David and Jonathan

Front matter

It has survived long enough for the copyright to expire and the book to enter the public domain. A public domain book is one that was never subject to copyright or whose legal copyright term has expired. Whether a book is in the public domain may vary country to country. Public domain books are our gateways to the past, representing a wealth of history, culture and knowledge that's often difficult to discover.

Marks, notations and other marginalia present in the original volume will appear in this file - a reminder of this book's long journey from the publisher to a library and finally to you.

Google is proud to partner with libraries to digitize public domain materials and make them widely accessible. Public domain books belong to the public and we are merely their custodians. Nevertheless, this work is expensive, so in order to keep providing this resource, we have taken steps to prevent abuse by commercial parties, including placing technical restrictions on automated querying.

Contents

I. — ^I Receive a Reward for mt Pains

II. — ^The Blood Ritual <» Friendship

III. — ^An Opportunity to See Life

Chapter I I Receive A Reward For My Pains

T IFE or Fate or Destiny — call it any one of the ^^ many names that happen to fit your terminology — ^has a subtle method of concealing its purpose. Speedi and the accompanying veneer of civilization which, age by age, generation by generation, are coated over the real impulsory instincts, have succeeded in varnishing our true selves out of recognition. It is as though we were like one of those so-called old masters to be seen in picture f ramers' windows. * ' Old masters, restored, ' * so you read on the printed card. Beneath that card is a canvas, half of which is covered by an apparently old painting, the head of a woman or man. The other half is that head restored with all the modem paint, all the modem varnish — ^restored, indeed, in the sense that it is made new, but no more like the original painting than a pot of paint is like a work of art.

In such a manner as this have our own real selves been restored and renovated out of recognition. Civilization, with the brushes of speech in its hand, the colours of varied manners and customs on its palette, has succeeded in concealing our real purposes, our true impulsory instincts, so that we now are scarcely conscious of the primary motives which, at the root of all, actuate us in everything we do.

Now and again in face of sudden death, so far as we can remember our sensations afterwards, we realize that the intention uppermost in our minds was the need for food, the preservation of our young, the combative instinct, which, as we regard them from a distance were actually the most important at the moment and indeed those which pulled us through. But quickly enough we forget that insight into the past, we lose all sense of the value of that vision of our primal motives, and carry on our lives in the same blind fashion, imagining that the appearances of facts, rather than the facts themselves, alone contribute to the shaping of our conduct.

I Receive a Reward for my Pains 3

This story— needing no recommendation of mine to guarantee its truth — ^is of bne of those isolated cases in which two men, and a woman as well, were brought face to face with the absolute and eternal impulses of life, and framed their conduct, worked out their destiny as inevitably and unconsciously upon the fundamental laws of existence as though Civilization had but lightly touched them with its brush of speech, as though the pigments of habit and custom had concealed nothing of what they were.

It was all by chance I came across the story. No man who had experienced it himself could have told it to any one else or written it for the benefit of his fellow creatures. A man who had been through it would be too sensitive to see it in print, even under an assumed name, even with every detail so disguised as to make it for ever unrecognizable to any but the parties concerned.

My friend evidently had felt that about it and yet had been so obsessed with its value as regards human interest, that he had been unable to resist making a document of it up to a certain point of the story and locking it away.

I am beginning my tale this way because I feel it needs this f orm^ai announcement or introduction.

The reality of it is in no little degree the measure of its value, and the reality of it, in however slight a degree, is contained in the way in which it came into my hands.

My friend was pending a winter on the Italian Riviera when a slight attack of pneumonia forced upon him the prospect of remaining there well on into the spring. His family was with him, and, being tired of hotel life, he looked about, securing at last a charming villa for a few months on the hills just outside Bordighera.

The place fascinated him. Both he and his wife loved the Italian life, the Italian people, the Italian scenery. He woke up one spring morning with the soft winds blowing in the window across the orange trees in his garden, and felt in himself the eager desire to live there for the rest of his life.

At breakfast he broached the project to his wife and children. There was a general chorus of delight, and no sooner was the meal over than he set about securing a lease for. an indefinite period and arranging for the furniture to be turned out with the least possible delay. His own gods — ^his own sticks, he insisted on having about him.

Within three days, I had received a letter from him telling me of his arrangements and the de-

I Receive a Reward for my Pains 5

dsion he had made to sell the lease of his house in Grosvenor Street.

