Manalive Page 4

  Chapter IV

  The Garden of the God

  Diana Duke seemed inexplicably irritated at the abrupt entranceand utterance of the other girl.

  "Well," she said shortly, "I suppose Miss Gray can decline him if shedoesn't want to marry him."

  "But she DOES want to marry him!" cried Rosamund in exasperation."She's a wild, wicked fool, and I won't be parted from her."

  "Perhaps," said Diana icily, "but I really don't see what we can do."

  "But the man's balmy, Diana," reasoned her friend angrily."I can't let my nice governess marry a man that's balmy!You or somebody MUST stop it!--Mr. Inglewood, you're a man;go and tell them they simply can't."

  "Unfortunately, it seems to me they simply can," said Inglewood,with a depressed air. "I have far less right of interventionthan Miss Duke, besides having, of course, far less moralforce than she."

  "You haven't either of you got much," cried Rosamund,the last stays of her formidable temper giving way;"I think I'll go somewhere else for a little sense and pluck.I think I know some one who will help me more than you do,at any rate... he's a cantankerous beast, but he's a man,and has a mind, and knows it..." And she flung out into the garden,with cheeks aflame, and the parasol whirling like a Catherine wheel.

  She found Michael Moon standing under the garden tree, looking overthe hedge; hunched like a bird of prey, with his large pipe hanging downhis long blue chin. The very hardness of his expression pleased her,after the nonsense of the new engagement and the shilly-shallyingof her other friends.

  "I am sorry I was cross, Mr. Moon," she said frankly. "I hated youfor being a cynic; but I've been well punished, for I want a cynicjust now. I've had my fill of sentiment--I'm fed up with it.The world's gone mad, Mr. Moon--all except the cynics, I think.That maniac Smith wants to marry my old friend Mary, and she--and she--doesn't seem to mind."

  Seeing his attentive face still undisturbedly smoking, she added smartly,"I'm not joking; that's Mr. Smith's cab outside. He swears he'lltake her off now to his aunt's, and go for a special licence.Do give me some practical advice, Mr. Moon."

  Mr. Moon took his pipe out of his mouth, held it in his handfor an instant reflectively, and then tossed it to the other sideof the garden. "My practical advice to you is this," he said:"Let him go for his special licence, and ask him to get anotherone for you and me."

  "Is that one of your jokes?" asked the young lady."Do say what you really mean."

  "I mean that Innocent Smith is a man of business,"said Moon with ponderous precision--"a plain, practical man:a man of affairs; a man of facts and the daylight.He has let down twenty ton of good building bricks suddenlyon my head, and I am glad to say they have woken me up.We went to sleep a little while ago on this very lawn, in thisvery sunlight. We have had a little nap for five years or so,but now we're going to be married, Rosamund, and I can't seewhy that cab..."

  "Really," said Rosamund stoutly, "I don't know what you mean."

  "What a lie!" cried Michael, advancing on her with brightening eyes."I'm all for lies in an ordinary way; but don't you see that to-nightthey won't do? We've wandered into a world of facts, old girl.That grass growing, and that sun going down, and that cab at the door,are facts. You used to torment and excuse yourself by saying Iwas after your money, and didn't really love you. But if I stoodhere now and told you I didn't love you--you wouldn't believe me:for truth is in this garden to-night."

  "Really, Mr. Moon..." said Rosamund, rather more faintly.

  He kept two big blue magnetic eyes fixed on her face."Is my name Moon?" he asked. "Is your name Hunt? On my honour,they sound to me as quaint and as distant as Red Indian names.It's as if your name was `Swim' and my name was `Sunrise.' But ourreal names are Husband and Wife, as they were when we fell asleep."

  "It is no good," said Rosamund, with real tears in her eyes;"one can never go back."

  "I can go where I damn please," said Michael, "and I can carryyou on my shoulder."

  "But really, Michael, really, you must stop and think!"cried the girl earnestly. "You could carry me off my feet, I dare say,soul and body, but it may be bitter bad business for all that.These things done in that romantic rush, like Mr. Smith's, they--they do attract women, I don't deny it. As you say, we're alltelling the truth to-night. They've attracted poor Mary, for one.They attract me, Michael. But the cold fact remains:imprudent marriages do lead to long unhappiness and disappointment--you've got used to your drinks and things--I shan't bepretty much longer--"

  "Imprudent marriages!" roared Michael. "And pray where in earthor heaven are there any prudent marriages? Might as well talkabout prudent suicides. You and I have dawdled round each otherlong enough, and are we any safer than Smith and Mary Gray,who met last night? You never know a husband till you marry him.Unhappy! of course you'll be unhappy. Who the devil are youthat you shouldn't be unhappy, like the mother that bore you?Disappointed! of course we'll be disappointed. I, for one,don't expect till I die to be so good a man as I am at this minute--a tower with all the trumpets shouting."

