It had been raining steadily for the three days since Vance’s return to Oubli. A soft regular rain; it came down on the roof of the Anglican chapel with a rapping like the rattle of palm-fronds in an African oasis. Why had that occurred to him? He had never been to Africa, never seen an oasis; but he had heard some one say: “In the dry season the rattle of palms in the wind sounds just like rain. God, it gets up a fellow’s thirst!” Like drift on a swollen river, all sorts of unrelated thoughts and images jostled each other in his brain. He could not clear his mind of them, or fix it, for more than a moment or two, on the sombre words that Mr. Dorman, distant and surpliced, was speaking from the chancel.
“Thou makest his beauty to consume away, like as it were a moth fretting a garment. . .
“As soon as Thou scatterest them they are even as sheep . . . For when Thou art angry all our days are gone . . . O spare me a little that I may recover my strength, before I go hence and be no more seen. . .”
Ah, cruel implacable God of Israel, Who, among all the generations of men, sufferest so few to recover their strength before they go! What mockery to apply to this poor broken boy the stupendous words that shake the bones of the saints!
There he lay, under the pall and the wreaths, “turned to destruction”, as Mr. Dorman told them — voluntarily turned to it, as Vance secretly believed. The shabby wreath of anemones and stocks was, of course, Miss Plummet’s. Lady Dayes–Dawes had sent arums. There was a hideous cushion of white immortelles with “Chris” on it in yellow — how he would have laughed at it! Halo had managed to find violets, heaps and heaps of them, though they were nearly over — with a spray of cherry-blossom, the first of the year. Ah, implacable God of Israel! But now — listen:
“It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory. . .” What martial music the Prayer-book made out of the old cry of human mourning! This sorrow sown in dishonour, was it indeed to be raised in glory? A sob from one of the black-muffled figures in front seemed to ask the same question. Then silence again; the rattle of rain; and “Lead, Kindly Light” from the volunteer choir, with Miss Plummet, in tears, at the harmonium.
When they came out the rain had stopped. The coffin was lifted into the old weak-springed hearse, with its moth-eaten tufts of black feathers all bent one way. (How he would have laughed at the feathers too!) The procession straggled off. Oubli could not provide enough mourning coaches, and its two wheezy Fords closed the line, noisily resisting their drivers’ attempts to keep them in step with the heavy black horses. In the English corner of the hard bare cemetery cypresses and laurestinus had been planted, green things trained over the graves. But to get there the mourners had to walk two by two (Mrs. Churley’s weak swollen feet setting the uncertain pace) through arid rows of French graves with wreaths of wire and painted tin-foil, and china saints under glass bells. Vance remembered Chris’s saying that French funeral wreaths always reminded him of the once-for-all thoughts that the living think of the dead: rigid indestructible opinions that there is never any need to renew.
“Inasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God to take out of this world the soul of our deceased brother — ” Mr. Dorman was saying across the yawning grave.
“Out of the world”; with all its laughing and crying and vain tumult . . . “The wind on the heath, brother — ” How Chris had shrugged away Vance’s facile admonitions! Wind on the heath, wind in the palms, all the multiple murmurs of life — Chris Churley’s ears were forever closed to them.
Yes; he had been Vance’s brother; and how had Vance dealt with him? “What hast thou done with this thy brother?” Why, deserted him at the last moment, shoved him into the train and left him alone with his self-derision, his bitter consciousness of futility and failure. Vance knew well enough what it felt like to be alone in such a mood, without friends, without hope, without future; he had been through it all in the early days in New York. Yet he had not given it a thought when he shoved Chris into the train and dashed away on his own crazy errand. What had he done with his brother?
“Ashes to ashes — dust to dust — ” As Chris was today, so would he be in his turn, nailed up with his withered dreams. . .
The earth fell on the coffin; somebody piled the wreaths on the mound. The sun came out, as if curious to see what this little group of bowed-down people were about; and in the dazzle of the indifferent day they crawled back to the carriages.
In the taxi Halo burst into tears. Vance put his arm about her. She seldom wept, and her grief moved him, and made him feel ashamed of his own dry eyes. But though his soul was heavy he could get no relief. Halo wiped away her tears and looked up at him. “You still think it wasn’t an accident?”
“I’m sure it wasn’t.”
