The night was exceedingly close. Willard Bent, after Spink’s departure, had undressed and stretched himself on his camp bed; but the mosquitoes roared like lions, and lying down made him more wakeful.
“In any Christian country,” he mused, “this would mean a thunderstorm and a cool-off. Here it just means months and months more of the same thing.” And he thought enviously of Spink, who, in two or three days, his “deal” concluded, would be at sea again, heading for the north.
Bent was honestly distressed at his own state of mind: he had feared that Harry Spink would “unsettle” Mr. Blandhorn, and, instead, it was he himself who had been unsettled. Old slumbering distrusts and doubts, bursting through his surface-apathy, had shot up under the drummer’s ironic eye. It was not so much Spink, individually, who had loosened the crust of Bent’s indifference; it was the fact of feeling his whole problem suddenly viewed and judged from the outside. At Eloued, he was aware, nobody, for a long time, had thought much about the missionaries. The French authorities were friendly, the Pacha was tolerant, the American Consul at Mogador had always stood by them in any small difficulties. But beyond that they were virtually non-existent. Nobody’s view of life was really affected by their presence in the great swarming mysterious city: if they should pack up and leave that night, the story-tellers of the market would not interrupt their tales, or one less bargain be struck in the bazaar. Ayoub would still doze in the door, and old Myriem continue her secret life on the roofs . . .
The roofs were of course forbidden to the missionaries, as they are to men in all Moslem cities. But the Mission-house stood close to the walls, and Mr. Blandhorn’s room, across the passage, gave on a small terrace overhanging the court of a caravansary upon which it was no sin to look. Willard wondered if it were any cooler on the terrace.
Some one tapped on his open door, and Mr. Blandhorn, in turban and caftan, entered the room, shading a small lamp.
“My dear Willard — can you sleep?”
“No, sir.” The young man stumbled to his feet.
“Nor I. The heat is really . . . Shall we seek relief on the terrace?”
Bent followed him, and having extinguished the lamp Mr. Blandhorn led the way out. He dragged a strip of matting to the edge of the parapet, and the two men sat down on it side by side.
There was no moon, but a sky so full of stars that the city was outlined beneath it in great blue-gray masses. The air was motionless, but every now and then a wandering tremor stirred it and died out. Close under the parapet lay the bales and saddle-packs of the caravansary, between vaguer heaps, presumably of sleeping camels. In one corner, the star-glitter picked out the shape of a trough brimming with water, and stabbed it with long silver beams. Beyond the court rose the crenellations of the city walls, and above them one palm stood up like a tree of bronze.
“Africa — ” sighed Mr. Blandhorn.
Willard Bent started at the secret echo of his own thoughts.
“Yes. Never anything else, sir — ”
“Ah — ” said the old man.
A tang-tang of stringed instruments, accompanied by the lowing of an earthenware drum, rose exasperatingly through the night. It was the kind of noise that, one knew, had been going on for hours before one began to notice it, and would go on, unchecked and unchanging, for endless hours more: like the heat, like the drought — like Africa.
Willard slapped at a mosquito.
“It’s a party at the wool-merchant’s, Myriem tells me,” Mr. Blandhorn remarked. It really seemed as if, that night, the thoughts of the two men met without the need of words. Willard Bent was aware that, for both, the casual phrase had called up all the details of the scene: fat merchants in white bunches on their cushions, negresses coming and going with trays of sweets, champagne clandestinely poured, ugly singing-girls yowling, slim boys in petticoats dancing — perhaps little Ahmed among them.
“I went down to the court just now. Ayoub has disappeared,” Mr. Blandhorn continued. “Of course. When I heard in the bazaar that a black caravan was in from the south I knew he’d be off . . . ”
Mr. Blandhorn lowered his voice. “Willard — have you reason to think . . . that Ayoub joins in their rites?”
“Myriem has always said he was a Hamatcha, sir. Look at those queer cuts and scars on him . . . It’s a much bloodier sect than the Aissaouas.”
Through the nagging throb of the instruments came a sound of human wailing, cadenced, terrible, relentless, carried from a long way off on a lift of the air. Then the air died, and the wailing with it.
“From somewhere near the Potter’s Field . . . there’s where the caravan is camping,” Willard murmured.
The old man made no answer. He sat with his head bowed, his veined hands grasping his knees; he seemed to his disciple to be whispering fragments of Scripture.
“Willard, my son, this is our fault,” he said at length.
“What —? Ayoub?”
“Ayoub is a poor ignorant creature, hardly more than an animal. Even when he witnessed for Jesus I was not very sure the Word reached him. I refer to — to what Harry Spink said this evening . . . It has kept me from sleeping, Willard Bent.”
“Yes — I know, sir.”
“Harry Spink is a worldly-minded man. But he is not a bad man. He did a manly thing when he left us, since he did not feel the call. But we have felt the call, Willard, you and I— and when a man like Spink puts us a question such as he put this evening we ought to be able to answer it. And we ought not to want to avoid answering it.”
“You mean when he said: ‘What is there in it for Jesus?’”
“The phrase was irreverent, but the meaning reached me. He meant, I take it: ‘What have your long years here profited to Christ?’ You understood it so —?”
“Yes. He said to me in the bazaar: ‘What’s your bag?’”
Mr. Blandhorn sighed heavily. For a few minutes Willard fancied he had fallen asleep; but he lifted his head and, stretching his hand out, laid it on his disciple’s arm.
“The Lord chooses His messengers as it pleaseth Him: I have been awaiting this for a long time.” The young man felt his arm strongly grasped. “Willard, you have been much to me all these years; but that is nothing. All that matters is what you are to Christ . . . and the test of that, at this moment, is your willingness to tell me the exact truth, as you see it.”
Willard Bent felt as if he were a very tall building, and his heart a lift suddenly dropping down from the roof to the cellar. He stirred nervously, releasing his arm, and cleared his throat; but he made no answer. Mr. Blandhorn went on.
“Willard, this is the day of our accounting — of my accounting. What have I done with my twenty-five years in Africa? I might deceive myself as long as my wife lived — I cannot now.” He added, after a pause: “Thank heaven she never doubted . . . ”
The younger man, with an inward shiver, remembered some of Mrs. Blandhorn’s confidences. “I suppose that’s what marriage is,” he mused — “just a fog, like everything else.”
Aloud he asked: “Then why should you doubt, sir?”
“Because my eyes have been opened — ”
“By Harry Spink?” the disciple sneered.
The old man raised his hand. “‘Out of the mouths of babes — ’ But it is not Harry Spink who first set me thinking. He has merely loosened my tongue. He has been the humble instrument compelling me to exact the truth of you.”
Again Bent felt his heart dropping down a long dark shaft. He found no words at the bottom of it, and Mr. Blandhorn continued: “The truth and the whole truth, Willard Bent. We have failed — I have failed. We have not reached the souls of these people. Those who still come to us do so from interested motives — or, even if I do some few of them an injustice, if there is in some a blind yearning for the light, is there one among them whose eyes we have really opened?”
Willard Bent sat silent, looking up and down the long years, as if to summon from the depths of memory some single incident that should permit him to say there was.
“You don’t answer, my poor young friend. Perhaps you have been clearer-sighted; perhaps you saw long ago that we were not worthy of our hire.”
“I never thought that of you, sir!”
“Nor of yourself? For we have been one — or so I have believed — in all our hopes and efforts. Have you been satisfied with your results?”
Willard saw the dialectical trap, but some roused force in him refused to evade it. “No, sir — God knows.”
“Then I am answered. We have failed: Africa has beaten us. It has always been my way, as you know, Willard, to face the truth squarely,” added the old man who had lived so long in dreams; “and now that this truth has been borne in on me, painful as it is, I must act on it . . . act in accordance with its discovery.”
He drew a long breath, as if oppressed by the weight of his resolution, and sat silent for a moment, fanning his face with a corner of his white draperies.
“And here too — here too I must have your help, Willard,” he began presently, his hand again weighing on the young man’s arm. “I will tell you the conclusions I have reached; and you must answer me — as you would answer your Maker.”
“Yes, sir.”
The old man lowered his voice. “It is our lukewarmness, Willard — it is nothing else. We have not witnessed for Christ as His saints and martyrs witnessed for Him. What have we done to fix the attention of these people, to convince them of our zeal, to overwhelm them with the irresistibleness of the Truth? Answer me on your word — what have we done?”
Willard pondered. “But the saints and martyrs . . . were persecuted, sir.”
“Persecuted! You have spoken the word I wanted.”
“But the people here,” Willard argued, “don’t want to persecute anybody. They’re not fanatical unless you insult their religion.”
Mr. Blandhorn’s grasp grew tighter. “Insult their religion! That’s it . . . tonight you find just the words . . . ”
Willard felt his arm shake with the tremor that passed through the other’s body. “The saints and martyrs insulted the religion of the heathen — they spat on it, Willard — they rushed into the temples and knocked down the idols. They said to the heathen: ‘Turn away your faces from all your abominations’; and after the manner of men they fought with beasts at Ephesus. What is the Church on earth called? The Church Militant! You and I are soldiers of the Cross.”
