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A Spirit in Prison

R >> Robert Hichens >> A Spirit in Prison




For an instant he yielded his spirit to this sound of eternal
striving. Then he said:

"Hermione!"

No one answered.

"Hermione!"

He raised his voice. He almost called the name.

Still there was no answer. Yet the silence seemed to tell him that she
was near.

He did not call again. He waited a moment, then he stepped into the
passage.

The room to which it led was the central room, or hall, of the palace
--a vaulted chamber, high and narrow, opening to the sea at one end by
the great doorway already mentioned, to the land beneath the cliff by
a smaller doorway at the other. The faint light from without,
penetrating through these facing doorways, showed to Artois a sort of
lesser darkness, towards which he walked slowly, feeling his way along
the wall. When he reached the hall he again stood still, trying to get
accustomed to the strange and eerie obscurity, to pierce it with his
eyes.

Now to his left, evidently within the building, and not far from where
he stood, he heard almost loudly the striving of the sea. He heard the
entering wave push through some narrow opening, search round the walls
for egress, lift itself in a vain effort to emerge, fall back baffled,
retreat, murmuring discontent, only to be succeeded by another eager
wave. And this startling living noise of water filled him with a
sensation of acute anxiety, almost of active fear.

"Hermione!" he said once more.

It seemed to him that the voice of the water drowned his voice, that
it was growing louder, was filling the palace with an uproar that was
angry.

"Hermione! Hermione!"

He strove to dominate that uproar.

Now, far off, through the seaward opening, he saw a streak of silver
lying like a thread upon the darkness of the sea. And as he saw it,
the voice of the waves within the palace seemed to sink suddenly away
almost to silence. He did not know why, but the vision of that very
distant radiance of the young and already setting moon seemed to
restore to him abruptly the accuracy of his sense of hearing.

He again went forward a few steps, descending in the chamber towards
the doorway by the worn remains of an almost effaced staircase.
Reaching the bottom he stood still once more. On either side of him he
could faintly discern openings leading into other rooms. Perhaps
Hermione, hearing him call, had retreated from him through one of
them. A sort of horror of the situation came upon him, as he began
thoroughly to realize the hatred, hatred of brain, of nerves, of
heart, that was surely quivering in Hermione in this moment, that was
driving her away into the darkness from sound and touch of life. Like
a wounded animal she was creeping away from it and hating it. He
remembered Gaspare's words about the look she had cast upon perhaps
the most truly faithful of all her friends.

But--she did not know. And he, Artois, must tell her. He must make her
see the exact truth of the years. He must win her back to reason.

Reason! As the word went through his mind it chilled him, like the
passing of a thing coated with ice. He had been surely a reasonable
man, and his reasonableness had led him to this hour. Suddenly he saw
himself, as he had seen that palace door by lightning. He saw himself
for an instant lit by a glare of fire. He looked, he stared upon
himself.

And he shivered, as if he had drawn close to, as if he had stood by, a
thing coated with ice.

And he dared to come here, to pursue such a woman as Hermione! He
dared to think that he could have any power over her, that his ice
could have any power over her fire! He dared to think that! For a
moment all, and far more than all, his former feelings of
unworthiness, of helplessness, of cowardice, rushed back upon him.
Then, abruptly, there came upon him this thought--"Vere believes I
have power over Hermione." And then followed the thought--"Gaspare
believes that I have power over her." And the ice seemed to crack. He
saw fissures in it. He saw it melting. He saw the "thing" it had
covered appearing, being gradually revealed as--man.

"Vere believes in my power. Gaspare believes in my power. They are the
nearest to Hermione. They know her best. Their instincts about her
must be the strongest, the truest. Why do they believe in it? Why do
they--why do they know--for they must, they do know, that I have this
power, that I am the one to succeed where any one else would fail? Why
have they left Hermione in my hands to-night?"

The ice was gone. The lightning flash lit up a man warm with the
breath of life. From the gaunt door of the abandoned palace the strip
of black cloth, the tragic words above it, dropped down and
disappeared.

Suddenly Artois knew why Vere believed in his power, and why Gaspare
believed in it--knew how their instincts had guided them, knew to what
secret knowledge--perhaps not even consciously now their knowledge--
they had travelled. And he remembered the words he had written in the
book at Frisio's on the night of the storm:

"La Conscience, c'est la quantite de science innee que nous avons en
nous."

