blaise olifant sat over his work in the room which once, for want of a better name, the late mr. gale called his study; but it was a room transformed to studious use. the stuffed trout and the large scale-map of the neighbourhood and the country auctioneer’s carelessly bestowed oddments had been replaced by cases of geological specimens and bookshelves filled with a specialist’s library. the knee-hole writing-desk, with its cigarette-burned edge, had joined the rest of the old lares and penates in honourable storage, and a long refectory-table, drawn across the window overlooking the garden, and piled with papers, microscopes, and other apparatus, reigned in its stead. olifant loved the room’s pleasant austerity. it symbolized himself, his aims and his life’s limitations. a fire burned in the grate, for it was a cold, raw morning, and, outside, miserable rain defaced the april day.
he smoked a pipe as he corrected proofs, so absorbed in the minute and half-mechanical task that he did not hear the door open and the quiet entrance of a maid.
“mr. triona, sir.”
the words cut through the silence so that he started and swung round in his chair.
“mr. triona? where?”
“in the dining-room.”
“show him in here.”
the maid retired. olifant rose and stood before the fire with a puzzled expression on his face. triona in medlow at ten o’clock in the morning? something serious must have brought a man, unannounced, from london to shropshire. his thoughts flew to olivia.
a moment afterwards the dishevelled spectre of triona burst into the room and closed the door behind him. his coat was wet with rain, his boots and trouser hems muddy. his eyes stared out of a drawn, unshaven face.
“thank god i’ve found you. during the journey i had a sickening dread lest you might be away.”
“but how did you manage to get here at this hour?” asked olifant, for medlow is far from london and trains are few. “you must have arrived last night. why the deuce didn’t you come to me?”
“i got to worcester by the last train and put up for the night and came on first thing this morning,” replied triona impatiently.
“and you’ve walked from the station. you’re wet through. let me get you a jacket.”
olifant moved to the bell, but triona arrested him.
“no—no. i’m taking the next train back to london. don’t talk of jackets and foolery. i’ve left olivia.”
olifant made a stride, almost menacing, towards him, the instinctive gesture of his one arm curiously contrasting with the stillness of the pinned sleeve of the other.
“what?”
“what i say,” cried triona. “i’ve left olivia. i’ve left her for ever. i’m cutting myself out of her life.”
“you’re mad. olivia——”
triona put up a checking hand. “oh, no, not olivia.” he laughed bitterly at the indignant advocacy in olifant’s tone. “olivia’s there—where she always has been—among the stars. it’s i that have fallen. good god! like lucifer. it’s i that crawl.” he caught an accusing question in the other’s hardening eyes. “it isn’t what you might naturally think. there’s not the ghost of another woman. there never has been—never shall be. it’s my only clean record. and i love her—my god! my soul’s in hell, aching and burning and shrieking for her. i shall live in hell for the rest of my life.”
olifant turned, and wheeling round his writing-chair sat down and pointed to an arm-chair by the fire.
“sit down and tell me quietly what is the matter.”
but triona waved aside the invitation and remained standing. “the matter is that i’m an impostor and a liar, and olivia has found it out. listen. don’t ask questions until i’ve done. i’m here for olivia’s sake. you’re the only creature in the world that can understand—the only one that can help her through. and she couldn’t tell you. her pride wouldn’t let her. and if it did, the ordeal for her! you’ll be able to go to her now and say, ‘i know everything.’?”
“up to now, my dear fellow,” said olifant, “you’ve been talking in riddles. but before you begin, let me remind you that there are two sides to every story. what i mean is—get it into your head that i realize i’m listening to your side.”
“but there aren’t two sides,” cried triona. “you don’t suppose i’ve come down here to defend myself! if you see when i’ve done that i’ve had some excuse, that there is a grain of saving grace lying somewhere hidden—all well and good. but i’m not here to plead a case. haven’t i cleared the ground by telling you i’m a liar and an impostor?”
olifant again looked searchingly at the pale and haggard-eyed young man, his brown hair unkempt and falling across his broad forehead, his lips twitching nervously; and the elder man’s glance turned to one of pitying kindness. he rose, laid his hand on the lapel of the wet coat.
“you’ll take this off, at any rate. there—we’ll hang it over the fender-seat to dry. sit beside it and dry your legs. it’s no good catching your death of cold.”
triona submitted to the friendly authority and sat down in his shirt sleeves before the blaze. olifant, aware of the sedative value of anticlimax, smiled and offered refreshments. tea—coffee—a drop of something to keep out the cold. triona suddenly glanced at him.
