by Ethel Rolt Wheeler.
As published in Behind the Veil (David Nutt; 1906)
'We have been friends for exactly ten years,' said Thornhill Morris in a low voice, 'it is time to say good-bye.'
Dr. Wallscourt gazed at him for a moment in speechless amazement. 'Look here, Thornhill, I'm not fool enough to suppose that you want to break with me simply because I happened to turn idiotic in our climbing expedition to-day. It was a nasty bit, and—well, my nerve isn't what it was. ... I know I nearly killed you, and myself into the bargain. Oh, I am willing readily to accept the lesson. I'm getting old—my forty years are beginning to tell; no more giddy heights for me. It's a stage we've all got to come to sooner or later, and your cooler head and greater powers of endurance hardly justify you in so very blatant a piece of cynicism as your remark implies.'
Morris, who looked a good deal younger than the doctor, drew his chair closer to his friend and laid a hand upon his arm. He had a grave and pleasing face, which would have looked quite ordinary, but for some indefinable quality of melancholy, that gave it an elusive, haunting interest. His actions were usually marked by a certain old-world stateliness, but to-night his native dignity had deserted him;—he seemed agitated and restless.
'Dear old Edward, don't let's misunderstand each other after all these years,' he said, 'I've not got to tell you that your friendship has been ... just one of the best things in my life. As to getting old ... to say truth I envy you your every sense of pain, your every ache of stiffness. This I don't expect you to understand. But indeed there are reasons—cogent reasons—why we should part.'
'You do not deny that these reasons are connected with the question of age,' observed Wallscourt.
'Not ... not in the way you mean,' Morris replied. His voice faltered; he got up and went to the window.
They were in the smoking-room of the hotel at Wastdale Head, which that night they happened to have to themselves.
Morris looked out for some time into the silvering darkness, his face working; then he turned towards his friend.
'Edward, I want you to take my word on trust,—have faith in me,—faith just this once, in my judgment for us both. It is better ... indeed it is essential—that we go separate ways.'
'I take nothing on trust,' answered Wallscourt. His pale face, square in build, which gained its character, its expression of concentrated force, from the shape and lines of the overhanging brow, assumed a sterner aspect; there came an alertness of light in the somewhat weary blue eyes. 'I take nothing on trust,' he repeated, 'I have the right to demand an explanation. I gave you ... all that one man can give to another: you had free passage into my most secret thoughts. And now—now you suggest airily that it is time to say good-bye. Tell me frankly that you are tired of me, that you have outgrown me, and I suppose I must shrug my shoulders and accept the somewhat bitter inevitable. But understand, Thornhill, you owe me the truth,—I insist upon my right to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.'
'Have I not given in equal proportion?' asked Thornhill, 'you know well ... how much I admire ... how much I
love ...' His voice broke. ... 'We do not talk of such things. ... But Edward, there are reasons. ... I cannot give you the reasons—you would think me mad. ... Has it never occurred to you, never for a moment, that I am not quite like other men? Can't you see something ... different about me? Look, look at my face. ... Don't be harsh, old friend,—I am desperately unhappy.'
He stooped, almost kneeling, beside Wallscourt's chair. The doctor scanned his features closely in the lamplight. There was a perceptible pause, then Wallscourt spoke 'You are talking, you are behaving, like an emotional schoolboy,' he said brightly, moved by the signs of suffering he saw, as well as by a strange, pathetic touch of youthfulness in his friend's expression. 'You are certainly very different to-night from the Thornhill I recollect when we met here first, by chance, some ten years ago. I was a youngster of thirty then, and you awed me by something staid, almost Early-Victorian, about your appearance and manner. I took you to be a good deal older than myself, I was proud you should seek my acquaintance,—your brilliance of conversation, your extraordinary range of knowledge, fascinated me. So we became friends,—you were my guide, my ideal. Then, with years, we seemed to grow into closer equality; you had lifted me up to your intellectual level, and our friendship assumed its rare and perfect intimacy. But lately—I suppose I am ageing too rapidly—we have drifted a little apart. You have become prey to a curious melancholy; you brood, you keep away from your friends. And to-night the position is actually reversed. I am the aged wiseacre, and you ... you look like a mere sentimental boy, instead of a sober, middle-aged man of at least forty winters. Come, Thornhill, what is distressing you? Why not confide in me?'
Morris stood up. 'Honestly ... I appeared more or less like other men?'
