Chapter IV
Death and Departure
Now I must tell of my own terrible sorrow, which turned my life
to bitterness and my hopes to ashes.
Never were a man and a woman happier together than I and
Natalie. Mentally, physically, spiritually we were perfectly
mated, and we loved each other dearly. Truly we were as one. Yet
there was something about her which filled me with vague fears,
especially after she found that she was to become a mother. I
would talk to her of the child, but she would sigh and shake her
head, her eyes filling with tears, and say that we must not count
on the continuance of such happiness as ours, for it was too
great.
I tried to laugh away her doubts, though whenever I did so I
seemed to hear Bastin's slow voice remarking casually that she
might die, as he might have commented on the quality of the
claret. At last, however, I grew terrified and asked her bluntly
what she meant.
"I don't quite know, dearest," she replied, "especially as I am
wonderfully well. But--but--"
"But what?" I asked.
"But I think that our companionship is going to be broken for a
little while."
"For a little while!" I exclaimed.
"Yes, Humphrey. I think that I shall be taken away from you--
you know what I mean," and she nodded towards the churchyard.
"Oh, my God!" I groaned.
"I want to say this," she added quickly, "that if such' a thing
should happen, as it happens every day, I implore you, dearest
Humphrey, not to be too much distressed, since I am sure that you
will find me again. No, I can't explain how or when or where,
because I do not know. I have prayed for light, but it has not
come to me. All I know is that I am not talking of reunion in Mr.
Bastin's kind of conventional heaven, which he speaks about as
though to reach it one stumbled through darkness for a minute
into a fine new house next door, where excellent servants had
made everything ready for your arrival and all the lights were
turned up. It is something quite different from that and very
much more real."
Then she bent down ostensibly to pat the head of a little black
cocker spaniel called Tommy which had been given to her as a
puppy, a highly intelligent and affectionate animal that we both
adored and that loved her as only a dog can love. Really, I knew,
it was to hide her tears, and fled from the room lest she should
see mine.
As I went I heard the dog whimpering in a peculiar way, as
though some sympathetic knowledge had been communicated to its
wonderful animal intelligence.
That night I spoke to Bickley about the matter, repeating
exactly what had passed. As I expected, he smiled in his grave,
rather sarcastic way, and made light of it.
"My dear Humphrey," he said, "don't torment yourself about such
fancies. They are of everyday occurrence among women in your
wife's condition. Sometimes they take one form, sometimes
another. When she has got her baby you will hear no more of
them."
I tried to be comforted but in vain.
The days and weeks went by like a long nightmare and in due
course the event happened. Bickley was not attending the case; it
was not in his line, he said, and he preferred that where a
friend's wife was concerned, somebody else should be called in.
So it was put in charge of a very good local man with a large
experience in such domestic matters.
How am I to tell of it? Everything went wrong; as for the
details, let them be. Ultimately Bickley did operate, and if
surpassing skill could have saved her, it would have been done.
But the other man had misjudged the conditions; it was too late,
nothing could help either mother or child, a little girl who died
shortly after she was born but not before she had been
christened, also by the name of Natalie.
I was called in to say farewell to my wife and found her
radiant, triumphant even in her weakness.
"I know now," she whispered in a faint voice. "I understood as
the chloroform passed away, but I cannot tell you. Everything is
quite well, my darling. Go where you seem called to go, far away.
Oh! the wonderful place in which you will find me, not knowing
that you have found me. Good-bye for a little while; only for a
little while, my own, my own!"
Then she died. And for a time I too seemed to die, but could
not. I buried her and the child here at Fulcombe; or rather I
buried their ashes since I could not endure that her beloved body
should see corruption.
Afterwards, when all was over, I spoke of these last words of
Natalie's with both Bickley and Bastin, for somehow I seemed to
wish to learn their separate views.
The latter I may explain, had been present at the end in his
spiritual capacity, but I do not think that he in the least
understood the nature of the drama which was passing before his
eyes. His prayers and the christening absorbed all his attention,
and he never was a man who could think of more than one thing at
a time.
When I told him exactly what had happened and repeated the
words that Natalie spoke, he was much interested in his own
nebulous way, and said that it was delightful to meet with an
example of a good Christian, such as my wife had been, who
actually saw something of Heaven before she had gone there. His
own faith was, he thanked God, fairly robust, but still an
undoubted occurrence of the sort acted as a refreshment, "like
rain on a pasture when it is rather dry, you know," he added,
breaking into simile.
I remarked that she had not seemed to speak in the sense he
indicated, but appeared to allude to something quite near at hand
and more or less immediate.
