chest, his thick neck, red-brown colour, and clear open gaze, he seemed to Harkness to be the typical, rather naïve, friendly, but cautious British man of business.
That impression soon passed. There was something in Maradick that almost instantly warmed his heart. He responded—as do all American men—immediately, even emotionally, to any friendly contact. The reserves that were in his nature were from his superficial cosmopolitanism; the native warm-hearted, eager, and trusting American was as real and active as it ever had been. It was, in five minutes, as though he had known this large kindly man always. His shyness dropped from him. He was talking eagerly and with great happiness.
Maradick did not patronise, did not check that American spontaneity with traditional caution as so many Englishmen do; he seemed to like Harkness as truly as Harkness liked him.
Westcott had to go. The other American also departed, but Maradick and Harkness sat on there, amused, and even absorbed.
‘If I am keeping you——’ Harkness said suddenly, some of his shyness for a moment returning.
‘Not at all,’ Maradick answered. ‘I have nothing urgent this afternoon. I’ve got the very place for you, I believe.’
They had been speaking of places. Maradick had travelled, and together they found some of the smaller places that they both knew and loved—Dragör on the sea beyond Copenhagen, the woods north of Helsingfors, the beaches of Ischia, the enchantment of Girgente with the white goats moving over carpets of flowers through the ruined temples, the silence and mystery of Mull. He knew America too—the places that foreigners never knew; the teeth-shaped mountains at Las Cruces, the lovely curve of Tacoma, the little humped-up hills of Syracuse, the purple horizons beyond Nashville, the lone lake shore of Marquette——
‘And then in this country there is Treliss,’ he said softly, staring in front of him.
‘Treliss?’ Harkness repeated after him, liking the name.
‘Yes. In North Cornwall. A beautiful place.’
He paused—sighed.
‘I was there more than ten years ago. I shall never go back.’
‘Why not?’
‘I liked it too well. I daresay they’ve spoiled it now as they have many others. Thanks to wretched novelists, the railway company and char-a-bancs, Cornwall and Glebeshire are ruined. No, I dare not go back.’
‘Was it very beautiful?’ Harkness asked.
‘Yes. Beautiful? Oh yes. Wonderful. But it wasn’t that. Something happened to me there.’
‘So that you dare not go back?’
‘Yes. Dare is the word. I believe that the same thing would happen again. And I’m too old to stand it. In my case now it would be ludicrous. It was nearly ludicrous then.’ Harkness said nothing. ‘How old are you? If it isn’t an impertinence——’
‘Thirty-five? You’re young enough. I was forty. Have you ever noticed about places——?’ He broke off. ‘I mean——Well, you know with people. Suppose that you have been very intimate with some one and then you don’t see him or her for years, and then you meet again—don’t you find yourself suddenly producing the same set of thoughts, emotions, moods that have, perhaps, lain dormant for years, and that only this one person can call from you? And it is the same with places. Sometimes of course in the interval something has died in you or in them, and the second meeting produces nothing. Hands cross over a grave. But if those things haven’t died, how wonderful to find them all alive again after all those years, how you had forgotten the way they breathed and spoke and had their being; how interesting to find yourself drawn back again into that old current, perilous perhaps, but deep, real after all the shams——’
He broke off. ‘Places do the same, I think,’ he said. ‘If you have the sort of things in you that stir them they produce in their turn their things . . . and always will for your kind . . . a sort of secret society; I believe,’ he added, suddenly turning on Harkness and looking him in the face, ‘that Treliss might give you something of the same adventure that it gave me—if you want it to, that is—if you need it. Do you want adventure, romance, something that will pull you right out of yourself and test you, show you whether you are real or no, give you a crisis that will change you for ever? Do you want it?’
Then he added quietly, reflectively: ‘It changed me more than the war ever did.’
‘Do I want it?’ Harkness was breathing deeply, driven by some excitement that he could not stop to analyse. ‘I should say so. I want nothing so much. It’s just what I need, what I’ve been looking for——’
‘Then go down there. I believe you’re just the kind—but go at the right time. There’s a night in August when they have a dance, when they dance all round the town. That’s the time for you to go. That will liberate you if you throw yourself into it. It’s in August. August the——I’m not quite sure of the date. I’ll write to you if you’ll give me your address.’
Soon afterwards, with a warm clasp of the hand, they parted.
