Hugh Lamb – The Black Reaper: Tales of Terror by Bernard Capes (страница 9)
He spoke in a rather high, mellow voice – too frank for irony.
At another time Rose might have met such a request with some slightly agitated temporising. Now, fevered with disgust of his late company, the astringency of nerve that came to him at odd moments, in the exaltation of which he felt himself ordinarily manly and human, braced him to an attitude at once modest and collected.
‘I shall be quite happy,’ he said. ‘Only, don’t blame me if you find you are entertaining a fool unawares.’
‘You were out of your element, and are piqued. I saw you there, but wasn’t introduced.’
‘The loss is mine. I didn’t observe you – yes, I did!’
He shot the last words out hurriedly – as they came within the radiance of a street lamp – and his pace lessened a moment with a little bewildered jerk.
He had noticed this person, indeed – his presence and his manner. They had arrested his languid review of the frivolous forces about him. He had seen a figure, strange and lofty, pass from group to group; exchange with one a word or two, with another a grave smile; move on and listen; move on and speak; always statelily restless; never anything but an incongruous apparition in a company of which every individual was eager to assert and expound the doctrines of self.
This man had been of curious expression, too – so curious that Amos remembered to have marvelled at the little comment his presence seemed to excite. His face was absolutely hairless – as, to all evidence, was his head, upon which he wore a brown silk handkerchief loosely rolled and knotted. The features were presumably of a Jewish type – though their entire lack of accent in the form of beard or eyebrow made identification difficult – and were minutely covered, like delicate cracklin, with a network of flattened wrinkles. Ludicrous though the description, the lofty individuality of the man so surmounted all disadvantages of appearance as to overawe frivolous criticism. Partly, also, the full transparent olive of his complexion, and the pools of purple shadow in which his eyes seemed to swim like blots of resin, neutralised the superficial barrenness of his face. Forcibly, he impelled the conviction that here was one who ruled his own being arbitrarily through entire fearlessness of death.
‘You saw me?’ he said, noticing with a smile his companion’s involuntary hesitation. ‘Then let us consider the introduction made, without further words. We will even expand to the familiarity of old acquaintanceship, if you like to fall in with the momentary humour.’
‘I can see,’ said Rose, ‘that years are nothing to you.’
‘No more than this gold piece, which I fling into the night. They are made and lost and made again.’
‘You have knowledge and the gift of tongues.’
The young man spoke bewildered, but with a strange warm feeling of confidence flushing up through his habitual reserve. He had no thought why, nor did he choose his words or inquire of himself their source of inspiration.
‘I have these,’ said the stranger. ‘The first is my excuse for addressing you.’
‘You are going to ask me something.’
‘What attraction—’
‘Drew me to Lady Sarah’s house? I am young, rich, presumably a desirable
‘Yet you knew your taste would take alarm – as it did.’
‘I have an acute sense of delicacy. Naturally I am prejudiced in favour of virtue.’
‘Then – excuse me – why put yours to a demoralising test?’
‘I am not my own master. Any formless apprehension – any shadowy fear enslaves my will. I go to many places from the simple dread of being called upon to explain my reasons for refusing. For the same cause I may appear to acquiesce in indecencies my soul abhors; to give countenance to opinions innately distasteful to me. I am a quite colourless personality.’
‘Without force or object in life?’
‘Life, I think, I live for its isolated moments – the first half-dozen pulls at a cigarette, for instance, after a generous meal.’
‘You take the view, then—’
‘Pardon me. I take no views. I am not strong enough to take anything – not even myself – seriously.’
‘Yet you know that the trail of such volitionary ineptitude reaches backwards under and beyond the closed door you once issued from?’
‘Do I? I know at least that the ineptitude intensifies with every step of constitutional decadence. It may be that I am wearing down to the nerve of life. How shall I find that? diseased? Then it is no happiness to me to think it imperishable.’
‘Young man, do you believe in a creative divinity?’
‘Yes.’
‘And believe without resentment?’
‘I think God hands over to His apprentices the moulding of vessels that don’t interest Him.’
