Christopher’swas the slowest motor-cycle on the road that day. At times it proceeded with the leisureliness of a station fly. They loitered along in the sunshine, stopping at the least excuse—a view, an old house, a flock of primroses. They had tea at Salisbury, and examined the Cathedral, and talked gaily ofJude the Obscure, surely the most unfortunate of men, and from him they naturally proceeded to discuss death and disaster, and all very happily, for they were in the precisely opposite mood of the one praised by the poet as sweet, and the sad thoughts evoked by Sarum Close brought pleasant thoughts to their mind.
How much they had to say to each other. There was no end to their talk, their eager exchange of opinions. Chickover was dim as a dream now in Catherine’s mind; and the Catherine who had gone to bed there every evening in a growing wretchedness was a dream within a dream. With Christopher she was alive. He himself was so tremendously alive that one would indeed have to be a hopeless mummy not to catch life from him and wake up. Besides, it was impossible to be—anyhow for a short time—with some one who adored one, unless he was physically repulsive, and not be happy. That Christopher adored her was plain to the very passers-by. The men who passed grinned to themselves in sympathy; thewomen sighed; and old ladies, long done with envy, smiled with open benevolence between their bonnet-strings.
Unconscious of everybody except each other, they walked about Salisbury looking at the sights and not seeing them, so deeply were they engaged in talk. What could be more innocent than to walk, talking, about Salisbury? Yet if Stephen, Virginia, or Mrs. Colquhoun had met them they would have been moved by unpleasant emotions. Once during the afternoon this thought crossed Catherine’s mind. It was when, at tea in a confectioner’s, Christopher was holding out a plate of muffins to her, his face the face of a seraph floating in glory; and she took a muffin, and held it suspended while she looked at him, arrested by the thought, and said, ‘Why mayn’t one be happy?’
‘But one may, and one is,’ said Christopher.
‘One is,’ she smiled, ‘but one mayn’t. At least, one mayn’t go on being happy. Not over again. Not in this way. Not——’ she tried to find the words to express it—‘out of one’s turn.’
‘What one’s relations think, or wish, or approve, or deplore,’ said Christopher, who scented Stephen somewhere at the back of her remarks, ‘should never be taken the least notice of if one wishes to go on developing.’
‘Well, I seem to be going on developing at a breakneck rate.’
‘Besides, it’s jealousy. Nearly always. Deep down. The grudge of the half dead against the wholly alive, of the not wanted against the wanted. They can’t manage to be alive themselves, so they declare the only respectable thing is to be dead. The only pure thing. The only holy thing. And they pretend every sort of pious horror ifone won’t be dead too. Relations,’ he finished, lighting a cigarette and speaking from the depths of an experience that consisted of one uncle, and he the most amiable and unexacting of men, who never gave advice and never criticised, and only wanted sometimes to be played golf with, ‘are like that. They have to be defied. Or they’ll strangle one.’
‘It seems dangerous,’ said Catherine, pursuing her first thought, ‘to show that one likes anything or anybody very much.’
‘Isn’t it the rankest hypocrisy,’ said Christopher with a face of disgust.
‘If you were bald, and had a long white beard——’ she began. ‘But even then,’ she went on after a pause, ‘if we looked pleased while we talked and seemed very much interested, we’d be done for.’
She smiled. ‘They wouldn’t mind at all,’ she said, ‘if you were eating muffins happily with a girl of your own age. It’s when somebody like me comes along, who has had her turn, who is out of her turn.’
‘They would have people love by rule,’ said Christopher.
‘I don’t know about love, but they would have them be happy by rule,’ said Catherine.
‘They must be defied,’ said Christopher.
She laughed. ‘Wearedefying them,’ she said.
Proceeding from Salisbury with the setting sun behind them, they continued with the same leisureliness in the direction of Andover and London.
‘Oughtn’t we to go a little faster?’ Catherine asked, noticing the lowness of the sun.
‘If you’re home by nine o’clock, won’t that be soon enough?’ he asked.
‘Oh, quite. I love this.’
‘I’d like to go on for ever,’ said Christopher.
‘Aren’t we friends,’ said Catherine, looking up at him with a smile.
‘Aren’twe,’ said Christopher, in deep contentment.
The chimney stacks of an old house on their right among trees attracted her, and they turned off the main road to go and look at it. The house was nothing specially beautiful, but the road that led to it was, and it went winding on past the house through woods even more beautiful.
They followed it, for the main road was uninteresting, and this one, though making a detour, would no doubt ultimately arrive at Andover.
Charming, this slow going along in the soft, purple evening. The smell of the damp earth and grass in the woods they passed through was delicious. It was dead quiet, and sometimes they stopped just to listen to the silence.
Companionship: what a perfect thing it was, thought Catherine. To be two instead of one, to be happily two, with no strain, no concealing or pretending, quite natural, quite simple, quite relaxed—so natural and simple and relaxed that it was really like being oneself doubled, but oneself at one’s best, at one’s serenest and most amusing. Could any condition be more absolutely delightful? And, thought Catherine, to be two with some one of the opposite sex, some one strong who could take care of one, with whom one felt safe and cosy, some one young, who liked doing all the things the eternal child in oneself liked doing so much, but never dared to for want of backing up, for fear of being laughed at—how completely delightful.
They came, on the outer edge of the woods, to a group of cottages; a little hamlet, solitary, tucked away from noise, the smoke of its chimneys going straight up into the still air, so small that it hadn’t even got a church—happy, happy hamlet, thought Catherine, remembering her past week of church—and in one of the cottage gardens, sheltered and warm, was the first flowering currant bush she had seen that year.
It stood splendid against the grey background of the shadowy garden, brilliant pink and crimson in the dusk, and Christopher stopped at her exclamation, and got off and went into the cottage and asked the old woman who lived there to sell him a bunch of the flowers; and the old woman, looking at him and Catherine, was sure from their faces of peace that they were on their honeymoon, and picked a bunch and went to the gate and gave it to Catherine, and wouldn’t take any money for it, and said it was for luck.
