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The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales by Arthur Thomas Quiller Couch

A >> Arthur Thomas Quiller Couch >> The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales




All this Gilbart's gaze took in; with the stately merchantmen riding
beyond the throng, and the low breakwater three miles away, and the blue
horizon beyond all. Out of that blue from time to time came the low,
jarring vibration which told of an unseen gunboat at practice; and from
time to time a puff of white smoke from the Picklecombe battery held him
listening for its louder boom. But he returned always to the _Berenice_
moving away up the Asia passage, so cautiously that between whiles she
seemed to be drifting; but always moving, with the smoke blown level
from her buff-coloured funnels, with clean white sides and clean white
ensign, and here and there a sparkle of sunlight on rail or gun-breech
or torpedo-tube. She was bound on a three-years' cruise; and Gilbart,
who happened to know this and was besides something of a sentimentalist,
detected pathos in this departure on a festival morning. It seemed to
him--as she swung round her stern and his quick eye caught the glint of
her gilded name with the muzzle of her six-inch gun on the platform
above, foreshortened in the middle of its white screen like a bull's-eye
in a target--it seemed to him that this holiday throng took little heed
of the three hundred odd men so silently going forth to do England's
work and fight her battles. On her deck yesterday afternoon he had
shaken hands and parted with a friend, a stoker on board, and had seen
some pitiful good-byes. His friend Casey, to be sure, was unmarried--an
un-amiable man with a cynical tongue--with no one to regret him and no
disposition to make a fuss over a three-years' exile. But at the head
of the ship's ladder Gilbart had passed through a group of red-eyed
women, one or two with babies at the breast. It was not a pretty sight:
one poor creature had abandoned herself completely, and rocked to and
fro holding on by the bulwarks and bellowing aloud. This and a vision
of dirty wet handkerchiefs haunted him like a physical sickness.

Gilbart considered himself an Imperialist, read his newspaper
religiously, and had shown great loyalty as secretary of a local
sub-committee at the time of the Queen's Jubilee, in collecting
subscriptions among the dockyardsmen. Habitually he felt a lump in his
throat when he spoke of the Flag. His calling--that of lay-assistant
and auxiliary preacher (at a pinch) to a dockyard Mission--perhaps
encouraged this surface emotion; but by nature he was one of those who
need to make a fuss to feel they are properly patriotic. To his
thinking every yacht in the Sound should have dipped her flag to
the _Berenice_.

Surely even a salute of guns would not have been too much. But no: that
is the way England dismisses her sons, without so much as a cheer!

He felt ashamed of this cold send-off; ashamed for his countrymen.
"What do they know or care?" he asked himself, fastening his scorn on
the backs of an unconscious group of country-people who had raced one
another uphill from an excursion steamer and halted panting and laughing
half-way up the slope. It irritated him the more when he thought of
Casey's pale, derisive face. He and Casey had often argued about
patriotism; or rather he had done the arguing while Casey sneered.
Casey was a stoker, and knew how fuel should be applied.

Casey made no pretence to love England. Gilbart never quite knew why he
tolerated him. But so it was: they had met in the reading-room of a
Sailors' Home, and had somehow struck up an acquaintance, even a sort of
unacknowledged friendship. Their common love of books may have helped;
for Casey--Heaven knew where or how--had picked up an education far
above Gilbart's, and amazing in a common stoker. Also he wore some
baffling, attractive mystery behind his reserve. Once or twice--
certainly not half a dozen times--he had at a casual word pulled open
for an instant the doors of his heart and given Gilbart a sensation of
looking into a furnace, into white-hot depths, sudden and frightening.
But what chiefly won him was the knowledge that in some perverse,
involuntary and quite inexplicable way he was liked by this sullen
fellow, who had no other friend and sought none. He knew the liking to
be there as surely as he knew it to be shy and sullen, curt in
expression, contemptuous of itself. Had he ever troubled to examine
himself honestly, Gilbart must have acknowledged himself Casey's
inferior in all but amiability; and Casey no doubt knew this. But in
friendship as in love there is usually one who likes and one who suffers
himself to be liked, and the positions are not allotted by merit.
Gilbart--a self-deceiver all his life--had accepted the compliment
complacently enough.

