She went home heavy-footed and ashamed. Trouble, expense, disappointment, an intolerable long separation from Christopher,—that was all she had got out of this. Oh yes—she had got the useful knowledge that she was a fool; but she had had that before.
Still, she wouldn’t quite give up hope yet. There was one more treatment, and it might well be that she would suddenly take a turn....
But she never had the final treatment, and never saw either Dr. Sanguesa or the nurse again; for when she got home that day, she found a telegram from Mrs. Colquhoun, asking her to come to Chickover at once.
Therewas a note of urgency in the telegram that made Catherine afraid. Going down in the slow afternoon train, the first she could catch, which stopped so often and so long, she had much time to think, and it seemed to her that all this she had been doing since her marriage was curiously shabby and disgraceful. What waste of emotions, what mean fears. Now came real fear, and at its touch those others shrivelled up. Virginia down there at grips with danger, being tortured—oh, she knew what torture—just this stark fact shocked her back to vision.
She sat looking out of the window at the fields monotonously passing, and many sharp-edged thoughts cut through her mind, and one of them was of the last time she had gone down to Chickover, and of her gaiety because some strange man, taken in by the cleverness with which Maria Rome had disguised her, had obviously considered her younger than she was. How pitiful, how pitiful; what a sign one was indeed old when a thing like that could excite one and make one feel pleased.
She stared at this memory a moment, before it was hustled off by other thoughts, in wonder. The stuff one filled life with! And at the faintest stirring of Death’s wings, the smallest movement forward of that great figure from the dark furthermost corner of the littleroom called life, how instantly one’s eyes were smitten open. One became real. Was one ever real till then? Had there to be that forward movement, that reminder, ‘I am here, you know,’ before one could wake from one’s strange, small dreams?
She had to wait an hour at the junction. This comforted her, for if things had been serious the car would have been sent for her there.
It was past nine when she reached Chickover. The chauffeur who met her looked unhappy, but could tell her nothing except that his mistress had been ill since the morning. The avenue was dark, the great trees in solemn row shutting out what still was left of twilight, and the house at the end was dark too and very silent. The place seemed to be holding its breath, as if aware of the battle being fought on the other side in the rooms towards the garden.
Silence everywhere, complete and strange; except——
Yes—what was that?
She caught her breath and stopped; for as she was crossing the hall, past the pale maid, a slow moaning crept down the stairs like a trickle of blood,—a curious slow moaning, not human at all, more like some poor animal, dying hopelessly by inches in a trap.
Virginia....
Catherine stood struck with horror. That noise? Virginia? Just like an animal?
She looked round at Kate. Their white faces stared at each other. Kate’s lips moved. ‘Since this morning,’ came out of them. ‘Since early this morning. The master——’
She broke off, her pale lips remaining open.
Catherine turned and ran upstairs. She ran as onedemented towards the moaning. It must be stopped, it must be stopped. Virginia must be saved, she couldn’t, she mustn’t be allowed to suffer like that, nobody should be allowed to suffer like that, hours and hours....
She ran along the passage to Virginia’s room, the same room where nineteen years ago Virginia herself had been born, but instead of getting nearer the moaning she seemed to be going away from it.
Where was Virginia, then? Where had they put her?
She stood still to listen, and her heart beat so loud that she could hardly hear. There—to the left, where the spare-rooms were. But why? Why had they taken her there?
She ran down the passage to the left. Yes; here it was; behind this shut door....
Catherine’s knees seemed to be going to give way. The sound was terribly close,—so hopeless, so unceasing. What were they doing in there to her child? What was God doing to let them?
Her shaking hand fumbled at the handle. She laid the other over it to steady it. She mustn’t be like this, she knew; she mustn’t go in there only to add to the terror that was there already.
With both hands gripping the handle she slowly turned it and went in.
Stephen.
Stephen half sitting, half lying on the floor up against a sofa. His mother standing looking at him. No one else. The room shrouded in dust-sheets, the bed piled high with spare blankets and pillows. Stephen moaning.
‘Stephen!’ Catherine exclaimed, so much shockedthat she could only stare. Stephen—Stephen of all people—in such a state....
His mother turned and came towards her.
‘But—Virginia?’ said Catherine, her lips trembling, for if Stephen could be reduced to this, what dreadful thing was happening to Virginia?
Mrs. Colquhoun took her face in both hands and kissed her,—really kissed her. Her eyes were very bright, with red rims. She had evidently been crying, and she had the look of those who have reached the end of their tether.
‘All is going well I believe now with Virginia,’ she said. ‘I tell him so, and he won’t listen. Do you think you could make him listen? There was a terrible time before the second doctor came and put her under an anæsthetic, and it upset him so that he—well, you see.’
And she made a gesture, half shame, half anger, and wholly unhappy, towards the figure leaning against the sofa.
Then she added, her bright, tear-stained eyes on Catherine’s, ‘To think that my son and God’s priest should go to pieces like this—should be unable in a crisis to do his duty—should lose—should lose——’
She broke off, continuing to stare at Catherine with those bright, incredulous eyes.
Catherine could only gaze at Stephen in dismay. No wonder Kate downstairs hadn’t succeeded in saying what she was trying to say about the master. Stephen, the firm-lipped, the strong denouncer of weakness, the exhorting calm Christian—what a dreadful thing to happen. She didn’t know husbands ever collapsed like that. George hadn’t. He had been anxious and distressed, but he hadn’t moaned. The moaning had beendone, she remembered, exclusively by her. George had been her comfort, her rock. What comfort could Virginia have got that day out of Stephen? And it was after all Virginia who was having the baby.
‘Couldn’t the doctors give him something?’ she asked, feeling that poor Stephen ought certainly too to be given a little chloroform to help him through his hours of misery,—anything rather than that he should be left lying there suffering like that.
‘I asked them to give him a soothing draught,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun, ‘and they only told me to take him away. Of course I took him away, for he was killing Virginia, and here I’ve been shut up with him ever since. Catherine——‘it was the first time she had called her that—‘I don’t remember in our day——? I don’t remember that my husband——?’ And she broke off, and stared at her with her bright, exhausted eyes.