The missionary had risen and stood leaning against the parapet, his right arm lifted as if he spoke from a pulpit. The music at the wool-merchant’s had ceased, but now and then, through the midnight silence, there came an echo of ritual howls from the Potters’ Field.
Willard was still seated, his head thrown back against the parapet, his eyes raised to Mr. Blandhorn. Following the gesture of the missionary’s lifted hand, from which the muslin fell back like the sleeve of a surplice, the young man’s gaze was led upward to another white figure, hovering small and remote above their heads. It was a muezzin leaning from his airy balcony to drop on the blue-gray masses of the starlit city the cry: “Only Allah is great.”
Mr. Blandhorn saw the white figure too, and stood facing it with motionless raised arm.
“Only Christ is great, only Christ crucified!” he suddenly shouted in Arabic with all the strength of his broad lungs.
The figure paused, and seemed to Willard to bend over, as if peering down in their direction; but a moment later it had moved to the other corner of the balcony, and the cry fell again on the sleeping roofs:
“Allah — Allah — only Allah!”
“Christ — Christ — only Christ crucified!” roared Mr. Blandhorn, exalted with wrath and shaking his fist at the aerial puppet.
The puppet once more paused and peered; then it moved on and vanished behind the flank of the minaret.
The missionary, still towering with lifted arm, dusky-faced in the starlight, seemed to Willard to have grown in majesty and stature. But presently his arm fell and his head sank into his hands. The young man knelt down, hiding his face also, and they prayed in silence, side by side, while from the farther corners of the minaret, less audibly, fell the infidel call.
Willard, his prayer ended, looked up, and saw that the old man’s garments were stirred as if by a ripple of air. But the air was quite still, and the disciple perceived that the tremor of the muslin was communicated to it by Mr. Blandhorn’s body.
“He’s trembling — trembling all over. He’s afraid of something. What’s he afraid of?” And in the same breath Willard had answered his own question: “He’s afraid of what he’s made up his mind to do.”
Two days later Willard Bent sat in the shade of a ruined tomb outside the Gate of the Graves, and watched the people streaming in to Eloued. It was the eve of the feast of the local saint, Sidi Oman, who slept in a corner of the Great Mosque, under a segment of green-tiled cupola, and was held in deep reverence by the country people, many of whom belonged to the powerful fraternity founded in his name.
The ruin stood on a hillock beyond the outer wall. From where the missionary sat he overlooked the fortified gate and the irregular expanse of the Potters’ Field, with its primitive furnaces built into hollows of the ground, between ridges shaded by stunted olive-trees. On the farther side of the trail which the pilgrims followed on entering the gate lay a sun-blistered expanse dotted with crooked grave-stones, where hucksters traded, and the humblest caravans camped in a waste of refuse, offal and stripped date-branches. A cloud of dust, perpetually subsiding and gathering again, hid these sordid details from Bent’s eyes, but not from his imagination.
“Nowhere in Eloued,” he thought with a shudder, “are the flies as fat and blue as they are inside that gate.”
But this was a fugitive reflection: his mind was wholly absorbed in what had happened in the last forty-eight hours, and what was likely to happen in the next.
“To think,” he mused, “that after ten years I don’t really know him . . . A labourer in the Lord’s vineyard — shows how much good I am!”
His thoughts were moody and oppressed with fear. Never, since his first meeting with Mr. Blandhorn, had he pondered so deeply the problem of his superior’s character. He tried to deduce from the past some inference as to what Mr. Blandhorn was likely to do next; but, as far as he knew, there was nothing in the old man’s previous history resembling the midnight scene on the Mission terrace.
That scene had already had its repercussion.
On the following morning, Willard, drifting as usual about the bazaar, had met a friendly French official, who, taking him aside, had told him there were strange reports abroad — which he hoped Mr. Bent would be able to deny . . . In short, as it had never been Mr. Blandhorn’s policy to offend the native population, or insult their religion, the Administration was confident that . . .
Surprised by Willard’s silence, and visibly annoyed at being obliged to pursue the subject, the friendly official, growing graver, had then asked what had really occurred; and, on Willard’s replying, had charged him with an earnest recommendation to his superior — a warning, if necessary — that the government would not, under any circumstances, tolerate a repetition . . . “But I daresay it was the heat?” he concluded; and Willard weakly acquiesced.
He was ashamed now of having done so; yet, after all, how did he know it was not the heat? A heavy sanguine man like Mr. Blandhorn would probably never quite accustom himself to the long strain of the African summer. “Or his wife’s death — ” he had murmured to the sympathetic official, who smiled with relief at the suggestion.
And now he sat overlooking the enigmatic city, and asking himself again what he really knew of his superior. Mr. Blandhorn had come to Eloued as a young man, extremely poor, and dependent on the pittance which the Missionary Society at that time gave to its representatives. To ingratiate himself among the people (the expression was his own), and also to earn a few pesetas, he had worked as a carpenter in the bazaar, first in the soukh of the ploughshares and then in that of the cabinet-makers. His skill in carpentry had not been great, for his large eloquent hands were meant to wave from a pulpit, and not to use the adze or the chisel; but he had picked up a little Arabic (Willard always marvelled that it remained so little), and had made many acquaintances — and, as he thought, some converts. At any rate, no one, either then or later, appeared to wish him ill, and during the massacre his house had been respected, and the insurgents had even winked at the aid he had courageously given to the French.
Yes — he had certainly been courageous. There was in him, in spite of his weaknesses and his vacillations, a streak of moral heroism that perhaps only waited its hour . . . But hitherto his principle had always been that the missionary must win converts by kindness, by tolerance, and by the example of a blameless life.
Could it really be Harry Spink’s question that had shaken him in this belief? Or was it the long-accumulated sense of inefficiency that so often weighed on his disciple? Or was it simply the call — did it just mean that their hour had come?
Shivering a little in spite of the heat, Willard pulled himself together and descended into the city. He had been seized with a sudden desire to know what Mr. Blandhorn was about, and avoiding the crowd he hurried back by circuitous lanes to the Mission. On the way he paused at a certain corner and looked into a court full of the murmur of water. Beyond it was an arcade detached against depths of shadow, in which a few lights glimmered. White figures, all facing one way, crouched and touched their foreheads to the tiles, the soles of their bare feet, wet with recent ablutions, turning up as their bodies swayed forward. Willard caught the scowl of a beggar on the threshold, and hurried past the forbidden scene.
He found Mr. Blandhorn in the meeting-room, tying up Ayoub’s head.
“I do it awkwardly,” the missionary mumbled, a safety-pin between his teeth. “Alas, my hands are not hers.”
“What’s he done to himself?” Willard growled; and above the bandaged head Mr. Blandhorn’s expressive eyebrows answered.
There was a dark stain on the back of Ayoub’s faded shirt, and another on the blue scarf he wore about his head.
“Ugh — it’s like cats slinking back after a gutter-fight,” the young man muttered.
Ayoub wound his scarf over the bandages, shambled back to the doorway, and squatted down to watch the fig-tree.
The missionaries looked at each other across the empty room.
“What’s the use, sir?” was on Willard’s lips; but instead of speaking he threw himself down on the divan. There was to be no prayer-meeting that afternoon, and the two men sat silent, gazing at the back of Ayoub’s head. A smell of disinfectants hung in the heavy air . . .
“Where’s Myriem?” Willard asked, to say something.
“I believe she had a ceremony of some sort . . . a family affair . . . ”
“A circumcision, I suppose?”
Mr. Blandhorn did not answer, and Willard was sorry he had made the suggestion. It would simply serve as another reminder of their failure . . .
He stole a furtive glance at Mr. Bland-horn, nervously wondering if the time had come to speak of the French official’s warning. He had put off doing so, half-hoping it would not be necessary. The old man seemed so calm, so like his usual self, that it might be wiser to let the matter drop. Perhaps he had already forgotten the scene on the terrace; or perhaps he thought he had sufficiently witnessed for the Lord in shouting his insult to the muezzin. But Willard did not really believe this: he remembered the tremor which had shaken Mr. Blandhorn after the challenge, and he felt sure it was not a retrospective fear.
“Our friend Spink has been with me,” said Mr. Blandhorn suddenly. “He came in soon after you left.”
“Ah? I’m sorry I missed him. I thought he’d gone, from his not coming in yesterday.”
“No; he leaves tomorrow morning for Mogador.” Mr Blandhorn paused, still absently staring at the back of Ayoub’s neck; then he added: “I have asked him to take you with him.”
“To take me — Harry Spink? In his automobile?” Willard gasped. His heart began to beat excitedly.
“Yes. You’ll enjoy the ride. It’s a long time since you’ve been away, and you’re looking a little pulled down.”
“You’re very kind, sir: so is Harry.” He paused. “But I’d rather not.”
Mr. Blandhorn, turning slightly, examined him between half-dropped lids.
