The world he knew, the peaceful happy world of the surface, was like a pretty lake in which were reflected the dappled clouds and the willows that grew on its bank, where care-free boys paddled their canoes and the girls with them trailed their fingers in the soft water.
It was terrifying to think that below, just below, dangerous weeds waved tentacles to ensnare you and all manner of strange, horrible things, poisonous snakes, fish with murderous jaws, waged an unceasing and hidden warfare.
From a word here, a word there, Charley got the impression that Simon had peered fascinated into those secret depths, and he asked himself whether it was merely curiosity, or some horrible attraction, that led him to observe those crooks and blackguards with a cynical indulgence.
In this world Robert Berger had found himself wonderfully at home.
Of a higher class and better educated than most of its inhabitants, he had enjoyed a certain prestige.
His charm, his easy manner and his social position attracted his associates, but at the same time put them on their guard against him.
They knew he was a crook, but curiously enough, because he was a garcon de bonne famille, a youth of respectable parentage, took it somewhat amiss that he should be.
He worked chiefly alone, without confederates, and kept his own counsel.
They had a notion that he despised them, but they were impressed when he had been to a concert and talked enthusiastically and, for all they could tell, with knowledge of the performance.
They did not realize that he felt himself wonderfully at ease in their company.
In his mother’s house, with his mother’s friends, he felt lonely and oppressed; he was irritated by the inactivity of the respectable life.
After his conviction on the charge of stealing a motor car he had said to Jojo in one of his rare moments of confidence:
“Now I needn’t pretend any more.
I wish my father were alive, he would have turned me out of the house and then I should be free to lead the only life I like.
Evidently I can’t leave my mother.
I’m all she has.”
“Crime doesn’t pay,” said Jojo.
“You seem to make a pretty good thing out of it,” Robert laughed.
“But it’s not the money, it’s the excitement and the power.
It’s like diving from a great height.
The water looks terribly far away, but you make the plunge, and when you rise to the surface, gosh! you feel pleased with yourself.”
Charley put the newspaper cuttings back in his pocket, and, his brow slightly frowning with the effort, tried to piece together what he now knew of Robert Berger in order to get some definite impression of the sort of man he really was.
It was all very well to say he was a worthless scamp of whom society was well rid; that was true of course, but it was too simple and too sweeping a judgement to be satisfactory; the idea dawned in Charley’s mind that perhaps men were more complicated than he had imagined, and if you just said that a man was this or that you couldn’t get very far.
There was Roberts passion for music, especially Russian music, which, so unfortunately for her, had brought Lydia and him together.
Charley was very fond of music.
He knew the delight it gave him, the pleasure, partly sensual, partly intellectual, when intoxicated by the loveliness that assailed his ears, he remained yet keenly appreciative of the subtlety with which the composer had worked out his idea.
Looking into himself, as perhaps he had never looked before, to find out what exactly it was he felt when he listened to one of the greater symphonies, it seemed to him that it was a complex of emotions, excitement and at the same time peace, love for others and a desire to do something for them, a wish to be good and a delight in goodness, a pleasant languor and a funny detachment as though he were floating above the world and whatever happened there didn’t very much matter; and perhaps if you had to combine all those feelings into one and give it a name, the name you’d give it was happiness.
But what was it that Robert Berger got when he listened to music?
Nothing like that, that was obvious.
Or was it unjust to dismiss such emotions as music gave him as vile and worthless?
Might it not be rather that in music he found release from the devil that possessed him, that devil which was stronger than himself so that he neither could be delivered, nor even wanted to be delivered, from the urge that drove him to crime because it was the expression of his warped nature, because by throwing himself into antagonism with the forces of law and order he realized his personality—might it not be that in music he found peace from that impelling force and for a while, resting in heavenly acquiescence, saw as though through a rift in the clouds a vision of love and goodness?
Charley knew what it was to be in love.
He knew that it made you feel friendly to all men, he knew that you wanted to do everything in the world for the girl you loved, he knew that you couldn’t bear the thought of hurting her and he knew that you couldn’t help wondering what she saw in you, because of course she was wonderful, definitely, and if you were honest with yourself you were bound to confess that you couldn’t hold a candle to her.
And Charley supposed that if he felt like that everyone else must feel like that and therefore Robert Berger had too.
There was no doubt that he loved Lydia with passion, but if love filled him with a sense of—Charley jibbed at the word that came to his mind, it made him almost blush with embarrassment to think of it—well, with a sense of holiness, it was strange that he could commit sordid and horrible crimes.
There must be two men in him.
Charley was perplexed, which can hardly be considered strange, for he was but twenty-three, and older, wiser men have failed to understand how a scoundrel can love as purely and disinterestedly as a saint.
And was it possible for Lydia to love her husband even now with an all-forgiving devotion if he were entirely worthless?
“Human nature wants a bit of understanding,” he muttered to himself.
Without knowing it, he had said a mouthful.
But when he came to consider the love that consumed Lydia, a love that was the cause of her every action, the inspiration of her every thought, so that it was like a symphonic accompaniment that gave depth and significance to the melodic line which was her life from day to day, he could only draw back in an almost horrified awe as he might have drawn back, terrified but fascinated, at the sight of a forest on fire or a river in flood.
This was something with which his experience could not cope.
By the side of this he knew that his own little love affairs had been but trivial flirtations and the emotion which had from time to time brought charm and gaiety into his somewhat humdrum life no more than a boy’s sentimentality.
It was incomprehensible that in the body of that commonplace, drab little woman there should be room for a passion of such intensity.
It was not only what she said that made you realize it, you felt it, intuitively as it were, in the aloofness which, for all the intimacy with which she treated you, kept you at a distance; you saw it in the depths of her transparent eyes, in the scorn of her lips when she didn’t know you were looking at her, and you heard it in the undertones of her sing-song voice.
It was not like any of the civilized feelings that Charley was familiar with, there was something wild and brutal in it, and notwithstanding her high-heeled shoes, her silk stockings, and her coat and skirt, Lydia did not seem a woman of to-day, but a savage with elemental instincts who still harboured in the darkest recesses of her soul the ape-like creature from which the human being is descended.
“By God! what have I let myself in for?” said Charley.
He turned to Simon’s article.
Simon had evidently taken pains over it for the style was more elegant than that of his reports of the trial.
It was an exercise in irony written with detachment, but beneath the detachment you felt the troubled curiosity with which he had considered the character of this man who was restrained neither by scruple nor by the fear of consequences.