‘George didn’t,’ said Catherine hesitatingly, ‘but I think—I think Stephen loves Virginia more than perhaps——’
‘A nice way of loving,’ remarked Mrs. Colquhoun, who had had a terrible day shut up with Stephen, and whose distress for him was by now shot with indignation.
‘Oh, but he can’t help it. Dear Mrs. Colquhoun——’
‘Call me Milly.’
Milly? These barriers tumbling down all round before the blast of a crisis bewildered Catherine. Stephen, who had been so firmly entrenched behind example and precept, lying exposed there, so helplessly and completely exposed that she hardly liked to look at him, hardly liked either him or his mother to know she was there, because of later on when he should be normal again and they both might be humiliated by the recollection, and Mrs.Colquhoun, not only turning on her adored son but flinging away her insincerities and kissing her with almost eager affection and demanding to be called Milly. Strange by-products of Virginia’s suffering, thought Catherine. ‘I must go to her,’ she said, going towards the door.
‘Dear Catherine,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun holding her back, ‘they won’t let you in. It will soon be over now. And what will she say,’ she added, turning to Stephen and raising her voice, ‘what will she say when she asks for her husband and he is incapable of coming to her side?’
But Stephen was far beyond reacting to any twittings.
‘Oh, but he will be—won’t you, Stephen,’ said Catherine. ‘You’re going to be so happy, you and Virginia—so, so happy, and forget all about this——’
And she ran over to him, and stooped down and kissed him.
But Stephen only moaned.
‘He ought to go to bed and have a doctor,’ Catherine said, looking round at Mrs. Colquhoun.
‘Heisn’t having the baby,’ was Mrs. Colquhoun’s reply.
‘No—but mental agony is worse than physical,’ said Catherine.
‘Not if it’s babies,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun firmly.
What a strange night that was. What a night of mixed emotions,—great fear, deep pity immense surprise; and what a clearing up in Catherine’s mind of nonsense, of her own private follies. None of the three in that room had yet in their lives been up against this kind of reality, this stark, ruthless reality, before. There were hours and hours to think in, hours and hoursto feel in. A few yards away lay Virginia, hanging between life and death. From her room came no moans. An august silence enveloped it, as of issues too great and solemn being settled within for any crying out. It was the slowest, most difficult of births. She herself was far away, profoundly unconcerned, wrapped in the mercifulness of unconsciousness; but how long could even the youngest, strongest body stand this awful strain on it?
The two women away in that spare-room on the other side of the house didn’t dare let themselves even look at this question. It lay cold and heavy on the heart of each, and they turned away their mind’s eyes and busied themselves as best they could,—Catherine with stroking Stephen and murmuring words of comfort in his ear, of which he took no notice, and Mrs. Colquhoun with making tea.
All night long poor Mrs. Colquhoun, herself within an ace of collapse, made fresh tea at short intervals, finding in the rattle of the cups and saucers a way of drowning some at least of her unhappy son’s nerve-racking moans and her own thoughts. She couldn’t and wouldn’t contemplate the possibility of anything happening to Virginia; she insisted to herself that in that quarter all was well. Two doctors and a skilled nurse, two doctors and a skilled nurse, she kept on repeating in her mind, her shaking hands upsetting the cups. A difficult birth, of course, and a long one, but that was nothing unusual with the first child. Nonsense, nonsense, to let even the edge of an imagining of possible disaster slide into one’s mind. One had quite enough to think of without that, with Stephen lying there disgracing himself and her, denying in effect his God, and certainlyabandoning his manhood,—for Virginia’s screams before the anæsthetist arrived, those awful, awful screams coming from his gentle wife, had sent the unhappy Stephen, after two hours of having to listen to them, out of his mind. He had killed her, he was her murderer, he had killed her, killed her with his love....
‘Nonsense,’ his mother had said in her most matter-of-fact way, on his shouting out things like this for every one to hear,—really excessively shocking things when one remembered all the young maids in the house; and then with trembling hands she had led him into this distant room, and he had thrown himself down where he had ever since been lying, and had said no word more, but only ceaselessly moaned.
And Mrs. Colquhoun, who had never in her life overwhelmingly loved, and never till that day known she possessed any nerves, looked on at first helplessly, and then indignantly, and the whole time uncomprehendingly. It was all very well, and of course a husband was anxious on such occasions, and should and was expected to show feeling, but within decent limits. These limits were not decent. Anything but. What would the parish say if it saw him? What did the servants say, who could hear him?
She put aspirin into his heedless mouth, and asked him severely if he had forgotten God. She tried to twit him into manliness and priestliness. She actually shook him once, believing that counter-shocks were good for the nerves. Useless, all useless; and by the time Catherine arrived she herself was very nearly done for.
But tea, the domesticities,—natural, reassuring little activities,—were, she found, the only real props. Notprayer. Strange, not once did she wish to pray. If Stephen had prayed it would have been a good thing, but it wouldn’t have been a good thing for her to pray. No emotions, if you please, she admonished herself several times aloud—it froze Catherine’s blood to hear her—duty, duty, duty; the making of tea to sustain the body, to compose the nerves by the routine of it,—this was the real anchor. She would gladly have gone round with a duster, dusting the ornaments that collect in spare-rooms, but to dust at night seemed too highly unnatural to offer a hope of forgetfulness.
So she kept on ringing the bell for fresh hot water and more cups, and just the sight of the housemaid in her cap and apron at the door—she wasn’t allowed inside, because of Stephen—seemed to hold Mrs. Colquhoun down to sanity. There were other things in the world besides suffering; there were next mornings, and the precious routine of life with its baths and breakfasts and orders to the cook,—how she longed for that, how she longed to be back in her safe shell again, with everything normal about her, and Stephen in his senses, and the sickening load of fear on her heart lifted away and forgotten.
A cup was chipped. She held it to the light. Kate, of course, who really was most careless with china. At that rate Virginia would soon have none left.