6
Two days later Harkness received a small parcel. Opening it he discovered an old brown-covered book and a letter.
The letter was as follows:
Dear Mr. Harkness—In all probability in the cold light of reason, and removed from the fumes of the Reform Club, our conversation of yesterday will seem to you nothing but foolishness. Perhaps it was. The merest chance led me to think of something that belongs, for me, to a life quite dead and gone; not perhaps as dead, though, as I had fancied it. In any case, I had not, until yesterday, thought directly of Treliss for years.
Let us put it on the simplest ground. If you want a beautiful place, near at hand, for a holiday, that you have not yet seen, here it is—Treliss, North Cornwall—take the morning train from Paddington and change at Trewth. If you will be advised by me you really should go down for August 6th, when they have their dance. I could see that you are interested in local customs, and here is a most entertaining one surviving from Druid times, I believe. Go down on the day itself and let that be your first impression of the place. The train gets you in between five and six. Take your room at the ‘Man-at-Arms Hotel,’ ten years ago the most picturesque inn in Great Britain. I cannot, of course, vouch for what it may have become. I should get out at Trewth, which you will reach soon after four, and walk the three miles to the town. Well worth doing.
One word more. I am sending you a book. A completely forgotten novel by a completely forgotten novelist. Had he lived he would, I think, have done work that would have lasted, but he was killed in the first year of the war and his earlier books are uncertain. He hadn’t found himself. This book, as you will see from the inscription, he gave me. I was with him down there. Some things in it seem to me to belong especially to the place. Pages 102 and 236 will show you especially what I mean. When you are at the ‘Man-at-Arms’ go and look at the Minstrels’ Gallery, if it isn’t pulled down or turned into a jazz dancing-hall. That too will show you what I mean.
Or go, as perhaps after all is wiser, simply to a beautiful place for a week’s holiday, forgetting me and anything I have said.
Or, as is perhaps wiser still, don’t go at all. In any case I am your debtor for our delightful conversation of yesterday.—Sincerely yours,
James Maradick.
What Maradick had said occurred. As the days passed the impression faded. Harkness hoped that he would meet Maradick again. He did not do so. During the first days he watched for him in the streets and in the clubs. He devised plans that would give him an excuse to meet him once more; the simplest of all would have been to invite him to luncheon. He knew that Maradick would come. But his own distrust of himself now as always forbade him. Why should Maradick wish to see him again? He had been pleasant to him, yes, but he was of the type that would be agreeable to any one, kindly, genial, and forgetting you immediately. But Maradick had not forgotten him. He had taken the trouble to write to him and send him a book. It had been a friendly letter too. Why not ask Westcott and Maradick to dinner? But Westcott was married. Harkness had met his wife, a charming and pretty English girl, younger a good deal than her husband. Yes, all right about Mrs. Westcott, but then Harkness must ask another woman. Maradick, he understood, was a widower. The thing was becoming a party. They would have to go somewhere, to a theatre or something. The thing was becoming elaborate, complicated, and he shrank from it. So he always shrank from everything were he given time to think.
He paid all the gentle American’s courtesy and attention to fine details of conduct. Englishmen often shocked him by their casual inattention, especially to ladies. He must do social things elaborately did he do them at all. He was gathering around him already some of the fussy observances of the confirmed bachelor. And therefore as Maradick became to him something of a problem, he put him out of his mind just as he had put so many other things and persons out of his mind because he was frightened of them.
Treliss too, as the days passed, lost some of the first magic of its name. He had felt a strange excitement when Maradick had first mentioned it, but soon it was the name of a beautiful but distant place, then a seaside resort, then nowhere at all. He did not read Lester’s book.
Then an odd thing occurred. It was the last day in July and he was still in London. Nearly every one had gone away—every one whom he knew. There were still many millions of human beings on every side of him, but London was empty for himself and his kind. His club was closed for cleaning purposes, and the Reform Club was offering him and his fellow-clubmen temporary hospitality.
He had lunched alone, then had gone upstairs, sunk into an arm-chair and read a newspaper. Read it or seemed to read it. It was time that he went away. Where should he go? There was an uncle who had taken a shooting-box in Scotland. He did not like that uncle. He had an invitation from a kind lady who had a large house in Wiltshire. But the kind lady had asked him because she pitied him, not because she liked him. He knew that very well.
There were several men who would, if he had caught them sooner, have gone with him somewhere, but he had allowed things to drift and now they had made their own plans.
