Two lean greyhounds came bounding toward him down the drive when Densham entered Madame Milónoff’s gate on the Wednesday afternoon. He paused and fondled the long, damp noses snuffing at his legs.
“Princely creatures,” he thought, as he dallied there, talking to them caressingly, while they leaped about him.
They were part of the scene, vivid because of its strangeness, and drenched in an atmosphere of damp, mouldering, ancient calm, into which he found himself strolling with grave thoughtfulness. It was indicative of his mood that he could spend precious moments, just inside the gate, teasing the dogs with the curved end of his stick, while he glanced leisurely about at all the tall rhododendrons, whose dusty leaves hung motionless in the afternoon sun, at the brown earth of newly-raked flower beds, at the low, grey walls of the old-fashioned house, the upper windows of which, with their leaded, diamond-shaped panes, seemed to be shrinking from observation, so thickly overhung were they with ivy.
As he approached the steps an agitated exultation seized him, magnifying and surrounding with brightness the tiniest objects and the minutest sounds. From the back of the house there came the faint “clip … clip” of a gardener’s shears, and he could hear through an open, up-stairs window the low humming of a maidservant rustling quietly about her tasks.
He was astonished to find himself trembling, ever so slightly, as he raised the heavy bronze knocker, fashioned in the form of a tragic mask. The vacant eye-sockets and drooping mouth seemed to regard him with grim foreknowledge of his ordained destiny, while he stood waiting for the door to open.
Anton, the old footman, came at last. He opened wide the door, and Densham’s vision was immediately dazzled with the glory of the down-going sun pouring through the high, stained-glass window above the turn of the stairs. It flooded the spacious hall, and with this halo behind his venerable head the palsied old servitor looked more than ever like some Biblical prophet, whose arms might at any minute be lifted in lamentation.
Instead he lifted his thick brows and gave Griffith a steady, appraising glance. “M’sieur Densham?” Griffith inclined his head.
“Your honour is expected.”
The hall looked larger with the sunlight streaming along the polished floor and striking the mirrors of the antlered clothes-rack with scintillating bursts of light. The great canvases, too, looked heavier and gloomier; the slender bronze figure on the stair-post seemed more remote.
The rumble of Anton’s voice interrupted Densham’s observation of these half-strange surroundings. The old footman was preceding him down the hall. At an open doorway near the foot of the stairs he paused, and ushered Densham into Madame Milónoff’s presence.
She was seated in her wheel-chair, facing the door, in a small, cosy room, into which the dying blaze of the sun did not penetrate. Twilight was already settling about her, and as he moved forward Densham experienced a delicate pang of melancholy. Grey, erect, immobile—there was about her figure the pathetic poise of one who has waited a very long time, with resolute expectancy, for some revelation, some miracle, some perfect and sufficient fulfillment of an inexpressible hope.
He bent over her hand, and she said—“It’s so good of you to come. I didn’t ask you on Sunday night how long you intend staying in England; but I suppose you must have a hundred places to go, and not half enough time.”
He took a low seat beside her and leaned forward, clasping his hands.
“I think I am going to stay here,” he said, and paused. A sudden impotence attacked him, draining his mind of words. He felt incapable of murmuring anything but “yes” and “no.” The sensation was akin to that enchantment, experienced sometimes in dreams, which holds one breathless, unable to stir or utter a sound, while the peopled vision passes within arm’s reach.
“Then you have no ties to speak of in Canada?” she was saying.
“No.”
His brain refused to set itself to the task of conversing with her; it was concerned only with the strange heaviness which numbed his power of speech. “What has come over me?” he kept repeating to himself, and in answer, out of the confused web of his thoughts, there floated a phrase of De Quincey’s—“the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me.”
Instead of ignoring it the current of his consciousness swept him on to fresh questioning—“What made me think of that? What is that from?” His errant mind tracked it down, placing it in the context which he had once fondly memorized.
All this flashed through his brain instantaneously. She was speaking again.
“And do you find your friends much scattered after so long an absence?”
“Not as much as I had expected.” He spoke mechanically, without real volition.
“I suppose we don’t move about much in England. Although I am indoors so much that everyone else seems so active and restless in comparison.”
She was looking at him and he at her as though both of them were aware of some long enduring but interrupted familiarity which gave to these trite remarks an air of polite mockery. It puzzled them both; and yet was cogent enough to establish between them an understanding that the usual pretences and pettinesses of casual conversation might be dispensed with from that moment onward.
It was she who lifted their talk into this new plane.
“You were so frank with me on Sunday that I feel I have known you a very long time.”
It was said aloud, and yet hardly addressed to him. It was an uttered thought, a justification, a reason for this odd feeling that they had known each other intimately in some half-forgotten past.
