Dwala: A Romance by George Calderon - HTML preview

XXXVII

WHEN the sun cast his cold inquiring eye on England in the morning, and the innocent fields awoke in their grey shifts of dew, the trains that shot North, West, and South from London over the landscape, like worldly thoughts in a house of prayer, bore the tidings of Dwala’s disgrace. Trainloads of newspapers, the white wax sweated forth by the grimy bees in the sleepless hives of the big city, rattled past answering loads of milk and meat, gifts of the country, making the daily exchange. Squires and parsons were too shocked to eat their breakfast; their wives raced against the doctor to carry the news from house to house; the schoolmasters told the children; the children carried the tidings with the handkerchief of dinner to their fathers under the trees in the field. There was no room for hesitation; verdict and judgment were pronounced already. The country had been made the victim of a hideous hoax. Dwala and all his works must perish.

And yet, when the Biologist blurted his hint of a tail, a roomful of people turned and rent him! It is the way of the world; it is part of good manners. A partial revelation, a timid hint, an indiscretion, is smothered ignominiously; when the whole blatant truth brays out, men welcome it with ferocious joy. So, in the ancient days, tactless young angels in Heaven were sent to Coventry who alluded to Lucifer’s tail, or noticed anything odd about his feet; but when his tumbling-day came at last, the Seraphim were in the very front of the crowd which stood pelting meteors and yelling Caudate! ungulate! down from the clouds.

Men shut up their shops in London and gathered about taverns and corner-posts to unravel the sense of the bewildering news. Public Opinion, deserting the grass of the Parks, slouched into the streets to learn what it must do.

When Joey ran down into the street to fetch the morning milk, the news stared out at her from the boards in pink and black: ‘Dwala, the Missing Link!’

‘Golly!’ said her pals; ‘what’s your bloke been up to now?’

Joey was a heroine every day—the greatness of her acquaintance had a savour in Seven Dials which it had lacked in Park Lane; but this morning she soared altogether out of sight. What were milk-jugs and breakfast to such a thing as this? The milk penny went in a couple of newspapers, and she darted off with them across country for Dwala’s house. Who knew but she might be the first to bring him the great news?

Everybody was in the streets, as happens when public events are astir; and every street sent forth a thin stream that trickled in the same direction, till it formed a full river in Park Lane. A posse of policemen guarded the spiked gates.

‘Move on! Move on!’ said the official voice.

‘None of your nonsense, constable; I’m a friend of the Missin’ Link.’

‘What! Miss Joey!’ beamed a familiar face from under a helmet. ‘Let her in, Bill; she won’t ’urt ’im.’

The steps were littered with telegrams that lay like autumn leaves unswept; and an anxious footman, muttering to himself, was strapping a bag in the entry.

‘Is the Missin’ Link at home, young man?’

‘The brutes! To leave me behind, all alone!’

It was the last of the servants, deserted like an unwilling Casa Bianca in the general flight, while packing his things in his cubicle. A moment later he had gone too, without even looking at her, and she stood alone in the empty, echoing hall. She could hear Hartopp cursing and thumping with his wooden leg on the floor above. Then a pistol-shot rang out somewhere in the house, and she was frightened. While she stood hesitating which way to run a door swung to, and Lady Wyse walked across the hall, with a basin steaming in her hands. She went in at another door, and Joey followed her, clutching her newspapers.

Dwala sat up in bed, propped against pillows, with ghastly, hollow eyes; and on the chair beside him was Mr. Cato, pale and dishevelled, fast asleep. A cold wave of disappointment surged over Joey. Was this what Missing Links looked like? But he smiled at her, and the old feeling of fellowship came back.

‘Have you heard the news?’ said Joey.

Dwala nodded. ‘What do they say?’

Joey read him column on column of frantic outcry, at all of which he smiled gently.

‘This is our joke,’ he said, at last, to Lady Wyse.

‘It’s not our best.’

Then there came a tap at the door, and a gentle voice saying:

‘May I come in?’