“But they said he didn’t see the other train coming when he got out. The people in the other train said so.”
“Yes.”
“All the same, you think —?”
“Oh, what does it matter?” Vance groaned.
“I’m glad Mr. Dorman was convinced it was an accident. Otherwise there couldn’t have been a proper funeral. . .”
“I know. . .”
“It would have killed Mrs. Churley if he’d refused.”
“Sorrow don’t kill people. It seems to give them a sort of kick. Look how she walked all the way to the grave and back.”
Silence again; she pressed his hand tight. “Promise me, dearest, you won’t go on thinking yourself to blame.”
Vance laughed drearily. “People have got to think what they can. I ought to have come back with him. . .”
“What folly! You put him in the train.”
“I ought to have come back,” Vance repeated, as if to himself. The taxi stopped before the pink house and they got out.
At first Mrs. Churley had refused to see Vance; but two or three days after the funeral she deputed Mrs. Dorman to ask him to come up to the villa. Halo wanted to go instead; she seemed to dread the meeting between Vance and the Churleys. Vance, she argued, was still suffering from the shock of the dreadful news; he had told her what little there was to tell. Why not let Mrs. Dorman explain this to the Churleys, and suggest that Halo should go to them instead?
Mrs. Dorman pursed up her lips, and her cheeks reddened, as they did when she saw a chance of imparting unpleasant news. “It was Mr. Weston that Mrs. Churley asked for.”
“Of course I’ll go,” Vance roused himself to answer.
When he came back from the Churleys’ he went upstairs to the study and threw himself down on the old divan where Chris had so often sprawled during the long evenings full of laughter and discussion. Vance, on his way back from Monte Carlo, had thought longingly of that room; his old life seemed to hold out healing arms to him. Then, on his threshold, he had heard the stupefying news of Chris Churley’s death — the accident which had flung him under the wheels of an incoming express as he was getting out of his own train at Toulon; and from that moment Oubli and everything about it had become as hateful to Vance as the scenes from which he had just fled.
He lay with his eyes shut, reliving the hours since his return, and feeling as if he too had been flung out of the security and peace of his life and crushed under the sudden wheels of disaster. In the next room Halo was moving about. She would not come in and torment him with questions, as another woman might; she would merely let him know by an occasional sound or movement — the pushing back of a chair, the click of the Remington — that she wanted him to be aware of her nearness, and of the silent participation it implied.
The Remington . . . If only he could have got back to work! In the first horror of seeing Floss Delaney down by the river with his grandfather his anguish, he remembered, had crystallized itself in words; the shock had forced his first story out of him. And all through the dark weeks before Laura Lou’s death he had known the same mysterious heightening of creative power: as if his talent were an ogre, and lived on human suffering. But now he felt only an inner deadness; he seemed faced by a blank wall against which he might dash his brains out. Everything was stale and withered, without and within; he could almost taste the corruption — the same, no doubt, that Chris had tasted. . .
He got up and wandered into Halo’s room. She turned as he entered, feigning surprise. “Back already? — Well?”
Vance stood beside her, drumming on the lid of the typewriter. “She knows — ”
“Mrs. Churley? Knows what?”
“That it wasn’t an accident.”
“Vance! Did she tell you —?”
“No. He was there. But she didn’t have to — ”
Halo put out her hand and imprisoned his restless fingers. “Dear, aren’t you just imagining —?”
“God! I don’t have to imagine — ”
“Tell me just what she said.”
“She said she couldn’t bear to have me there. It didn’t last five minutes.”
“Poor, poor woman!”
“I could see she hated the very sight of me. She thinks I killed him.”
“But what folly — when it was you who gave him his best chance!”
“Did I? Perhaps they’re right and we were wrong. Anyhow I ought to have come back with him.”
“But surely you told them you couldn’t find a place in the train?”
“Yes — I told them.”
“Well, dear?” She lifted her grave eyes to his, and he thought: “If I told her the truth, would it make any difference?” For he knew well enough that what he was suffering from was not so much the shock of poor Chris’s suicide as the dark turmoil in his own heart. It was his vanity that was aching, and his pride; in a sudden craving for self-abasement he longed to cry out his miserable secret.
“I wish you could get back to work,” Halo said.
He made a derisive gesture. “Get back to work — that was what I used to tell Chris. I see now there wasn’t much point ............