“I have business for you — with the Consul,” he said with a certain sternness. “I don’t suppose you will object — ”
“Oh, of course not.” There was another pause. “Could you tell me — give me an idea — of what the business is, sir?”
It was Mr. Blandhorn’s turn to appear perturbed. He coughed, passed his hand once or twice over his beard, and again fixed his gaze on Ayoub’s inscrutable nape.
“I wish to send a letter to the Consul.”
“A letter? If it’s only a letter, couldn’t Spink take it?”
“Undoubtedly. I might also send it by post — if I cared to transmit it in that manner. I presumed,” added Mr. Blandhorn with threatening brows, “that you would understand I had my reasons — ”
“Oh, in that case, of course, sir — ” Willard hesitated, and then spoke with a rush. “I saw Lieutenant Lourdenay in the bazaar yesterday — ” he began.
When he had finished his tale Mr. Bland-horn meditated for a long time in silence. At length he spoke in a calm voice. “And what did you answer, Willard?”
“I— I said I’d tell you — ”
“Nothing more?”
“No. Nothing.”
“Very well. We’ll talk of all this more fully . . . when you get back from Mogador. Remember that Mr. Spink will be here before sunrise. I advised him to get away as early as possible on account of the Feast of Sidi Oman. It’s always a poor day for foreigners to be seen about the streets.”
At a quarter before four on the morning of the Feast of Sidi Oman, Willard Bent stood waiting at the door of the Mission.
He had taken leave of Mr. Blandhorn the previous night, and stumbled down the dark stairs on bare feet, his bundle under his arm, just as the sky began to whiten around the morning star.
The air was full of a mocking coolness which the first ray of the sun would burn up; and a hush as deceptive lay on the city that was so soon to blaze with religious frenzy. Ayoub lay curled up on his doorstep like a dog, and old Myriem, presumably, was still stretched on her mattress on the roof.
What a day for a flight across the desert in Harry’s tough little car! And after the hours of heat and dust and glare, how good, at twilight, to see the cool welter of the Atlantic, a spent sun dropping into it, and the rush of the stars . . . Dizzy with the vision, Willard leaned against the door-post with closed eyes.
A subdued hoot aroused him, and he hurried out to the car, which was quivering and growling at the nearest corner. The drummer nodded a welcome, and they began to wind cautiously between sleeping animals and huddled heaps of humanity till they reached the nearest gate.
On the waste land beyond the walls the people of the caravans were already stirring, and pilgrims from the hills streaming across the palmetto scrub under emblazoned banners. As the sun rose the air took on a bright transparency in which distant objects became unnaturally near and vivid, like pebbles seen through clear water: a little turban-shaped tomb far off in the waste looked as lustrous as ivory, and a tiled minaret in an angle of the walls seemed to be carved out of turquoise. How Eloued lied to eyes looking back on it at sunrise!
“Something wrong,” said Harry Spink, putting on the brake and stopping in the thin shade of a cork-tree. They got out and Willard leaned against the tree and gazed at the red walls of Eloued. They were already about two miles from the town, and all around them was the wilderness. Spink shoved his head into the bonnet, screwed and greased and hammered, and finally wiped his hands on a black rag and called out: “I thought so — . Jump in!”
Willard did not move.
“Hurry up, old man. She’s all right, I tell you. It was just the carburettor.”
The missionary fumbled under his draperies and pulled out Mr. Blandhorn’s letter.
“Will you see that the Consul gets this tomorrow?”
“Will I— what the hell’s the matter, Willard?” Spink dropped his rag and stared.
“I’m not coming. I never meant to.”
The young men exchanged a long look.
“It’s no time to leave Mr. Blandhorn — a day like this,” Willard continued, moistening his dry lips.
Spink shrugged, and sounded a faint whistle. “Queer —!”
“What’s queer?”
“He said just the same thing to me about you — wanted to get you out of Eloued on account of the goings on today. He said you’d been rather worked up lately about religious matters, and might do something rash that would get you both into trouble.”
“Ah — ” Willard murmured.
“And I believe you might, you know — you look sorter funny.” Willard laughed.
“Oh, come along,” his friend urged, disappointed.
“I’m sorry — I can’t. I had to come this far so that he wouldn’t know. But now I’ve got to go back. Of course what he told you was just a joke — but I must be there today to see that nobody bothers him.”
Spink scanned his companion’s face with friendly flippant eyes. “Well, I give up — . What’s the use, when he don’t want you? — Say,” he broke off, “what’s the truth of that story about the old man’s having insulted a marabout in a mosque night before last? It was all over the bazaar — ”
Willard felt himself turn pale. “Not a marabout. It was — where did you hear it?” he stammered.
“All over — the way you hear stories in these places.”
“Well — it’s not true.” Willard lifted his bundle from the motor and tucked it under his arm. “I’m sorry, Harry — I’ve got to go back,” he repeated.
“What? The Call, eh?” The sneer died on Spink’s lips, and he held out his hand. “Well, I’m sorry too. So long.” He turned the crank, scrambled into his seat, and cried back over his shoulder: “What’s the use, when he don’t want you?”
Willard was already labouring home across the plain.
After struggling along for half an hour in the sand he crawled under the shade of an abandoned well and sat down to ponder. Two courses were open to him, and he had not yet been able to decide between them. His first impulse was to go straight to the Mission, and present himself to Mr. Bland-horn. He felt sure, from what Spink had told him, that the old missionary had sent him away purposely, and the fact seemed to confirm his apprehensions. If Mr. Bland-horn wanted him away, it was not through any fear of his imprudence, but to be free from his restraining influence. But what act did the old man contemplate, in which he feared to involve his disciple? And if he were really resolved on some rash measure, might not Willard’s unauthorized return merely serve to exasperate this resolve, and hasten whatever action he had planned?
The other step the young man had in mind was to go secretly to the French Administration, and there drop a hint of what he feared. It was the course his sober judgment commended. The echo of Spink’s “What’s the use?” was in his ears: it was the expression of his own secret doubt. What was the use? If dying could bring any of these darkened souls to the light . . . well, that would have been different. But what least sign was there that it would do anything but rouse their sleeping blood-lust?
Willard was oppressed by the thought that had always lurked beneath his other doubts. They talked, he and Mr. Blandhorn, of the poor ignorant heathen — but were not they themselves equally ignorant in everything that concerned the heathen? What did they know of these people, of their antecedents, the origin of their beliefs and superstitions, the meaning of their habits and passions and precautions? Mr. Blandhorn seemed never to have been troubled by this question, but it had weighed on Willard ever since he had come across a quiet French ethnologist who was studying the tribes of the Middle Atlas. Two or three talks with this traveller — or listenings to him — had shown Willard the extent of his own ignorance. He would have liked to borrow books, to read, to study; but he knew little French and no German, and he felt confusedly that there was in him no soil sufficiently prepared for facts so overwhelmingly new to root in it . . . And the heat lay on him, and the little semblance of his missionary duties deluded him . . . and he drifted . . .
As for Mr. Blandhorn, he never read anything but the Scriptures, a volume of his own sermons (printed by subscription, to commemorate his departure for Morocco), and — occasionally — a back number of the missionary journal that arrived at Eloued at long intervals, in thick mouldy batches, Consequently no doubts disturbed him, and Willard felt the hopelessness of grappling with an ignorance so much deeper and denser than his own. Whichever way his mind turned, it seemed to bring up against the blank wall of Harry Spink’s; “What’s the use?”
He slipped through the crowds in the congested gateway, and made straight for the Mission. He had decided to go to the French Administration, but he wanted first to find out from the servants what Mr. Blandhorn was doing, and what his state of mind appeared to be.
The Mission door was locked, but Willard was not surprised; he knew the precaution was sometimes taken on feast days, though seldom so early. He rang, and waited impatiently for Myriem’s old face in the crack; but no one came, and below his breath he cursed her with expurgated curses.
“Ayoub — Ayoub!” he cried, rattling at the door; but still no answer. Ayoub, apparently, was off too. Willard rang the bell again, giving the three long pulls of the “emergency call”; it was the summons which always roused Mr. Blandhorn. But no one came.
Willard shook and pounded, and hung on the bell till it tinkled its life out in a squeak . . . but all in vain. The house was empty: Mr. Blandhorn was evidently out with the others.
Disconcerted, the young man turned, and plunged into the red clay purlieus behind the Mission. He entered a mud-hut where an emaciated dog, dozing on the threshold, lifted a recognizing lid, and let him by. It was the house of Ahmed’s father, the water-carrier, and Willard knew it would be empty at that hour.
A few minutes later there emerged into the crowded streets a young American dressed in a black coat of vaguely clerical cut, with a soft felt hat shading his flushed cheek-bones, and a bead running up and down his nervous throat.
The bazaar was already full of a deep holiday rumour, like the rattle of wind in the palm-tops. The young man in the clerical coat, sharply examined as he passed by hundreds of long Arab eyes, slipped into the lanes behind the soukhs, and by circuitous passages gained the neighbourhood of the Great Mosque. His heart was hammering against his black coat, and under the buzz in his brain there boomed out insistently the old question: “What’s the use?”