“You must have been astonished at my vehemence,” Densham remarked. “I thought about it a great deal—afterward; and wondered what could have caused me to pour out my feelings as I did. It seemed to me that you must have drawn me out,—and yet I can’t remember anything you said that might have given me an excuse.”
She leaned forward. “You are not going to apologize,” she protested, with a soft rebuke in her glance.
“Not for that,” he went on. “It was just because you did not seem like a stranger to me, I suppose, that I could do it. But just now, when I first sat down, I didn’t want to talk at all. Just the reverse, you see. And yet it springs from the same thing. One doesn’t remain silent in the presence of strangers.”
He stopped and regarded her with a look that demanded her understanding, and she accepted what he had said with that slow enlargement of her eyes which seemed to invite him to look and find there the complete accord and sympathy with his bared emotion which his glance craved.
“I have thought about it, too,” she said, very quietly, “and I think it must be that you sense in me something of the disappointment, the tragedy of lost opportunities, which you seem to have experienced yourself. You shouldn’t, you know. I mean you shouldn’t give way to disappointment, to disillusionment. You have the best of your life before you. You are still young—without handicaps …”
“Except one,” he interrupted, almost fiercely. “Myself! ‘The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.’ Externally, perhaps, I am not confronted with handicaps; but inside—inside I am chained!”
He paused, frowned, looked at her as though wondering whether to go on, and decided to do so.
“Do you know, I spent a lot of time, once, digging into the source-plots of ‘Hamlet.’ I was consumed with curiosity to know how much of Hamlet’s vacillating character was attributable to Shakespeare’s invention, and how much to the original story, if there was one. I found that there was not merely one, but many, and that they extended back through a host of quaint variants of an old tradition which had its roots in the myths of most ancient peoples. But right up to the lost drama of Thomas Kyd, on which Shakespeare is supposed to have based his tragedy, the story was always one of external difficulties placed in the path of Hamlet’s revenge. Shakespeare removed them all. One almost fancies him taking Kyd’s melodramatic manuscript and saying to himself—‘Suppose we take all the knots out of it, all the stage tricks that hold up the action, all the creaking machinery—and place the whole burden of the delayed vengeance on the protagonist.’ That’s precisely what he did. Hamlet’s only handicap is himself. And it’s well to remember that the story springs from a myth about some primeval dragon-slayer, so ancient that there are literally scores of versions of it in every language and literature—even in the Bible. The dragon-slaying element had been eliminated from the actual Hamlet story long before it came to Shakespeare; but ‘the native hue of resolution’—that was there—the valour becoming to a prince, the intrepidity fitting to a stage hero—it was there until Shakespeare, wearied of swashbuckling gallants, ‘sicklied it o’er with the pale cast of thought’.”
His eyes underwent a change of colour as they often did with the mercurial flashes of his humour. They darkened perceptibly and a bluish glow replaced the gleam that mostly haunted them. “How I talk,” he cried.
Madame Milónoff had been listening with a deep interest which was not confined to his subject alone. She was absorbed, at the same time, in wondering what had led him to such studies. And, more than that, she had been watching with carefully veiled curiosity his way of telling her all this, the confidence with which he gave it out, the flash of his eyes, the tense lines about his mouth, the abruptness of his occasional gestures.
“How do you pull yourself up like that?” she asked. “It must have been a most intriguing quest. Cannot you believe that I’m interested?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“But, you see,” he murmured, humbly, “I came with the vowed intention of not talking about myself. I wanted …”
“But you haven’t been talking about yourself—it’s been about Shakespeare.”
“Yes—about Shakespeare; about Hamlet. But why do I tell you all that? Why did I plunge into all that research? Because it throws some light on this queer puzzle …” He clasped his temples. “This restless, inconstant, wayward intellect.”
“Why should I concern myself so much about it? Why am I not content to live, as other people seem to?”
He looked up at her and smiled ruefully.
“But above all,” he blurted out, in a helpless tone, “why should I burden you with my troubles?”
He folded his arms tightly, with an air of taking hold of himself. “I wanted you to talk today.”
“But that would simply be reversing the roles,” she said. “Must it be so one-sided?”
Anton appeared with the tea-things before he could answer. There was a pause while the tray was arranged before her. Then, as she busied herself with serving him, he asked—“Do you get out very much? I suppose you …”
“In a bath chair,” she replied, simply. “Oh yes. Anton takes me out— every morning when it is fine. And often quite late at night, when people are not here. Sometimes even after they have gone. I love the stars—I love the stars—they make up for so much, and they help me to feel humble. They cool my soul.”
