when triona after many dim day-dreams and relapses into nothingness, at last recovered consciousness, he found himself in a narrow sort of cubicle, staring upwards at a mile away ceiling. he was tightly bound, body and legs. he had a vague memory of a super-juggernaut of a thing killing him; therefore he sagely concluded that he was dead and this was the next world. it occurred to him that the next world had been singularly over-rated, being devoid of any interest for an intelligent being. later, when the familiar figure of a nurse popped round the screen, he recognized, with some relief, the old universe. he was alive; but where he was, he had no notion.
only gradually did he learn what had befallen him; that he had laid for weeks unconscious; that he had a broken thigh and crushed ribs; that most of the time he had hovered between life and death; that even now he was a very sick man who must lie quiet and do exactly what nurses and doctors told him. this sufficed for a time, while his brain still worked dully. but soon there came a morning when all the memories surged back. he questioned the nurse:
“when do you think i can start for poland?”
“perhaps in six months,” she replied soothingly.
he groaned. “i want to go there now.”
“what for?”
“to join the polish army.”
she had nursed through the war, and knew that men in his plight were of no further use in armies. gently she told him so. he stared uncomprehensively on an empty world.
“what can i do when i leave here?”
“you must have a long, long rest, and do nothing at all and think of nothing at all.”
he tried to smile at the nurse’s pleasant face. “you’ve done me a bad turn in bringing me back to life,” said he.
when they thought him capable of grappling with his personal affairs, they brought him his bulging pocket-book, and bade him count his money. he laughed. it was quite safe. he handed back the roll of notes into the nurse’s keeping. but the other contents of the case he looked at dismally: the passport, with the foreign visas; the railway tickets; the letters to prague and warsaw. what were the good of them now? he would never go to poland. when he got strong, all the fighting would be over. and when he did get strong, in a few months or a year, he would probably be lame, with odds and ends of organs gone wrong inside him. he tried to read the letters; but they were written in polish—unintelligible now in spite of his strenuous short study of the language. they bore a signature which he could not decipher. but it was certainly not boronowski. his mind soon tired of the puzzle. what was the good of keeping the letters? drearily he tore them in pieces and gave them to the nurse to dispose of, when she brought him a meal.
tired with the effort he slept. he awoke to a sense of something final done, or something important left undone. as his brain cleared, he realized that subconsciously he had been thinking of his duty to boronowski. of course, he must be informed at once of the reason for his defection.
and then dismay overwhelmed him. he had no address to boronowski. the only channels of communication with him, the prague and warsaw letters, he had destroyed. a happy idea struck him. he toyed with it for what seemed interminable hours until the nurse came to his bedside. he called for writing materials, which were smilingly denied him. he was too weak. but the nurse would write a short letter from dictation. he dictated two identical letters, one to the polish legation, one to the polish consulate, asking for the address of mr. paul boronowski, late of 21 hillditch street, st. pancras. by return of post came polite replies from legation and consulate. both disclaimed any knowledge of the identity of mr. paul boronowski. legation and consulate were blandly ignorant of the existence of their confidential agents. then he remembered the baffling signature to the two letters. he laughed somewhat bitterly. his life seemed to be involved in a tangle of false names.
after all, what did it matter? but it did matter, vitally. if ever he had set his soul on a true thing, he had set it on keeping faith with boronowski. and boronowski like the rest of the world would set him down as an impostor. in his desperate physical weakness the tears rolled down his cheeks; and so the nurse found him, with one of the letters clutched in his thin hand.
“my only friend in the world,” said he.
“dead?” asked the nurse.
“no. lost.”
he gave her the letter.
“surely you have at least one more,” she said. “in fact i have written to her to tell her of your recovery.”
“her?” he looked at the nurse out of ghastly eyes.
“miss myra stebbings.”