* 'You can help me, " he said blandly in his letter. "I don't want to come home just for a household removal."

There followed then, on a separate sheet of paper, a complete list of all the things he wanted to keep and those he wanted me to arrange to be sold in a Bond Street auction mart. The lease of his house was in the hands of agents. He did not require me to exert myself over that.

Finally he concluded, as though offering me reward — as indeed it has proved — ^for my trouble: "In the top [drawer of that Queen Anne desk in the billiard-room, you will find a bulky package of papers. They are tied up with red tape. This is not indicative of their character. Do what you like with them."

Such casual reference as this made no arrest upon my mind. It was not until the Queen Anne desk, with other pieces of furniture, was being packed to be sent oflf to Bordighera that I remembered this sentence in the letter, and before the keys were given up, took the papers away with me. One Sunday afternoon, some weeks later, when the rain was falling in cascades from the overflowing waterspouts, when the river steamed with the splash of the falling drops and the noise of it on my window-panes drowned even the distant pulse of the trams along the Embankment, I ordered the fire to be lit, filled my pipe, and took those papers out of my desk, to which I had consigned them.

It required but two moments to realize that this was no ordinary statement of facts, but a human document, set out, not with the experience of the practised story writer, nor yet with the precision of a diary, yet more intimate, more illuminating than any diary could have been ; more engrossing than any tale with its introduction, its gradual development, and its climax.

Yet to have published it in the form in which I found it so absorbing would not only have been impossible by reason of the facts which it disclosed or the identities it made no effort to conceal, but its wider interest would have been lost to the outside reader. He was my friend. I had known him intimately for some years. It was because I knew him so well that the written substance of those papers was to me such an amazing revelation. But for the general reader, who was not acquainted with my friend, I knew if I were to make use of

I Receive a Reward for my Pains 7

those papers as he had given me permission to, I must adopt some other form of expression.

I have transcribed it, then, into the form of a tale, with here and there actual quotations from his manuscript, where I have felt that sentences, as he had written them, with the memory of the fact vivid in his mind, were more virile and alive than my pen could ever hope to make them.

Here, then, is the story, and if it does not give the reader that impulse to reconsider the whole play of motives and emotions throughout his life, I shall be surprised. Some such impulse it gave me, and, indeed, has made me often since go back in my imagination to those days when my friend was faced with the first instincts of Nature. With that story before me, I strive to undeceive myself of those varnished and highly polished appearances of purpose with which Civilization makes us forget at times the creatures of flesh and blood we are.

I need scarcely say I have altered all names, or

that I have endeavoured in every way to conceal

the identity of everyone connected with the story.

In a later communication, my friend expressly

wished this to be done. In due time it will be seen how natural a wish it was. So it is, I call him David.

CHAPTER II pROM two points of view it is essential to be ^ given a glimpse, however brief, of David Mortlake when he was a boy at school. The first' is because it is important to realize his character in the period of its formation, and the second because there he met and made his friendship with John Hawkesley.

Let me take these points of view, briefly as possible, in their order. David was precocious. There is Uttle doubt about that. His first love affair, when he was nine, was with a girl of twenty-three — the essence of womanhood to him. Th^s affection was nourished in silence and only broken when he thought he saw her laugh on an occasion when in her presence he was ordered to bed, according to custom, at half -past eight.

He quotes that incident in his papers, and writes of it with a twitch of laughter in his pen. * * I must have been an abominable youth," he writes. Later love aflEairs — and there were many between the ages of thirteen and sixteen — ^he does not allude to with derision, though apparently he does not treat them as seriously as he might. The seriousness they had for him at the time may possibly be dismissed; but as indications of the precodousness and ardent qualities of his temperament they should be considered within their proper perspective.

He became engaged to be married when he was sixteen. A Richard Peverel and Lucy love aflfair it was, only that in his case the Lucy was some three or four years older than himself. I refer to his papers and find that she was five years older— a girl of twenty-one.

This aflfair was carried on in secret after he had left school and had gone up to Cambridge. It was only broken by the girl herself when, after two years, she fotmd him still faithful. It became necessary then to tell him that with regard to actual marriage, she had never really entertained a serious thought of him at all. Her people hoped and indeed she herself contemplated her marriage with a man older than herself and with more soHd prospects than David could loflfer at the time.