'Why, certainly,—a little more in the clouds, a little more fastidious, perhaps; more impatient for change, more hopeless of result: yes, no doubt. You stood aloof from all the movements of the time; you spoke out of what seemed an almost abnormal experience. It was part of your magnetism, though you puzzled me occasionally, I confess; and on reflection,—yes, once or twice I was aware of some element in your character utterly new and bewildering to me. What is the secret, Thornhill, since you allow there is one?'
Thornhill Morris went over again to the window. The moon had by this time risen over Scawfell. He spoke in a dreamy voice, without turning round. 'You were talking just now about getting old. I hear a great deal on all sides about the fearsomeness of getting old. It is a commonplace of conversation. To lose the fire, the enthusiasm, the wild freshness of morning! To know the keen edge of pleasure blunted once for all! Then gradually for the limbs to grow stiff, the faculties to decay,—how sad, how ghastly, how gruesome! ... You are familiar with all that kind of stuff, Edward? There was a time I uttered such rubbish myself.'
'Unfortunately, the coming on of age is a sober fact,' said the doctor, rather testily. He suspected an artifice in the renewal of this subject. 'You can't get away from it by calling it bad names.'
Thornhill faced round. 'Have you ever thought how it would feel to be getting young instead of getting old?' he asked. 'Will you for a moment try and think of this possibility, not as a golden impracticability, but as a harsh, unavoidable reality? The years as they recede gather about them a halo, which is the mere mist of distance; you would realise this quickly enough if you could reverse the dial and go backwards. ..."Oh that I were twenty-five!" ... "Oh that I were twenty!" sighs the middle-aged world; but would any sane person choose in actuality to live again through those periods of acute suffering—suffering unproportioned, because it has no standard—that imprisons our untried faculties in a maze of disillusion and mystery to which we have not yet found the key? Oh, youth has dazzling heights too, and we fall from them down, down, down into the abyss! Edward, can you remember when you first came to know the evil and the cruelty of the world? That is the most awful moment of life: no individual pain can ever after equal the shrinking horror that confronts at that moment the naked and trembling soul.'
'What has all this to do with our friendship?' asked Wallscourt, after a pause.
'Let me finish. Try for one moment to credit my supposition, admit for one moment the possibility of going backwards; contemplate as a near future the torturing doubts, the quivering faiths of youth; regard as an approaching experience the deceptive imaginings, the tortured awakenings of childhood. It is not so much the tyranny of the nursery that daunts, with its puzzling, unmeaning restrictions, the ceaselessness of its petty slavery; what appals is the thought of traversing again that impossible child-world, that trackless country of vague and impalpable perils where we wandered during the first twelve years of our lives. To pass from middle-age to old age, is to float along a series of fair and gentle slopes towards a securer, serener landscape; but to return to childhood is to plunge down precipice after precipice, to change from one Protean shape to another, to lose all sense of continuity or identity, and to live in a land peopled by childish terrors, compared with which the worst visions of delirium are mere graceful fancies.'
'Allowing your proposition to be true,' said Wallscourt, 'I hold your statement to be absurdly exaggerated. You are imagining the case of an over-sensitive organism,—the ordinary healthy child has compensations that far outweigh its momentary fears.'
'I put the case rather strongly, perhaps,' answered Morris, 'but you will grant that it is nearer truth than "the trailing clouds of glory" or the "golden age" representations. It is, in fact, a great deal nearer. ... Edward, Edward—thank God that age lies before you, not youth,—not childhood,—not—infancy!'
There was a drawn look on the doctor's face. 'What has put such thoughts into your head?' he asked.
'You said ... that when you first ... knew me, I seemed older than you were,' faltered Morris, 'and that now the position ... is reversed. ...'
Wallscourt lifted the lamp and went over to where Morris stood. Once more he scrutinised intently his friend's face. A mad notion was taking form in his mind—an unheard-of absurdity, from which he sought to free himself. He put down the lamp.
'You look barely thirty,' he said abruptly.
'I am in fact twenty-nine to-night,' breathed Thornhill slowly.
'And when I first met you?'
'I was thirty-nine.'
'Man! Impossible!'
'If you calculate by the number of years I have lived, I am one hundred and twenty years old.'
The doctor began pacing the room uneasily, and Thornhill went on:—'If you come to think of it, there's nothing so wonderful in living one hundred and twenty years. Science asserts that, if properly treated, the body should be good for, at least, twice the term of years it lasts at present. And leaving out of account unproved legends, such as that of the Wandering Jew, we have almost incontrovertible evidence that certain secret societies—the Rosicrucians, for example—discovered the means of prolonging life indefinitely beyond the usual limit. Only, in the case of a disciple endowed with this quasi-immortality, the growth and the decay of faculty and function are arrested; the world rushes past him with its changes of season and of seas, but he remains ever the same, growing neither younger nor older, unrestricted by the conditions that bind most of us slaves of change and time.'