“oh, my god!” said he, and fainted.
whereat the nurse, anxious to bring him comforting tidings was exceedingly troubled. the shock put him back for two or three days. he grew light-headed, and raved about a woman called olivia, and about all sorts of strange and incomprehensible things. when he regained his senses it was an awakening to a life of even more terrifying consternation than before. myra, he learned, had called daily at the hospital—to be denied access to him till he should be in a fit state to receive her. the nurse told him of her first visit the morning after the accident and of the newspaper paragraph which she had chanced to read. but if myra knew, surely olivia knew. and olivia, knowing him to have been for weeks at death’s door, had treated him, as though he had already passed through that door to the other side. horror gripped him. he questioned the nurse. this miss stebbings, had she left no message? no, she was a woman of few words. she had said, in an unemotional way: “i’ll come in again to-morrow.”
“for god’s sake don’t let her see me,” he cried.
but after a while he countermanded the request. he would learn the worst, and meet steadily the supreme punishment, the tale of olivia’s implacable hatred. there were degrees in a woman’s scorn. much he knew he had justly incurred; but his sick frame shuddered at this maximum of contempt and loathing. ill-conditioned dog he avowed himself; yet to let him die, for aught she knew, like a dog, without sign or word of interest . . . it transcended thought.
“are you sure there has been no other lady? not a letter of enquiry? nothing?”
“you’ll make yourself bad again, if you worry like that,” said the nurse.
“i wish to god i could,” said he; “and that would be the end of it all.”
in a large ward of a london hospital, nurses have not much time to devote to the sick fancies of patients. more than enough for them were their physical needs. the crumb of kindly commonplace was all that the nurse could give to the man’s hungering soul. he passed the day, staring up at the mile-high ceiling, incurious as to what vista of misery lay beyond the still remaining american-cloth covered screen.
from the shaft of fierce sunshine on the wall to his right, he gathered that spring had passed into early summer. the outside world was a-riot in the new life of wild flowers and trees and birds and human hopes and loves. outside that prison of his—a whitewashed wall, a screen, a window behind his head reaching sky-high—spread this world with whose pulsations his heart had ever throbbed in unison. god! how he had loved it! every leaf, every crested wave, every patch of sand, every stretch of heat, every rusty horse grazing on a common, every child before a cottage door, every vibrating sound or sight of great cities, every waste in regions of grand desolation, every man with sinews or with purpose in his eyes, every woman parading the mystery of her sex, from the tow-haired, dirt-encrusted goose-girl of a russian village to the wonder of ever inscrutable wonders that was olivia.
in all his dreams he inevitably came back to olivia. indeed she was the centripetal force of his longings. all that earth held of the rustle of leaves and the murmur of waters, the magic of dawn and the roar of town multitudes and the laughter of green forests and the silence of frozen steppes, were incorporated in the woman of his adoration. through her spoke the voices of the infinite universe. and all that was visible of it, the patch of sunlight on the whitewashed wall, said:
“she lives and i, a reflected glory of her, live too; but even if you go hence i shall only appear mockingly before you, on prison walls, until you are dead. and you will never find me on the blue seas or the joyous roads or the stone-bounded, clattering haunts of mankind, other than a meaningless mirage, because the inspired meaning of it all which is olivia, has passed from you for evermore.”
“damn you,” said he, and turned away his head, for he could not turn his plaster of paris encased body, and shut out the white line from his burning eyes.
the next morning myra came. he had been prepared for her visit. she sat on the cane-bottomed chair by his bedside. as soon as the nurse left them together:
“i’m glad you are better, sir,” she said.
“have you brought me any message from mrs. triona?” he asked.
she looked at him steadily. “you don’t suppose mrs. triona knows you are here?”
it was some time before he could appreciate the meaning of her words.
“she thinks i’m in poland?”
“she doesn’t know you are here,” said myra truthfully. “she doesn’t know where you are.”
“or care?”
“or care,” said myra, and her tone was flat like that of a fate.
for a while he was silent, accepting the finality of myra’s words.
“you’ve left her in ignorance of my accident?”
