CHAPTER XXIX

 

It was after ten o'clock.  The dancers had already dispersed and the last lights were being put out.  Tomorrow the tents would be struck, the dismantled merry-go-round would be packed into waggons and carted away.  An expanse of worn grass, a shabby brown patch in the wide green of the park, would be all that remained.  Crome Fair was over.

      By the edge of the pool two figures lingered.

      'No, no no,' Anne was saying in a breathless whisper, leaning backwards, turning her head from side to side in an effort to escape Gombauld's kisses.  'No, please.  No.’ Her raised voice had become imperative.

      Gombauld relaxed his embrace a little.  'Why not?' he said.  'I will.'

      With a sudden effort Anne freed herself.  'You won't,' she retorted.  'You've tried to take the most unfair advantage of me.'

      'Unfair advantage?' echoed Gombauld in genuine surprise.

      'Yes, unfair advantage.  You attack me after I've been dancing for two hours, while I'm still reeling drunk with the movement, when I've lost my head, when I've got no mind left but only a rhythmical body!  It's as bad as making love to someone you've drugged or intoxicated.'

      Gombauld laughed angrily.  'Call me a White Slaver and have done with it.'

      'Luckily,' said Anne, 'I am now completely sobered, and if you try and kiss me again I shall box your ears.  Shall we take a few turns round the pool?' she added.  'The night is delicious.'

      For answer Gombauld made an irritated noise.  They paced off slowly, side by side.

      'What I like about the painting of Degas ...' Anne began in her most detached and conversational tone.

      'Oh, damn Degas!' Gombauld was almost shouting.

      From where he stood, leaning in an attitude of despair against the parapet of the terrace, Denis had seen them, the two pale figures in a patch of moonlight, far down by the pool's edge.  He had seen the beginning of what promised to be an endlessly passionate embracement, and at the sight he had fled.  It was too much; he couldn't stand it.  In another moment, he felt, he would have burst into irrepressible tears.

      Dashing blindly into the house, he almost ran into Mr Scogan, who was walking up and down the hall smoking a final pipe.

      'Hullo!' said Mr Scogan, catching him by the arm; dazed and hardly conscious of what he was doing or where he was, Denis stood there for a moment like a somnambulist.  'What's the matter?' Mr Scogan went on.  'You looked disturbed, distressed, depressed.'

      Denis shook his head without replying.

      'Worried about the cosmos, eh?'  Mr Scogan patted him on the arm.  'I know the feeling,' he said.  'It's a most distressing symptom.  "What's the point of it all?  All is vanity.  What's the good of continuing to function if one's doomed to be snuffed out at last along with everything else?"  Yes, yes.  I know exactly how you feel.  It's most distressing if one allows oneself to be distressed.  But then, why allow oneself to be distressed?  After all, we all know that there's no ultimate point.  But what difference does that make?'

      At this point the somnambulist suddenly woke up.  'What?' he said, blinking and frowning at his interlocutor.  'What?'  Then breaking away, he dashed up the stairs, two steps at a time.

      Mr Scogan ran to the foot of the stairs and called up after him.  'It makes no difference, none whatever.  Life is gay all the same, always, under whatever circumstances - under whatever circumstances,' he added, raising his voice to a shout.  But Denis was already far out of hearing, and even if he had not been, his mind tonight was proof against all the consolations of philosophy.  Mr Scogan replaced his pipe between his teeth and resumed his meditative pacing.  'Under any circumstances,' he repeated to himself.  It was ungrammatical to begin with; was it true?  And is life really its own reward?  He wondered.  When his pipe had burned itself to its stinking conclusion he took a drink of gin and went to bed.  In ten minutes he was deeply, innocently asleep.

      Denis had mechanically undressed and, clad in those flowered silk pyjamas of which he was so justly proud, was lying face downwards on his bed.  Time passed.  When at last he looked up, the candle which he had left alight at his bedside had burned down almost to the socket.  He looked at his watch; it was nearly half-past one.  His head ached, his dry, sleepless eyes felt as though they had been bruised from behind, and the blood was beating within his ears a loud arterial drum.  He got up, opened the door, tiptoed noiselessly along the passage, and began to mount the stairs towards the higher floors.  Arrived at the servants' quarters, under the roof, he hesitated, then turning to the right he opened a little door at the end of the corridor.  Within was a pitch-dark cupboard-like boxroom, hot, stuffy, and smelling of dust and old leather.  He advanced cautiously into the blackness, groping with his hands.  It was from this den that the ladder went up to the leads of the western tower.  He found the ladder, and set his feet on the rungs; noiselessly, he lifted the trapdoor above his head; the moonlit sky was over him, he breathed the fresh, cool air of the night.  In a moment he was standing on the leads, gazing out over the dim, colourless landscape, looking perpendicularly down at the terrace seventy feet below.