He had written those words hurriedly, irritably, merely because he had
to write something, and they chanced--he knew not why--to come into
his mind as he took hold of the pen. And it was on that night, surely,
that his conscience--his innate knowledge--began to betray him. Or--no
--it was on that night that he began to defy it, to deny it, to
endeavor to cast it out.

For surely he must have known, he had known, what Vere and Gaspare
innately knew. Surely his conscience had not slept while theirs had
been awake.

He did not know. It seemed to him as if he had not time to decide this
now. Very rapidly his mind had worked, rushing surely through
corridors of knowledge to gain an inner room. He had only stood at the
foot of the crumbling staircase two or three minutes before he moved
again decisively, called again, decisively:

"Hermione! Hermione! I know you are here. I have come for you!"

He went to the right. On the left was the chamber which had been taken
possession of by the sea. She could not have gone that way, unless--he
thought of the /fattura della morte/, and for a moment the
superstitious horror returned upon him. But he banished it. That could
not be. His heart was flooded by conviction that cruelty has an end,
that the most relentless fate fails at last in its pursuing, that the
/fattura della morte/, if it brought death with it, brought a death
that was not of the body, brought, perhaps, a beautiful death of
something that had lived too long.

He banished fear, and he entered the chamber on the right. It was lit
only by an opening looking to the sea. As he came into it he saw a
tall thing--like a tall shadow--pass close to him and disappear. He
saw that, and he heard the faint sound of material in movement.

There was then still another chamber on this side, and Hermione had
passed into it. He followed her in silence, came to the doorway of it,
looked, saw black darkness. There was no other opening either to sea
or land. In it Hermione had found what she sought--absolute blackness.

But he had found her. Here she could not escape him.

He stood in the doorway. He remembered Vere's trust in him. He
remembered Gaspare's trust. He remembered that Gaspare was waiting in
the boat for him--for them. He remembered the words of Gaspare:

"You must make the poor Signora understand!"

That was what he had to do: to make Hermione understand. And that
surely he could do. Surely he had the power to do it now.

For he himself understood.



CHAPTER XLII

"Hermione!"

Artois spoke to the void.

"Hermione, because I have followed you, because I have come here,
don't you think that I am claiming any right. Don't think that I
imagine, because I am your--because I am--I mean that it has not been
easy to me to come. It has not been--it is not a simple thing to me to
break in upon--upon--"

He had begun to speak with determination. He had said the very first
words with energy, almost with a warm eagerness, as of one hurrying on
to vital speech. But suddenly the energy faltered, the eagerness
failed, the ring of naturalness died out of the voice. It was as if a
gust of cold air had blown out a flame. He paused. Then he said, in a
low voice:

"You hate me for coming."

He stopped again. He stared at the void, at the blackness.

"You hate me for being here."

As he said the last words the blackness before him surely gathered
itself together, took a form, the form of a wave, towered up as a
gigantic wave towers, rolled upon him to overwhelm him. So acute was
his sensation of being attacked, of being in peril, that his body was
governed by it and instinctively shrank, trying to make itself small
that it might oppose as little resistance as possible to the oncoming
foe.

For it seemed to him that the wave of blackness was the wave of
Hermione's present hatred, that it came upon him, that it struck him,
that it stunned and almost blinded him, then divided, rushing onwards
he knew not where, unspent and unsatisfied.

He stood like a man startled and confused, striving to regain lost
footing, to recover his normal condition.

"You hate me."

Had he spoken the words or merely thought them? He did not know. He
was not conscious of speaking them, yet he seemed to hear them. He
looked at the blackness. And again it surely moved. Again he surely
saw it gathering itself together, and towering up as a wave towers.

His sensation was absolutely one of nightmare. And exactly as in a
nightmare a man feels that he is no longer fully himself, has no
longer the power to do any manly or effective thing, so Artois felt
now.

It seemed to him that he was nothing, and yet that he was hated. He
turned and looked behind him, moved by a fierce desire for relief. He
had not the courage to persist in confronting that blackness which
took a form, which came upon him, which would surely overwhelm him.