"I don't know that there is anything nearer at hand than the
Hereafter," he answered. "I expect she meant that you will
probably soon die and join her in Paradise, if you are worthy to
do so. But of course it is not wise to put too much reliance upon
words spoken by people at the last, because often they don't
quite know what they are saying. Indeed sometimes I think this
was so in the case of my own wife, who really seemed to me to
talk a good deal of rubbish. Good-bye, I promised to see Widow
Jenkins this afternoon about having her varicose veins cut out,
and I mustn't stop here wasting time in pleasant conversation.
She thinks just as much of her varicose veins as we do of the
loss of our wives."
I wonder what Bastin's ideas of unpleasant conversation may be,
thought I to myself, as I watched him depart already
wool-gathering on some other subject, probably the heresy of one
of those "early fathers" who occupied most of his thoughts.
Bickley listened to my tale in sympathetic silence, as a doctor
does to a patient. When he was obliged to speak, he said that it
was interesting as an example of a tendency of certain minds
towards romantic vision which sometimes asserts itself, even in
the throes of death.
"You know," he added, "that I put faith in none of these
things. I wish that I could, but reason and science both show me
that they lack foundation. The world on the whole is a sad place,
where we arrive through the passions of others implanted in them
by Nature, which, although it cares nothing for individual death,
is tender towards the impulse of races of every sort to preserve
their collective life. Indeed the impulse is Nature, or at least
its chief manifestation. Consequently, whether we be gnats or
elephants, or anything between and beyond, even stars for aught I
know, we must make the best of things as they are, taking the
good and the evil as they come and getting all we can out of life
until it leaves us, after which we need not trouble. You had a
good time for a little while and were happy in it; now you are
having a bad time and are wretched. Perhaps in the future, when
your mental balance has re-asserted itself, you will have other
good times in the afternoon of your days, and then follow
twilight and the dark. That is all there is to hope for, and we
may as well look the thing in the face. Only I confess, my dear
fellow, that your experience convinces me that marriage should be
avoided at whatever inconvenience. Indeed I have long wondered
that anyone can take the responsibility of bringing a child into
the world. But probably nobody does in cold blood, except
misguided idiots like Bastin," he added. "He would have twenty,
had not his luck intervened."
"Then you believe in nothing, Friend," I said.
"Nothing, I am sorry to say, except what I see and my five
senses appreciate."
"You reject all possibility of miracle, for instance?"
"That depends on what you mean by miracle. Science shows us all
kinds of wonders which our great grandfathers would have called
miracles, but these are nothing but laws that we are beginning to
understand. Give me an instance."
"Well," I replied at hazard, "if you were assured by someone
that a man could live for a thousand years?"
"I should tell him that he was a fool or a liar, that is all.
It is impossible."
"Or that the same identity, spirit, animating principle--call
it what you will--can flit from body to body, say in successive
ages? Or that the dead can communicate with the living?"
"Convince me of any of these things, Arbuthnot, and mind you I
desire to be convinced, and I will take back every word I have
said and walk through Fulcombe in a white sheet proclaiming
myself the fool. Now, I must get off to the Cottage Hospital to
cut out Widow Jenkins's varicose veins. They are tangible and
real at any rate; about the largest I ever saw, indeed. Give up
dreams, old boy, and take to something useful. You might go back
to your fiction writing; you seem to have leanings that way, and
you know you need not publish the stories, except privately for
the edification of your friends."
With this Parthian shaft Bickley took his departure to make a
job of Widow Jenkins's legs.
I took his advice. During the next few months I did write
something which occupied my thoughts for a while, more or less.
It lies in my safe to this minute, for somehow I have never been
able to make up my mind to burn what cost me so much physical and
mental toil.
When it was finished my melancholy returned to me with added
force. Everything in the house took a tongue and cried to me of
past days. Its walls echoed a voice that I could never hear
again; in the very looking-glasses I saw the reflection of a lost
presence. Although I had moved myself for the purposes of sleep
to a little room at the further end of the building, footsteps
seemed to creep about my bed at night and I heard the rustle of a
remembered dress without the door. The place grew hateful to me.
I felt that I must get away from it or I should go mad.
One afternoon Bastin arrived carrying a book and in a state of
high indignation. This work, written, as he said, by some ribald
traveller, grossly traduced the character of missionaries to the
South Sea Islands, especially of those of the Society to which he
subscribed, and he threw it on the table in his righteous wrath.
Bickley picked it up and opened it at a photograph of a very
pretty South Sea Island girl clad in a few flowers and nothing
else, which he held towards Bastin, saying:
"Is it to this child of Nature. that you object? I call her
distinctly attractive, though perhaps she does wear her hibiscus
blooms with a difference to our women--a little lower down."
"The devil is always attractive," replied Bastin gloomily.
"Child of Nature indeed! I call her Child of Sin. That photograph
is enough to make my poor Sarah turn in her grave."
"Why?" asked Bickley; "seeing that wide seas roll between you
and this dusky Venus. Also I thought that according to your
Hebrew legend sin came in with bark garments."