She rang the bell and sent the housemaid for Kate, and when she came, her cap a little crooked and her hair a little wispy, Mrs. Colquhoun took the cup out into the passage to her and scolded her soundly, and it did them both good, and Kate was so much restored by this breath of normality that she was able to ask in a whisperhow the master was, and Mrs. Colquhoun, dropping unconsciously into the very language of the occasion, replied that he was doing nicely.
And indeed Stephen’s moans seemed less since Catherine had taken his head on her lap and was stroking and patting him. She stroked and patted without stopping, and every now and then bent down and murmured words of encouragement in his ear, or else, when she found no words because her own heart was so full of fear, simply bent down and kissed him. Did he hear? Did he feel? She couldn’t tell; but she thought his moans grew quieter, and that he seemed dimly conscious of comfort when her hand passed softly down his sunken face.
‘You’ll wear yourself out,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun, pursing her lips to keep them from quivering.
‘It comforts me,’ said Catherine.
‘You’d much better have another cup of tea.’
‘How passionately he loves her. I didn’t quite realise——’
‘Loving passionately seems to get people into nice messes,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun grimly.
‘I suppose one really oughtn’t to love too much,’ said Catherine.
‘I consider Stephen preached himself into it. That course of sermons last Lent—you remember? I thought at the time that he was almost too eloquent. It sometimes very nearly wasn’t quite what one wishes a parish to hear. The love he talked about—well, he started with St. John’s ideas, but soon got away from them into something else. People, especially the servants, listened open-mouthed. They wouldn’t have done that if there hadn’t been something else in it besides the Bible. Andyou know, Catherine, one can talk oneself into anything, and in my opinion that is what Stephen did. And he came to think so much and so often of that side of life that he forgot moderation, and here he is. This is his punishment, and my disgrace.’
‘No, no,’ said Catherine soothingly.
‘It is—it is.’ And Mrs. Colquhoun, who had kept up so courageously till then, bowed her head over the teatray and wept.
It would be useless, Catherine felt, to argue with poor Mrs. Colquhoun about love, so gently laying Stephen’s head on a cushion she went over to her and sat down beside her and put her arm round her and began to stroke her too, and murmur soothing words.
How strange it was, this night of fear spent stroking the Colquhouns. That queer imp that sits in a detached corner of one’s mind refusing to be serious just when it most should be, actually forced her at this moment, when hope was at its faintest, to laugh inside herself at the odd turn her relationship with Stephen and his mother had taken. The collapsed Colquhouns; the towers of strength laid low; and she, the disapproved of, the sinner as Stephen thought, and perhaps he had told his mother and she thought it too, being their only support and comforter. The collapsed Colquhouns. It really was funny—very funny—very fun....
Why, what was this? She too crying?
Horrified she jumped up, and hurried across to the window and flung it open as far as it would go, and stood at it with her face to the damp night air and struggled with herself, squeezing back those ill-timed tears; and as she stood there the sluggish air suddenly became a draught, and turning quickly she found the door hadbeen opened, and a strange man was framed in it, with Kate in the background ushering him in.
One of the doctors. She flew to him. He was very red, with drops of sweat on his forehead.
‘Where’s that husband?’ he asked, looking round the room and speaking cheerfully, though his eyes were serious. ‘Oh—I see. Still no good to us. I never saw such a fellow. He might be having the baby himself. Well, his mother, then. Oh dear—what’s this? Tears? Come, come,’ he said, laying his hand on Mrs. Colquhoun’s shoulder very kindly, and looking at Catherine. ‘Are you the other grandmother?’ he asked, smiling.
‘Grandmother?’
‘A whacking boy. The biggest I’ve brought into the world for a long time.’
WhenVirginia recovered consciousness she lay for some time with her eyes shut, frowning. She seemed to have come back from somewhere very far away, and it had been difficult, so difficult to come back at all, and she was tired out with the effort. Where had she been? She lay trying to remember, her arms straight down by her side, the palms of her hands upturned as if some one had flung them there like that and she had been too indifferent to move them. Her hair, in two thick plaits, was neatly arranged, a plait drawn down over each shoulder, and her bed was spotless and tidy.
She opened her heavy eyes presently, and saw her mother sitting by the pillow.
Her mother. She shut her eyes again and thought this over; but it tired her to think, and she didn’t bother much with it. Her mother was sitting quite still, holding a plait of some one’s dark hair against her lips and kissing it. There was another person in the room, moving about without any noise, dressed in white. Who?
A glimmer of recollection stole into Virginia’s mind. Without bothering to open her eyes—the exertion of doing that was so enormous—she managed to murmur, ‘Have I—had my baby?’ And her mother took her hand and kissed it and told her she had, and that it was a boy. A beautiful boy, her mother said.
She thought this over too, frowning with the effort. A beautiful boy. That was the opposite of a beautiful girl. And the nurse—of course, that white thing was the nurse—came and held a cup to her mouth and made her drink something.
Then she lay quiet again, with her eyes shut. She had had her baby. A beautiful boy. The news in no way stirred her; it tired her.
Presently there came another flicker of recollection. Stephen. That was her husband. Where was he?
With an effort she opened her eyes and looked languidly at her mother. How hard it was to pronounce that St. Such an exertion. But she managed it, and got out, ‘Stephen——?’
Her mother, kissing her hand again, said he had a little cold, and was staying in bed.
Stephen had a little cold, and was staying in bed. This news in no way stirred her either. She lay quite apathetic, her arms straight by her side, her hands palm upwards on the counterpane. Stephen; the baby; her mother; a profound indifference to them all filled her mind, still dark with the shadows of that great dim place she had clambered out of, clambered and clambered till her body was bruised and sore from head to foot, and so dead tired—so dead, dead tired.
Some one else came into the room. A man. Perhaps a doctor, for he took up her hand and held it in his for a while, and then said something to the nurse, who came and raised her head and gave her another drink,—rather like what she remembered brandy used to be.
Brandy in bed. Wasn’t that—what was the word?—yes, queer. Wasn’t that queer, to drink brandy in bed.
