PART IV
I
“OH no,” the specialist said, “I don’t see what purpose it would serve, your telling his wife exactly what happened. I prefer, indeed, that you should not. No doubt it was the shock of hearing the voice on the telephone that actually induced the state of mind. But to know the fact doesn’t help us—it doesn’t help us towards the cure. All we can do is to wait. His chance is that he’s not such a very young man. If it had happened ten years ago there wouldn’t have been any chance for him at all; but the brain-fibre—what the Germans call theHirnstoff—is tougher now. Anyhow, we can’t say.”
Sir William Wells, an unreasonably lugubrious man of fifty, having in his eyes the look of a man doomed beyond hope, with ruffled grey hair, an untidy grey beard, very dark eyebrows, a whitish complexion, in which tints of blue predominated, except that on his cheek-bones were patches of red so bright that he had the appearance of having rouged—with an air, in fact, of having had all his hair ruffled up the wrong way, and of remaining still a personage of importance—Sir William Wells repeated:
“All we can do is to wait.”
“Don’t you think,” Robert Grimshaw said—they were in the great man’s first-class consulting-room—a tall place, very gay, with white walls, bright plaster-worked ceiling, chairs with seats and backs of scarlet leather, and numerous cabinets inlaid with green and yellow wood, very shiny and new, and yet conveying a sinister suspicion that they contained not rose-leaves, silks, or bibelots, but instruments, diagrams, and disinfectants—“don’t you think,” Robert Grimshaw said, “that, since his mania, if it is a mania, is so much along the lines of his ordinary character, that is an indication that his particular state is not so very serious?”
“My dear sir,” the specialist answered, “what we’ve got to do is to establish whether there is or isn’t a lesion in the brain. His character’s nothing to do with it.”
“Of course we’re in your hands,” Grimshaw answered, “but I should have thought that a man who’s been abnormal all his life ...”
“My dear sir,” Sir William repeated, shaking his glasses as if minatorily at Grimshaw’s nose, “have you any profession? I suppose not. But if you had a profession you would know how utterly impossible the suggestions of laymen are to the professional. People come to me for this sort of thing because I have had thousands—literally, thousands—of similar cases. It’s no good my considering individual eccentricities; my business is to put my finger on the spot.”
“Then, what do you propose to do?” Grimshaw said.
“Nothing,” the specialist answered. “For the present, absolutely nothing.”
“But don’t you think a change ...” Grimshaw suggested.
Having entirely redecorated his house from top to bottom in order to indicate that he was more prosperous than Dr. Gegg of No. 161, Sir William, who was heavily indebted to Jews, was upon the turning-point between bankruptcy and possible salvation.
“No,” he said determinedly, so that he seemed to bay like a dog from his chest, “certainly not. If I am to cure him, I must have him under my own close personal attention. There’s nothing to be done but to wait.”
He rose upon the points of his toes, and then brought his heels sharply down upon the floor.
“You understand, we know nothing yet. Your friend doesn’t speak a word. He’s no doubt aware that he’s watched. He has a companion whom I have personally instructed, and who will report to me. Get him to take as much exercise as he can. Keep him fairly quiet, but have him in the room when cheerful people are about. I will drop in at every moment of the day that I can spare.”
He paused to glare at Robert Grimshaw.
“I’m a very busy man, but I’ll pay special attention to your friend’s case. I will try to be always in and out of Mr. Leicester’s house. More I can’t do.”
Backed up as he was by Katya Lascarides’ suggestion that Sir William was a good man, Grimshaw felt an intense satisfaction—even a gratitude—to Sir William; and whilst he slipped his five-pound note carefully wrapped round five shillings under the specialist’s paper-weight, which was made of one huge aqua-marine, he uttered a formal speech of thanks.
“Mind,” Sir William shouted at him as he reached the door, “I don’t promise you a cure. I’m not one of those quacks. But you know my position, and you know my reputation. I work from ascertained facts, not from theories. If it were possible to communicate with your friend—if he’d speak, or if it were possible to manipulate him—we might get at something. If, for instance, we could get him to stand with his heels together, his hands at his sides, and his eyes shut; but we can’t get him to speak, and he doesn’t listen when he’s spoken to. There’s nothing to do but wait until he does.”
A period of strain, enhanced by the continual droppings in of Sir William Wells, ensued for the house in Curzon Street, and nothing happened, save that they all became personally acquainted with Sir William’s idiosyncrasies. They discovered that he had a singular prejudice against the eating of fish; that he was exceedingly insolent to the servants; that he read theDaily Telegraph; that he liked the singing of Scotch comedians, and considered all ballet-dancers to be physically abnormal. They also had the perpetual company of a gentle and black-haired youth called Held. This young man, with a singular slimness and taciturnity, had been put in by Sir William as if he were a bailiff in possession of Dudley Leicester. Dudley Leicester never spoke, the young man hardly ever; but he was exceedingly nice in his table manners, and eventually Pauline made the discovery at dinner that he very much disliked cats, and was a Christian Scientist. And with these additions the household continued its way.
To Robert Grimshaw the bright spot in this tenebrous affair was the inflexible tranquillity of Pauline Leicester. Looking back upon it afterwards he seemed to see her upon the background of his own terrible pain—to see her as a golden and vibrating spot of light. She spoke about the weather, about some improvements that were being made in the village of Icking, about the forthcoming General Election, about her clothes. She went everywhere that she could go without her husband. She went to “at homes,” to private views, she was “at home.” She had Dudley himself in her drawing-room where in the farther comers young Mr. Held and Ellida Langham held animated conversations so close to his passive form that it might appear that, monosyllabic as he always was, he was at least attentive to the conversation. She drove regularly in the Park with Dudley beside her, and most often with Robert Grimshaw sitting opposite them; but she never mentioned her husband’s condition to Grimshaw, and her face wore always its little, tender smile. He was aware that in her there was a certain determination, almost a fierceness. It wasn’t that in her deep black her face was more pallid, or that her features hardened. It wasn’t that she chattered less. Her little tongue was going perpetually, with its infantile gaiety, if her eyes were for ever on the watch.
There was, moreover, a feeling of a General Election in the air—of that General Election in which Dudley, as a foregone conclusion, was to replace the member sitting for his division of the county; and one afternoon Robert Grimshaw came in to one of Pauline’s “at homes.” The little encampment round Dudley Leicester had its place usually in the small, back drawing-room which Dudley’s great chair and Ellida’s enormous hat and Mr. Held’s slim figure almost contrived to fill. Dudley sprawled back, his complexion perfectly clear, his eyes gazing abstractedly before him, perfectly normal, perfectly healthy, on show for anyone who chose to look at him; and Ellida and Mr. Held joined in an unceasing and animated discussion on Christian Science. Robert Grimshaw, having addressed a word or two to Madame de Bogota, and having nodded to Mr. Balestier, who sat for a Midland county, and having shaken hands with Mrs. Jimtort, the wife of a Recorder of a south-western city, was moving slowly up to close in the little group in the background. And suddenly, with an extraordinary running step, Dudley Leicester shot past him straight at the member for the Midland county. He had brought out the words: “Are you the man ...” when already shooting, as it were sideways, between the people, Mr. Held had very lightly touched his wrist.