"You should search the Scriptures, Bickley," I broke in, "and
cultivate accuracy. It was fig-leaves that symbolised its
arrival. The garments, which I think were of skin, developed
later."
"Perhaps," went on Bickley, who had turned the page, "she" (he
referred to the late Mrs. Bastin) "would have preferred her
thus," and he held up another illustration of the same woman.
In this the native belle appeared after conversion, clad in
broken-down stays--I suppose they were stays--out of which she
seemed to bulge and flow in every direction, a dirty white dress
several sizes too small, a kind of Salvation Army bonnet without
a crown and a prayer-book which she held pressed to her middle;
the general effect being hideous, and in some curious way,
improper.
"Certainly," said Bastin, "though I admit her clothes do not
seem to fit and she has not buttoned them up as she ought. But it
is not of the pictures so much as of the letterpress with its
false and scandalous accusations, that I complain."
"Why do you complain?" asked Bickley. "Probably it is quite
true, though that we could never ascertain without visiting the
lady's home."
"If I could afford it," exclaimed Bastin with rising anger, "I
should like to go there and expose this vile traducer of my
cloth."
"So should I," answered Bickley, "and expose these introducers
of consumption, measles and other European diseases, to say
nothing of gin, among an innocent and Arcadian people."
"How can you call them innocent, Bickley, when they murder and
eat missionaries?"
"I dare say we should all eat a missionary, Bastin, if we were
hungry enough," was the answer, after which something occurred to
change the conversation.
But I kept the book and read it as a neutral observer, and came
to the conclusion that these South Sea Islands, a land where it
was always afternoon, must be a charming place, in which perhaps
the stars of the Tropics and the scent of the flowers might
enable one to forget a little, or at least take the edge off
memory. Why should I not visit them and escape another long and
dreary English winter? No, I could not do so alone. If Bastin and
Bickley were there, their eternal arguments might amuse me. Well,
why should they not come also? When one has money things can
always be arranged.
The idea, which had its root in this absurd conversation, took
a curious hold on me. I thought of it all the evening, being
alone, and that night it re-arose m my dreams. I dreamed that my
lost Natalie appeared to me and showed me a picture. It was of a
long, low land, a curving shore of which the ends were out of the
picture, whereon grew tall palms, and where great combers broke
upon gleaming sand.
Then the picture seemed to become a reality and I saw Natalie
herself, strangely changeful in her aspect, strangely varying in
face and figure, strangely bright, standing in the mouth of a
pass whereof the little bordering cliffs were covered with bushes
and low trees, whose green was almost hid in lovely flowers.
There in my dream she stood, smiling mysteriously, and stretched
out her arms towards me.
As I awoke I seemed to hear her voice, repeating her dying
words: "Go where you seem called to go, far away. Oh! the
wonderful place in which you will find me, not knowing that you
have found me."
With some variations this dream visited me twice that night. In
the morning I woke up quite determined that I would go to the
South Sea Islands, even if I must do so alone. On that same
evening Bastin and Bickley dined with me. I said nothing to them
about my dream, for Bastin never dreamed and Bickley would have
set it down to indigestion. But when the cloth had been cleared
away and we were drinking our glass of port--both Bastin and
Bickley only took one, the former because he considered port a
sinful indulgence of the flesh, the latter because he feared it
would give him gout--I remarked casually that they both looked
very run down and as though they wanted a rest. They agreed, at
least each of them said he had noticed it in the other. Indeed
Bastin added that the damp and the cold in the church, in which
he held daily services to no congregation except the old woman
who cleaned it, had given him rheumatism, which prevented him
from sleeping.
"Do call things by their proper names," interrupted Bickley. "I
told you yesterday that what you are suffering from is neuritis
in your right arm, which will become chronic if you neglect it
much longer. I have the same thing myself, so I ought to know,
and unless I can stop operating for a while I believe my fingers
will become useless. Also something is affecting my sight,
overstrain, I suppose, so that I am obliged to wear stronger and
stronger glasses. I think I shall have to leave Ogden" (his
partner) "in charge for a while, and get away into the sun. There
is none here before June."
"I would if I could pay a locum tenens and were quite sure it
isn't wrong," said Bastin.
"I am glad you both think like that," I remarked, "as I have a
suggestion to make to you. I want to go to the South Seas about
which we were talking yesterday, to get the thorough change that
Bickley has been advising for me, and I should be very grateful
if you would both come as my guests. You, Bickley, make so much
money out of cutting people about, that you can arrange your own
affairs during your absence. But as for you, Bastin, I will see
to the wherewithal for the locum tenens, and everything else."
"You are very kind," said Bastin, "and certainly I should like
to expose that misguided author, who probably published his
offensive work without thinking that what he wrote might affect
the subscriptions to the missionary societies, also to show
Bickley that he is not always right, as he seems to think. But I
could never dream of accepting without the full approval of the
Bishop.