The stranger twitched himself erect.
‘I beg you not to be profane,’ he said.
‘I am not,’ said Rose. ‘I don’t know why I confide in you, or what concern I have to know. I can only say my instincts, through bewildering mental suffering, remain religious. You take me out of myself and judge me unfairly on the result.’
‘Stay. You argue that a perishing of the bodily veil reveals the soul. Then the outlook of the latter should be the cleaner.’
‘It gazes through a blind of corruption. It was never designed to stand naked in the world’s market-places.’
‘And whose the fault that it does?’
‘I don’t know. I only feel that I am utterly lonely and helpless.’
The stranger laughed scornfully.
‘You can feel no sympathy with my state?’ said Rose.
‘Not a grain. To be conscious of a soul, yet to remain a craven under the temporal tyranny of the flesh; fearful of revolting, though the least imaginative flight of the spirit carries it at once beyond any bodily influence! Oh, sir! Fortune favours the brave.’
‘She favours the fortunate,’ said the young man, with a melancholy smile. ‘Like a banker, she charges a commission on small accounts. At trifling deposits she turns up her nose. If you would escape her tax, you must keep a fine large balance at her house.’
‘I dislike parables,’ said the stranger drily.
‘Then, here is a fact in illustration. I have an acquaintance, an impoverished author, who anchored his ark of hope on Mount Olympus twenty years ago. During all that time he has never ceased to send forth his doves; only to have them return empty beaked with persistent regularity. Three days ago the olive branch – a mere sprouting twig – came home. For the first time a magazine – an indifferent one – accepted a story of his and offered him a pound for it. He acquiesced; and the same night was returned to him from an important American firm an understamped MS, on which he had to pay excess postage, half a crown. That was Fortune’s commission.’
‘Bully the jade, and she will love you.’
‘Your wisdom has not learned to confute that barbarism?’
The stranger glanced at his companion with some expression of dislike.
‘The sex figures in your ideals, I see,’ said he. ‘Believe my long experience that its mere animal fools constitute its only excuse for existing – though’ (he added under his breath) ‘even they annoy one by their monogamous prejudices.’
‘I won’t hear that with patience,’ said Rose. ‘Each sex in its degree. Each is wearifully peevish over the hateful rivalry between mind and matter; but the male only has the advantage of distractions.’
‘This,’ said the stranger softly, as if to himself, ‘is the woeful proof, indeed, of decadence. Man waives his prerogative of lordship over the irreclaimable savagery of earth. He has warmed his temperate house of clay to be a hot-house to his imagination, till the very walls are frail and eaten with fever.’
‘Christ spoke of no spiritual division between the sexes.’
There followed a brief silence. Preoccupied, the two moved slowly through the fog, that was dashed ever and anon with cloudy blooms of lamplight.
‘I wish to ask you,’ said the stranger at length, ‘in what has the teaching of Christ proved otherwise than so impotent to reform mankind, as to make one sceptical as to the divinity of the teacher?’
‘Why, what is your age?’ asked Rose in a tone of surprise.
‘I am a hundred tonight.’
The astounded young man jumped in his walk.
‘A hundred!’ he exclaimed. ‘And you cannot answer that question yourself?’
‘I asked you to answer it. But never mind. I see faith in you like a garden of everlastings – as it should be – as of course it should be. Yet disbelievers point to inconsistencies. There was a reviling Jew, for instance, to whom Christ is reported to have shown resentment quite incompatible with His teaching.’
‘Whom do you mean?’
‘Cartaphilus; who was said to be condemned to perpetual wandering.’
‘A legend,’ cried Amos scornfully. ‘Bracket it with Nero’s fiddling and the hymning of Memnon.’
A second silence fell. They seemed to move in a dead and stagnant world. Presently said the stranger suddenly—
‘I am quite lost; and so, I suppose, are you?’
‘I haven’t an idea where we are.’
‘It is two o’clock. There isn’t a soul or a mark to guide us. We had best part, and each seek his own way.’