“You know,” he said, “that you’renotto talk politics this afternoon. We’re all tired out.”
Leicester passed his hand lightly down his face, and, turning slowly, went back to his arm-chair.
Mr. Balestier opened his eyes rather wide; he was a stoutish, clean-shaven man of forty-five with a rather disagreeable expression, who, probably because he was interested in South American railways, went about everywhere with the Senhora de Bogota.
“Oh, I say,” he ejaculated to Pauline, “you have got them under your thumb, if it’s you who insists they’re not to talk politics. It seems to act like a military command.”
And Pauline stifled a yawn with her tiny hand.
“Well, it’s perfectly true what Dudley’s secretary says. We are all nearly worn out, so you’ll have to excuse my yawning,” Grimshaw heard her say from behind his back. “And Dudley hasn’t been really well since he had the ‘flu.’”
“Oh, you’re altogether too nervous,” Mr. Balestier’s fat voice came. “Dudley’s absolutely certain of his seat, and as for not well, why, he’s a picture of ox-like health. Just look at him!”
“But he’s so terribly thorough,” Pauline answered. “He’s much too wrapped up in this work. Why, he thinks about nothing else all day and all night. If you watch him you’ll see he hardly ever speaks. He’s thinking, I wouldn’t mind betting, about how to win the heart of a man called ”Down,“ with red@@@ whiskers, who’s an Antipedobaptist and not our tenant, and supposed to be able to influence thirty Nonconformists’ votes. You just keep your eye on Dudley.”
“Oh, I’ll take your word for his industry,” Mr. Balestier said. “But I’ve got something much better worth keeping my eyes on.”
“Is that meant for you or me, Madame de Bogota?” Pauline said. “Or possibly it’s you, Mrs. Jimtort!”
“As a matter of fact,” Mr. Balestier said, “I was thinking of Grimshaw’s dog. I feel convinced he’ll have a piece out of my leg, one of these days.”
Robert Grimshaw meanwhile was supporting himself with one hand on the blue curtains that decorated the archway between the two rooms. He was positively supporting himself; the sudden shock of Leicester’s shooting past him had left him weak and trembling. And suddenly he said:
“What’s the good?”
Ellida—for even Ellida had not yet recovered from the panic of Dudley’s swift evasion—took with avidity this opening for a recommencement of one of her eternal and animated conversations with Mr. Held.
“What’s the good of exposing these impostures?” she said. “Why, all the good in the world. Think of all the unfortunate people that are taken in....”
And so she talked on until Mr. Held, the name of Mrs. Mary Baker G. Eddy upon his lips, plunged again into the fray.
But Robert Grimshaw was not asking what was the good of Christian Science. He had turned his back upon the front room. Nevertheless, every word that Pauline uttered had at once its hearing, its meaning, and its painful under-meaning in his ears. And when he had said, “What’s the good?” it had been merely the question of what was the good of Pauline’s going on with these terrible vigilances, this heart-breaking pretence. And through his dreadfully tired mind there went—and the vision carried with it a suggestion of sleep, of deep restfulness—the vision of the logical sequence of events. If they let Dudley Leicester down, if they no longer kept up the pretence—the pretence that Dudley Leicester was no more an engrossed politician—then Dudley Leicester would go out of things, and he and Pauline ... he and Pauline would fall together. For how long could Pauline keep it up?
The cruelty of the situation—of each word that was uttered, as of each word that she uttered in return, the mere impish malignancy of accidental circumstances—all these things changed for the moment his very view of Society. And the people sitting behind him—Madame de Bogota, with the voluptuous eyes and the sneering lips; Mrs. Jimtort, whose lips curved and whose eyes were cold; Mr. Balestier, whose eyes rolled round and round, so that they appeared to be about to burst out of his head, and the deuce only knows what they didn’t see or what conclusions they wouldn’t draw from what they did see—these three seemed to be a small commission sent by Society to inquire into the state of a household where it was suspected something was “wrong.” He realized that it was probably only the state of his nerves; but every new word added to his conviction that these were not merely “people,” bland, smiling, idle, and innocuous—good people of social contacts. They were, he was convinced, Inquisitors, representing each a separate interest—Mrs. Jimtort standing for provincial Society, Madame de Bogota for all the cosmopolitanism of the world’s centre that Western London is, and Balestier for the Party. And outside there seemed to be—he seemed to hear them—the innumerable whispers of the tongues of all Society, canvassing the results of the report that would be brought back by this committee of inquiry. It worked up, indeed, to an utterly abominable climax when Balestier, with his rather strident voice, exclaimed:
“Why don’t you let me mote you down to Well-lands one day, Mrs. Leicester? You ought to know the Hudsons. Lady Etta’s a peach, as I learned to say when I went over with the Newfoundland Commission.”
And at that even Ellida threw up her hands and gazed, her lips parted, into Grimshaw’s eyes. From behind his back, a minute before, there had come little rustlings of people standing up. He had heard Pauline say:
“What, you can’t all be going at once?” and he had heaved a great sigh of relief. But in the dead silence that followed Mr. Balestier’s words, whilst Robert Grimshaw was wondering whether Balestier had merely and colossally put his almost ox-like foot into it, or whether this actually was a “try on,” Pauline’s voice came:
“Oh, not just yet. I’m in mourning, you know. I think I go out a little too much as it is.”
“Oh, she’s saved the situation again!” And then irresistibly it came over him to ask what was the good of this eternally saving the situation that neither of them really wanted to maintain. “She should,” he said to himself fiercely, “give it up.” He wasn’t going to stand by and see her tortured. Dudley Leicester had given in, and serve him right, the cad! For all they could tell, he was having the time of his life. Why shouldn’t they do the same?
“Oh, isn’t shewonderful!” Ellida exclaimed suddenly. “I don’t wonder....” And then she gazed at him with her plaintive eyes. The slim, dark Mr. Held brought out suddenly:
“It’s the most wonderful ...” but his voice died away in his jaws. “After all,” he continued as suddenly, “perhaps she’s holding the thought. You see, we Christian Scientists ...” But again his voice died away; his dark eyes gazed, mournful and doglike, at Pauline’s dimly-lit figure.
The tall, small room, with its large white panels, to which the frames of pale-tinted pictures gave an occasional golden gleam, had about it an air of blue dimness, for the curtains, straight at the sides, and half concealing the very tall windows, were of a transparent and ultramarine network. The little encampment around Dudley Leicester occupied a small back drawing-room, where the window, being of stained glass that showed on its small, square panels the story of St. George, was, on account of its tall, dark furniture, almost in gloom. Little, and as it were golden, Pauline stood motionless in the middle of the room; she looked upon the floor, and appeared lost in reflection. Then she touched one side of her fair hair, and without looking up she came silently towards them. Ellida was upon the point of running towards her, her arms outstretched, and of saying: “Youarewonderful!” but Pauline, with her brown eyes a little averted, brought out without any visible emotion, as if she were very abstracted, the words: “And how is your little Kitty? She is still at Brighton with Miss Lascarides? Robert dear, just ring the bell for the tea-things to be taken away.”