“yes,” said myra. “haven’t you done the same since you’ve recovered your wits?”
her dry logic was unanswerable. yet a man does not expect logic from an elderly waiting-woman. he passed a hand over his eyes and held it there for a long time, while myra sat patient and unemotional. he understood nothing of her motives. for the moment he did not seek to understand them. one fact alone mattered. olivia did not know. she had not, with horrible contempt, left him to die like a dog. by the thought of such a possibility he had wronged her. she might, with every reason, desire never to set eyes on him again—but of active cruelty he should have known her incapable.
presently he withdrew his hand and turned to myra. “my head’s not altogether right yet,” he said half-apologetically.
“i can quite believe it,” said myra.
“why you should bother with me, i don’t understand,” he said.
“neither do i,” she replied in her disconcerting way. “if you had died i shouldn’t have been sorry. for her sake. now you’re not going to die, i’m glad. for yours.”
“thank you,” said he with a note of irony. and then after a pause:
“how is your mistress?”
“she is quite well, sir.”
“and happy?”
“begging your pardon, sir,” said myra stiffly, “but i’ve not come here to be asked questions. i’ve no intention of your using me as a go-between.”
“it never entered my head,” he declared.
“it might,” said myra. “so i give you warning. whatever go-between-ing i do will be to keep you apart from mrs. triona.”
“then why are you worrying about me?” he asked.
“because i’ve found you in affliction and i’m a christian woman.”
neither of them understood the other. he said suddenly with a flash of the old fire:
“will you swear you’ll never tell your mistress where i am?”
a faint light flickered in her pale eyes. “i’ll swear if you like. but haven’t you taken in what i’ve been telling you all the time?”
“so long as we can trust each other—that is all that matters.”
“you can trust me all right,” said myra.
they talked the ground over again for a while longer. then he grew tired with the strain, and the nurse put an end to the interview. but myra came the next day and the day after that, and triona grew to long for her visit. he became aware of a crabbed kindness in her attitude towards him side by side with her jealous love for olivia. she was anxious for his welfare within grimly prescribed limitations. his immediate future concerned her. what did he purpose to do with his invalid-dom after his discharge from the hospital? he himself, at this stage, had no notion. he confided to her the despair of his active life. the motor-lorry had wrecked his hopes of salvation. he told her the whole boronowski story. myra nodded; but faithful to the part she had chosen, she said nothing of boronowski’s letter to major olifant. only by keeping the lives of the ill-fated pair in tightly sealed and non-communicable compartments, could she be true to an ethical code formulated by many definite sorrows and many vague, but none the less poignant, spiritual conflicts.
“it’s funny,” said he, “that you’re the only human being i should know in the world.”
her intuition skipped the gap of demonstration of so extraordinary a pronouncement, and followed his flight into the unknown.
“it might be luck for you,” she said.
he smiled wistfully on her.
“why?”
he hung on her answer which she took some time to give. in the lines on the pallid face, in the dull blue eyes of this sphinx-like woman so correct in her negative attire of black coat and skirt and black hat with just a redeeming touch of white, and on the thin, compressed lips, his sick man’s brain seemed to read his destiny. she hovered over him, impressive, baffling, ever about-to-be oracular. combined with her mystery existed the strange fact that she was his sole link with the world, not only the great humming universe of thought and action, but the inner spiritual world in which olivia reigned. he regarded her with superstitious dread and reverence; conscious all the time of the comedy of so regarding the woman whose duty had been to fold up his trousers and set out his underclothes on the hot rail of the bathroom.
“what are you going to do when you leave?” she asked, and he guessed a purpose behind her question.
“i must hide until i am strong enough to take up active life again.”
“where will you hide?”
he didn’t know. he had not thought—so remote did the date of his discharge appear. it must be some secluded, man-forgotten spot.
“if the worst comes to the worst and you need a place where you’ll be looked after, i’ll give you an address of friends of mine,” said myra. “you’ll, maybe, spend the rest of your life on crutches, and have all sorts of things wrong inside you. i shouldn’t like you to feel i was abandoning you. if you were broken down and needed help, i suppose you wouldn’t write to me, would you?”