The _Berenice_ cleared the crowd and quickened her speed as the
five-minute gun puffed out from the committee-ship and the Blue Peter
ran up the halyards in the smoke. Gilbart turned his attention upon the
two big yachts and followed their movements until the starting-gun was
fired; saw them haul up and plunge over the line so close together that
the crews might have shaken hands; watched them as they fluttered out
their spinnakers for the run to the eastern mark, for all the world like
two great white moths floating side by side swiftly but with no show of
hurry. When he returned to the cruiser she was far away, almost off the
western end of the breakwater--gone, so far as he was concerned and
whoever else might be watching her from the shore; the parting over, the
threads torn and snapped, her crew face to face now with the long
voyage.

He drew a long breath, and was aware for the first time of a woman
standing about twenty yards on his left behind a group of chattering
holiday-makers. He saw at a glance that she did not belong to them, but
was gazing after the _Berenice_; a forlorn, tearless figure, with a
handkerchief crumpled up into a ball in her hand. Affability was a part
of Gilbart's profession, and besides, he hated to see a woman suffer.
He edged toward her and lifted his hat.

"I hope," said he, "these persons are not annoying you? They don't
understand, of course. I, too, have a friend on the _Berenice_."

The woman looked at him as though she heard but could not for the moment
grasp what he said. She tightened her grip on the handkerchief and kept
her lips firmly compressed.

Gilbart saw that, though tearless, her eyes wore traces of tears--no
redness, but some swelling of the lids, with dark semicircles
underneath.

"To them," he went on, nodding toward the holiday-keepers, "it's only
regatta day. To them she's only a passing ship helping to make up the
pretty scene. They know nothing of the gallant hearts she carries or
the sore ones she leaves behind. If they knew, I wonder if they'd care?
The ordinary Anglo-Saxon has so little imagination!"

She was staring at him now, and at length seemed to understand.
But with understanding there grew in her eyes a look of anger, almost of
repugnance. "Oh, please go away!" she said.

He lifted his hat and obeyed; indeed, he walked off to the farthest end
of the Hoe. He was hurt. He had a thin-skinned vanity, and hated to
look small even before a stranger. That snub poisoned his morning, and
although he looked at the yachts, his mind ran all the time upon the
encounter. To be sure he had brought it upon himself, but he preferred
to consider that he had meant kindly--had obviously meant kindly.
He tried to invent a retort,--a gentle, dignified retort which would
have touched her to a regret for her injustice--nothing more.
Perhaps it was not yet too late to return and convey his protest under a
delicate apology; or perhaps the mere sight of him, casually passing,
might move her to make amends. He even strolled back some way with this
idea, but she had disappeared.

The _Berenice_ had vanished too; around Penlee Point no doubt.
He remembered the field-glasses slung in a case by his hip and was
fumbling with the leather strap when a drop of rain fell on his hand,
the herald of a smart shower. A dark squall came whistling down the
Hamoaze; and standing there in the fringe of it he saw it strike and
spread itself out like a fan over the open Sound at his feet, blotting
the sparkle out of the water, while some of the small boats heeled to it
and others ran up into the wind and lay shaking. It was over in five
minutes, and the sun broke out again before the rain ceased falling; but
Gilbart decided that there was more to follow. He had not come out to
keep holiday, and an unfinished manuscript waited for him in his
lodgings--an address on True Manliness, to be delivered two evenings
hence in the Mission Room to lads under eighteen. Though he delivered
them without manuscript, Gilbart always prepared his addresses carefully
and kept the fair copies in his desk. He lived in hope of being
reported some day, and then--who could say but a book might be called
for?

His lodgings lay midway down a long, dreary street of small houses, each
with a small yard at the back, each built of brick and stuccoed, all as
like as peas, all inhabited by dockyardsmen or the families of gunners,
artificers, and petty officers in the navy. Prospect Place was its
deceptive name, and it ran parallel with three precisely similar
thoroughfares--Grafton Place, Alderney Place, and Belvedere Avenue.
These four--with a cross-street, where the Mission Room stood facing a
pawnbroker's--comprised Gilbart's field of labour.

He reached home a little after twelve, ate his dinner, and fell to work
on his manuscript. By half-past three he had finished all but the
peroration. Gilbart prided himself on his perorations; and knowing from
experience that it helped him to ideas and phrases he caught up his hat
and went out for a walk.

