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Jerome K. Jerome - "Fanny and the Servant Problem"

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In the Wilderness

R >> Robert Hichens >> In the Wilderness




His feet echoed on the dirty staircase so he mounted slowly up till he
stood in front of his own door. Slowly, like one making an effort that
was almost painful to him he searched for his key and drew it out. His
hand shook as he inserted the key into the keyhole. He tried to steady
his hand, but he could not control its furtive and perpetual movement.
When the door was open he struck a match, and lit a candle that stood on
a chair in the dingy and narrow lobby. Then he turned round wearily
to shut the door. He was possessed by a great fatigue, and wondered
whether, if he fell on his bed in the blackness, he would be able to
sleep. As he turned, he saw, lying on the matting at his feet, a square
white envelope. It was lying upside down. Some one must have pushed it
under the door while he was out.

He stood looking at it for a minute. Then he shut the door, bent down,
picked up the envelope, turned it over and held it near the candle
flame. He read his name and the handwriting was Rosamund's.

After a long pause he took the candle and carried the letter into his
sitting-room. He set the candle down on the table on which lay "The
Kasidah" and a few other books, laid the letter beside it, with
trembling hands drew up a chair and sat down.

Rosamund had written to him. When? Before she had learnt the truth or
afterwards?

For a long time he sat there, leaning over the table, staring at the
address which her hand had written. And he saw her hand, so different
from Mrs. Clarke's, and he remembered its touch upon his, absolutely
unlike the touch of any other hand ever felt by him. Something quivered
in his flesh. The agony of the body rushed upon him and mingled with
the agony of the soul. He bent down, laid his hot forehead against the
letter, and shut his eyes.

A clock struck presently. He opened his eyes, lifted his head, took up
the envelope, quickly tore it, and unfolded the paper within.


"HOTEL DE BYZANCE, CONSTANTINOPLE, Wednesday evening

"I am here. I want to see you. Shall I come to you to-morrow? I can come
at any time, or I can meet you at any place you choose. Only tell me the
hour and how to go if it is difficult.

"ROSAMUND."


Wednesday evening! It was now the night of Wednesday. Then Rosamund
had written to him after she had been to Santa Sophia and had met Mrs.
Clarke. She knew, and yet she wrote to him; she asked to see him; she
even offered to come to his rooms. The thing was incomprehensible.

He read the note again. He pored over every word in it almost like a
child. Then he held it in his hand, sat back in his chair and wondered.

What did Rosamund mean? Why did she wish to see him? What could she
intend to do? His intimate knowledge of what Rosamund was companioned
him at this moment--that knowledge which no separation, which no hatred
even, could ever destroy. She was fastidiously pure. She could never be
anything else. He could not conceive of her ever drawing near to, and
associating herself deliberately with, bodily degradation. He thought of
her as he had known her, with her relations, her friends, with himself,
with Robin. Always in every relation of life a radiant purity had been
about her like an atmosphere; always she had walked in rays of the sun.
Until Robin had died! And then she had withdrawn into the austere purity
of the religious life. He felt it to be absolutely impossible that she
should seek him, even seek but one interview with him, if she knew what
his life had been during the last few months. And, feeling that, he was
now forced to the conclusion that Mrs. Clarke's intuition had gone for
once astray. If Rosamund knew she would never have written that note.
Again he looked at it, read it. It must have been written in complete
ignorance. Mrs. Clarke had made a mistake. Perhaps she had been betrayed
into error by her own knowledge of guilt. And yet such a lapse was
very uncharacteristic of her. He compared his knowledge of her with his
knowledge of Rosamund. It was absolutely impossible that Rosamund had
written that letter to him with full understanding of his situation in
Constantinople. But she might have heard rumors. She might have resolved
to clear them up. Having traveled out with the intention of seeking
a reconciliation she might have thought it due to him to accept
evil tidings of him only from his own lips. Always, he knew, she had
absolutely trusted in his loyalty and faithfulness to her. Perhaps then,
even though she had put him out of her life, she was unable to believe
that he had tried to forget her in unfaithfulness. Perhaps that was the
true explanation of her conduct.

Could he then save himself from destruction by a great lie?