It was as if the strain upon her rendered her gently autocratic to Robert Grimshaw, who watched her from another point, having settled himself down in the arm-chair before the window looking into the little back room. Against the rows of the stained-glass window Ellida Langham appeared all black, impulsive, and ready as it were to stretch out her arms to enfold this little creature in her cloak, to hide her face under the great black hat with the drooping veil and the drooping feathers. But as he understood it, Pauline fended off these approaches by the attentive convention of her manner. They were in face of Dudley Leicester’s condition; they had him under their eyes, but Pauline was not going—even to the extent of accepting Ellida’s tenderness—to acknowledge that there was any condition about Dudley Leicester at all. It wasn’t, of course, that Ellida didn’t know, for Robert Grimshaw himself had told her, and Ellida, with her great and impulsive tenderness, had herself offered to come round and to play at animated conversations with Dudley and Mr. Held. But except by little pressures of the hand at meeting or at parting, and by little fluttering attentions to Ellida’s hats and toilets when she rose to go, Pauline was not going to show either gratitude or emotion for the moment. It was her way of keeping her flag flying. And he admired her for it as he admired her for everything, and looking down at Peter between his feet, Robert shook his head very sadly. “Perhaps,” he thought to himself, “until she knows it’s hopeless, she’s not going to acknowledge even to herself that there’s anything the matter at all.”
II
BETWEEN his feet Peter’s nostrils jerked twice, and a little bubble of sound escaped. He was trying to tell his master that a bad man was coming up the stairs. It was, however, only Sir William Wells who, with his brisk straightforwardness and his frowning authority, seemed to push himself into the room as its master, and to scatter the tables and chairs before him. In his harsh and minatory tones he informed them that the Marchioness of Sandgate had gone to Exeter with Mrs. Jjohns, and then he appeared to scatter the little group. It was, indeed, as if he had thrown Ellida out of the room, so quickly—whilst she exclaimed over her shoulder to Grimshaw: “Well, you’ll be round to dinner?”—did she disappear.
With his rasping voice, shaking his glasses at her, Sir William continued for some minutes to inform Pauline of the movements of those of his patients who were of political prominence. They were his patients of that class uneasily dispersing over the face of the country, opening bazaars, bowling the first balls of cricket-seasons, devising acts of graciousness all night, putting them into practice all day, and perpetually shaking hands that soiled their delicate gloves. For that particular world was full of the whispered words “General Election.” When it was coming no one seemed to know, for the Prime Minister with his amiable inscrutability very reasonably distrusted the great majority of his followers. This disconcerted innumerable hostesses, for no one knew when they wouldn’t have to pack up bag and baggage and bolt like so many rabbits back to their burrows. This febrile condition gave occupation of a secretarial kind to great numbers of sleek and smooth-haired young gentlemen, but it was very hard upon the London tradesman.
It was, Robert Grimshaw was thinking, very hard upon Pauline, too. He couldn’t be absolutely certain what she meant to do in case the General Election came before Dudley could make some sort of appearance in the neighbourhood of Cove Park. In the conversations that he had had with her they had taken it for tacitly understood that he was to be well—or at least that he was to be well enough for Pauline to run him herself.
But supposing it was to be a matter of some years, or even of some months? What was Pauline thinking of when she thought of the General Election that hung over them? Mustn’t it add to her suspense? And he wondered what she meant to do. Would she simply stick Leicester in bed and give it out that he had a temporary illness, and run the election off her own bat? She had already run Leicester down in their car all over the country roads, going dead slow and smiling at the cottagers. And there wasn’t much chance of the other side putting up a candidate....
Between his feet Peter was uttering little bubbles of dissatisfaction whenever Sir William spoke, as if his harsh voice caused the small dog the most acute nervous tension. Grimshaw whistled in a whisper to keep the animal quiet. “All these details,” Grimshaw thought, Pauline had all these details to attend to, an incessant vigilance, a fierce determination to keep her end up, and to do it in silence and loneliness. He imagined her to be quivering with anxiety, to be filled with fear. Heknewher to be all this. But Sir William, having ceased to impart his social information, turned his brows upon his patient, and Pauline came from the back room to sit down opposite him by the fireplace. And all she had to say was: “These coals really are very poor!”
Silence and loneliness. In the long grass, engrossed, mere small spots of black, the starlings in a little company went about their task. From beneath the high trees came the call of the blackbirds echoing in true wood-notes, and overhead a wood-pigeon was crooning incessantly. The path ran broad down the avenue. The sounds of the wood-cutters at work upon the trees felled that winter were sharp points in the low rumble from a distance, and over all the grass that could be seen beneath the tree-trunks there hung a light-blue haze.
Having an unlit cigarette between his fingers Grimshaw felt in his pocket for his matchbox, but for the first time in many years the excellent Jervis had forgotten to fill it. And this in his silence and his loneliness was an additional slight irritant. There was undoubtedly a nostalgia, a restlessness in his blood, and it was to satisfy this restless desire for change of scene that he had come from his own end of the Park into Kensington Gardens. Peter was roaming unostentatiously upon his private affairs, and upon his seat Grimshaw leaned forward and looked at the ground. He had been sitting like that for a long time quite motionless when he heard the words: “You will not, I think, object to my sharing your seat? I have a slight fit of dizziness.” He turned his head to one side and looked up. With a very long, square and carefully tended grey beard, with very long and oiled locks, with a very chiselled nose, high dark brows and complexion as of marble, and upon his head a black cylindrical hat, wearing a long black cassock that showed in its folds the great beads of a wooden rosary, an Orthodox priest was towering over him. Robert Grimshaw murmured: “Assuredly not, Father,” in Greek, and silently the priest sat down at the other end of the bench. His face expressed aloofness, severity, and a distant pride that separated him from all the rest of the world. He, too, sat silent for a very long time, his eyes gazing down through the trees over the Serpentine and into immense distances. Robert Grimshaw looked distastefully at the unlit cigarette which he held between his fingers, and then he observed before him a man who might have been fifty, with watery blue eyes and a red nose, his clothes and hat all a mossy green with age and between his lips a misformed cigarette.
“You haven’t got a light?” Grimshaw said, and the man fumbled in his pocket, producing a greasy, blue box which he pushed open to exhibit its emptiness.
“Oh, well, give me a light from your cigarette,” Grimshaw said.
A hesitancy came over the man’s whole being, but reluctantly he surrendered the feeble vapour tube. Grimshaw took his light.
“Oh, here,” he said, and he drew out his bulky case, “that your last? Here, take one of mine,” and he shook his case over the extended palm. The cigarettes fell into it in a little shower.
“That’ll keep you going for a bit. Thanks, it’s nothing. I’m only obliged to you for the light. I wanted it.”
“Ah, you do want it when you do, guv’nor,” the man said. Then he walked off, lifting his feet a little higher, with a little colour in his cheeks and his back more erect.
“Poor devil!” Grimshaw said, half to himself.
“Surely,” the priest said beside him in fluting and lofty tones, “are we not all poor devils in the sight of the Ruler of Ages?”
Robert Grimshaw minutely bowed his head.
“Your dizziness has left you, Father?” he asked. “It is the long fasting. I was on the watch for you to fall.”
“You speak Greek,” the priest said, “and are acquainted with the practices of the Church?” It was then just the end of Lent, for Easter fell very late that year.
“My mother was a Lascarides and I have many interests in Greece,” Grimshaw answered.