K> David and Jonathan

'*I happened to be going intx) a tobacconist's shop just after I had received that letter, " he has written, "and in a glass mirror I caught sight of my face. It was a pallid grey, and my eyes seemed to lie in my head like burning coals in dead ashes. I knew the man she was going to marry. I recognized it was jealousy I felt, and, looking down at the counter of the shop in some shock of realization at what I had seen in that reflection, I found my fingers had picked up one of those knives they open cigar-boxes with and were gripping it as though a current of electricity held them there."

This, in all probability, was David's first serious love affair. It would appear to have somewhat broken his health and impaired his nerves, since after that he suffered for some time with insomnia, finally having to be sent abroad to recuperate his strength. It was, however, by no means the first affair in which his heart was engaged. There were many young ladies, of his own age and older, with whom his affections became involved. These attachments, lasting various lengths of time, were mostly expressed by the writing of long letters conveyed by messengers pledged to secrecy.

The Blood Ritual of FHendshIp ii

He says himself : ' * I suppose other boys of that age are similarly inclined and drawn towards demonstration of their awakening affections — other boys make little fools of themselves and grow out of folly as they grow out of their knickerbockers. I have alluded to these boyish escapades only because they might be considered to have some bearing upon the events it is my intention to set forth."

Undoubtedly they have a great bearing as he supposes, and indeed contribute in no small way to the violent contrast of that situation in which surely no two men were ever placed before or since.

When he says that other boys of that age are similarly inclined, as was he, I fancy he suggests a greater proportion than surely can be the case. The affectionate instincts of most boys are slow in development. As a rule they have the greatest .contempt for demonstrativeness and shudder when even their mother kisses them in the presence of their schoolmates.

I have no doubt David, too, would have avoided any pubhc exhibition of his affections, but that did not deter him from pursuing them in secret.

'*K I thought I loved one girl," he said, •*! thought I loved twenty, until after I had gone up to the 'Varsity and was jilted and then really knew what the business was like."

It is not perhaps so extraordinary that at that age if he liked one he liked twenty girls, the astonishing fact is that, between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, twenty girls of all ages should have liked him.

The girl who jilted him had apparently found no little delight in his love-making. This is the fact that seems to me of vital importance, which, indeed, should be remembered and taken into consideration when the story in the swiftness and tensity of its motion is like to sweep such memory absolutely from the mind.

I come now to the second point of view from which it has seemed necessary to me to give this brief sketch of Pavid's youth. It was at school and between the ages of thirteen and sixteen that he met John Hawkesley.

At first they were antagonistic. David, quicker of perception, keener in imagination, intuitive, sometimes dlmost to a feminine degree, outstripped this quiet, plodding boy, who came by his rewards through sheer hard work, indomitable perseverance, and a quality of intellect which, moving slowly and deliberately, attains a sure a^id successful end.

It was no doubt this quality of success in both their temperaments which clashed in those early days at school. Both, in all probability without realizing it, recognized that capacity in each other. Both felt the spirit of conflict it created between them; David swiftly in a first glance, John gradually as they came into opposition to each other through the daily round of school life.

They were in the same form, and there, David's quicker intelligence left John plodding far behind, not stationary, but advancing by inevitable and unvarying stages of progression. He had in those days a supreme contempt for the way in which David did his work. Translations left to the inspiration of the moment when the class was sitting and often carried oflf with brilliant success, were prepared by John with laborious thoroughness. His results were those of unqualified accuracy, but literal to such a degree as never earned for them the enthusiasm of the master. They deserved their points and they got their points, and by reason of those points, John slowly but steadily rose in the form to the position he deserved.

It was more, however, in the playing field that the true essence of conflict between them was pronounced. Here, for instance, David was a half-back in the Rugby fifteen, while John was a forward. Just such positions as these they might have been expected to fill. Both were good players, invaluable to the team, yet there was no question as to who, in their separate capacities, won most applause from the school.

To any one ignorant of the game of Rugby football this comparison may somewhat miss its point, but I pursue it for a moment, because David, in those papers of his, makes much of it, and to me, at least, it is full of illumination.

David was one of those brilliant players who scores again and again by daring feats and lightning appreciation of opportunity. John Hawkesley carried the weight of the scrum on his broa^ shoulders, keeping the pack together when the odds were all against them.