During that walk he did indeed catch and fix the needed sentences.
But, as it happened, he was never afterward able to recall one of them.
All he remembered was that much rain must have fallen; for the pavements
which had been dry in the morning were glistening, and the roadways
muddy and with standing puddles. On his way homeward each of these
puddles reflected the cold, pure light of the dying day, until Prospect
Place might have been a street in the New Jerusalem, paved with jasper,
beryl, and chrysoprase. So much he remembered, and also that his feet
must have taken him back to the Hoe, where the crowd was thicker and the
regatta drawing to an end--a few yachts only left to creep home under a
greenish sky, out of which the wind was fast dying. He had paused
somewhere to listen to a band: he could give no further account to
himself.

For this was what had happened: as he entered his lodgings and closed
the front door, the letter-box behind it fell open and he saw a sealed
envelope lying inside. He picked it out and read the address.

"Mrs. Wilcox!" he called down the passage. "When did this come?"

Mrs. Wilcox, appearing at the kitchen door and wiping her hands, could
not tell. The midday post or else the three o'clock. There were no
others. Come to think of it, she had heard a postman's knock when she
was dishing up the dinner, but had supposed it to be next door.
It sounded like next door.

Gilbart took the letter upstairs with him. The address was in Casey's
handwriting. "Queer fellow, Casey." He broke the seal in the little
bay window. "Just like him, though, to shake hands yesterday without a
spark of feeling, and then send his good-byes to reach me after he was
well on his way." He drew out the inclosure, unfolded it, and saw that
the paper bore the printed address of the Sailors' Home where Casey
dossed when ashore, and where writing-paper was supplied gratis.
"Couldn't have come ashore after I left him: he'd paid his bill at the
Rest and his bag was aboard. Must have had this in his pocket all the
time; might just as well have handed it to me--with instructions not to
open it--and saved the stamp. What a secretive old chap it is!"

He held the letter close to his eyes in the waning daylight.


"DEAR JOHN,--By the time this reaches you we shall have started;
and by then, or a little later, I shall have gone and the
Berenice with me. If you ask where, I don't know; but it is where
we shall never meet.

"You serve your country in your own way. I am going to serve mine.
Perhaps I shall also be serving yours; for it is only by striking
terribly and without warning that the brave men in this world can
get even with the cowards who make its laws.

"One thing I envy you--you'll be alive to see the rage of the sheep.
I am playing this hand alone and without help. So when your silly
newspapers begin to cry out about secret societies, _you will
know_. I never belonged to one in my life.

"I think I am sorriest about the way you'll think of me. But that
makes no real difference, because I know it to be foolish. I have
the stuff on board and the little machine. I cannot fix the time
to an hour up or down; but you may take it for sure that _some time
between 10 p.m. and midnight the_ Berenice _will be at the bottom of
the sea_ with

"Yours, P. C."

While John Gilbart read this there was silence in the stuffy little
room, and for some minutes after. Then he stepped to the mantelpiece
for the match-box and candle. A small ormolu clock ticked there, and
while he groped for the matches he put out a hand to stop the noise,
which had suddenly grown intolerable. He desisted, remembering that he
did not know how the clock worked--that Mrs. Wilcox, who wound it up
religiously on Monday mornings, was proud of it, and--anyway, _that_
wasn't the machine he wanted to stop. He found a match, lit it and held
it close to the letter.

The match burned low, scorched his fingers. He dropped it in the
fender, where it flickered out, just missing the "waterfall" of shavings
with which Mrs. Wilcox decorated her fireplace in the summer months.
He did not light another, but went back to the window and stood there,
quite still.

Down the street to the westward, over the wet roofs still glimmering in
the twilight, one pale green rift divided the heavy clouds, and in that
rift the last of the daylight was dying. Across the way, in the house
facing him, a woman was lighting a lamp. As a rule the inhabitants of
Prospect Place did not draw the blinds of their upper rooms until they
closed the shutters also and went to bed: and Gilbart looked straight
into the little parlour. But he saw nothing.

He was trying--vainly trying--to bring his mind to it. Nothing really
big had happened to him before: and his first feeling,
characteristically selfish, was that this terrible thing had risen up to
alter all the rest of his life. He must disentangle himself, get away
to a distance and have a look at it. His brain was buzzing. Yes, there
it rose, like a black wall between this moment and all the hours to
come; a brute barrier stretching clean across the prospect. Again and
again he brought his mind up to it as you might coax a horse up to a
fence; again and again it refused. Each time in the last few steps his
heart froze, extending its chill until every separate faculty hung back
springless and inert. And there was no getting round!