“i most certainly shouldn’t,” said triona.
“i thought so,” said myra. “in that case i’d better give you the address.” she scribbled it on the writing pad by his bedside. “there. take it or leave it. it’s the best i can do.”
she left him with an abrupt “good day, sir,” and took the next train back to medlow.
“you haven’t had a long holiday, myra,” olivia remarked when she arrived.
“i didn’t say i was going on a holiday.”
“i hope things were all right.”
“as right as they ever can be,” replied myra.
the weary weeks of convalescence dragged themselves out. myra did not come again; and of course he had no other visitor. he made casual acquaintances in the ward; here and there an ex-soldier with whom he could exchange reminiscences of warfare.
once a discharged sailor in the next bed—the screen had long since been removed—recovering from an operation, spoke to him of mine-sweeping days, and perils of storm and submarine and he grew to regard him as a brother. both regretted the deluging waters of the north sea. the sailor in these times of peace drove a dust cart for the st. pancras borough council. the wages were good—but what a life for a sea-faring man! he would have stuck to his old job were it not that a wave had washed him down on the slithery deck and had brought his knee-cap up against a stanchion and had stiffened it out so that his career on board-ship was over. but those were good times, weren’t they? oh yes. of course they groused. but they only groused when they had time. mostly they hadn’t. dust-collecting was an open-air life, true enough; but there was a difference between the smell of brine and the stench of house refuse. it was in summer that it made him sick. the odours of the fo’c’sle were not those of a hairdresser’s shop—nothing smelt so fine, he declared, as a hairdresser’s shop—they were a bit thick, but a man could go on deck and fill his lungs with good salt air. and the grub! what an appetite! he conjured up gargantuan meals in perilous tempests. nothing of the sort now. everything he ate tasted of sour potato peelings.
“that’s the taste of everything in these post-war days,” said triona, “everything in life—sour potato peelings.”
the dustman reckoned he was right. in those old days of mine-sweeping, a man had no anxieties. he had no responsibilities. he was happy as the day was long. now he was married and already had a couple of kids. life was just one wearisome worry, a continuous accumulation on the debit side of the slate, with few advantages on the credit side to balance. if it wasn’t the wife it was the boy; if it wasn’t the boy, it was the baby; and if it wasn’t them, it was his appendix which had just been removed. whoever heard of a sailor-man aboard ship getting appendicitis? no, all them things, said he, were blessings of peace. besides, how was he going to feed his family when they grew older? and clothes, boots, schooling? and he himself—limited to beer—and such beer! he hadn’t tasted a drop of rum——. was there anything like it? sometimes he saw it and smelt it in his dreams, but he always woke up before he could put his lips to the pannikin. if only one could get something to hold on to in dreams. he never had need to dream of rum in the navy. so much for peace. give him the good old war again.
and when his wife, a thin lipped, scraggy blonde, with a moth-eaten fur stole round her neck (although it was sweltering summer), and a pallid baby in her arms came to visit him, and spoke querulously of domestic affairs, triona gave him his unreserved sympathy.
“and it ain’t,” said the ex-mariner, “as if i couldn’t carry on straight and proper in civil life. i wonder how many of my mates are getting what i’m getting. she ought to be proud of me, she ought. instead of that—you heard what she said?”
triona had heard. she had upbraided him for his ungenteel occupation, considering herself, the daughter (so triona learned) of a small sweet-stuff monger in dover, where they had met during his sea-going days, socially degraded by her marriage with a municipal collector of dust. she had married him, by the by, before his present appointment, while he was drawing out-of-work pay. apparently he was possessed of some low-comedy histrionic talent, and she was convinced that he could make his fortune as a cinema star.
“you married?” he asked.
“not now,” said triona.
“you’ve been through it,” said the misogynist. “women! there never was a woman who knew when she was well off! oh, gawd! give me the old days on the barracouta, where there wasn’t any thought of women. that was my last ship. i had nine months in her. there was barracouta, annie sandys, seahorse. . . .”
he ran through the names of his squadron, forgetful, in the sudden flush of reminiscence, of domestic cares.