She had betrayed the fire that was burning in her. It flared in her eyes, flushed her cheek, and agitated her white hands. He repeated that phrase to himself—“They cool my soul.” What was this hope, this expectancy, that flamed within her? Whence sprang this need to humble herself? His sympathy—it was almost pity—surged through him again.
“I wonder if you would let me come some time and wheel you,” he said, over his tea-cup. “Somehow I feel we could talk better in the open air. And there is so much that I want to tell you, to ask you. Why should that be? I come back from Canada, expecting to talk for hours on end with old friends—not so much about old times—but to find out how they have changed. Seeking always, you see, for something that will explain the change that has taken place in me. But they haven’t changed. And we talk about trivialities. None of them have probed their own souls. They don’t like the word ‘soul’. No doubt they are much happier—just because they are able to forget that they possess such a thing. But I—I—well, I flung myself into life with immense resolution. I felt there were tremendous tasks ahead—dragons to be slain! I began to equip myself for the ordeal. Presently I sallied forth to achieve, conquer, make a noise in the world. I can’t remember when I wasn’t writing something—and always, always, with a purpose. No knight ever believed his lance more potent than I my pen. My enthusiasm was almost blasphemous. I felt myself to be a man sent from God. I hardly suppose you can understand. Well, I should like to be able to tell you what happened, but I cannot. I don’t know myself; unless it was that there were too many dragons. I began to ponder which I should attack first. It took some time to come to a decision, but after a while I began. I fought with all the zeal I was capable of; and it was a lot. I have never lacked zest. But before I could finish, the particular dragon I was fighting seemed to lose importance. Another began roaring in another part of the field. I made off in that direction and started all over again. I have been starting ever since, eternally starting, never finishing. Not one of the dragons is dead. I have nothing to show for all my wounds and weariness. Nothing!”
He put down his tea cup and abruptly rose. She did not deter him with a sound or a gesture, but sat with widened eyes, as though his misery were no new thing to her, as though she wholly comprehended it and had shared it from the beginning of the world.
He had stalked nervously to the window, but coming back and standing over her, he looked into her face with an intensity that amounted almost to fierceness.
“See what you have let yourself in for,” he said, with a hard, squeezed tone, “by the mere appearance of taking an interest in me.”
With a motion that was so sudden as to seem entirely involuntary she extended her hand to him over the side of her wheel-chair. He clasped it in both his, dropped upon a low foot-rest at her side, and kept her soft fingers imprisoned in his own.
“My dear boy,” she said, “it isn’t ‘mere appearance’. I shouldn’t have asked you to come today if—if I hadn’t wanted to let myself in for something, as you say. I hoped for this—just this—that you would tell me more about this torment that exasperates you. You said enough on Sunday to make me curious. You see, I too have my moments of torture. I, too, have sometimes believed myself to be sent … Perhaps life was too kind to me at the start, holding out glowing promises of a high destiny, conquests, triumphs—ah, you know what I mean, so well. Is it any wonder that we felt some sort of kinship—so soon?”
She gently withdrew her hand. He allowed it to slip lingeringly through his fingers.
“I like you to come to me, as you would to a father-confessor—I am old enough, you see …”
He leaned forward to interrupt her vehemently. Age had dropped from her in his eyes. She was as old as Time, and yet as youthful as a flower. Time, space, circumstance—nothing earthy, it seemed, could impinge upon this proximity of their two souls—so near, familiar and exalted by mutually experienced suffering.
She bestowed on him a glance that possessed the significance of an accolade. So it seemed to him, obsessed as he was with her queenliness.
“I should like to help,” she murmured. “I don’t know how, of course; but you are still so young, so full of—well, let’s use your words—‘valour’ and ‘intrepidity’—Oh, yes, yes.”
But he was already crying out—“No, no, no!”—and groping blindly for her hand, unable to withdraw his eyes from hers, so full were they of hope for him.
She let him have her hand and for a space they sat silent, feeling no necessity for speech. Suddenly his clasp tightened and he raised her fingers impetuously to his lips.
Her eyes deepened and were swept by strange gleams as though some long forgotten memory were striving to exhume itself from her past. In a stifled, anguished voice she cried:
“It’s unbelievable that we haven’t met before. Tell me. Who are you?”
He felt himself dropping out of the existing moment into an immemorial retrospect. He experienced an impossible sensation of having become suddenly fleshless.
“Somewhere—some time,” he murmured, in a hushed, hoarse voice, “a long, long time ago—before the earth and the sea were made—we must have been—together! That’s all I know. I don’t know even that. I’ve never believed in such things. But—what else? And you—you feel it, too?”
It was a whisper that came to him, a breath, tenuous as air, and yet her whole being floated out of her with it and united with his.
“Yes.”