It seemed quite natural, and in keeping with everything else that afternoon, to find a nice old woman who gave them flowers and wished them luck. In Salisbury people had all seemed extraordinarily amiable. This old woman was extraordinarily amiable. She even called them pretty dears, which filled their cup of enjoyment to the brim.
After this the country was very open, and solitary, and still. No signs of any town were to be seen; only rolling hills, and here and there a little group of trees. Also a few faint stars began to appear in the pale sky.
‘Oughtn’t we to go faster?’ asked Catherine again, her lap full of the crimson flowers.
‘We’ll make up between Andover and London,’ said Christopher. ‘If it’s half-past nine instead of nine before we get to Hertford Street, will it be early enough?’
‘Oh, quite,’ said Catherine placidly.
They jogged along, up and down the windings of the lane, which presently grew grassier and narrower, into hollows and out of them again. Not a house was to be seen, not a human being. Stillness, evening, stars. It seemed to Catherine presently, in that wide place of rolling country and great sky, that in the whole world there was nothing except herself, Christopher, and the stars.
About seven miles beyond the hamlet of the flowering currant bush, just at the top of an incline, the motor-cycle stopped.
She thought, waking from the dream she had fallen into, that he was stopping it, as so often before that afternoon, to listen to the silence; but he hadn’t stopped it, it had stopped itself.
‘Damn,’ said Christopher, pulling and pushing and kicking certain parts of the thing.
‘Why?’ asked Catherine comfortably.
‘The engine’s stopped.’
‘Perhaps it wants winding up.’
He got off, and began to stoop and peer. She sat quiet, her head back, her face upturned, gazing at the stars. It was most beautiful there in the great quiet of the falling night. There was still a dull red line in the sky where the sun had gone down, but from the east a dim curtain was drawing slowly towards them. The road, just at the place they were, curved southwards, and she had the red streak of the sunset on her right and the advancing darkness on her left. They were onthe top of a rising in the vast flatness, and it was as if she could see to the ends of the world. The quiet, now that the motor had stopped, was profound.
Christopher came and looked at her. She smiled at him. She was perfectly content and happy.
He didn’t smile back. ‘The petrol’s run out,’ he said.
‘Has it?’ said Catherine placidly. In cars, when petrol ran out, one opened another can of it and ran it in again.
‘There isn’t any more,’ said Christopher. ‘And from the look of this place I should say we were ten miles from anywhere.’
He was overwhelmed. He had meant to have his tank filled up at Salisbury, and in his enchanted condition of happiness had forgotten. Of all the infernal, hopeless fools....
He could only stare at her.
‘Well, what are we going to do?’ she asked, waking up a little to the seriousness of his face.
‘If we were near anywhere——’ he said, looking round.
‘Can’t we go back to those cottages?’
‘The thing won’t budge.’
‘Walk?’
‘At least seven miles.’
They stared at each other in the deepening dusk.
‘Well, but, Christopher——’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘We’re in a hell of a fix, and it’s entirely my fault. I simply forgot to have her filled up at Salisbury.’
‘Well, but there must be some way out.’
‘Not unless some one happens to come along, and Icould persuade him to go to the nearest petrol place and fetch us some.’
‘Can’t you go?’
‘And leave you here?’
‘Can’t I go?’
‘As though you could!’
In silence they gazed at each other. The stars were growing brighter. Their faces stood out now as something white in the darkening landscape.
‘Well, but, Christopher——’ began Catherine incredulously.
‘If I thought we could by walking get anywhere within reasonable time, I’d leave the blighted machine here to its fate. But we might get lost, and wander round for hours. And besides, where would we find a railway station? Miles and miles we might have to go.’
‘That wouldn’t matter. I mean, however late we got to London wouldn’t matter as long as we did get there.’
‘I quite see we’ve jolly well got to get there. What beats me is how.’
Catherine was silent. They were indeed, as Christopher said, in a fix. She would even, mentally, agree with him that it was a hell of a one.
‘Catherine, I’m sorry,’ he said, laying his hand on hers.
The words but feebly represented his feelings. He was crushed by his folly, by his idiotic forgetfulness in Salisbury. Would she ever trust herself with him again? If she didn’t, he deserved all he got.
‘I was so happy in Salisbury,’ he said, ‘that I never thought about the petrol. I’m the most hopeless blighter.’
‘But what are we todo?’ asked Catherine earnestly.
‘I’m hanged if I know,’ he said.
Again they stared at each other in silence. The night seemed to have descended on them now with the suddenness of a huge swooping bird.
‘I suppose we had better leave it here and walk on,’ she said. ‘It seems a dreadful thing to do, but there’s a chance perhaps of our meeting some one or getting somewhere. Or couldn’t we push it? Is it very heavy?’
‘I could push it for two miles, perhaps, but that would be about the limit.’
‘But I’d help.’
‘You!’
He smiled at her, miserable as he was.
‘We might strike the main road,’ he said, gazing across the dim space to where—how many miles away?—it probably lay.
‘It can’t be very far, can it?’ she said. ‘And then perhaps a car passing might help us.’
He struck a match and lit the lamps—their light comforted them a little—and took out his map and studied it.
As he feared, this obscure and attractive cart-track was not to be found on it, nor was the group of solitary cottages.
Far away to the north, in some distant trees, an owl hooted. It had the effect of making them feel more lost than ever.
‘I think we’d better stay where we are,’ he said.
‘And hope some one may come along?’
‘Yes. We’ll have the lights on. They ought to be seen for miles round. Somebody may wonder whatthey’re doing up here, not moving. There’s just a chance. People are so damned incurious, though,’ he added.
‘Especially if being curious would mean walking up here in the dark.’
She tried to talk in her usual voice, but it was difficult, for she was aghast at the misfortune that had overtaken them.
‘Perhaps if you shouted——?’ she suggested.
He shouted. It sounded awful. It emphasised the loneliness. It made her shiver. And after each shout, out of the silence that succeeded it, the owl away in the distant trees hooted. It was the only answer.