Why had this happened to _him_ of all people? It never for a moment
occurred to him to doubt Casey's word. He saw it now; hideous as the
deed was, Casey was capable of it--had always been capable of it.
Let it go for a miserable tribute to Casey's honesty in the past that
Gilbart accepted the infernal statement at once and without suspicion.
He knew now that from the bottom of their intercourse this candid devil
had been grinning up at him all the time; only his own cowardly,
comfortable habit of seeing the world as he wished it had kept his eyes
turned from the truth. Men don't as a rule commit crimes; not one man
in millions translates himself into a crime of this sort; the odds
against his daring it are only to be told in millions. Yet it had
happened. Man or devil, Casey never paltered with his creed; if the
world differed from him, then it was Casey against the world; a hopeless
business for him, yet he would get in a blow if possible. And Casey had
got in his blow. The incredible had happened; but (Gilbart groaned) why
had it happened to _him?_ In his stupefaction he returned again and
again upon this, catching in the flood at that one little straw of self;
not inhumanly, as callous to the ruin of others; but pitifully, meanly,
because it was the one thing familiar in the roar and din. He cursed
Casey; cursed him for betraying his friendship. The man had no right--
He pulled up suddenly, with a laugh. After all, Casey had played the
game, had faced the music, and would go down with the _Berenice_.
One soul against three hundred and fifty, perhaps; not what you would
call atonement; but, after all, the best he had to offer. Wonder how
many Samson pulled down with him at Gaza? Wonder if the Bible says?

"Beg pardon, Mr. Gilbart?"

It was Mrs. Wilcox standing in the doorway with his tea on a tray.

"It--it was nothing," he stammered. She must have heard his laugh.

"Talking to yourself? I often hear you at it over your sermons and
things; sometimes at your dressing, too; I hears you when I'm in here
doing up the room. You'd like the lamp lit, I suppose?" She set down
the tray.

"Not just yet."

"Well, it's a bad habit, reading with your meals."

"It's not worth while to bring a lamp. I must drink my tea in a hurry,
and run out. I have an engagement."

He heard her go out and close the door. "Casey had no right. It was a
betrayal. If the man were bent on this infernal crime--put the atrocity
of it aside for a moment--call it just an ordinary crime; . . . but why
need he have written that letter? Why involve _him?_ Well, not
involve, perhaps; still there was a kind of responsibility--"

His eyes had been fastened on the little parlour across the road.
The woman after lighting the lamp had set it in the centre of a round
table and left the room. Between this table and the hearth an old man
sat in an arm-chair, smoking his pipe and reading a newspaper. The back
of the chair was turned toward the window, but over it Gilbart could see
the crown of a grey head and small, steady puffs of smoke ascending
between it and the upper edge of the paper. A light appeared in the
room above; the light of a candle behind the drawn blind. It lasted
there perhaps for ten minutes, and once the woman's shadow moved across
the blind.

The light went out, and after a minute or two the woman reappeared in
the parlour. She carried a work-basket, and after speaking a word with
the old man in the chair she set the basket down on the table, drew up a
chair and began to darn a child's stocking. Now and then she looked up
as if listening for some sound or movement in the room overhead, but
after a moment or two began to ply her needle again. The needle moved
more slowly--stopped--she bowed her head over the stocking.
Gilbart knew why. She was the wife of a petty officer on the
_Berenice_. The old man in the chair went on reading.

All this while a light had been growing in Gilbart's brain, and now he
saw. In this street, and the next, and the next, lived scores who had
sons, husbands, brothers on board the _Berenice_; thin walls of brick
and plaster dividing to-night their sore hearts and their prayers; a
whole town with its hopes and its happy days given into keeping of one
ship; not its love only but its trust for life's smallest comforts
following her as she moved away through the darkness. And he alone
knew! He had only to throw open the window--to fling four words into
that silent street--to shout, "The _Berenice_ is lost!"--and with the
breath of it windows would fly open, partitions fall down, and all those
privacies meet and answer in one terrible outcry. He put up a hand to
thrust it away--this awful gift of power. He would have none of it; he
was unfit. "Oh, my God!"--it was he, not Casey, who held the real
infernal machine. It was here, not in the _Berenice_, that the levin
must fall; and he, John Gilbart, held it in his fingers. "Oh, my God, I
am unfit--thrust not this upon me!"

