Virginia could only kiss her mother a worried and bewildered good-bye. Fancy saying that to her mother-in-law. What could her mother have meant? Of course it was true of everybody that they needed love, but one didn’t say so.
Mrs. Colquhoun took it, she considered, very well. Turning away out of the hall she waited in the drawing-room till the car had gone, and then when Virginia came in begged her not to give it another thought.
‘Give what another thought?’ Virginia asked, at once bristling, as she had lately so often bristled when with Mrs. Colquhoun, at the merest insinuation that her mother needed either explaining or excusing.
Well, well. Poor little Virginia. One had to be very patient with her just now.
Christopherdined with Lewes the evening Catherine was at Chickover, and stayed with him till it was time to go to Waterloo to meet her train. He thoroughly enjoyed being with old Lucy again, and listening to his yarns about the imminent economic collapse of Europe. He had forgotten how interesting economics and Europe were. There were other important things in the world besides love, and it was a refreshment to get among them again for a bit.
They dined at the restaurant they used most often to go to when they lived together, and afterwards went back to Lewes’s rooms and sat in great contentment with the two windows wide open to the summer night, each in his own comfortable old chair, each with his feet on the sill of a window, smoking and talking, while the pleasant London summer evening street sounds floated up into the room, and the dusk deepened in the corners.
Next door was the room Christopher used to rage up and down. He laughed to think how calm and happy he now was. No more ragings up and down for him. Marriage set one free from all that sort of torment. Old Lucy ought to marry. Not that he seemed tormented in any way, but Christopher would have liked him to know for himself what a delight life could be. The poor chap hadn’t the beginning of the foggiest suspicion of it.
Lewes was very glad to see his friend looking so well and happy. Evidently the marriage was still a success. He found it impossible to believe that it would be lastingly successful. True, the lady on her wedding-day had seemed much younger than her years; but there were the years,—he had himself seen them in black and white on the certificate, and they were bound sooner or later to gallop on faster and faster ahead of Christopher’s. However, few marriages, he understood, were lasting successes, so that perhaps after all it didn’t much matter.
The two therefore were in great harmony, each much pleased to be once more with the other.
‘She’s gone down for the day to her daughter,’ Christopher said, when Lewes, observing the laws of politeness, inquired after Catherine.
‘She has a daughter?’ asked Lewes surprised, for he had never heard of her.
‘Certainly,’ said Christopher, as who should say, ‘Hasn’t everybody?’
Lewes made no comment. He silently considered this further drawback to the marriage. And Christopher, happy and expansive, continued: ‘She has married a man years older than herself.’
‘Who has?’ inquired Lewes, not quite following.
‘Well, Catherine hasn’t, has she.’
‘No. I’m obtuse. Forgive me. I think I was surprised your wife should have a daughter grown up enough to marry.’
‘It is absurd, isn’t it,’ said Christopher, liking Lewes for this. ‘She’s much too young, isn’t she. He’s a parson, and old enough to be her father.’
‘Whose father?’ asked Lewes, again not quite following.
‘His wife’s, of course. The girl’s only a girl, and he’s a horny-beaked old rooster.’
‘Is he?’ said Lewes, and thought things. Not that he, or, he admitted, anybody, could possibly have applied such epithets to Chris’s wife, but still.... And had his friend considered that he was now the stepfather-in-law of a person he described as a horny-beaked old rooster?
‘Why, he’s old enough to be Catherine’s father too,’ said Christopher.
‘Is he?’ said Lewes, reflecting how that could be. Wouldn’t that make him old enough, then, to be his wife’s grandfather? Well, best let it alone. It was a perplexing mix-up.
‘I call it disgusting,’ said Christopher.
Lewes was silent. Long ago he had observed how people are most critical in others of that which they do and are themselves. When he spoke again it was to return to the exposition and illustration of the doctrines of Mr. Keynes, from which he had so injudiciously wandered.
‘Come with me to the station,’ said Christopher, getting up at half-past eleven and preparing to go and meet Catherine at Waterloo.
‘I think not,’ said Lewes.
‘Come on. It’ll do you good. You’ll see Catherine again. It’s time you did. And we’ll arrange with her when you’re to come to dinner.’
Lewes didn’t want in the least to see Catherine again, or be done good to, or go to dinner, but Christopher was determined, and he gave in and went; which was just as well, for when everybody had got out of the train and the platform was empty and it was clear she hadn’t come, at least he was able to reason with Christopherand restrain him from fetching out his motor-bicycle and tearing off through the night to Chickover.
‘It’s that blasted son-in-law of hers,’ Christopher kept on repeating,—showing, Lewes considered, a lamentable want of balance. ‘He’sat the bottom of this——’
Lewes, applying his mind to probabilities, soon hit on the truth, and pointed out that the telegram that had certainly been sent was too late in arriving to be delivered in London that night, and he would get it the first thing in the morning.
‘But suppose she’s ill? Suppose——’
‘Oh my dear Chris, try and not be a fool. She has simply missed the last train. You’ll know all about it in the morning.’ And he took him by the arm and walked him home to Hertford Street.
When they got there Christopher insisted on his going up and having a drink. Lewes did his best not to, for he had no wish to behold his friend’s marriedmilieu; but Christopher was determined, and he gave in and went.
He felt a faint distaste at seeing his friend opening a door, his only by marriage, with a latch-key belonging really to a woman, but suppressed this as foolish. Fortunately the flat was not the thing of fal-lals he had imagined, and he was quite relieved on being taken into the drawing-room to find it so solid and so sombre.
‘George,’ explained Christopher, seeing his friend looking round.
‘George?’ repeated Lewes, who had never heard of him.
‘All this black stuff.’
Lewes said nothing.
‘Catherine’s first husband,’ said Christopher. ‘He was old enough to be her father too.’
‘Was he?’ said Lewes, groping about among these different persons old enough to be people’s fathers.
He sank into a chair. He drank whisky. At intervals he tried to go, but Christopher wouldn’t let him. For two hours he had to listen to talk that made him feel dimmer and dimmer of mind, more and more as if his roots were wilting; for Christopher was jerked back by Catherine’s unexpected failure to come home, and his unhappiness at the prospect of the first night alone in their room, and his efforts not to be anxious and worried, into thinking and talking only of her.
‘My dear chap—yes ...,’ ‘Old man, I’m sure of it ...,’ Lewes, as sympathetically as he could, from time to time interjected. But his head drooped; his spirit failed him. Women. What didn’t they do to a sensible, intelligent man? Made him go all slushy and rotten; turned him into nothing better than a jabbering ass. Much of it was whisky, Lewes allowed, as Christopher drowned his disappointment and secret fear in more and more of the stuff, but most of it was woman.
