Dance of the Years (21 page)

Alfred Timson was still quivering visibly, and a surge of hatred for this stupid little social struggler who had attempted to blackmail him so crudely swept over Castor, and so shook him that he could barely trust himself to speak. When he was perfectly sure of his voice he asked Mr. Timson to leave. The man stared at him; he looked dumbfounded, and Castor's fury rose. Now that he was convinced Timson was attempting to deceive him, his normal perception was impaired; he could see duplicity in everything. He made himself very clear, and Mr. Timson, who was not mentally defective, came struggling out of his pain to face something more shocking than he had dreamed could exist.

Castor, a judge and a gentleman, a man of reputed honour and integrity, was revealing himself a scoundrel. The sentimental, unconquerably innocent little man was appalled. He had come in kindness, in sympathy, in Christian forgiveness, and he had assumed he was dealing with a man and a father, a person like himself, but probably better. Instead, he found a cheap lawyer. He said so.

His dismay gave him words, and Edwin Castor, who expected abuse from a frustrated swindler, was grimly amused. However, he saw himself as the winner, as one who had seen an ambush and avoided it. For the life of him he could not resist the final thrust.

“You have your remedy,” he said, “you can sue.”

Mr. Timson got up with more dignity than he had betrayed throughout the interview. There were red and white patches on his face, but his eyes were contemptuous. The two stood looking at each other, and each man was drawn away in loathing, each shrank in disgust, each hated. Neither of them realized for an instant how ridiculous he was, inasmuch as it was done. Already the dance of the years had begun another turn in its inescapable pattern. Already they were bound. Already they two were mingled in living blood. Already beneath Miss Lizzie's heart there beat another heart in which the two of them were intermixed, shuffled, tangled inextricably together and for ever in a partnership nothing could ever untie.

Before that absurdity their hatred belittled them and made them idiotic. Yet secure in the little circles of their downward eyes they did not see it even as a fleeting light.

Later on that same night, when Frank's tutor was on his way to London, with his ears still tingling, Edwin Castor talked to his son.

The two were peculiarly alike as they sat looking at one another. Frank was in bed, sitting up clasping his knees, and his father leant back in the chair by the fire. It had been a long and difficult conversation, but one carried on with surprisingly little passion once the first outburst had died away. The boy was white, and his eyes were dark saucers, while Castor himself was more unaffected and sincere than he had ever been in his life.

“You see,” he said, emphasizing the point he had made before, “there is nothing to it but that. It would be a folly out of all reason to spoil your life for it. There is nothing to it but that, nothing whatever.”

The boy opened his mouth to speak, swallowed, and put his head down. “It is difficult to believe that, sir,” he said at last.

“Is it?” Castor was staring at him fiercely. “Is it? Do you honestly find it difficult to believe that now?”

It was an unfair question. There had been dreadful moments for Frank during the hours he had spent with Lizzie; moments of hair-raising embarrassment and erratic revulsion, moments when he had hated himself, but never her. At the time while the incense of enchantment was still burning, these moments had been snatched up quickly and bundled away into the back of his mind like dirty linen in a cupboard. But now at Castor's command they came tumbling out again, twice as hideous in the clearer light.

There was another thing, too.

This was something more difficult, more awful, somehow; to the instincts more wrong. Now that he knew Lizzie so thoroughly, now that her mystery was explained, she was just as dear, if not dearer, but not so overwhelming, not so muddling to the mind, not so ‘above all the world' important. This was true. At his father's command it had to be faced.
There is nothing to it but that. It would be a folly out of all reason to spoil your life for it
.

Frank's life spread out before him into the haze of the future like
an inviting valley. Always its promise had been held out to him as something fair. There were glimpsed, triumphal avenues in it, happy mysteries. At one time (in Mr. Timson's stucco temple, for instance) it had seemed well lost for one touch of Lizzie in the dark, but to-night, when the bright light of unstimulated life and Castor's cold intelligence were brought to illumine that moment, it looked a time of delusion, of madness, or drunkenness.