But there was no escape. He must take his hat and run--run to the Port
Admiral. The errand was useless, he knew; for all the while at the back
of his soul's confusion some practical corners of his brain had been
working at the problem of time--was there time to follow and prevent?
There was not. He knew the _Berenice's_ natural speed to be eighteen
knots. Put it at sixteen, fifteen even; still not the fastest destroyer
in the port--following in a bee-line--could overtake her by midnight.
And there might be, must be, delays. Yet God, too, might interfere;
some providential accident might delay the cruise. _He_ must run, at
any rate. He picked up his hat and ran.

Now that he was taking action--doing something--the worst horror of
responsibility left him for a while; he seemed to have cast some of it
already off his own shoulders and on to the Admiral's. As he ran he
found time to think of Casey. Casey was doing this thing--not in hatred
or in villainy for gain--but because it seemed to him right--right, or
at least necessary. Casey was laying down his own life in the deed.
How could man, framed in God's image, expect ultimate good out of
devilish cruelty? Yet from the world's beginning men had murdered and
tortured each other on this only plea; had butchered women and the very
babes; had stamped upon God's image and--marvel of marvels--for its
soul's salvation, not for their own advantage. At every stride Gilbart
felt his moral footing, trusted for years without question, cracking and
crumbling and swirling away in blocks. Red flames leapt into the
fissures and filled them. The end of the world had surely come; but--he
must run to the Admiral! He kept that uppermost in his mind, and ran.

The windows of the Admiralty House blazed with light. The Admiral's
wife was giving a dinner and a dance, and already a small crowd had
gathered to see the earlier guests arrive. The sight dashed Gilbart.
Suddenly he remembered that the letter had reached him by the afternoon
post. It was now half-past seven, and he would have to explain the
interval; for of course the Admiral would suspect the whole story at
first. Gilbart knew the official manner; he had been privileged to
study the fine flower of it in this particular Admiral one afternoon six
months before, when the great man had condescended to sit on the
platform at the Mission anniversary. "Tut, tut--a stupid practical joke
"--that would be the beginning; and then would follow cross-examination
in the coldest court-martial fashion. Well, he could explain; but it
would be just as well to have the story pat beforehand.

One minute--ten minutes went by. Cabs rattled up and private carriages;
officers in glittering uniforms, ladies muffled in silk and swansdown
stepped past the policeman behind whom Gilbart hesitated. This would
never do; better he had gone in with the story hot on his lips.
He twitched the policeman's elbow.

"May I pass, please? I want to see the Admiral."

"That's likely, ain't it?"

"But I have a message for him; an urgent one--one that won't keep a
moment!"

"Why, I have seen you hanging round here this quarter hour with these
very eyes! 'Won't keep'? Here, you get out!"

"I tell you--"

"Oh, deliver us!" the policeman interrupted. "What's the matter with
you? Come to keep the Admiral's dinner cold while you hand over command
of the Channel Fleet?" He winked heavily at one or two of the nearest
in the crowd, and they laughed.

Gilbart eyed them savagely. He had a word in his mouth which would stop
their laughing; and for one irrational moment he was near speaking it,
near launching against half a dozen loafers the bolt which only to hold
and handle had aged him ten years in an hour. The word was even on his
tongue when a carriage passed and at its open window a young girl leaned
forward and looked out on the crowd. Her face in the light of the
entrance-lamp was exquisitely fair, delicately rose and white as the
curved inner lip of a sea-shell. At her throat, where her cloak-collar
fell back a little, showing its quilted lining of pale blue satin, a
diamond necklace shimmered, and a rosebud of diamonds in her hair
sparkled so that it seemed to dance. It caught Gilbart's eye, and
somehow it seemed to lift and remove her and the house she was
entering--the lit windows, the guests, the Admiral himself--into another
world. If it were real, then (like enough) this fragile thing, this
Dresden goddess, owned a brother, perhaps a lover, on board the
_Berenice_. If so, here was another world waiting to be shattered--a
world of silks and toys and pretty uniforms and tiny bric-a-brac--a sort
of doll's house inhabited by angels at play. But could it be real?
Could such a world exist and be liable as his own to _It_? Could the
same brutal touch destroy this fabric and the sordid privacies of
Prospect Place--all in a run like a row of card-houses?

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