But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. It was nice when nothing mattered. So peaceful and quiet; so, so peaceful and quiet. Like floating on one’s back in calm water on a summer afternoon, looking up at the blue sky, and every now and then letting one’s head sink a little,—just a little, so that the cool water rippled over one’s ears; or letting it sink a little more,—just a little more, so that the cool water rippled over one’s face; and one sank and sank; gently deeper; gently deeper; till at last there was nothing but sleep.
WhenChristopher arrived in Hertford Street from Scotland a week later, Mrs. Mitcham met him in the hall of the flat. He knew nothing of what had happened at Chickover. Catherine had written him a brief scribble the day she left, telling him she was going to Virginia, and as he hadn’t had a word since, and found his holiday, which he anyhow hated, completely intolerable directly she cut him off from her by silence, he decided it was no longer to be endured; and flinging his things together, and remarking to Lewes that he was fed up, he started for London, getting there hard on the heels of a telegram he had sent Mrs. Mitcham.
She came into the hall when she heard his latchkey in the door. Her face looked longer than ever, and her clothes seemed blacker.
‘Oh, sir,’ she began at once, taking his coat from him, ‘isn’t it dreadful.’
‘What is?’ asked Christopher, twisting round and looking at her, quick fear in his heart.
‘Miss Virginia——’
He breathed again. For a terrible moment he had thought——
‘What hasshebeen doing?’ he asked, suddenly indifferent, for the having of babies hadn’t entered hisconsciousness as anything dangerous; if it were, the whole place wouldn’t be littered with them.
Mrs. Mitcham stared at him out of red-rimmed eyes.
‘Doing, sir?’ she repeated, stung by the careless way he spoke; and for the first and last time in her life sarcastic, she said with dignified rebuke, ‘Only dying, sir.’
It was his turn to stare, his eyes very wide open, while dismay, as all that this dying meant became clear to him, stole into them. ‘Dying? That girl? Do you mean——’
‘Dead, sir,’ said Mrs. Mitcham, her head well up, her gaze, full of rebuke and dignity, on his.
Too late to go down that night. No trains any more that night. But there was the motor-bicycle. Catherine—Catherine in grief—he must get to her somehow....
And once again Christopher rushed westwards to Catherine. Through the night he rushed in what seemed great jerks of speed interrupted by things going wrong, every conceivable thing going wrong, as if all hell and all its devils were in league to trip him up and force him each few miles to stand aside and look on impotently while the hours, not he, flew past.
She hadn’t sent for him. She was suffering and away, and hadn’t sent for him. But he knew why. It was because she couldn’t bear, after all the things he had said about Virginia, to smite him with the fact of her death. Or else she herself was so violently hit that she had been stunned into that strange state people got into when death was about, and thought no longer of what was left, of all the warmth and happiness life still went on being full of, but only of what was gone.
But whatever she was feeling or not able to feel, she was his, his wife, to help and comfort; and if she wasso much numbed that help and comfort couldn’t reach her, he would wait by her side till she woke up again. What could it be like down there, he asked himself as the black trees and hedges streamed past him, what could it possibly be like for Catherine, shut up in that unhappy house, with young Virginia dead? That girl dead. Younger by years than himself. And her husband.... ‘Oh, Lord—my Catherine,’ he thought, tearing along faster and faster, ‘I must get her out of it—get her home—love her back to life——’
Pictures of her flashed vivid in his mind, lovely little pictures, such as had haunted him with increasing frequency the longer his holiday without her dragged on; and he saw her in them with the eye of starved passion, a most lovely little Catherine, far, far prettier than she had ever been in her prettiest days,—so sweet with her soft white skin, so sweet with her soft dark hair, so sweet with her soft grey eyes, and her face lit up with love,—love all and only for him. And he who had thought, those last days before Scotland, that there was too much love about! He all but swerved into a ditch when he remembered this piece of incredible folly. Well, he knew now what life was like for him away from her: it was like being lost in the frozen dark.
He got to Chickover about five in the morning, just as the grey light was beginning to creep among the trees. He couldn’t go and rouse that sad house so early, so he stopped in the village and managed, after much difficulty, to induce the inn to open and let him in, and give him water and a towel and promise him tea when the hour should have become more decent; and then he lay down on the horsehair sofa in the parlour and tried to sleep.
But how sleep, when he was at last so near Catherine? Just the thought of seeing her again, of looking into her eyes after their four weeks’ separation, was enough to banish sleep; and then there was the anxiety about her, the knowledge that she must be crushed with sorrow, the effort to imagine life there with that poor devil of a husband....
At half-past seven he began to urge on breakfast, ringing the bell and going out into the beer-smelling passage and calling. With all his efforts, however, he couldn’t get anything even started till after eight, when a sleepy girl came downstairs and put a dirty cloth on the table and a knife or two.
He went out into the road and walked up and down while the table was being laid. He wouldn’t question any one there, though they all of course could have told him about Virginia’s death and what was happening at the house. And they, supposing he was a stranger,—as indeed he was and hoped for ever to be in regard to Chickover—did not of themselves begin to talk.
He knew nothing; neither when she died, nor when she was buried. Perhaps she hadn’t been buried yet, and in that case he wouldn’t be able to get Catherine away, as he had hoped, that very day. He found himself trying not to think of Virginia,—he owed her so many apologies! But only because she was dead. Who could have supposed she would die, and put him, by doing that, in the wrong? One had to talk as one felt at the moment, and it wasn’t possible to shape one’s remarks with an eye to the possibility of their subject dying. Yet Christopher was very sorry, and also sore. He felt he had been a brute, but he also felt she had taken an unfair advantage of him.
He switched his thoughts off her as much as he could. Poor little thing. And such fine weather, too,—such a good day to be alive on; for by this time the September sun was flooding Virginia’s village, and the dew-drenched asters in the cottage gardens were glittering in the light. Poor little thing. And poor devil of a husband. How well he could understandhismisery. God, if anything were to happen to Catherine!