“and what did you say you were in?”
“vestris.”
“of course. i remember. torpedoed. but even that was better than this?”
triona agreed, and the eternal talk of the sea went on, until the nostalgia for the wide, free spaces of the world gripped his vitals with the pains of hunger.
“what are you going to do when you come out?” asked the dustman.
“about the same as you,” replied triona. “what’s the good of a man with a game leg?”
the dustman sighed. “you’ve got education,” said he.
at first, aware of accent and manner of expression, the dustman had taken him for an ex-officer. only the discharge-papers of john briggs, able-seaman, convinced him of john briggs lowly estate. still, in the barracouta they had an elderly stoker who had been at cambridge college. such a man might be his neighbour.
“i ran away to sea when i was a boy,” said triona.
so had the dustman. he waxed more confidential. his name was josh bunnings, and he had sailed in every conceivable kind of craft from alaska to singapore. but he had found no time for education. how did his neighbour acquire it? books? he shook his head. he had been cured of books on his first voyage, when the second mate catching him reading a tattered manual on gardening, when he ought to have been washing up in the galley, had kicked and cuffed him round the deck. triona’s mind went back to his boyhood—to an almost identical incident. there was much in common between himself and josh bunnings. they had started on even terms. they had met on even terms in the foul fo’c’sles on the north sea. they were on even terms, now, lying side by side, lamed, their life of free adventure a thing of the past. each dreaded the future; josh bunnings condemned to cart refuse beneath the affected nose of a shrew of a wife for the remainder of his days; he, triona, to deal with such refuse as the world would leave him, but away from the wife who abhorred him and all his works. on the other hand, between him and josh bunnings lay a great gulf. he had made himself a man of wide culture. josh bunnings had remained abysmally ignorant. but josh bunnings had lived his life an honourable man. if he told his story to josh bunnings he would be condemned by him, even as he had been condemned by his sister on the morning of his mother’s funeral. so, when the dustman, with another sigh, harked back to his former idea and said:
“if only i had education.”
“you’re a damned sight better man than i am, without it,” triona replied bitterly.
when the three weeks’ comradeship came to an end, on the discharge of josh bunnings, he found himself lost again in a friendless world. the neighbouring familiar bed was occupied by an ancient man in the throes of some ghastly malady, and around him was stretched the horrible, death-suggesting screen. and behind the screen, a week later, the old man died. it was to relieve the nervous tension of this week that he began a correspondence with josh bunnings. the writing man’s instinct awoke—the mania of self-expression. his letters to the dustman, full of the atmosphere of the ward, vivid with lightning sketches of house-surgeons, sisters, nurses and patients, with here and there excursions into contrasting tempests, storms of battle, and everywhere touched with the magic of his queer genius, would, if sent to his literary agents, have gained him a year’s subsistence.
josh bunnings visited him occasionally, when freed from municipal, and escaped from domestic, obligations. the visits, he explained, were in return for the letters; for being no scholar, he could not reply. then one day he appeared and sat on the chair by triona’s bed, with the air of a man about to bring glad tidings. he was rather a heavy, pallid, clean-shaven man, with a curl of black hair sweeping down to his eyebrows. his small dark eyes gleamed. at once he disemburdened his honest soul. he was a church of england man; always held with church-going—so did his wife; it was the great bond of union between them. so he was on friendly terms with the curate of st. simon’s. and being on friendly terms with the curate, he had shewn him the letters.
“and, would you believe it, mate?” said he. “would you believe it? he wants to put them in print in the parish magazine. in print! fancy!”
he slapped his thigh. triona stared at him for a moment and then laughed out loud for the first time for many weeks.
“what are you laughing at?” asked the astonished bunnings.
“it seems so funny,” said triona.
“that’s what i thought.”
“and a great honour,” said triona recovering.