‘Look here, I must be off,’ he said, getting up firmly on Christopher’s showing a tendency, after quite a lot of whisky, to become too intimate in his talk for comfort. ‘This room’s pure George,’ he had been saying, ‘but Catherine’s bedroom—you should see Catherine’s bedroom——‘—was he going to offer to show it to him?
Lewes hurriedly got up and said he must be off.
‘You’re not crawling back into your shell already?’ cried Christopher, much flushed, and his hair, from his frequent passing his hand through it while he talked, much ruffled. ‘I’ll tell you what you are, Lucy—you’re nothing but a miserable whelk.’ And he laughed immoderately.
‘I’ve some work I must get finished to-night,’ said Lewes, taking no notice of this.
‘At two in the morning?’ exclaimed Christopher, laughing louder than ever. ‘That’s just the sort of thing you would do at two in the morning. Get married, old whelk—get married——’ He clapped him on the shoulder. ‘You jolly well wouldn’t——’
‘Good night,’ interrupted Lewes abruptly.
But after he had gone Christopher soon recovered from the exuberance of whisky, and went very sadly to bed. He missed Catherine terribly. The flat was the loneliest place without her. And what if something had happened to her after all, in spite of Lewes’s cold-blooded assurances that nearly always nothing happens to anybody? He didn’t sleep much. He hated being alone in that dear room of happiness; and when at breakfast he got the telegram, as Lewes had foretold, saying she was coming by the first train, he determined to chuck the office and go and meet her.
Catherine, however, anxiously turning over every possibility, had thought that he might do this, and at Chickover station, eluding Stephen who was talking to a parishioner, sent a second telegram saying she wouldn’t be back till dinner. Her one desire was to keep out of Christopher’s sight till she had been to Maria Rome. Impossible to let him see her in the state she was in. Well did she know that this was being a slave, a silly slave, and that it was cruel to leave him all day wondering what was happening, but shewasa slave, and this cruelty was nothing to the cruelty to themboth of letting him meet her and see what she now looked like really. So she sent the second telegram.
Naturally, Christopher was excessively perturbed when he got in. What in damnation had happened in that beastly Chickover? Never again should she go there without him. Never again should she go a step without him. And she hadn’t taken any luggage with her, and she would be worn out. Blast Stephen. Blast that girl. And probably the bird-faced mother-in-law had had a hand in all this too. If so, let her be specially and thoroughly blasted.
He looked up the trains, and found that one arrived at 5.30, and there was no other till after ten. The 5.30 must be the one, then. He told Mrs. Mitcham, who had shown every symptom of astonishment and uneasiness on getting to the flat that morning and finding her mistress hadn’t returned, to have dinner ready earlier than usual, because Mrs. Monckton would be badly needing food, and then he went to his office after all, intending to go to Waterloo to meet the 5.30.
What a day it was. He couldn’t do a stroke of work. He felt like nothing on earth after the whisky. His chief was sarcastic. Everything went wrong. At five he was starting for Waterloo when Mrs. Mitcham rang him up to say her mistress was safely back and resting.
Safely back? How had she managed that, with no train that he knew of?
He flew home. Catherine, her face beautifully rearranged, was lying in the shaded drawing-room.
‘Why, darling—how? When——?’ he cried, rushing across to her.
He didn’t wait for an answer. There was no timefor one before he had picked her up and locked her in his arms.
Oh, how blessed this was—oh,ohhow blessed this was, sighed Catherine, her cheek against his, her eyes shut, safe in heaven again.
The great feature of Maria Rome’s treatment was that it was husband-proof. Nothing came off.
Catherinemade much of Virginia’s fainting.
‘What she want to faint for?’ asked Christopher sceptically. ‘A great girl like that.’
‘Well, shedid. So of course I couldn’t leave her sooner.’
But when she was saying this sort of thing she felt uncomfortable. Such tiresome almost lying, such petty almost truth. She seemed now to walk continually in small deceits. It was as though her feet couldn’t move a step without getting into a tangle of repulsive little cobwebs. Nothing much really; nothing more than she supposed most women, whom she began to think of as creatures necessarily on the defensive, had to wade through; but so different from the clean-swept path along which she had all her life till then proceeded. All her life? All her death. That hadn’t been life. Up to her marriage with Christopher she had merely been dead. Now she was alive; and mustn’t she take the stings and the pains and even the pettiness of life gladly, in return for its beatitudes?
But they worried her, the stings and the pains and the pettiness. Also, beatitudes were expensive. They forced her to go oftener to Maria Rome, and the oftener she went the more she needed her. It was like drug-taking. And suppose there should come a point—in her heart she knew it must come—when Maria’s ministrations would merely accentuate what they were intended to hide? Once or twice lately she had fancied they had been less successful; or was it that there was more to do to her the deeper she sank in this business of being young and happy? She led a racked life, an uneasy mixture of fears and blisses. And the grey in her hair seemed to multiply, and it too had to be treated by Maria Rome, and she began to look more and more like somebody adventurous,—she who was really the most unadventurous of perch-clinging doves.
The thought of Virginia’s life,—Virginia, so young, so needing to do nothing to herself, so completely at ease with her elderly husband—made her sigh as the overheated and overtired sigh at the thought of cool shadows and clear waters. Therewasa difference, and it was simply all the difference in the world, between their two cases. She had been horribly right when at the beginning she snubbed Christopher for declaring there wasn’t. Stephen didn’t need to watch Virginia as she watched Christopher, anxiously on the alert for the least sign of change in her, in what she did, what she said, in the very tone in which she said it. Stephen was safe, was at rest; Virginia would never, never do anything but love him. He was the father of her child, the authority she looked up to, the intelligence she adored. But Catherine—she wasn’t going to be the mother of any child of Christopher’s, she hadn’t got any intelligence for him to adore, and wouldn’t have wished to have authority, even if she could have, for him to look up to. For her there was nothing but strain and effort, with the tormenting knowledge that her very strain and effort were bound to bring about what she dreaded.
It was a terrible business, this business of bliss. Sheclung to him, clung to him, tighter and tighter, as if his youth must somehow get through and make her young to match.
Now nobody can be clung to tightly for any length of time without presently feeling that they would like a little air; and soon after the return from Chickover, when he had got over his anxiety at her absence and his joy at her return, Christopher began to have this feeling. It was gorgeous to love and be loved as he and Catherine loved, but it was a patent and acknowledged fact, and he gradually now began to want to talk about something else. Catherine apparently never wanted to. She loved, he couldn’t but notice, anxiously. She seemed to have very little of the repose of real faith, and she needed an incredible amount of reassuring. And when he had reassured her, and got her quiet and placid as he supposed, there she was needing it all over again.
Marriage being mainly repetition, and Christopher now being a husband, he presently began to make fewer rapturous speeches. It was quite unconscious, but as the weeks passed it became natural to love with fewer preliminary cooings—to bill, as it were, without remembering first to coo.