David's most notable feat appears to have been on the occasion of a great match when five minutes before time the scores were level. The game was pressing in the school twenty-five. The ball had come out of the scrimmage and was in the hands of the opposing three-quarters. A little caieftd

The Blood Ritual of FHendshIp 15

passing and a try was certain. You may be sure the school, looking on, held its breath. It was then David made p. fierce feint to tackle the three-quarters. So determined was the feint that the ball was passed to safety. This was exactly what David had anticipated. Every muscle in his body was set for the volte-face as he turned, leapt, and caught the ball in mid-air. Then followed the greatest exhibition of an individual run the school had ever seen. Alone he carried the ball out of his own twenty-five. There was no one to pass to. Alone he carried it the whole length of the field, tricking the full-back as neatly as a full-back has ever been tricked in his life and planting a try — as they say in football journalese — between the uprights.

That was David's feat. John's, in its way, was no less characteristic or worthy of applause. A scrimmage had broken away in their opponents' twenty-five. It was no moment to pick up the ball and pass. A loose ball in one's own twenty-five — ^but this story is not for players of Rugby football. The forwards were dribbling it at their feet. At their feet John threw himself on the ball — one cannot praise him for his duty — ^while his body became the butt of all their kicks. But that was not all. He held the ball; he got to his feet;

he started for the goal line, and immediately there were three men like dogs at his heels. One sprang on his shoulders, two took him round the middle, yet all between them could not bring him to the ground. He carried them, all three, fifteen yards on his back and scored a try, with the school lined around the touch line shouting themselves hoarse with delight.

David tells these two stories with uncommon zest. He loved the one evidently no less than the other, and it is not only because he thought they served his purpose that I have troubled the reader with them, but because they are vivid pictiu-es to my mind of that contrast of character which makes for this story the absorbing interest it has.

There is only need now to speak of that antagonism which existed between them for the first three terms while they were together at that school. It ended in the fourth term, when, on some schoolboy pretext, a challenge was given by John and a fight accepted by David in the comer behind the chapel. There were sides for both parties, but no doubt about the issue. /

*'If you like to beg my pardon," said John while they were taking oflE their coats, "that'll be enough."

David's taunt to the eflEect that if John had lost his stomach for a fight it was his own lookout, settled matters as to that, but by no means belied his feelings about the business.

He says: **I felt as sick as a cat, and couldn't have been better pleased if a master had come round the comer of the chapel and stopped it before it began. The fear, however, of showing fear is the most compelling fear of all. I knew John was not afraid of me. It> was really generosity on his part. He was ready to give up his first chance of scoring heavily over me. I did not regard it in that light then, and utilized the opportunity for a cheap gibe at his expense. He was not out of pocket for long."

I somewhat like the honesty 'of that — "he was not out of pocket for long" — ^and apparently it was no less than the truth. In scarcely more than ten minutes, John Hawkesley had, as David says, *'made a complete mess of him." Half a dozen times from the force of John's powerful blows, he had found himself sprawling on the ground. It was a moment of no little reHef to him when a master did make his appearance round the comer of the chapel wall and put a stop to the encounter.

As they walked away in the crowd of boys, David, with his bleeding nose, his cut Up, and two puflfy eyes, found himself by the side of John. He firmly believes, he says, that it was what John did at that moment which became the basis of their friendship.

"He was scarcely hurt at all," says David, ''and I was bleeding like a stuck pig. As we were pushed together in the crowd of boys, he just said, 'Want a handkerchief ?* and gave me his own to use on my bloody face. What that meant as a chance to wipe away the evidence of defeat, I can't exactly explain but it was the soul of generosity, and I took it."

This was the beginning of the friendship between David and John Hawkesley. Before two more terms had gone by, they had earned the nickname of David and Jonathan, and, except for the forms which at that time separated them, were never seen apart.

As introduction to the events that follow, indeed to the whole purpose of this story, these few incidents are practically the sum of all that need be said. David left school for the 'Varsity, Jonathan for a college of mining engineers. The stream of life came between their days together, but did not divide their friendship.