“of course. only he said he couldn’t print ’em without your permission.”
triona gave permission, stipulating, however, that his name should not be used. his modesty forbade it he explained. josh bunnings went away delighted. in the course of a few posts came a grateful letter from the curate. in mr. briggs’s writing he saw signs of considerable literary talent which he hoped mr. briggs would cultivate. if he could be of help in this way, he put his services at mr. briggs’s disposal. triona again laughed, with grim amusement, at a funny, ironical world.
then, suddenly, the underlying tragedy of this comic interlude smote him breathless. alexis triona was dead and so were his writings, for evermore. but the impulse to write stirred within him so vehemently that even in these idle letters to josh bunnings he had put all his vividness of literary expression. the curate’s dim recognition of the unusual was a sign and a token. whatever he wrote would be stamped with his individuality and if published, even anonymously, would lead to his identification. the arresting quality of his style had been a main factor in his success. this flashing pictorial way of his he could not change. if he strove self-consciously to write sober prose, he would produce dull, uninspired stuff that no man could read; if he lost self-consciousness, automatically he would betray himself. he would re-appear in the olivia-dominated world. every book or article would dance before her eyes like an ignis fatuus, reminding her maddeningly of his existence in her propinquity.
an ignis fatuus. at this point of his reflection he remembered his first talk with her, wherein he had counselled her never to lose faith in her will-o’-the-wisp, but to compel it to be her guiding star. more ironical laughter from the high gods! and yet, why not? he wrestled with the temptation. as he lay, convalescent on his back, his brain clear, the sap of youth working in his veins, the uncontrolled fancies of the imaginative writer wove themselves into shreds of fine romance and tapestries of exquisite scenes. just a little concentration, impossible in the open hospital ward, and all these would blend together into a thing of immortal beauty. he would find a publisher. nothing easier. no name would appear. or else, perhaps, as a handle for convenience sake, he would sign the book “incognito.” it would stir the hearts of men, and they would say: “there is but one man living who could do this and that is alexis triona.” and olivia, reading it, and beholding him in it, would find her heart stirred with the rest, yet far far more deeply than the rest, and would seek him out, obeying his far-off counsel, and believe that, in his essential self and in his infinite love, he was verily her guiding-star.
but when the hour of exaltation had passed and given way to the dreary commonplace, when the nurse came to wash him like a child, or to chatter pleasantly of the outside world, the revue which she had seen on her free afternoon, or the sentimental novel which had beguiled her scanty leisure, he knew that he had been living in a land of dreams. his real achievement olivia knew, and by it she was unmoved. myra had held out to him no chance of hope; only certainty of despair. by no further achievement could olivia be persuaded. she realized her will-o’-the-wisp as what it really was, a miasmatic gas leading her into quagmires. she would bitterly resent his reappearance. it would be another trick, another way of flaunting before her under false pretences. as well write to her now that he was a mangled wreck in university college hospital.
in the course of time he was able to leave his bed and be wheeled about the ward and afterwards to hobble about on a crutch. but the injured leg was just a bit shorter than the other, so that he was condemned to a perpetual limp; and though the ribs were mended, yet their breakage had occasioned internal lesions which would have to be watched for the rest of his life. no more adventures in wide spaces. no more tramps to john o’ groats.
“but i’m a born wanderer,” he cried to the surgeon who made the final pronouncement. “what shall i do when the wander fever is on me?”
“fill yourself up with bromide and stick leeches on your head.”
he laughed into the smiling kindly face, and was silent for a moment.
“i can drive a car, i suppose?” he said after a while.
“safer to drive a horse. you haven’t to crank it up.”
“so i’m going out, a hopeless crock.”
“oh no. there’s no reason why you shouldn’t live, with reasonable care, to ninety. you’re fit for light work. why not office work? an educated chap like you——by the way, you were off to poland, if i remember rightly, when you met with your accident. what’s your trade or profession?”
“before the war, i was a cosmopolitan chauffeur,” said triona.
“and since?”
“the damnedest fool god ever made.”
the surgeon asked him no more questions.