Castor went on talking about the Timsons. Now that he had won he was tolerant again, and in an unenlightened fashion, kind.

They were all right, he said, probably even good little people in their way. Only anxious to do something extra fine for their child. One must be intelligent, he said. One must try to see their motive. They had wealth already but little position. This was an attempt to acquire one. They wanted to attach themselves to an established family. It was natural and human enough, but in these circumstances, ridiculous.

He could not talk about the girl, he said cautiously, but didn't Frank think that perhaps …?

Frank must forgive him if he were wrong, but didn't Frank think that perhaps it was possible that she knew as much about the matter, the—ah—the attempt to ensnare as anyone else.

Castor silenced the boy's protest and hurried on.

It was only a suggestion of course, he said, but Frank must see that in these matters a young man was extraordinarily helpless. The physical passion, the animal's naturally overwhelming desire to reproduce his species—one must put a thing like this plainly—was very strong, especially in youth. Given the opportunity, the entire body conspired to make what was in cold reason a bestial and degrading act, palatable—possible. With women—girls—it was quite different.

Frank was still sitting with his head bowed, but he heard, and the lie filtered slowly into him. One vision alone remained unpolluted, and he looked up, shy and wretched.

“She didn't know,” he said huskily. “Honestly, father, she didn't know. I … I taught her. Honestly she didn't know.”

“Then the blame lies with the parents,” said Castor, as if he were on the Bench, “and with you.”

Frank began to cry. He wept helplessly, like a baby, and Castor revolted at his weakness. A vicious outburst from him pulled the boy together effectively, and he sat up stiffly, his face wet but his eyes angry.

Castor was relieved, and said so.

“Look here, my boy,” he continued, speaking with a spitefulness which clipped the words, “you have made a fool of yourself, and if the girl really was innocent, as you say, and as I still doubt, then you've made worse of yourself. That is a serious thing. But it is not enough
to break you unless you let it. Life is a desperate business, and to get through it, and to conquer it, and to make something of it, you must take all sorts of thrashings. Some of them will be trivial, and some of them will be like this, deeply injurious. Don't deceive yourself that you have not lost something valuable; you have. You have done an evil thing, and you are weakened by that. But you have not been smashed by it. You have not been trapped into a disastrous marriage, and, since these people have some pretensions and aspirations, they will not care to sue, and you will escape a public scandal.

“But neither of these things is to your credit. It is purely fortuitous that you will avoid the material consequences of your act. The other, the moral consequence, you cannot avoid. For the rest of your life you will remember this wickedness, and remember that it was yours. That is the penalty for a stupid, ignorant act of undisciplined ugliness. It will torment you, and that I think is just. I do not think that what you have done merits any less or any more.”

He rose, and dropping his judicial manner as swiftly as he had taken it up, said wearily: “Life is full of this sort of thing. Much of it is very confusing and extraordinary; I do not see the reasoning in it, but I am convinced there must be some, you know. There must be. There must be a Mind engineering it all for some great reasonable purpose. Otherwise it's all meaningless. Good night, my son.”

He went out and the boy sat alone in the dark and faced his father's world. Had it not been for one thing he might have rejected it and seen the gaping sophistry in it. But that thing was integral in him; he was Castor's son. Many of Castor's ingredients were in him also. Therefore Castor's interpretation sounded to his mind horribly likely. All except the bit about Lizzie.

He could not think of Lizzie without his throat contracting, and a great weight descending about his eyes, while a wave of thirsty loneliness swept over him. So, since he knew now that these were but symptoms of a dreadful mental illness—a thing common enough and natural, but not a right condition—he tried very hard not to think of her.

It was the explanation of the Phenomenon which sounded so appallingly convincing to Frank. His father's explanation sounded so feasible when he remembered the inadequacy most of the descriptions of it in the great tales (he had not read them with his new eyes, of course), and the note of warning and regret which appeared in the majority of them.

