William John Locke

“ All the ideals; all the colour and music and gorgeous edifices of life; all the world vibration of thought and action and joy of which she had dreamed, every manifold thrill that had run through her being from feet to hair on that first night in London when she had leaned out of her Victoria Street flat and opened her young soul to the informing spirit of the vast city of mystery—the whole spiritual meaning, nay, the whole material reason for her existence, was resolved into one exquisitely pure, bafflingly translucent in its mystery of shooting flames, utterly elemental crystal of sex. ”

“ Olivia saw that her hesitations were those of a cool brain and not of an ardent spirit, and she knew that the brain had already come to a decision.
“I quite see,” said Lydia half apologetically, “that you think I ought to wait until I fall in love with a man. But I should have to wait till Doomsday. I thought I was in love with poor dear Fred. But I wasn’t. I’m not that sort. If Fred had gone on living I should have gone on letting him adore me and have been perfectly happy—so long as he didn’t expect me to adore him.”
“Doesn’t Mr. Rooke expect you to adore him?” asked Olivia. ”

“ But the very craziness of the habitation made for their selfish joy. The universe, just for these twain, had gone joyously mad. A cocky little villa made to the model of a million others would have defeated the universe’s benign intention. Nothing could be nearer to Triona’s dream nest in a cliff. Their first half-hour’s exploring, hand in hand, was that of children let loose in a fairy tale castle.
“There’s only one egg-cup,” croaked Myra, surveying an exiguous row of crockery.
“How many more do we want?” cried Olivia. “We can only eat one egg at a time.” ”

“ Tea companions seldom failed. When she had no evening engagements she was glad to get to bed, soon after the dinner in the downstairs restaurant, and to sleep the sleep of untroubled youth. And all the time the spell of London still held her captive. To walk the crowded streets, to join the feminine crush before the plate-glass windows of great shops, to watch the strange birds in the ornamental water in St. James’s Park, to wander about the Abbey and the Temple Gardens, to enter on the moment’s impulse a Bond Street picture gallery or a cinema—all was a matter of young joy and thrill. ”

“ On the Blair Park side—she wondered laughingly at their unsupercilious noses—Blaise Olifant and his sister accompanied her in the gentle festivities. Each day had brought its petty golden dust—the futile Church bazaar, the tennis tournament, the whist-drive of which old John Freke, the linen-draper father of Lydia, had made her a lady-patroness, the motor-run into quaint Shrewsbury, on shopping adventure in quest of crab or lobster unobtainable in Medlow—a thousand trivial activities—to the innocent choking of her soul, to use Matthew Arnold’s figure, and an inevitable forgetfullness. ”

“ But infinite sorrow and the weakness engendered by constant physical pain had transformed her into a spirituality just breathing the breath of life and regarding her daughter less as a woman than as a kindred essence from whom no secrets could be hid. At her bedside Olivia thus learned the mystery of birth and life and death. Chiefly the mystery of life, which appealed more to her ardent maidenhood.
So when at last her mother faded out of existence and Olivia’s vigil was over, she faced a world of changing values with a new set of values of her own. ”

“ And from that moment to this, just as the London train was steaming in, both luggage and unpaid bill had vanished from his mind. There was nothing to do but go to the inn and proceed to London by a later train. Thus, Fate had stage-managed for him another deception of Olivia.
The realization of his crazy lapse of memory was a sobering shock. Never before had he lost grip of himself. Hitherto, the tighter the corner—and he had found himself in many—the clearer had been his brain. The consciousness of the working of a cool intellect had given a pleasurable thrill to danger. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sometimes he went back, as in his talks with the dustman, to the idyllic tempests in the North Sea; sometimes to the fierce freedom of the speed across the illimitable steppes of Russia; sometimes to his perilous escape to Petrograd; sometimes to his tramps along the safe roads of England; to his wanderings through the dangerous by-ways of the East End. Bitterly he cursed the motor-lorry that had knocked him out of his Polish adventure. Except on Olivia he had never so set his heart on a thing before. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As John Briggs, British subject, he was freeman of the civilized world. But John Briggs was dead and done for. It was impossible to wander over the globe as Alexis Triona with a passport bearing the name of John Briggs. He would be held up and turned back at any frontier. And it was beyond his power of deception to induce Olivia to travel with him round the world under the incognito of Mrs. John Briggs.
Rigid, so that he should not wake the beloved woman, he stared for hours and hours into the darkness, vainly seeking a solution. ”