Suddenly, near the fountain that faced one of the doors of the Great Mosque, he saw the figure of a man dressed like himself. The eyes of the two men met across the crowd, and Willard pushed his way to Mr. Blandhorn’s side.
“Sir, why did you — why are you —? I’m back — I couldn’t help it,” he gasped out disconnectedly.
He had expected a vehement rebuke; but the old missionary only smiled on him sadly. “It was noble of you, Willard . . . I understand . . . ” He looked at the young man’s coat. “We had the same thought — again — at the same hour.” He paused, and drew Willard into the empty passage of a ruined building behind the fountain. “But what’s the use, — what’s the use?” he exclaimed.
The blood rushed to the young man’s forehead. “Ah — then you feel it too?”
Mr. Blandhorn continued, grasping his arm: “I’ve been out — in this dress — ever since you left; I’ve hung about the doors of the Medersas, I’ve walked up to the very threshold of the Mosque, I’ve leaned against the wall of Sidi Oman’s shrine; once the police warned me, and I pretended to go away . . . but I came back . . . I pushed up closer . . . I stood in the doorway of the Mosque, and they saw me . . . the people inside saw me . . . and no one touched me . . . I’m too harmless . . . they don’t believe in me!”
He broke off, and under his struggling eyebrows Willard saw the tears on his old lids.
The young man gathered courage. “But don’t you see, sir, that that’s the reason it’s no use? We don’t understand them any more than they do us; they know it, and all our witnessing for Christ will make no difference.”
Mr. Blandhorn looked at him sternly. “Young man, no Christian has the right to say that.”
Willard ignored the rebuke. “Come home, sir, come home . . . it’s no use . . . ”
“It was because I foresaw you would take this view that I sent you to Mogador. Since I was right,” exclaimed Mr. Blandhorn, facing round on him fiercely, “how is it you have disobeyed me and come back?”
Willard was looking at him with new eyes. All his majesty seemed to have fallen from him with his Arab draperies. How short and heavy and weak he looked in his scant European clothes! The coat, tightly strained across the stomach, hung above it in loose wrinkles, and the ill-fitting trousers revealed their wearer’s impressive legs as slightly bowed at the knees. This diminution in his physical prestige was strangely moving to his disciple. What was there left, with that gone —?
“Oh, do come home, sir,” the young man groaned. “Of course they don’t care what we do — of course — ”
“Ah — ” cried Mr. Blandhorn, suddenly dashing past him into the open.
The rumour of the crowd had become a sort of roaring chant. Over the thousands of bobbing heads that packed every cranny of the streets leading to the space before the Mosque there ran the mysterious sense of something new, invisible, but already imminent. Then, with the strange Oriental elasticity, the immense throng divided, and a new throng poured through it, headed by riders ritually draped, and overhung with banners which seemed to be lifted and floated aloft on the shouts of innumerable throats. It was the Pasha of Eloued coming to pray at the tomb of Sidi Oman.
Into this mass Mr. Blandhorn plunged and disappeared, while Willard Bent, for an endless minute, hung back in the shelter of the passage, the old “What’s the use?” in his ears.
A hand touched his sleeve, and a cracked voice echoed the words.
“What’s the use, master?” It was old Myriem, clutching him with scared face and pulling out a limp djellabah from under her holiday shawl.
“I saw you . . . Ahmed’s father told me . . . ” (How everything was known in the bazaars!) “Here, put this on quick, and slip away. They won’t trouble you . . . ”
“Oh, but they will — they shall!” roared Willard, in a voice unknown to his own ears, as he flung off the old woman’s hand and, trampling on the djellabah in his flight, dashed into the crowd at the spot where it had swallowed up his master.
They would — they should! No more doubting and weighing and conjecturing! The sight of the weak unwieldy old man, so ignorant, so defenceless and so convinced, disappearing alone into that red furnace of fanaticism, swept from the disciple’s mind every thought but the single passion of devotion.
That he lay down his life for his friend — If he couldn’t bring himself to believe in any other reason for what he was doing, that one seemed suddenly to be enough . . .
The crowd let him through, still apparently indifferent to his advance. Closer, closer he pushed to the doors of the Mosque, struggling and elbowing through a mass of people so densely jammed that the heat of their breathing was in his face, the rank taste of their bodies on his parched lips — closer, closer, till a last effort of his own thin body, which seemed a mere cage of ribs with a wild heart dashing against it, brought him to the doorway of the Mosque, where Mr. Blandhorn, his head thrown back, his arms crossed on his chest, stood steadily facing the heathen multitude.
As Willard reached his side their glances met, and the old man, glaring out under prophetic brows, whispered without moving his lips: “Now — now!”
Willard took it as a signal to follow, he knew not where or why: at that moment he had no wish to know.
Mr. Blandhorn, without waiting for an answer, had turned, and, doubling on himself, sprung into the great court of the Mosque. Willard breathlessly followed, the glitter of tiles and the blinding sparkle of fountains in his dazzled eyes . . .
The court was almost empty, the few who had been praying having shortened their devotions and joined the Pasha’s train, which was skirting the outer walls of the Mosque to reach the shrine of Sidi Oman. Willard was conscious of a moment of detached reconnoitring: once or twice, from the roof of a deserted college to which the government architect had taken him, he had looked down furtively on the forbidden scene, and his sense of direction told him that the black figure speeding across the blazing mirror of wet tiles was making for the hall where the Koran was expounded to students.
Even now, as he followed, through the impending sense of something dangerous and tremendous he had the feeling that after all perhaps no one would bother them, that all the effort of will pumped up by his storming heart to his lucid brain might conceivably end in some pitiful anti-climax in the French Administration offices.
“They’ll treat us like whipped puppies — ”
But Mr. Blandhorn had reached the school, had disappeared under its shadowy arcade, and emerged again into the blaze of sunlight, clutching a great parchment Koran.
“Ah,” thought Willard, “now —!”
He found himself standing at the missionary’s side, so close that they must have made one black blot against the white-hot quiver of tiles. Mr. Blandhorn lifted up the Book and spoke.
“The God whom ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you,” he cried in halting Arabic.
A deep murmur came from the turbaned figures gathered under the arcade of the Mosque. Swarthy faces lowered, eyes gleamed like agate, teeth blazed under snarling lips; but the group stood motionless, holding back, visibly restrained by the menace of the long arm of the Administration.
“Him declare I unto you — Christ crucified!” cried Mr. Blandhorn.
An old man, detaching himself from the group, advanced across the tiles and laid his hand on the missionary’s arm. Willard recognized the Cadi of the Mosque.
“You must restore the Book,” the Cadi said gravely to Mr. Blandhorn, “and leave this court immediately; if not — ”
He held out his hand to take the Koran. Mr. Blandhorn, in a flash, dodged the restraining arm, and, with a strange new elasticity of his cumbrous body, rolling and bouncing across the court between the dazed spectators, gained the gateway opening on the market-place behind the Mosque. The centre of the great dusty space was at the moment almost deserted. Mr. Blandhorn sprang forward, the Koran clutched to him, Willard panting at his heels, and the turbaned crowd after them, menacing but still visibly restrained.
In the middle of the square Mr. Bland-horn halted, faced about and lifted the Koran high above his head. Willard, rigid at his side, was obliquely conscious of the gesture, and at the same time aware that the free space about them was rapidly diminishing under the mounting tide of people swarming in from every quarter. The faces closest were no longer the gravely wrathful countenances of the Mosque, but lean fanatical masks of pilgrims, beggars, wandering “saints” and miracle-makers, and dark tribesmen of the hills careless of their creed but hot to join in the halloo against the hated stranger. Far off in the throng, bobbing like a float on the fierce sea of turbans, Willard saw the round brown face of a native officer frantically fighting his way through. Now and then the face bobbed nearer, and now and then a tug of the tide rolled it back.
Willard felt Mr. Blandhorn’s touch on his arm.
“You’re with me —?”
“Yes — ”
The old man’s voice sank and broke. “Say a word to . . . strengthen me . . . I can’t find any . . . Willard,” he whispered.
Willard’s brain was a blank. But against the blank a phrase suddenly flashed out in letters of fire, and he turned and spoke it to his master. “Say among the heathen that the Lord reigneth.”
“Ah —— .” Mr. Blandhorn, with a gasp, drew himself to his full height and hurled the Koran down at his feet in the dung-strown dust.
“Him, Him declare I unto you — Christ crucified!” he thundered: and to Willard, in a fierce aside: “Now spit!”
Dazed a moment, the young man stood uncertain; then he saw the old missionary draw back a step, bend forward, and deliberately spit upon the sacred pages.
“This . . . is abominable . . . ” the disciple thought; and, sucking up the last drop of saliva from his dry throat, he also bent and spat.
“Now trample — trample!” commanded Mr. Blandhorn, his arms stretched out, towering black and immense, as if crucified against the flaming sky; and his foot came down on the polluted Book.