He wouldn’t have noticed it if Catherine hadn’t noticed it and said something about it. Whereupon he began to meditate on this, as he recognised, undoubted fact, and came to the following conclusions:
A husband cannot go on cooing after he has ceased to thrill, but he can go on very happily billing. Only mystery thrills, and only the unknown is mysterious. It wasn’t reasonable for the dear explored one to want still to be mysterious, for the so felicitously known to want still to be unknown. Catherine was the darlingest loveof a wife, and every night when he went to sleep with his arms round her he thanked God he had got her, but she was no longer mysterious; his heart would never give great choking bumps again when he came near her. Yet that, it seemed, was what she wanted and expected. And she had a really remarkable love-memory, and never forgot a single love-look or love-word or love-vow or love-action of his, and had taken to comparing him with himself,—which was rather awkward, for unconsciously at the beginning, it appeared, he had been creating precedents and setting a standard; and the standard, it appeared, was a very high one, and the precedents were difficult to follow in calmer blood.
What he now wanted, thought Christopher, reflecting on these things, was to lead a happy, healthy, lovemaking life, in which all the speeches were taken for granted. Was that out of the way at all? Didn’t married people inevitably get into this condition after a bit? He supposed that the difference between himself and Catherine—he hated to admit there could be such a thing—was their several attitude towards billing and cooing. He wanted—and he imagined most husbands at last wanted—to bill without cooing, and she wasn’t happy in any billing that hadn’t been preceded by coos. Loud coos, too; loud and long ones.
Well, no man can coo for ever. Christopher was convinced of that. Not with spontaneity, anyhow. He tried to once or twice just to please her, but she instantly found him out and was tremendously upset. He then tried to laugh about it and tease her; but she wouldn’t laugh and be teased. She took everything that had to do with love very seriously. Her view was that love was like God, and couldn’t be joked about without profanity.
She told him this used to be his view too. Was it? He couldn’t remember, but didn’t tell her he couldn’t, for a certain amount of caution, highly unnatural to him, began to creep into what he said. The expression ‘used to be’ seemed to recur rather a lot, he thought. He had heard tell of one’s evil past dogging one’s footsteps, but fancy being dogged by one’s alleged satisfactory past, and having it shake its fists at one!
He told her this one morning, waking up in the jolly, careless mood when he would have tickled a tiger; but she only looked thoroughly alarmed, and said he never used to talk like that.
What a frightened, nervy little thing she was. What was she frightened of? He couldn’t imagine; but he only had to look at her eyes to see shewasfrightened. She was happiest and most content when they didn’t go anywhere, and didn’t do anything but just sit in the flat together, she curled up close to him on the sofa, and he reading aloud. They spent evening after evening this way. About every third evening or so she would suddenly get into a panic lest he found it boring, and would start making eager plans about things they would do next week: they would go to the play, and have supper afterwards, or motor down into the country and drift round on the river and come home by moonlight.
When the time came she would cling to him and beg him to let her off. Let her off! What a funny way of putting it, he would tell her, laughing and kissing her. Was she going to have a baby, he began to wonder? And he asked her so one evening, when she was wriggling out of a plan they had made that involved exertion.
She seemed thunderstruck. ‘Chris!’ she cried, staring at him.
Well, why not? he asked. People did. Especially women, he said, trying to make her laugh, because her face had gone so very tragic. They had babies much more often than they had husbands, anyhow. She must have noticed that.
‘But not if—not if——’ she stammered, her eyes full of tears.
Oh Lord—he had forgotten that age-complex of hers. He never thought of her age. She was as old to him as she looked, and she looked the same age as himself. He never could remember that she was convinced she was a little Methuselah.
‘After all,’ he said cheerfully, still trying to make her laugh, ‘there was Sarah. I don’t see why you——’
‘Sarah!’
She stood looking at him a moment, and then ran out of the room.
Horrified, he ran after her; but she had locked herself into the bedroom, their bedroom—locked herself in, and him out.
This was their first scene. And it was peculiarly distressing, because nobody was angry, only sorry.
Soonafter this the Fanshawes gave a dinner, and invited the Moncktons. It was, in fact, a dinner for Catherine, who hadn’t enjoyed their dance very much, they felt. Dinners were perhaps pleasanter for her now, they decided. It couldn’t be much fun, Ned had remarked, to sit looking on at that great red-headed lout of hers dancing with a pack of girls, just as if she were chaperoning her débutant s——
‘Ohhush, Ned!’ cried Kitty Fanshawe, stamping her foot.
For some reason, impossible Catherine considered to account for, except as one of the many off-shoots of their warmly benevolent dispositions, the Fanshawe family as one man loved her. They had known her slightly in the days of George, and with growing intimacy ever since. In those days they had deplored that she should be tied to one so old; they were now engaged in deploring that she should be tied to one so young. Fanshawe-like they wouldn’t even to themselves judge any one they loved, but tacitly making the best of a bad job, set about seeing what they could do to amuse and entertain her.
They came to the conclusion that a little dinner at a restaurant would be more amusing than a dinner at home, and chose the Berkeley; and they reservedone of those tables in the window-recesses which have sofas fitted round three sides of them.
The party was eight: themselves, the Moncktons, Sir Musgrove and Lady Merriman—great friends of theirs, and both delightful, which made them conspicuous among married couples, who sometimes were, the Fanshawes were forced regretfully to admit, unequal in attractiveness, so that while one of them would make a party go the other would prevent its budging—and Duncan Amory, a rising barrister. But at the last moment Kitty Fanshawe caught a cold and couldn’t come, and Mrs. Fanshawe invited Emily Wickford, an agreeable spinster, to take her place.
Five sat on the sofa, and three on chairs on the outer side of the table. Mrs. Fanshawe put Catherine in the middle of the sofa facing the room, between Ned and Sir Musgrove—Ned had invented a birthday for her, so that she should be the guest of honour and he could give her flowers, for Ned was good but tactless, and it hadn’t occurred to him that birthdays were the last things Catherine wished attention drawn to—and on Ned’s left sat Lady Merriman, and on her left sat Christopher, and on his left sat Miss Wickford, and on her left sat Duncan Amory, with Mrs. Fanshawe next to him on his other side, between him and Sir Musgrove.
All would have been well if it hadn’t been for Miss Wickford. That exquisite spinster, who had refused so many offers that she could hardly be called a spinster at all, was still only twenty-eight, and had the most beautiful eyes in London. She had been invited merely to fill Kitty’s place, and the Fanshawes had thought of her only because she was a great friend of DuncanAmory’s, and he at any rate would enjoy himself if she came.
Unfortunately, Sir Musgrove and Christopher enjoyed themselves too because she came—at least, Sir Musgrove did at the beginning. Taking advantage of the table being round, he leaned over whenever he could to talk to Miss Wickford, and while he was doing that he naturally wasn’t talking to Catherine, for whose entertainment he had been specially invited; and Christopher, whose duty it was to begin by talking to Lady Merriman, at once upset the balance of the party by talking to Miss Wickford instead.