  "You see all this," said Rosamund, with a grand sincerity in her solid face,"and do you really want to marry me?"

  "My darling, what else is there to do?" reasoned the Irishman. "What otheroccupation is there for an active man on this earth, except tomarry you? What's the alternative to marriage, barring sleep?It's not liberty, Rosamund. Unless you marry God, as our nuns do in Ireland,you must marry Man--that is Me. The only third thing is to marry yourself--yourself, yourself, yourself--the only companion that is never satisfied--and never satisfactory."

  "Michael," said Miss Hunt, in a very soft voice, "if you won't talk so much,I'll marry you."

  "It's no time for talking," cried Michael Moon; "singing is the only thing.Can't you find that mandoline of yours, Rosamund?"

  "Go and fetch it for me," said Rosamund, with crisp and sharp authority.

  The lounging Mr. Moon stood for one split second astonished;then he shot away across the lawn, as if shod with the featheredshoes out of the Greek fairy tale. He cleared three yardsand fifteen daisies at a leap, out of mere bodily levity;but when he came within a yard or two of the open parlour windows,his flying feet fell in their old manner like lead;he twisted round and came back slowly, whistling. The eventsof that enchanted evening were not at an end.

  Inside the dark sitting-room of which Moon had caught a glimpse a curiousthing had happened, almost an instant after the intemperate exitof Rosamund. It was something which, occurring in that obscure parlour,seemed to Arthur Inglewood like heaven and earth turning head over heels,the sea being the ceiling and the stars the floor. No words can expresshow it astonished him, as it astonishes all simple men when it happens.Yet the stiffest female stoicism seems separated from it only by a sheet ofpaper or a sheet of steel. It indicates no surrender, far less any sympathy.The most rigid and ruthless woman can begin to cry, just as the mosteffeminate man can grow a beard. It is a separate sexual power,and proves nothing one way or the other about force of character.But to young men ignorant of women, like Arthur Inglewood, to see Diana Dukecrying was like seeing a motor-car shedding tears of petrol.

  He could never have given (even if his really manly modesty had permitted it)any vaguest vision of what he did when he saw that portent. He actedas men do when a theatre catches fire--very differently from how theywould have conceived themselves as acting, whether for better or worse.He had a faint memory of certain half-stifled explanations, that the heiresswas the one really paying guest, and she would go, and the bailiffs(in consequence) would come; but after that he knew nothing of his ownconduct except by the protests it evoked.

  "Leave me alone, Mr. Inglewood--leave me alone; that's not the way to help."

  "But I can help you," said Arthur, with grinding certainty;"I can, I can, I can..."

  "Why, you said," cried the girl, "that you were much weaker than me."

  "So I am weaker than you," said Arthur
, in a voice that wentvibrating through everything, "but not just now."

  "Let go my hands!" cried Diana. "I won't be bullied."

  In one element he was much stronger than she--the matter of humour.This leapt up in him suddenly, and he laughed, saying: "Well, you are mean.You know quite well you'll bully me all the rest of my life.You might allow a man the one minute of his life when he's allowed to bully."

  It was as extraordinary for him to laugh as for her to cry,and for the first time since her childhood Diana was entirelyoff her guard.

  "Do you mean you want to marry me?" she said.

  "Why, there's a cab at the door!" cried Inglewood, springing upwith an unconscious energy and bursting open the glass doorsthat led into the garden.

  As he led her out by the hand they realized somehow for the first timethat the house and garden were on a steep height over London. And yet,though they felt the place to be uplifted, they felt it also to be secret:it was like some round walled garden on the top of one of theturrets of heaven.

  Inglewood looked around dreamily, his brown eyes devouringall sorts of details with a senseless delight. He noticed forthe first time that the railings of the gate beyond the gardenbushes were moulded like little spearheads and painted blue.He noticed that one of the blue spears was loosened in its place,and hung sideways; and this almost made him laugh. He thought itsomehow exquisitely harmless and funny that the railing shouldbe crooked; he thought he should like to know how it happened,who did it, and how the man was getting on.