“i’ll never touch alcohol again as long as i live.”
a cigarette, then? olifant handed the box, held a match. triona smoked. olifant re-lit his pipe and leaned back in his chair.
“now let me have the plain, unvarnished tale.”
they smoked many cigarettes and many pipes during the telling of the amazing story. as his life had unfolded itself in the grimness of the little newcastle kitchen, so he recounted it to olifant. in his passionate final grip on truth, which for the last few months of his awakening had proved so elusive, he tried to lay bare the vain secret of every folly and the root of every lie. the tangled web of the hackneyed aphorism he unwove, tracking every main filament to its centre, every cross-thread from the beginning to end of its vicious circle.
plain unvarnished tale it was not in the man’s nature to give. even in his agony of avowal he must be dramatic, must seize on the picturesque. now he sat on the narrow leather-covered fender-seat, hunched up, his eyes ablaze, narrating the common actualities of his life; and now he strode about the room, with great gestures of his pink-shirted arms, picturing vividly the conflicting emotions of his soul. first he sketched—so it seemed to the temperamentally remote olifant—in broad outlines of flame, his true career. then in strokes, like red-hot wire, he filled in the startling details. the grizzled head and sharp-cut features of the naked body of the dead man krilov in the ditch—the cold grey waste around—the finding of the odds and ends, the glint of the pocket-compass behind a few spikes of grass, the false teeth, the little black book, the thing of sortilege, of necromantic influence . . . the spell of the book in the night watches in the north sea, its obsession; his pixy-led infatuation which made him cast aside the slough of john briggs and sun himself in the summer of the world as the dragonfly, alexis triona. in swift lines, too, of a will-o’-the-wisp’s dance he revealed the course of his love. then, unconsciously, before the concentrated gaze of the other man he dropped a baffling gauze curtain, as on a stage, through which his motives and his actions appeared uncertain and unreal.
olifant had listened in astounded silence. his first instinct was one of indignation. he had been unforgivably deceived by this exterior of friendship under false pretences. the blow dealt to unregenerate man’s innate vanity hurt like a stab. his own clear soul rose in revolt. the fellow’s mendacity, bewildering in its amplitude, would have set hell agape. he shivered at the cold craft of his imposture; besides, he was a ghoul, a stripper of the dead. he lost the man he had loved in a new and incomprehensible monster. but as triona went on he gradually fell under the spell of his passionate remorse, and found himself setting the human against the monstrous and wondering which way the balance would turn. and then he became suddenly aware of the impostor’s real and splendid achievements, and he stood in pitiful amaze at the futility of the unnecessary fraud.
“but why, in god’s name? why?” he cried, staring through the baffling curtain. “a man of genius, you would have held your own without all this.”
“i could have done nothing without the help of that damned little black book. don’t you see how the necromancy of the thing gripped me—how it has got its diabolical revenge? i told you not to ask me questions,” triona burst out fiercely. “you’re trying to make me defend myself.” he swung away, then laughed mirthlessly. “there seems to be a poetic justice in life. this room in which we have spent so many hours—it’s filled from floor to ceiling with my lies. now i come with truth, a sort of disinfectant. perhaps i was driven back just to do it.”
olifant knitted a perplexed brow. such fantastic psychologies were beyond his simple scientific habit of mind. he said:
“you told me you came here on account of olivia.”
“of course.”
“well—i must ask you again the same everlasting ‘why?’ how could you dare to marry her with this lie on your soul?”
“yes. how dared i?” said triona dejectedly.
“but wouldn’t it have been quite simple to tell her the truth? you could have afforded to make a clean breast of it. you had proved yourself a remarkable man, apart from—from the triona myth. and she is big enough to have stood it. why, in god’s name, didn’t you trust her?”
triona threw out his hands helplessly. he did not know. again he pleaded the unseen power that had driven him. when he had tried to resist, it was too late.
“and now you think me a fool and a knave.”
“i think you’re a fool,” said olifant.
“but not a scoundrel? i should like to know. you were the first man who really held out the hand of friendship to me. till then people regarded me as an interesting specimen. you took me on my human side. i shall never forget coming to your sister’s house at oxford. it was a new and wonderful atmosphere.”
“if that is so,” said olifant, “why didn’t it compel confidence—something of the real truth? i see you now telling my sister and myself your fairy tale; in the same fervid way as you’ve been telling me the truth this morning.”
triona rose and put on his jacket which now was dry.
“how can i hope to make you understand, when i don’t understand myself? besides,” he flashed, after shrugging himself impatiently into the garment, “haven’t i said i wasn’t seeking condonation or sympathy?”
“you asked me whether i thought you a scoundrel,” said olifant quietly.