He sat pondering that problem, oblivious of time. Could he lie to
Rosamund? All his long bitterness against her for the moment was gone,
driven out by his self-condemnation. A great love must forgive. It
cannot help itself. It carries within it, as a child is carried in the
womb, the sweet burden of divinity, and shares in the attributes of
God. So it was with Dion on that night as he sat in his dingy room. And
presently his soul rejected the lie he had abominably thought of. He
knew he could not tell Rosamund a life. Then what was he to do?

He drew out of a drawer a piece of letter paper, dipped a pen in ink.
He had a mind to write the horrible truth which he could surely never
speak.

"I have received your letter," he wrote, in a blurred and unsteady
handwriting. Then he stopped. He stared at the paper, pushed it away
from him, and got up. He could not write the truth. He went to the
window and looked out into the dark night. Here and there he saw faint
lights. But Stamboul was almost hidden in the gloom, a city rather
suggested by its shadow than actually visible. The Golden Horn was a
tangled mystery. There were some withdrawn stars.

Should he not reply to Rosamund's letter? If she had heard rumors about
his life would not his silence convey to her the fact that they were
true? He had perhaps only to do nothing and Rosamund would understand
and--would leave Constantinople.

The blackness which shrouded Stamboul suddenly seemed to him to become
more solid, impregnable. He felt that his own life would be drowned in
blackness if Rosamund went away. And abruptly he knew that he must see
her. Whatever the cost, whatever the shame and bitterness, he must see
her at once. He would tell her, or try to tell her, what he had been
through, what he had suffered, why he had done what he had done.
Possibly she would be able to understand. If only he could find the
words that would give her the inner truth perhaps they might reach
her heart. Something intense told him that he must try to make her
understand how he had loved her, through all his hideous attempts to
slay his love of her. Could a woman understand such a thing? Desperately
he wondered. Might not his terrible sincerity perhaps overwhelm her
doubts?

He left the window, sat down again at the table, and wrote quickly.


"I have your letter. Will you meet me to-morrow at Eyub, in the cemetery
on the hill? I will be near the Tekkeh of the dancing Dervishes. I will
be there before noon, and will wait all day.

"DION"


When he began to write he knew that he could not make his confession to
Rosamund within the four walls of his sordid and dingy room. Her power
to understand would surely be taken from her there. Might it not be
released under the sky of morning, within sight of those minarets which
he had sometimes feared, but which he had always secretly, in some
obscure way, loved even in the most abominable moments of his abominable
life, as he had always secretly, beneath all the hard bitterness of his
stricken heart, loved Rosamund? From them came the voice which would not
be gainsaid, the voice which whispered, "In the East thou shalt find me
if thou hast not found me in the West." Might not that voice help him
when he spoke to Rosamund, help her to understand him, help her perhaps
even to----

But there he stopped. He dared not contemplate the possibility of her
being able to accept the man he had become as her companion. And yet now
he felt himself somehow closely akin to the former Dion, flesh of that
man's flesh, bone of his bone. It was as if his sin fell from him when
he so utterly repented of it.

Slowly he put the note he had written into an envelope, sealed it and
wrote the address--"Mrs. Dion Leith, Hotel de Byzance." He blotted it.
Then he fetched his hat and stick. He meant to take the note himself to
the Hotel de Byzance. The night might be made for sleep, but he knew he
could not sleep till he had seen Rosamund. When he was out in the air,
and was walking uphill towards Pera, he realized that within him, in
spite of all, something of hope still lingered. Rosamund's letter to
him had wrought already a wonderful change in his tortured life. The
knowledge that he would see her again, be with her alone, even if only
for an hour, even if only that he might tell her what would alienate
her from him forever, thrilled through him, seemed even to shed a fierce
strength and alertness through his body. Now that he was going to see
her once more he knew what the long separation from her had meant to
him. He had known the living death. Within a few hours he would have
at least some moments of life. They would be terrible moments,
shameful--but they would take him back into life. Fiercely,
passionately, he looked forward to them.

He left his letter at the hotel, giving it into the hands of a weary
Albanian night porter. Then he returned to his rooms, undressed, washed
in cold water, and lay down on his bed. And presently he was praying in
the dark, instinctively almost as a child prays. He was praying for
the impossible. For he believed that it was absolutely impossible the
Rosamund could ever forgive him for what he had done, and yet he prayed
that she might forgive him. And he felt as if he were praying with all
his body as well as with all his soul.

