DP Tool Club 12/CD_ASCQ_12_0294.iso/vrac/manaliv1.zip/MAN-04.TXT

Text File | 1994-01-15 | 26KB | 491 lines

                         Chapter IV

                    The Garden of the God


Diana Duke seemed inexplicably irritated at the abrupt
entrance and utterance of the other girl.
   "Well," she said shortly, "I suppose Miss Gray can
decline him if she doesn't want to marry him."
   "But she DOES want to marry him!" cried Rosamund in
exasperation.  "She's a wild, wicked fool, and I won't be
parted from her."
   "Perhaps," said Diana icily, "but I really don't see what
we can do."
   "But the man's balmy, Diana," reasoned her friend
angrily.  "I can't let my nice governess marry a man that's
balmy!  You or somebody MUST stop it! -- Mr. Inglewood,
you're a man; go and tell them they simply can't."
   "Unfortunately, it seems to me they simply can," said
Inglewood, with a depressed air.  "I have far less right of
intervention than Miss Duke, besides having, of course, far
less moral force than she."
   "You haven't either of you got much," cried Rosamund, the
last stays of her formidable temper giving way; "I think
I'll go somewhere else for a little sense and pluck.  I
think I know some one who will help me more than you do, at
any rate... he's a cantankerous beast, but he's a man, and
has a mind, and knows it..."  And she flung out into the
garden, with cheeks aflame, and the parasol whirling like a
Catherine wheel.
   She found Michael Moon standing under the garden tree,
looking over the hedge; hunched like a bird of prey, with
his large pipe hanging down his long blue chin.  The very
hardness of his expression pleased her, after the nonsense
of the new engagement and the shilly-shallying of her other
friends.
   "I am sorry I was cross, Mr. Moon," she said frankly.  "I
hated you for being a cynic; but I've been well punished,
for I want a cynic just now.  I've had my fill of sentiment
-- I'm fed up with it.  The world's gone mad, Mr. Moon --
all except the cynics, I think.  That maniac Smith wants to
marry my old friend Mary, and she -- and she -- doesn't seem
to mind."
   Seeing his attentive face still undisturbedly smoking,
she added smartly, "I'm not joking; that's Mr. Smith's cab
outside.  He swears he'll take her off now to his aunt's,
and go for a special licence.  Do give me some practical
advice, Mr. Moon."
   Mr. Moon took his pipe out of his mouth, held it in his
hand for an instant reflectively, and then tossed it to the
other side of the garden.  "My practical advice to you is
this," he said: "Let him go for his special licence, and ask
him to get another one for you and me."
   "Is that one of your jokes?" asked the young lady.  "Do
say what you really mean."
   "I mean that Innocent Smith is a man of business," said
Moon with ponderous precision -- "a plain, practical man: a
man of affairs; a man of facts and the daylight.  He has let
down twenty ton of good building bricks suddenly on my head,
and I am glad to say they have woken me up.  We went to
sleep a little while ago on this very lawn, in this very
sunlight.  We have had a little nap for five years or so,
but now we're going to be married, Rosamund, and I can't see
why that cab..."
   "Really," said Rosamund stoutly, "I don't know what you
mean."
   "What a lie! cried Michael, advancing on her with
brightening eyes.  "I'm all for lies in an ordinary way; but
don't you see that to-night they won't do?  We've wandered
into a world of facts, old girl.  That grass growing, and
that sun going down, and that cab at the door, are facts.
You used to torment and excuse yourself by saying I was
after your money, and didn't really love you.  But if I
stood here now and told you I didn't love you -- you
wouldn't believe me: for truth is in this garden to-night."
   "Really, Mr. Moon..." said Rosamund, rather more faintly.
   He kept two big blue magnetic eyes fixed on her face.
"Is my name Moon?" he asked.  "Is your name Hunt?  On my
honour, they sound to me as quaint and as distant as Red
Indian names.  It's as if your name was `Swim' and my name
was `Sunrise.'  But our real names are Husband and Wife, as
they were when we fell asleep."
   "It is no good," said Rosamund, with real tears in her
eyes; "one can never go back."
   "I can go where I damn please," said Michael, "and I can
carry you on my shoulder."
   "But really, Michael, really, you must stop and think!"
cried the girl earnestly.  "You could carry me off my feet,
I dare say, soul and body, but it may be bitter bad business
for all that.  These things done in that romantic rush, like
Mr. Smith's, they -- they do attract women, I don't deny
it.  As you say, we're all telling the truth to-night.