He felt terribly lonely, soused suddenly with that despicable self-pity to which he was rather too easily prone. He thought of Baker—Lord! how hot it must be there just now! He was half asleep. It was hot enough here. Only one other occupant of the room, and he was fast asleep in another arm-chair. Snoring. The room rocked with his snores. The papers laid neatly one upon another wilted under the heat. The subdued London roar came from behind the windows in rolling waves of heat. A faint iridescence hovered above the enormous chairs and sofas that lay like animals panting.
He looked across the long room. Almost opposite him was a square of wall that caught the subdued light like a pool of water. He stared at it as though it had demanded his attention. The water seemed to move, to shift. Something was stirring there. He looked more intently. Colours came, shapes shifted. It was a scene, some place. Yes, a place. Houses, sand, water. A bay. A curving bay. A long sea-line dark like the stroke of a pencil against faint egg-shell blue. Water. A bay bordered by a ring of saffron sand, and behind the sand, rising above it, a town. Tier on tier of houses, and behind them again in the farthest distance a fringe of dark wood. He could even see now little figures, black spots, dotted upon the sand. The sea now was very clear, shimmering mother-of-pearl. A scattering of white upon the shore as the long wave-line broke and retreated. And the houses tier upon tier. He gazed, filled with an overwhelming breathless excitement. He was leaning forward, his hands pressing in upon the arms of the chair. It stayed, trembling with a kind of personal invitation before him. Then, as though it had nodded and smiled farewell to him, it vanished. Only the wall was there.
But the excitement remained, excitement quite unaccountable.
He got up, his knees trembling. He looked at the stout bellying occupant of the other chair, his mouth open, his snores reverberant.
He went out. Six days later he was in the train for Treliss.
7
Now too, of course, he had his reactions just as he always had. He could explain the thing easily enough; for a moment or two he had slept, or, if he had not, a trick of light on that warm afternoon and his own thoughts about possible places had persuaded him.
Nevertheless the picture remained strangely vivid—the sea, the shore, the rising town, the little line of darkening wood. He would go down there, and on the day that Maradick had suggested to him. Something might occur. You never could tell. He packed his etchings—his St. Gilles, Marais, his Flight into Egypt and Orvieto, his Whistler and Strang and Meryon. They would protect him and see that he did nothing foolish.
He had special confidence in his St. Gilles.
He had intended to read the Lester book all the way, but as we have seen, managed only a bare line or two; the Browning he had not intended even to have with him, but in some fashion, with the determined resolve that books so often show, it had crept into his bag and then was on his knee, he knew not whence, and soon out of self-defence against the old man he was reading ‘The Flight of the Duchess,’ carried away on the wings of its freedom, strength, and colour.
Nevertheless, that is the kind of man I am, he thought, even the books force me to read them when I have no wish. And soon he had forgotten the old man, the carriage, the warm weather. How many years since he had read it? No matter. Wasn’t it fine and touching and true? When he came to the place:
. . . the door opened and more than mortal Stood, with a face where to my mind centred All beauties I ever saw or shall see, The Duchess—I stopped as if struck by palsy. She was so different, happy and beautiful, I felt at once that all was best, And that I had nothing to do, for the rest But wait her commands, obey and be dutiful. Not that, in fact, there was any commanding, —I saw the glory of her eye And the brow’s height and the breast’s expanding, And I was hers to live or to die.
‘Hurrah!’ Harkness cried.
‘I beg your pardon?’ the old man said, looking up.
Harkness blushed. ‘I was reading something rather fine,’ he said, smiling.
‘You’d better look out for what you’re reading, to whom you’re speaking, where you’re walking, what you’re eating, everything, when you’re in Treliss,’ he remarked.
‘Why? Is it so dangerous a place?’ asked Harkness.
‘It doesn’t like tourists. I’ve seen it do funny things to tourists in my time.’
‘I think you’re hard on tourists,’ Harkness said. ‘They don’t mean any harm. They admire places the best way they can.’
‘Yes, and how long do they stay?’ the old man replied. ‘Do you think you can know a place in a week or a month? Do you think a real place likes the dirt and the noise and the silly talk they bring with them?’
‘What do you mean by a real place?’ Harkness asked.
