That night in his room, after sitting for an hour with bowed head, gazing fixedly before him, Densham suddenly jumped up and went to the tiny secretaire which he had scarcely used since taking up his lodging there.
With characteristic impulsiveness he drew a sheet of paper towards him, removed the stopper of the ink-well, and selected a pen. The corners of his mouth were drawn down in that accustomed grimace which accentuated the stern line of his upper lip. Deep lines appeared in his forehead. His glance roved over the wall above the writing desk.
How would he address her?
She came vividly before his mind, a solitary figure, surrounded by grey shadows, her white hands like drifted snow in her lap. He recalled that last look she had sent him as he retreated from the room.
As so often happened, a phrase of grandiose prose from a much-beloved book soared upward to express his thought.
“When the waters of sad knowledge …”
How did it go? He got up and went to the bookcase where some of his favourite volumes had been hurriedly installed. His own pencilled index on the fly-leaf of one of them guided him quickly to the passage he sought;
“I sit now, alone and melancholy, with that melancholy which comes to all of us when the waters of sad knowledge have left their ineffaceable delta in the soul.”
He dropped the book on the window-sill, thrust his hands deeply into his thick hair and strained his head back against the nest of his clasped fingers.
Sad knowledge!
Yes, he thought, that ancient tree must indeed have been forbidden. To generation after generation it brings nothing but sadness.
That deep and unutterable sense of the continuity of existence, which had come to him in that twilight-filled room, emphasized more than ever his impatience, his distrust, his quarrel with the fleshly world.
He had glimpsed in her eyes the radiance of imperishable youth. He felt that he could come near to her only by shaking off the flesh. They could reunite in that companionship of which they had both experienced a mysterious augury only by destroying and leaving behind the whole conception of an earthly condition.
Across the black gulf of his habitual scepticism this thought fell like a ray of intoxicating light. He suddenly felt his heart elated by an unusual happiness. His need to write to her returned.
He sat down again at the table, dipped his pen, and began:
Dear Madame Milónoff:
I have not yet told you why I came to England. A single phrase from a great book impelled me to uproot myself. It was this: ‘Thought appears in Nature as an arrested, a degraded physical action.’
I began to suspect that the secrets of life, if they can be fathomed at all, are unapproachable through the intellect. After doubting everything else I began to doubt the efficacy of my mind, my own faculty of doubting.
It occurred to me that all our sadness, our impatience, our scepticism, springs from the attempt to get outside of Life and see it whole. I determined that Life was not to be seen, not to be known; but only experienced. I believed that the happiest and most beautiful creatures do not contemplate themselves. They are content with being. In this, I thought, might lie the richest ecstasy. I made up my mind to pursue it. I tried to crush back my thoughts, my reason. ‘We think too much and feel too little,’ I told myself. I came back to England because I thought that in this tranquil landscape, on sunny downs and beside the lapping sea, I might give the quietus to my eternally questing mind. Here, I believed, ecstasy might be found, in surrendering oneself to the glamour, the beauty, the blessedness of Nature.
How we deceive ourselves! It is so palpably wrong to think of brute nature as content with being. There is no content. All Nature is restless. The blood of every tiniest creature throbs with the impulse of this blind, inexplicable quest—for what? For something new? For ‘perfect adaptation’? For ‘the peak of fitness’?
Just since this afternoon I am coming to believe that the biologists are all wrong. It seems to me that all of us—all Nature—is seeking something old; not something new. Something older than the universe, older than Time, which has been experienced before, and toward which—finding it lacking—all Life yearns. I am left to the thought that matter itself—dead though we have been apt to deem it—is itself impregnated, in its minutest particles, with this urge to seek a state from which it has been exiled.
Why do I tell you all this? Because it is what I really meant this afternoon. ‘Before the heavens were brought forth, or the earth or sea were made’, we lived a life other than this; and deep in us, deeper than our thoughts, closer to the heart of our being than our blood, there is the unconscious, but vitalizing memory of that lovelier existence. And for millions of years—which, perhaps, is but an hour of that other life—every particle of matter has been groping, straining forward in the dark, blindly seeking the Paradise from which it has strayed.
Both of us seemed to sense something of all this, this afternoon. With a suddenness passing comprehension we both recognized in each other—like exiles meeting in a strange land—the familiar spark of that other youth, which seems never to grow old nor wearied of seeking its lost dwelling place.