“Ah! the Lascarides were very faithful,” the priest said. “It was they in the main who helped us to build the church here.”
“The church can’t be much more than a stone’s-throw from here. I was wondering what brought you.”
“I am glad you are Greek,” the Father said, “for I think it was a very good charity you did just now, and you spoke to that man like a brother, which is not what the best of these English can do.”
“Oh, come!” Grimshaw said, “the English have their virtues.”
The priest bowed his head in courtesy.
“It is one of their traditions,” Robert Grimshaw said, “to give tobacco instead of pence to beggars. It is less demoralizing.”
Again the priest bowed.
“Precisely so,” he said. “It is less demoralizing. It gives less pleasure. I imagine that when the English blest spirit descends from heaven once a year to the place of torment, he will bear a drop of water to place upon the sufferer’s tongue. It will be less demoralizing than the drop of healing oil that you and I will bear. Also, it will teach the poor soul to know its place.... Tell me, my son,” he added suddenly, “do we not, you and I, feel lonely in this place?”
“Well, it is a very good place,” Robert Grimshaw said. “I think it is the best place in the world.”
“Eemeision!” the priest said. “I do not say that it is not. And in that is shown the truth of the saying:‘How evil are the good places of this world!’”
“Assuredly you have fasted long, Father,” Grimshaw said.
“To a demoralizing degree!” the priest answered ironically. “And let us consider where that leads us. If we have fasted long, we have given ourselves to the angelic hosts. We have given our very substance to these sweet beggars. So we have demoralized the poor of heaven by the alms of our bodies.”
“Surely,” Robert Grimshaw said, “if we overburden our bodies with fasting, we demoralize the image of our Creator and Saviour?”
“Not so!” the priest thundered suddenly, and his eyes blazed far back in his skull. “We have mortified this our body which is from the devil, and in the lowness of the tides of this life we see the truth. For I tell you that when we see this place to be lonely, then, indeed, we see the truth, and when we say that it is pleasant, we lie foully.”
“Then, indeed,” Robert Grimshaw said, “we—I mean you and I—are to be creatures of two natures. We shall follow our passions—if they be passions of well-doing—till they lead us, as always they must, into evil.”
“And,” the priest assented, “we must purge then from us that satisfaction of well-doing and well-being by abstentions and by fastings, and by thinking of the things that are not of this world.”
“It is strange,” Robert Grimshaw said, “to hear your conversation. I have heard so little of these things since I was a very young man. But you teach me now as my aunt and foster-mother taught me at her knee. She was Mrs. Peter Lascarides.”
“I knew her,” the priest said. “She was a very good woman. You could not have had a better teacher.”
“And yet,” Robert Grimshaw said, “it was from her teaching that I have evolved what has been the guiding phrase of my life: ‘Do what you want and take what you get for it.’”
“And God in His mercy pardon the ill we do.” The priest crossed himself.
“I had forgotten that,” Grimshaw said, and he added gravely: “God in His mercy pardon the ill I have done.”
“May it be pardoned to you,” the priest said. He stopped for a moment to let the prayer ascend to Heaven. Then he added didactically: “With that addition your motto is a very good one; for, with a good training, a man should have few evil instincts. And to do what you want, unless obviously it is evil, is to follow the dictates of the instincts that God has placed in you. Thus, if you will feast, feast; if you will fast, fast; if you will be charitable to your neighbour, pour out your goods into the outstretched hands of the poor. Then, if you chance to give three scudi into the hands of a robber, and with these three scudi he purchase a knife wherewith he slay his brother, God may well pardon it to you, who hung, omnipotent, upon the Cross, though thereby to Cæsar was left power to oppress many of the Churches.”
“So that we should not think too much of the effects of our deeds?” Robert Grimshaw asked.
“Not too much,” the priest said. “For then we shall lose much Christian charity. I know a lady who resides near our church and is noted for a frosty sort of charity, going with tracts into the poorer regions. I have heard that she said once to her niece: ‘My dear, never keep a diary; it may be used against you!’” The priest pronounced these words with a singular mixture of laughter and contempt. “Do you not hear all England speaking in these words?” he asked suddenly.
A nurse, tall, pink and white, with a dove-coloured veil and cloak, passed them, with averted face, pushing in a low cart a child, whose blue eyes gazed with contentment upon the tree-tops.
“Well, hasn’t it given us that?” Grimshaw said.
“Yes, it has given that to the world,” the priest said. “A menial who averts her eyes—a child who is inanimate by force of being kept ‘good’—a ‘good’ child. My son, a ‘good’ child is a thing to make the angels cry; for is it not recorded of our Comforter that once He struck His mother?”
“But should not the nursemaid avert her eyes?” Grimshaw said.
“Consider,” the black pope answered, “with what a laughing glance she would have passed you had she been a Cypriote; or how she would have gazed till her eyes started from her head at an English Bishop. But as for this girl, she averts her gaze. Her aunt has told her that it might be used against her.”
“It might be used against her, you know,” Grimshaw said.
“Oh, my son,” the priest said, “for what has God given a maiden eyes, save to use them in innocent glances? And what use is the teaching of our Church if passer-by may not smile upon passer-by and pass the time of day by well-heads and in the shady groves? It may be used against them. But tell me this, my son: Are there not four times more fallen women and brothels in one-half of this city than in all Greece and Cyprus and the Isles?”
“Yet there there is not one such nursemaid,” Grimshaw said. “And it is that that our civilization has bent all its energies to produce. That, without doubt, is why you and I are lonely here.” He added: “But is it not wiser to strive to produce nursemaids?”
“Son,” the priest asked, “will you not come with me and confess your troubles? For I am very certain that you have troubles. You have, is it not, done what you wanted; you are now, therefore, taking what you get for it? I have heard you say, may God pardon the ill you have done! It is not that you regret having rained your cigarettes upon that poor man?”
“Ah, I regret that less than other things,” Grimshaw said.
“Because you asked him first for the service of a light?”
“Why,” Grimshaw answered, “in this case I had really need of a light. But I confess that quite often I have asked poor men for lights when I had my own, that I might give them a taste of good tobacco.”
“And why did you first ask them for a light?” the priest asked. “Was it that they might not be demoralized?”
“I hardly know,” Grimshaw said. “I think it was to get into touch with them—to precede the pleasure of the tobacco with the pleasure of having done me a service. One doesn’t inquire so closely into one’s motives.”
“Ah,” the black pope answered, “from that alone one may perceive that you are not English, for the English do not, like you, seek to come into contact with their fellow-beings or with persons whom they may meet by chance. They are always afraid of entanglements—that it may be used against them.”
Robert Grimshaw leaned forward over his stick. It was pleasant to him to come into contact with this representative of an unseen world—to come for a moment out of the ring, very visible and circumscribed, in which he moved. It gave him, as it were, a chance to stand upon a little hill and look down into the misty “affair” in which he was so deeply engaged.
“Then you don’t advise me,” he said suddenly in English, “to pull up my sticks—to wash my hands of things and people and affections?”
“Assuredly,” the priest said, “I do not advise you to give away your little dog for fear that one day it will die and rend your heart.”
Grimshaw looked meditatively at Peter, who was flapping through the grass, his nose tracking some delicious odour beyond the path just opposite them.