This left Ned to amuse two neglected ladies, and as he wasn’t amusing he didn’t amuse them. It also cut off Duncan Amory from his dear Emily, for Emily liked beginnings rather than endings, and therefore preferred Christopher, whom she hadn’t seen before, to Duncan whom she had seen almost too much; and, regarding him as years younger than herself, probably still at Oxford, or the other place, proceeded to give the boy a good time and see that he thoroughly enjoyed his evening.
She succeeded. Christopher did enjoy himself. Here was a girl who was clever as well as pretty, delightful to talk to as well as delightful to look at. In ten minutes he felt as if they were old friends. She asked him if he had any Scandinavian blood in him, because that was what he looked like,—rather her idea of a sun-kissed young Norse god; and he retorted by asking her if she had any Greek blood in her, because that was what she looked like,—rather his idea of a sun-kissed young Greek goddess; and they laughed, and were pleased with each other. Aphrodite for choice, saidChristopher warming to his work, and glancing first at Emily’s hair and then at her justly celebrated eyes; Aphrodite was fair too, and had eyes like the sea too, he said; all the most beautiful women were fair and had eyes like the sea, he said.
Emily was much pleased.
Sir Musgrove, catching the word Aphrodite, tried to chime in, for he was not only a well-known Greek scholar, engaged at that very moment in writing an inquiry into the mythologies, but he would have been interested to discuss the delicious goddess with Miss Wickford. Duncan Amory also tried to chime in, with a story about an American lady who by some mix-up at her baptism got christened Aphrodite, and the effect it had on her afterwards. It wasn’t a bad story, and anyhow it was apt, and he felt aggrieved that nobody listened to it except the Fanshawes. The others were absorbed in watching Emily. Emily wasn’t at all a good person to have at a party, thought Amory. She absorbed attention. Her proper place was atête-à-tête. That was how he himself chiefly cultivated her. He shrugged his shoulders, and turned resolutely to Mrs. Fanshawe.
Lady Merriman was bored. Able and willing to talk about anything,—book, play, picture or politician—she found herself, because of Miss Wickford, left with only half a man; half of Ned Fanshawe, too, who even when he was whole had more of good nature than of conversation. And she wished very much to talk to this young Mr. Monckton and find out for herself what could have induced that middle-aged woman to be so reckless as to marry him. However, he was engrossed. Natural, she supposed, at his age. What wasn’t sonatural was that Musgrove was engrossed too. He would talk to neither of his neighbours, and had eyes and ears only for Miss Wickford.
Lady Merriman, who was fond of Musgrove, and had been faithfully and patiently through the thick and the thin of him for twenty-five years, was a little put out; not on her own account, for nothing, she knew, could alter his complete private dependence on her, but on his. She didn’t like her man, who was anything but silly, to look it. Also, she did wish he would amuse poor Mrs. Monckton, and distract her attention from what that boy of hers was saying to Miss Wickford. Marriage, thought Lady Merriman, observing the expression on Musgrove’s face and observing the expression on Catherine’s, was rich in humiliations. If one allowed it to be, that is; if one didn’t keep them out by the only real defence—laughter.
The band began to play a fox-trot. One or two active young people got up from neighbouring tables and danced.
‘Will you dance?’ Christopher asked Miss Wickford.
‘I’d adore to,’ she answered, getting up just as the waiter put a nice hot quail on her plate. ‘May we?’ she asked, smiling at Mrs. Fanshawe, and floating off without waiting for an answer.
‘Ah, youth, youth,’ said Sir Musgrove, shaking his head indulgently. ‘And we greybeards console ourselves with quails.’
This was tactless of Musgrove, Mrs. Fanshawe considered, and she protested.
‘There are no greybeards here,’ protested Mrs. Fanshawe with great vigour.
‘Ah well—I speak allegorically,’ said Sir Musgrove,following Miss Wickford’s movements as she exquisitely gyrated in Christopher’s arms.
‘I should eat your quail before it gets cold, Musgrove,’ said his wife,—it was all Martha’s fault for not having put such effervescent guests on the sofa, safe behind the table where they couldn’t have got out. But some one ought to tell Mrs. Monckton not to look quite so....
‘Personally, I think it foolish to interrupt a good dinner and let it get cold,’ said Duncan Amory, who didn’t at all like the way Emily was behaving.
‘My dear friend, they are at the golden age when dinner is of no consequence,’ said Sir Musgrove. ‘A good-looking couple—a very good-looking couple,’ he added dreamily, his eye on Emily.
Well, really—hadn’t Musgrove grasped the fact that the young man was Mrs. Monckton’s husband? thought Lady Merriman, trying to catch the eye that was fixed so persistently on Miss Wickford.
The Fanshawes saw their mistake, and were repenting bitterly. Of course Emily Wickford should have been put on the sofa. Better still, not asked at all. She was ruining the party for every one except Catherine’s husband. Duncan Amory, usually such good company, was sulking; Musgrove—they couldn’t have believed it of him; Lydia Merriman—naturally she was vexed; Catherine—well, they hardly liked to look at her.
The band left off playing, and the couples all came back except Christopher and Miss Wickford. They disappeared through the arch into the next room, Emily smiling back over her shoulder at her hosts, and Christopher holding up an explanatory cigarette case.
It was Emily who proposed this. She said she didn’t want any more dinner, and thought it much more funnot to sit cooped up at that table, with which Christopher heartily agreed.
‘They all seem so old,’ said Emily, bending forward for him to light her cigarette. ‘Don’t you think so?’
‘Fossils,’ said Christopher, forgetting in his admiration of the face being lit up by the match he was holding, that Catherine was one of them, but he did ask, after a minute, whether she didn’t think the Fanshawes would mind their not going back.
‘Oh, they never mind anything,’ said Emily easily. ‘They’re darlings.’
The Fanshawes, however, did mind this. They fumed. It was a stricken party that remained at the table. Mrs. Fanshawe was casting her mind back to whether Emily knew Christopher was Catherine’s husband, and couldn’t remember that she had made this clear when she introduced them. But how, after all, could one make a thing like that clear, short of taking the other person aside and explaining in a whisper? Just to say, ‘And this is Mr. Monckton,’ after having introduced somebody to Mrs. Monckton wasn’t in this case, she was afraid, enough. On the other hand one couldn’t introduce him as Mrs. Monckton’s husband. Still, instinct ought to have told Emily. Mrs. Fanshawe, who never was unfair, was unfair now. She was angry. She was the last person in the world to grudge young people having a good time, and was of an easy-goingness that verged on laxity; but this deeply annoyed her, this carrying off of Christopher. Also, she considered that Christopher oughtn’t to have let himself be carried off. He, at any rate, knew he was Catherine’s husband.