He drank some tepid tea and ate some unpleasant bread and butter—Stephen evidently hadn’t succeeded in making the village innkeeper good, anyhow—and then, feeling extraordinarily agitated, a mixture of palpitating love and excitement and reluctance and fear, and all of it shot with distress because of Virginia, he started off through the park, cutting across the grass, going round along the back of the kitchen-garden wall to the lodge gates, and walking up the avenue like any other respectful sympathetic early caller; and when he turned the bend and got to the point where one first saw the house he gave a great sigh of thankfulness, for the blinds were up. The poor little thing’s funeral was over, then, and at least he wasn’t going to tumble, as he had secretly feared, into the middle of that.
But if it was over, why hadn’t Catherine sent for him? Or come home? Or at least written? He remembered, however, that she supposed he was in Scotland, and of course she would have written to him there; and, consoled, he went on up the avenue whose very trees seemed sad, with their yellowing leaves slowly fluttering to the ground at every little puff of wind.
The front door was open, and the drawing-room door on the other side of the hall was open too, so that while he stood waiting after ringing the bell he could see rightthrough to the sunny terrace and garden. The house was very silent. He could hear no sounds at all, except somewhere, away round behind the stables, the quacking of a distant duck. Wasn’t anybody having breakfast? Were they still asleep? If Catherine were still asleep he could go up to her,—not like the last time when he came to this place to fetch her, and had to wait in the drawing-room, a stranger still, a suppliant without any rights.
Kate the parlour-maid appeared. She knew of course, directly she saw him, that this was the young gentleman Mrs. Cumfrit had married—there had been talk enough about that at the time in the servants’ hall—and the ghost of a smile lifted the solemnity of her face, for an ordinary, healthy young gentleman was refreshing to eyes that for the last week had witnessed only woe.
‘The ladies are not down yet, sir,’ she said in a subdued voice, showing him, or rather trying to show him, for he wouldn’t go, into the drawing-room.
‘The ladies?’ repeated Christopher, not subduing his voice, and the house, for so many days hushed, quivered into life again at the vigour of it.
‘Mr. Colquhoun’s mother is staying here, sir,’ said Kate, dropping her voice to a whisper so as to damp him down to the proper key of quiet. ‘Mr. Colquhoun is still very ill, but the doctor thinks he’ll be quite himself again when he is able to notice the baby. If you’ll wait in here, sir,’ she continued, making another attempt to get him into the drawing-room, ‘I’ll go and tell the ladies.’
‘I’m not going to wait anywhere,’ said Christopher. ‘I’m going up to my wife. Show me the way.’
Yes, it was refreshing to see an alive gentleman again, and a nice change from the poor master; though themaster, of course, was behaving in quite the proper way, taking his loss as a true widower should, and taking it so hard that he had to have a doctor and be kept in bed. The whole village was proud of him; yet for all that it was pleasant to hear a healthy gentleman’s voice again, talking loud and masterfully, and Kate, pleased to have to obey, went up the stairs almost with her ordinary brisk tread, instead of the tiptoes she had got into the habit of.
Christopher followed, his heart beating loud. She led him down a broad passage to what appeared to be the furthermost end of the house, and as they proceeded along it a noise he had begun to hear when he turned the corner from the landing got bigger and bigger, seeming to swell at him till at last it was prodigious.
The baby. Crying. He hoped repenting of the damage it had already found time to do in its brief existence. But he had no thoughts to spare for babies at that moment, and when Kate stopped at the very door the cries were coming out of, he waved her on impatiently.
‘Good God,’ he said, ‘you don’t suppose I want to see the baby?’
She only smiled at him and knocked at the door. ‘It’s a beautiful baby,’ she said, with that odd look of satisfied pride and satisfied hunger that women, he had noticed, when they get near very small babies seem to have.
‘Hang the baby—take me to my wife,’ he commanded.
‘She’s here, sir,’ Kate answered, opening the door on some one’s calling out, above the noise, that she was to come in.
It was Mrs. Colquhoun’s voice. He recognised it, and drew back quickly.
No—he’d be hanged if he’d go in there and meet Catherine in a nursery, with the nurse and the baby and Mrs. Colquhoun all looking on. But he didn’t draw back so quickly that he hadn’t caught a glimpse of the room, and seen a bath on two chairs in front of a bright fire, and three women bending over it, one in white and two in black, and all of them talking at once to that which was in the bath, while its cries rose ever louder and more piercing.
Absorbed, the women were; absorbed to the exclusion of every wish, grief, longing, or other love, he thought, swift hot jealousy flashing into his heart. He felt Catherine ought somehow to have known he was there, been at once conscious of him the minute he set foot in the house. He would have been conscious of her all right the very instant she got under the same roof; of that he was absolutely certain. Instead of that, there was that absorbed back, just as though she had never married, never passionately loved—every bit as absorbed as the other one’s, as Mrs. Colquhoun’s, who was an old woman with no love left in her life except what she could wring out of some baby. And whether it was because they were both in the same attitude and clothes he couldn’t tell, but his impression had been the same of them both—a quick impression, before he had time to think, of a black cluster of grizzled women.
Grizzled? What an extraordinarily horrid word, he thought, to come into his mind. How had it got there?
‘Shut that door!’ called out Mrs. Colquhoun’s voice above the baby’s cries. ‘Don’t you see you are making a draught?’
Kate looked round hesitatingly at Christopher.
‘Come in and shut that door!’ called out Mrs. Colquhoun still louder.
Kate went in, shutting it behind her, and Christopher waited, standing up stiff against the wall.
He hadn’t expected this. No, it was the last thing he had expected. And now when Catherine came to him Kate would be there too, following on her heels; and was it to be a handshake, then, or a perfunctory marital kiss in the presence of a servant, their sacred, blessed moment of reunion?
But it was not to be quite like that, for though somebody came out and Kate came with her, somebody small who exclaimed, ‘Oh Chris——!’ and who seemed to think she was Catherine, she wasn’t Catherine, no, no—she wasn’t and couldn’t be. What came out was a ghost, a pale little grizzled ghost, which held out its hands and made as if to lift up its face to be kissed; and when he didn’t kiss it, when he only drew back and stared at it, drew back at once itself and stood looking at him without a word.