Willard, seized with the communicative frenzy, fell on his knees, tearing at the pages, and scattering them about him, smirched and defiled in the dust.
“Spit — spit! Trample — trample! . . . Christ! I see the heavens opened!” shrieked the old missionary, covering his eyes with his hands. But what he said next was lost to his disciple in the rising roar of the mob which had closed in on them. Far off, Willard caught a glimpse of the native officer’s bobbing head, and then of Lieutenant Lourdenay’s scared face. But a moment later he had veiled his own face from the sight of the struggle at his side. Mr. Blandhorn had fallen on his knees, and Willard heard him cry out once: “Sadie — Sadie!” It was Mrs. Blandhorn’s name.
Then the young man was himself borne down, and darkness descended on him. Through it he felt the sting of separate pangs indescribable, melting at last into a general mist of pain. He remembered Stephen, and thought: “Now they’re stoning me — ” and tried to struggle up and reach out to Mr. Blandhorn . . .
But the market-place seemed suddenly empty, as though the throng of their assailants had been demons of the desert, the thin spirits of evil that dance on the noonday heat. Now the dusk seemed to have dispersed them, and Willard looked up and saw a quiet star above a wall, and heard the cry of the muezzin dropping down from a near-by minaret: “Allah — Allah — only Allah is great!”
Willard closed his eyes, and in his great weakness felt the tears run down between his lids. A hand wiped them away, and he looked again, and saw the face of Harry Spink stooping over him.
He supposed it was a dream-Spink, and smiled a little, and the dream smiled back.
“Where am I?” Willard wondered to himself; and the dream-Spink answered: “In the hospital, you infernal fool. I got back too late — ”
“You came back —?”
“Of course. Lucky I did — I I saw this morning you were off your base.”
Willard, for a long time, lay still. Impressions reached him slowly, and he had to deal with them one by one, like a puzzled child.
At length he said: “Mr. Blandhorn —?” Spink bent his head, and his voice was grave in the twilight.
“They did for him in no time; I guess his heart was weak. I don’t think he suffered. Anyhow, if he did he wasn’t sorry; I know, because I saw his face before they buried him . . . Now you lie still, and I’ll get you out of this tomorrow,” he commanded, waving a fly-cloth above Willard’s sunken head.
“Travelling, sir,” a curt parlour-maid announced from Mrs. Donald Paul’s threshold in Kensington; adding, as young Willis French’s glance slipped over her shoulder down a narrow and somewhat conventional perspective of white panelling and black prints: “If there’s any message you’d like to write” —
He did not know if there were or not; but he instantly saw that his hesitation would hold the house-door open a minute longer, and thus give him more time to stamp on his memory the details of the cramped London hall, beyond which there seemed no present hope of penetrating.
“Could you tell me where?” he asked, in a tone implying that the question of his having something to write might be determined by the nature of the answer.
The parlour-maid scrutinized him more carefully. “Not exactly, sir: Mr. and Mrs. Paul are away motoring, and I believe they’re to cross over to the continent in a day or two.” She seemed to have gathered confidence from another look at him, and he was glad he had waited to unpack his town clothes, instead of rushing, as he had first thought of doing, straight from the steamer train to the house. “If it’s for something important, I could give you the address,” she finally condescended, apparently reassured by her inspection.
“It is important,” said the young man almost solemnly; and she handed him a sheet of gold-monogrammed note-paper across which was tumbled, in large loose characters: “Hotel Nouveau Luxe, Paris.”
The unexpectedness of the address left Willis French staring. There was nothing to excite surprise in the fact of the Donald Pauls having gone to Paris; or even in their having gone there in their motor; but that they should be lodged at the Nouveau Luxe seemed to sap the very base of probability.
“Are you sure they’re staying there?”
To the parlour-maid, at this point, it evidently began to look as if, in spite of his reassuring clothes, the caller might have designs on the umbrellas.
“I couldn’t say, sir. It’s the address, sir,” she returned, adroitly taking her precautions about the door.
These were not lost on the visitor, who, both to tranquillize her and to gain time, turned back toward the quiet Kensington street and stood gazing doubtfully up and down its uneventful length.
All things considered, he had no cause to regret the turn the affair had taken; the only regret he allowed himself was that of not being able instantly to cross the threshold hallowed by his young enthusiasm. But even that privilege might soon be his; and meanwhile he was to have the unforeseen good luck of following Mrs. Donald Paul to Paris. His business in coming to Europe had been simply and solely to see the Donald Pauls; and had they been in London he would have been obliged, their conference over, to return at once to New York, whence he had been sent, at his publisher’s expense, to obtain from Mrs. Paul certain details necessary for the completion of his book: The Art of Horace Fingall. And now, by a turn of what he fondly called his luck — as if no one else’s had ever been quite as rare — he found his vacation prolonged, and his prospect of enjoyment increased, by the failure to meet the lady in London.
Willis French had more than once had occasion to remark that he owed some of his luckiest moments to his failures. He had tried his hand at several of the arts, only to find, in each case, the same impassable gulf between vision and execution; but his ill-success, which he always promptly recognized, had left him leisure to note and enjoy all the incidental compensations of the attempt. And how great some of these compensations were, he had never more keenly felt than on the day when two of the greatest came back to him merged in one glorious opportunity.
It was probable, for example, that if he had drawn a directer profit from his months of study in a certain famous Parisian atelier, his labours would have left him less time in which to observe and study Horace Fingall, on the days when the great painter made his round among the students; just as, if he had written better poetry, Mrs. Morland, with whom his old friend Lady Brankhurst had once contrived to have him spend a Sunday in the country, might have given him, during their long confidential talk, less of her sweet compassion and her bracing wisdom. Both Horace Fingall and Emily Morland had, professionally speaking, discouraged their young disciple; the one had said “don’t write” as decidedly as the other had said “don’t paint”; but both had let him feel that interesting failures may be worth more in the end than dull successes, and that there is range enough for the artistic sensibilities outside the region of production. The fact of the young man’s taking their criticism without flinching (as he himself had been thankfully aware of doing) no doubt increased their liking, and thus let him farther into their intimacy. The insight into two such natures seemed, even at the moment, to outweigh any personal success within his reach; and as time removed him from the experience he had less and less occasion to question the completeness of the compensation.
Since then, as it happened, his two great initiators had died within a few months of each other, Emily Morland prematurely, and at the moment when her exquisite art was gaining new warmth from the personal happiness at last opening to her, and Horace Fingall in his late golden prime, when his genius also seemed to be winged for new flights. Except for the nearness of the two death dates, there was nothing to bring together in the public mind the figures of the painter and the poet, and Willis French’s two experiences remained associated in his thoughts only because they had been the greatest revelations of temperament he had ever known. No one but Emily Morland had ever renewed in him that sense of being in the presence of greatness that he had first felt on meeting Horace Fingall. He had often wondered if the only two beings to whom he owed this emotion had ever known each other, and he had concluded that, even in this day of universal meetings, it was unlikely. Fingall, after leaving the United States for Paris toward his fortieth year, had never absented himself from France except on short occasional visits to his native country; and Mrs. Morland, when she at last broke away from her depressing isolation in a Staffordshire parsonage, and set up her own house in London, had been drawn from there only by one or two holiday journeys in Italy. Nothing, moreover, could have been more unlike than the mental quality and the general attitude of the two artists. The only point of resemblance between them lay in the effect they produced of the divine emanation of genius. Willis French’s speculations as to the result of a meeting between them had always resulted in the belief that they would not have got on. The two emanations would have neutralized each other, and he suspected that both natures lacked the complementary qualities which might have bridged the gulf between them. And now chance had after all linked their names before posterity, through the fact that the widow of the one had married the man who had been betrothed to the other! . . .
French’s brief glimpses of Fingall and Mrs. Morland had left in him an intense curiosity to know something more of their personal history, and when his publisher had suggested his writing a book on the painter his first thought had been that here was an occasion to obtain the desired light, and to obtain it, at one stroke, through the woman who had been the preponderating influence in Fingall’s art, and the man for whom Emily Morland had written her greatest poems.
That Donald Paul should have met and married the widow of Horace Fingall was one of the facts on which young French’s imagination had always most appreciatively dwelt. It was strange indeed that these two custodians of great memories, for both of whom any other marriage would have been a derogation, should have found the one way of remaining on the heights; and it was almost equally strange that their inspiration should turn out to be Willis French’s opportunity!
At the very outset, the wonder of it was brought home to him by his having to ask for Mrs. Paul at what had once been Mrs. Morland’s house. Mrs. Morland had of course bequeathed the house to Donald Paul; and equally of course it was there that, on his marriage to Mrs. Fingall, Donald Paul had taken his wife. If that wife had been any other, the thought would have been one to shrink from; but to French’s mind no threshold was too sacred for the feet of Horace Fingall’s widow.
Musing on these things as he glanced up and down the quiet street, the young man, with his sharp professional instinct for missing no chance that delay might cancel, wondered how, before turning from the door, he might get a glimpse of the house which was still — which, in spite of everything, would always be — Emily Morland’s.