It was a stricken party. Ned was furious, Sir Musgrove fidgeted, Duncan Amory sulked, and Catherineseemed to be shrivelling smaller before their very eyes. Only Lady Merriman and Mrs. Fanshawe talked,—across the table to each other, gallantly, after the manner of women, trying to cover things up.
The music began again, and everybody watched the arch. It was some time before the two appeared, and when they did they were talking and laughing as happily as ever.
‘Come here—you are very unkind, you two, deserting us like this,’ Mrs. Fanshawe called out to them as they danced past; but they didn’t hear, and danced on.
At the end, when the party was breaking up, Miss Wickford, who had enjoyed her evening immensely, said to Christopher, ‘Come and see me on Sunday.’
‘No—you come to us,’ he answered.
She looked at him surprised. ‘But wouldn’t that bore your mother dreadfully?’ she asked.
‘Bore my mother?’ echoed Christopher, staring. ‘What mother?’
‘Why, isn’t——’
Miss Wickford broke off, instinctively feeling she was somehow getting into trouble. That little made-up Mrs. Monckton on the sofa—wasn’t she the boy’s mother?
‘My mother died when I was three,’ said Christopher.
‘Poor you,’ murmured Miss Wickford non-commitally: something warned her to be cautious.
‘But my wife will be delighted if you’ll come.’
There was the briefest silence. Then Emily managed to say, without, she trusted, showing her astonishment, ‘How perfectly sweet of her. I’ll ring up and ask.’
Shenever did. And it was just as well, thought Christopher, for Catherine had, most astoundingly, taken it into her head to be jealous of her. She wouldn’t admit she was, and professed immense admiration for Miss Wickford’s beauty, but if the emotion she showed after that dinner wasn’t jealousy he was blest if he knew what jealousy was.
It amazed him. She might have heard every word he said. Miss Wickford was extremely pretty and quite clever, and why shouldn’t he like talking to her? But he was very sorry to have made Catherine unhappy, and did all he knew to make her forget it; only it was suffocating sort of work in hot weather, and he felt as if he were tied up in something very sweet and sticky, with no end to it. Rather like treacle. It was rather like being swathed round with bands of treacle.
He came to the conclusion Catherine loved him too much. Yes, she did. If she loved him more reasonably she would be much happier, and so would he. It was bad for them both. The flat seemed thick with love. One waded. He caught himself putting up his hand to unbutton his collar. Perhaps the stuffy weather had something to do with it. July was getting near its end, and there was no air at all in Hertford Street. London was a rotten place in July. He always walked to hisoffice and back so as to get what exercise he could, and every Saturday they went down to his uncle for golf; but what was that? He ached to be properly stretched, to stride about, to hit things for days on end, and his talk became almost exclusively of holidays, and where they should go in August when his were due.
Lewes was going to Scotland to play golf. He had gone with Lewes last year, and had had a glorious time. What exercise! What talk! What freedom! He longed to go again, and asked Catherine whether she wouldn’t like to; and she said, with that hiding look of hers—there was a certain look, very frequent on her face, he called to himself herhidinglook—that it was too far from Virginia.
Virginia? Christopher was much surprised. What did she want with Virginia? Short of actually being at Chickover, she wouldn’t see Virginia anyhow, he said; and she, with her arms round his neck, said that was true, but she didn’t want to be out of reach of her.
This unexpected reappearance of Virginia on the scene, this sudden cropping up of her after a long spell of no mention of the girl, puzzled and irritated him. They would, apparently, have gone to Scotland if it hadn’t been for Virginia. Must he then too—of course he must, seeing that he couldn’t and wouldn’t go away without Catherine—be kept hanging round within reach of Virginia? She was the last object he wished to be within reach of.
He was annoyed, and showed it. ‘Why this recrudescence,’ he asked, ‘of maternal love?’
‘It isn’t a recrudescence—it’s always, Chris darling,’ she said, looking rather shamefacedly at him, he thought—anyhow queerly. ‘You don’t suppose one ever leaves off loving somebody one really loves?’
No, he didn’t suppose it. He was sure she wouldn’t. But he wasn’t going into that now; he wasn’t going, at ten in the morning, to begin talking about love.
‘It’s time I was off,’ he said, bending down and kissing her quickly. ‘I’m late as it is.’
He hurried out, though he wasn’t late. He knew he wasn’t late, only he did want to get into what air there was,—into, anyhow, sunlight, out of that darkened bedroom.
She too knew he wasn’t late, but she too wanted him for once to go, because she had a secret appointment for half-past ten, and it was ten already; a most important, a vital appointment, the bare thought of which thrilled her with both fear and hope.
She didn’t know if anything would come of it, but she was going to try. She had written to the great man and told him her age and asked if he thought he could do anything for her, and he had sent a card back briefly indicating 10.30 on this day. Nothing more: just 10.30. How discreet. How exciting.
She had read about him in the papers. He was a Spanish doctor, come over to London for a few weeks, and he undertook to restore youth. Marvellous, blissful, if he really could! A slight operation, said the papers, and there you were. The results were most satisfactory, they affirmed, and in some cases miraculous. Suppose her case were to be one of the miraculous ones? She hadn’t the least idea how she would be able to have an operation without Christopher knowing, but all that could be thought out afterwards. The first thing to do was to see the doctor and hear what he had to say. Whowouldn’t do anything, take any pains, have any operation, to be helped back to youth? She, certainly, would shrink from nothing. And it sounded so genuine, so scientific, what the doctor, according to the papers, did.
The minute Christopher had gone she hurried into her clothes, refused breakfast, hadn’t time to do her face—better she shouldn’t that day, better she should be seen exactly as she really was—and twenty minutes after he left she was in a taxi on the way to the great man’s temporary consulting rooms in Portland Place.
With what a beating heart she rang the bell. Such hopes, such fears, such determination, such shrinking, all mixed up together, as well as being ashamed, made her hardly able to speak when the nurse—she looked like a nurse—opened the door. And suppose somebody should hear her when she said who she was? And suppose somebody she knew should see her going in? If ever there was a discreet and private occasion it was this one; so that the moment the door was opened she was in such a hurry to get in out of sight of the street that she almost tumbled into the arms of the nurse.
It gave her an unpleasant shock to find herself put into a room with several other people. She hadn’t thought she would have to face other seekers after youth. There ought to have been cubicles—places with screens. It didn’t seem decent to expose the seekers to one another like that; and she shrank down into a chair with her back to the light, and buried her head in a newspaper.
The others were all burying their heads too in newspapers, but they saw each other nevertheless. All men, she noticed, and all so old that surely they must be past any hopes and wishes? What could they want with youth? It was a sad sight, thought Catherine, peepinground her newspaper, and she felt shocked. When presently two women came in, and after a furtive glance round dropped as she had done into chairs with their backs to the light, she considered them sad sights too and felt shocked; while for their part they were thinking just the same of her, and all the men behind their newspapers were saying to themselves, ‘What fools women are.’