In the distance he saw a pallor, where the face of the night looked
into the palace from the sea. And he heard the distant water. Still
the little waves were entering the deserted chambers, only to seek an
exit which they could never find. Their ceaseless determination was
horrible to him, because it suggested to him the ceaseless
determination of those other waves of black hatred, one following
another, from some hidden centre of energy that was inexhaustible. As
he listened the sound of the sea stole into his ears till his brain
was full of it, till he felt as if into his brain, as into those
deserted chambers, the waves were penetrating, the waves of the sea
and those dark waves which gathered themselves together and flowed
upon him from the void.

For a moment they possessed him. For a moment he was the prey of these
two oceans.

Then he made a violent effort, released himself, and turned again to
the chamber in which Hermione was hidden. He faced the blackness. He
was able to do that now. But he was not able to go on speaking to the
woman who remained invisible, but whose influence he was so painfully
conscious of. He was not able to speak to her because she was surely
speaking to him, was communicating to him not only her feeling towards
him, but also its reason, its basis, in that wordless language which
is only used and comprehended by human beings in moments of crisis and
intense emotion. That was what he felt, seemed to know.

He stood there, facing the blackness and listening, while she seemed
to be telling him her woman's reasons for her present hatred of the
man who had been for so long a time her closest friend.

And these reasons were not only the reasons born of a day's events, of
the discovery of the lie on which her spirit had been resting. She did
not say--her heart did not say only: "I hate you because you let me
believe in that which never existed except in my imagination--my
husband's complete love of me, complete faithfulness to me. I hate you
because you enclosed me in the prison of a lie. I hate you because
during all these years you have been a witness of my devotion to an
idol, a graven image whose wooden grimace I mistook for the smile of
the god's happy messenger, because you have been a witness of my cult
for the memory of one who betrayed my trust in him, who thought
nothing of my gift to him, who put another in the sanctuary that
should have been sacred to me, and who has poisoned the sources of the
holy streams that flow into and feed the soul of a good woman."

If Hermione had silently told Artois reasons such as these for hating
him she would have roused him to battle with her, to defend himself
with some real hope of holding his own, even of eventual conquest. But
other reasons, too, did they not come from her, creeping out of her
brain and heart and soul into his, reasons against which he had no
weapons, against which he could make no defence?

He had claimed to understand the psychology of women. He had believed
he comprehended women well. Hermione best of all women. But these
reasons, creeping out of her into him, set a ring of illuminating fire
about his misconception. They told him that though perhaps he had
known one Hermione in his friend, there were other Hermiones in her
whom he had never really known. Once in the garden of the island by
night he had seen, or fancied he had seen, a strange smile upon her
face that betokened a secret bitterness; and for a moment he had been
confused, and had faltered in his speech, and had felt as if he were
sitting with a stranger who was hostile to him, or, if not actually
hostile, was almost cruelly critical of him. Now that stranger
silently spoke to him, silently told him many things.

She told him--that which few men ever know--something of what women
specially want, specially need in life. And the catalogue of these
needs seemed to him to be also the catalogue of her reasons for hating
him at this moment.

"Women need--I needed," she seemed to say, "not only a large and ample
friendship, noble condescending, a friendship like an announcement to
citizens affixed to the wall of a market-place, and covering boldly
all the principal circumstances and likely happenings of ordinary
feminine life, but a friendship, an affection, very individual, very
full of subtlety, not such as would suit, would fit comfortably women,
but such as would suit, would fit comfortably, would fit beautifully
one individual woman--me."

Ah, the "women need" was flung away, like a stone thrown into the sea!
It was the "I needed" that was held fast, that was shown to Artois
now. And the "I" stood to Hermione for herself. But might it not have
stood to the world for many a woman?

"I needed some one to whom I could be kind, for whom I could think,
plan, hope, weave a fabric of ambitious dreams, look forward along the
path that leads to glory. I needed some one for whom I could be
unselfish, to whom I could often offer those small burnt sacrifices
whose smoke women love to see ascending towards God, burnt sacrifices
of small personal desire, small personal plans and intentions. I
needed some one to need my encouragement, my admiration--frequently
expressed--my perpetual sympathy hovering about him like a warm cloud
of fragrant incense, my gentle criticism, leading him to efforts which
would win from the world, and from me, more admiration of and wonder
at his energy and genius. I needed some one to stir within me woman's
soft passion for forgiveness, woman's delight in petting the child who
has been naughty, but who puts the naughtiness aside and runs home to
be good again. I needed some one to set upon a pedestal.