  When they were gone a few feet across that fiery grass they realizedthat they were not alone. Rosamund Hunt and the eccentric Mr. Moon,both of whom they had last seen in the blackest temper of detachment,were standing together on the lawn. They were standing in quitean ordinary manner, and yet they looked somehow like people in a book.

  "Oh," said Diana, "what lovely air!"

  "I know," called out Rosamund, with a pleasure so positivethat it rang out like a complaint. "It's just like that horrid,beastly fizzy stuff they gave me that made me feel happy."

  "Oh, it isn't like anything but itself!" answered Diana, breathing deeply."Why, it's all cold, and yet it feels like fire."

  "Balmy is the word we use in Fleet Street,"said Mr. Moon. "Balmy--especially on the crumpet."And he fanned himself quite unnecessarily with his straw hat.They were all full of little leaps and pulsations of objectlessand airy energy. Diana stirred and stretched her long arms rigidly,as if crucified, in a sort of excruciating restfulness;Michael stood still for long intervals, with gathered muscles,then spun round like a teetotum, and stood still again;Rosamund did not trip, for women never trip, except when theyfall on their noses, but she struck the ground with her footas she moved, as if to some inaudible dance tune; and Inglewood,leaning quite quietly against a tree, had unconsciouslyclutched a branch and shaken it with a creative violence.Those giant gestures of Man, that made the high statuesand the strokes of war, tossed and tormented all their limbs.Silently as they strolled and stood they were bursting likebatteries with an animal magnetism.

  "And now," cried Moon quite suddenly, stretching out a hand on each side,"let's dance round that bush!"

  "Why, what bush do you mean?" asked Rosamund, looking round with a sortof radiant rudeness.

  "The bush that isn't there," said Michael--"the Mulberry Bush."

  They had taken each other's hands, half laughing and quite ritually;and before they could disconnect again Michael spun them all round,like a demon spinning the world for a top. Diana felt, as the circle ofthe horizon flew instantaneously around her, a far aerial sense of the ringof heights beyond London and corners where she had climbed as a child;she seemed almost to hear the rooks cawing about the old pines on Highgate,or to see the glowworms gathering and kindling in the woods of Box Hill.

  The circle broke--as all such perfect circles of levity must break--and sent its author, Michael, flying, as by centrifugal force, far awayagainst the blue rails of the gate. When reeling there he suddenlyraised shout after shout of a new and quite dramatic character.

  "Why, it's Warner!" he shouted, waving his arms. "It's jolly old Warner--with a new silk hat and the old silk moustache!"

  "Is that Dr. Warner?" cried Rosamund, bounding forward in aburst of memory, amusement, and distress. "Oh, I'm so sorry!Oh, do tell him it's all right!"

  "Let's take hands and tell him," said Michael Moon. For indeed,while they were talking, another hansom cab had dashed up behindthe one already waiting, and Dr. Herbert Warner, leaving a companionin the cab, had carefully deposited himself on the pavement.

  Now, when you are an eminent physician and are wired for byan heiress to come to a case of dangerous mania, and when,as you come in through the garden to the house, the heiressand her landlady and two of the gentlemen boarders join handsand dance round you in a ring, calling out, "It's all right! it'sall right!" you are apt to be flustered and even displeased.Dr. Warner was a placid but hardly a placable person.The two things are by no means the same; and even when Moon explainedto him that he, Warner, with his high hat and tall, solid figure,was just such a classic figure as OUGHT to be danced roundby a ring of laughing maidens on some old golden Greek seashore--even then he seemed to miss the point of the general rejoicing.

  "Inglewood!" cried Dr. Warner, fixing his former disciple with a stare,"are you mad?"

  Arthur flushed to the roots of his brown hair, but he answered,easily and quietly enough, "Not now. The truth is, Warner, I've justmade a rather important medical discovery--quite in your line."

  "What do you mean?" asked the great doctor stiffly--"what discovery?"

  "I've discovered that health really is catching, like disease,"answered Arthur.

  "Yes; sanity has broken out, and is spreading," said Michael,performing a ~pas seul~ with a thoughtful expression."Twenty thousand more cases taken to the hospitals;nurses employed night and day."