Theystood looking at each other. Kate went away down the passage. Emptiness was round them, pierced by the baby’s cries through the shut door of the nursery. Catherine didn’t shrink at all, and let Christopher look at her as much as he liked, for she had done with everything now except truth.
‘Catherine——’ he began, in the afraid and bewildered voice of a child fumbling in the dark.
‘Yes, Chris?’
She made no attempt to go close to him, he made no attempt to go close to her; and it was strange to Catherine, who couldn’t continually as yet remember the difference in herself, to be alone with Christopher after separation, and not instantly be gathered to his heart.
But his face made her remember; in it she could see her own as clearly as if she were in front of a glass.
‘I had no idea—no idea——’ he stammered.
‘That I could look like this?’
‘That you’ve suffered so horribly, that you loved her so terribly——’
And he knew he ought to take her in his arms and comfort her, and he couldn’t, because this simply wasn’t Catherine.
‘But it isn’t that only,’ she said,—and hesitated for an instant.
For an instant her heart failed her. Why tell him? After all, all she had done was for love of him; for a greedy, clutching love it was true, made up chiefly of vanity and possessiveness and fear, but still love. Why not forget the whole thing, and let him think she had grown old in a week from grief?
Creditable and touching explanation. And so nearly true, too, for if passion had begun the ruin, grief had completed it, and the night and day of that birth and death, of the agony of Stephen and her own long-drawn-out torment, had put the finishing touches of age beyond her age on a face and hair left defenceless to lines and greyness without Maria Rome’s massage and careful dyes, and anyhow twice as worn and grey as they had been before she began the exhausting processes of Dr. Sanguesa.
But she put this aside. She had had enough of nearly truth and the wretched business of taking him in. How could she go on doing him such wrongs? She had done him the greatest of wrongs marrying him, of that she was certain, but at least she would leave off making fools of them both. Rotten, rotten way of living. Let him see her as she was; and if his love—how natural that would be at his age, how inevitable—came to an end, she would set him free.
For in those remarkable hours that followed Virginia’s death, when it seemed to Catherine as if she had suddenly opened the door out of a dark passage and gone into a great light room, she saw for the first time quite plainly; and what she saw in that strange new clearness, that merciless, yet somehow curiously comforting, clearness,was that love has to learn to let go, that love if it is real always does let go, makes no claims, sets free, is content to love without being loved—and that nothing was worth while, nothing at all in the tiny moment called life except being good. Simply being good. And though people might argue as to what precisely being good meant, they knew in their hearts just as she knew in her heart; and though the young might laugh at this conviction as so much sodden sentiment, they would, each one of them who was worth anything, end by thinking exactly that. Impossible to live as she had lived the last week close up to death and not see this. For four extraordinary days she had sat in its very presence, watching by the side of its peace. She knew now. Life was a flicker; the briefest thing, blown out before one was able to turn round. There was no time in it, no time in the infinitely precious instant, for anything except just goodness.
So she said, intent on simple truth, ‘I did deeply love Virginia, and I have suffered, but I looked very nearly like this before.’
And Christopher, who hadn’t lived these days close up to death, and hadn’t seen and recognised what she so clearly did, and wasn’t feeling any of this, was shocked out of his bewilderment by such blasphemy, and took a quick, almost menacing step forward, as if to silence the ghost daring to profane his lovely memory.
‘You didn’t look like it—you didn’t!’ he cried. ‘You were my Catherine. You weren’t this—this——’
He stopped, and stared close into her face. ‘What has become of you?’ he asked, bewildered again, a dreadful sense of loss cold on his heart. ‘Oh, Catherine—what have you done to yourself?’
‘Why, that’s just it,’ she said, the faintest shadow of a smile trembling a moment in her eyes. ‘I haven’t done anything to myself.’
‘But your hair—your lovely hair——’
He made agonised motions with his hands.
‘It’s all gone grey because of—of what you’ve been through, you poor, poor little thing——’
And again he knew he ought to take her in his arms and comfort her, and again he couldn’t.
‘No, it wasn’t that made it go grey,’ she said. ‘It was grey before, only I used to have it dyed.’
He stared at her, entirely bewildered. Catherine looking like this, and saying these things. Why did she say them? Why was she so anxious to make out that all this had nothing to do with Virginia’s death? Was it some strange idea of sparing him the pain of being sorry for her? Or was she so terribly smitten that she was no longer accountable for what she said? If this was it, then all the more closely should he fold her to his heart and shield and comfort her, and what a damned scoundrel he was not to. But he couldn’t. Not yet. Not that minute. Perhaps presently, when he had got more used....
‘You dyed it?’ he repeated stupidly.
‘Yes. Or rather Maria Rome did.’
‘Maria Rome?’
‘Oh, what does it matter. It makes me sick to think of that old nonsense. She’s a place in London where they do up women who’ve begun not to keep. She did me up wonderfully, and at first it very nearly looked real. But it was such a business, and I was so frightened always, living like that on the brink of its not being a success, and yousuddenly seeing me. I’m sick, sick just remembering it—now.’
And she laid her hand on his arm, looking up at him with Catherine’s eyes, Catherine’s beautiful, fatigued eyes.
They were the same,—beautiful as he had always known them, and fatigued as he had always known them; but how strange to see them in that little yellow face. Her eyes; all that was left of his Catherine. Yes, and the voice, the same gentle voice, except that it had a new note of—was it sensibleness? Sensibleness! Catherine sensible? She had been everything in the world but that,—obstinate, weak, unaccountable, irrelevant, determined, impulsive, clinging, passionate, adorable, his own sweet love, but never sensible.
‘Doesn’t it seem too incredibly little and mean, that sort of lying, any sort of lying, whenthishas happened,’ she said, her hand still on his arm, her eyes very earnestly looking up into his. ‘So extraordinarily not worth while. And you mustn’t think I’m out of my mind from shock, Chris,’ she went on, for it was plain from his expression that that was what he did think, ‘because I’m not. On the contrary—for the first time I’m in it.’