‘Places have souls just like people. Some have more soul and some have less. And some have none at all. Sometimes a place will creep away altogether, it is so disgusted with the things people are trying to do to it, and will leave a dummy instead, and only a few know the difference. Why, up in the Welsh hills there are several places that have gone up there in sheer disgust the way they’ve been treated, and left substitutes behind them. Parts of London, for instance. Do you think that’s the real Chelsea you see in London? Not a bit of it. The real Chelsea is living—well, I mustn’t tell you where it is living—but you’ll never find it. However, Americans are the last to understand these things. I am wasting my breath talking.’
The train had drawn now into Drymouth. The old man was silent, looking out at the hurrying crowds on the platform. He was certainly a pessimist and a hater of his kind. He was looking out at the innocent people with a lowering brow as though he would slaughter the lot of them had he the power. ‘Old Testament Moses’ Harkness named him. After a while the train slowly moved on. They passed above the mean streets, the hoardings with the cheap theatres, the lines with the clothes hanging in the wind, the grimy windows. But even these things the lovely sky, shining, transmuted.
They came to the river. It lay on either side of the track, a broad sheet of lovely water spreading, on the left, to the open sea. The warships clustered in dark ebony shadows against the gold; the hills rose softly, bending in kindly peace and happy watchfulness.
‘Silence! We’re crossing!’ the old man cried. He was sitting forward, his gnarled hands on his broad knees, staring in front of him.
The train drew in to a small wayside station, gay with flowers. The trees blew about it in whispering clusters. The old man got up, gathered his basket and lumbered out, neither looking at nor speaking to Harkness.
He was alone. He felt an overwhelming relief. He had not liked the old man, and very obviously the old man had not liked him. But it was not only that he was alone that pleased him. There was something more than that.
It was indeed as though he were in a new country. The train seemed to be going now more slowly, with a more casual air, as though it too felt a relief and did not care what happened—time, engagements, schedules, all these were now forgotten as they went comfortably lumbering, the curving fields embracing them, the streams singing to them, the little houses perched on the clear-lit skyline smiling down upon them.
It would not be long now before they were in Trewth, where he must change. He took his two books and put them away in his bag. Should he send the bag on and walk as Maradick had advised him? Three miles. Not far, and it was a most lovely day. He could smell the sea now through the windows. It must be only over that ridge of hill. He was strangely, oddly happy. London seemed far, far away. America too. Any country that had a name, a date, a history. This country was timeless and without a record. How beautifully the hills dipped into valleys! Streams seemed to be everywhere, little secret coloured streams with happy thoughts. Everything and every one surely here was happy. Then suddenly he saw a deserted mine tower like a gaunt and ruined temple. Haggard and fierce it stood against the skyline, and, as Harkness looked back to it, it seemed to raise an arm to heaven in desperate protest.
The train drew into Trewth.
8
Trewth was nothing more than a long wooden platform open to all the winds of heaven, and behind it a sort of shed with a ticket collector’s box in one side of it.
Harkness was annoyed to see that others beside himself climbed out and scattered about the platform waiting for the Treliss train to come in.
He resented these especially because they were grand and elegant, two men, long, thin, in baggy knickerbockers, carrying themselves as though all the world belonged to them with that indifferent assurance that only Englishmen have; a large, stout woman, quietly but admirably dressed, with a Pekinese and a maid to whom she spoke as Cleopatra to Charmian. Five boxes, gun-cases, magnificent golf-bags, these things were scattered about the naked bare platform. The wind came in from the sea and sported everywhere, flipping at the stout lady’s skirts, laughing at the elegant sportsmen’s thin calves, mocking at the pouting Pekinese. It was fresh and lovely: all the cornfields were waving invitation.
It was characteristic of Harkness that a fancied haughty glance from the sportsman’s eye decided him. He’s laughing at my clothes, Harkness thought. How was it that Englishmen wore old things so carelessly and yet were never wrong? Harkness bought his clothes from the best London tailors, but they were always finally a little hostile. They never surrendered to his personality, keeping their own proud reserve.
I’ll walk, he thought suddenly. He found a young porter who, in anxious fashion, so unlike American porters who were always so superior to the luggage that they conveyed, was wheeling magnificent trunks on a very insecure barrow.
‘These two boxes of mine,’ Harkness said, stopping him. ‘I want to walk over to Treliss. Can they be sent over?’
‘Happen they can,’ said the young porter doubtfully.
‘They are labelled to the “Man-at-Arms Hotel,” ’ Harkness said.