Even my first glimpse of you on Sunday night gave me some premonition of all this. I marvelled then at the depth of expression in your eyes. I asked myself then—‘What is it in her glance which speaks of an infinitely receding and mysterious past?’
But to-day I felt sure. You will not readily realize what that means to me, to feel sure of anything! You have given me hope, where there was nothing before but the blankest scepticism. You contain in yourself the sweet evidence, the very spark of that something divine in us ‘that was before the elements and owes no homage unto the Sun.’
Do you remember that wonderful passage of Sir Thomas Browne’s?
And Francis Thompson, too. He sensed it. ‘O Titan Nature! a petty race may find you too vast, may shrink from you into its earths; but though you be a very large thing, and my heart a very little thing, yet Titan as you are, my heart is too great for you.’
I am afraid you will be amazed at all this. I couldn’t help but write you, though. For over an hour I have been sitting here thinking. When may I see you again? There is so much that I want to say to you.
Griffith Densham
The following day he spent in London, securing an interview with a publisher.
He had lain awake most of the night, disturbed by the most vivid recollection of what had transpired between him and Madame Milónoff during the afternoon. His unposted letter to her, lying sealed and stamped on the flap of the secretaire, troubled his thoughts. Half a dozen times he all but got out of bed with the intention of re-writing it. He luxuriated in the novel sensation of believing in something. Invariably his imagination was most active during the early hours of the morning. His fantastic theory—in the dark, and with the radiance of Madame Milónoff’s eyes still a potent memory—seemed to him sound, sane and worthy of the most exhaustive elaboration.
After a while he did get up, turned on the light and smoked a cigarette in an easy-chair by the open window.
Life had taken on a different hue. He looked up at the distant stars and a thrill of happiness shot through him as he realized that in a day the mighty, whirling universe had been transfigured for him. The vast swing of these glowing, hurrying spheres through the profound ether possessed for the first time a recognizable significance, a purpose.
These stars were homing to the Paradise they had strayed from. Instinctively, from the earliest times, mankind had reached the astounding conclusion that this life was not all, that something lay beyond it. Perhaps they were right, after all. He shaped his thought paradoxically—“Men have been constantly concerned with a Heaven to which they are going, instead of one from which they have come.”
He left his cigarette-end smoking in the ash-tray and went back to bed; but it was a long time before he slept.
In the morning he awoke with a sense of being in a strange universe. It was not that the room seemed unfamiliar. Indeed, that was in itself the essence of the new sensation—the feeling that these solid, physical things about him were no longer of any importance, their very existence only a delusion. A singular clairvoyance edged his thought so that it cut through the thickness of mere appearance to the heart of some palpitating actuality which he had never before suspected.
Slowly he recalled the extravagant imaginings of the night that had just passed.
“Homing Stars! An exiled universe! Paradise Lost!”
He sat up and rumpled his hair with both hands. A musing sceptical smile drew down the corners of his mouth. He was trying to laugh at himself, at the folly of false hopes, at the entirely unusual sensation of waking into a world that meant something, that was vital, possessed of an aim and a goal.
He got up and looked at himself in the mirror; but as he gazed at the reflection of his mocking greenly-glinting eyes, the cynical laughter died out of them. A new and austere determination could be read in the set of his jaw. Within him he felt the lift and buoyancy of a strange, invigorating power.
At breakfast he decided to go up to London, interview a publisher to whom he could gain access, through a mutual friend, and set himself to some definite task. Even the distasteful prospect of sheer hack-work had no terrors for him.
As the train sped toward Victoria he analysed the causes underlying this hasty determination to fling himself into some sort of occupation. Madame Milónoff was more than indirectly responsible for it. It was she, certainly who had inspired this sudden, but profound consciousness of an unsuspected potency, behind the mask of the material. But there was, too, another, a more practical influence. He could not continue to visit her in the role of a sluggard. The ache to achieve was awakened in his heart.
On looking up his friend he was surprised to learn that the publisher whose interest he wished to arouse was a permanent guest at the Suffolk Hotel, where he always put up when staying overnight in the city. The three met at dinner that night, and Densham was more than ever amused to find that the editor of one of the oldest and most dignified English reviews turned out to be precisely the figure he had most often noticed in the smoking-room of the hotel, during his previous stops there.