“I certainly will not give away my little dog,” Grimshaw said.
He meditated for a little longer, then he stood up, straightening himself, with his stick behind his back.
“I know I may not offer you my arm,” he said, “to take you back to your church.”
The priest smiled gently.
“That is forbidden to you,” he said, “for it would militate against the dignity of my appearance; but all other human contacts lie open to you. Cherish them.” The haughty curve of his brows became militant; his voice took on the tone of a challenger. “Go out into the world; help all that you may; induce all that you may to go into the right paths. Bring one unto the other, that mutual comprehension may result. That is the way of Christian fellowship; that is the way to bring about the peace of God on earth.”
“And pray God to forgive any ill that I may do,” Grimshaw answered.
“That, too,” the priest answered; and, tall, haughty, his brows very arched, his hair curled and his beard tended, he moved slowly away towards the gates, casting looks, apparently of indignation, at the chestnut-blossoms of the avenue.
III
THAT night Robert Grimshaw dined at the Langhams’. Little Kitty was still at Brighton with Katya, and the room, in the pleasant shade of a hanging-lamp above the table, was tranquil and soothing. Paul Langham, who was the director of a bank doing most of its business with the Orient, was a blond gentleman with a high nose, able to pass from the soup to the coffee without speaking a word. And having that afternoon purchased at a railway bookstall an engineer’s puzzle, by means of which sixteen crescents of orange-coloured cardboard could be made to fit the form of a perfect circle into a square box, Ellida was more engaged with these little coloured objects than with either of her companions.
And suddenly Mr. Held was in the room. He had the air of springing from the dark floor into the little circle of light that the lamp cast. His black hair hung down over his ears, his great black eyes were luminous and very open, and his whole gentle being appeared to be pervaded by some deep excitement.
“I thought if you’d just come round,” he said in a deep voice, with extreme embarrassment. Robert Grimshaw was already half out of his chair, but to his, “What is it?” Mr. Held replied only, “I don’t know that it’s anything, but I should like you just to come round.”
Robert Grimshaw was in the hall and then in the street beside the figure of Mr. Held, who, with his dancing and hurrying step and his swarthy but extreme leanness, had the grotesque appearance of an untried tragic actor. It wasn’t that Dudley was any worse, he said, and it wasn’t—no, certainly it wasn’t, that he’d made any attack upon Pauline. It was simply that he would like Mr. Grimshaw just to come round.
In the drawing-room in Curzon Street Pauline was sitting chafing Dudley Leicester’s hands between her own, and Robert Grimshaw never quite understood what it was that had led the young man to call him in. By cross-questioning him a great deal later he discovered that young Mr. Held had conceived a mournful but enormous tenderness for Pauline. It was, indeed, enough to see how from a distance his enormous eyes pored like a spaniel’s over her tiny figure, or to see how, like a sprinter starting to make a record, he would spring from one end of the drawing-room to fetch her a footstool before she could even select a chair upon which to sit down. It couldn’t be said that he did not brood over Dudley Leicester with efficiency and attention, for that obviously was one of the services he rendered her. But the whole of his enthusiasm went into his attempts to foresee what in little things Pauline would be wanting. And, as he explained later to Robert Grimshaw, that day he had felt—he had felt it in his bones, in his soul—that Pauline was approaching a crisis, a breakdown of her personality. It wasn’t anything she had done; perhaps it was rather what she hadn’t, for she had sat that whole afternoon holding Leicester’s hand, rubbing it between her own, without speaking, looking straight in front of her. And suddenly he had a feeling—he couldn’t explain it. Perhaps, he said, Christian Science had had something to do with it—helped him to be telepathic.
But, sitting as she always did, perched on the arm of the chair where Leicester sprawled, Pauline simply turned her head to the door at Grimshaw’s entry.
“This doctor’s no good,” she said, “and the man he’s called in in consultation’s no good. What’s to be done?”
And then, like Mr. Held himself, Robert Grimshaw had a “feeling.” Perhaps it was the coldness of her voice. That day Sir William Wells had called in a confrère, a gentleman with red hair and an air of extreme deafness; and, wagging his glasses at his friend, Sir William had shouted:
“What d’you say to light baths?Heh? What d’you say to zymotic massage?Heh?” whilst his friend had looked at Dudley with a helpless gaze, dropping down once or twice to feel Leicester’s pulse, and once to press his eyeball. But he did not utter a word, and to Grimshaw, too, the spectacle of these two men standing over the third—Sir William well back on his heels, his friend slouched forward—had given him a sudden feeling of revulsion. They appeared like vultures. He understood now that Pauline, too, had had the same feeling.
“No, they don’t seem much good,” he said.
She uttered, with a sudden fierceness, the words:
“Then it’s up to you to do what’s to be done.”
Robert Grimshaw recoiled a minute step.
“Oh, I don’t mean,” she said, “because it’s your fault, but simply—I can’t think any more. It’s too lonely, yet I can’t talk about it. I can’t.”
Mr. Held, his mouth wide open with agony, glided out of the room, squeezing his ascetic hands together.
“But ...” Robert Grimshaw said.
“Oh, I know,” she answered. “Ididtalk to you about it. But it does not somehow seem to be right any more. Don’t you understand? Not only because it isn’t delicate or it doesn’t seem the right thing to talk about one’s relations with one’s husband, but simply ... I can’t. I can keep things going; I can run the house and keep it all dark.... But is he going to get well, or isn’t he? We know nothing. And I can’t face the question alone. I candothings. It drives me mad to have to think about them. And I’ve no one to talk to, not a relation, not a soul in the world.”
“You aren’t angry with me?” Grimshaw asked.
“Angry!” she answered, with almost a touch of contempt in her voice. “Good heavens! I’d dust your shoes for all you’ve done for us, and for all you’re doing. But you’ve got to do more. You’ve got to do much more. And you have to do it alone.”
“But ...” Robert Grimshaw said.
Pauline remained silent. She began again to chafe Dudley Leicester’s hands between her little palms. Suddenly she looked hard at Grimshaw.
“Don’t you understand?” she said. “I do, if you don’t, see where we’re coming to.” His face expressed a forced want of comprehension, as if he were afraid. She looked remorselessly into his eyes.
“It’s no use hiding our heads in the sand,” she said, and then she added in cold and precise words:
“You’re love with me and I’m in love with you. We’re drifting, drifting. But I’m not the woman to drift. I mean to do what’s right, and I mean to make you. There’s no more to be said.”
Robert Grimshaw walked to the farthest end of the tall room. He remained for a long time with his face to the corner. He attempted no denial. He could not deny, and once again he seemed older. His voice was even a little husky when, looking at her feet, he said:
“I can’t think what’s to be done,” and, in a very low voice, he added, “unless ...” She looked at him with her lips parted, and he uttered the one word: “Katya!” Her hand went up over her heart.
And he remembered how she had said that her mother always looked most characteristic when she sat, with her hand over her heart, erect, listening for the storms in the distance. And suddenly her voice appeared to be one issuing from a figure of stone:
“Yes, that is it! She was indicated from the first; we ought to have asked her from the first. That came into my head this afternoon.”
“We couldn’t have done better than we have,” he said. “We didn’t know how. We haven’t been letting time slip.”
She nodded her head slowly.
