“It’s strange,” he said, “how often I’ve longed for a tea like this. In a rough, hurrying sort of life with men, one longs sometimes for refinement—and tea seems to me a symbol of that—peace, security, women, idle talk—and the night outside.”
“A loaf of bread,” she said, “no jam, no cakes.”
“That’s nothing,” he brooded over the thick china cup, which he held awkwardly with an unaccustomed hand.
“Why are you here?” she asked. “You don’t belong. You should be a student, I think. You look like a man who daydreams.”
“Doesn’t even a student need courage?” he questioned bitterly. “And I’m not a dreamer. I hate dreams.”
“Is there anything you care for or want?” She watched him as though he were a new and curious animal.
“To be null and void,” he said without hesitation.
“Dead?”
The sound of the word seemed to draw his eyes to the window, which stared now on complete darkness.
“No, no,” he said, “not that.” He gave a small shiver and spoke again. “When music plays, one does not see or think; one hardly hears. A bowl—and the music is poured in until there is no ‘I,’ I am the music.”
“But why, why,” she asked, “did you ever come to live like this?” and with a small gesture of her hand she seemed to enclose his fear, his misery, his fugitive body and mind.
“My father did it before me,” he replied.
“Was that all?” she asked.
“No, I was fascinated,” he said. “There’s a man I know with a voice as near to music as any voice I’ve ever heard,” he hesitated and then looked up at her, “except for yours.”
She paid no attention to the compliment, but frowning a little at the fire nipped her lip between small sharp teeth.
“Can’t he help you now that you are in trouble?” she asked. “Can’t you go to him?”
He stared at her in amazement. He had forgotten that she was ignorant of his story and of his flight from Carlyon, and because he had forgotten, her remark came to him with the force of a wise suggestion. “Andrews, Andrews,” an echo of a soft melancholy voice reached him. “Why are you frightened? It’s Carlyon, merely Carlyon.” The voice was tipped always with the cool, pure poetry which it loved. Why, indeed, should he not go to Carlyon and confess the wrong he had done and explain? That voice could not help but understand. He would go as the woman who had sinned to Christ, and the comparison seemed to him to carry no blasphemy, so strong was the impulse to rise and go to the door and go out into the night.
“Is it of him you are frightened?” she asked, watching the changes in his face. He had thought her voice also near to music, and now he sat still, watching with a strange disinterestedness the two musics come in conflict for the mastery of his movements. One was subtle, a thing of suggestions and of memories; the other, plain, clear-cut, ringing. One spoke of a dreamy escape from reality; the other was reality, deliberately sane. If he stayed sooner or later he must face his fear; if he went he left calmness, clarity, instinctive wisdom for a vague and uncertain refuge. How would Carlyon greet his confession? Carlyon was a romantic with his face in the clouds, who hated any who gave him contact with a grubby earth. Andrews remembered suddenly, his mind still drifting between the two differing musics, another Carlyon, a Carlyon who had shot one of his own men in the back, because on a cargo-running night the man had raped a young girl. No trouble followed, for the man had been a coward and unpopular in a crew of men, who with all their faults and villainies, had the one virtue of courage. Andrews remembered Carlyon’s face, as he stepped back from the dark bundle where it lay on a beach silvered by the moon. The thoughtful eyes which peered from the apelike skull had been suffused with disgust and a kind of disillusionment. They had re-embarked with the utmost speed, lest the shot should have aroused the revenue men, but Carlyon was the last to enter the boat. He came with evident reluctance like a man who had left a lover on land, and he had indeed left a lover, whom he did not see again for many weeks, a dear and romantic illusion of adventure.
“Andrews, Andrews,” the voice had lost its charm. That music was spell-less, for Andrews remembered now that it was with the same soft melancholy regret that Carlyon had spoken to the offending smuggler. Pointing out to the sea he had said: “Look here. Can you tell me what that is?” and the man had turned his back to scan a waste of small ridges, which formed, advanced, fell and receded, and continued so to form, advance, fall and recede, as his eyes glazed in death.
“I can’t go to him,” he said aloud.
“But if he came to you? …” she asked, as though she intended to make up a quarrel between two schoolboys on their dignity.
“No, no,” he said, and suddenly rose with a poignant, stabbing sense of fear. “What’s that?” he whispered. Elizabeth leant forward in her chair listening. “You are imagining things,” she said.
With unexpected brutality he struck her hand, as it lay on the table, with his fist, so that she caught her breath with pain. “Can’t you whisper?” he asked. “Do you want to tell the whole world there’s someone here? There, didn’t you hear that?” And this time she thought that she could hear a very faint stir of gravel no louder than a rustle of leaves. She nodded her head slowly. “There’s someone moving on the path,” she murmured. The hand which he had struck stiffened into a small and resolute fist.
“For God’s sake,” Andrews muttered, staring round him. She
