A Long Time Ago

ELISSA KOEBEL was as good as her word, for she came very early next morning. The life of the courtyard had scarcely begun and most of the party were still up in their towers. From the kitchen quarters came faint sounds of activity, but an early morning stillness lay upon the little paved square, with its well in the middle, and the empty doorways, and the pigeons fluttering about the grey battlements.

This stillness was very soon broken by Elissa. She perched herself upon the edge of the well and began to warble folk-songs in the clear mountain voice of the Sennerin:

Ich grüsse dich

Zehn tausend mal!

Du himmelschöne Ziller Thal!

The rousing echoes were flung from wall to wall, and the pigeons rose up in a startled flock. Nor were the castle towers quite impervious to sound. The slit windows on the stairs let in a great deal of Elissa’s yodelling.

In the keep all the children were just getting up. They began joyfully to yodel, too, until Muffy had to say:

Louise and Gordon turned to one another with infatuated smiles, as they leapt out of bed and began to dress.

“It’s too good to be true,” said Louise. “And to-day they are really going to meet at last.”

A faint chill descended upon Gordon’s rapture. He was not so very anxious to see Elissa falling in love with Guy Fletcher. To his mind they all did very well as they were.

Maude and Barny were having a scene in the bedroom and spared very little attention to the yodelling outside.

“You might have let me know how you felt about it before,” Barny was saying. “I thought you quite approved.”

“I didn’t want to annoy you. I thought if I really let you know how nervous I should be, and then Dick didn’t come, and the whole plan fell through, I should just have annoyed you for nothing.”

“I’ve written for my boots and climbing tackle. You seemed quite enthusiastic … I can’t understand …”

“I know, darling. Of course you must go. I’ve no business to be nervous. I must learn to get over it. Only will you just not tell me when you do go? If I don’t know you’re doing it, then I can’t be frightened. You just slip off and climb if you want to, and I shan’t know till it’s over, so I shall be spared all those awful visions of you lying with your back broken at the bottom of a precipice.”

“Of course I shan’t go if you feel like that about it,” said Barny coldly. “Only I do think you might have…. Good God! Is that damned woman here already?”

“I beg your pardon, Maude. But I do wish you’d say what you mean or mean what you say. It’s impossible ever to know where one is with you. I quite thought …”

“O Hojo! Ho-jo! Ho-jo!

Mein Heimatland, Tirol!

Tirol!

Mein Heimatland, Tirol!”

Over in the other tower, Guy Fletcher and Kerran both woke up with a jerk. Their first emotion was one of discomfort upon beholding one another, for they disliked having to share a room. Kerran’s prosperous pink face peered cautiously over the blanket at Guy’s pale square one. And then they realised what it was that had roused them.

They said no more, but for the first time in their lives a small spark of sympathy began to flicker between them.

Dick, in the room below, was the only person to be taken by surprise. He was already up and had begun to shave. When Elissa gave tongue he started violently and asked:

She sat up in bed and rubbed her eyes. And then, as their unhappy plight came back to her, she gave him a quick, anxious look. He turned away at once. In the shaving glass he saw that he had scratched his chin, and as he dabbed at the cut with a towel he swore under his breath. This propinquity, and these loving anxious looks, were more than he could bear.

Ellen’s letters were undramatic, and he had had no accounts of Elissa save from her. He now learnt for the first time of her friendship with Louise, and he was greatly surprised.

“She’s queer. She’s quite interesting. I mean, she seems to have travelled about a good deal and seen a lot. And I must say she does sing beautifully.”

“But all this about her being such a rake, I mean? Is that all moonshine? I suppose it must be, or Louise wouldn’t have her here. Or Gordon either.”

“Oh!” said Ellen, opening her eyes very wide. “I don’t know. Maude thinks it isn’t. Not moonshine, I mean. She thinks Louise is making a terrible mistake. And she thinks that Madame Koebel is … is drawing off Gordon.”

Dick began to laugh, both at the idea and at Ellen’s idiom. It was with a briskened sense of anticipation that he finished dressing and went down into the courtyard. His attention had been diverted by this unexpected little drama, and he felt that the presence of Elissa in the castle might make everything a great deal easier than he had expected.