‘Let us wait quietly,’ she said, laying her hand on his arm. ‘Some one is sure to see the lights, sooner or later.’
A little wind began to creep round them, a mere stirring, to begin with, of the air, but it was a very cool little wind, not to say cold, and any more of it would be decidedly unpleasant.
He looked round him again. The ground dropped on the left of the track into one of the many hollows they had been down into and up out of since leaving the cottages.
‘We’ll go and sit down there,’ he said. ‘It’ll be more sheltered, and we shall hear all right if anybody comes along the road.’
She got on to her feet, and he helped her out, unwinding the rug as he had done that morning—was it really only that morning?—in the sunny cove by the sea.
‘What a day we’re having!’ said Catherine, trying to be gay; but never did anybody feel less so.
He carried the rug and cushions across the grass and down the slope. He had nothing he could say. He was overwhelmed by his folly. Of what use throwing himself at her feet and begging her to forgive him? That wouldn’t help them. Besides, she wasn’t angry with him, she couldn’t forgive an offence she didn’t recognise. She was an angel. She was made up of patience and sweet temper. And he had got her into this incredible mess.
Silently Christopher chose, by one of the lamps he took off his machine, a little hollow within the hollow, and spread the rug in it and arranged the cushions. ‘It’s not much past eight,’ he said, looking at his wrist-watch. ‘Quite early. With any luck——’
He broke off, and covered her up, as she sat on it, with the ends and sides of the rug, for what did he mean by luck? If anybody were to come across that plain and consent to go and fetch petrol, what hours before it could be found and brought! Still, to get her back to Hertford Street in the small hours of the night, even in the very smallest, would be better than not getting her back till next day.
‘You stay here,’ he said, ‘and I’ll go up to that confounded machine again, and do a bit more shouting.’
‘It sounds so gruesome,’ she said, with a shiver. ‘As if we were being murdered.’
‘You won’t hear it so much down here.’
He went up the slope, and presently the forlorn sound echoed round again. The night rang with it. It seemed impossible that the whole world should not be startled into activity by such a noise.
When he was hoarse he came back to her, and satlistening with a cocked ear for any sounds of approaching footsteps.
‘You’re not cold?’ he asked. ‘Oh, Catherine—forgive me.’
‘Quite warm,’ she answered smiling. ‘And I don’t mind this a bit, you know. It really is—fun.’
He said no more. He who was so ready of tongue had nothing to say now. In silence he sat beside her, listening.
‘I’m glad we ate all those muffins for tea,’ she said presently.
‘Are you hungry?’
‘Not yet. But I think I shall be soon, and so will you.’
‘And soon you’ll be cold, I’m afraid. Oh, Catherine——’
‘Well, I’m not cold yet,’ she interrupted him, smiling again, for what was the good of poor Christopher reproaching himself?
Peering into her face, white in the darkness, he could see she was smiling. He tucked the rug closer round her. He wanted to kiss her feet, to adore her for being so cheerful and patient, but what was the good of that? Nothing he did could convey what he thought of himself. There they were; and it was getting cold.
He fancied he heard a sound on the track above, and leapt up the bank.
Silence up there. Silence, and the stars, and the lonely lights of his deserted machine, and black down below, and all round emptiness.
He shouted again. His shout seemed to come back to him mournfully, from great distances.
By this time it was half-past nine.
He stayed up there, shouting at intervals, for half an hour, till his voice gave out. When he scrambled down again into the hollow, Catherine was asleep.
He sat down carefully beside her. He didn’t dare light a cigarette for fear the smell would wake her. It was better that she should sleep.
He sat cursing himself. Suppose she caught cold, suppose she was ill from fatigue and exposure? Beyond this, and her natural, and he was afraid inevitable, loss of trust in him, he saw no other danger for her. These were bad enough, but he saw no others. Nobody would know about this. None of her detestable relations would ever hear that she did not after all get home till—when? How should they? It wouldn’t enter Mrs. Mitcham’s head, or the porter’s, to mention it. Why on earth should they? His mind was quiet as to that. But Catherine out there, in a damp field, at night, perhaps for hours—Catherine who was so precious a jewel in his eyes that he felt she ought never to be let out of the softest, safest nest—Catherine brought there by him, marooned there by his fault—these were the things that made him swear under his breath, sitting beside her while she slept.
It got colder, much colder. A mist gathered below them, and crawled about among the hillocks. No wind could reach them in their hollow, but a mist, he knew, is a nasty clammy thing to have edging up over one’s boots.
Perhaps it wouldn’t come so high. He watched it anxiously. He was in despair. They could get warm, he knew, by walking, and he himself would get more than warm pushing his machine, but he couldn’t push it for anything like two miles, as he had told her, on thatrough track, and when he was obliged to stop from exhaustion they would both very soon be colder than ever. Besides, imagine Catherine, with her little feet, slithering and stumbling about in the mud and the dark! And anyhow they’d get nowhere now there was that mist. Better stick where they were. At least they were sheltered from wind. But it was fantastic to think, as he was beginning to be forced to think, that they might have to stay there till daylight.
He sat with his hands gripped round his knees, and stared at the stars. How hard and cold they looked. What did they care? Cruel brutes. He wondered why he had ever admired them.
Catherine moved, and he turned to her quickly, and gently tucked the loosened rug round her again.
This woke her, and she opened her eyes and looked for a moment in silent astonishment at his head, dark and shadowy, with stars behind it in a black sky, bending over her.
It seemed to be Christopher’s, but why?
Then she remembered. ‘Oh,’ she said faintly, ‘we’re still here....’
She tried not to shiver, but she was very cold, and what is one rug and damp grass to lie on to a person used at that time of night to a bed and blankets? Also, her surface was small, and she got cold more quickly than bigger people.
He saw her shiver, and without asking leave, or wasting time in phrases, moved close up to her and took her in his arms.