“well, do you? say i am, and have done with it.”
“if i did, i don’t see what good it would do,” replied olifant, a vague comprehension of this imaginative alien soul dawning on his mind. “you’re out for penance in the same crazy way you’ve been out for everything else. so you hand me the scourge and tell me to lay on. but i won’t. also—if i committed myself by calling you an unmitigated blackguard, i couldn’t give you the advice that it’s in my heart to give you.”
“and what’s that?”
“to go back to olivia and do your penance with her by telling and living the truth. magna est veritas et pr?valebit. especially with a woman who loves you.”
triona turned to the table by the window and stared out into the rain-swept garden, and the vision of a girl horror-stricken, frozen, dead, rose before his eyes. presently he said, his back to the room:
“you mean kindly and generously. but it’s impossible to go back. the man, alexis triona, whom she loved, has melted away. he never had real existence. in his place she sees a stranger, one john briggs, whom she loathes like hell—i’ve seen it in her eyes. she feels as if she had been contaminated by contact with some unclean beast.”
olifant sprang from his chair and, catching him by the shoulder, swung him round.
“you infernal fool, she doesn’t!”
“i know better,” said triona.
“i’m beginning to think i know her better,” olifant retorted.
“well—that is possible,” said triona. “you’re of her caste. i’m not. i’ve pretended to be, and that’s how i’ve come to grief. you’re a good fellow, olifant, straight, just like her; and neither of you can understand the man who runs crooked.”
“crooked be damned!” exclaimed olifant.
but all his condemnation of self-accusing epithets could not dissuade the fate-driven young man from his purpose. triona repeated the original intention of his visit: to put olifant in complete possession of facts which olivia’s pride might not allow her to reveal, and to charge him, thus equipped, with olivia’s immediate welfare. at last he burst out again:
“man alive! don’t torture me. all the devils in hell are doing it, and they’re enough for any man. have some imagination! think what it would mean to her to have me crawling about in her path for ever and ever. when love is dead it’s dead. there’s no resurrection. she loved alexis triona. won’t you ever understand? he’s dead. the love’s dead. if i stayed with her, i should be a kind of living corpse to which she’s tied. so i’m going away—out of her life altogether.”
“and where are you going?”
“just out into the spaciousness of the wide world,” replied triona with a gesture. he looked suddenly at his wrist watch. “good lord!” he cried. “i’ve only just time to catch my train. good-bye.”
“wait a minute,” said olifant. “do you think it fair on a woman? while you disappear for ever into spaciousness she’ll remain none the less married—tied to you for the rest of her life.”
“oh, don’t let her worry about that!” cried triona. “i’ll soon be dead.”
he sped to the door. olifant clutched at him and for a while held fast.
“never mind trains. you’ll stay here to-day. i can’t let you go—in this hysterical state.”
but triona wrenched himself free. a one-armed man is at a physical disadvantage in a struggle with a wiry two-armed opponent. olifant was pushed staggering back, and, before he could recover himself, triona had flashed from the room, and a moment later the clang of the front door told him he had left the house.
olifant, after a moment’s reflection, went to the telephone and gave a london number. then he drew his chair nearer the fire and re-lit his pipe and waited for the call to come through. work was impossible. he was in no mood to enter into the gaiety of printers in their dance through the dead languages with which his biological pages were strewn. his heart was exceeding heavy. he stared into the fire and thought of what might have been, had he not been a fool. at any rate, she would have been spared misery such as this. he had loved her from the moment she had opened that untouched room upstairs, and the delicate spirit of one that was dead had touched them with invisible hands. and he had been a fool. just a dry stick of a tongue-tied, heart-hobbled, british fool. it had only been when another, romantic and unreticent, had carried her off that he realized the grotesqueness of his unutterable pain. well, she was married, and married to the man to whom he had given his rare affection; and, folly of follies, all his intimacy with her had grown since her marriage. she was inexpressibly dear to him. her hurt was his hurt. her happiness all that mattered. and she loved her madman of a husband. deep down in her heart she loved him still, in spite of shock and disillusion. of that he was certain. he himself forgave him for his wild, boyish lovableness. olivia abandoned—it was unthinkable!
after an eternity the telephone bell rang. he leaped up. eventually came the faint, clear notes of a voice which was olivia’s. they established identities.
“alexis has been here. has told me everything. he has left here by the midday train. of course, i don’t know whether you want to see him; but if you do his train gets into paddington at six-fifteen.”
and the voice came again:
“thanks. i’ll meet him there.”
and there was silence.
olivia and myra met the train at paddington. but they sought in vain for alexis triona. he had not arrived in london.