“You were not thinking of looking at the house, sir?”
French turned back with a start of joy. “Why, yes — I was!” he said instantly.
The parlour-maid opened the door a little wider. “Of course, properly speaking, you should have a card from the agent; but Mrs. Paul did say, if anyone was very anxious — May I ask, sir, if you know Mrs. Paul?”
The young man lowered his voice reverentially to answer: “No; but I knew Mrs. Morland.”
The parlour-maid looked as if he had misunderstood her question. After a moment’s thought she replied: “I don’t think I recall the name.”
They gazed at each other across incalculable distances, and Willis French found no reply. “What on earth can she suppose I want to see the house for?” he could only wonder.
Her next question told him. “If it’s very urgent, sir — ” another glance at the cut of his coat seemed to strengthen her, and she moved back far enough to let him get a foot across the threshold. “Would it be to hire or to buy?”
Again they stared at each other till French saw his own wonder reflected in the servant’s doubtful face; then the truth came to him in a rush. The house was not being shown to him because it had once been Emily Morland’s and he had been recognized as a pilgrim to the shrine of genius, but because it was Mrs. Donald Paul’s and he had been taken for a possible purchaser!
All his disenchantment rose to his lips; but it was checked there by the leap of prudence. He saw that if he showed his wonder he might lose his chance.
“Oh, it would be to buy!” he said; for, though the mere thought of hiring was a desecration, few things would have seemed more possible to him, had his fortune been on the scale of his enthusiasm, than to become the permanent custodian of the house.
The feeling threw such conviction into his words that the parlour-maid yielded another step.
“The drawing-room is this way,” she said as he bared his head.
It was odd how, as he paced up and down the Embankment late that evening, musing over the vision vouchsafed him, one detail continued to detach itself with discordant sharpness from the harmonious blur.
The parlour-maid who had never heard of Mrs. Morland, and who consequently could not know that the house had ever been hers, had naturally enough explained it to him in terms of its new owners’ habits. French’s imagination had so promptly anticipated this that he had, almost without a shock, heard Mrs. Morland’s library described as “the gentleman’s study,” and marked how an upstairs sitting-room with faded Venetian furniture and rows of old books in golden-brown calf had been turned, by the intrusion of a large pink toilet-table, into “the lady’s dressing-room, sir.” It did not offend him that the dwelling should he used as suited the convenience of the persons who lived in it; he was never for expecting life to stop, and the Historic House which has been turned into a show had always seemed to him as dead as a blown egg. He had small patience with the kind of reverence which treats fine things as if their fineness made them useless. Nothing, he thought, was too fine for natural uses, nothing in life too good for life; he liked the absent and unknown Donald Pauls the better for living naturally in this house which had come to them naturally, and not shrinking into the mere keepers of a shrine. But he had winced at just one thing: at seeing there, on the writing-table which had once been Emily Morland’s, and must still, he quickly noted, be much as she had left it — at seeing there, among pens and pencils and ink-stained paper-cutters, halfway between a lacquer cup full of elastic bands and a blotting-book with her initials on it, one solitary object of irrelevant newness: an immense expensively framed photograph of Fingall’s picture of his wife.
The portrait — the famous first one, now in the Luxembourg — was so beautiful, and so expressive of what lovers of Fingall’s art most loved in it, that Willis French was grieved to see it so indelicately and almost insolently out of place. If ever a thing of beauty can give offence, Mrs. Fingall’s portrait on Emily Morland’s writing-table gave offence. Its presence there shook down all manner of French’s faiths. There was something shockingly crude in the way it made the woman in possession triumph over the woman who was gone.
It would have been different, he felt at once, if Mrs. Morland had lived long enough to marry the man she loved; then the dead and the living woman would have faced each other on an equality. But Mrs. Morland, to secure her two brief years of happiness, had had to defy conventions and endure affronts. When, breaking away from the unhappy conditions of her married life, she had at last won London and freedom, it was only to learn that the Reverend Ambrose Morland, informed of her desire to remarry, and of his indisputable right to divorce her, found himself, on religious grounds, unable to set her free. From this situation she sought no sensational escape. Perhaps because the man she loved was younger than herself, she chose to make no open claim on him, to place no lien on his future; she simply let it be known to their few nearest friends that he and she belonged to each other as completely as a man and woman of active minds and complex interests can ever belong to each other when such life as they live together must be lived in secret. To a woman like Mrs. Morland the situation could not be other than difficult and unsatisfying. If her personal distinction saved her from social slights it could not save her from social subserviences. Never once, in the short course of her love-history, had she been able to declare her happiness openly, or to let it reveal itself in her conduct; and it seemed, as one considered her case, small solace to remember that some of her most moving verse was the expression of that very privation.
At last her husband’s death had freed her, and her coming marriage to Donald Paul been announced; but her own health had already failed, and a few weeks later she too was dead, and Donald Paul lost in the crowd about her grave, behind the Morland relations who, rather generously as people thought, came up from Staffordshire for the funeral of the woman who had brought scandal and glory to their name.
So, tragically and inarticulately, Emily Morland’s life had gone out; and now, in the house where she and her lover had spent their short secret hours, on the very table at which she had sat and imperishably written down her love, he had put the portrait of the other woman, her successor; the woman to whom had been given the one great thing she had lacked . . .
Well, that was life too, French supposed: the ceaseless ruthless turning of the wheel! If only — yes, here was where the real pang lay — if only the supplanting face had not been so different from the face supplanted! Standing there before Mrs. Fingall’s image, how could he not recall his first sight of Emily Morland, how not feel again the sudden drop of all his expectations when the one woman he had not noticed on entering Lady Brankhurst’s drawing-room, the sallow woman with dull hair and a dowdy dress, had turned out to be his immortal? Afterward, of course, when she began to talk, and he was let into the deep world of her eyes, her face became as satisfying as some grave early sculpture which, the imagination once touched by it, makes more finished graces trivial. But there remained the fact that she was what is called plain, and that her successor was beautiful; and it hurt him to see that perfect face, so all-expressive and all-satisfying, in the very spot where Emily Morland, to make her beauty visible, had had to clothe it in poetry. What would she not have given, French wondered, just once to let her face speak for her instead?
The sense of injustice was so strong in him that when he returned to his hotel he went at once to his portmanteau and, pulling out Mrs. Morland’s last volume, sat down to reread the famous love-sonnets. It was as if he wanted to make up to her for the slight of which he had been the unwilling witness . . .
The next day, when he set out for France, his mood had changed. After all, Mrs. Morland had had her compensations. She had been inspired, which, on the whole, is more worth while than to inspire. And then his own adventure was almost in his grasp; and he was at the age when each moment seems to stretch out to the horizon.
The day was fine, and as he sat on the deck of the steamer watching the white cliffs fade, the thought of Mrs. Morland was displaced by the vision of her successor. He recalled the day when Mrs. Fingall had first looked out at him from her husband’s famous portrait of her, so frail, so pale under the gloom and glory of her hair, and he had been told how the sight of her had suddenly drawn the painter’s genius from its long eclipse. Fingall had found her among the art students of one of the Parisian studios which he fitfully inspected, had rescued her from financial difficulties and married her within a few weeks of their meeting: French had had the tale from Lady Brankhurst, who was an encyclopaedia of illustrious biographies.
“Poor little Bessy Reck — a little American waif sent out from some prairie burrow to ‘learn art’ — that was literally how she expressed it! She hadn’t a relation of her own, I believe: the people of the place she came from had taken pity on her and scraped together enough money for her passage and for two years of the Latin Quarter. After that she was to live on the sale of her pictures! And suddenly she met Fingall, and found out what she was really made for.”
So far Lady Brankhurst had been satisfying, as she always was when she trod on solid fact. But she never knew anything about her friends except what had happened to them, and when questioned as to what Mrs. Fingall was really like she became vague and slightly irritable.
“Oh, well, he transformed her, of course: for one thing he made her do her hair differently. Imagine; she used to puff it out over her forehead! And when we went to the studio she was always dressed in the most marvellous Eastern things. Fingall drank cups and cups of Turkish coffee, and she learned to make it herself — it is better, of course, but so messy to make The studio was full of Siamese cats. It was somewhere over near the Luxembourg — very picturesque, but one did smell the drains. I used always to take my salts with me; and the stairs were pitch-black.” That was all.
But from her very omissions French had constructed the vision of something too fine and imponderable not to escape Lady Brankhurst, and had rejoiced in the thought that, of what must have been the most complete of blisses, hardly anything was exposed to crude comment but the stairs which led to it.
