sides; and” that the coachman wore a black cockade. The servants followed in the waggon the next day, a week after, some time later, going to a little place in Sussex, to Brighton, to London town. His informants had not noticed the lady these last weeks. Mr Pope, the butler at New Place, was a proud, touch-?me-?not gentleman; all the servants were a stiff London lot, and kept themselves to themselves.
Less downright in his approach than Jack, Stephen opened the simple lock of the garden gate with a piece of wire, and the kitchen door with a Morton’s retractor. He walked composedly up the stairs, through the green-?baize door and into the hail. A tall thirty-?day clock was still going, its weight nearly touching the ground; a solemn tock-? tock that echoed through the hail and followed him up into the drawing-?room. Silence; a perfection of dustsheets, rolled carpets, ranged furniture; rays of light that came through the shutters, motes turning in them; moths; the first delicate cobwebs in unexpected places, such as the carved mantelpiece in the library, where Mr Lowndes had written some lines of Sappho large on the wall in chalk.
‘An elegant hand,’ said Stephen, as he stood to consider it. ‘The moon has set, and the Pleiades; midnight is gone; the how’ wear by, and here I lie alone: alone. Perhaps and here I, Sappho, lie alone, to give the sex. No. The sex is immaterial. It is the same for both.’
Silence; anonymous perfection; unstirring air - never a waft or a movement; silence. The smell of bare boards. A tailboy with its face turned to the wall.
In her room the same trim bare sterility; even the looking-?glass was shrouded. It was not so much severe, for the grey light was too soft, as meaningless. There was no waiting in this silence, no tension of any kind:
the creaking of the boards under his feet contained no threat, no sort of passion: he could have leapt or shrieked without affecting the inhuman vacuum of sense. It was as meaningless as total death, a skull in a dim thicket, the future gone, its past wiped out. He had the strongest feeling of the deja-?vu that he had ever experienced, and yet it was familiar enough to him, that certain knowledge of the turn of a dream, the sequence of words that would be said by a stranger in a coach and of his reply, the disposition of a room he had never seen, even to the pattern of the paper on its walls.
In the waste-?paper-?basket there were some balled-?up sheets, the only imperfection, apart from the living clock, in this desert of negation, and the only exception to the completeness of his deja-?vu. ‘What indeed am I looking for?’ he said, and the sound of his voice ran through the open rooms. ‘An out-?of-?date announcement of my death?’ But they were lists in a servant’s hand, quite meaningless, and one paper where a pen had been tried - spluttering lines of ink that might have had a meaning once, but none that could be understood. He tossed them back, stood for a long moment listening to his heart, and walked straight into her dressing-?room. Here he found what he had known he should find: the stark bareness, the pretty satinwood furniture huddled against the wall was of no importance, did not signify; but here, coming from no particular shelf or cupboard, there was the ghost of her scent, now a little stronger, now so tenuous that his most extreme attention could hardly catch it.
‘At least,’ he said, ‘this is not the horror of the last.’
He closed the door with the greatest caution, walked down into the hail; stopped the clock, setting his mark upon the house, and let himself out into the garden. He turned the lock behind him, walked along the leaf-?strewn, already neglected paths, out by the green door and so to the road along the coast. With his hands behind his back and his eyes on this road as it streamed evenly beneath him, watching its flow while there was still any day to see, he followed it until he reached the lights of Deal. Then, remembering that he had left his boat at Dover, he turned and paced the smooth miles back again. ‘It is very well,’ he said. ‘I should have sat in the parlour of an inn, in any case, until I could return and go to bed without any conversation or civilities. This is better by far. I rejoice in this even, sandy road, stretching on and on for ever.’
The morning was rich in such events as the introduction of Mr Floris, the surgeon, his invitation to view the sick-?bay, equipped with his personally-?invented wind-?sail to bring fresh air below, and his flattering eagerness, his flattering deferential eagerness for Dr Maturin’s opinion on Wallace - as clear a case for instant suprapubic cystotomy as Stephen had ever seen; and the appearance of Mrs Miller and her child, bright and early, for the Lively was at single anchor, with the blue peter flying.
She was a pretty young woman with a decided air, and with a hint not of boldness but rather of that freedom which a wedding-?ring and the protection of a child provides. Not that any of this was visible when Jack greeted her on the quarterdeck, however; all was demure gratitude and apologies for the intrusion. Little Brydges would be no trouble, she assured him - he was thoroughly accustomed to ships - had been to Gibraltar and back - was never sick, and never cried.
‘Why, ma’am,’ said Jack, ‘we are delighted to have the honour of your company, and wish it were for farther than Portsmouth. If a man cannot give a brother-?officer’s wife and sister a lift, things are in a sad way. Though I believe we may look forward to the pleasure of having you with us for quite a while, the wind is getting round into that God
- that bothersome southerly quarter.’
‘Uncle John,’ said young Brydges, ‘why are you nodding and winking at Mama? She has not talked to the Captain too much, yet; and I dare say she will stop directly. And I have said nothing at all.’
‘Stephen,’ said Jack, ‘may I come in? I hope I have not woken you - was you asleep?’
‘No,’ said Stephen. ‘Not at all.’
‘Well, the gun-?room is in rather a taking. It seems that a round million of your reptiles got into their cocoa-?pot this morning - immolated themselves by the hundred, crawling in at the spout. They say that the wear and anxiety of such another breakfast would make them give up the service.’
‘Did they note down the exact time?’
‘Oh, I am sure they did. I am sure that in the intervals of avoiding attack, eating their breakfast, and navigating the ship, they hurried off to check the precise moment by the master’s twin chronometers. Ha, ha.’
‘You speak ironically, no doubt. But this is a striking instance of sagacity in bees. I feed them with a syrup of cocoa and sugar. They connect the scent of cocoa with their nourishment. They discover a new source of cocoa-? scent; they busily communicate this discovery to their fellows, together with its location, and there you have the whole situation - as satisfactory a proof as you could wish to see. Tomorrow I hope the gun-?room will note down the time of their first appearance. I bet you a considerable sum of money that it will be within ten minutes either side of seven bells, the moment at which they were first fed.’
‘Do you mean that they will rush in again?’
‘So long as the gun-?room continues to drink heavily-?sugared cocoa, I see no reason why they should ever stop. It will be interesting to see whether this knowledge is passed on to all the subsequent generations of bees. I thank you, Jack, for telling me this: no discovery has given me so much satisfaction for years. Once it has been thoroughly tested - a sequence of some weeks or months - I shall communicate it to Monsieur Huber.’