“Wehavebeen letting time slip. I knew it when I saw these two over Dudley this afternoon. I lost suddenly all faith in Sir William. It went out of me like water out of a glass, and I saw at once that we had been letting time slip.”
Grimshaw said: “Oh!”
But with her little air of sad obstinacy she continued:
“If we hadn’t, we should have seen from the first that that man was a cold fool. You see it the moment you look for it. Yes, get Miss Lascarides! That’s what you’ve got to do.”
And when Robert Grimshaw held out his hand to her she raised her own with a little gesture of abstention.
“Go to-night and ask Ellida if she will lend us her sister, to put us all straight.”
Eating the end of his meal—which he had begun at the Langhams’—with young Held alone in the dining-room, Robert Grimshaw said:
“We’re going to call Miss Lascarides to the rescue.”
The lean boy’s dark eyes lit up with a huge delight.
“How exactly the right thing!” he exclaimed. “I’ve heard of her. She’s a great professional reputation. You wouldn’t think there was a whole world of us talking about each other, but there is, and you couldn’t do better. How did you come to hear of her?” And then his face fell. “Of course it means my going out of it,” he said.
Robert Grimshaw let his commiserating glance rest on the young man’s open countenance, over which every emotion passed as openly and as visibly as gusts of wind pass over still waters. Suddenly an expression of timid appeal came into the swarthy face.
“I should like you to let me say,” the boy brought out, “how much I appreciate the way you’ve all treated me. I mean, you know, exactly as an equal. For instance,youtalked to me just as if I were anybody else. And Mrs. Leicester!”
“Well, you are like anybody else, aren’t you?” Robert Grimshaw said.
“Of course, too,” Held said, “it’ll be such a tremendous thing for her to have a woman to confide in. She does need it. I can feel that she needs it. Oh, as for me, of course I took a first in classics, but what’s the good of that when you aren’t any mortal use in the world? I might be somebody’s secretary, but I don’t know how those jobs are got. I never had any influence. My father was only Vicar of Melkham. The only thing I could do would be to be a Healer. I’ve so much faith that I am sure I could do it with good conscience, whereas I don’t think I’ve been doing this quite conscientiously. I mean I don’t think that I ever believed I could be much good.”
Robert Grimshaw said: “Ah!”
“If there’d been anything to report to Sir William, I could have reported it, for I am very observant, but there was nothing. There’s been absolutely nothing. Or if there’d been any fear of violence—Sir William always selects me for cases of intermittent violence.”
Again Robert Grimshaw said: “Ah!” and his eyes went over Mr. Held’s form.
“You see,” Held continued, “I’m so immensely strong. I held the amateur belt for wrestling for three years, Græco-Roman style. I expect I could hold it still if I kept in training. But wasn’t I right when I said that Mrs. Leicester had some sort of psychological revulsion this afternoon?” He spoke the words pleadingly, and added in an almost inaudible voice: “You don’t mind my asking? It isn’t an impertinence? It means such an immense amount to me.”
“Yes, I think perhaps you’re right,” Grimshaw said. “Something of the sort must have occurred.”
“I felt it,” Held continued, speaking very quickly; “I felt it inwardly. Isn’t it wonderful, these waves that come out from people one’s keenly sympathetic to? Quite suddenly it came; about an hour after Sir William had gone. She was sitting on the arm of Mr. Leicester’s chair and I felt it.”
“But wasn’t it because her face fell—something like that?” Robert Grimshaw asked.
“Oh no, oh no,” Held said; “I had my back to her. I was looking out of the window. To tell the truth, I can’t bear to look at her when she sits like that beside him; it’s so ...”
A spasm of agony passed over Mr. Held’s face and he swallowed painfully. And then he continued, his face lighting up:
“Why it’s such a tremendous thing to me is that it means I can go forward; I can go on to be a Healer without any conscientious doubts as to my capacities. If I felt this mentality so much, I can feel it in other cases, so that really it means life and death to me; because this sort of thing, if it’s very good study, doesn’t mean any more than being a male nurse, so that I’ve gained immensely, even if I do go out of the house. You don’t know what it’s meant to me to be in contact with your two natures. My mentality has drawn its strength, light; I’m a different person from what I was six weeks ago.”
“Oh, come!” Robert Grimshaw said.
“Oh, it’s true,” Mr. Held answered. “In the last place I was in I had to have meals with the butler, and here you’ve been good, and I’ve made this discovery, that my mentalitywillsynchronize with another person’s if I’m much in sympathy with them.” And then he asked anxiously: “Mrs. Leicester wasn’t very bad?”
“Oh no,” Robert Grimshaw answered, “it was only that she had come to the resolution of calling in Miss Lascarides.”
“Now, I should have thought it was more than that,” Held said. “I was almost certain that it was something very bitter and unpleasant. One of those thoughts that seem suddenly to wreck one’s whole life.”
“Oh, I don’t think it was more than that,” Robert Grimshaw said; and Mr. Held went on to declare at ecstatic lengths how splendid it would be for Pauline to have Katya in the house, to have someone to confide in, to unbosom herself to, to strengthen her mentality with, and from whom to receive—he was sure she would receive it, since Miss Lascarides was Mrs. Langham’s sister—to receive a deep and clinging affection. Besides, Miss Lascarides having worked in the United States, was certain to have imbibed some of Mrs. Eddy’s doctrine, so that, except for Mr. Leicester’s state, it was, Mr. Held thought, going to be an atmosphere of pure joy in the house. Mrs. Leicester so needed a sister.
Robert Grimshaw sipped his coffee in a rather grim silence. “I wish you’d get me the ‘ABC,’ or look up the trains for Brighton,” he said.
IV
“HERE comes mother and the bad man,” Kitty said from the top of her donkey, and there sure enough to meet them, as they were returning desultorily to lunch along the cliff-top, came Ellida Langham and Robert Grimshaw. Ellida at the best of times was not much of a pedestrian, and the donkey, for all it was large and very nearly white, moved with an engrossed stubbornness that, even when she pulled it, Katya found it difficult to change. On this occasion, however, she did not even pull it, and the slowness of their mutual approach across the green grass high up in the air had the effect of the coming together of two combatant but reluctant forces.
“He’s a bad, bad man,” little Kitty said.
“And he’s a bad, bad man,” Katya answered her.
At her last parting it had been agreed between them that they parted for good, or at least until Robert Grimshaw would give in to her stipulation. He had said that this would not be until he had grown very, very tired; and Katya felt it, like Mr. Held, in her bones that Robert Grimshaw had not come now to submit to her. They approached, however, in weather that was very bright, over the short turf beneath dazzling seagulls overhead against the blue sky. And, Katya having stood aside cool and decided in her grey dress, Ellida, dressed as she always was in a loose black, flung herself upon the child. But, having showered as many kisses and endearments as for the moment she needed, she took the donkey by the bridle as a sign that she herself took charge of that particular portion of the enterprise.
“You’ve got,” she said to her sister, “to go a walk with Toto. I’ll take this thing home.”
Katya gave Robert a keen scrutiny whilst she said to Ellida:
“You’ll never get it home. It will pull the arms out of your body.”
“Well, I’ll admit,” Ellida said, a little disconsolately, “that I never expected to turn into a donkey-boy, but”—and she suddenly grew more brisk—“it’s got to be done. You remember that you’re only my nursemaid.”
