The two o’clock snorted out of Charing Cross, but no healths were drunk, this time, to Viscount Lascelles. A desiccating sobriety made arid the corner of the third-class carriage in which Gumbril was sitting. His thoughts were an interminable desert of sand, with not a palm in sight, not so much as a comforting mirage. Once again he fumbled in his breast-pocket, brought out and unfolded the flimsy paper. Once more he read. How many times had he read it before?
‘Your telegram made me very unhappy. Not merely because of the accident—though it made me shudder to think that something terrible might have happened, poor darling—but also, selfishly, my own disappointment. I had looked forward so much. I had made a picture of it all so clearly. I should have met you at the station with the horse and trap from the Chequers, and we’d have driven back to the cottage—and you’d have loved the cottage. We’d have had tea and I’d have made you eat an egg with it after your journey. Then we’d have gone for a walk; through the most heavenly wood I found yesterday to a place where there’s a wonderful view—miles and miles of it. And we’d have wandered on and on, and sat down under the trees, and the sun would have set, and the twilight would slowly have come to an end, and we’d have gone home again and found the lamps lighted and supper ready—not very grand, I’m afraid, for Mrs Vole isn’t the best of cooks. And then the piano; for there is a piano, and I had the tuner come specially from Hastings yesterday, so that it isn’t so bad now. And you’d have played; and perhaps I would have made my noises on it. And at last it would have been time for candles and bed. When I heard you were coming, Theodore, I told Mrs Vole a lie about you. I said you were my husband, because she’s fearfully respectable, of course; and it would dreadfully disturb her if you weren’t. But I told myself that, too. I meant that you should be. You see, I tell you everything. I’m not ashamed. I wanted to give you everything I could, and then we should always be together, loving one another. And I should have been your slave, I should have been your property and lived inside your life. But you would always have had to love me.
‘And then, just as I was getting ready to go and call at the Chequers for the horse and trap, your telegram came. I saw the word “accident”, and I imagined you all bleeding and smashed—oh, dreadful, dreadful. But then, when you seemed to make rather a joke of it—why did you say “a little indisposed”? that seemed, somehow, so stupid, I thought—and said you were coming to-morrow, it wasn’t that which upset me; it was the dreadful, dreadful disappointment. It was like a stab, that disappointment; it hurt so terribly, so unreasonably much. It made me cry and cry, so that I thought I should never be able to stop. And then, gradually, I began to see that the pain of the disappointment wasn’t unreasonably great. It wasn’t merely a question of your coming being put off for a day; it was a question of its being put off for ever, of my never seeing you again. I saw that that accident had been something really arranged by Providence. It was meant to warn me and show me what I ought to do. I saw how hopelessly impracticable the happiness I had been imagining really was. I saw that you didn’t, you couldn’t love me in anything like the same way as I loved you. I was only a curious adventure, a new experience, a means to some other end. Mind, I’m not blaming you in the least. I’m only telling you what is true, what I gradually came to realize as true. If you’d come—what then? I’d have given you everything, my body, my mind, my soul, my whole life. I’d have twisted myself into the threads of your life. And then, when in due course you wanted to make an end to this curious little adventure, you would have had to cut the tangle and it would have killed me; it would also have hurt you. At least I think it would. In the end, I thanked God for the accident which had prevented you coming. In this way, Providence lets us off very lightly—you with a bruise or two (for I do hope it really is nothing, my precious darling), and me with a bruise inside, round the heart. But both will get well quite soon. And all our lives, we shall have an afternoon under the trees, an evening of music and in the darkness, a night, an eternity of happiness, to look back on. I shall go away from Robertsbridge at once. Good-bye, Theodore. What a long letter! The last you’ll ever get from me. The last—what a dreadful hurting word that is. I shall take it to post at once, for fear, if I leave it, I may be weak enough to change my mind and let you come to-morrow. I shall take it at once, then I shall come home again and pack up and tell some new fib to Mrs Vole. And after that, perhaps I shall allow myself to cry again. Good-bye.’
Aridly, the desert of sand stretched out with not a tree and not even a mirage, except perhaps the vague and desperate hope that he might get there before she started, that she might conceivably have changed her mind. Ah, if only he’d read the letter a little earlier! But he hadn’t woken up before eleven, he hadn’t been down before half-past. Sitting at the breakfast-table, he had read the letter through.
The eggs and bacon had grown still colder, if that was possible, than they were. He had read it through, he had rushed to the A.B.C. There was no practicable train before the two o’clock.