It began to occur to him very slowly and coldly that Castor was right. The discovery appalled him. It was such a very shocking thing, such a curiously filthy, beastly trick, such a spiteful pitfall set just at the beginning of life to catch and hurt the innocent. There was
a sadistic quality in the idea. It was a sort of lovely cruelty. It made him frankly blasphemous. Any creator who could design such an artifice, even for the useful purpose of carrying on a species, was not a loving god. The terrible notion that the Almighty might not be kind crept into his mind and sat there freezing him. After all, it was possible, if this other thing was. How could one tell? Being thus once so utterly, so cruelly deceived; having found out once that all the finest in one, all the sweetness, all the gentleness, all the self-sacrifice could be transmuted unawares into an enticement to savagery, then how could one be certain of any other solid glory? For all Frank could tell the world might be in the hands of a Moloch.

But meanwhile, and all the time too, like distant fire music behind his thinking, there was Lizzie's tragedy. Where was she? What were they doing to her? What would happen to her? Somewhere now, at this very moment, in this very darkness, the crease where her arm shut down beside her breast must be just as deep and shadowed as ever it had been. Where was she? Oh God, cruel but omnipotent, where was she? Who would comfort her?

The pain rose in a crescendo and then there were the degrading symptoms again; signs of madness, of vulgar illness; signs of the weakness and helpless rottenness of man.

He laid himself down very wearily, hid his face in the cold linen, and wished quite sincerely that he was dead, and, for Lizzie's sake, that he had never lived.

Later on, when he grew older, as he developed in the cool, intellectual atmosphere of his home, he altered some of the more childish theories he formed that night, but he never escaped all of them.

The sentence which his father had pronounced on him with so much thought and so little imagination was duly served. He never did forget what he had done, and the knowledge did torment him, but also he never had another child.

When he married somewhat reluctantly, at thirty-five, with that object in view, his wife found him no lover. He died a sad, lady-like old man, with very strict views and a quite innocent habit of preferring young male society.

When Edwin Castor left Frank that night he went along to his own room, feeling heavy and dissatisfied. He was convinced that he had done his best for his son in an abominable situation. He had seen that he did not escape punishment altogether, and had yet averted for him the entirely disproportionate doom of a life handicapped at the very outset by a union with an entirely unsuitable girl. He did not see what else he could have done, and felt sure that in the recesses of His great mind, his Maker would agree with him.

But all the same, he was very wretched about the whole business and
his hatred for the Timsons flared up again, doing its confusing and disorganizing damage within him.

So the Castors got nothing from the incident, and lost much. For them it was all loss, all decay, all potential rottenness. James got more out of it, both good and bad, but Lizzie, strangely, got much good out of it in the end, or so it would appear from her story.

To almost any other temperament her betrayal must certainly have been a ruining experience. Lizzie had been deceived, even more cruelly than had Frank. She had been abominably and stupidly misused, bitterly misled, deserted, and punished out of all reason. But Lizzie had loved, completely, honestly and without reservation; without any mortal thing set on one side or put by in case.

This was the touchstone and the saving grace. For it would seem that the remarkable thing about utter generosity is that there is unwanted, but inescapable gain in its giving. Perhaps this is because there is growth in it, for had she given less of her heart while making the same sacrifice of her body, there could surely have been nothing but horror in it for her. But as it was she gave everything, and was, in the giving, comforted. So while Frank was trying to shoulder unforgivable sin, Lizzie was taking the first stages of her punishment.

She was locked in a shuttered room, and in three days had been given nothing but bread and water, then a fashionable correction for far slighter crimes than hers. She was hungry and exhausted from crying and was far more clear-headed than usual in consequence. The stunning incredulity had passed, but so also had much of her sense of guilt. She was still sweatingly afraid, of course, very much alive to what had already happened, and to something of what must inevitably happen thereafter.