The Little Iliad

Front matter

Google to make the world's books discoverable online.

Il has survived long enough for the copyright to expire and the book to enter the public domain. A public domain book is one thai was never subject

to copy right or whose legal copyright term has expired. Whether a book is in the public domain may vary country to country. Public domain books

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Initiation 9

II. Illumination 24

II

Hector was dressed before I was half-way through my bath. I know that because I heard him throw his boots down and then bang his door. On my way down-stairs to the hall where we used to assemble I saw him leaning against a pillar. He was scowling; but he couldn't help that — that was facial: otherwise he might have been saying his prayers or (which is the same thing with his sort) looking at a woman. His eyes were grey, and looked black at night. People — even women — thought him a black-eyed man. He was thin, sallow, elegant, and had jetblack hair. Not so good-looking as all that came to, he had a trustworthy face because it was essentially a simple one. You knew where you were with a face like that; you knew that it disguised nothing; you felt that there was nothing to disguise. Again, he had a caressing manner. I found him soothing — I knew a great many others did. Then he had good teeth, and a singularly sweet smile. It was that in particular which saved him from the acute crisis frequently brought on him by his want of tact. For tactlessness he was without a peer. You would have thought men and women centipedes from the havoc Hector did among their toes. As for his own treadings, he would have made a faux pas on the last day. But his smile saved him: that never failed. And he was a lovable creature. If he made more enemies than were good for any man, he turned them all into friends — which was perhaps worse. Bless him, anyhow, for a donkey, the most sincere, irresistible, serious-minded, enthusiastic, impracticable donkey that ever brought a stick about his ears.

But all this is a digression. He tempts me to parentheses; but it is the fact that he was looking at a woman. He and she were conspicuous in a hall which even then was three parts full of diners, moving about, hailing each other, recounting the prowesses of the day or the schemes for to-morrow. Certainly I had not seen her before or I think I must have remarked her. A tallish woman, she was; pale, with a face like a star. That is poetry perhaps — it is, to be just to him, Hector's poetry — but like all poetry it is true. She had a starry face, a kind of divine, remote limpidity, as if she smiled in her own atmosphere, apart from the dust and heat of ours. She carried herself rarely, and though she was plainly dressed she had the air of jewels about her — especially in her hair. I mean that her head seemed to be lifting a coronet. Her hair was dark> lustrous and abundant, smooth over her brows, heavily looped and bunched behind. It was like a hood to her, thrown back to rest upon the nape and shoulders. I suppose that she really was tall, but being modestly formed she did not look her height. Her matronly air was seated in her eyes and lips. It was impossible to suppose her unmarried. You couldn't have thought that for a moment. She had no lines on her face; but I put her down for thirty-five. Malleson in his ardour said thirty, and turned out to be right. She was dressed that evening in black — black silk and lace — without any ornaments but a few rings. I noticed afterwards that she always dressed in black or white — so long, that is, as she remained at Gironeggio.

I had come down from my part of the house by the lift, which brought me out behind Malleson. The lady stood at the foot of the stairs at the other end of the hall. She was alone, but evidently waiting for a companion.

"Austrian," I said over Malleson's shoulder, and made him jump.

He shook me off in momentary irritation. "You would label the Venus of Milo," he said, and I replied that the Louvre had saved me the trouble, but that I would certainly have done it if necessary.

"Such women have no country," Hector said, as if to himself. I suggested the Pays du Tendre; but I don't think he heard me.

There were a great many people about, and she was not, I hope, aware of our unaffected interest in her. I trusted then, I am quite sure now, that we were not so conspicuous to her as she was to us. She had, anyhow, that peculiar possession of the well-bred, that power of ignoring what is disagreeable or uncomfortable — of ignoring it out of existence, you may say. She remained where she was, with one hand upon the banister-rail, not so much indifferent to the assemblage about her as independent of it. I don't think she knew that we were there — any of us. Her simplicity was upon her like a panoply, so much so that one was almost provoked by it, conscious of a desire to try it, to find out whether it was as shock-proof as it seemed. But after a while it reacted upon me, and I felt that we couldn't stop there forever.

"Come," I said. "We can't spy upon her."

Hector murmured some inaudible thing. By this time the diners had begun to flock into the salle a manger ■, and I saw our common friend Chevenix already at our table.

"Come along," I repeated. "Chevenix is arranging his table-napkin. I see him at it."

"Wait," said Malleson. "Wait. Or go if you like. I stay here. I can't come yet."

