These Twain

"Did you bring your dress-clothes?" she murmured, while she was reading. She had instructed him in her letter on this point.

"Of course," he said, manfully, striving to imply the immense untruth that he never stirred from home without his dress-clothes.

She continued to read, frowning, and drawing her heavy eyebrows still closer together. Then she said:

"Here!"

And passed him the letter. He could see now that she was becoming excited.

The letter was from the legitimate Mrs. George Cannon, and it said that, though nothing official was announced or even breathed, her solicitor had gathered from a permanent and important underling of the Home Office that George Cannon's innocence was supposed to be established, and that the Queen's pardon would, at some time or other, be issued. It was an affecting letter. Edwin, totally ignorant of all that had preceded it, did not immediately understand its significance. At first he did not even grasp what it was about. When he did begin to comprehend he had the sensation of being deprived momentarily of his bearings. He had expected everything but this. That is to say, he had absolutely not known what to expect. The shock was severe.

"What is it? What is it?" he questioned, as if impatient.

Hilda replied:

"It's about George Cannon. It seems he was quite innocent in that bank-note affair. It's his wife who's been writing to me about it. I don't know why she should. But she did, and of course I had to reply."

"You never said anything to me about it."

"I didn't want to worry you, dearest. I knew you'd quite enough on your mind with the works. Besides, I'd no right to worry you with a thing like that. But of course I can show you all her letters, – I've kept them."

Unanswerable! Unanswerable! Insincere, concocted, but unanswerable! The implications in her spoken defence were of the simplest and deepest ingenuity, and withal they hurt him. For example, the implication that the strain of the new works was breaking him! As if he could not support it, and had not supported it, easily! As if the new works meant that he could not fulfil all his duties as a helpmeet! And then the devilishly adroit plea that her concealment was morally necessary since he ought not to be troubled with any result of her pre-conjugal life! And finally the implication that he would be jealous of the correspondence and might exact the production of it! … He now callously ignored Cecil's signals for attention… He knew that he would receive no further enlightenment as to the long secrecy of the past twelve months. His fears and apprehensions and infelicity were to be dismissed with those few words. They would never be paid for, redeemed, atoned. The grand scenic explanation and submission which was his right would never come. Sentimentally, he was cheated, and had no redress. And, as a climax, he had to assume, to pretend, that justice still prevailed on earth.

"Isn't it awful!" Hilda muttered. "Him in prison all this time!"

He saw that her eyes were wet, and her emotion increasing.

He nodded in sympathy.

He thought:

"She'll want some handling, – I can see that!"

He too, as well as she, imaginatively comprehended the dreadful tragedy of George Cannon's false imprisonment. He had heart enough to be very glad that the innocent man (innocent at any rate of that one thing) was to be released. But at the same time he could not stifle a base foreboding and regret. Looking at his wife, he feared the moment when George Cannon, with all the enormous prestige of a victim in a woman's eyes, should be at large. Yes, the lover in him would have preferred George Cannon to be incarcerated forever. Had he not heard, had he not read, had he not seen on the stage, that a woman never forgets the first man? Nonsense, all that! Invented theatrical psychology! And yet-if it was true! … Look at her eyes!

"I suppose he is innocent?" he said gruffly, for he mistrusted, or affected to mistrust, the doings of these two women together, – Cannon's wife and Cannon's victim. Might they not somehow have been hoodwinked? He knew nothing, no useful detail, naught that was convincing-and he never would know! Was it not astounding that the bigamist should have both these women on his side, either working for him, or weeping over his woes?

"He must be innocent," Hilda answered, thoughtfully, in a breaking voice.

"Where is he now, – up yon?"

He indicated the unvisited heights of Dartmoor.

"I believe so."

"I thought they always shifted 'em back to London before they released 'em."

"I expect they will do. They may have moved him already."