Neither one nor the other was given to correspondence. They met frequently, but generally at each other's clubs; spent an evening together, mostly filled with school reminiscences, and then fell apart again. The career which Jonathan had undertaken carried him into far countries, prospecting for his company. The work suited his temperament. He had a strong vein of adventure in him combined with a proud satisfaction in the loneliness of his own company. For months he would be away in the wildest comers of the earth, then turn up unexpectedly one day in London, dropping in at David's breakfast-hour in the Albany as though he had done little more than cross the street to get there.

At the respective ages of thirty-five and thirtysix neither of them was married. Both chaffed each other about their possible chances, but whatever chances there were, neither David nor Jonathan availed himself of them. With Jonathan perhaps it was an inherent and temperamental shyness in the presence of women. It would be idle to say that he did not know or had not experienced their attractions. More it was that he was fearful of the power he knew they would have, and the influence they would exert upon his life.

With David, he confesses, it was the bitterness of that first love affair which in some sense gave him immimity. It was not so much that he lost his liking for women as that he liked too many. One would have the attraction of the woman who had jilted him; another the attraction of constancy she had never possessed; another possessed them both, and yet another possessed neither, but had an attraction of her own. He became intimate with them all, but loved none.

"Men," he writes, on one of those papers he left me in that Queen Anne desk — "men only love one woman, and if they lose her, they go on loving her qualities in other women, never finding them all, for the rest of their lives. I believe, " he says, * ' in the principle of mating. We pick and choose — but some of us are picking all our lives."

Chapter III An Opportunity To See Ufe

TT was when David was thirty-seven and Jona- * than thirty-eight, there arose that chain of events which, in the phrase with which this story begins, revealed in these two the purpose of Life, Fate, or Destiny so cunningly concealed in ninetynine individuals out of a hundred.

David, well-to-do, with a comfortable little fortune which had been left him by one of those unexpected turns of generosity in a distant relative, was contemplating a three months' big game shooting in Central Africa. Jonathan, from the wilds of South America, returned just as David was making a fuss over buying kit, his floor strewn with tropical garments, gun cases standing in comers of the room, and books of travel lying open on the table.

"What the deuce is this?" asked Jonathan, putting his head round the comer of the door, never annotmcing his presence, but speaking in that casual tone of voice — ^in the same way as he had offered the loan of his handkerchief, or as though he had just walked up from those rooms he always kept in Gray's Inn and called his permanent hutch. So far as being a permanency, he kept them always, but if he occupied them two months out of the year, it was as much as ever he made use of them.

' ' What the deuce is this ? ' ' said he, and twice over. To the repetition of that question, David explained, whereupon Jonathan sat down on the nearest chair, looking on in silence at the process of packing with a S3rmpathetic grin of amusement on his face.

"Going to wear all those things?" he asked presently.

David referred to authorities — ^mostly tailors — who had assured him he would require every stitch.

"Well — put the strongest and the most durable on your back, " said Jonathan.

David inquired why. ^

"Niggers, " he was told, "have a habit of losing interest in their load, dropping it in unlikely places, and you never see them again. A wise man keeps his best on his back."

"The man who's arranging the trip will see to that, " said David, with all the confidence of one who has paid his money in advance. "He's told

An Opportunity to See Life 23

me what to bring, anck says I can leave all the porterage question entirely to him."

Jonathan sat silent for some moments, and then he said : * 'You're going to a part of the world where values as you understand them don't exist. You seem to have forgotten that, or perhaps you never knew it. You're going to a part of the world where money has only face value, and as soon as it's in the next man's pocket its face is out of sight. Where you're going, human nature is human nature. In this environment one's apt to forget what that is. But as far as all this kit's concerned, I'll tell you. If a man finds the load of it more irksome than he thinks the money's worth he's been paid to bear it, he'll drop the whole caboose in the night and he'll scoot. There are no sjrmbols where you're going. It's the real thing — the real instinct — ^the real impulse. Money, in Piccadilly, is a sjmibol, with the law behind it to hold it up on the end of a processional staflf. Out there, it's what you can get for it, and, having got it, it means nothing to any one but you. That's as immoral as you like, but it's what Adam and Eve felt when they shared the apple off the tree, and if you'd knocked about as I have, you'd know there's the old Adam and the old Eve still to be accounted for in every human beast that walks on two legs. We're civilizing— but it's a mistake to suppose we're civilized. We're growing, but it's a mistake to suppose we're grown up. Behind the mass that follows the S3mibol in the procession, there's still the individual who only knows the value of things when they're his."