They've attracted poor Mary, for one.  They attract me,
Michael.  But the cold fact remains: imprudent marriages do
lead to long unhappiness and disappointment -- you've got
used to your drinks and things -- I shan't be pretty much
longer --"
   "Imprudent marriages!" roared Michael.  "And pray where
in earth or heaven are there any prudent marriages?  Might
as well talk about prudent suicides.  You and I have dawdled
round each other long enough, and are we any safer than
Smith and Mary Gray, who met last night?  You never know a
husband till you marry him.  Unhappy! of course you'll be
unhappy.  Who the devil are you that you shouldn't be
unhappy, like the mother that bore you?  Disappointed! of
course we'll be disappointed.  I, for one, don't expect till
I die to be so good a man as I am at this minute, for just
now I'm fifty thousand feet high  -- a tower with all the
trumpets shouting."
   "You see all this," said Rosamund, with a grand sincerity
in her solid face, "and do you really want to marry me?"
   "My darling, what else is there to do?" reasoned the
Irishman.  "What other occupation is there for an active man
on this earth, except to marry you?  What's the alternative
to marriage, barring sleep?  It's not liberty, Rosamund.
Unless you marry God, as our nuns do in Ireland, you must
marry Man -- that is Me.  The only third thing is to marry
yourself -- to live with yourself -- yourself, yourself,
yourself -- the only companion that is never satisfied --
and never satisfactory."
   "Michael," said Miss Hunt, in a very soft voice, "if you
won't talk so much, I'll marry you."
   "It's no time for talking," cried Michael Moon; "singing
is the only thing.  Can't you find that mandoline of yours,
Rosamund?"
   "Go and fetch it for me," said Rosamund, with crisp and
sharp authority.
   The lounging Mr. Moon stood for one split second
astonished; then he shot away across the lawn, as if shod
with the feathered shoes out of the Greek fairy tale.  He
cleared three yards and fifteen daisies at a leap, out of
mere bodily levity; but when he came within a yard or two of
the open parlour windows, his flying feet fell in their old
manner like lead; he twisted round and came back slowly,
whistling.  The events of that enchanted evening were not at
an end.
   Inside the dark sitting-room of which Moon had caught a
glimpse a curious thing had happened, almost an instant
after the intemperate exit of Rosamund.  It was something
which, occurring in that obscure parlour, seemed to Arthur
Inglewood like heaven and earth turning head over heels, the
sea being the ceiling and the stars the floor.  No words can
express how it astonished him, as it astonishes all simple
men when it happens.  Yet the stiffest female stoicism seems
separated from it only by a sheet of paper or a sheet of
steel.  It indicates no surrender, far less any sympathy.
The most rigid and ruthless woman can begin to cry, just as
the most effeminate man can grow a beard.  It is a separate
sexual power, and proves nothing one way or the other about
force of character.  But to young men ignorant of women,
like Arthur Inglewood, to see Diana Duke crying was like
seeing a motor-car shedding tears of petrol.
   He could never have given (even if his really manly
modesty had permitted it) any vaguest vision of what he did
when he saw that portent.  He acted as men do when a theatre
catches fire -- very differently from how they would have
conceived themselves as acting, whether for better or
worse.  He had a faint memory of certain half-stifled
explanations, that the heiress was the one really paying
guest, and she would go, and the bailiffs (in consequence)
would come; but after that he knew nothing of his own
conduct except by the protests it evoked.
   "Leave me alone, Mr. Inglewood -- leave me alone; that's
not the way to help."
   "But I can help you," said Arthur, with grinding
certainty; "I can, I can, I can..."
   "Why, you said," cried the girl, "that you were much
weaker than me."
   "So I am weaker than you," said Arthur, in a voice that
went vibrating through everything, "but not just now."
   "Let go my hands!" cried Diana.  "I won't be bullied."
   In one element he was much stronger than she -- the
matter of humour.  This leapt up in him suddenly, and he
laughed, saying: "Well, you are mean.  You know quite well
you'll bully me all the rest of my life.  You might allow a
man the one minute of his life when he's allowed to bully."
   It was as extraordinary for him to laugh as for her to
cry, and for the first time since her childhood Diana was
entirely off her guard.
   "Do you mean you want to marry me?" she said.
   "Why, there's a cab at the door!" cried Inglewood,
springing up with an unconscious energy and bursting open
the glass doors that led into the garden.
   As he led her out by the hand they realized somehow for
the first time that the house and garden were on a steep
height over London.  And yet, though they felt the place to
be uplifted, they felt it also to be secret: it was like
some round walled garden on the top of one of the turrets of
heaven.