Of Donald Paul he had been able to learn even less, though Lady Brankhurst had so many more facts to give. Donald Paul’s life lay open for everybody in London to read. He had been first a “dear boy,” with a large and eminently respectable family connection, and then a not especially rising young barrister, who occupied his briefless leisure by occasionally writing things for the reviews. He had written an article about Mrs. Morland, and when, soon afterward, he happened to meet her, he had suddenly realized that he hadn’t understood her poetry in the least, and had told her so and written another article — under her guidance, the malicious whispered, and boundlessly enthusiastic, of course; people said it was that which had made her fall in love with him. But Lady Brankhurst thought it was more likely to have been his looks — with which French, on general principles, was inclined to agree. “What sort of looks?” he asked. “Oh, like an old picture, you know”; and at that shadowy stage of development the image of Donald Paul had hung. French, in spite of an extensive search, had not even been able to find out where the fateful articles on Mrs. Morland’s verse had been published; and light on that point was one of the many lesser results he now hoped for.
Meanwhile, settled in his chair on deck, he was so busy elaborating his own picture of the couple he was hastening to that he hardly noticed the slim figure of a traveller with a sallow keen face and small dark beard who hovered near, as if for recognition.
“Andre Jolyesse — you don’t remember me?” the gentleman at length reminded him in beautifully correct English; and French woke to the fact that it was of course Jolyesse, the eminent international portrait painter, whose expensively gloved hand he was shaking.
“We crossed together on the Gothic the last time I went to the States,” Monsieur Jolyesse reminded him, “and you were so amiable as to introduce me to several charming persons who added greatly to the enjoyment of my visit.”
“Of course, of course,” French assented; and seeing that the painter was in need of a listener, the young man reluctantly lifted his rugs from the next chair.
It was because Jolyesse, on the steamer, had been so shamelessly in quest of an article that French, to escape his importunities, had passed him on to the charming persons referred to; and if he again hung about in this way, and recalled himself, it was doubtless for a similarly shameless purpose. But French was more than ever steeled against the celebrating of such art as that of Jolyesse; and, to cut off a possible renewal of the request, he managed — in answer to a question as to what he was doing with himself — to mention casually that he had abandoned art criticism for the writing of books.
The portrait painter was far too polite to let his attention visibly drop at this announcement; too polite, even, not to ask with a show of interest if he might know the subject of the work Mr. French was at the moment engaged on.
“Horace Fingall — bigre!” he murmured, as if the aridity of the task impressed him while it provoked his pity. “Fingall — Fingall — ” he repeated, his incredulous face smilingly turned to French, while he drew a cigarette from a gold case as flat as an envelope.
French gave back the smile. It delighted him, it gave him a new sense of the importance of his task, to know that Jolyesse, in spite of Fingall’s posthumous leap to fame, still took that view of him. And then, with a start of wonder, the young man remembered that the two men must have known each other, that they must have had at least casual encounters in the crowded promiscuous life of the painters’ Paris. The possibility was so rich in humour that he was moved to question his companion.
“You must have come across Fingall now and then, I suppose?”
Monsieur Jolyesse shrugged his shoulders. “Not for years. He was a savage — he had no sense of solidarity. And envious — !” The artist waved the ringed hand that held his cigarette. “Could one help it if one sold more pictures than he did? But it was gall and worm-wood to him, poor devil. Of course he sells now — tremendously high, I believe. But that’s what happens: when an unsuccessful man dies, the dealers seize on him and make him, a factitious reputation. Only it doesn’t last. You’d better make haste to finish your book; that sort of celebrity collapses like a soap-bubble. Forgive me,” he added, with a touch of studied compunction, “for speaking in this way of your compatriot. Fingall had aptitudes — immense, no doubt — but no technique, and no sense of beauty; none whatever.”
French, rejoicing, let the commentary flow on; he even felt the need to stimulate its flow.
“But how about his portrait of his wife — you must know it?”
Jolyesse flung away his cigarette to lift his hands in protest. “That consumptive witch in the Luxembourg? Ah, mais non! She looks like a vegetarian vampire. Voyez vous, si l’on a beaucoup aimé les femmes — ” the painter’s smile was evidently intended to justify his championship of female loveliness. He puffed away the subject with his cigarette smoke, and turned to glance down the deck. “There — by Jove, that’s what I call a handsome woman! Over there, with the sable cloak and the brand new travelling-bags. A honeymoon outfit, hein? If your poor Fin-gall had had the luck to do that kind —! I’d like the chance myself.”
French, following his glance, saw that it rested on a tall and extremely elegant young woman who was just settling herself in a deck-chair with the assistance of an attentive maid and a hovering steward: A young man, of equal height and almost superior elegance, strolled up to tuck a rug over her shining boot-tips before seating himself at her side; and French had to own that, at least as a moment’s ornament, the lady was worth all the trouble spent on her. She seemed, in truth, framed by nature to bloom from one of Monsieur Jolyesse’s canvases, so completely did she embody the kind of beauty it was his mission to immortalize. It was annoying that eyes like forest-pools and a mouth like a tropical flower should so fit into that particular type; but then the object of Monsieur Jolyesse’s admiration had the air of wearing her features, like her clothes, simply because they were the latest fashion, and not because they were a part of her being. Her inner state was probably a much less complicated affair than her lovely exterior: it was a state, French guessed, of easy apathetic good-humour, galvanized by the occasional need of a cigarette, and by a gentle enjoyment of her companion’s conversation. French had wondered, since his childhood, what the Olympian lovers in fashion-plates found to say to each other. Now he knew. They said (he strolled nearer to the couple to catch it): “Did you wire about reserving a compartment?”; and “I haven’t seen my golf-clubs since we came on board”: and “I do hope Marshall’s brought enough of that new stuff for my face,” — and lastly, after a dreamy pause: “I know Gwen gave me a book to read when we started, but I can’t think where on earth I’ve put it.”
It was odd too that, handsome and young as they still were (both well on the warm side of forty), this striking couple were curiously undefinably old-fashioned — in just the same way as Jolyesse’s art. They belonged, for all their up-to-date attire, to a period before the triumph of the slack and the slouching: it was as if their elegance had pined too long in the bud, and its belated flowering had a tinge of staleness.
French mused on these things while he listened to Jolyesse’s guesses as to the class and nationality of the couple, and finally, in answer to the insistent question: “But where do you think they come from?” replied a little impatiently: “Oh, from the rue de la Paix, of course!” He was tired of the subject, and of his companion, and wanted to get back to his thoughts of Horace Fingall.
“Ah, I hope so — then I may run across them yet!” Jolyesse, as he gathered up his bags, shot a last glance at the beauty. “I’ll haunt the dressmakers till I find her — she looks as if she spent most of her time with them. And the young man evidently refuses her nothing. You’ll see, I’ll have her in the next Salon!” He turned back to add: “She might be a compatriot of yours. Women who look as if they came out of the depths of history usually turn out to be from your newest Territory. If you run across her, do say a good word for me. My full lengths are fifty thousand francs now — to Americans.”
All that first evening in Paris the vision of his book grew and grew in French’s mind. Much as he loved the great city, nothing it could give him was comparable, at that particular hour, to the rapture of his complete withdrawal from it into the sanctuary of his own thoughts. The very next day he was to see Horace Fingall’s widow, and perhaps to put his finger on the clue to the labyrinth: that mysterious tormenting question of the relation between the creative artist’s personal experience and its ideal expression. He was to try to guess how much of Mrs. Fingall, beside her features, had passed into her husband’s painting; and merely to ponder on that opportunity was to plunge himself into the heart of his subject. Fingall’s art had at last received recognition, genuine from the few, but mainly, no doubt, inspired by the motives to which Jolyesse had sneeringly alluded; and, intolerable as it was to French to think that snobbishness and cupidity were the chief elements in the general acclamation of his idol, he could not forget that he owed to these baser ingredients the chance to utter his own panegyric. It was because the vulgar herd at last wanted to know what to say when it heard Fingall mentioned that Willis French was to be allowed to tell them; such was the base rubble the Temple of Fame was built of! Yes, but future generations would enrich its face with lasting marbles; and it was to be French’s privilege to put the first slab in place.
The young man, thus brooding, lost himself in the alluring and perplexing alternatives of his plan. The particular way of dealing with a man’s art depended, of course, so much on its relation to his private life, and on the chance of a real insight into that. Fingall’s life had been obdurately closed and aloof; would it be his widow’s, wish that it should remain so? Or would she understand that any serious attempt to analyse so complex and individual an art must be preceded by a reverent scrutiny of the artist’s personality? Would she, above all, understand how reverent French’s scrutiny would be, and consent, for the sake of her husband’s glory, to guide and enlighten it? Her attitude, of course, as he was nervously aware, would greatly depend on his: on his finding the right words and the convincing tone. He could almost have prayed for guidance, for some supernatural light on what to say to her! It was late that night when, turning from his open window above the throbbing city, he murmured to himself: “I wonder what on earth we shall begin by saying to each other?”
Her sitting-room at the Nouveau Luxe was empty when he was shown into it the next day, though a friendly note had assured him that she would be in by five. But he was not sorry she was late, for the room had its secrets to reveal. The most conspicuous of these was a large photograph of a handsome young man, in a frame which French instantly recognized as the mate of the one he had noticed on Mrs. Morland’s writing-table. Well — it was natural, and rather charming, that the happy couple should choose the same frame for each other’s portraits, and there was nothing offensive to Fingall’s memory in the fact of Donald Paul’s picture being the most prominent object in his wife’s drawing-room.