If he had taken the seven-twenty-seven he would certainly have got there before she started. Ah, if only he had woken up a little earlier! But then he would have had to go to bed a little earlier. And in order to go to bed earlier, he would have had to abandon Mrs Viveash before she had bored herself to that ultimate point of fatigue at which she did at last feel ready for repose. And to abandon Mrs Viveash—ah, that was really impossible, she wouldn’t allow herself to be left alone. If only he hadn’t gone to the London Library yesterday! A wanton, unnecessary visit it had been. For after all, the journey was short; he didn’t need a book for the train. And the Life of Beckford, for which he had asked, proved, of course, to be out—and he had been utterly incapable of thinking of any other book, among the two or three hundred thousand on the shelves, that he wanted to read. And, in any case, what the devil did he want with a Life of Beckford? Hadn’t he his own life, the life of Gumbril, to attend to? Wasn’t one life enough, without making superfluous visits to the London Library in search of other lives? And then what a stroke of bad luck to have run into Mrs Viveash at that very moment! What an abject weakness to have let himself be bullied into sending that telegram. ‘A little indisposed. ...’ Oh, my God! Gumbril shut his eyes and ground his teeth together; he felt himself blushing with a retrospective shame.
And of course it was quite useless taking the train, like this, to Robertsbridge. She’d be gone, of course. Still, there was always the desperate hope. There was the mirage across the desiccated plains, the mirage one knew to be deceptive and which, on a second glance, proved not even to be a mirage, but merely a few livery spots behind the eyes. Still, it was amply worth doing—as a penance, and to satisfy the conscience and to deceive oneself with an illusion of action. And then the fact that he was to have spent the afternoon with Rosie and had put her off—that too was highly satisfying. And not merely put her off, but—ultimate clownery in the worst of deliriously bad taste—played a joke on her. ‘Impossible come to you, meet me 213 Sloane Street, second floor, a little indisposed.’ He wondered how she’d get on with Mr Mercaptan; for it was to his rococo boudoir and Crébillon-souled sofa that he had on the spur of the clownish moment, as he dashed into the post office on the way to the station, sent her.
Aridly, the desiccated waste extended. Had she been right in her letter? Would it really have lasted no more than a little while and ended as she prophesied, with an agonizing cutting of the tangle? Or could it be that she had held out the one hope of happiness? Wasn’t she perhaps the one unique being with whom he might have learned to await in quietness the final coming of that lovely terrible thing, from before the sound of whose secret footsteps more than once and oh! ignobly he had fled? He could not decide, it was impossible to decide until he had seen her again, till he had possessed her, mingled his life with hers. And now she had eluded him; for he knew very well that he would not find her. He sighed and looked out of the window.
The train pulled up at a small suburban station. Suburban, for though London was already some way behind, the little sham half-timbered houses near the station, the newer tile and rough-cast dwellings farther out on the slope of the hill proclaimed with emphasis the presence of the business man, the holder of the season ticket. Gumbril looked at them with a pensive disgust which must have expressed itself on his features; for the gentleman sitting in the corner of the carriage facing his, suddenly leaned forward, tapped him on the knee, and said, ‘I see you agree with me, sir, that there are too many people in the world.’
Gumbril, who up till now had merely been aware that somebody was sitting opposite him, now looked with more attention at the stranger. He was a large, square old gentleman of robust and flourishing appearance, with a face of wrinkled brown parchment and a white moustache that merged, in a handsome curve, with a pair of side whiskers, in a manner which reminded one of the photographs of the Emperor Francis Joseph.
‘I perfectly agree with you, sir,’ Gumbril answered. If he had been wearing his beard, he would have gone on to suggest that loquacious old gentlemen in trains are among the supernumeraries of the planet. As it was, however, he spoke with courtesy, and smiled in his most engaging fashion.
‘When I look at all these revolting houses,’ the old gentleman continued, shaking his fist at the snuggeries of the season-ticket holders, ‘I am filled with indignation. I feel my spleen ready to burst, sir, ready to burst.’
‘I can sympathize with you,’ said Gumbril. ‘The architecture is certainly not very soothing.’
‘It’s not the architecture I mind so much,’ retorted the old gentleman, ‘that’s merely a question of art, and all nonsense so far as I’m concerned. What disgusts me is the people inside the architecture, the number of them, sir. And the way they breed. Like maggots, sir, like maggots. Millions of them, creeping about the face of the country, spreading blight and dirt wherever they go; ruining everything. It’s the people I object to.’
‘Ah well,’ said Gumbril, ‘if you will have sanitary conditions that don’t allow plagues to flourish properly; if you will tell mothers how to bring up their children, instead of allowing nature to kill them off in her natural way; if you will import unlimited supplies of corn and meat: what can you expect? Of course the numbers go up.’
The old gentleman waved all this away. ‘I don’t care what the causes are,’ he said. ‘That’s all one to me. What I do object to, sir, is the effects. Why sir, I am old enough to remember walking through the delicious meadows beyond Swiss Cottage, I remember seeing the cows milked in West Hampstead, sir. And now, what do I see now, when I go there? Hideous red cities pullulating with Jews, sir. Pullulating with prosperous Jews. Am I right in being indignant, sir? Do I do well, like the prophet Jonah, to be angry?’