His mood grew soft, indulgent. He conceded that her emotion was natural. She had been bound up with the man. Cannon's admitted guilt on the one count, together with all that she had suffered through it, only intensified the poignancy of his innocence on the other count. Contrary to the general assumption, you must be sorrier for an unfortunate rascal than for an unfortunate good man. He could feel all that. He, Edwin, was to be pitied; but nobody save himself would perceive that he was to be pitied. His rôle would be difficult, but all his pride and self-reliance commanded him to play it well, using every resource of his masculine skill, and so prove that he was that which he believed himself to be. The future would be all right, because he would be equal to the emergency. Why should it not be all right? His heart in kindliness and tenderness drew nearer to Hilda's, and he saw, or fancied he saw, that all their guerilla had been leading up to this, had perhaps been caused by this, and would be nobly ended by it.

Just then a mysterious noise penetrated the room, growing and growing until it became a huge deafening din, and slowly died away.

"I expect that's breakfast," said Edwin in a casual tone.

The organism of the English household was functioning. Even in the withdrawn calm of the bedroom they could feel it irresistibly functioning. The gong had a physical effect on Cecil; all his disappointment and his sense of being neglected were gathered up in his throat and exploded in a yell. Hilda took him in her right arm and soothed him and called him silly names.

Edwin rose from the bed, and as he did so, Hilda retained him with her left hand, and pulled him very gently towards her, inviting a kiss. He kissed her. She held to him. He could see at a distance of two inches all the dark swimming colour of her wet eyes half veiled by the long lashes. And he could feel the soft limbs of the snuffling baby somewhere close to his head.

"You'd better stick where you are," he advised her in a casual tone.

Hilda thought:

"Now the time's come. He'll be furious. But I can't help it."

She said:

"Oh no. I shall be quite all right soon. I'm going to get up in about half an hour."

"But then how shall you get out of going to Princetown?"

"Oh! Edwin! I must go. I told them I should go."

He was astounded. There was no end to her incalculability, – no end! His resentment was violent. He stood right away from her.

"'Told them you should go'!" he exclaimed. "What in the name of heaven does that matter? Are you absolutely mad?"

She stiffened. Her features hardened. In the midst of her terrible relief as to the fate of George Cannon and of her equal terrible excitement under the enigmatic and irresistible mesmerism of Dartmoor prison, she was desperate, and resentment against Edwin kindled deep within her. She felt the brute in him. She felt that he would never really understand. She felt all her weakness and all his strength, but she was determined. At bottom she knew well that her weakness was the stronger.

"I must go!" she repeated.

"It's nothing but morbidness!" he said savagely. "Morbidness! … Well, I shan't have it. I shan't let you go. And that's flat."

She kept silent. Frightfully disturbed, cursing women, forgetting utterly in a moment his sublime resolves, Edwin descended to breakfast in the large, strange house. Existence was monstrous.

And before the middle of the morning Hilda came into the garden where everyone else was idling. And Alicia and Janet fondly kissed her. She said her headache had vanished.

"Sure you feel equal to going this afternoon, dearest?" asked Janet.

"Oh yes!" Hilda replied lightly. "It will do me good."

Edwin was helpless. He thought, recalling with vexation his last firm forbidding words to Hilda in the bedroom:

"Nobody could be equal to this emergency."

CHAPTER XV

THE PRISON

I

Harry had two stout and fast cobs in a light wagonette. He drove himself, and Hilda sat by his side. The driver's boast was that he should accomplish the ten miles, with a rise of a thousand feet, in an hour and a quarter. A hired carriage would have spent two hours over the journey.

It was when they had cleared the town, and were on the long straight rise across the moor towards Longford, that the horses began to prove the faith that was in them, eager, magnanimous, conceiving grandly the splendour of their task in life, and irrepressibly performing it with glory. The stones on the loose-surfaced road flew from under the striding of their hoofs into the soft, dark ling on either hand. Harry's whip hovered in affection over their twin backs, never touching them, and Harry smiled mysteriously to himself. He did not wish to talk. Nor did Hilda. The movement braced and intoxicated her, and rendered thought impossible. She brimmed with emotion, like a vase with some liquid unanalysable and perilous. She was not happy, she was not unhappy; the sensation of her vitality and of the kindred vitality of the earth and the air was overwhelming. She would have prolonged the journey indefinitely, and yet she intensely desired the goal, whatever terrors it might hold for her. At intervals she pulled up the embroidered and monogrammed apron that slipped slowly down over her skirt and over Harry's tennis-flannels, disclosing two rackets in a press that lay between them. Perhaps Harry was thinking of certain strokes at tennis.

