Audrey Craven Part 17

"Everything. A really unbia.s.sed judgment is the rarest thing in the world, and there's always a charm about nave criticism."

"I couldn't put the book down. Can I say more?"

"Yes, of course you can say more. You can tell me which legend you disliked least; you can criticise my hero's conduct, and find fault with my heroine's manners; you can object to my plot, pick holes in my style.

No, thank goodness, you can't do that; but you can take exception to my morality."

She sat silent, waiting for her cue, and trying to collect her thoughts, which were fluttering all abroad in generalities.

He went on with a touch of bitterness in his voice--

"I thought so. It's the old stumbling-block--my morality. If it hadn't been for that, you would have told me, wouldn't you? that my figures breathe and move, that every touch is true to life. But you daren't. You are afraid of reality; facts are so immoral."

It would be impossible to describe the accent of scorn which Wyndham threw into this last word.

"I thought your book very clever--in spite of the facts."

"Facts or no facts, you'd rather have your beliefs, wouldn't you?"

"No, no; I lost them all long ago!" cried Audrey, indignantly.

"I don't mean the old vulgar dogmas, of course, but the dear little ideals that shed such a rosy light on things in general, you know. Ah!

that's what you want; and when an artist paints the real thing for you, you say, 'Thank you; yes, it's very clever, I see; but I prefer the pretty magic-lantern views, and the limelight of life.'"

"Not at all. I've much too great a regard for truth."

"I know. You're always looking for Truth, with a capital T; but, when it comes to the point, you'd rather have two miserable little half-truths than one honest whole truth about anything. That's why you disliked my book."

"I didn't."

"Oh, yes, you did. What you disliked about it was this. It made you see men and women, not as you imagined them, but as G.o.d made them. You saw, that is, the naked human soul, stripped of the clumsy draperies that Puritanism wraps round it. You saw below the surface--below the top-dressing of education, below the solid layer of traditional morality--deep down to the primitive pa.s.sions, the fire of the clay we're all made of. You saw love and hate, forces which are older than all religions and all laws, older than man and woman, and which make men and women what they are. And they seemed to you not commonplaces, which they are--but something worse. You don't know that these _facts_ are the stuff of art, because they are the stuff of nature; that it takes mult.i.tudes of such facts, not just one or two picked out because of their 'moral beauty'--for you purists believe in the beauty of morality as well as in the immorality of beauty--to make up a faithful picture of life. And you shuddered, didn't you? as you laid down the book you sat up half the night to read, and you said it was ugly, revolting; you couldn't see any perfect characters in it--only character in the making, only wretched men and women acting according to certain disagreeable laws, which are none the less immutable because one half of the world professes to ignore their existence. You said, 'Take away the whole world of nature, take away logic and science and art, but leave me--leave me my ideals!' Isn't that it?"

The torrent of his rhetoric swept her away, she knew not whither. But in his last words she had caught her cue. If she was ever to be an influence in Wyndham's life, encouraging, inspiring his best work, she must not suffer him to speak lightly of "ideals." It seemed to her that her methods with Ted were crude compared with her management of Wyndham.

"Oh, don't, don't! It's dreadful! But you are right. I can't live without ideals. All the great artists had them. You have them yourself, or at least you _had_ them. I don't know what to think about your book--I can't think, I can only feel; and I read between the lines.

Surely you feel with me that there's nothing worth living for except morality? Surely you believe in purity and goodness?"

Her face was flushed, her hands were clasped tightly together in her intensity. So strong was the illusion her manner produced, that for one second Wyndham could have been convinced of her absolute sincerity. Not long--no, not long afterwards, her words were to come back to him with irony.

"Morality? I've the greatest respect for it. But after all, its rules only mark off one little corner from the plain of life. Out there, in the open, are the fine landscapes and the great highroads of thought.

And if you are to travel at all, you must go by those ways. There's dust on them, and there's mud--plenty of mud; but--there are no others."

"I would be very careful where I put my feet, though. I don't like muddy boots."

"I daresay not; who does? But the traveller is not always thinking about his boots."

"Don't let's talk about boots." She made a little movement with her mouth, simulating disgust.

"Your own metaphor; but never mind. _A propos des bottes_, I should like----" he broke off and added in a deep, hieratic voice, "To the pure all things are pure, but to the Puritan most things are impure. I wish I could make you see that; but it's a large subject. And besides, I want to talk about you."

"Me?"

"Yes, you. With all your beliefs, there was a time, if I'm not much mistaken, when you were pleased to doubt the existence of your charming self?"