   Inglewood looked around dreamily, his brown eyes
devouring all sorts of details with a senseless delight.  He
noticed for the first time that the railings of the gate
beyond the garden bushes were moulded like little spearheads
and painted blue.  He noticed that one of the blue spears
was loosened in its place, and hung sideways; and this
almost made him laugh.  He thought it somehow exquisitely
harmless and funny that the railing should be crooked; he
thought he should like to know how it happened, who did it,
and how the man was getting on.
   When they were gone a few feet across that fiery grass
realized that they were not alone.  Rosamund Hunt and the
eccentric Mr. Moon, both of whom they had last seen in the
blackest temper of detachment, were standing together on the
lawn.  They were standing in quite an ordinary manner, and
yet they looked somehow like people in a book.
   "Oh," said Diana, "what lovely air!"
   "I know," called out Rosamund, with a pleasure so
positive that it rang out like a complaint.  "It's just like
that horrid, beastly fizzy stuff they gave me that made me
feel happy."
   "Oh, it isn't like anything but itself!" answered Diana,
breathing deeply.  "Why, it's all cold, and yet it feels
like fire."
   "Balmy is the word we use in Fleet Street," said Mr.
Moon.  "Balmy -- especially on the crumpet."  And he fanned
himself quite unnecessarily with his straw hat.  They were
all full of little leaps and pulsations of objectless and
airy energy.  Diana stirred and stretched her long arms
rigidly, as if crucified, in a sort of excruciating
restfulness; Michael stood still for long intervals, with
gathered muscles, then spun round like a teetotum, and stood
still again; Rosamund did not trip, for women never trip,
except when they fall on their noses, but she struck the
ground with her foot as she moved, as if to some inaudible
dance tune; and Inglewood, leaning quite quietly against a
tree, had unconsciously clutched a branch and shaken it with
a creative violence.  Those giant gestures of Man, that made
the high statues and the strokes of war, tossed and
tormented all their limbs.  Silently as they strolled and
stood they were bursting like batteries with an animal
magnetism.
   "And now," cried Moon quite suddenly, stretching out a
hand on each side, "let's dance round that bush!"
   "Why, what bush do you mean?" asked Rosamund, looking
round with a sort of radiant rudeness.
   "The bush that isn't there," said Michael -- "the
Mulberry Bush."
   They had taken each other's hands, half laughing and
quite ritually; and before they could disconnect again
Michael spun them all round, like a demon spinning the world
for a top.  Diana felt, as the circle of the horizon flew
instantaneously around her, a far aerial sense of the ring
of heights beyond London and corners where she had climbed
as a child; she seemed almost to hear the rooks cawing about
the old pines on Highgate, or to see the glowworms gathering
and kindling in the woods of Box Hill.
   The circle broke -- as all such perfect circles of levity
must break -- and sent its author, Michael, flying, as by
centrifugal force, far away against the blue rails of the
gate.  When reeling there he suddenly raised shout after
shout of a new and quite dramatic character.
   "Why, it's Warner!" he shouted, waving his arms.  "It's
jolly old Warner -- with a new silk hat and the old silk
moustache!"
   "Is that Dr. Warner?" cried Rosamund, bounding forward in
a burst of memory, amusement, and distress.  "Oh, I'm so
sorry!  Oh, do tell him it's all right!"
   "Let's take hands and tell him," said Michael Moon.  For
indeed, while they were talking, another hansom cab had
dashed up behind the one already waiting, and Dr. Herbert
Warner, leaving a companion in the cab, had carefully
deposited himself on the pavement.
   Now, when you are an eminent physician and are wired for
by an heiress to come to a case of dangerous mania, and
when, as you come in through the garden to the house, the
heiress and her landlady and two of the gentlemen boarders
join hands and dance round you in a ring, calling out, "It's
all right! it's all right!" you are apt to be flustered and
even displeased.  Dr. Warner was a placid but hardly a
placable person.  The two things are by no means the same;
and even when Moon explained to him that he, Warner, with
his high hat and tall, solid figure, was just such a classic
column as OUGHT to be danced round by a ring of laughing
maidens on some old golden Greek seashore -- even then he
seemed to miss the point of the general rejoicing.
   "Inglewood!" cried Dr. Warner, fixing his former disciple
with a stare, "are you mad?"
   Arthur flushed to the roots of his brown hair, but he
answered, easily and quietly enough, "Not now.  The truth
is, Warner, I've just made a rather important medical
discovery -- quite in your line."
   "What do you mean?" asked the great doctor stiffly --
"what discovery?"
   "I've discovered that health really is catching, like
disease," answered Arthur.
   "Yes; sanity has broken out, and is spreading," said
Michael, performing a ~pas seul~ with a thoughtful
expression.  "Twenty thousand more cases taken to the
hospitals; nurses employed night and day."