‘You do, sir,’ said Gumbril, with growing enthusiasm, ‘and the more so since this frightful increase in population is the world’s most formidable danger at the present time. With populations that in Europe alone expand by millions every year, no political foresight is possible. A few years of this mere bestial propagation will suffice to make nonsense of the wisest schemes of to-day—or would suffice,’ he hastened to correct himself, ‘if any wise schemes were being matured at the present.’
‘Very possibly, sir,’ said the old gentleman, ‘but what I object to is seeing good cornland being turned into streets, and meadows, where cows used to graze, covered with houses full of useless and disgusting human beings. I resent seeing the country parcelled out into back gardens.’
‘And is there any prospect,’ Gumbril earnestly asked, ‘of our ever being able in the future to support the whole of our population? Will unemployment ever decrease?’
‘I don’t know, sir,’ the old gentleman replied. ‘But the families of the unemployed will certainly increase.’
‘You are right, sir,’ said Gumbril, ‘they will. And the families of the employed and the prosperous will as steadily grow smaller. It is regrettable that birth control should have begun at the wrong end of the scale. There seems to be a level of poverty below which it doesn’t seem worth while practising birth control, and a level of education below which birth control is regarded as morally wrong. Strange, how long it has taken for the ideas of love and procreation to dissociate themselves in the human mind. In the majority of minds they are still, even in this so-called twentieth century, indivisibly wedded. Still,’ he continued hopefully, ‘progress is being made, progress is certainly, though slowly, being made. It is gratifying to find, for example, in the latest statistics, that the clergy, as a class, are now remarkable for the smallness of their families. The old jest is out of date. Is it too much to hope that these gentlemen may bring themselves in time to preach what they already practise?’
‘It is too much to hope, sir,’ the old gentleman answered with decision.
‘You are probably right,’ said Gumbril.
‘If we were all to preach all the things we all practise,’ continued the old gentleman, ‘the world would soon be a pretty sort of bear-garden, I can tell you. Yes, and a monkey-house. And a wart-hoggery. As it is, sir, it is merely a place where there are too many human beings. Vice must pay its tribute to virtue, or else we are all undone.’
‘I admire your wisdom, sir,’ said Gumbril.
The old gentleman was delighted. ‘And I have been much impressed by your philosophical reflections,’ he said. ‘Tell me, are you at all interested in old brandy?’
‘Well, not philosophically,’ said Gumbril. ‘As a mere empiric only.’
‘As a mere empiric!’ The old gentleman laughed. ‘Then let me beg you to accept a case. I have a cellar which I shall never drink dry, alas! before I die. My only wish is that what remains of it shall be distributed among those who can really appreciate it. In you, sir, I see a fitting recipient of a case of brandy.’
‘You overwhelm me,’ said Gumbril. ‘You are too kind, and, I may add, too flattering.’ The train, which was a mortally slow one, came grinding for what seemed the hundredth time to a halt.
‘Not at all,’ said the old gentleman. ‘If you have a card, sir.’
Gumbril searched his pockets. ‘I have come without one.’
‘Never mind,’ said the old gentleman. ‘I think I have a pencil. If you will give me your name and address, I will have the case sent to you at once.’
Leisurely, he hunted for the pencil, he took out a notebook. The train gave a jerk forward.
‘Now, sir,’ he said.
Gumbril began dictating. ‘Theodore,’ he said slowly.
‘The—o—dore,’ the old gentleman repeated, syllable by syllable.
The train crept on, with slowly gathering momentum, through the station. Happening to look out of the window at this moment, Gumbril saw the name of the place painted across a lamp. It was Robertsbridge. He made a loud, inarticulate noise, flung open the door of the compartment, stepped out on to the footboard and jumped. He landed safely on the platform, staggered forward a few paces with his acquired momentum and came at last to a halt. A hand reached out and closed the swinging door of his compartment and, an instant afterwards, through the window, a face that, at a distance, looked more than ever like the face of the Emperor Francis Joseph, looked back towards the receding platform. The mouth opened and shut; no words were audible. Standing on the platform, Gumbril made a complicated pantomime, signifying his regret by shrugging his shoulders and placing his hand on his heart; urging in excuse for his abrupt departure the necessity under which he laboured of alighting at this particular station—which he did by pointing at the name on the boards and lamps, then at himself, then at the village across the fields. The old gentleman waved his hand, which still held, Gumbril noticed, the notebook in which he had been writing. Then the train carried him out of sight. There went the only case of old brandy he was ever likely to possess, thought Gumbril sadly, as he turned away. Suddenly, he remembered Emily again; for a long time he had quite forgotten her.
The cottage, when at last he found it, proved to be fully as picturesque as he had imagined. And Emily, of course, had gone, leaving, as might have been expected, no address. He took the evening train back to London. The aridity was now complete, and even the hope of a mirage had vanished. There was no old gentleman to make a diversion. The size of clergymen’s families, even the fate of Europe, seemed unimportant now, were indeed perfectly indifferent to him.