In the dawn he was tired. But he did not sleep at all.

About ten o'clock he went out to take the boat to Eyub.



CHAPTER XVI

At a few minutes past eleven Dion was in the vast cemetery on the
hill. It was a gray morning, still and hot. Languor was in the air.
The grayness, the silence, the oily waters, suggested a brooding
resignation. The place of the dead was almost deserted. He wandered
through it, and met only two or three Turks, who returned his glance
impassively. After the sleepless night he had come out feeling painfully
excited and scarcely master of himself. In Galata and on the boat he had
not dared to look into the eyes of those who thronged about him. He had
felt transparent, as if all his thoughts and his tumultuous feelings
must be visible to any one who regarded him with attention. But now he
was encompassed by a sensation of almost dull calmness. He looked at the
grayness and at the innumerable graves, he was conscious of the
stagnant heat, he seemed to draw into himself the wide silence, and the
excitement faded out of him, was replaced by a curious inertia. Both
his mind and his body felt tired and resigned. The gravestones suggested
death, the end of the early hopes, aspirations, yearnings and despairs
of men. A few bones and a headstone--to that he was traveling. And yet
all through the night he had been on fire with longing, and with a fear
that had seemed almost red hot. Now he thought he perhaps understood the
fatalism of the Turk. Whatever must be must be. All was written surely
from the beginning. It was written that to-day he should be alone in the
cemetery of Eyub, and it was written that Rosamund should come to him
there, or not come to him.

If she did not come?

He remembered the exact wording of his letter to her, and he realized
for the first time that in her letter she had asked him to tell her how
to go to their meeting-place "if it is difficult," and he had not told
her what she had to do in order to come to Eyub.

But of course she had a dragoman, and he would bring her. She could not
possibly come alone.

Perhaps, however, she would not come.

Long ago she had opened and read his letter and had taken her decision.
If she was coming, probably she was already on the way. He forced
himself to imagine the whole day passed by him alone in the cemetery,
the light failing as the evening drew on, the darkness of night
swallowing up Stamboul, the knowledge forced upon him that Rosamund had
abandoned the idea of seeing him again. He imagined himself returning to
Constantinople in the night, going to the Hotel de Byzance and learning
that she had left by the Orient express of that day for England.

What would he feel?

A handful of bones and a headstone! Whatever happened to-day, and in
the future, he was on his way to just that. Then, why agonize, why allow
himself to be riven and tormented by longings and fears that seemed
born out of something eternal? Perhaps, indeed, there was nothing at
all after this short life was ended, nothing but the blank grayness of
eternal unconsciousness. If so, how little even his love for Rosamund
meant. It must be some bodily attraction, some imperious call to his
flesh which he had mistaken for a far greater thing. Men, perhaps, are
merely tricked by those longings of theirs which seem defiant of time,
by those passionate tendernesses in which eternity seems breathing. All
that they think they live by may be illusion.

Mechanically, as the minutes drew on towards noon, he walked towards the
Tekkeh of the Dervishes. Once he had come here to meet Cynthia Clarke,
and now he had deliberately chosen the same place for the terrible
interview with his wife. It could only be terrible. He did not know what
he was going to do and say when she came (if she did come), but he
did know that somehow he would tell her the whole truth about himself,
without, of course, mentioning the name of a woman. He would lay bare
his soul. It was fitting that he should confess his sin in the place
of its beginnings. He had begun to sin against the woman whom he could
never unlove here in this wilderness of the dead, when he had spoken
against her to the woman who had long ago resolved some day to make
him sin. (He told himself now that he had definitely spoken against
Rosamund.) In this sad place of disordered peace, under the gray, and
within sight of the minarets lifted to the Unknown God, he had opened
the book of evil things; in this place he would close it forever--if
Rosamund came. He felt now that there was something within him which,
despite all his perversity, all that he had given himself to in the fury
of the flesh, was irrevocably dedicated to that which was sane, clean
and healthy. By this he was resolved to live henceforth, not because
of any religious feeling, not because of any love of that Unknown God
who--so he supposed--had flung him into the furnace of suffering as
refuse may be flung into a fire, but because he now began to understand
that this dedicated something was really Him, was of the core of his
being, not to be rooted out. He had left Cynthia Clarke. In a short
time--before the gray faded over the minarets of Stamboul--Rosamund
would have done with him forever. He faced complete solitude, the
wilderness without any human soul, good or bad, to keep him company; but
he faced it with a sort of hard and final resignation. By nightfall he
would have done with it all. And then--the living Death? Yes, no doubt
that would be his portion. He smiled faintly as he thought of his
furious struggle against just that.