      Why had he climbed up to this high, desolate place?  Was it to look at the moon?  Was it to commit suicide?  As yet he hardly knew.  Death - the tears came into his eyes when he thought of it.  His misery assumed a certain solemnity; he was lifted up on the wings of a kind of exaltation.  It was a mood in which he might have done almost anything, however foolish.  He advanced towards the farther parapet; the drop was sheer there and uninterrupted.  A good leap, and perhaps one might clear the narrow terrace and so crash down yet another thirty feet to the sun-baked ground below.  He paused at the corner of the tower, looking now down into the shadowy gulf below, now up towards the rare stars and the waning moon.  He made a gesture with his hand, muttered something, he could not afterwards remember what; but the fact that he had said it aloud gave the utterance a peculiarly terrible significance.  Then he looked down once more into the depths.

      'What are you doing, Denis?' questioned a voice from somewhere very close behind him.

      Denis uttered a cry of frightened surprise, and very nearly went over the parapet in good earnest.  His heart was beating terribly, and he was pale when, recovering himself, he turned round in the direction from which the voice had come.

      'Are you ill?'

      In the profound shadow that slept under the eastern parapet of the tower, he saw something he had not previously noticed - an oblong shape.  It was a mattress, and someone was lying on it.  Since that first memorable night on the tower, Mary had slept out every evening; it was a sort of manifestation of fidelity.

      'It gave me a fright,' she went on, 'to wake up and see you wavering your arms and gibbering there.  What on earth were you doing?'

      Denis laughed melodramatically.  'What, indeed!' he said.  If she hadn't woken up as she did, he would be lying in pieces at the bottom of the tower; he was certain of that, now.

      'You hadn't got designs on me, I hope?' Mary inquired, jumping too rapidly to conclusions.

      'I didn't know you were here,' said Denis, laughing more bitterly and artificially than before.

      'What is the matter, Denis?'

      He sat down on the edge of the mattress, and for all reply went on laughing in the same frightful and improbable tone.

      An hour later he was reposing with his head on Mary's knees, and she, with an affectionate solicitude that was wholly maternal, was running her fingers through his tangled hair.  He had told her everything, everything: his hopeless love, his jealousy, his despair, his suicide - as it were providentially averted by her interposition.  He had solemnly promised never to think of self-destruction again.  And now his soul was floating in a sad serenity.  It was embalmed in the sympathy that Mary so generously poured.  And it was not only in receiving sympathy that Denis found serenity and even a kind of happiness; it was also in giving it.  For if he had told Mary everything about his miseries, Mary, reacting to these confidences, had told him in return everything, or very nearly everything, about her own.

      'Poor Mary!'  He was very sorry for her.  Still, she might have guessed that Ivor wasn't precisely a monument of constancy.

      'Well,' she concluded, 'one must put a good face on it.'  She wanted to cry, but she wouldn't allow herself to be weak.  There was a silence.

      'Do you think?' asked Denis hesitatingly - 'do you really think that she ... that Gombauld ...'

      'I'm sure of it,' Mary answered decisively.  There was another long pause.

      'I don't know what to do about it,' he said at last, utterly dejected.

      'You'd better go away,' advised Mary.  'It's the safest thing, and the most sensible.'

      'But I've arranged to stay here three weeks more.'

      'You must concoct an excuse.'

      'I suppose you're right.'

      'I know I am,' said Mary, who was recovering all her firm self-possession.  'You can't go on like this, can you?'

      'No, I can't go on like this,' he echoed.

      Immensely practical, Mary invented a plan of action.  Startlingly, in the darkness, the church clock struck three.

      'You must go to bed at once,' she said.  'I'd no idea it was so late.'

      Denis clambered down the ladder, cautiously descended the creaking stairs.  His room was dark; the candle had long ago guttered to extinction.  He got into bed and fell asleep almost at once.