This shabby, dishevelled, Micawber-like person, whose insolently truculent air had more than once attracted Densham’s attention, proved himself to be the gentlest of creatures, when properly introduced.
In the lounge, after dinner, the talk drifted toward the specific nature of Densham’s capabilities. His Shakespearian research-work immediately established a point of contact, and late that evening the men separated, Densham glowing with the prospect of putting to practical use his months of study in a series of articles on the source-plots of ‘Hamlet’.
In the morning he took an early train for Croydon, and found a note from Madame Milónoff awaiting him at his room. For several moments he stood gazing at the unfamiliar writing which he nevertheless knew—at a glance—to be hers. His pulses quickened as he tore open the envelope and read:
Dear Mr Densham:
Tomorrow night I am entertaining at dinner—people you would not find interesting. But if you can come in about ten o’clock Anton will show you to the library where I will find you as soon as they leave.
Till then —
Natálya Milónoff
Perhaps you shall wheel me under the stars as you wished.
The letter had been posted the previous evening. It meant that tonight he would see her again. The day passed slowly.
When he approached the house, excited by the unusual hour of the appointment, and eager to tell her of the commission he had secured in London, a hum of voices reached his ears. Her guests were leaving. He walked past and loitered until they were gone. Then, with a recurrence of the trembling which had affected him two days before, he lifted the tragic mask—more sinister than ever in the dim light of the porch at night—and knocked.
Anton came. In a few moments Madame Milónoff appeared with a filmy blue wrap about her shoulders, wheeling herself down the hall.
He and Anton assisted her down the steps and into the bath-chair. Densham was surprised to discover that she could walk at all.
“If it were not for my heart I could hobble about with a stick or a crutch,” she told him. “But I have to be so careful. The slightest strain or over-excitement makes me quite ill. But let’s forget about all that. Tell me what you have been doing.”
They were at the gate by this time, which Anton had come down to open.
“Which way shall we go?” asked Griffith.
She signified that it did not matter, and settled herself sideways in the chair so that she could look up at him as he walked behind.
He told her of his interview with the publisher and his chance to make use of the reams of notes he had made at the time he was studying ‘Hamlet’. She expressed an eager curiosity to learn how he was going to handle it. He began enthusiastically, but when it occurred to him that their hour was slipping away he was filled with impatience.
Not until they were close to the house again, the hour nearly up, did he feel emboldened enough to bend nearer to her and engage her eyes in a deep glance.
“Somehow we seem like quite ordinary people tonight, don’t you think?” he murmured, with a perceptible trace of disappointment in his voice.
“Surely not,” said she, rather soberly.
“I mean that we have not talked as I had expected—hoped. We have been too human for my liking. On Wednesday we seemed to get—to get behind the material; on a different plane. You know what I mean—don’t you?”
They were at the gate. He opened it, placed his foot against it, and guided in the chair. Then he bent over for an answer.
“Yes,” she said, “It has been there—the other—underneath our talk. It has not been a bit strange, this outing with you. I still feel—as I did on Wednesday—that I have known you a very long time.”
“But not in the same way,” he demurred, in her ear. “Not as intensely.”
He brought the chair to a standstill opposite the steps and moved to one side so that he could look directly into her face. It seemed to him that she was deliberately keeping her feelings in check.
“You live so intensely yourself,” she cried, almost as though she envied him. “But you mustn’t expect all of us poor mortals to keep up with you. After you had gone on Wednesday I felt quite exhausted.”
He bent closer. “Did you? Did you?” he exclaimed. It seemed to give him a sort of savage pleasure that he could stir the depths of her.
She saw his impassioned look and held up her hand, palm outwards, as though protecting herself from the fierceness of a flame.
“And have you thought of it since?” he demanded, hoarsely.
“A great deal. Too much. It is so strange! I can’t! I mustn’t! Please ring for Anton.”
“Can’t we manage together?” he asked, coming to the front of the chair.
She sat forward. He put his arm about her and lifted her up. She stepped to the ground, leaning heavily on his arm.
“Let me carry you,” he whispered.
“No, no. I can manage this way.”
She stood still for a moment, looking up at the thickly strewn stars. With one arm about her and the other supporting her wrist he stood gazing down at her, his heart aching. Slowly her eyes turned to his, and without another word they laboriously ascended the steps.
“Will you come Sunday night?” she asked, while Anton helped her into the house-chair.
He murmured a polite affirmative and went away, raging inwardly.