"Longford!" ejaculated Harry, turning his head slightly towards the body of the vehicle, as they rattled by a hamlet.

Soon afterwards the road mounted steeply, – five hundred feet in little more than a mile, and the horses walked, but they walked in haste, fiercely, clawing at the road with their forefeet and thrusting it behind them. And some of the large tors emerged clearly into view-Cox Tor, the Staple Tors, and Great Mis lifting its granite above them and beyond.

They were now in the midst of the moor, trotting fast again. Behind and before them, and on either side, there was nothing but moor and sky. The sky, a vast hemisphere of cloud and blue and sunshine, with a complex and ever elusive geography of its own, discovered all the tints of heath and granite. It was one of those days when every tint was divided into ten thousand shades, and each is richer and more softly beautiful than the others. On the shoulder of Great Mis rain fell, while little Vixen Tor glittered with mica points in the sun. Nothing could be seen over the whole moor save here and there a long-tailed pony, or a tiny cottage set apart in solitude. And the yellowish road stretched forward, wavily, narrowing, disappeared for a space, reappeared still narrower, disappeared once more, reappeared like a thin meandering line, and was lost on the final verge. It was an endless road. Impossible that the perseverance of horses should cover it yard by yard! But the horses strained onward, seeing naught but the macadam under their noses. Harry checked them at a descent.

"Walkham River!" he announced.

They crossed a pebbly stream by a granite bridge.

"Hut-circles!" said Harry laconically.

They were climbing again.

Edwin, in the body of the wagonette with Janet and Alicia, looked for hut-circles and saw none; but he did not care. He was content with the knowledge that prehistoric hut-circles were somewhere there. He had never seen wild England before, and its primeval sanity awoke in him the primeval man. The healthiness and simplicity and grandiose beauty of it created the sublime illusion that civilisation was worthy to be abandoned. The Five Towns seemed intolerable by their dirt and ugliness, and by the tedious intricacy of their existence. Lithography, – you had but to think of the word to perceive the paltriness of the thing! Riches, properties, proprieties, all the safeties, – futile! He could have lived alone with Hilda on the moor, begetting children by her, watching with satisfaction the growing curves of her fecundity-his work, and seeing her with her brood, all their faces beaten by wind and rain and browned with sun. He had a tremendous, a painful longing for such a life. His imagination played round the idea of it with voluptuous and pure pleasure, and he wondered that he had never thought of it before. He felt that he had never before peered into the depths of existence. And though he knew that the dream of such an arcadian career was absurd, yet he seemed to guess that beneath the tiresome surfaces of life in the Five Towns the essence of it might be mystically lived. And he thought that Hilda would be capable of sharing it with him, – nay, he knew she would!

His mood became gravely elated, even optimistic. He saw that he had worried himself about nothing. If she wanted to visit the prison, let her visit it! Why not? At any rate he should not visit it. He had an aversion for morbidity almost as strong as his aversion for sentimentality. But her morbidity could do no harm. She could not possibly meet George Cannon. The chances were utterly against such an encounter. Her morbidity would cure itself. He pitied her, cherished her, and in thought enveloped her fondly with his sympathetic and protective wisdom.

"North Hessary," said Harry, pointing with his whip to a jutting tor on the right hand. "We go round by the foot of it. There in a jiff!"

Soon afterwards they swerved away from the main road, obeying a signpost marked "Princetown."

"Glorious, isn't it?" murmured Janet, after a long silence which had succeeded the light chatter of herself and Alicia about children, servants, tennis, laundries.

He nodded, with a lively responsive smile, and glanced at Hilda's mysterious back. Only once during the journey had she looked round. Alicia with her coarse kind voice and laugh began to rally him, saying he had dozed.