“That doesn’t,” Katya said amiably, “give you the right to dispose of me when it comes to followers.”
“Oh, get along, you cantankerous cat.” Ellida laughed at her. “The gentleman isn’t here as a follower. He’s heard I’ve given you notice, and he’s taken up your character. He thinks you’ll do. He wants to employ you.”
Katya uttered “Oh,” with minute displeasure, and a little colour came into her clear cheeks. She turned her profile towards them, and against the blue sky it was like an extraordinary cameo, so clear, so pale, the dark eyelashes so exact, the jet-black hair receiving only in its coils the reflection of the large, white, linen hat that Katya wore because she was careful of her complexion and her eyes and her whole face had that air of distant and inscrutable determination that goes with the aspect of a divinity like Diana.
“In fact, it’s only a matter of terms,” Robert Grimshaw said, looking away down the long slopes of the downs inland.
“Everything is always a matter of terms,” Katya said.
The white donkey was placidly browsing the short grass and the daisy heads.
“Oh, come up,” Ellida said, and eventually the white beast responded to her exertions. It wasn’t, however, until the donkey was well out of earshot that Grimshaw broke the silence that Katya seemed determined to maintain. He pointed with his stick to where—a dark patch of trees dominated by a squarish, dark tower, in the very bottom of a fold in the downs—a hamlet occupied the extreme distance.
“I want to walk to there,” he said.
“I’m not at all certain that I want to walk at all,” she answered, and he retorted:
“Oh yes, you do. Look how the weathercock shines in the sun. You know how, when we were children, we always wanted to walk to where the weathercock shone, and there was always something to prevent it. Now we’re grown up, we’re going to do it.”
“Ah, it’s different now,” she answered. “When we were children we expected to find something under the shining weathercocks. Now there’s nothing in the world that we can want to find. It seems as if we’d got all that we’re ever going to get.”
“Still, you don’t know what we mightn’t find under there,” he said.
She looked straight into his clear olive-coloured face. She noted that his eyes were dark and tired.
“Oh, poor dear!” she said to herself, and then she uttered aloud: “Now, look here, Toto, it’s understood once and for all that I’m ready to live with you to-day. But I won’t marry you. If I go with you now, there’s to be no more talking about that.”
“Oh, that’s understood,” he said.
“Well, then,” she replied, and she unfolded her white sunshade, “let’s go and see what we find beneath the weathercock and she put her hand on his arm.”
They strolled slowly down the turf. She was used enough to his method of waiting, as if for the psychological moment, to begin a conversation of importance, and for quite a long way they talked gaily and pleasantly of the little herbs of which, as they got farther inland, they discovered their carpet to be composed— the little mints, the little yellow blossoms, the tiny, silvery leaves like ferns—and the quiet and the thrilling of the innumerable larks. The wind seemed to move low down and cool about their feet.
And she said that he didn’t know what it meant to her to be back—just in the quiet.
“Over there,” she said, “it did seem to be rather dreadful—rather comfortless, and even a little useless. It wasn’t that they hadn’t got the things. Why, there are bits in Philadelphia and bits round Philadelphia—old bits and old families and old people. There are even grass and flowers and shade. But somehow, what was dreadful, what made it so lonely, was that they didn’t know what they were there for. It was as if no one knew—what he was there for. I don’t know.”
She stopped for a minute.
“I don’t know,” she said—“I don’t know how to express it. Over here things seem to fit in, if it’s only a history that they fit into. They go on. But over there one went on patching up people—we patched them up by the score, by the hundred. And then they went and did it all over again, and it seemed as if we only did it for the purpose of letting them go and do it all over again. It was as if instead of preparing them for life we merely prepared them for new breakdowns.”
“Well, I suppose lifeisn’tvery well worth living over there?” Grimshaw asked.
“Oh, it isn’t the life,” she said. “Thelife’sworth living—more worth living than it is here.... But there’s something more than mere life. There’s—you might call it the overtone of life—the something that’s more than the mere living. It’s the what gives softness to our existence that they haven’t got. It’s the ... That’s it! It’s knowing one’s place; it’s feeling that one’s part of a tradition, a link in the chain. And oh ...” she burst out, “I didn’t want to talk about it. But it used to come over me like a fearful doubt—the thought that I, too, might be growing into a creature without a place. That’s why it’s heaven to be back,” she ended. She looked down the valley with her eyes half closed, she leant a little on his arm. “It’s heaven, heaven!” she repeated in a whisper.
“You were afraid,” he said, “that we shouldn’t keep a place for you—Ellida, and I, and all of us?”
“Perhaps that was all it was,” she dropped her voice to say. He pressed with his arm her hand against his heart.
“Oh,” he said, “it isn’t only the old place we want you to go into. There’s a new one. You’ve heard that I’ve been taking up your character?”
“Ah,” she said; and again she was on the alert in an instant. “I’m to have a situation with you? Who’s the invalid? Peter?” The little dog with the flapping ears was running wide on the turf, scenting the unaccustomed grasses.
“Oh, Peter’s as near speaking as he can ever get,” Grimshaw said.
Katya laughed.
“That would be a solution,” she said, “if you took me on as Peter’s nurse. But who’s your dumb child now? I suppose it’s your friend ... ah! ... Dudley Leicester.”
“You remember,” Grimshaw said, “you used always to say he was like Peter.”
“No; it was you I used to say were like Peter. W ell, what’s the matter with Dudley Leicester? ... at least. No. Don’t tell me. I’ve heard a good deal from Ellida. She’s gone clean mad about his wife.”
“Yes; she’s mad enough about Pauline,” Grimshaw said, “and so would you be.”
“I dare say,” she answered. “She seems brave. That’s always a good deal.”
“Oh, if you want braveness!” Grimshaw said. “But how can you consider his case if you won’t hear about him?”
“I’ve hadoneversion,” she said. “I don’t want two. It would obscure my view. What we know is that he sits about speechless, and that he asks strangers in the street a question about a telephone. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“What an admirable professional manner you’ve got!” Grimshaw said; and he disengaged her hand from his arm to look better at her. “It’s quite right about poor Dudley.”
“Well,” she said, “don’t be silly for a moment. This is my work in life—you know you don’t look over-well yourself—but answer me one question. I’m content to take Ellida’s version about him, because she can’t influence my views.Youmight. And one wants to look only from personal observation. But ...” She stretched out her hand and felt his pulse for a light minute.
“You aren’t well,” she said. “No, I don’t want to look at your tongue. Here, take off your cap;” and suddenly she ran her fingers smoothly and firmly over his temples, so that they seemed to explore deep places, cool and restful. “That soothes you, doesn’t it?” she said. “That’show I make my bread. But take care, dear thing, or it’ll be you that I shall be nursing next.”
“It lies with you to cure it,” he answered.
She uttered a painful “Oh!” and looked down the valley between her gloved fingers. When she took her hands down from her face, she said:
“Look here! That’s not fair. You promised not to.”
He answered: “But how can I help it? How can I help it?”
She seemed to make her head grow rigid.
“One thing at a time, then,” she said. “You know everything. What happened to him at the telephone?” And when he said that someone—when he was in a place where he ought not to have been—had recognized his voice, she said: “Oh!” and then again, “Oh! that explains.”