Only — if this were indeed Donald Paul, where had French seen him already? He was still questioning the lines of the pleasant oft-repeated face when his answer entered the room in the shape of a splendidly draped and feathered lady.
“I’m so sorry! The dressmakers are such beasts — they’ve been sticking pins in me ever since two o’clock.” She held out her hand with a click of bracelets slipping down to the slim wrist. “Donald! Do come — it’s Mr. French,” she called back over her shoulder; and the gentleman of the photograph came in after her.
The three stood looking at each other for an interval deeply momentous to French, obviously less stirring to his hosts; then Donald Paul said, in a fresh voice a good deal younger than his ingenuous middle-aged face: “We’ve met somewhere before, surely. Wasn’t it the other day at Brighton — at the Metropole?”
His wife looked at him and smiled, wrinkling her perfect brows a little in the effort to help his memory. “We go to so many hotels! I think it was at the Regina at Harrogate.” She appealed to their visitor for corroboration.
“Wasn’t it simply yesterday, on the Channel?” French suggested, the words buzzing a little in his own ears; and Mrs. Paul instantly remembered.
“Of course! How stupid of me!” Her random sweetness grew more concentrated. “You were talking to a dark man with a beard — Andre Jolyesse, wasn’t it? I told my husband it was Jolyesse. How awfully interesting that you should know him! Do sit down and let me give you some tea while you tell us all about him.”
French, as he took the cup from her hand, remembered that, a few hours earlier, he had been wondering what he and she would first say to each other.
It was dark when he walked away from the blazing front of the Nouveau Luxe. Mrs. Donald Paul had given him two generous hours, and had filled them with talk of her first husband; yet as French turned from the hotel he had the feeling that what he brought away with him had hardly added a grain to his previous, knowledge of Horace Fingall. It was perhaps because he was still too blankly bewildered — or because he had not yet found the link between what had been and what was — that he had been able to sift only so infinitesimal a residue out of Mrs. Paul’s abundance. And his first duty, plainly, if he were ever to thread a way through the tangle, was to readjust himself and try to see things from a different point of view.
His one definite impression was that Mrs. Paul was very much pleased that he should have come to Paris to see her, and acutely, though artlessly, aware of the importance of his mission. Artlessness, in fact, seemed her salient quality: there looked out of her great Sphinx-eyes a consciousness as cloudless as a child’s. But one thing he speedily discovered: she was keenly alive to her first husband’s greatness. On that point French saw that she needed no enlightenment. He was even surprised, sitting opposite to her in all the blatancy of hotel mirrors and gilding, to catch on her lips the echoes of so different a setting. But he gradually perceived that the words she used had no meaning for her save, as it were, a symbolic one: they were like the mysterious price-marks with which dealers label their treasures. She knew that her husband had been proud and isolated, that he had “painted only for himself” and had “simply despised popularity”; but she rejoiced that he was now at last receiving “the kind of recognition even he would have cared for”; and when French, at this point, interposed, with an impulse of self-vindication: “I didn’t know that, as yet, much had been written about him that he would have liked,” she opened her fathomless eyes a little wider, and answered: “Oh, but the dealers are simply fighting for his things.”
The shock was severe; but presently French rallied enough to understand that she was not moved by a spirit of cupidity, but was simply applying the only measure of greatness she knew. In Fingall’s lifetime she had learned her lesson, and no doubt repeated it correctly — her conscientious desire for correctness was disarming — but now that he was gone his teaching had got mixed with other formulas, and she was serenely persuaded that, in any art, the proof and corollary of greatness was to become a best seller. “Of course he was his own worst enemy,” she sighed. “Even when people came to buy he managed to send them away discouraged. Whereas now —!”
In the first chill of his disillusionment French thought for a moment of flight. Mrs. Paul had promised him all the documentation he required: she had met him more than half-way in her lavish fixing of hours and offering of material. But everything in him shrank from repeating the experience he had just been subjected to. What was the use of seeing her again, even though her plans included a visit to Fingall’s former studio? She had told him nothing whatever about Fingall, and she had told him only too much about herself. To do that, she had not even had to open her beautiful lips. On his way to her hotel he had stopped in at the Luxembourg, and filled his eyes again with her famous image. Everything she was said to have done for Fingall’s genius seemed to burn in the depths of that quiet face. It was like an inexhaustible reservoir of beauty, a still pool into which the imagination could perpetually dip and draw up new treasure. And now, side by side with the painter’s vision of her, hung French’s own: the vision of the too-smiling beauty set in glasses and glitter, preoccupied with dressmakers and theatre-stalls, and affirming her husband’s genius in terms of the auction room and the stock exchange!
“Oh, hang it — what can she give me? I’ll go straight back to New York,” the young man suddenly resolved. The resolve even carried him precipitately back to his hotel; but on its threshold another thought arrested him. Horace Fingall had not been the only object of his pilgrimage: he had come to Paris to learn what he could of Emily Morland too. That purpose he had naturally not avowed at the Nouveau Luxe: it was hardly the moment to confess his double quest. But the manifest friendliness of Donald Paul convinced him that there would be no difficulty in obtaining whatever enlightenment it was in the young man’s power to give. Donald Paul, at first sight, seemed hardly more expressive than his wife; but though his last avatar was one so remote from literature, at least he had once touched its borders and even worn its livery. His great romance had originated in the accident of his having written an article about its heroine; and transient and unproductive as that phase of his experience had probably been, it must have given him a sense of values more applicable than Mrs. Paul’s to French’s purpose.
Luck continued to favour him; for the next morning, as he went down the stairs of his hotel, he met Donald Paul coming up.
His visitor, fresh and handsome as his photograph, and dressed in exactly the right clothes for the hour and the occasion, held out an eager hand.
“I’m so glad — I hoped I’d catch you,” he smiled up at the descending French; and then, as if to tone down what might seem an excess of warmth, or at least make it appear the mere overflow of his natural spirits, he added: “My wife rushed me off to say how sorry she is that she can’t take you to the studio this morning. She’d quite forgotten an appointment with her dressmaker — one of her dressmakers!” Donald Paul stressed it with a frank laugh; his desire, evidently, was to forestall French’s surprise. “You see,” he explained, perhaps guessing that a sense of values was expected of him, “it’s rather more of a business for her than for — well, the average woman. These people — the big ones — are really artists themselves nowadays, aren’t they? And they all regard her as a sort of Inspiration; she really tries out the coming fashions for them — lots of things succeed or fail as they happen to look on her.” Here he seemed to think another laugh necessary. “She’s always been an Inspiration; it’s come to be a sort of obligation to her. You see, I’m sure?”
French protested that he saw — and that any other day was as convenient —
“Ah, but that’s the deuce of it! The fact is, we’re off for Biarritz the day after to-morrow; and St. Moritz later. We shan’t be back here, I suppose, till the early spring. And of course you have your plans; ah, going back to America next week? Jove, that is bad.” He frowned over it with an artless boyish anxiety. “And tomorrow — well, you know what a woman’s last day in Paris is likely to be, when she’s had only three of them! Should you mind most awfully — think it hopelessly inadequate, I mean — if I offered to take you to the studio instead?” He reddened a little, evidently not so much at the intrusion of his own person into the setting of his predecessor’s life, as at his conscious inability to talk about Horace Fingall in any way that could possibly interest Willis French.
“Of course,” he went on, “I shall be a wretched substitute . . . I know so little . . . so little in any sense . . . I never met him,” he avowed, as if excusing an unaccountable negligence. “You know how savagely he kept to himself . . . Poor Bessy — she could tell you something about that!” But he pulled up sharp at this involuntary lapse into the personal, and let his smile of interrogation and readiness say the rest for him.
“Go with you? But of course — I shall be delighted,” French responded; and a light of relief shone in Mr. Paul’s transparent eyes.
“That’s very kind of you; and of course she can tell you all about it later — add the details. She told me to say that if you didn’t mind turning up again this afternoon late, she’ll be ready to answer any questions. Naturally, she’s used to that too!”
This sent a slight shiver through French, with its hint of glib replies insensibly shaped by repeated questionings. He knew, of course, that after Fingall’s death there had been an outpouring of articles on him in the journals and the art-reviews of every country: to correct their mistakes and fill up their omissions was the particular purpose of his book. But it took the bloom — another layer of bloom — from his enthusiasm to feel that Mrs. Paul’s information, meagre as it was, had already been robbed of its spontaneity, that she had only been reciting to him what previous interrogators had been capable of suggesting, and had themselves expected to hear.
Perhaps Mr. Paul read the disappointment in his looks, and misinterpreted it, for he added: “You can’t think how I feel the absurdity of trying to talk to you about Fingall!”
His modesty was disarming. French answered with sincerity: “I assure you I shall like nothing better than going there with you,” and Donald Paul, who was evidently used to assuming that the sentiments of others were as genuine as his own, at once brightened into recovered boyishness.
“That’s jolly. — Taxi!” he cried, and they were off.