He wanted to get out of the room and away from Ellen. All night he had kept on repeating to himself that it was impossible to remain shut up with her like this. He ought never to have come to Inishbar. He ought to go away. But his will to do anything seemed to have vanished. If he could make the effort to go he might equally make the greater effort, pull himself together, and put this dark interlude behind him. Both courses required a moral struggle.

Louise and Gordon were both in the courtyard already, and they too were sitting on the edge of the well. They were examining the peasant dress which Elissa had put on that morning. She, it seemed, was in an earthy mood. She had assumed the full, homespun petticoat and the shawl worn by the barefoot women of Killross, and her golden braids were wound neatly round her head. She would sing nothing but Volksliede. Even her face seemed to have broadened, to have become rosier and more bucolic. She radiated good humour and physical well-being, laughed loudly, swung her slender bare feet to and fro, and stared about her with the unabashed, animal liveliness of the comely savage. Gordon and Louise, who knew how she loved to dramatise every role, admired and applauded. When they presented Dick they both looked at him anxiously, as if to demand his instant appreciation. But it was impossible ever to know what Dick thought of anybody. His long, cold face had about as much expression as a block of granite. He returned Elissa’s bold survey with one short, but observant glance, and sat down without a word upon the wall beside her.

He could not remember that they had, but he did not trouble to deny it. In one way it was perfectly true. He had met her before. There had been something of her in every woman who had ever roused his sensuality. And he had no doubt but that she had met him before, frequently, in other men. Their understanding, on that point, was complete. It had been instantaneous.

Her strange, wild eyes, that unabashed regard which had given Kerran such a turn, held a message which could not be mistaken. He looked at the rest of her, swiftly, and flashed his own message back.

Now he sat beside her on the wall, and marvelled, with mingled relief and dismay, at his own amazing insensibility. She had turned away from him and was talking in German to Louise, but he knew that she was aware of him with every nerve in her body. She was his for the taking: he was perfectly certain of that. And he did not want her. The inertia which had brought him to Inishbar, which was going to keep him there, had put a bridgeless gulf between them. He was too sick at heart to want anything or anybody. He was as safe from all carnal desires as St. Simon on the top of his pillar.

And he thought, sardonically amused, of her fury when she should find this out. For his message, flashed in that instant of greeting, had been an impudent deception. He would not have sent it if he had not known that he was safe. If he had not been safe he would not have been there at all. He was not likely to betray his poor Ellen in this particular way because he was betraying her in every other way. He was allowing his life, and hers, to go to pieces. If the spectacle of her misery last night could not reclaim him, then his case was surely hopeless.

“No, no, my dear,” he mentally informed the lady at his side. “I’m a good husband. You just wait and see what a good husband I am!”

But the imagined diversion of this dialogue was not to last for long. The commonplace features of his colleague, Ensor Thring, peered sideways round a corner at him. He heard Thring’s neat little voice saying something, just not audible. It was Thring’s face and Thring’s voice which would haunt him for ever. He could forget a woman’s face, rigid in death. He could forget the sobs of a desolate husband. But there would still be Thring, squinting at him sideways, whispering inaudible things: and in the white glare, the suffocating heat of the theatre (he felt a wrench of nausea when he thought of that light and the heat) there would be myriads of Thrings: Thring on the table, Thring giving the anæsthetic, Thring’s face squinting under a nurse’s cap, Thring whispering and pushing in the students’ gallery….

He sought, with shaking hands, in his pocket for a pipe and a tobacco pouch. Elissa, aware of the movement, turned round to look at him.

Already she was aware of something amiss. She had discovered the gulf across which their messages had flown and now she was running up and down, in search of a bridge. Poor Elissa!

She jumped up and went to meet the reluctant Guy, who had just appeared at the door of his tower staircase. Gordon followed her more slowly, wishing in secret that Guy Fletcher were somewhere else. For a few seconds Dick and Elissa were left to wage their silent battle by the well.

“Quite right, my friend. We shall see. In the end you will either take me or run away from me.”

Thring’s voice filled up the silence with an inaudible comment, and Louise brought up Guy Fletcher to be introduced. Those eyes which Barny had said were like a basilisk or an odalisk—Maude could not remember which—were turned for a moment in Guy’s direction. Dick watched, as he filled his pipe, and saw how Guy shied like a nervous horse. He thought:

“That’s what I ought to have done. There, but for a touch of accidie, goes Dick Napier.”

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