At that minute — the hall being nearly emptied of its folk — a dark bulk loomed in the passage beside the stairs which lead from the ground-floor rooms; and then I heard a peculiar sliding noise, as if one was dragging a weight over the floor. The lady looked quickly round, left her anchorage and stood facing the dining-room doors. This then was her companion: a darkly flushed, bearded man, square-shouldered, round-headed, dragging a foot, and moving out of the dark, as it seemed by main force. A wounded monster, a maimed Titan, haling himself along.

He had a stick in each clenched hand, and got along rather than walked. It must have been enormous labour — you could see the muscles grappling with the problem — you could see that each step, indeed, was a new problem; and yet his eyes were twinkling; he smiled into the lady's face: he, too, had patience, to cope with hers. I saw the meeting of eyes: his laughing to ask, hers not giving, but rather accepting. As he drew level with her she turned, and accommodating her pace to his, together they went into the dining-room. She was built for swiftness, but she curbed herself. I saw his square shoulders doggedly conquering the inches to the table, doggedly dragging that deadweight.

What more Malleson saw, or what he had seen, I can't tell you. He turned upon me a tragic look.

"Doom," he said. "A human sacrifice appointed to live, not to die. I feel sick at the heart."

He looked as if he was charged with heavy fate — as if all the burden of two unhappycreatures whom he had never seen before in his life had been piled on to his pair of slim shoulders : but I knew him well. I made the best of it, for his sake.

"It's bad," I admitted. "It's bad, but it might be worse. Did you see her come into the hall?"

He looked at me for a few seconds without speaking. Then he nodded his head and looked away. I waited. Presently he said — it was as if I had compelled him — " She came down-stairs." It is true, I had intended him to tell me that, as I say, for his own sake.

"Come," I said; "we'll go and dine." But he shook me off.

"Dine as you will. I can't. I shall go out and walk about. I'll get something to eat when I want it. I can't go in there. I don't want to see them again just yet. I tell you I can't afford it."

I didn't reason with him — why should I?

It would have been foolishness. So I left him and joined the exasperated Chevenix, a copper-headed, red-faced, very complacent friend, who was said to be easily the bestdressed man in Gironeggio.

I saw him with extended hand and fire in his blue eyes threatening the waiter. He had no fulmination to spare for me — at least, I think not.

"What the devil . . ."he was saying, but at the same moment his soup came to him, and did more than any excuses from me. He addressed himself to that. "It might be hotter," he said, "but it seems nourishing. Where's Malleson?"

I explained that Malleson wasn't dining. Chevenix looked momentarily concerned.

"What's up?" he asked. "Toothache? Telegrams? Can I do anything?"

"Nothing, Chevenix," I assured him, and looked about for the real cause of trouble.

They had a side-table and a diligent attendance. I guessed them immediately for persons of consequence, because the head-waiter had such a careful eye for them. Apart from that, they looked it. The man, with his square bulk and hardy eyes, had the assured air of the comfortably cushioned in this world, that air of a corner-seat which the great, especially the foreign great, are seldom without. An English peer is very often apologetic. He seems to say, "Excuse my greatness. I was born to it — it's a thing that can't be helped." The French aristocrat, on the other hand, is frank about it. " I am somebody, and you are canaille. True. But all that apart, how can I serve you ? " And as for the German — it is like the rest of his system. It is the act of God.

I put these people down as Austrians, and Chevenix, when I called his attention to them, agreed.

"Austrian, right," he said. "You can always tell. If ever you see Germans who seem sorry about it, and anxious to be something else, they are Austrians. Very nice people — except to each other. There, I happen to know, they are the deuce. I knew a couple once — " But at that moment he stopped. He stared — he grew red — he looked the other way.

"Sorry," he said, then to me in a tragic whisper, "Bad case."

I had seen what he had seen. The man by sheer muscular force had managed to drink out of a wine-glass. He had collected, concentrated, his will-power upon it, grappled with it, rocked it to and fro in mighty conflict, drained it, and set it down. It gave you much the same effect as you would get at a circus from an elephant lighting a cigar — that of enormous concentration, of incredible difficulties overcome by strength. It was a question of a few seconds only; yet I had seen the gathering of the forces for attack, the clutching hand, the putting forth of all his strength — and the futility of effort. It affected me very much. I felt it tragic and horrible at once.