Lady Lillico had been awoken by a dream with the sound of a shot in it. Nine o’clock! Why, where was Harper? She rang, and rang in vain. Then she looked out of window, and smiled and nodded at the crowd. How sweet of them to be so anxious about the poor dear Prince! And still no Harper. Never mind! One must expect to rough it in a house of sickness. She knotted her hair and slipped on her dressing-gown; a first visit in déshabillé lends a motherly grace to a nurse’s part.

She tripped lightly down the silent stairs to Dwala’s room.

‘May I come in?’

She tip-toed up to the bed with a ceremonious face. Mr. Cato frowned; Lady Wyse looked at her with cold curiosity.

‘Have you heard the news?’ said Joey, rustling a newspaper.

‘Evidently not,’ said Lady Wyse.

‘It’s all come out,’ said Mr. Cato, sepulchrally.

‘What’s come out?’ said his sister, scared. ‘I’ve heard nothing.’

Joey thrust the paper at her with an indicating finger.

She stared for a long time at the words without understanding; then fell into a chair and laughed hysterically.

‘What do you think of it now they’ve caught it?’ whispered Dwala, turning white eyes towards her.

‘Well, really, you ridiculous creature!’ she exclaimed, flapping at him with a little lace handkerchief, half coquettishly, half as if keeping something off. ‘It’s so out of the common.... The Prime Minister!... One doesn’t know what to say!’

‘He’s dying,’ said Mr. Cato.

‘Wyndham! How can you!’

‘Lady Wyse must go and get some sleep now; you will take her place.’

‘Don’t be idiotic! I should be no use. Oh dear, oh dear! Where can Harper be?’

‘Sit down, Louisa!’ said Mr. Cato sternly, barring her way. ‘Lady Wyse has been up all night.’

‘Don’t be so cruel.... Let me go! let me go!’ she screamed in an access of sudden fear, wrenched herself free from him, and ran towards the door.

Then abruptly her horror leaped up and overwhelmed her; the instinct of flying from the incomprehensible—the instinct of the horse which shies at a piece of moving paper—was swallowed up in the nightmare of realising that the impossible had happened, was in this very room with her. This man she had come to nurse, this man with whom she had talked and shaken hands, was suddenly not a man, but something unknown and monstrous, of another world. Her faculties failed, as at sight of a ghost, not in fear of injury, but in the mere awfulness of the alien power. She staggered out at the door crying ‘Save me! save me!’ threw her hands forward in her first natural gesture since childhood, and fell swooning in the hall. When she came back to consciousness, after long journeying in nightmare worlds, she heard angry voices speaking near her.

‘Let me out, d—— you!’ said Hartopp—that dreadful Mr. Hartopp—‘they’re throwing stones at my windows, I tell you. They’ll smash my china! Let me get at the brutes!’

‘This door ain’t goin’ to be opened till the Prince is re-moved.’

It was the American who answered him. He stood with his hat on, leaning against the barred and bolted hall-door, his arms folded and a pistol drooping from either hand.

‘D—— the ——!’ said Hartopp. ‘Why don’t you chuck him out and have done with it? It’s all his fault.’

‘Thank God you’re back!’ said Lady Wyse’s voice right over Lady Lillico’s head. ‘Have you arranged it?’

‘The Boss is agreeable,’ said the American. ‘The “Phineas” will be at Blackwall at twelve o’clock, steam up. One of his vans is waitin’ down back in Butlin Street now, and we must shift the Prince at once, before any onpleasantness begins. There was no other way; the Prince will hev to go as an anamal.’

A stone came jingling through the window beside them, and others followed in showers.

‘B—— brutes!’ said the blind man.

‘Where’s Huxtable?’ said Lady Wyse.

‘Huxtable’s gone.’

‘Skunk!’ said Joey.

‘Not quite a skunk,’ said the American; ‘“skunk” is goin’ too fur.’

There was a roar and a rush outside, battle cries, shrieks of despairing whistles, and a moment later a heavy battering at the mahogany of the front door.

Lady Lillico, fully conscious at last, jumped up with piercing yells. She ran this way and that, bewildered.

‘We must get the Prince away quickly,’ said Lady Wyse, going towards his room.

‘Oh, let me out, let me out somewhere!’ cried Lady Lillico. Joey ran past with her tongue thrust mockingly forth, like a heraldic lion gardant.