‘This is nothing to do with anything, Catherine,’ he explained, as she made a movement of resistance, ‘except a determination not to let you die of cold.Besides, it will keep me warm too—which I daresay I wouldn’t be, towards the small hours of the morning, if I kept myself to myself.’
‘The morning?’ she echoed in a very small voice. ‘Are we—do you think we shall be here all night?’
‘It looks like it,’ he said.
‘Oh, Christopher——’
‘I know.’
She said no more, and he held her and her coat and the rug tightly in his arms. As a mother holds her babe, so did Christopher hold Catherine, and with much the same sort of passionate protective tenderness. One arm was beneath her shoulders, so that her head rested on his breast, the other was round her body, keeping her coverings close round her. His own head was on the cushion from the side-car, and his cheek leaned against her soft motoring cap.
Like this they lay in silence, and what Catherine felt was, first, amazement that she should be there, on an unknown hillside in a lonely country at night with Christopher, forced by circumstances to get as close to him as possible; and secondly, as she became warmer and drowsier, and nature accordingly prevailed over convention, a queer satisfaction and peace. And what Christopher felt, as he lay leaning his cheek against her head and gazing up at the stars, was that he had never seen anything more beautiful than the way those blessed stars seemed to understand—twinkling and flashing down at them as if they were laughing for joy at the amount of happiness that was flung about the world. His precious little love—his precious, precious little love....
‘Of course—you know—’ murmured Catherine, on the verge of sleep, ‘this is only—a kind of—precautionary measure——’
‘Quite,’ whispered Christopher, holding the rug closer round her.
But sleep is a great loosener of the moral sense. How is one to know right from wrong if one is asleep? How can one, in that state, be expected to be responsible? Catherine slept, and Christopher kissed her. Dimly through her dreams she knew she was being kissed, but it was so gentle a kissing, so tender, it made her feel so safe ... and up there there was no one to mind, no one to criticise ... and yesterday was infinitely far away ... and to-morrow might never come....
She was not so much asleep that she did not know she was happy; she was too much asleep to feel she ought to stop him.
Mrs. Mitcham, not expecting her mistress back till Monday, went on that Saturday to visit a friend in Camden Town, and when she came back soon after nine was surprised to find Miss Virginia’s husband on the mat outside the door of the flat ringing the bell. He, of all people, should know her mistress wasn’t there, thought Mrs. Mitcham, seeing that it was in Miss Virginia’s house she was staying.
The carpet on the stairs was thick, and Mrs. Mitcham arrived at Stephen’s side unnoticed. He was absorbed in ringing. He rang and rang.
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said Mrs. Mitcham respectfully.
He turned quickly. ‘Where is your mistress?’ he inquired.
‘My mistress, sir?’ said Mrs. Mitcham, much surprised. ‘I understood she was coming back on Monday, sir.’
‘She left the Manor this afternoon on her way home. She ought to have been here long ago. Have you had no telegram announcing her arrival?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Well, I have,’ he said, looking quite upset, Mrs. Mitcham noticed, and pulling a telegram out of his overcoat pocket. ‘My wife telegraphed her motherhad started, and asked me to see if she got here safely.’
‘Safely, sir?’ echoed Mrs. Mitcham, surprised at the word.
‘Mrs. Cumfrit was—motoring up. As you know, my wife should not be worried and made anxious just now,’ said Stephen frowning. ‘It is most undesirable—most undesirable.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Mrs. Mitcham. ‘But I’m sure there is no cause. Mrs. Cumfrit will be here presently. It’s not more than nine o’clock, sir.’
‘She left at half-past two.’
‘Allowing for punctures, sir——’ suggested Mrs. Mitcham respectfully. ‘Will you come in, sir?’ she added, unlocking the door and holding it open for him.
‘Yes—and wait,’ said Stephen in a determined voice.
He went straight into the drawing-room without taking off his overcoat. That Miss Virginia’s husband was upset was plain to Mrs. Mitcham. He hardly seemed like the same gentleman who had on his last visit so nicely called her and her mistress little children and told them to love one another. She was quite glad to get away from him into her calm kitchen.
Stephen was very much upset. He had received Virginia’s telegram at six o’clock, just as he was quietly sitting in his hotel bedroom going over his sermons and giving them the last important touches. These were valuable hours, these afternoon and evening hours of the Saturdays before he preached, and to be taken away from them for any reason was most annoying. To be taken away from them for this one was more than annoying, it was gravely disturbing. Again that side-car; again that young man; as if a whole morning in it and with himwere not sufficiently deplorable. No wonder his poor little darling at home was anxious. She said so in the telegram. It ran:Mother left for Hertford Street in Mr. Monckton’s side-car 2.30. Do see if arrived safely. Anxious.
Two-thirty; and it was then six. He went round at once. He didn’t know much about motor-cycles, but at the pace he had seen them going he judged that Monckton, not less swift than his confrères in upsetting the peace of God’s countryside, would have had time to get to London.
No one, however, was in the flat, not even Mrs. Mitcham, who was bound to it by duty. He rang in vain. As he went away he inquired of the hall porter why no one was there, and learned that Mrs. Mitcham had gone out at three o’clock and had not yet returned, and that Mrs. Cumfrit had been away for the last week in the country,—which he already only too well knew.
At half-past seven he called again—his sermons would suffer, he was painfully aware—but with the same result. It was dark then, and he too began to feel anxious; not on his mother-in-law’s account, for whatever happened to her would be entirely her own fault, but on Virginia’s. She would be in a terrible state if she knew her mother had not reached home yet. That Mrs. Mitcham should still be absent from her duties he regarded as not only reprehensible and another proof of Mrs. Cumfrit’s laxness, but as a sign that she was unaware of her mistress’s impending return, which was strange.
Immediately after dinner—a bad one, but if it had been good he could not have appreciated it in his thencondition of mind—he went back to Hertford Street, and unable to believe, in spite of the hall porter’s assurances, that the flat was still empty, rang and rang, and was found by Mrs. Mitcham ringing. His mother-in-law must be there by now. She was inside. He felt she was inside, and had gone to bed tired.
