Across the Stream

Archie poured himself out his first tumbler. He held it in his hand a moment, not tasting it, now that he had got it. Delay, when the delay was voluntary, would but add deliciousness to the moment when his mouth and throat would feel that cold sting…

"I don't understand," he said, watching the bubbles stream up from the sides and bottom of his glass.

His father threw down the paper.

"It's as simple as heads and tails," he said. "I've bought a quantity of Russian mining shares, without paying for them, in the hope that they will go up. If they do, I shall sell at the higher price and pocket the difference. But if they go down I shall have to pay the difference at the next account. If the shares are each worth L8 now, and at the next account are only standing at L6, I shall have to pay L2 on each share. If I like, I can telegraph to my broker to sell now, while they're at L8. I shall have a loss because I bought them at L9, but I shall no longer be running any risks. But it's thirsty work talking. Just fill my glass again."

"But then, if the scare dies down again, I suppose your shares will go up," said Archie.

His father laughed.

"Sound business head you've got, Archie," he said. "You've got the hang of it; it's just heads and tails. Never you speculate: it's a rotten business. I've got into the habit now, but I recommend you not to take to it. It's easy enough to take to it, but it's the devil to break it. Same with other things. Make a habit of virtue, and you'll never go to the deuce."

He watched Archie a moment, who with head thrown back, and young, strong throat throbbing as he swallowed, was reaping the rewards of his delay in drinking. And when, with brightened eyes, he put his glass down, he stood there like some modern incarnation of Dionysus, his face pure Greek from the low-growing brown curls to the straight nose and the short round chin. With a cloak over his shoulders in exchange for his dress-clothes, with sandals for his patent leather shoes, and a wine-cup for his tall glass, he might have stepped straight from some temple-frieze, and his father wondered how any girl in her senses could have chosen the precise, pedantic man whom she was soon going to marry, when Archie was but waiting, as she must have known, for his moment. He, poor fellow, was often a very dreary and dispirited boy all day; but in the evening he came to himself again, and was what he used to be. And yet, though it seemed to Lord Tintagel a cruel thing to wish to deprive him of the few hours of the joy of living that were his during the day, he was smitten, with the easy and vague remorse of a man only half-sober, to see the effect that alcohol had on Archie, who, all his life till now, had scarcely tasted it. But he remembered when he himself had been at that stage; he remembered also his father giving him just such a warning as he now proposed to give Archie. He wished he had taken notice of it, and he hoped that Archie would.

That evening, thirty years ago, he recalled now with extreme distinctness. The scene had taken place in this very room, and his father, already half-tipsy, as his habit was, had warned him of the dangers of drink, and he remembered how laughable and grotesque such a warning had seemed coming from lips that had lost all precision of utterance. But he told himself that he was not going to commit any such absurdity: he was perfectly sober, indeed it seemed very likely that it had never entered Archie's head to think of him as a drunkard. Sometimes he stumbled a little going upstairs at night, sometimes he had an impression that his pronunciation was not quite distinct; but he never became incapable, as he could remember his father becoming, and being carried off to bed by two perspiring footmen.

He put down his second glass without tasting it.

"There's something I want to speak to you about, Archie," he said, "and you mustn't be vexed with me, because I'm only doing what I believe to be my duty. You won't be vexed, will you?"

Archie looked at him in surprise.

"No, I don't suppose I shall, father," he said. "What is it?"

His father got up and stood by his chair quite steadily, for he leaned back against the high chimney-piece.

"Well, I want to you be careful about that stuff," he said, pointing to the bottle. "That's one of the habits I was speaking about, which they say is so easy to keep clear of, but so hard to break. You drink rather freely, you know, whereas a few months ago you never touched wine or spirits. It's an awful snare – you may get badly entangled in it before you know you are caught at all."

Archie kept his lucid eyes fixed on his father's, and not a tremor of his beautiful mouth betrayed his inward laughter, his derisive merriment at this solemn adjuration delivered by a man who spoke very carefully for fear of his words all running into each other like the impress of ink on blotting-paper. It really was ludicrously funny, and the immortal Mr. Stiggins came into his mind.

"I hope you don't think a whisky and soda after dinner is dangerous, father," he said. "You usually have one yourself, you know."

He moved across to the table as he spoke, and handed his father the drink he had mixed for him but a few moments before. Lord Tintagel, quite missing the irony of the act, began sipping it as he talked.

"No, of course not, my dear boy," he said. "I'm not a faddist who thinks there's a microbe of delirium tremens in every glass of wine. But – though you may never have heard it – your grandfather was a man who habitually took too much, and it's strange how that sort of failing runs in families."

Archie's mouth broadened into a smile.

"Skipping a generation now and then," he said gravely.

His father turned sharply on him.