The nurse—she looked exactly like a nurse—came in after a long while and beckoned to her, not calling out her name, for which she was thankful, and she was shown into the consulting room, and found herself confronted by two men instead of one, because Dr. Sanguesa, the specialist, could only say three words in English—‘We will see’ were his words—so that there was another man there, dark and foreign-looking too, but voluble in English, to interpret.
He did the business part as well. ‘It will cost fifty pounds,’ he said almost immediately.
In a whole year Catherine had only ten of these for everything, but if the treatment had been going to cost all ten she would have agreed, and lived somehow in an attic, on a crust—with Christopher and youth. Indeed, she thought it very cheap. Surely fifty pounds was cheap for youth?
‘Twenty-five pounds down,’ said the partner—she decided he was more a partner than an interpreter—‘and twenty-five pounds in the middle of the treatment.’
‘Certainly,’ she murmured.
Dr. Sanguesa was observing her while the partner talked. Every now and then he said something in Spanish, and the other asked her a question. The questions were intimate and embarrassing,—the kind it ismore comfortable to reply to to one person rather than two. However, she was in for it; she mustn’t mind; she was determined not to mind anything.
In her turn she asked some questions, forcing herself to be courageous, for she was frightened in spite of her determination and hopes. Would it hurt, she asked timidly; would it take long; when would the results begin?
‘We will see,’ said Dr. Sanguesa, who hadn’t understood a word, nodding his head gravely.
It would not hurt, said the partner, because in the case of women it was dangerous to operate, and the treatment was purely external; it would take six weeks, with two treatments a week; she would begin to see a marked difference in her appearance after the fourth treatment.
The fourth treatment? That would be in a fortnight. And no operation? How wonderful. She caught her breath with excitement. In a fortnight she would be beginning to look younger. After that, every day younger and younger. No more Maria Rome, no more painful care over her dressing, no more fear of getting tired because of how ghastly it made her look, but the real thing, the real glorious thing itself.
‘Shall Ifeelyoung?’ she asked, eagerly now.
‘Of course. Everything goes together. You understand—a woman’s youth, and accordingly her looks, depends entirely on——’
The partner launched into a rapid explanation which was only saved from being excessively improper by its technical language. Dr. Sanguesa sat silent, his elbows on the arms of his revolving chair, his finger-tips together. He looked a remote, unfriended,melancholy man, rather like the pictures she had seen of Napoleon III., with dark shadows under his heavy eyes and a waxen skin. Every now and then his sad mouth opened, and he said quite automatically, ‘We will see,’ and shut it again.
She wanted to begin at once. It appeared she must be examined first, to find out if she could stand the treatment. This rather frightened her again. Why? How? Was the treatment so severe? What was it?
‘We will see,’ said Dr. Sanguesa, nodding.
The partner became voluble, waving his hands about. Not at all—not at all severe; a matter of X-rays merely; but sometimes, if a woman’s heart was weak——
Catherine said she was sure her heart wasn’t weak.
‘We will see,’ said Dr. Sanguesa, mechanically nodding.
‘The examination is three guineas,’ said the partner.
‘Three more, or three of the same ones?’ asked Catherine, rather stupidly.
‘We will s——’
The partner interrupted him this time with a quickly lifted hand. He seemed to think Catherine’s question was below the level of both his and her dignities and intelligences, for he looked as if he were a little ashamed of her as he said stiffly, ‘Three more.’
She bowed her head. She would have bowed her head to anything, if these men in exchange would give her youth.
The examination could be made at once, the partner said, if she was ready.
Yes, she was quite ready.
She got up instantly. They were used to eagerness,especially in the women patients, but this was a greater eagerness than usual. Dr. Sanguesa’s sombre, sunken eyes observed her thoughtfully. He said something in Spanish to his partner, who shook his head. Catherine had the impression it was something he wished interpreted, and she looked inquiringly at the partner, but he said nothing, and went to the door and opened it for her.
She was taken upstairs into a sort of Rose du Barri boudoir, arranged with a dressing-table and looking-glasses, and another nurse—at least, she too looked like one—helped her to undress. Then she was wrapped in a dressing-gown—she didn’t like this public dressing-gown against her skin—and led into a room fitted up with many strange machines and an operating table. What will not a woman do, she thought, eyeing these objects with misgiving, and her heart well down somewhere near her feet, for the man she loves?
Dr. Sanguesa came in, all covered up in white like an angel. The partner, she was thankful to notice, didn’t appear. She was examined with great care, the nurse smiling encouragingly. It was a relief to be told by the nurse, who interpreted, that her heart was sound and her lungs perfect, even though she had never supposed they weren’t. At the end the nurse told her the doctor was satisfied she could stand the treatment, and asked when she would like to begin.
Catherine said she would begin at once.
Impossible. The next day?
Oh yes, yes—the next day. And would she really—she was going to say look nice again, but said instead feel less tired?
‘It’s wonderful how different people feel,’ the nurse assured her; and Dr. Sanguesa nodded gravely, without having understood a word, and said, ‘We will see.’
‘He hasn’t tried it on himself, has he?’ remarked Catherine, when she was in the Rose du Barri room again, dressing.
The nurse laughed. She was a jolly-looking young woman,—but perhaps she was really an old woman, who had had the treatment.
‘Haveyoubeen done?’ asked Catherine.
The nurse laughed again. ‘I shall be if I see I’m getting old,’ she said.
‘It reallyiswonderful?’ asked Catherine, whose hands as she fastened her hooks were trembling with excitement.
‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ said the nurse earnestly. ‘I’ve seen men of seventy looking and behaving not a day more than forty.’
‘That’s thirty years off,’ said Catherine. ‘And supposing they were forty to begin with, would they have looked and behaved like ten?’
‘Ah well, that’s a little much to expect, isn’t it,’ said the nurse, laughing again.
‘I’m forty-seven. I wouldn’t at all like to end by being seven.’
‘Your husband would pack you off to a kindergarten, wouldn’t he,’ said the nurse, laughing more than ever.
Catherine laughed too. She was so full of hope that she already felt younger. But when she put on her hat before the glass she saw she didn’t anyhow look it.
‘Don’t I looktooawful,’ she said, turning roundfrankly to the friendly nurse, who, after all, was going to be the witness of her triumphant progress backwards through the years.
‘We’ll soon get rid of all that,’ said the nurse gaily.
Catherine quite loved the nurse.
Itwas an exciting life during the next week,—so much to plan, so much to arrange, and she herself buoyant with hope and delight. She couldn’t, of course, leave London during her treatment, so to Christopher’s astonishment she urged him to go to Scotland without her.