  Dr. Warner studied Michael's grave face and lightly movinglegs with an unfathomed wonder. "And is THIS, may I ask,"he said, "the sanity that is spreading?"

  "You must forgive me, Dr. Warner," cried Rosamund Hunt heartily."I know I've treated you badly; but indeed it was all a mistake.I was in a frightfully bad temper when I sent for you, but nowit all seems like a dream--and and Mr. Smith is the sweetest,most sensible, most delightful old thing that ever existed,and he may marry any one he likes--except me."

  "I should suggest Mrs. Duke," said Michael.

  The gravity of Dr. Warner's face increased. He took a slipof pink paper from his waistcoat pocket, with his paleblue eyes quietly fixed on Rosamund's face all the time.He spoke with a not inexcusable frigidity.

  "Really, Miss Hunt," he said, "you are not yet very reassuring.You sent me this wire only half an hour ago: `Come at once,if possible, with another doctor. Man--Innocent Smith--gone madon premises, and doing dreadful things. Do you know anything of him?'I went round at once to a distinguished colleague of mine, a doctorwho is also a private detective and an authority on criminal lunacy;he has come round with me, and is waiting in the cab. Now you calmlytell me that this criminal madman is a highly sweet and sane old thing,with accompaniments that set me speculating on your own definition of sanity.I hardly comprehend the change."

  "Oh, how can one explain a change in sun and moon and everybody's soul?"cried Rosamund, in despair. "Must I confess we had got so morbidas to think him mad merely because he wanted to get married; and that wedidn't even know it was only because we wanted to get married ourselves?We'll humiliate ourselves, if you like, doctor; we're happy enough."

  "Where is Mr. Smith?" asked Warner of Inglewood very sharply.

  Arthur started; he had forgotten all about the central figure of their farce,who had not been visible for an hour or more.

  "I--I think he's on the other side of the house, by the dustbin," he said.

  "He may be on the road to Russia," said Warner, "but he must be found."And he strode away and disappeared round a corner of the houseby the sunfl
owers.

  "I hope," said Rosamund, "he won't really interfere with Mr. Smith."

  "Interfere with the daisies!" said Michael with a snort."A man can't be locked up for falling in love--at leastI hope not."

  "No; I think even a doctor couldn't make a disease out of him.He'd throw off the doctor like the disease, don't you know?I believe it's a case of a sort of holy well. I believe Innocent Smithis simply innocent, and that is why he is so extraordinary."

  It was Rosamund who spoke, restlessly tracing circles in the grasswith the point of her white shoe.

  "I think," said Inglewood, "that Smith is not extraordinary at all.He's comic just because he's so startlingly commonplace.Don't you know what it is to be all one family circle, with auntsand uncles, when a schoolboy comes home for the holidays?That bag there on the cab is only a schoolboy's hamper.This tree here in the garden is only the sort of tree that anyschoolboy would have climbed. Yes, that's the thing that hashaunted us all about him, the thing we could never fit a word to.Whether he is my old schoolfellow or no, at least he is all myold schoolfellows. He is the endless bun-eating, ball-throwinganimal that we have all been."

  "That is only you absurd boys," said Diana. "I don't believeany girl was ever so silly, and I'm sure no girl was everso happy, except--" and she stopped.

  "I will tell you the truth about Innocent Smith," said Michael Moon in alow voice. "Dr. Warner has gone to look for him in vain. He is not there.Haven't you noticed that we never saw him since we found ourselves?He was an astral baby born on all four of us; he was only our ownyouth returned. Long before poor old Warner had clambered out of his cab,the thing we called Smith had dissolved into dew and light on this lawn.Once or twice more, by the mercy of God, we may feel the thing,but the man we shall never see. In a spring garden before breakfastwe shall smell the smell called Smith. In the snapping of brisk twigsin tiny fires we shall hear a noise named Smith. Everything insatiableand innocent in the grasses that gobble up the earth like babies at a bun feast,in the white mornings that split the sky as a boy splits up white firwood,we may feel for one instant the presence of an impetuous purity;but his innocence was too close to the unconsciousness of inanimate thingsnot to melt back at a mere touch into the mild hedges and heavens; he--"

  He was interrupted from behind the house by a bang like that of a bomb.Almost at the same instant the stranger in the cab sprang out of it,leaving it rocking upon the stones of the road. He clutched the blue railingsof the garden, and peered eagerly over them in the direction of the noise.He was a small, loose, yet alert man, very thin, with a face that seemedmade out of fish bones, and a silk hat quite as rigid and resplendentas Warner's, but thrust back recklessly on the hinder part of his head.