‘Here, give me your pistols,’ said the blind man; ‘I’ll give the brutes what for!’

Slowly and heavily they carried Dwala out across the hall, wrapped in his blankets like a gigantic mummy; while Hartopp stood in an expectant joy of ferocity guarding the entrance. Down the kitchen passage they carried him, and out into the high-walled garden—with Lady Lillico flitting like a Banshee before them—through the stable-yard, and into the deserted street, where the van was waiting for them. Public Opinion, so rigorous once in its denunciation of ‘frontal attacks,’ seemed to have forgotten the ‘lessons of the Boer War.’ When the big door was battered down, and the furious crowd broke in, half a dozen of them fell mortally wounded before Hartopp was overpowered. The old Fence died, fighting like a tiger for his property.

What was Dwala thinking of as he lumbered slowly through the length of London in that menagerie van? Was he laughing quietly to himself at the thought that he, the saviour of England, the superhuman mind, was being hustled secretly out of England, for a trivial pride of species, as if he had committed some unspeakable crime? Was he weeping at the nearness of his separation from this handful of faithful friends? Probably not. His mind, withdrawn to the innermost darkness of the caves, was probably busy with the trivial thoughts which beset men at such times. It is only in the last moment that the soul throws off the load of little things, and, soaring like a bird, sees Life and Death spreading in their vastness beneath it. He lay still, with his eyes shut, and his temples hollow with decay. Lady Lillico was fast asleep, under a black cloak which somebody had thrown over her. The rest sat silent in the jolting twilight with their feet in the straw.

‘It’s a lesson for all of us,’ murmured Mr. Cato at last.

‘It’s that,’ said the American; ‘it p’ints a moral sharp enough to hurt.’

As Mr. Cato stood with Joey on the jetty, watching the last moments of departure, the American came to the bulwarks with Lady Wyse, and, leaning over, beckoned him.

‘“Skunk” was goin’ too fur for Huxtable. I’ve just bin tellin’ Lady Wyse; he shot himself whin the noos came. I found him lyin’ in his room.’

‘Was he dead?’ murmured Mr. Cato, awestruck at the fall of an enemy.

The American nodded.

‘Deader’n a smelt.’

‘I wish I were dead too!’ said Mr. Cato bitterly.

The American made a motion of diving with his joined hands. Mr. Cato shook his head.

‘I have my two sisters to look after.’

‘I wish you joy.’

Then the cables were loosed, the screw snorted in the water, the American waved, and followed Lady Wyse into the cabin; the boat slid away from the jetty, and, slowly turning in mid-stream, reared its defiant head towards the sea.

After many days of alert and passive silence, Dwala died on his pallet on the deck. He turned his face sideways down into the pillow, as if to hide the smile that was rising to his lips; then breathed one deep, luxurious sigh, and was ended. They wrapped him in sacking, with an iron reel at his feet; and in the cold, clear morning, when the sun mounted flat and yellow to its daily course and the low mists smoked this way and that along the waves, they slid him without a word off a door and over the bulwarks.

Down, down through the crystal indifference, wavering gently to his appointed place in the rocky bottom of the rapt thicket of weeds; losing the last remnant of individuality as the motion ceased; indistinguishable from a little heap of sand; lying careless and obscure, like some tired animal which has crept to rest in the wild garden of a crumbled castle in an empty world, long since abandoned and forgotten by mankind.

The ‘Phineas’ paused for a moment in mid-ocean, the only living thing of its tribe upon the waters without a purpose straining in its hull. The hesitation lasted only a moment. The boat swung round, took one look at the horizon, then dashed forwards again on the home journey to England and new work.

England had gone back to its occupations. The papers spoke of the return of political sanity; of the rejection of ideas from a tainted source; of the restoration of the system which had been the bulwark of our greatness through so many centuries. The composition of Lord Glendover’s Cabinet attested his sincere intention of putting public affairs on a business-like and efficient footing.

There is no remedy for the errors of Democracy; there is no elasticity of energy to fulfil purposes conceived on a larger scale than its every-day thought. Other systems may be purged by the rising waves of national life; but Democracy is exhaustive.

END