'Thornhill, this is hallucination,' interjected the doctor, 'you are ill. ...'
Morris passed his hand wearily across his brow. 'I was seventy-five when I discovered the secret,' he continued, 'it was in the year 1861. But I made some mistake, some fatal mistake. Instead of merely attaining to a continuation of life, I reversed the life-process; instead of suspending the wheels of mortality, by some inexplicable error I caused them to work backwards. I have been getting younger for the last forty-five years. ... Edward, you know all the horrible conceptions formed of those whose lives have been magically, or, if you will, scientifically prolonged,—the shock of incongruity that a Rip van Winkle must feel, the endless lassitude of the Wandering Jew, the grasping degeneracy of the harpies in Gulliver's Travels. But no one in his wildest dreams has ever conceived such a tragedy as I have to face: the tragedy of losing, one by one, all my painfully acquired weapons of defence, all the comfort of philosophy and experience,—the tragedy of drifting back through chaos into the unknown. I cannot think of it. ... It would be better to kill myself.'
'What you tell me is incredible,' said the doctor, 'and yet when I look at you ... I remember once ... you spoke, as if from personal knowledge, of certain obscure effects of the Napoleonic wars; you expounded to me some medical theories of Coleridge that, wishing to refer to in my lectures, I found it impossible to trace. I remember. ...' A whole flood of recollections swept across the doctor's mind. He recalled Thornhill's social aloofness, his invariable method of tracing daily events to remote origins, his extraordinary intellectual range, and the vitality and minutiae in his descriptions of events a century old. It struck him now for the first time, that in all their ten years of closest intimacy, he had never learned anything of his friend's relatives or connections. He knew him to be, like himself, without family, and further curiosity never occurred to him. But now the realisation came upon him with a strange significance. Strongest evidence of all,—he had seen Thornhill growing visibly younger before his eyes. ... That very day, when there had nearly been an accident in the gully, Thornhill had shown a nerve, a reliance upon his muscle, and a power of endurance, surely impossible to any one unless in the full prime of early manhood. ... 'So you see,' Thornhill broke in upon his meditations, 'it is time to say good-bye. My friendships have all been limited to ten years, else it would have been impossible for me to keep my secret: from sixty to fifty, from fifty to forty, the alteration in appearance is not so very perceptible. But now, from thirty to twenty, I shall change yearly, perhaps even more rapidly, and after that ... I have never told any one before; but our comradeship had been so much more to me than any other ... and ... oh, this is a sore time! ... You forced the confession from me,—I could not have you think of me ... with unkindness. ...'
'I cannot believe anything so preposterous,' the doctor said, rousing himself, 'but even if it were so, there is all the greater reason for continuing our friendship. You will need me, my help, my advice even as a young man; you will want my protection as a boy. Thornhill, you must not go out of my life, you must not face these terrors of youth—if such indeed there be—without one near you who understands. That you exaggerate these troubles is more than evident, but to some extent I realise that they exist. Our relationship must be altered, I admit, but it will be as close as before.'
Morris grasped the doctor's hand. 'My friend ... my father!' he murmured. Then with an almost whimsical smile that was full of pathos, he added: 'But you don't know what you're undertaking. I may fall in love,—I was a gallant in those old days; and oh, all the miseries I went through! We laugh at lovers' pains—in retrospect. ... But if we feared a recurrence ? ... Reflect, Edward, I shall love passionately—it was in my nature—and yet my terrible secret must keep me apart from every good woman. I can never marry. This mattered nowise in my studious middle life, but ... who can gauge the folly of youth ? I had best end it once for all—or shut myself up in a monastery.'
'Was there ever any one ... any one that mattered?' asked Wallscourt with hesitation.
'Yes; her grave is in the little churchyard outside. It is dated 1814. Shall I tell you the story? My long, long life has been clouded by it. She was only the daughter of a farmer. I stayed at her father's farm in those far-off days, when I was discovering the climbs that we have since done together. We loved each other devotedly. ... There is no question here of the halo of Time. I have never met any one like her—any one so high-spirited, so pure-minded. She had all the virility of the mountains, yet an exquisite grace and delicacy, like the passing of cloud shadows over a sun-parched landscape. O my friend, is not the tale somewhat too stale for you? It is so old, so trite, so eternal in its ruthless recrudescence through all time. ...'
'Go on, please,' said the doctor.
