The Gap in the Curtain Read Free Page A

meet you, sir,” he said. “I’m a candidate for public life, and I wanted to see a man who interests me more than anybody else in the game. I hope you don’t mind my saying that . . . What about going into the garden? There’s a moon of sorts, and the nightingales will soon begin. If they’re like the ones at Goodeve, eleven’s their hour.”
    We went through the hall to the terrace, which lay empty and quiet in a great dazzle of moonlight. It was only about a fortnight till midsummer, a season when in fine weather in southern England it is never quite dark. Now, with a moon nearing the full, the place was bright enough to read print. The stone balustrade and urns were white as snow, and the two stairways that led to the sunk garden were a frosty green like tiny glaciers.
    We threaded the maze of plots and lily ponds and came out on a farther lawn, which ran down to the little river. That bit of the Arm is no good for fishing, for it has been trimmed into a shallow babbling stretch of ornamental water, but it is a delicious thing in the landscape. There was no sound except the lapse of the stream, and the occasional squattering flight of a moorhen. But as we reached the brink a nightingale began in the next thicket.
    Goodeve had scarcely spoken a word. He was sniffing the night scents, which were a wonderful blend of early roses, new-mown hay, and dewy turf. When we reached the Arm, we turned and looked back at the house. It seemed suddenly to have gone small, set in a great alleyway of green between olive woods, an alleyway which swept from the high downs to the river meadows. Far beyond it we could see the bare top of Stobarrow. But it looked as perfect as a piece of carved ivory—and ancient, ancient as a boulder left millenniums ago by a melting icecap.
    â€œPretty good,” said my companion at last. “At Flambard you can walk steadily back into the past. Every chapter is written plain to be read.”
    â€œAt Goodeve, too,” I said.
    â€œAt Goodeve, too. You know the place? It is the first home I have had since I was a child, for I have been knocking about for years in lodgings and tents. I’m still a little afraid of it. It’s a place that wants to master you. I’m sometimes tempted to give myself up to it and spend my days listening to its stories and feeling my way back through the corridors of time. But I know that that would be ruin.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause you cannot walk backward. It is too easy, and the road leads nowhere. A man must keep his eyes to the front and resist the pull of his ancestors. They’re the devil, those ancestors, always trying to get you back into their own rut.”
    â€œI wish mine would pull harder,” I said. “I’ve been badly overworked lately, and I feel at this moment like a waif, with nothing behind me and nothing before.”
    He regarded me curiously. “I thought you looked a little done up. Well, that’s the penalty of being a swell. You’ll lie fallow for a day or two and the power will return. There can’t be much looking backward in your life.”
    â€œNor looking forward. I seem to live between high blank walls. I never get a prospect.”
    â€œOh, but you are wrong,” he said seriously. “All your time is spent in trying to guess what is going to happen—what view the courts will take of a case, what kind of argument will hit the prospective mood of the House. It is the same in law and politics and business and everything practical. Success depends on seeing just a little more into the future than other people.”
    I remembered my odd feeling at dinner of the raft on the misty sea, and the anxious peering faces at the edge.
    â€œMaybe,” I said. “But just at the moment I’m inclined to envy the people who live happily in the present. Our host, for example, and the boys and girls who are now dancing.” In the stillness the