“ 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? ”

“ There the man and woman had compromised. She had suffered him to hang his Victorian mirror and his screaming pictures in the midst of her delicate scheme. But here her taste reigned absolute. It was all so simple, so exquisite: a few bits of Chippendale and Sheraton, a few water-colours on the walls, a general impression for curtains and upholstery of faded rose brocade. On a table by the bed-head stood a little row of books in an inlaid stand. With the instinct of a bookish man, Olifant bent over to look at their backs, but first turned to Olivia. ”

“ She was furious with Myra. We all are with people who confront us with the naked truth about ourselves. That was all she was fit for; all that life had taught her; to look after a man. She stared at the blatant proposition in the grimness of the night-watches. What else, in God’s name, was she capable of doing for an inch advancement of humanity? She had gone forth long ago—so it seemed—from Medlow, to open the mysterious mysteries of the world. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Even Lydia’s cynical world was better than this. Yet between these two extremes there must be a world of high endeavour, of science, art, philanthropy, thought; that in which, she vaguely imagined, Blaise Olifant must have his being; even that of the women at the club dinner. But her mind shook off women as alien to its subconscious argument. In this conjectural London world one man alone stood out typical—the man striding loosely by her side. A young careless angel, he had delivered her from Mavenna. A man, he had exorcised her horror of Bobby Quinton. ”

“ And for her, another aspect of him, the simple, clean-cut Englishman, divested of vague and disquieting Russian citizenship, the perfect companion, responsive to every chord struck by the spirit of the magic afternoon. In the years to come, who can say that they will not remember this sweet and delicate adventure of their souls creeping forth in trembling reconnaissance one of the other? Perhaps it will be a more precious memory to the woman than to the man. Men do not lay things up in lavender as women do. ”

“ And Olivia sat, when he had left her, staring at public disgrace. Against that she could not fight. The man she had loved was a shadow, a non-existent thing; but she bore his name. She had sworn to keep bright the honour of the name before the world. And now the world would sweep it into the dustbin of ignominy. A maddening sense of helplessness, growing into a great terror, got possession of her.
The next morning, when Myra brought in her letters, she felt ill and feverish after a restless night. One of the envelopes bore Triona’s familiar handwriting. ”

“ He stared at the patriot open-mouthed.
“Yes, Poland,” said Boronowski. “Why not? You want to fight for a Great Cause. Is not a free and independent Poland the keystone of the arch of reconstructed Europe? It is a commonplace axiom. Poland overthrown, overrun with Bolshevism, all Europe crumbles into dust. The world is convulsed. Fighting for Poland is fighting for the salvation of the world. Could there be a greater cause?”
His dark eyes glowed with compelling inspiration. His outflung arm ended in a pointing finger. And Triona saw it as the finger of Salvation Yeo in his boyhood’s picture. ”

“ And Alexis Triona, sitting on the scrubby grass and sand, his back against the little veranda, the infinite sea and all the universe enveloped in still moonlight, laughed the laugh of deep happiness at their childish inspiration. He rolled, licked and lit the final cigarette. Tobacco was good. Better was this August night of velvet and diamonds. Below, the little stone groin shone like onyx. The lazy surf of ebb-tide far away on the sand of a tiny bay glimmered like the foam in fairyland.
Only half the man’s consciousness allowed itself to be drenched with the beauty of the night. ”

“ Trivett and Mr. Fenmarch, for a woman seldom discloses her main argument to a male adversary—there might come a glorious moment in some now unconjecturable adventure when it might be essential for her to draw cheques for dazzling sums which she could put in her pocket and go over mysterious hills and far away. She stood on the edge of her dull tableland and gazed wide-eyed at the rolling Land of Romance veiled by gold and purple mist. ”