   Dr. Warner studied Michael's grave face and lightly
moving legs with an unfathomed wonder.  "And is THIS, may I
ask," he said, "the sanity that is spreading?"
   "You must forgive me, Dr. Warner," cried Rosamund Hunt
heartily.  "I know I've treated you badly; but indeed it was
all a mistake.  I was in a frightfully bad temper when I
sent for you, but now it all seems like a dream -- and --
and Mr. Smith is the sweetest, most sensible, most
delightful old thing that ever existed, and he may marry any
one he likes -- except me."
   "I should suggest Mrs. Duke," said Michael.
   The gravity of Dr. Warner's face increased.  He took a
slip of pink paper from his waistcoat pocket, with his pale
blue eyes quietly fixed on Rosamund's face all the time.  He
spoke with a not inexcusable frigidity.
   "Really, Miss Hunt," he said, "you are not yet very
reassuring.  You sent me this wire only half an hour ago:
`Come at once, if possible, with another doctor.  Man --
Innocent Smith -- gone mad on premises, and doing dreadful
things.  Do you know anything of him?'  I went round at once
to a distinguished colleague of mine, a doctor who is also a
private detective and an authority on criminal lunacy; he
has come round with me, and is waiting in the cab.  Now you
calmly tell me that this criminal madman is a highly sweet
and sane old thing, with accompaniments that set me
speculating on your own definitions of sanity.  I hardly
comprehend the change."
   "Oh, how can one explain a change in sun and moon and
everybody's soul?" cried Rosamund, in despair.  "Must I
confess we had got so morbid as to think him mad merely
because he wanted to get married; and that we didn't even
know it was only because we wanted to get married
ourselves?  We'll humiliate ourselves, if you like, doctor;
we're happy enough."
   "Where is Mr. Smith?" asked Warner of Inglewood very
sharply.
   Arthur started; he had forgotten all about the central
figure of their farce, who had not been visible for an hour
or more.
   "I -- I think he's on the other side of the house, by the
dustbin," he said.
   "He may be on the road to Russia," said Warner, "but he
must be found."  And he strode away and disappeared round a
corner of the house by the sunflowers.
   "I hope," said Rosamund, "he won't really interfere with
Mr. Smith."
   "Interfere with the daisies!" said Michael with a snort.
"A man can't be locked up for falling in love -- at least I
hope not."
   "No; I think even a doctor couldn't make a disease out of
him.  He'd throw off the doctor like the disease, don't you
know?  I believe it's a case of a sort of holy well.  I
believe Innocent Smith is simply innocent, and that is why
he is so extraordinary."
   It was Rosamund who spoke, restlessly tracing circles in
the grass with the point of her white shoe.
   "I think," said Inglewood, "that Smith is not
extraordinary at all.  He's comic just because he's so
startlingly commonplace.  Don't you know what it is to be in
all one family circle, with aunts and uncles, when a
schoolboy comes home for the holidays?  That bag there on
the cab is only a schoolboy's hamper.  This tree here in the
garden is only the sort of tree that any schoolboy would
have climbed.  Yes, that's the thing that has haunted us all
about him, the thing we could never fit a word to.  Whether
he is my old schoolfellow or no, at least he is all my old
schoolfellows.  He is the endless bun-eating, ball-throwing
animal that we have all been."
   "That is only you absurd boys," said Diana.  "I don't
believe any girl was ever so silly, and I'm sure no girl was
ever so happy, except --" and she stopped.
   "I will tell you the truth about Innocent Smith," said
Michael Moon in a low voice.  "Dr. Warner has gone to look
for him in vain.  He is not there.  Haven't you noticed that
we never saw him since we found ourselves?  He was an astral
baby born of all four of us; he was only our own youth
returned.  Long before poor old Warner had clambered out of
his cab, the thing we called Smith had dissolved into dew
and light on this lawn.  Once or twice more, by the mercy of
God, we may feel the thing, but the man we shall never see.
In a spring garden before breakfast we shall smell the smell
called Smith.  In the snapping of brisk twigs in tiny fires
we shall hear a noise named Smith.  Everything insatiable
and innocent in the grasses that gobble up the earth like
babies at a bun feast, in the white mornings that split the
sky as a boy splits up white firwood, we may feel for one
instant the presence of an impetuous purity; but his
innocence was too close to the unconsciousness of inanimate
things not to melt back at a mere touch into the mild hedges
and heavens; he--"
   He was interrupted from behind the house by a bang like
that of a bomb.  Almost at the same instant the stranger in
the cab sprang out of it, leaving it rocking upon the stones
of the road.  He clutched the blue railings of the garden,
and peered eagerly over them in the direction of the noise.