'A mésalliance in those days was almost an impossibility: besides, I was poor, and practically dependent. I lacked courage; to speak more honestly, I was a coward. The whole force of family influence was brought to the separation of us. I was a dastard, Edward,—a scoundrel, a mean cur. ... It was a hundred years ago, my friend,—remember that, and have pity on me. Since I might not have her as my wife, I asked her ... I insulted her by asking ... I shall never forget the look on her face. She loved me, and I had killed her soul. I left her without another word, and I never saw her again. A year afterwards I heard of her death. She was lost upon Great Gable. How she fell was never known. I was in Italy at the time—but ... O God! ... Edward, how it all comes back to me ... the delirium of grief, the anguish of remorse! ... Must I live through it all again?'
'As you say yourself, the story is nearly a hundred years old,' the doctor reminded him.
'And I have gone back into the very heart of it,—the wheel has come full circle. I was twenty-nine then, I am twenty-nine now. The pain is as vital, as fresh, as unbearable. ... Edward, come out, and I will show the very gate where we used to meet. The moon is still up; we can find our way through the meadows in spite of the mist. To take you there will help to make me realise that the past is truly dead ... will help me to disentangle ...' He passed his hand over his brow with the old movement. ... 'Come, Edward, you are not too tired?'
Wallscourt shook his head, and together they went out into the moonlight. The mountains rose dark and indistinct against a rapidly clouding sky. The drifts veiled and disclosed the moon alternately, throwing mist-wraiths into the valley. The silence and dimness lent to the scene an even greater than its wonted mystery, while the hazy mist-movement distilled an impression of unknown and hostile presences lurking close at hand. Wallscourt was several times on the point of suggesting a return to the hotel, but Morris pressed on, finding his way as if by instinct to a rough tree-trunk bridging a stream, which he crossed, and then followed a path that led to a ruined gatepost.
'Come here, Edward, here. This is where we stood by this broken gate—she on that side, I here. She met me once
on just such a night as this. Her grey dress looked silver in the moonlight: she wore a large, shady hat tied with blue ribbons, and her face was radiant like light upon dark waters. I remember hearing the rustling of the grass as she came towards me. ... What was that?' Thornhill gripped his friend's hand. 'You heard ? ...'
Wallscourt nodded. There had been a perfectly distinct sound, like the swishing of skirts over grass. The next moment, he could almost have sworn he saw the shadowy form of a girl flit past on the opposite side of the hedge. ... It was, of course, the misty light, the silent hour, the strange tale. ...
'You saw it?' whispered Thornhill, tightening his grasp, 'young as ever, lovely as ever,—ghosts don't get old, you know. Well, she hardly thought to find her lover in the flesh, waiting at the gate, the same—after a hundred years. I too am a ghost,—what else? ... Look, it is coming back! ... this way ... at this side of the hedge now, you see the grey dress that looks like silver ? ... you hear the rustling?'
'Thornhill, this is folly,—let us go back. We are both overwrought, hysterical ... we imagine ...'
'She has turned,—she will not meet me,—even her ghost disdains me. How it all comes back! For I love her more
than ever! ... I must speak to her. ... Yes, yes, I know it's only a ghost ... what matter? ... I must tell her that I have suffered ... that I have been faithful ... always. ...'
Before Wallscourt could stop him, he had leapt the barrier. Immediately he was engulfed in the darkness, which was by this time complete. The doctor followed hastily, calling aloud his friend's name. Once or twice he fancied he heard a reply; several times, so quickened was his imagination, the swishing robe seemed to brush by him. He stumbled on, striking himself against the branches of trees, foundering in swampy places. Quite unexpectedly he came upon the stream, and slipped into one of the shallower pools: he managed to scramble out somehow, and going more cautiously—still calling to Thornhill—he saw at last the welcome light of a lantern, moving over the meadows in his direction.
'My friend! I have lost my friend!' cried the doctor to the figure approaching him. He was almost inarticulate with anxiety and foreboding, and pointed unconsciously in the direction of the lake. The man, who had been sent from the hotel to look for the visitors, asked one or two sharp questions, to which Wallscourt could only return vague and unsatisfactory replies.
'It's dangerous ground about here at night, I warn you,' the man said, and it was decided that Wallscourt, lantern in hand, should go back to the hotel, and return with more assistance.
The white dawn found Wallscourt trailing back weary steps in the wake of a search-party whose efforts had been ... vain.
The mountains flushed faintly in the growing light, but the face of the lake was black—inscrutable. ... Perhaps it was the fairer part of childhood, the nobler part of youth, that Thornhill was to experience after all.