  "Murder!" he shrieked, in a high and feminine but very penetrating voice."Stop that murderer there!"

  Even as he shrieked a second shot shook the lower windowsof the house, and with the noise of it Dr. Herbert Warner cameflying round the corner like a leaping rabbit. Yet beforehe had reached the group a third discharge had deafened them,and they saw with their own eyes two spots of white sky drilledthrough the second of the unhappy Herbert's high hats.The next moment the fugitive physician fell over a flowerpot,and came down on all fours, staring like a cow. The hat withthe two shot-holes in it rolled upon the gravel path before him,and Innocent Smith came round the corner like a railway train.He was looking twice his proper size--a giant clad in green,the big revolver still smoking in his hand, his face sanguineand in shadow, his eyes blazing like all stars, and his yellowhair standing out all ways like Struwelpeter's.

  Though this startling scene hung but an instant in stillness,Inglewood had time to feel once more what he had felt whenhe saw the other lovers standing on the lawn--the sensationof a certain cut and coloured clearness that belongs ratherto the things of art than to the things of experience.The broken flowerpot with its red-hot geraniums, the greenbulk of Smith and the black bulk of Warner, the blue-spikedrailings behind, clutched by the stranger's yellow vultureclaws and peered over by his long vulture neck, the silk haton the gravel, and the little cloudlet of smoke floatingacross the garden as innocently as the puff of a cigarette--all these seemed unnaturally distinct and definite.They existed, like symbols, in an ecstasy of separation.Indeed, every object grew more and more particularand precious because the whole picture was breaking up.Things look so bright just before they burst.

  Long before his fancies had begun, let alone ceased,Arthur had stepped across and taken one of Smith's arms.Simultaneously the little stranger had run up the steps and takenthe other. Smith went into peals of laughter, and surrenderedhis pistol with perfect willingness. Moon raised the doctorto his feet, and then went and leaned sullenly on the garden gate.The girls were quiet and vigilant, as good women mostlyare in instants of catastrophe, but their faces showed that,somehow or other, a light had been dashed out of the sky.The doctor himself, when he had risen, collected his hat and wits,and dusting himself down with an air of great disgust, turned tothem in brief apology. He was very white with his recent panic,but he spoke with perfect self-control.

  "You will excuse us, ladies," he said; "my friend andMr. Inglewood are both scientists in their several ways.I think we had better all take Mr. Smith indoors, and communicatewith you later."

  And under the guard of the three natural philosophers the disarmed Smithwas led tactfully into the house, still roaring with laughter.

  From time to time during the next twenty minutes his distantboom of mirth could again be heard through the half-open window;but there came no echo of the quiet voices of the physicians.The girls walked about the garden together, rubbing up each other'sspirits as best they might; Michael Moon still hung heavily againstthe gate. Somewhere about the expiration of that time Dr. Warnercame out of the house with a face less pale but even more stern,and the little man with the fish-bone face advanced gravely in his rear.And if the face of Warner in the sunlight was that of a hanging judge,the face of the little man behind was more like a death's head.

  "Miss Hunt," said Dr. Herbert Warner, "I only wish to offer you my warmthanks and admiration. By your prompt courage and wisdom in sendingfor us by wire this evening, you have enabled us to capture and put outof mischief one of the most cruel and terrible of the enemies of humanity--a criminal whose plausibility and pitilessness have never been beforecombined in flesh."

  Rosamund looked across at him with a white, blank face and blinking eyes."What do you mean?" she asked. "You can't mean Mr. Smith?"

  "He has gone by many other names," said the doctor gravely,"and not one he did not leave to be cursed behind him. That man,Miss Hunt, has left a track of blood and tears across the world.Whether he is mad as well as wicked, we are trying, in the interestsof science, to discover. In any case, we shall have to take himto a magistrate first, even if only on the road to a lunatic asylum.But the lunatic asylum in which he is confined will have to besealed with wall within wall, and ringed with guns like a fortress,or he will break out again to bring forth carnage and darknesson the earth."

  Rosamund looked at the two doctors, her face growing paler and paler.Then her eyes strayed to Michael, who was leaning on the gate;but he continued to lean on it without moving, with his face turnedaway towards the darkening road.