But directly he got in he knew she was not. There was a chill, a silence about the flat, such as only places abandoned by their inhabitants have. The drawing-room was as cold and tidy as a corpse. He kept his coat on. The idea of taking it off in such bleakness would not have occurred to him. He would have liked to keep his hat on too, for he had gone bald early, but the teaching of his youth on the subject of ladies’ drawing-rooms and what to do in them prevented him.
Mrs. Mitcham, coming in to light the fire, found him staring out of the window in the dark. The room was only lit by the shining in of the street lamps. She was quite sorry for him. She had not supposed him so much attached to Mrs. Cumfrit. Mrs. Mitcham was herself feeling rather worried by now, and as she made Catherine’s bed and got her room ready she had only kept cheerful by recollecting that a car had four tyres, all of which might puncture, besides innumerable other parts, no doubt equally able to have things the matter with them.
‘I’ll light the fire, if you please, sir,’ she said.
‘Not for me,’ said Stephen, without moving.
She lit it nevertheless, and also turned on the light by the sofa. She didn’t like to draw the curtains, because he continued to stand at the window staring into the street. Watching, thought Mrs. Mitcham; watching anxiously. She was quite touched.
‘Is there anything you would like, sir?’ she inquired.
‘Nothing,’ said Stephen, his gaze riveted on the street.
Throughout that dreadful night Stephen watched at the window, and Mrs. Mitcham came in at intervals to see what she could do for him. She made coffee at eleven o’clock, and brought it to him, and fetched it away again at midnight cold and untouched. She carried in an armful of blankets at one o’clock, and arranged a bed for him on the sofa, into which he did not go. At five she brought him tea, which he did not drink. At eight she began to get breakfast ready. Throughout the night he stood at the window, or walked up and down the room, and each time she saw him he seemed to have grown thinner. Certainly his face looked sharper than it had the night before. Mrs. Mitcham could not but be infected by such agitation, though being naturally optimistic she felt somehow that her mistress was delayed rather than hurt. Still, it was impossible to see a gentleman like Mr. Colquhoun, a gentleman of great learning, she had heard, who must know everything about everything and had preached in St. Paul’s Cathedral,—it was impossible to see such a gentleman grow thinner with anxiety before one’s eyes without becoming, in spite of one’s secret faith, anxious too. And the hard fact that her mistress’s bed had not been slept in stared her in the face.
‘I must wash,’ said Stephen hoarsely, when she told him breakfast was ready and would do him good.
She conducted him to the bathroom.
‘I must shave,’ he said, looking at her with hollow eyes. ‘I have to preach this morning. I must go back to my hotel and shave.’
‘Oh no, sir,’ said Mrs. Mitcham; and brought him George’s razors—a little blunt, but yet razors.
He stared at them. His eyes seemed to become more hollow.
‘Razors?’ he said. ‘Here?’
That there should be razors in the apartment of a widow——
‘The late Mr. Cumfrit’s, sir,’ said Mrs. Mitcham.
Of course. Really his control was gone; he was no longer apparently able to keep his thoughts from plunging into the most incredible places.
He stropped the razors, thinking of the probable last time they had been stropped by his father-in-law before being folded away by him who would never strop again, and shaved in front of the glass in the bathroom before which the excellent man must so often have stood.Pulvis et umbra sumum, said Stephen to himself in his profound dejection, forgetting for a moment the glorious resurrection he so carefully believed in. At what point did one, he wondered, his mind returning to his troubles,—at what point did one, in the circumstances in which he found himself, inform the police?
He forced himself to eat some breakfast for fear he might otherwise collapse in the pulpit, and he drank a cup of strong coffee with the same idea of being kept up. The thought that it was his own mother-in-law who had brought all this trouble on him had a peculiar sting. Quite evidently there had been an accident, and God knew how he would get through his sermon, with the fear crushing him of the effect such terrible news would have on the beloved mother of his child to be. There was no blessing, he told himself, outside the single straight path of one’s duty. If his mother-in-law hadcontinued in that path as she used to continue in it, instead of suddenly taking to giving way to every impulse—that she should still have impulses was in itself indecent—this misery for Virginia, and accordingly for himself, would have been avoided. To go rushing about the country with a young man,—why, how scandalous at her age. And the punishment for this, the accident that had so evidently happened, fell most heavily, as punishments so mysteriously often did—only one must not question God’s wisdom—on the innocent. What living thing in the whole world could be more innocent than his wife? Except the child; except the little soul of love she bore about with her beneath her heart; and that too would suffer through her suffering.
Stephen prayed. He couldn’t bear the thought of what Virginia was going to suffer. He bowed his head on his arms and prayed. Mrs. Mitcham found him like this when she came to clear away the breakfast. She was deeply sorry for him; he seemed to have been so much more attached to her mistress than one would have ever guessed.
‘You’ll feel better, sir,’ she consoled him, ‘when your breakfast has had more time.’ And she ventured to ask, ‘Was it Miss Virginia’s car bringing Mrs. Cumfrit up? I beg pardon, sir—I mean, your car? Because if so, I’ll be bound she’ll be safe with Smithers.’
Stephen shook his head. He could bear no questions. He could not go into the story of the motor-cycle with Mrs. Mitcham. He felt ill after his night walking about the drawing-room; his head seemed to be bursting. He got up and left the room.
He had to go to the hotel on his way to St. Jude’s to fetch his sermon. He waited till the last possible minute, still hoping that some news might come; andthen, when he dared wait no longer, and Mrs. Mitcham was helping him into his coat, he told her he would come back immediately after morning service and consider what steps should be taken as to informing the police.
‘The police?’ repeated Mrs. Mitcham, much shocked. The police and her mistress. Out of her heart disappeared the last ray of optimism.
‘We must somehow find out what has happened,’ said Stephen sharply.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Mrs. Mitcham, opening the door for him.
The police and her mistress. She had a feeling that the mere putting the police on to search would make them find something dreadful,—that if nothing had happened, the moment they began to look something would have happened.