Grimshaw looked at her, his dark eyes imploring.
“It can be cured?” he said.
“It ought to be,” she answered. “It depends. I’ll look at him.”
“Oh, youmust,” he answered.
“Well, I will,” she retorted. “But, you understand, I must be paid my fee.”
“Oh,” he said, “don’t rub it in just now.” “Well, you rubbed it in just now,” she mocked him. “You tried to get round my sympathies. I’ve got to harden myself to get back to where I was. You know you shook me. But I’m a lonely woman. My work’s all I’ve got.”
“Katya!” he said. “You know your half of your father’s money is waiting for you. I’ve not spent a penny of it.”
“I know you’re a dear,” she said, “but it doesn’t alter matters. I won’t take money from a man who won’t make a sacrifice for me.”
“Ellida took her share,” he said.
“Ellida’s Ellida,” she answered. “She’s a darling, but she’s not me. If you’d take the steps you might, you could have me, and I’d have father’s money. But that’s all there is to it. I’ll do all I can for Dudley Leicester. Don’t let’s talk about the other thing.”
They came down to the hard road over the bank.
“Now we shall see what’s under the weathercock,” she said.
V
IT was as if in the churchyard, amongst the old and slanting tombs, in the sunlight and in the extended fingers of the yews, there was the peace of God. In the highroad, as it passed through the little hamlet, not a single person stirred. The cottage doors stood open, and as they had passed they could hear even the ticking of the clocks. The dust on the highroad was stamped into little patterns by the feet of a flock of sheep that, from the hill above, they had seen progressing slowly at a great distance.
“The peace of God,” Robert Grimshaw said. They were sitting in the small plastered porch of the little old church.
“‘The peace of God, which passeth all understanding....’ I’ve always thought that those words, coming where they do, are the most beautiful thing in any rite. It’s like ...” He seemed to be about to enter on a long train of thought, but suddenly he said, “Oh, my dear,” and he laid his head on her shoulder, his eyes closed, and the lines of his face drooping. They sat silent for a long time, and slowly into hers there came an expression of a deep and restful tenderness, a minute softening of all the lines and angles of his chiselled countenance; and at last he said, very low: “Oh, you must end it!” and she answered in an echo of his tone: “No, no. Don’t ask me. It isn’t fair;” and she knew that if she looked at his tired face again, or if again his voice sounded so weary, that she would surrender to his terms.
He answered: “Oh, I’m not asking that. I promised that I wouldn’t, and I’m not. It’s the other thing that you must end. You don’t know what it means to me.”
She said: “What?” with an expression of bewilderment, a queer numb expression, and whilst he brought out in slow and rather broken phrases, “It’s an unending strain ... And I feel I am responsible ... It goes on night and day ... I can’t sleep ... I can’t eat ... I have got the conviction that suddenly he might grow violent and murder....” Her face was hardening all the while. It grew whiter and her eyes darkened.
“You’re talking of Dudley Leicester?” she said, and slowly she removed her arm from beneath his hand. She stood up in front of him, clear and cool in her grey dress, and he recovered his mastery of himself.
“But, of course,” he went on, “that’s only a sort of nightmare, and you’re going to put an end to it. If we start back now you could see him to-night.”
She put her hands behind her back, and said with a distinct and clear enunciation: “I am not going to.” He looked at her without much comprehension.
“Well, to-morrow, then. Next week. Soon?”
“I am not going to at all,” she brought out still more hardly. “Not to-day. Not this week. Not ever.” And before his bewilderment she began to speak with a passionate scorn: “This is what I was to discover beneath the weathercock! Do you consider what a ridiculous figure you out? You bring me here to talk about that man. What’s he to you, or you to him? Why should you maunder and moon and worry about him?”
“But ...” Robert Grimshaw said, and she burst into a hard laugh.
“No wonder you can’t give in to me if you’ve got to be thinking of him all the time. Well, put it how you will, I have done with him, and I’ve done with you. Go your own idiotic ways together. I’ve done with you.” And with her hands stretched down in front of her she snapped the handle of her parasol, her face drawn and white. She looked down at the two pieces contemptuously, and threw them against the iron-bolted, oak church door. “That’s an end of it,” she said.
Grimshaw looked up at her, with his jaw dropping in amazement.
“But you’re jealous!” he said.
She kept herself calm for a minute longer.
“I’m sorry,” she said—“I’m sorry for his poor little wife. I’m sorry for Ellida, who wants him cured, but it’s their fault for having to do with such a soft, meddlesome creature as you.” And then suddenly she burst out into a full torrent: “Jealous!” she said. “Yes, I’m jealous. Is that news to you? It isn’t to me. That’s the secret of the whole thing, if you come to think of it. Now that it’s all over between us there’s no reason why you shouldn’t know it. All my life you’ve tortured me. When I was a tiny child it was the same. I wanted you altogether, body and soul, and you had always someone like that, that you took an interest in; that you were always trying to getmeto take an interest in. Just you think the matter out. It’ll make you understand a good many things.” She broke off, and then she began again: “Jealous? Yes, if it’s jealousy to want a woman’s right—the whole of a man altogether.” She closed her eyes and stood for a moment shuddering. “Good-bye,” she said; and with an extreme stiffness she went down the short path. As she turned to go through the gate she called back: “You’d better try Morley Bishop.”
Grimshaw rose to his feet as if to follow her, but an extreme weariness had overcome him. He picked up the pieces of her parasol, and with a slow and halting gait went along the dusty road towards the village inn.
A little later he took from the nearest station the train up to London, but the intolerable solitude of the slow journey, the thought of Pauline’s despair, the whole weight of depression, of circumstance, made him, on arriving at London Bridge, get out and cross the platform to the down-train time-tables. He was going to return to Brighton.
Ellida was sitting in the hotel room about eleven, reading a novel that concerned itself with the Court life of a country called “Nolhynia.” She looked up at Robert Grimshaw, and said:
“Well, what have you two been up to?”
“Hasn’t Katya told you?”
Ellida, luxuriating at last in the sole possession of her little Kitty, who by now prattled distractingly; luxuriating, too, in the possession of many solid hours of a night of peace, stolen unexpectedly and unavoidably from the duties of a London career, was really and paganly sprawling in a very deep chair.
“No,” she said. “Katya hasn’t told me anything. Where is Katya? I thought you’d decided to go off together at last, and leave poor little Pauline to do the best she could;” and she held out, without moving more than her hand, a pink telegram form which bore the words:
“Don’t worry about me. Am quite all right. See that Kitty’s milk is properly metchnikoffed.”
“It was sent from Victoria,” she said, “so ofcourseI thought you’d been and gone and done it. I didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry, but I think I was mostly glad.” She looked up at his anxious face curiously. “Haven’t you gone and done it?” she said. “You don’t mean to say you’ve split again?”
“We’ve split again,” he answered. “Worse than ever before.” And he added anxiously: “You don’t think she’ll have been doing anything rash?”
“Anything rash!” she mocked him pleasantly. “She’s never in her life done anything else. But if you mean gone under a motor-bus, I can tell you this, Mr. Toto, she too jolly well means to have you to do anything of that sort. What’s the matter now?”