It set Chevenix moralizing at random. "That's bad, you know, when you get it like that. Uses up your reserves, what? And all for a drink! All for love and the world well lost, eh? Oh, quite so, quite so! But for a glass of claret!" He mused, and I had lost the thread of his discourse when he broke out again. " I knew a man — married to a jolly pretty woman, too — who had no feet at all. Accident, you know. Volcano 3 or something. Found himself in lava — that sort of thing. Pegs he had — two pegs. No feet. He used to go dotting about with two sticks. You might have been following your own dressing-table, I assure you. ... A pretty woman, too. Yet he seemed to give satisfaction. She never looked at anybody else — so far as / know."

"You mean that she didn't look at you, I suppose?" I ventured.

"Right," said Chevenix. "That's just what I do mean."

"Now, with our friend over there," he continued, when he had helped himself to ice-pudding, "I should say that she was considerably bored. Shouldn't you? She's your still-water sort — that you can see. She never told her love. Not she. Sooner die. Bless you, I know that kind. Damask cheek, what? I suppose, you know, that it took her unawares. And him, too. A thief in the night. Oh, it's pretty thick, a thing of that sort. And — I say!" He suddenly fixed me with a very open and alert pair of eyes. "I say, what's the matter with Malleson, anyhow?"

I must say that Bill Chevenix, with the manners of a first-class ass, has a far-reaching intelligence. Here, however, he rather divined than inferred.

I said, "Malleson has seen them."

"And it has knocked him out? Well, he's a sensitive plant. But Broderode's all right."

I jumped. "What!" I said. "You know them, then?"

He grew explanatory. "My dear man, I know their names — that's as far as I am prepared to go at present. He is a Baron Eugene von Broderode — and she is his Baroness."

"Then you've seen them before?"

Chevenix tossed his head. "Seen them before? I should hope so. When did you ever know me not see a pretty woman before ? You imagine a vain thing."

I said that she was more than a pretty woman, and he allowed it. I said that she was a beautiful woman, by which I largely mean a woman made beautiful by a beautiful nature. A kind of lamp, illuminated from within. I judged that she was not a happy woman and didn't see how she could expect to be; but I allowed a great deal for useand-wont, and wasn't prepared to be as shocked as the too susceptible Hector had been. I considered that she was chiefly bored, but I admit that I had not gone deeply into her case. Perhaps you need imagination to do that. I don't think I have much of it. I did notice, however, that they were a silent couple, speaking only upon commonplaces; I noticed also that such talk as there was came from him. She answered, but carelessly, as if such prattle was not worth notice. Then again there was this. He sought her attention and occasionally compelled it. She looked at him when she had to, but not unless he made her. Letters and a newspaper or two were brought to them by the ever-watchful head-waiter. She opened his for him, as the poor fellow was making a dreadful mess of it. Her own occupied her for the rest of the meal. She ate hardly anything; but he, on the contrary, did himself extremely well, and wrestled for his wine with a zeal worthy of a better cause. To see him at that was to witness an enthralling spectacle. A battle on a large scale — masses engaged — no quarter — and all for a glass of claret!

After dinner we took our coffee in the Lounge with a cosmopolitan Dutchman from The Hague, who knew everybody. Eugene von Broderode was our man's name, he agreed. She was a Pole, he believed. His family, of course, was from the Low Countries; he bore an historical name; but he was of a younger branch of it long settled in Galicia. A very accomplished man, great traveller, spoke English as well as we did; had been in diplomacy, and was so when our friend saw most of him — in Rome that had been, in J %6- J %%. We saw how it was with him? Here Chevenix nodded sagely and looked concerned. Never be surprised at such things, said our friend. His manner of life had been — here he shrugged up into the air — absurd — up to the hilt. He went into life, as you can find it when you want it, with the zest of a young giant. It had been one long series of pursuits. And in at the death every time. He shrugged his chorus to the strokes of Doom. "He got out by marriage — as you see. Just in time, as it seemed. She was a girl of eighteen — out of a convent school. It was twelve or more years ago. Nearer fourteen, I should say. She didn't make a fuss — either from pure ignorance or because they never do. For they don't, you know. If once they began that, God knows where they would end — " There he paused and stroked the ash off his cigar against the match-box. He rolled the glowing stump about in his fingers; and then said slowly and with great distinctness, "And I think he would be a bad friend to a woman who taught her that her lot might be very much better than it is — in every case."

We had no commentary to offer upon this dictum; but I thought of my grave-eyed friend pacing the shores of the lake.