"Eh? What?" he asked.

He looked hard at Archie for a moment – as hard, that is, as his rather wandering power of focus allowed him – and suddenly beheld himself with Archie's eyes, even as, thirty years ago, he had beheld his father when he spoke to him on precisely the same theme. He put down his glass, and a wave of shame as he saw himself as Archie saw him, went over him.

"I know: this doesn't come very well from me, Archie," he said. "It's ridiculous, isn't it? But I meant well."

He looked at the boy with a pathetic, deprecating glance.

"If I make an effort, will you make one, too?" he asked. "I've gone far along that road, and I should be sorry to see you following me. I should indeed. Just now I know you're unhappy, and a bottle of wine makes things more tolerable, doesn't it?"

Archie, in his empty, exasperated heart felt a sort of pity for his father, which was based on scorn. Something inside Lord Tintagel was probably serious and sincere, and yet it was what he had drunk that stimulated his scruples for Archie. He was in a mellow, kindly, moralizing stage in his cups that Archie had often noticed before. Certainly he himself did not want to become like that, but he felt that he was not within measurable distance of the need of making any resolution on the subject, so far was he from needing the exercise of his will. Just at present, even as his father had said, he was unhappy, and his unhappiness melted in the sunshine of drink. He did not care for it in itself; he but took it, so he told himself, like medicine because his mind was ailing.

"Well, let us talk about it to-morrow," he said. "We'll make some rule, shall we, father? And don't imagine for a moment that I am vexed with you. But I shall go upstairs now, I think. I've got some writing I want to do."

He hesitated a moment.

"I'll just take a night-cap with me," he said. "Good-night, father."

"Good-night, my dear boy; God bless you! We'll have a talk to-morrow."

Archie took the glass he had filled out into the hall, and waited there a moment, and the pity faded from his mind, leaving only contempt. It was just the maudlin mood that had prompted his father to be so ridiculous, and talk about resolutions. Certainly resolutions would do him no harm, and the keeping of them would undoubtedly do him good, for, instead of the firm, masterful man whom Archie had known as the rather prodigious denizen of that formidable room, there sat there now a weak, entangled creature. Archie could hardly believe that, in years not so long past, he had been afraid of his father: now his whole force, that dominating, intangible quality, had vanished. Occasionally he still flew into fits of anger that alarmed nobody, but that was all that was left of his power.

Archie sat for a few minutes on the hall-table, instead of going upstairs, for he meant, with a certain object in view, to go back to his father's room, on some trivial errand, and, as he waited, the big clock ticked him back into boyhood. There was the fire-place by which Abracadabra sat on the last of her appearances; there the screen behind which, as he had subsequently ascertained, William had hidden with a trumpet and the servants' dinner-bell, there the side-door into the gardens through which, pleasingly excited, he had hurried with the box for coffin of the dead bird which the cat had killed… A hundred memories crowded about him, and not one, save where Blessington was concerned, held any romance or tenderness for him. They were as meaningless as pictures taken out from the empty house and leaning against the railings in the street: in the house itself, his bitter, lonely spirit, there was nothing left but the places where once they hung.

He went back to his father's room, crossing the hall with light foot, and turning the handle of the door with swiftness and silence. There was his father by the table, filling his glass again. It was just that which Archie wished to verify.

"I only came back for a book," he said. "Good-night again."

CHAPTER X

Archie went straight up to his room: his brimming glass was difficult to carry quite steadily, and he reduced its contents half-way upstairs. William had orders always to put whisky and soda in his room in case he wanted to sit up and write; but sometimes William forgot, or, at any rate, did not obey, and Archie wondered if the man did it on purpose, with perhaps the same excellent intentions as those which flowered so decorously in his father's mind. But to-night all was as it should be, and, as it was very hot, Archie undressed and put on his pyjamas before settling down to work. Writing, the absorbing joy of creation, the delicate etching of sentences that bit into the plate, still possessed him when he had taken the requisite evening dose.

But to-night, though he had got his material ready, his hand could not accomplish the fashioning of it, and he got up and walked with bare feet, once or twice up and down the room, wondering why he could not link up his thoughts to his power of expression. He was nearly at the end of one of those sea-stories, which he had begun at Silorno, and he knew exactly what he meant to say. The brain-centre that dictated was charged, and sufficiently stimulated, and yet he could get nothing on to paper that was worth putting there, though he was ready to write, and wanted to write.

He had not drunk too much and made himself fuddled; he had not drunk too little, and left the bitter weeds of daily consciousness uncovered, like rocks at low tide.