"These needs you fully satisfied.

"You gave me generously opportunities for kindness, for
thoughtfulness, for impersonal ambition, for looking forward on your
behalf, for unselfishness, for the sacrifice of my little personal
desires, plans, and intentions, for encouragement of you, for
admiration of your abilities, for sympathy--even for gentle criticism
leading you to efforts which won from me eventually a greater respect
for your powers and for secret forgiveness which ended in open
petting. When I prepared the pedestal you were quite ready to mount
it, and to remain upon it without any demonstration of fatigue.

"And so many needs of mine you satisfied.

"But I had more needs, and far other needs, than these.

"I needed not only to make many gifts, to satisfy my passion for
generosity, but to have many gifts, and gifts of a special nature,
made in return to me. I needed to feel another often, if not
perpetually and exclusively, intent on me. I needed to feel
tenderness--watchful, quick, eager tenderness, not tenderness slow-
footed and in blinkers--round about me.

"I needed a little blindness in my friend. That is true. But the
blindness that I needed was not blindness to my little sacrifices, but
blindness to my little faults.

"To a woman there is such a world of difference between the two! I
longed for my friend to see the smoke ascending from my small burnt-
offerings of self made for his sake. But I longed, too, for him not
always to see with calm, clear eyes my petty failings, my minute
vanities, my inconsistencies, my incongruities, my frequent lack of
reasoning power and logical sequence, my gusts of occasional injustice
--ending nearly always in a rain of undue benefits--my surely
forgivable follies of sentiment, my irritabilities--how often due to
physical causes which no man could ever understand!--my blunders of
the head--of the heart I made but few, or none--my weak depressions,
struggled against but not always conquered, my perhaps childish
anxieties and apprehensions, my forebodings, not invariably well
founded, my fleeting absurdities of temper, of temperament, of manner,
or of word.

"But as definitely as my friend did not see my little sacrifices he
saw my little faults, and he made me see that he saw them. Men are so
free from the tender deceits that women are compact of.

"And as I needed blindness in some directions, in others I needed
clear sight.

"I needed some one to see that my woman's heart was not only the heart
of a happy mother, to whom God had given an almost perfect child, but
also the heart of a lover--not of a /grande amoureuse/, perhaps, but
of a lover who had been deprived of the love that is the complement of
woman's, and who suffered perpetually in woman's peculiar and terrible
way because of that deprivation.

"I needed an understanding of my sacred hunger, a comprehension of my
desolation, a realization that my efforts to fill my time with work
were as the efforts of a traveller in a forest to escape from the
wolves whose voices he hears behind him. I needed the recognition of a
simple truth--that the thing one is passionately eager to give is
nearly always the thing one is passionately eager to receive, and that
when I poured forth sympathy upon others I was longing to have it
poured forth upon me. I gave because secretly I realized the hunger I
was sharing. And often, having satisfied your hunger, I was left to
starve, no longer in company, but entirely alone.

"I needed great things, perhaps, but I needed them expressed in little
ways; and I needed little cares, little attentions, little
thoughtfulnesses, little preventions, little, little, absurd
kindnesses, tendernesses, recognitions, forgivenesses. Perhaps,
indeed, even more than anything magnificent or great, I needed the so-
called little things. It is not enough for a woman to know that a man
would do for her something important, something even superb, if the
occasion for it arose. Such an occasion probably never would arise--
and she cannot wait. She wants to be shown at every moment that some
one is thinking kindly of her, is making little, kind plots and plans
for her, is wishing to ward off from her the chill winds, to keep from
pricking her the thorns of the roses, to shut out from her the shadows
of life and let in the sunbeams to her pathway.