A town, more granite than the moor itself, gradually revealed its roofs in the heart of the moor. The horses, indefatigable, quickened their speed. Villas, a school, a chapel, a heavy church-tower followed in succession; there were pavements; a brake full of excursionists had halted in front of a hotel; holiday-makers-simple folk who disliked to live in flocks-wandered in ecstatic idleness. Concealed within the warmth of the mountain air, there pricked a certain sharpness. All about, beyond the little town, the tors raised their shaggy flanks surmounted by colossal masses of stone that recalled the youth of the planet. The feel of the world was stimulating like a tremendous tonic. Then the wagonette passed a thick grove of trees, hiding a house, and in a moment, like magic, appeared a huge gated archway of brick and stone, and over it the incised words:

PARCERE SUBJECTIS

"Stop! Stop! Harry," cried Alicia shrilly. "What are you doing? You'll have to go to the house first."

"Shall I?" said Harry. "All right. Two thirty-five, be it noted."

The vehicle came to a standstill, and instantly clouds of vapour rose from the horses.

"Virgil!" thought Edwin, gazing at the archway, which filled him with sudden horror, like an obscenity misplaced.

II

Less than ten minutes later, he and Hilda and Alicia, together with three strange men, stood under the archway. Events had followed one another quickly, to Edwin's undoing. When the wagonette drew up in the grounds of the Governor's house, Harry Hesketh had politely indicated that for his horses he preferred the stables of a certain inn down the road to any stables that hospitality might offer; and he had driven off, Mrs. Rotherwas urging him to return without any delay so that tennis might begin. The Governor had been called from home, and in his absence a high official of the prison was deputed to show the visitors through the establishment. This official was the first of the three strange men; the other two were visitors. Janet had said that she would not go over the prison, because she meant to play tennis and wished not to tire herself. Alicia said kindly that she at any rate would go with Hilda, – though she had seen it all before, it was interesting enough to see again.

Edwin had thereupon said that he should remain with Janet. But immediately Mrs. Rotherwas, whose reception of him had been full of the most friendly charm, had shown surprise, if not pain. What, – come to Princetown without inspecting the wonderful prison, when the chance was there? Inconceivable! Edwin might in his blunt Five Towns way have withstood Mrs. Rotherwas, but he could not withstand Hilda, who, frowning, seemed almost ready to risk a public altercation in order to secure his attendance. He had to yield. To make a scene, even a very little one, in the garden full of light dresses and polite suave voices would have been monstrous. He thought of all that he had ever heard of the subjection of men to women. He thought of Johnnie and of Mrs. Chris Hamson, who was known for her steely caprices. And he thought also of Jimmie and of the undesirable Mrs. Jimmie, who, it was said, had threatened to love Jimmie no more unless he took her once a week without fail to the theatre, whatever the piece, and played cards with her and two of her friends on all the other nights of the week. He thought of men as a sex conquered by the unscrupulous and the implacable, and in this mood, superimposed on his mood of disgust at the mere sight of the archway, he followed the high official and his train. Mrs. Rotherwas's last words were that they were not to be long. But the official said privately to the group that they must at any rate approach the precincts of the prison with all ceremony, and he led them proudly, with an air of ownership, round to the main entrance where the wagonette had first stopped.

A turnkey on the other side of the immense gates, using a theatrical gesture, jangled a great bouquet of keys; the portal opened, increasing the pride of the official, and the next moment they were interned in the outer courtyard. The moor and all that it meant lay unattainably beyond that portal. As the group slowly crossed the enclosed space, with the grim façades of yellow-brown buildings on each side and vistas of further gates and buildings in front, the official and the two male visitors began to talk together over the heads of Alicia and Hilda. The women held close to each other, and the official kept upon them a chivalrous eye; the two visitors were friends; Edwin was left out of the social scheme, and lagged somewhat behind, like one who is not wanted but who cannot be abandoned. He walked self-conscious, miserable, resentful, and darkly angry. In one instant the three men had estimated him, decided that he was not of their clan nor of any related clan, and ignored him. Whereas the official and the two male visitors, who had never met before, grew more and more friendly each minute. One said that he did not know So-and-So of the Scots Greys, but he knew his cousin Trevor of the Hussars, who had in fact married a niece of his own. And then another question about somebody else was asked, and immediately they were engaged in following clues, as explorers will follow the intricate mouths of a great delta and so unite in the main stream. They were happy.