And as he stared at her, and thought that if this was what she was like when she was in her mind then how much better and happier for them both if she had stayed out of it, the baby on the other side of the door was taken out of its bath, and that which had been cries became yells.
‘For God’s sake let’s go somewhere where there isn’t this infernal squalling,’ exclaimed Christopher, with a movement so sudden and exasperated that it shook her hand off his arm.
‘Yes, let us,’ she said, moving away down the passage ahead of him; and more plainly than ever, when they got to the big windows on the stairs and she turned the bend of them before him, he could see how yellow she was, and what a quantity of grey, giving it that terrible grizzled look, there was in her hair.
Yellow; grizzled; what had she done, what had they done to her, to ruin her like this, to take his Catherine from him and give him this instead? It was awful. He was robbed. His world of happiness was smashing to bits. And he felt such a brute, the lowest of low brutes, not to be able to love her the same as before, now when she so much must need love, when she had been having what he could well imagine was a simply hellish time.
Virginia again, he thought, with a bitterness that shocked him himself. That girl, even in death spoiling things. For even if it was true what Catherine insisted on telling him about dyes and doings-up, she never would have thought it necessary to tell him, to make a clean breast, if it hadn’t been for Virginia’s death. No; if it hadn’t been for that she would have gone on as before, doing whatever it was she did to herself, the results of which anyhow were that he and she were happy. God, how he hated clean breasts, and the turning over of some imaginary new leaf. Whenever anything happened out of the ordinary, anything that pulled women up short and made them do what they called think, they started wrecking—wrecking everything for themselves and for the people who had been loving them happily and contentedly, by their urge for the two arch-destroyers of love, those damned clean breasts and those even more damned new leaves.
He followed her like an angry, frightened child. How could he know what she knew? How could he see what she saw? He was where he had always been, while she had gone on definitely into something else. And there were no words she could have explained in. If she had tried, all she could have found to say, with perplexed brows, would have been, ‘But Iknow.’
She took him into the garden. They passed her bedroom door on the way, and he knew it was hers for it was half open, and the room hadn’t been done yet, and the little slippers he had kissed a hundred times were lying kicked off on the carpet, the slippers that had belonged to the real Catherine—or rather, as this one was now insisting, to the artificial Catherine, but anyhow to his Catherine.
For a moment he was afraid she would take him in there. Ice seemed to slide down his spine at the thought. But she walked past it as if it had nothing to do with either of them, and then he was offended.
Out in the garden it was easier to breathe. He couldn’t, in that public place, with the chance of a gardener appearing at any moment, take her in his arms, so he didn’t feel quite such a scoundrel for not doing it; and walking by her side and not looking at her, but just listening to her voice, he felt less lost; for the voice was the voice of Catherine, and as long as he didn’t look at her he could believe she was still there. It was like, in the night, hearing the blessed reassurance of one’s mother talking, when one was little, and frightened, and alone.
She took him through the garden and out by the wicket-gate into the park, where rabbits were scuttling across the dewy grass, leaving dark ribbons along itssilver, and the bracken, webbed with morning gossamer, was already turning brown. And all the way she talked, and all the way he listened in silence, his eyes fixed straight in front of him.
She told him everything, from that moment of their honeymoon when, from loving, she had fallen in love, and instantly began to be terrified of looking old, and her desperate, grotesque efforts to stay young for him, and his heart, as he heard her voice talking of that time, went to wax within him, and he had to gaze very steadily at the view ahead lest, turning to throw his arms round Catherine, his sweetheart, his angel love, he should see she wasn’t there, but only a ghost was there with her voice and eyes, and then he mightn’t be able to help bursting out crying.
‘Is this far enough away from the poor baby?’ she asked, stopping at an oak-tree, whose huge exposed roots were worn with the numbers of times she had sat on them in past years during the long, undisturbed summer afternoons of her placid first marriage. ‘You know,’ she added, sitting down on the gnarled roots, ‘he’s the most beautiful little baby, and is going to comfort all poor Stephen’s despair.’
‘But he isn’t going to comfort mine,’ said Christopher, standing with his eyes fixed on the distant view.
She was silent. Then she said, ‘Is it as bad as that, Chris?’
‘No, no,’ he said quickly, his back to her, ‘I didn’t mean that. You’ll get well again, and then we’ll——’
‘I don’t see how I can get well if I’m not ill,’ she said gently.
‘Why do you want to take hope from me?’ he answered.
‘I only don’t want any more lies. I shan’t look different again from what I do now. I shan’t go back, I mean, to what I was. But perhaps presently—when you’ve had time to get over——’
She hesitated, and then went on humbly,—for she was vividly conscious of the wrong she had done him, vividly aware that she ought to have saved him from himself whatever the pressure had been that was brought to bear on her, however great his misery was at the moment,—‘Presently I thought perhaps I might somehow make up for what I’ve done. I thought perhaps I might somehow comfort you——’
She hesitated again. ‘I don’t quite know how, though,’ she said, her voice more and more humble, ‘but I’d try.’ And then she said, almost in a whisper, ‘That is, if you will let me.’
‘Let you!’ he exclaimed, stabbed by her humbleness.
‘Yes. And if it’s no good, Chris, and you’d rather not, then of course I’ll—let you go.’
He turned round quickly. ‘What, in God’s name, do you mean by that?’ he asked.
‘Set you free,’ said Catherine, doing her best to look up at him unflinchingly.
He stared at her. ‘How?’ he asked. ‘I don’t understand. In what way, set me free?’
‘Well, there’s only one way, isn’t there—one way really. I meant, divorce you.’
He stood staring down at her. Catherine talking of divorcing him.Catherine.
‘How can you at your age be tied up, go on being married, to some one like me?’ she asked. ‘It isn’t even decent. And besides—in that flattogether—you might think I—I expected——’
She broke off with a gesture of helplessness, while he still stared at her.