‘But Catherine——’
He couldn’t believe his own ears.
‘Go and have a good time, Chris darling.’
‘Without you?’
‘I must stay in London.’
‘InLondon?’
‘Yes. Virginia may want me.’
‘Now what in God’s name, Catherine, is all this about Virginia. The other day——’
Then she told him, secure in the knowledge that she was so soon going to be young again—she didn’t in the least mind being a grandmother if she wasn’t going to look like one; on the contrary, to look like a girl and yet be a grandmother struck her as to the last degree chic—that Virginia was expecting a baby in September, and as babies sometimes appeared before they ought she must be within reach.
Well, that was all right; he understood that. Whathe didn’t understand was Catherine’s detachment. Why, she seemed not to mind his leaving her. He couldn’t believe it. And when it became finally evident that such was her real attitude and no pretence at all about it, he was deeply hurt. Incredibly, she genuinely wanted him to go.
‘You love Virginia more than me,’ he said, his heart suddenly hot with jealousy.
‘Oh Chris, don’t be silly,’ said Catherine impatiently.
She had never since their marriage told him not to be silly in that sensible, matter-of-fact way. What had come over her? He, who had been feeling he couldn’t breathe for all the love there was about, now found himself gasping for want of it. The atmosphere had suddenly gone clear and rarefied. Catherine seemed to be thinking of something that wasn’t him, and once or twice forgot to kiss him. Forgot to kiss him! He was deeply wounded. And she was so unaccountably cheerful too. She not only seemed to be thinking of something else but seemed amused by it, hugging whatever it was with delight. She was excited. What was she excited about? Surely not because she was going to be a grandmother? Surely that would make her brood more than ever on the difference in their ages?
‘She wants me to go to Scotland with you,’ he said, bursting in one day on Lewes. ‘She wants me to go away without her. Doesn’t care a hang. Four solid weeks. The whole of August.’
‘How sensible,’ said Lewes, not looking up from his work.
‘It’s that beastly baby.’
‘Baby?’ Lewes did look up.
‘Due in September.’
‘What? But surely——’
‘Oh, don’t be a fool. Virginia’s. She won’t leave London. Why she can’t go somewhere round near Chickover, where I could go too and be with her and get some golf as well—Lewes, old man, I believe she’s fed up with me.’
And he stared at Lewes with hot eyes.
In his turn Lewes told him not to be a fool; but the mere thought of Catherine, his Catherine, being fed up with him as he put it, sent him rushing back to her to see if it could possibly be true.
She was so airy, so much detached.
‘Now Chris, don’t be absurd. Of course you must have a good holiday and get out of London. It’s lucky that you have your friend to go with——’
That was the sort of thing.
‘But Catherine, how can you want me to? Don’t you love me any more?’
‘Of course I love you. Which is why I want you to go to Scotland.’
This was true. The treatment was being gone through for love of him, and he must go to Scotland because of the treatment. She was to have as much quiet as possible during it—‘No husbands,’ said Dr. Sanguesa—‘You’ve got to be a grass widow for a little while,’ interpreted the nurse—‘You must go to Scotland,’ still further interpreted Catherine.
But he couldn’t go at once. It was still only July. The first two treatments took place while Christopher was still in London, and as it was impossible without rousing his suspicions to keep him entirely at arm’s length, she wasn’t surprised when the effect of them was to make her feel more tired than ever.
‘It’s often like that to begin with,’ encouraged the nurse. ‘Especially if you’re not having complete rest from worries at home.’
Did she mean husbands by worries, Catherine wondered? There certainly wasn’t complete rest from that sort of worry, then, for Christopher, as Catherine apparently cooled, became more and more as he used to be, and possessed by the fear that he was somehow losing her rediscovered how much he loved her.
He had, of course, always intensely loved her, but he had felt the need of pauses. In her love there had been no pauses, and gradually the idea of suffocation had got hold of him. Now, so suddenly, so unaccountably, she seemed to be all pause. She tried to avoid him; she even suggested, on the plea that the nights were hot, that he should sleep in the dressing-room.
Whatever else he had tired of he hadn’t yet tired of the sweetness, the curious comfort and reassurance, of going to sleep with his arms round her. Since their marriage there had been no interruption in his wish to cling at night; what he hadn’t wanted was to be clung to in the morning. One felt so different in the morning; at least, he did. Catherine didn’t; and it was this that had given him the impression of stifling in treacle. Now she not only showed no wish at all to cling in the morning, but she tried—he wouldn’t and couldn’t believe it, but had to—to wriggle out of being clung to at night.
‘Catherine, what is it? What has come between us?’ he asked, his eyes hurt and indignant,—when Catherine had asked this sort of question, as she had on first noticing a different quality in his love-making, he had been impatient and bored, and thought in his heart‘How like all women,’ but of course he didn’t remember this.
‘Oh Chris, why are you so silly?’ she answered, laughing and pushing him away. ‘Don’t you feel how hot it is, and how much nicer not to be too close together? Let us be sanitary.’
Sanitary? That was a pleasant way of putting it. She was going back to what she used to be at first, when he had such difficulty in getting hold of her at all,—going back into just being an intelligent little stand-offish thing, independent, and determined to have nothing to do with him. How he had worshipped her in those days of her unattainableness. Her relapse now into what threatened to become unattainableness all over again didn’t make him worship her, because that had been the kind of worship that never returns, but it lit his love up again, while at the same time filling him with a fury of possessiveness. A thwarted possessiveness, however; she evaded him more and more.
‘I can’t go to Scotland and leave you. Damn golf. I simply can’t,’ he said at last.
And she, as cool as a little cucumber and as bright as a gay little button—the comparisons were his—told him he simply had to, and that when he came back he would find they were going to be happier than ever.
‘You’ll love me more than ever,’ she said laughing, for though the treatment was extraordinarily exhausting her spirits those days were bright with faith.
‘Rot. Nobody could love you more than I do now, so what’s the good of talking like that? Catherine, what has happened to you? Tell me.’
And there he was, just as he used to be, on the floor at her feet, his arms clasping her knees, his head on her lap.
All this made Catherine very happy. She began to see benefits in the treatment other than the ones Dr. Sanguesa had guaranteed.
Hewent to Scotland, and she stayed in London. She was inexorable. It was as if his soft, enveloping pillow had turned into a rock. She lied at last—how avoid lying, sooner or later, when one was married?—so as to get rid of him, for he was insisting on taking rooms for them both at the sea near Chickover, where she could be within reach of Virginia and yet not away from him. Driven into this corner what could she do but lie? It is what one does in corners, she thought, excusing herself. She told him Virginia was probably coming up to London to have her baby in a nursing home, and that was why she couldn’t go away.