Feeling profoundly conscious of being only a weak woman in a world full of headstrong men, she opened the door for Stephen, and he, going through it without further speech, met Catherine coming out of the lift,—Catherine perfectly sound and unharmed,—and with her was Christopher.
They all three stopped dead.
‘You, Stephen?’ said Catherine after a moment, very faintly. ‘Why, how——?’
‘I have,’ said Stephen, ‘been waiting all night. Waiting and watching for you.’
‘I—we—broke down.’
He made a sign to the lift boy that he was coming down with him.
‘Enough—enough,’ he said, with a queer gesture of pushing her and everything connected with her out of his sight; and hurried into the lift and disappeared.
Catherine and Christopher looked at each other.
Thatwas an awful day for Stephen.
Men have found out, with terrible pangs, that their wives, whom they regarded as models of blamelessness, were secretly betraying their homes and families, but Stephen could not recall any instance of a man’s finding this out about his wife’s mother. It was not, he supposed, quite so personally awful as if it were one’s wife, but on the other hand it had a peculiar awfulness of its own. A young woman might descend declivities, impelled by the sheer momentum of youth; but for women of riper years, for the matrons, for the dowagers, for those whose calm remaining business in life is to hold aloft the lantern of example, whose pride it should be to be quiet, to be immobile, to be looked-up to and venerated,—for these to indulge in conduct that disgraced their families and ruined themselves was, in a way, even more horrible. In any woman of riper years it was horrible and terrible. In this one,—what it was in this one was hardly to be uttered, for she—ah, ten times horrible and terrible—was his own mother-in-law.
He preached his sermon mechanically, with no sense of what he was reading, never lifting his eyes from his manuscript. The dilapidated pair—they had looked extraordinarily dilapidated as they stood there, guilty and caught, in the unsparing light of Sunday morning—floated constantly before him, and made it impossible for him to attend to a word he was saying.
What was he to do next? How could he ever face Virginia, and answer her anxious, loving questions about her mother’s safety? It must be kept from her, the appalling, the simply unutterable truth; at all costs it must be kept from her in her present condition, or it well might kill her. He felt he must tell his mother, for he could not bear this burden alone, but no one else must ever know what he knew. It would be the first secret between him and Virginia, and what a secret!
His thoughts whirled this way and that, anywhere but where he was, while his lips read out what he had written in those days last week of innocent peace, that now seemed so far away, about Love. Love! What sins, thought Stephen, were committed in its name. Incredible as it was, almost impossible to imagine at their different ages, and shocking to every feeling of decency and propriety, the word had probably frequented the conversations of those two.
He shuddered away. There were some things one simply could not think of. And yet he did think of them; they haunted him. ‘We broke down,’ she had said. Persons in her position always said that. He was man of the world enough to know what that meant. And then their faces,—their startled, guilty faces, when they found him so unexpectedly confronting them.
‘Love,’ read out Stephen from his manuscript, quoting part of his text and with mechanically uplifted hand and emphasis impressing it on his congregation, ‘thinketh no evil....’
After the service he went straight back to Hertford Street. Useless to flinch from his duty. His firstimpulse that morning, and he had followed it, was to remove himself at once from contact with his mother-in-law. But he was a priest; he was her nearest living male relative; he was bound to do something.
He went straight back to Hertford Street, and found her sitting in the dining-room quietly eating mutton.
It had always seemed grievous to Stephen, and deeply to be regretted, that no traces of sin should be physically visible on the persons of the sinners, that a little washing and tidying should be enough to make them indistinguishable from those who had not sinned. Here was this one, looking much the same as usual, very like any other respectable quiet lady at her Sunday luncheon, eating mutton as though nothing had happened. At such a crisis, he felt, at such an overwhelming moment of all their lives, of his, of hers, of his dear love’s, whitely unconscious at home, whatever his mother-in-law did it ought anyhow not to have been that.
She looked up when he came in, walking in unannounced, putting Mrs. Mitcham aside when she tried to open the door for him.
‘I’m glad you’ve come back, Stephen,’ she said, leaning forward and pushing out the chair on her right hand for him to sit on—as though he would dream of sitting!—‘I want to tell you what happened.’
He took no notice of the chair, and stood facing her at the end of the table, leaning on it with both hands, their thin knuckles white with his heavy pressure.
‘Won’t you sit down?’ she said.
‘No.’
‘Have you had lunch?’
‘No.’
‘Will you have some?’
‘No.’
There was nothing for it, Catherine knew, but to face whatever music Stephen should make, but she did think he might have said ‘No, thank you.’ Still, her position was very weak, so she accepted his monosyllables without comment. Besides—poor Stephen—he did look wretchedly upset; he must have had a dreadful night.
She was very sorry for him, and began to tell him what had happened, how the petrol had run out just when they were in that bare stretch of country between Salisbury and Andover——
Stephen raised his hand. ‘Spare me all this,’ he said. ‘Spare me and yourself.’
‘There’s nothing to spare,’ said Catherine. ‘I assure you I don’t mind telling you what happened.’
‘You shouldblush,’ said Stephen, leaning forward on his knuckles. ‘You shouldblush.’
‘Blush?’ she repeated.
‘Do you not know that you are fatally compromised?’
‘My dear Stephen——’
He longed to forbid her to call him by that name.
‘Fatally,’ he said.
‘My dear Stephen, don’t be ridiculous. I know it was most unfortunate that I shouldn’t get back till this morning——’
‘Unfortunate!’
‘But who will ever hear about it? And I couldn’t help it. You don’t suppose Ilikedit?’
Then, as she said the words, the remembrance of herself being kept warm in Christopher’s arms, and of him softly kissing her eyes, came back to her. Yes; she had liked that. Yes; she knew she had liked that, and been happy.
A deep red flooded her face even as she said the words, and she lowered her eyes.
Stephen saw; and any faint hope he had had that her story might be true went out. His soul seemed to drop into a pit of blackness. She was guilty. She had done something unthinkable. Virginia’s mother. It was horror to be in the same room with her.