"It was written," he thought. "Everything is written. But we are tricked
into a semblance of vigorous life and energy by our great delusion that
we possess free will."

He sat down beneath a cypress and remained quite still, looking downward
towards the water, downward along the path by which, if Rosamund came,
she would ascend the hill towards him.

It was nearly noon when he saw below him on this path the figure of a
woman walking slowly. She was followed by a man.

Dion got up. He could not really see who this woman was, but he knew who
she was. Instantly he knew. And instantly all the calm, all the fatalism
of which for a moment he had believed himself possessed, all the
brooding resignation of the man who says to his soul, "It is written!"
was swept away. He stood there, bare of his pretenses, and he knew
himself for what he was, just a man who was the prisoner of a great
love, a man shaken by the tempest of his feeling, a man who would, who
must, fight against the living Death which, only a moment before, he had
been contemplating even with a smile.

She had come, and with her life.

He put one arm against the seamed trunk of the cypress. Mechanically,
and unaware what he was doing, he had taken off his hat. He held it in
his hand. All the change which sorrow and excess had wrought upon him
was exposed for Rosamund to see. She had last seen him plainly as he
drove away with little Robin from the Green Court of Welsley on that
morning of fate. Now at last she was to see him again as she had remade
him.

She came on slowly. Presently she turned to her Greek dragoman.

"Where's the Tekkeh? Is it much farther?"

"No, Madame."

He pointed. As he did so Rosamund saw Dion's figure standing against the
cypress. She stood still. Her face was white and drawn, but full of
an almost flaming resolution. The mysticism which at moments Dion had
detected in her expression, in her eyes, during the years passed with
her, a mysticism then almost evasive, subtly withdrawn, shone now, like
a dominating quality which scorned to hide itself, or perhaps could
not hide itself. She looked like a woman under the influence of a fixed
purpose, fascinated, drawn onward, almost in ecstasy, and yet somehow,
somewhere, tormented.

"Please go back to the foot of the hill," she said to the Greek who was
with her.

"But, Madame, I dare not leave you alone here."

"I shall not be alone."

The Greek looked surprised.

"Some one is waiting for me, up there, by that cypress--a--a friend."

"Oh--I see, Madame."

With a look of intense comprehension he turned to go.

"At the foot of the hill, please!" said Rosamund.

"Certainly, Madame."

The dragoman was smiling as he walked away. Rosamund stood still
watching him till he was out of sight. Then she turned. The figure of a
man was still standing motionless under the old cypress tree among the
graves. She set her lips together and went towards it. Now that she saw
Dion, even though he was in the distance, she felt again intensely, as
if in her flesh, the bodily wrong he had done to her. She strove not to
feel this. She told herself that, after her sin against him, she had no
right to feel it. In her heart she knew that she was the greater sinner.
She realized now exactly the meaning of what she had done. She had no
more illusions about herself, about her conduct. She condemned herself
utterly. She had come to that place of the dead absolutely resolved to
ask forgiveness of Dion. And yet now that she saw his body the sense of
personal outrage woke in her, gripped her. She grew hot, she tingled. A
fierce jealousy of the flesh tormented her. And suddenly she was afraid
of herself. Was her body then more powerful than her soul? Was she,
who had always cared for the things of the soul hopelessly physical? It
seemed to her that even now she might succumb to what she supposed was
an overwhelming personal pride, that even now she might be unable to do
what she had come all the long way from England to do. But she forced
herself to go onward up the path. She looked down; she would not see
that body of a man which had belonged to her and to which she had
belonged; but she made herself go towards it.