"You might get that of your nurse also, if she happens to be
still alive," mocked Bickley. "As for his Lordship, I don't think
he will raise any objection when he sees the certificate I will
give you about the state of your health. He is a great believer
in me ever since I took that carbuncle out of his neck which he
got because he will not eat enough. As for me, I mean to come if
only to show you how continually and persistently you are wrong.
But, Arbuthnot, how do you mean to go?"
"I don't know. In a mail steamer, I suppose."
"If you can run to it, a yacht would be much better."
"That's a good idea, for one could get out of the beaten tracks
and see the places that are never, or seldom, visited. I will
make some inquiries. And now, to celebrate the occasion, let us
all have another glass of port and drink a toast."
They hesitated and were lost, Bastin murmuring something about
doing without his stout next day as a penance. Then they both
asked what was the toast, each of them, after thought, suggesting
that it should be the utter confusion of the other.
I shook my head, whereon as a result of further cogitation,
Bastin submitted that the Unknown would be suitable. Bickley said
that he thought this a foolish idea as everything worth knowing
was already known, and what was the good of drinking to the rest?
A toast to the Truth would be better.
A notion came to me.
"Let us combine them," I said, "and drink to the Unknown
Truth."
So we did, though Bastin grumbled that the performance made him
feel like Pilate.
"We are all Pilates in our way," I replied with a sigh.
"That is what I think every time I diagnose a case," exclaimed
Bickley.
As for me I laughed and for some unknown reason felt happier
than I had done for months. Oh! if only the writer of that
tourist tale of the South Sea Islands could have guessed what
fruit his light-thrown seed would yield to us and to the world!
I made my inquiries through a London agency which hired out
yachts or sold them to the idle rich. As I expected, there were
plenty to be had, at a price, but wealthy as I was, the figure
asked of the buyer of any suitable craft, staggered me. In the
end, however, I chartered one for six months certain and at so
much per month for as long as I liked afterwards. The owners paid
insurance and everything else on condition that they appointed
the captain and first mate, also the engineer, for this yacht,
which was named Star of the South, could steam at about ten knots
as well as sail.
I know nothing about yachts, and therefore shall not attempt to
describe her, further than to say that she was of five hundred
and fifty tons burden, very well constructed, and smart to look
at, as well she might be, seeing that a deceased millionaire from
whose executors I hired her had spent a fortune in building and
equipping her in the best possible style. In all, her crew
consisted of thirty-two hands. A peculiarity of the vessel was
that owing to some fancy of the late owner, the passenger
accommodation, which was splendid, lay forward of the bridge,
this with the ship's store-rooms, refrigerating chamber, etc.,
being almost in the bows. It was owing to these arrangements,
which were unusual, that the executors found it impossible to
sell, and were therefore glad to accept such an offer as mine in
order to save expenses. Perhaps they hoped that she might go to
the bottom, being heavily insured. If so, the Fates did not
disappoint them.
The captain, named Astley, was a jovial person who held every
kind of certificate. He seemed so extraordinarily able at his
business that personally I suspected him of having made mistakes
in the course of his career, not unconnected with the worship of
Bacchus. In this I believe I was right; otherwise a man of such
attainments would have been commanding something bigger than a
private yacht. The first mate, Jacobsen, was a melancholy Dane, a
spiritualist who played the concertina, and seemed to be able to
do without sleep. The crew were a mixed lot, good men for the
most part and quite unobjectionable, more than half of them being
Scandinavian. I think that is all I need say about the Star of
the South.
The arrangement was that the Star of the South should proceed
through the Straits of Gibraltar to Marseilles, where we would
join her, and thence travel via the Suez Canal, to Australia and
on to the South Seas, returning home as our fancy or convenience
might dictate.
All the first part of the plan we carried out to the letter. Of
the remainder I say nothing at present.
The Star of the South was amply provided with every kind of
store. Among them were medicines and surgical instruments,
selected by Bickley, and a case of Bibles and other religious
works in sundry languages of the South Seas, selected by Bastin,
whose bishop, when he understood the pious objects of his
journey, had rather encouraged than hindered his departure on
sick leave, and a large number of novels, books of reference,
etc., laid in by myself. She duly sailed from the Thames and
reached Marseilles after a safe and easy passage, where all three
of us boarded her.
I forgot to add that she had another passenger, the little
spaniel, Tommy. I had intended to leave him behind, but while I
was packing up he followed me about with such evident
understanding of my purpose that my heart was touched. When I
entered the motor to drive to the station he escaped from the
hands of the servant, whimpering, and took refuge on my knee.
After this I felt that Destiny intended him to be our companion.
Moreover, was he not linked with my dead past, and, had I but
known it, with my living future also?