‘This thing,’ he said in a low voice, his eyes wide open and blazing, as though he indeed beheld horror, ‘must be made good somehow. There is only one way. It is a shame, a shame to have to utter it in connection with a boy of his age and a woman of yours, but the only thing left for you to do is to marry him.’
‘Marry him?’
She stared at him, her mouth open in her amazement.
‘Nothing else will save you, either from man’s condemnation or God’s punishment.’
‘Stephen,’ she said, ‘are you mad?’—thatheshould be urging her to marry Christopher!—‘Why should I do anything of the sort?’
‘Why? You ask me why? Am I to suffer the uttermost shame, and be forced to put into words what you have done?’
‘You are certainly mad, Stephen,’ said Catherine, trying to keep her head up, but terribly handicapped, she being of so blameless a life that the least speck on it was conspicuous and looked to her enormous, by the memory of those dimly felt kisses.
If only she had trudged all night in the mud, trudged on, however much exhausted she had been, she could have faced Stephen with the proper indignation of virtue unjustly suspected; but there were those hours asleep, folded warm in Christopher’s arms, and through hersleep the consciousness of his kisses. She would probably have been very ill if she had trudged all night, but she could have held up her head and ordered Stephen out of her presence. As it was, her head wouldn’t hold up, and Stephen was as certain as if he had seen the pair in some hotel that there had been no breakdown, and his mother-in-law was lying.
Hideous, he thought; too hideous. So hideous that one couldn’t even pray about it, for to speak about such matters to God....
‘I have nothing more to say,’ he said slowly, his face as cold and hard as frozen rock, ‘except that unless you marry him you will never be allowed to see my wife again. But thedisgraceof such a marriage—thedisgrace——’
She stared at him, pale now.
‘But Stephen——’ she began.
She stared at him, across the absurd mutton, the mutton he had felt was so incongruous, gone cold and congealed on its dish. This silliness, this madness, this determination to insist on sin! She might have laughed if she had not been so angry; she might have laughed, too, if it had not been for the awkward, the mortifying memory of those kisses; she might, even so, have laughed, if he had not had the power to cut her off from Virginia. But he had the power,—he, the stranger she had let in to her gates when she could so easily have been ungenerous and shut him out. Why, it wouldn’t even have been ungenerous, but merely prudent. Three years more of freedom she would have gained, of freedom from him and possession of her child, by just saying one word. And she hadn’t said it. She had let him in. And here he was with power to destroy her.
She looked at him, very pale. ‘It’s at least a mercy, then,’ she said, her eyes full of bright tears of indignation at the injustice, the cruelty of the man she had made so happy, ‘that I love Christopher.’
‘You love him!’ repeated Stephen, appalled by the shamelessness of such a confession.
‘Yes,’ said Catherine. ‘I love him very much. He loves me so much, and I find it impossible—I find it impossible——’
Her voice faltered, but with a great effort she got it steady again, and went on, ‘I find it impossible not to love people who are good, if they love me.’
‘You dare,’ said Stephen, ‘to mention love? You dare to use that word in connection with this boy and yourself?’
‘But would you have me marry him and not love him?’
‘It is shameful,’ said Stephen, beside himself at what seemed to him her ghastly effrontery, ‘that some one so much older should even think of love in connection with some one so much younger.’
‘But what, then,’ said Catherine, ‘about you and Virginia?’
It was the first time she had ever alluded to it. The instant she had said it she was sorry. Always she had rather be hurt than hurt, rather be insulted than insult.
He looked at her a moment, his thin face white with this last outrage. Then he turned, and went away without a word.
Shespent the afternoon walking up and down the drawing-room, even as Stephen had spent the night walking up and down it.
She was trying to arrange her thoughts, so that she could see a little more clearly through the tangle they were in, but as they were not so much thoughts as feelings, and all of them agitated and all of them contradictory, it was difficult.
What had happened to her was from every point of view most unpleasant. Sometimes she cried, and sometimes she stopped dead in the middle of the room, smitten by a horrid sensation of sickness when she thought of Virginia. Stephen would be as good as his word, she knew, and cut her off from Virginia, and how could he cut her off from Virginia without explaining the reason for it, his reason for it? The alternative was to marry Christopher. But what would Virginia think ofthat? And if she did marry him—how incredible that she should find herself being forced by Stephen, of all people, even to consider it—it would prove to Stephen that he had been right, and that she had been guilty.
Guilty! She went scarlet with anger and humiliation at the word. She, at her age; she, with her record of unvaryingly correct wifehood and motherhood andwidowhood, her single-minded concentration of devotion, first on George and then on Virginia. Years and years of it there had been, years and years of complete blamelessness. One would have supposed, she said to herself, clenching her hands, that it ought to be possible, after a lifetime of crystal-clear propriety, for a woman to be in a motor break-down at night without instantly being suspected of wickedness. Only clergymen, only thoroughly good clergymen, could have such thoughts....
Oh, she would write at once to Virginia. She would tell her what had happened. But how shameful to have to defend herself to her daughter against such an accusation. And never again, of course, never, never again could things be the same between them, because how could they be, after all that Stephen had said?
Up and down the room walked Catherine. It was intolerable she told herself; the whole situation was intolerable. She wouldn’t endure it. She would go away to the ends of the earth,—away, away, and never come back to a country inhabited by Stephen. She would turn her back on everybody, shake their horrid dust from her feet, settle somewhere in Africa or Australia, give herself up to forgetting....
And hardly had she declared this than she was declaring that she wouldn’t. No, she wouldn’t be driven out of her own country by Stephen and his base mind. She would stay and brave him out. She would tell everybody what had happened,—not only Virginia, but Mrs. Colquhoun, and all her friends both in London and at Chickover, and she would tell them the sequel too, and what her clergyman son-in-law demanded of her as the price she was to pay for being readmitted into the ranksof honest women,—she would make him ridiculous, turn the laugh against him....