He sat and thought, wrote and impatiently erased again, and at last put down his pen. Perhaps even this, the only living interest that just now existed for him, was being taken from him also, and was following down the channel which had emptied itself into Helena. She had taken from him everything else that meant life: it would be like her consistency to take that also, and leave him nude and empty. It was not that she wanted the gift which she – in his vague, excited thought – seemed to be robbing him of; it was only that she and the memory of how she had treated him was a vampire to his blood. She had sucked him empty, drained him dry of happiness, of joy of life, of human interests. More than that, his love, the best thing which he had to give her, and for which she had no use, she now seemed to have treated with some devilish alchemy, so that it turned bitter; hate, like some oozy scum, rose from the depths of it, and covered its crystal with poisonous growth.

This would never do; the rocks at low tide had become uncovered, and, while he slipped and stumbled among them, bruising himself at every step with the thought of Helena, he could never get that abstraction and detachment which he knew were the necessary conditions of his writing. And all power of achieving that seemed taken from him; he felt himself an impotent atom, unable to order the workings of his own brain, defenceless against any thoughts that might assault him.

The house was perfectly quiet; the stillness of the midsummer night had flowed into its open windows and drowned it deep in that profound tranquillity that was yet tense with the energy of the spinning world and the far-flung orbits of the myriad stars. The moon had long since sunk, but the galaxy of uncounted worlds flared on their courses, driven onwards by the inexhaustible eternity of creative forces that ran through the stars, even as it ran through the humblest herb that put forth its unnoticed blossom on the wayside. But Archie, in this bitter stagnation that paralysed him, seemed to himself to have no part in life: all that current of energy that bubbled through the world, with its impulses of good and evil, love and hate, seemed to have been cut off from him. He neither loved nor hated any more. There was the nightmare of this death in life: at any price, and under whatever inspiration, he longed to be in the current again. Tonight even drink had failed him.

He had walked across to the window, and came back to his chair at the table where was spread the sheet of paper covered with the scrawlings and erasures which were all the last two hours had to show. And at this precise moment, as he looked at them in a dull despair, and idea flashed across the blank field of his brain. Perhaps there might still be some spark of life, of individuality latent without him, which he could reach by that surrender of his conscious self which had been familiar to him in his childhood. There, just in front of him, below his shaded lamp, lay his cigarette-case, with one bright point of light on it, and, lying back in his chair with half-closed eyes he gazed at this in order to produce that hypnotic condition in which the subconscious self comes to the surface.

Almost at once the mysterious spell began to act. Across the field of his vision there began to pass waves of light and shadow, moving upwards with a regular motion, while through them like a buoy moored in a rough sea there remained steadfast that bright speck on his cigarette-case, now for a moment submerged in a wave of shadow, but appearing again. Upwards and upwards moved the waves, and then it seemed that it was they which were stationary, while he himself was sinking down through them, as through crystal-clear waters, looking up at the sunny surface which rose ever higher and more remote above him. As he sank into this dim, delicious world, the sensation of being alive again and in touch with living intelligences grew momently more vivid. It was the very seat and hearth of life that in him before had been cold and numbed; now, though surface perceptions were gradually withdrawn, his essential being tingled with the rapture of returning vitality.

Once or twice during this descent his ears, through which there poured the roar of rushing waters, had been startled as by some surface perception of the sound of loud rappings somewhere in the room; but they had not disturbed his steadfast gaze at the point of light; and once again he had heard a voice faintly familiar near him that said "I am coming." But he was far too intent on his progress to let the interruption break in upon it, and indeed those sounds seemed to be less an interruption than a confirmation to his surface-senses of what was happening to him… And then he knew, as he sank down to rest at last on the bottom of that unsounded sea, who it was who was filling him with the sense of life again, for, echoing not only in his ears, but somewhere in his soul, he heard the same voice, which he now clearly recognized, and which had spoken to him years ago at Grives, say, "Archie, I am here."

* * * * *

Archie was conscious on two separate planes of consciousness. All round him and high above him were the gleams and aqueous shadows of the subconscious world, but here and there those seemed to be pierced, and through them, as through rents of mist, he had glimpses of the material plane. He could see, for instance, part of the sheet of paper in front of him, and he could see the far corner of his table. And by it, very faint and unfocusable, part of it in the mists of the subconscious world, part in the harder outlines of reality, there was standing the figure of a young man. How it was dressed he could not see, or did not care to notice, but when for a moment the mist cleared off its face, he recognized the strong likeness to himself, even as he had recognized the likeness to himself in the photograph which he had found in the cache. But here was no photograph: instead, mysteriously translated into outlines and features visible to mortal eyes, was the semblance of Martin himself. It wavered and flickered, like the blown flame of a candle, but it was there, standing at the corner of his table. And, as it spoke, he saw the mouth move and the throat throb.

"I have managed to come back, Archie," he said, "because you were in such trouble, and because you didn't understand the warning you had. Do you understand now?"

The whole explanation flashed on him.