He went off puzzled and unhappy, and his unhappiness filled her with secret joy. What balm to her spirit, which had lately been so anxious, to see all these unmistakable symptoms of devoted love in him. And she pictured his return in September, and herself at the station to meet him, changed, young, able to do everything with him, a fit mate for him at last.
‘You’ll never, never know how much I love you,’ she said, her arms round his neck when she said good-bye.
‘It looks like it, doesn’t it,’ he said gloomily.
‘Exactly like it,’ she laughed. She was always laughing now, just as she used always to be laughing at their very first meetings.
‘I can’t make it out,’ he said, looking down at her upturned face. ‘You’re sending me away. Suppose I meet that girl up there—Miss Wickford, or that other one who looked like a shark—I should comfort myself.’
Even that only made her laugh. ‘Do, Chris darling,’ she said, patting his face. ‘And then come back and tell me all about it.’
Shewaschanged. He went away extremely miserable, and Lewes’s talk—that talk he had thirsted for when he thought he wasn’t going to get it—seemed like just so much gritty drivel.
Left alone in London Catherine gave herself up entirely to the treatment. Twice a week she went to Portland Place and suffered,—for it hurt, though Dr. Sanguesa told her through the nurse that it didn’t. They laid her on a table, and a great machine was lowered to within a hair’s breadth of her bare skin, her eyes were bandaged, and crackling things—she couldn’t see what, but they sounded like sparks and felt like little bright stabbing knives—were let loose on her for half an hour at a stretch, first on one side of her and then on the other. When this was over she was injected with some mysterious fluid, and then went home completely exhausted.
All day afterwards she lay on her sofa, and Mrs. Mitcham brought her trays of nourishing food. She read and slept. She went to bed at nine o’clock. She did nothing to her face after Christopher had gone, and Mrs. Mitcham, looking at her and seeing her so persistently yellow, asked her with growing concern if she felt quite well.
After the fourth treatment she was to begin and see a difference. How anxiously she scanned herself in theglass. Nothing. And her body felt exactly as her face looked,—amazingly weary.
‘It takes longer with some people,’ said the nurse, when Catherine commented on this on her fifth visit. ‘There was one lady came here who noticed nothing at all till just before the end, and then you should have seen her. Why, she skipped out of that door. And sixty, if a day.’
‘Perhaps I’m not old enough,’ said Catherine. ‘All the people you tell me about are sixty or seventy.’
She was sitting on the sofa of the Rose du Barri boudoir being dressed. She was too tired to stand up. Those crackles, going on for half an hour, were a great strain on her endurance. They didn’t hurt enough to make her cry out, but enough to make her need all her determination not to.
The nurse laughed. ‘Well, wearedepressed to-day, aren’t we,’ she said brightly. ‘People do get like that about half-way through—the slow ones, I mean, who don’t react at once as some do. You’ll see. Rome wasn’t built in a day.’
The next time she came the nurse flung up both hands on seeing her. ‘Why, aren’t you looking well this morning!’ she cried.
Catherine hurried to the glass. ‘Am I?’ she said, staring at herself.
‘Sucha change,’ said the nurse with every sign of pleasure. ‘I was sure it would begin soon. Now you’ll see it going on more and more quickly every day.’
‘Shall I?’ said Catherine, scrutinising the face in the glass.
For the life of her she could see no difference. She said so. The nurse laughed at her.
‘Oh, you doubting Thomas,’ said the nurse, whose friendliness had flowered into a robust familiarity. ‘Just look at yourself now. Don’t you see?’ And she took her by the shoulders and twisted her round to the glass again.
No, Catherine didn’t see. She saw the nurse’s laughing, rosy face close to hers, and hers yellow and pale-lipped,—just as it always was now when nothing out of Maria Rome’s box had been put on it. Maria Rome had had a terrible effect on her. Her hair was startlingly more grey, now that the dye had had time to wear off, than it used to be before any was put on.
‘It’s the trained eye that can tell,’ said the nurse brightly. ‘I notice agreatchange.’
‘Do you?’ was all Catherine could say.
That day she seemed so much more quiet and tired than usual, lying on her sofa in the flat and not even reading, that Mrs. Mitcham, who hadn’t been at all happy about her since Christopher’s departure, asked her if it wouldn’t be a good plan to see a doctor.
Catherine couldn’t help smiling at this. Why, that was what was the matter with her, that shewasseeing a doctor.
‘I shall be all right soon,’ she assured Mrs. Mitcham; for she still hoped.
It wasn’t till after the ninth treatment that her hopes began to grow definitely pale. Nothing had happened. She was just as old as ever; older, if anything, for those stabbing sparks made her brace herself to an endurance that left her utterly exhausted. The nurse, it is true, continued stoutly to express delighted surprise each time she saw her, but this merely caused Catherine to distrust either her sincerity or her eyesight. She becamemore silent and less interested in the tales about other old ladies. Their alleged skipping began to leave her cold. It was possible, of course, that they had skipped, but she wasn’t able to bring herself to believe in it really.
‘Those other old ladies——’ she said, on her eleventh visit.
The nurse interrupted her with a gay burst of laughter. ‘You’re never going to class yourself with old ladies?’ she cried. ‘Now, Mrs. Monckton, that’s really naughty of you. I won’t allow it. I shall have to scold you soon, you know.’
‘Well, but this is my eleventh time, and you said they were all skipping by their eleventh time——’
‘Not all. Come, come now. It takes people differently, you know.’
Not that I want to skip,’ said Catherine, wearily pinning up a strand of hair the eye-bandage had loosened. ‘It’s that I don’t feel the least shred of the remotest desire to.’
‘That’ll come. It’ll all come in time.’
‘In what time?’ asked Catherine. ‘I’ve only got one treatment more.’
‘It often happens that people feel the benefit afterwards. Weeks, perhaps, afterwards. They wake up one morning, and find themselves suddenly quite young.’
Catherine said nothing to this. Her hopes had flickered very small by now.
The nurse, as jolly as ever, rallied her and laughed at her for being so ungrateful, when she only had to look at herself to see——
‘I’m always looking at myself, and I never see,’ said Catherine.
‘Oh,aren’tyou a naughty little thing!’ cried thenurse. ‘I don’t know what would become of poor Dr. Sanguesa if all his patients were as obstinately blind as you. Well, there’s still Thursday. Sometimes the last treatment of all convinces the patient, and we shall have you writing us wonderful testimonials——’
There was no response to this gaiety. Catherine went away heavy-footed. She was poorer by fifty pounds, Christopher was coming home in a week, and that bright dream of meeting him at the station seemed to the last degree unlikely to be realised. Useless for the nurse to pretend there was a difference in her; there was none. Perhaps if she hadn’t pretended Catherine would have been more able to believe. But the nurse treating her like a fool—well, but wasn’t that precisely what she was? Wasn’t any woman a fool who could suppose that she could be stirred up to youth again by showers of stabbing crackles?