And hardly had she declared this than she was declaring that she wouldn’t. No, she wouldn’t be bitter, she wouldn’t make Stephen ridiculous, of course she would do nothing of the kind. How could she so desperately hurt Virginia? But she would write to Virginia, and describe the night’s misfortunes, and as tactfully as possible explain how Stephen, in his anxiety, took an extreme view of what people might say of her adventure, but that she was sure when he had had time to think it over he would see that he was unnecessarily alarmed, and that nobody would say anything.
She would restrict herself to this. She couldn’t, to Virginia, bring herself to mention Stephen’s command that she should marry Christopher. Marry Christopher! She threw back her head and laughed out loud, standing alone among George’s frowning furniture, and went on laughing till she found she wasn’t laughing at all, but crying; for there were certainly tears rolling down her cheeks, and they were certainly not tears of amusement. So then she wiped her face and began to walk up and down again.
But struggle through the tangle of her mind as she might, Catherine could see no real daylight. Always beneath her anger, her indignation at Stephen’s odious instant jumping to the worst conclusions—‘And he a priest of God,’ she said to herself, rolling her damp handkerchief into a ball—was that memory of kisses on her closed eyelids. What things one did in the dark! How differently one behaved. The memory of these kisses pulverised her morale, made the bones of her pride go to water within her. If only, only she had insisted on walking on. But it had seemed so natural to sit down, especially when there was nowhere to walk to. And once she had sat down, the rest had followed in the simplest sequence.
At intervals of half an hour the telephone bell rang, and Mrs. Mitcham came in and said Mr. Monckton was at the telephone.
‘Tell him I’m asleep,’ said Catherine each time, turning her face away so that Mrs. Mitcham should not see she had been crying.
At five o’clock Mrs. Mitcham came to say that Mr. Monckton was asking when he might come round.
‘Tell him I’m still asleep,’ said Catherine, looking out of the window.
Christopher. What was she going to do about him? She could say she was asleep that afternoon, but she couldn’t be asleep for ever; sooner or later she would have to see him. That morning, after the dreadful encounter with Stephen on the door-mat, she had sent Christopher away at once. Overwhelmed by the shocking bad fortune of running straight into Stephen, by the shocking bad fortune of having Christopher with her, who had carried up her things for her when it wasn’t in the least necessary, only one doesn’t think, one says yes without thinking,—naturally one does, for one can’t suspect life of going to hit one at every twist and turn—she had told him to go away, had almost pushed him away, as if, now that the mischief was done, his going or staying mattered any more.
But what was she going to do about him? Was she strong enough to defy Stephen and go on seeing Christopher just as before, without marrying him? And Virginia? Whatever she did in regard to Stephenincluded Virginia; if she defied one she defied and cut herself off from the other. How could she let go of Virginia, her only flesh and blood, her one baby, so tenderly loved and cared for? How could she bear to know that Virginia would believe she had done something abominable? It was a nightmare ... she didn’t know how to shake herself free ... all because of Stephen....
Seeing nothing, because she was blind with tears, she stood at the window that looked out into the grey and gloomy street. To think that this had happened just as she had got her relationship with Christopher on to a clear and comfortable footing, freed him from all the nonsense in his mind! Oh, well—last night—it was true there was last night—but that didn’t count, that was an accident, that was because it was so cold and dark, and anyhow she wasn’t awake,—no, that didn’t count. Shehadfreed his mind, shehadcleared him up, and here comes Stephen, and with his awful points of view, his terrible saintly suspiciousness, smashes the whole of her friendship to bits. And however much she might have wished to marry Christopher—she never, never would have wished to, butsupposingshe had—she couldn’t do it now, because it would be an admission that she must.
She leant her forehead against the cold window-pane. The houses opposite stared across from out of their blank, curtained faces. It was raining, and the street looked a grimy, sooty place, chill and lonely on that wet Sunday afternoon, indifferent and hard. What did one do when one was in trouble and had no one to go to? What did onedo?
‘Mr. Monckton, m’m,’ said Mrs. Mitcham, opening the door.
‘However often he telephones,’ said Catherine in asmothered voice, her face carefully turned to the street, ‘tell him I’m still a—asleep.’
The door shut, and there was silence in the room behind her.
Then some one came across it,—she supposed Mrs. Mitcham, going to make up the fire, and she resented the impossibility, when one was unhappy, of getting away from the perpetual interruptions of routine. Fires to be made up, meals to sit down to and pretend to eat, clothes to be put on and taken off,—how could one be thoroughly unhappy, get to grips with one’s wretchedness, have it out, if one were always being interrupted?
Then she suddenly knew it wasn’t Mrs. Mitcham, it was Christopher.
She turned round quickly to send him away, but found him so close behind her that by merely turning she tumbled up against him.
Instantly his arms were round her, and instantly she had the feeling she had had the night before, when going to sleep, of comfort, and warmth and safety.
‘You mustn’t——’ she tried to protest; but he held her tight, and even while she said he mustn’t she knew he must, and she must.
‘Oh, Chris,’ she whispered, her cheek pressed against his coat, ‘I’m soashamed—soashamed——’
‘What of?’ asked Christopher, holding her so tight that even if she had wanted to she couldn’t have got away. But she didn’t want to.
‘Stephen has been here, saying the most awful things——’
‘Has he, by Jove,’ said Christopher, his head on hers, one hand softly stroking her face. ‘He’s a very good chap, though,’ he added.
‘What? Stephen? Why, you know he isn’t.’
‘But he is. He came to see me too, this afternoon.’
‘Oh.’
‘And I think he’s a thorough sensible chap.’
‘Why, what did he—what did he——?’
‘Narrow, of course, and an infernal ass in places, as I told him several times in the clearest language, besides being a disgusting swine with a regrettably foul mind——’
‘Oh, then did he—did he——?’
‘But as good and sensible really, within his limits, as any one I’d wish to speak to.’
‘Oh, Chris—then he——?’
‘Yes. And we’re going to.’