‘I haven’t an idea how we could manage all the—the details,’ she said, bowing her head, for she felt she couldn’t endure his stare. ‘It wouldhurtso,’ she finished in a whisper.
‘And so you think the solution is to divorce me,’ said Christopher.
‘What else is there to do? You’ve only got to look at me——’
‘Divorce me,’ he said, ‘when we have loved each other so?’
And suddenly he began to shout at her, stamping his foot, while hot tears rushed into his eyes. ‘Oh you littlefool, you littlefool!’ he shouted. ‘You’ve always been such a littlefool——’
‘Butlookat me,’ she said desperately, throwing back her head and flinging out her arms.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, don’t go on like this!’ he cried, dropping on the ground beside her and burying his face in her lap. Divorce him ... condemn him again to that awful loneliness ... where he couldn’t hear her voice....
‘Why couldn’t you go on letting me believe?’ he said, his arms tightly clutching her knees while he kept his face buried. ‘Why couldn’t you? As though I cared what you did before! It made us happy, anyhow, and I wish to God you’d go on doing it. But you’ve only got to get away from this infernal place to be as you used to be, and you didn’t always go to that woman, and I fell in love with you just as you were, and why shouldn’t I love you just as you are?’
‘Because I’m old, and you’re not. Because I’vegrown old since we married. Because I was too old to be married to some one so young. And you know I’m old. You see it now. You see it so plainly that you can’t bear to look at me.’
‘Oh, my God—the stuff, the stuff. I’m your husband, and I’m going to take care of you. Yes, I am, Catherine—for ever and ever. Useless to argue. I can’t live without the sound of your voice. I can’t. And how can you live without me? You couldn’t. You’re the most pitiful little thing——’
‘I’m not. I’m quite sensible. I haven’t been, but I am now.’
‘Oh, damn being sensible! Be what you were before. Good God, Catherine,’ he went on, hiding his face, clutching her knees, ‘do you think a man wants his wife to scrub herself with yellow soap as if she were the kitchen table, and then come all shiny to him and say, “See, I’m the Truth”? And she isn’t the truth. She’s no more the truth shiny than powdered—she’s only appearance, anyway, she’s only a symbol—the symbol of the spirit in her which is what one is really loving the whole time——’
‘What has happened is much more than that,’ she interrupted.
‘Oh yes, yes—I know. Death. You’re going to tell me that all this sort of thing seems rot to you now that you’ve been with death——’
‘So it does. And I’ve finished with it.’
‘Oh Lord—women,’ he groaned, burying his face deeper, as if he could hide from his unhappiness. ‘Do you suppose I haven’t been with death too, and seen it dozens of times? What do you think I was doing in the War? But women can’t take the simplest thingsnaturally—and they can’t take the natural things simply, either. What can be more simple and natural than death?Ididn’t throw away my silk handkerchiefs and leave off shaving because my friends died——’
‘Chris,’ she interrupted again, ‘you simply don’t understand. You don’t—know.’
‘I do—I know and understand everything. Why should the ones who didn’t die behave as though they had? Why should you send our happy life together to blazes because Virginia is dead? Isn’t that all the more reason for us who’re still alive to stick firmer than ever to each other? And instead you talk of divorce. Divorce? Because there’s been one tragedy there’s to be another? Catherine, don’t you, won’t you,can’tyou see?’
And he lifted his head from her lap and looked at her, tears of anger, and fear, and love driven back on itself burning in his eyes; and he caught her crying.
How long had she been crying? Her face was pitiful, all wet with tears, in its frame of grizzled hair. How long had she been crying quietly up there, while he was raving, and she at intervals said sensible calm things?
At the sight of her wet face the anger and the fear died out of him, and only love was left. She couldn’t do without him. She was a poor, broken-up little thing, for all her big words about divorce and setting free. She was his wife, who couldn’t do without him—a poor, broken-up little thing....
‘I’ve cried so much,’ she said, quickly wiping her eyes, ‘that I believe I’ve got into the habit of it. I’m ashamed. I hate whimpering. But—Virginia——’
He got up on to his knees, and at last put his armsround her. ‘Oh my Catherine,’ he murmured, drawing her head on to his breast and holding it there. ‘Oh my Catherine——’
An immense desire for self-sacrifice, to fling his life at her feet, rushed upon Christopher, a passion of longing to give, give everything and ask nothing in return, to protect, to keep all that could hurt her away from her for ever.
‘Don’t cry,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t cry. It’s going to be all right. We’re going to be happy. And if you can’t see that we are, I’ll see for you till your own eyes are opened again——’
‘But I do see—every time I look in the glass,’ she answered, instinctively understanding the feeling that was sweeping over him, and shrinking away from exploiting this that was being thrust upon her of the quick, uncounting generosity of youth. How would she be able to make it up to him? She couldn’t, except by loving him with utter selflessness, and then, when he found out for himself how impossible the situation was, setting him free. It was the only thing she could do. Some day he would see himself that it was the only thing.
‘Obstinate, aren’t you,’ he murmured, holding her face close against his breast, for when he was doing that it was hidden, and it hurt him too desperately as yet to look at it, it made him too desperately want to cry himself. Of course presently ... when he had got more used....
‘You’ll have to grow out of that,’ he went on, ‘because we can’t both be obstinate, and have deadlocks.’
‘No, no—we won’t have deadlocks,’ said Catherine. ‘We’ll just——’
She was going to say, ‘love each other very much,’ but thought that might sound like making a claim, and stopped.
They were silent for a while, and so motionless that the rabbits began to think they weren’t there after all, and came lolloping up quite close.
Then he said very gently, ‘I’m going to take care of you, Catherine.’
And she said, her voice trembling a little, ‘Are you, Chris? I was thinking that that’s what I’m going to do to you.’
‘All right. We’ll do it to each other, then.’
And they both tried to laugh, but it was a shaky, uncertain laughter, for they were both afraid.
THE ENDPrinted in Great Britain byR. & R. Clark, Limited,Edinburgh.