But the door of her room was locked.
I began to tremble, for I remembered our last meeting.
One night I had wakened to find her kneeling by my bed, her eyes brimming with tears. She was dressed for a journey. In a whisper she begged me not to speak, but to love her always—whatever anyone said. And then she went away.
At the time this had frightened me, but, when I was told she was dead, it terrified me. It had been her farewell.
I said to my father:
“Do people know when they are going to die?”
“No, of course not.”
“Mother knew.”
“What nonsense is this? What do you mean?”
“She knew,” I repeated. “She said good-bye to me. She was dressed for a journey. Is death a long way off? How do you go there?”
Then he was kind to me. He told me to be brave. He said that only courage mattered—and that I must never show my emotions. No matter how deeply I might suffer, I must never reveal it to the world. He said that was the whole secret of life.
Soon after her death, we moved to London. Till then we had lived in Suffolk, but now my father sold the house and its contents. The new London flat contained nothing that had been hers. She was obliterated. He never mentioned her, and he willed that I should never speak of her. I could feel his will freeze the sentence on my lips when suddenly I longed to share a memory of her with him.
In every other way he was kind to me. In Suffolk he had not bothered much about me, but, now, he did everything to capture my affection. We spent whole days together. Soon, I was terribly proud of him. He was distinguished, cultured, and he spoke to people as if their destiny were to obey him. I promised myself that I would be like him when I was a man. Courage was his god—and so it became mine.
And yet, sometimes when I woke in the night, I saw a vision of my mother. She stood before me, radiantly lovely, although she was dressed in rags. Twice I saw her like that. Then, when I was ten, I woke one night suddenly with a great start. She was standing motionless in the middle of the room. A misty light enveloped her, but her features were clear. She stretched out her arms to me. Then she seemed to dissolve till only the misty light remained.
A few days later I noticed that my father was pale and silent. He said he was ill, and that frightened me. I thought he, too, would die. I asked one of the maids what was the matter with him. She said she did not know, but that, a few days ago, a letter had come for him from abroad—and that since then he had been ill.
Nevertheless, he continued to take me for our daily walk in the Park, though he spoke seldom and his eyes had a fixed, steely expression which I had not seen before. Then, perhaps a week after the letter came from abroad, he stopped a bolting horse in the Row. It was an act of stupendous courage, for the animal was thundering along panic-stricken. Everyone regarded him as a hero, and there was a good deal about it in the papers.
Years later I realised that actually he had attempted suicide, but, at the time, I regarded him as a god. Although I was only ten, I tried to emulate him. I willed to fear nothing, and when that proved impossible—as it often did—I hid every sign of cowardice.
I steeled myself against all childish terrors. When I went to school, I tried to behave as if he were watching me. Actually, therefore, it was my father who rescued Marsden from that bully. Marsden now believes that I used the incident as a test for my will. He is right, but he does not know what my triumph cost me. I was ill for days afterwards. Still, I became Marsden’s hero—in the same way as my father was mine.
Marsden often spent part of the holidays with us, as his people were in India, and he did not exaggerate when he told Rendell that we thought my father was “God Almighty when we were kids.” Every day, every hour, I spent with him widened and deepened his influence over me. He became a unique being, a man raised far above the generality of men. To be like him—that was my creed. And it was a passionate fanatical creed which made each day and every night a living ordeal. To be fearless, distinguished, cultured—to go through the world as if it were one’s own—never to be impressed, never to surrender oneself, never to be inadequate to any situation! To be like him!
But what quickened the roots of my admiration was his silence concerning my mother. For, now, I believed that this silence represented the triumph of his creed. I believed that he remained silent, although her death had stretched him permanently on the rack. He always spoke contemptuously of women, but—to me—that contempt only revealed his overwhelming love for her. As I grew older, I became convinced that his creed of courage had triumphed over the supreme ordeal of his life. Not even to me would he show the suffering which had turned his world into a wilderness. This belief heightened the pedestal on which I had placed him till he inhabited the clouds. When I prayed, it was not to God—but to him.
I stayed at school till I was eighteen, then, a year later, we went abroad and did not return to England till I was nearly twenty-one.
As the weeks passed, I noticed a change in him. Often when we were together, reading, I would look up to find his eyes fixed on me, his book face downwards on his knee. Also, sometimes he would get up suddenly, hesitate as if he were about to say something, then go abruptly out of the room. I noticed, too, that he was extraordinarily pale, and that he would clasp and unclasp his hands in a quick nervous manner, utterly unlike his normal dignified demeanour.
The night before my twenty-first birthday, he suddenly said in a new disconnected manner:
“It’s—well, let me see—it’s your birthday tomorrow, isn’t it?”
“Yes, to-morrow.”
“Ah, I see, I see! Well, as a fact—I may as well tell you—you come into a certain amount of money when you’re twenty-one.”
“A certain amount of money! From whom?”
“Well, it’s all quite preposterous, of course, but—as a fact—a distant relative died a few years ago and left you some money. Quite unnecessary! I am a rich man. It was an impertinence, really.”
“But who was this relative?” I asked, astonished at this information.
“I did not even know her—or scarcely. She lived in Australia. She was—well, as a fact—she was a relative of your—mother’s.”
I stared at him. He had mentioned her at last! He stood, ashy-white, looking down at me, leaning heavily on a little table by his side.
Then—swiftly, terribly—I knew there was some mystery concerning my mother.
I leapt to my feet.
“Where was my mother buried?”
He made a curious whistling noise, exactly like the hiss of escaping steam.
“Where was she buried?” I repeated.
“I do not know.”
“You don’t—know!”
“No—or care.”
I went nearer to him.
“So you’ve lied to me. She died fourteen years ago——”
“Eleven!”
“Eleven?”
His arms shot up as if jerked by invisible strings. His face became distorted and his whole body began to writhe.
“Yes—eleven years ago! Eleven! Eleven! Died in rags, a pauper! And serve her right, too—the bitch, the harlot, the whore!”
The words fell like a whip across my eyes.
“But it was fourteen years—fourteen!—since she went off with her rat of an Italian lover. For that’s what she did. A dago was what she wanted. He knew all the bed tricks——”
A series of foul images followed. He pelted her with obscenities. A frenzy of sexual jealousy surged like lava from the depths of him. He stood swaying from side to side, a twisted, leering, humiliated being—ransacking the dung-heaps of his imagination for filth to hurl at her.