"I needed the tender, passing touch to show me my secret grief was
understood, and my inconsistency was pardoned. I needed the generous
smile to prove to me that my greed for kindness, even when perhaps
inopportune, was met in an ungrudging spirit. I needed now and then--I
needed this sometimes terribly, more, perhaps, than any other thing--a
sacrifice of some very small, very personal desire of yours, because
it was not mine or because it was opposite to mine. Never, never, did
my heart and my nature demand of yours any great sacrifice of self,
such as mine could have made--such as mine once did make--for you. But
it did demand, often--often it demanded some small sacrifice: the
giving up of some trifle, the resignation of some advantage, perhaps,
that your man's intellect gave you over my woman's intellect, the
abandoning of some argumentative position, or the not taking of it,
the sweet pretence--scarcely a sin against the Holy Ghost of truth!--
that I was a tiny bit more persuasive, or more clear-sighted, or more
happy in some contention, or more just in some decision, than perhaps
I really was. I needed to be shown your affection for me, as I was
ever ready, ever anxious, to show mine for you, in all the little ways
that are the language of the heart and that fill a woman's life with
music.

"All this I needed. My nature cried out for it as instinctively as the
nature of man cries out for God. But all this I needed generally in
vain. You were not always a niggard. You were ready sometimes to give
in your way. But were you ever ready to give in mine when you saw--and
sometimes you must have seen, sometimes you did see--what mine was? I
longed always to give you all you wanted in the way you wanted it. But
you gave when you wished and as you chose to give. I was often
grateful. I was too often grateful. I was unduly grateful. Because I
was giving, I was always giving far more than I received.

"But all that time I had something. All that time I had a memory that
I counted sacred. All that time, like an idiot child, I was clasping
in my hand a farthing, which I believed, which I stated, to be a
shining piece of gold.

"You knew what it was. You knew it was a farthing! You knew--you knew!

"And now that the hour has come when I know, too, can't you understand
that I realize not only that that farthing is a farthing, but that all
farthings are farthings? Can't you understand that I hate those who
have given me farthings when my hands were stretched out for gold--my
hands that were giving gold?

"Can't you understand? Can't you? Then I'll make you understand! I'll
make you! I'll make you!"

Again the blackness gathered itself together, took a form, the form of
a wave, towered up as a gigantic wave towers, rolled upon Artois to
overwhelm him. He stood firm and received the shock. For he was
beginning to understand. He was no longer confronting waves of hatred
which were also waves of mystery.

He had thought that Hermione hated him, hated every one just then,
because of what Ruffo had silently told her that day at Mergellina.
But as he stood there in the dark at the door of that black chamber,
hearing the distant murmur of the sea about the palace walls, there
were borne in upon him, as if in words she told him, all the reasons
for present hatred of him which preceded the great reason of that day;
reasons for hatred which sprang, perhaps, which surely must spring,
from other reasons of love.

His mind was exaggerating, as minds do when the heart is intensely
moved, yet it discerned much truth. And it was very strange, but his
now acute consciousness of a personal hatred coming to him from out of
the darkness of this almost secret chamber, and of its complex causes,
causes which nevertheless would surely never have produced the effect
he felt but for the startling crisis of that day, this acute
consciousness of a personal and fierce hatred bred suddenly in Artois
a new sensation of something that was not hatred, that was the reverse
of hatred. Vere had once compared him to a sleepy lion. The lion was
now awake.

"Hermione," he said--and now his voice was strong and unfaltering--"I
seem to have been listening to you all this time that I have been
standing here. Surely I have been listening to you, hearing your
thoughts. Don't you know it? Haven't you felt it? When I left the
island, when I followed you, I thought I understood. I thought I
understood what you were feeling, almost all that you were feeling. I
know now how little I understood. I didn't realize how much there was
to understand. You've been telling me. Haven't you, Hermione? Haven't
you?"

He paused. But there was no answer.

"I am sure you have been telling me. We must get down to the truth at
last. I thought--till now I have thought that I was more able to read
the truth than most men. You must often have laughed--how you must
have laughed--secretly at my pretensions. Only once--one night in the
garden on the island--I think I saw you laughing. And even then I
didn't understand. Mon Dieu!"

He was becoming fiercely concentrated now on what he was saying. He
was losing all self-consciousness. He was even losing consciousness of
the strange fact that he was addressing a void. It was as if he saw
Hermione, so strongly did he feel her.

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