Meantime I had been observing the pair upon whose nature and lot Van Riiver had been moralizing. They sat apart in a recess by the staircase, she with her needles and silk, he with his cigar. I admired the play of her beautiful hands, but still more her extraordinary patience. At the allotted moment came the coffee equipage and the old brandy. She busied herself with that, serving him but not herself, and then resumed her netting. He, apparently at ease, literally drank at his cigar, and inhaled the last pint of joy from it. Yet you could see that he kept a watchful eye for his grim, unsleeping enemy, and gave not one inch of ground. If his paper slipped from his knee he called up his forces to recover it. It came up fluttering like a rag in a gale — but it came. She did not help him: one saw that he would not allow that. By incredible efforts he accomplished what was needful with the appearance of ease. I warmed to him for his courage and audacity; and when he began to play patience, and at every shift of a card had to risk battle and rout — and nearly always triumphed — horrible as the flickering business was to watch, I felt that I could have been proud either of his friendship or his enmity. He was no shirker. He faced the foe. There was no faltering. The foe would pin him at last; but he would go to his death with the flag flying.

He was a strong man armed, with his handsome, galliard, shining face. He had kind, blue, humorous eyes, eyes which were kind even in the trap's teeth, and did not cease their laughing scrutiny. You couldn't catch him out anywhere. He was ready for you at all points. He seemed to me aboundingly clever and capable, so thoroughly awake as he was to a delicate situation. Occasionally, I went so far as to judge, he was foolhardy in his gallantry; he took risks which were heavy. But I thought I could hear his apology. " See," he might well be saying, "see how it is that, with this ghastly shackling upon me, I still hold this lovely creature at a nod. There's no chain; there's nothing but a confident look." That was true; there was no appeal. "I put it to you. You took me; here I am as you see me. Well, what are we to make of it, you and I?" I am not saying that there is no other side to this brave shield of his. I am saying that this was gallantry.

Chevenix, rendered grave by Van Riiver's reminiscences, had been blinking his light eyelashes over them. Then he said that he remembered a murder case where the defence was something like this. The accused said that he had sat opposite the murdered woman for something like twenty years without speaking. It had become a habit. They had not quarrelled, but they had nothing to say; so they didn't speak. Then, one evening, it struck him like a fire-ball from heaven, "Lord of Life and Death, I shall have to sit opposite this woman for twenty years more perhaps — and neither of us has a word to say. It is not to be borne." He yielded to the impulse — and he killed her.

Van Riiver chuckled. "Did they allow the plea?"

"They did not," said Chevenix.

"They hanged him?"

"They did."

Van Riiver said, "Perhaps it was well. And yet it's as likely a form of madness as any other that leads to sudden violence."

"Mind you," said Chevenix, "the thought might drive anybody mad. What! All silent and all damned!"

"Yes," said Van Riiver, getting up. "But no woman would have had the thought for a moment. It would have seemed quite in the order of things."

Thereupon he left us and crossed the room to greet our pair. Baron von Broderode gaily held out his left hand. The Baroness

4* smiled up at him from her work, but offered no more formal greeting. Van Riiver bowed deeply to her, and began to talk. The Baron laughed and joked, but never ceased for one moment his running battle. Every card that he moved flickered terribly in his hand. We watched them for a while. Then Chevenix said, "Good old Hector. He should have been here. He'd have been interested. Come and play French pills. I'll take you on.

jj

Ill

We saw nothing of Hector that night, but before it was ended our Dutch acquaintance had presented Chevenix and me formally to the Baron and his fair wife. That was exciting, as actual contact must always be, where the person touched has been the object of more or less intense speculation. He bristles at every point with the darts of your surmises. I found him, as I had expected, mQst affable; he spoke fluent, idiomatic English — occasionally at fault. He rose to greet us — I saw his brow break into beads of sweat as he did it : but do it he would and did. He said that he was delighted to see us, and I really thought that he was. She contented herself with bending her beautiful head — an act like that of a princess bowing from a carriage — but by and by she slid into the conversation, and towards the end she could laugh and be at ease with my engaging, red-headed friend, who, with a casual manner, always succeeded in getting interest, because he always gave it.

I forget what we all talked about — anything or nothing, as people do in hotels; but I do remember that Chevenix brought in the absent Hector. "A very serious young man," he told the Baroness. "Malleson," he said, "is a man who thinks that he was born to put the world to rights. cursed spite! I beg your pardon — not at all. He doesn't mind doing it in the least; but it weighs upon him all the same. He feels the responsibility. The time is slipping by, you see. He thinks us all very frivolous. " She was prepared for his examples; she could see that he was seething with anecdote — but it was her husband who spoke. I didn't think he had been listening..