Presently she felt that she was drawing near to it; then that she was
close to it. Then she stopped. Standing still for a moment she prayed.
She prayed that she might be able in this supreme crisis of her life to
govern the baser part of herself, that she might be allowed, might be
helped, to rise to those heights of which Father Robertson had spoken
to her, that she might at last realize the finest possibilities of her
nature, that she might be able to do the most difficult thing, to be
humble, to forget any injury which had been inflicted upon herself, and
to remember only the tremendous injury she had inflicted upon another.
When her prayer was finished she did not know whether it had been
heard, whether, if it had been heard, it had been accepted and would be
granted. She did not know at all what she would be able to do. But she
looked up and saw Dion. He was close to her, was standing just in front
of her, with one arm holding the cypress trunk, trembling slightly and
gazing at her, gazing at her with eyes that were terrible because they
revealed so much of agony, of love and of terror. She looked into those
eyes, she looked at the frightful change written on the face that had
once been so familiar to her, and suddenly an immense pity inundated
her. It seemed to her that she endured in that moment all the suffering
which Dion had endured since the tragedy at Welsley added to her own
suffering. She stood there for a moment looking at him. Then she said
only:

"Forgive me, oh, forgive me!"

Tears rushed into her eyes. She had been able to say it. It had not been
difficult to say. She could not have said anything else. And her soul
had said it as well as her lips.

"Forgive me! Forgive me!" she repeated.

She went up to Dion, took his poor tortured temples, from which the
hair, once so thick, had retreated, in her hands, and whispered again in
the midst of her tears:

"Forgive me!"

"I've been false to you," he said huskily. "I've broken my vow to you.
I've lived with another woman--for months. I've been a beast. I've
wallowed. I've gone right down. Everything horrible--I've--I've done
it. Only last night I meant to--to--I only broke away from it all last
night. I heard you were here and then I--I----"

"Forgive me!"

She felt as if God were speaking in her, through her. She felt as if
in that moment God had taken complete possession of her, as if for
the first time in her life she was just an instrument, formed for the
carrying out of His tremendous purposes, able to carry them out. Awe
was upon her. But she felt a strange joy, and even a wonderful sense of
peace.

"But you don't hear what I tell you. I have been false to you. I have
sinned against you for months and months."

"Hush! It was my sin."

"Yours? Oh, Rosamund!"

She was still holding his temples. He put his hands on her shoulders.

"Yes, it was my sin. I understand now how you love me. I never
understood till to-day."

"Yes, I love you."

"Then," she said, very simply. "I know you will be able to forgive me.
Don't tell me any more ever about what you have done. It's blotted out.
Just forgive me--and let us begin again."

She took away her hands from his temples. He did not kiss her, but
he took one of her hands, and they stood side by side looking towards
Stamboul, towards the City of the Unknown God. His eyes and hers were on
the minarets, those minarets which seem to say to those who have come to
them from afar, and whose souls are restless:

"In the East thou shalt find me if thou hast not found me in the West."

After a long silence Rosamund pressed Dion's hand, and it seemed to him
that never, in the former days of their union--not even in Greece--had
she pressed it with such tenderness, with such pulse-stirring intimacy
and trust in him. Then, still with her eyes upon the minarets, she said
in a low voice:

"I think Robin knows."



CHAPTER XVII

Not many days later, when the green valley of Olympia was wrapped in the
peace of a sunlit afternoon, and a faint breeze drew from the pine trees
on the hills of Kronos a murmur as of distant voices whispering the
message of Eternity, the keeper of the house of the Hermes was disturbed
in a profound reverie by the sound of slow footfalls not far from his
dwelling. He stirred, lifted his head and stared vaguely about him. No
travelers had come of late to the shrine he guarded. Hermes had been
alone with the child upon his arm, dreaming of its unclouded future with
the serenity of one who had trodden the paths where the gods walk, and
who could rise at will above the shadowed ways along which men creep
in anxiety, dreading false steps and the luring dangers of their fates.
Hermes had been alone with his happy burden, forgotten surely by the
world which his delicate majesty ignored without disdain. But now
pilgrims, perhaps from a distant land, were drawing near to look upon
him, to spend a little while in the atmosphere of his shining calm,
perhaps to learn something of the message he had to give to those who
were capable of receiving it.

A man and a woman, moving slowly side by side, came into the patch of
strong sunshine which made a glory before the house, paused there and
stood still.

From the shadow in which he was sitting the guardian examined them with
the keen eyes of one who had looked upon travelers of many nations. He
knew at once that the woman was English. As for the man--yes, probably
he was English too, Dark, lean, wrinkled, he was no doubt an Englishman
who had been much away from his own country, which the guardian
conceived of as wrapped in perpetual fogs and washed by everlasting
rains.