Edwin did not seriously mind that; but what he did mind was their accent-in those days termed throughout the Midlands "lah-di-dah" (an onomatopoeic description), which, falsifying every vowel sound in the language, and several consonants, magically created around them an aura of utter superiority to the rest of the world. He quite unreasonably hated them, and he also envied them, because this accent was their native tongue, and because their clothes were not cut like his, and because they were entirely at their ease. Useless for the official to throw him an urbane word now and then; neither his hate nor his constraint would consent to be alleviated; the urbane words grew less frequent. Also Edwin despised them because they were seemingly insensible to the tremendous horror of the jail set there like an outrage in the midst of primitive and sane Dartmoor. "Yes," their attitude said. "This is a prison, one of the institutions necessary to the well being of society, like a workhouse or an opera house, – an interesting sight!"

A second pair of iron gates were opened with the same elaborate theatricality as the first, and while the operation was being done the official, invigorated by the fawning of turnkeys, conversed with Alicia, who during her short married life had acquired some shallow acquaintance with the clans, and he even drew a reluctant phrase from Hilda. Then, after another open space, came a third pair of iron gates, final and terrific, and at length the party was under cover, and even the sky of the moor was lost. Edwin, bored, disgusted, shamed, and stricken, yielded himself proudly and submissively to the horror of the experience.

III

Hilda had only one thought-would she catch sight of the innocent prisoner? The party was now deeply engaged in a system of corridors and stairways. The official had said that as the tour of inspection was to be short he would display to them chiefly the modern part of the prison. So far not a prisoner had been seen, and scarcely a warder. The two male visitors were scientifically interested in the question of escapes. Did prisoners ever escape?

"Never!" said the official, with satisfaction.

"Impossible, I suppose. Even when they're working out on the moor? Warders are pretty good shots, eh?"

"Practically impossible," said the official. "But there is one way." He looked up the stairway on whose landing they stood, and down the stairway, and cautiously lowered his voice. "Of course what I tell you is confidential. If one of our Dartmoor fogs came on suddenly, and kind friends outside had hidden a stock of clothes and food in an arranged spot, then theoretically-I say, theoretically-a man might get away. But nobody ever has done."

"I suppose you still have the silent system?"

The official nodded.

"Absolutely?"

"Absolutely."

"How awful it must be!" said Alicia, with a nervous laugh.

The official shrugged his shoulders, and the other two males murmured reassuring axioms about discipline.

They emerged from the stairway into a colossal and resounding iron hall. Round the emptiness of this interior ran galleries of perforated iron protected from the abyss by iron balustrades. The group stood on the second of the galleries from the stony floor, and there were two galleries above them. Far away, opposite, a glint of sunshine had feloniously slipped in, transpiercing the gloom, and it lighted a series of doors. There was a row of these doors along every gallery. Each had a peep-hole, a key-hole and a number. The longer Hilda regarded, the more nightmarishly numerous seemed the doors. The place was like a huge rabbit-hutch designed for the claustration of countless rabbits. Across the whole width and length of the hall, and at the level of the lowest gallery, was stretched a great net.

"To provide against suicides?" suggested one of the men.

"Yes," said the official.

"A good idea."

When the reverberation of the words had ceased, a little silence ensued. The ear listened vainly for the slightest sound. In the silence the implacability of granite walls and iron reticulations reigned over the accursed vision, stultifying the soul.

"Are these cells occupied?" asked Alicia timidly.

"Not yet, Mrs. Hesketh. It's too soon. A few are."

Hilda thought:

"He may be here, – behind one of those doors." Her heart was liquid with compassion and revolt. "No," she assured herself. "They must have taken him away already. It's impossible he should be here. He's innocent."

"Perhaps you would like to see one of the cells?" the official suggested.

A warder appeared, and, with the inescapable jangle of keys, opened a door. The party entered the cell, ladies first, then the official and his new acquaintances; then Edwin, trailing. The cell was long and narrow, fairly lofty, bluish-white colour, very dimly lighted by a tiny grimed window high up in a wall of extreme thickness. The bed lay next the long wall; except the bed, a stool, a shelf, and some utensils, there was nothing to furnish the horrible nakedness of the cell. One of the visitors picked up an old book from the shelf. It was a Greek Testament. The party seemed astonished at this evidence of culture among prisoners, of the height from which a criminal may have fallen.