She looked up with a smile of pleasure and of perfect comprehension. He could hardly have said anything more delicately caressing to her self-love. It seemed, then, that every word she had uttered in his hearing had been weighed and treasured up. She could hardly be supposed to know that this power of noticing and preserving such little personal details was one of the functions of the literary organism. If a woman like Miss Fraser had been flattered by it, what must have been its effect on the susceptible Audrey?

"So you remember that too?" she said, softly.

"Yes; it impressed me at the time. Now I know you better I don't wonder at it. It's the fault of your very lovely and feminine idealism, but you seem to me to have hardly any hold on the fact of existence, to be unable to realise it. If I could only give you the sense of life--make you feel the movement, the pa.s.sion, the drama of it! My books have a little of that; they've got the right atmosphere, the _smell_ of life.

But never mind my books. I don't want you to have another literary craze--I beg your pardon, I mean phase; you seem to have had an artistic one lately."

He rose to go.

"I've always cared for the great things of life," said she.

"Ah yes--the great things, stamped with other people's approval. I want you to love life itself, so that you may be yourself, and feel yourself being."

Her whole nature responded as the strings of the violin to the bow of the master. "Life" was one of those words which specially stirred her sensibility. As Wyndham had foreseen, it was a word to conjure with; and now, as he had willed, the idea of it possessed her. She repeated mechanically--

"Life--to love life for itself----"

"And first--you must know life in order to love it."

She sighed slightly, as if she had taken in a little more breath to say good-bye. The ideal was flown. She had received the stamp of Wyndham's spirit, as if it had been iron upon wax. It was her way of being herself and feeling herself being.

The same evening she wrote a little note to Ted that ran thus:--

"DEAREST TED,--I have been thinking it all over, ever since yesterday, and I am convinced that my only right course is to break off our engagement. It has all been a mistake--mine and yours. Why should we not recognise it, instead of each persisting in making the other miserable? I release you from your promise to me, and will always remain very affectionately yours, AUDREY CRAVEN."

She had just sent the note to the post, when a servant came in with a telegram. It was from Hardy, announcing his arrival at Queenstown. And she had trusted to her engagement to Ted for protection against Vincent's claim.

If she had only waited!

CHAPTER XV

"Great strength and safety with heaviest charges." "Absolute immunity from all risk of blowing open." "The combination of a perfect trigger action with a perfect c.o.c.king action." Ted Haviland was standing outside the window of a gunsmith's shop in the King's Road, Chelsea, reading the enticing legends in which Mr. Webley sets forth the superiority of his wares above those of all other makers. It was the second day after he had got Audrey's letter. In his least hopeful moods he had never expected that blow; and when it fell, as a bolt from the blue, he was stunned and could not realise that he was struck. He imagined all kinds of explanations to account for Audrey's conduct. It was a misunderstanding, a sudden freak; there was some mystery waiting to be solved; some one--his cousin Nettie probably--had spread some story about him which had reached Audrey. The scandal already spread in the family would have been enough; she could hardly have identified its loudly dressed heroine as herself. It only remained for him to clear his character. Anything, anything rather than believe in what all healthy youth revolts against--the irrevocable, the end.

He had tried three times to see Audrey, and she was "not at home"; though the third time he had seen her go into the house not two minutes before. That instant he had turned away with a stinging mist in his eyes and the blood surging in his brain. His thoughts now leaped to the end as blindly as they had shrunk from it before. He had no definite idea of shooting himself when he turned into the King's Road--his one object was to go in any direction rather than home; but the shop window, with its stacks of rifles and cards displaying "Mark I." revolvers, arranged on them like the spokes of a wheel, caught his attention. He was possessed with the desire to have a revolver of his own, no matter for what purpose.

He had just chosen a "Mark I.," and was going into the shop to buy it, when he heard his name called in a loud hearty voice, "Ted, you bounder!

stop!" and his arm was pulled with a grip that drew him backward from the doorstep.

"Hardy!"

He knew the voice, but it was hard to recognise the man. A thick black beard, a face that might have been tanned with bark, trousers tucked into high boots, and tightened with a belt like a horse-girth, an old Norfolk jacket stained with travel and the chase, a canvas s.h.i.+rt laced with a red cord and ta.s.sels, and a plate-like hat of grey felt flapping about his ears, made Hardy look something like a cowboy or a bandit. So singular was the apparition that had plucked Ted back from the abyss, that the Furies and the infernal phantoms vanished into smoke before it.

It brought with it a breath of Atlantic seas and of winds from the far West.