He was a small, loose, yet alert man, very thin, with a face
that seemed made out of fish bones, and a silk hat quite as
rigid and resplendent as Warner's, but thrust back
recklessly on the hinder part of his head.
   "Murder!" he shrieked, in a high and feminine but very
penetrating voice.  "Stop that murderer there!"
   Even as he shrieked a second shot shook the lower windows
of the house, and with the noise of it Dr. Herbert Warner
came flying round the corner like a leaping rabbit.  Yet
before he had reached the group a third discharge had
deafened them, and they saw with their own eyes two spots of
white sky drilled through the second of the unhappy
Herbert's high hats.  The next moment the fugitive physician
fell over a flowerpot, and came down on all fours, staring
like a cow.  The hat with the two shot-holes in it rolled
upon the gravel path before him, and Innocent Smith came
round the corner like a railway train.  He was looking twice
his proper size -- a giant clad in green, the big revolver
still smoking in his hand, his face sanguine and in shadow,
his eyes blazing like stars, and his yellow hair standing
out all ways like Struwelpeter's.
   Though this startling scene hung but an instant in
stillness, Inglewood had time to feel once more what he had
felt when he saw the other lovers standing on the lawn --
the sensation of a certain cut and coloured clearness that
belongs rather to the things of art than to the things of
experience.  The broken flowerpot with its red-hot
geraniums, the green bulk of Smith and the black bulk of
Warner, the blue-spiked railings behind, clutched by the
stranger's yellow vulture claws and peered over by his long
vulture neck, the silk hat on the gravel, and the little
cloudlet of smoke floating across the garden as innocently
as the puff of a cigarette -- all these seemed unnaturally
distinct and definite.  They existed, like symbols, in an
ecstasy of separation.  Indeed, every object grew more and
more particular and precious because the whole picture was
breaking up.  Things look so bright just before they burst.
   Long before his fancies had begun, let alone ceased,
Arthur had stepped across and taken one of Smith's arms.
Simultaneously the little stranger had run up the steps and
taken the other.  Smith went into peals of laughter, and
surrendered his pistol with perfect willingness.  Moon
raised the doctor to his feet, and then went and leaned
sullenly on the garden gate.  The girls were quiet and
vigilant, as good women mostly are in instants of
catastrophe, but their faces showed that, somehow or other,
a light had been dashed out of their sky.  The doctor
himself, when he had risen, collected his hat and wits, and
dusting himself down with an air of great disgust, turned to
them in brief apology.  He was very white with his recent
panic, but he spoke with perfect self-control.
   "You will excuse us, ladies," he said; "my friend and Mr.
Inglewood are both scientists in their several ways.  I
think we had better all take Mr. Smith indoors, and
communicate with you later."
   And under the guard of the three natural philosophers the
disarmed Smith was led tactfully into the house, still
roaring with laughter.
   From time to time during the next twenty minutes his
distant boom of mirth could again be heard through the
half-open window; but there came no echo of the quiet voices
of the physicians.  The girls walked about the garden
together, rubbing up each other's spirits as best they
might; Michael Moon still hung heavily against the gate.
Somewhere about the expiration of that time Dr. Warner came
out of the house again with a face less pale but even more
stern, and the little man with the fish-bone face advanced
gravely in his rear.  And if the face of Warner in the
sunlight was that of a hanging judge, the face of the little
man behind was more like a death's-head.
   "Miss Hunt," said Dr. Herbert Warner, "I only wish to
offer you my warm thanks and admiration.  By your prompt
courage and wisdom in sending for us by wire this evening,
you have enabled us to capture and put out of mischief one
of the most cruel and terrible of the enemies of humanity --
a criminal whose plausibility and pitilessness have never
been before combined in flesh."
   Rosamund looked across at him with a white, blank face
and blinking eyes.  "What do you mean?" she asked.  "You
can't mean Mr. Smith?"
   "He has gone by many other names," said the doctor
gravely, "and not one he did not leave to be cursed behind
him.  That man, Miss Hunt, has left a track of blood and
tears across the world.  Whether he is mad as well as
wicked, we are trying, in the interests of science, to
discover.  In any case, we shall have to take him before a
magistrate first, even if only on the road to a lunatic
asylum.  But the lunatic asylum in which he is confined will
have to be sealed with wall within wall, and ringed with
guns like a fortress, or he will break out again to bring
forth carnage and darkness on the earth."
   Rosamund looked at the two doctors, her face growing
paler and paler.  Then her eyes strayed to Michael, who was
leaning on the gate; but he continued to lean on it without
moving, with his face turned away towards the darkening
road.