"How is he getting on — your friend ?" he asked, deeply appreciative of the nature of the man thus lightly etched in.

Chevenix tossed his head. "He wrestles with it, sir. He's out and about now, seeing that the lake does its duty. 'Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll' — which it does not fail to do, with Malleson's encouragement. Do you read Byron?" With that he turned to the lady. She confessed to having read the poet — when she was a girl.

"There's nothing Byronic about Hector," Chevenix told her, "except his pre-occupation with eternity. Hector's a very religious man. He'll end up a Catholic, I don't doubt — and then he'll be all right. The Church, you see, will take his responsibilities from him. Byron would have done the same, if he'd had time."

The Baron agreed. "You are right, Mr. Chevenix," he said. "Voltaire was a pose with Byron. He wore him like plate armour. He scorned himself, that young man, and took pains to be scornful of the world in order to let himself down, as you say. There never was any man of his ability and force who got less out of this world than your Lord Byron." Here he drank prodigiously of his cigar.

"There," said Chevenix to me as we watched him heave out of sight, trailing his feet into the dusk of the passage, "there goes a man who will squeeze the last drops out of life." The implication of this heedless remark struck me all of a heap, as the companion of the ruthless Titan turned her head, and showed us her tragic profile. From what lives was he not squeezing the last drops? I was able to appreciate Hector's concern, though, unlike Hector, I did not propose to take any steps.

Van Riiver chuckled grimly. "Oh, he will squeeze life with anybody. He has always done that."

"Did you notice, ,, Chevenix said, after a moment of amused reflection, "how he drank his cigar?"

"That was how he drank — everything," Van Riiver said. "He went over them like a hot wind."

"Them?" said Chevenix, with a lift of the eyebrow. Van Riiver nodded.

"Them," he said. "And now he's footing the bill."

I said that he did it like a man. Van Riiver shrugged.

"He gets a lot of help, you know," he said.

I thought of that pale and tragic profile, turned sideways as if looking for help. I was glad that Hector had not been there — for what can you do?

In the morning Chevenix went his ways, entrenched in portmanteaux and kit-bags. I saw him to the station on his way to Rome. "Look after Hector," were his parting words. "He'll want it. There's divine simplicity pealing in that lady's eyes. He'll hear it as you and I hear the dinner-gong."

"I know he's very susceptible," I said. "Put it down to youth. And women are to be fallen in love with."

"Right," said Chevenix. "The Catholics knew what they were about."

"I'm sure of it," said I. "Bless you, she's older then Hector."

"She's a dangerous age. I'll tell you a good thing I read somewhere. I don't know who said it, but I daresay you do. l After forty a woman gets bored with virtue and a man with honesty.'"

"Sydney Smith said that," I told him. "But be just to our friends. Neither of them is forty yet."

"She's words to that effect," said Chevenix, "and as for him, the devil of it is that he'll never get tired of honesty. If he did he'd be harmless. I knew a man once —

We're off. I leave it at that. So long." He waved his hand, and went out, veiled in anecdote to the last.

I found Hector at his coffee in the sun. He looked sedate, pre-occupied, and saluted me remotely. He did not seem inclined to discuss his agitation of overnight, and it wasn't for me to begin upon it. I asked him if he had any plans for the day: he said, none. I asked him had he thought of our movements? He said he had not. I was by this time somewhat ruffled and inclined to damn his eyes at a venture.

I said, "We should have been glad of your company last night, and I think that you would have been glad of ours. Van Riiver was very interesting."

"He can be, I know," Hector said. "He's a wicked old sinner, but all the better company for that."

"Yes," I said, "and he knows everyone. That's useful sometimes."

I think he began to have an inkling. He shot me a moment's glance, then deliberately drank before he answered.

"Very useful. Did he find some acquaintance last night?"

"He did," I said, "and we made some."

Hector's sallow skin burned — a sort of brick-red suffused him.

"The von Broderodes are friends of his. We were presented, Chevenix and I."

Hector's hand shook as he filled a pipe. He was very agitated.

"My dear chap — " he began, then he started and stopped.

"Look here, Hector," I said, "we'll get out of this place as soon as you please — " He began to fume.

"You may do as you like. I have no power to stop you. I had better tell you at once that I have no intention of going, and that I don't recognize any right in the world — "

I laughed at him; a stupid thing to do. "You wouldn't recognize it if you saw it hard upon your nose," I said. "And there is no right in the matter, if you come to that. But I have rights of my own all the same, just as you may have; and if you believe it your right to languish over a married woman, I am sure it is mine to avoid the spectacle.