1
He did not know why he had consented to receive her, unless it was because he knew that they would meet inevitably sooner or later. He felt very able to meet her—cool, and hard and clear-thinking. It was early yet. A wintry sunlight rested on his neatly ordered table, and he could smile at the idea that in a few hours he would begin to be afraid again.
She had made no appointment. Urged by some caprice or other she had driven up to his door and sent up her card with the pencilled inscription "Me voici!" Standing at his window he could just see the long graceful lines of her Rolls-Royce, painted an amazing blue—pale blue was notoriously her colour—and the pale-blue clad figure of her chauffeur. It occurred to him that she had chosen the uniform simply to make the man ridiculous—to show that there were no limits to her audacity and power. She was, he thought, stronger than the men who thought they were ruling the destinies of nations. For she could ride rough-shod over convention and prejudice and human dignity. She was perhaps the last representative of an autocratic egotism in a world in which the individual will had almost ceased to exist. She seemed to him the survival of an eternal evil.
And yet when he saw her he laughed. She was so magnificently impossible. It seemed that she had put on every jewel that she could carry. She was painted more profusely than usual, and her dress was one of those fantastic creations with which producers endeavour to bluff through a peculiarly idiotic revue. But she carried it all without self-consciousness. It was as natural to her as gay plumage to a bird-of-paradise.
She gave him her hand to kiss, and then laughed and shook hands instead with an exaggerated manliness.
"I forget," she said. "It is a bad 'abit. You see. I keep my promise. I make ze return call. And 'ow kind of you to see me."
"It didn't occur to you that I might refuse," he told her.
"No, that's true. I never thought about it. You 'ave a leetle time for me,hein?"
"About ten minutes," he said.
He assumed a very professional attitude on the other side of his table. He wanted to nonplus and disconcert her, if such a thing were possible. Now that his first involuntary amusement was over he felt a return of the old malignant dislike. She had cost him Cosgrave's friendship, and he wanted to hurt her—to get underneath that armour of soulless good-humour. "I knew that you'd turn up one day or other," he said.
She looked at him with a rather wistful surprise.
"'Ow clever of you! You knew? Don't I look well,hein? I feel well—quite all right. But I say to myself: 'Voyons—'alf an hour with nothing to do. I pay that cross doctor a visit.' I would 'ave come before, but I 'ave been so busy. We re'earse 'Mademoiselle Pantalonne,' ze first night to-morrow. You come? I send you a ticket."
"Thanks. That form of entertainment wouldn't entertain me—except pathologically. And if I went to the theatre I'd rather leave my profession outside."
"Path—pathologically," she echoed. "That sounds 'orrid—rather rude.You don't like me still,hein, doctor?"
"Does that surprise you?"
"It surprise me ver' much," she admitted frankly. She picked up the photograph on the table and examined it with an unconscious impertinence. "You like 'er?" she asked. "That sort of woman?"
"I don't know," he said. "I've never met her."
"She is not your wife?"
"She is Cosgrave's wife."
It was evident that although the episode had been concluded less than three months before she had already almost forgotten it.
"Cosgrave?Ah oui, le cher petit Rufus? There now—did I not tell you? Didn't I 'ave reason? Tell me—'ow many babies 'ave 'e got?"
"They were married last month," Stonehouse observed.
"Ah—la la! But 'ow glad I am! I can see she is the right sort for 'im. A nice leetle girl. But first 'e 'ave to 'ave a good time—just to give 'im confidence. Now 'e be a ver' good boy—a leetle dull per'aps, but ver' good and 'appy. I would write and tell 'im 'ow glad I am—but per'aps better not,hein?"
She winked, and there was an irresistible drollery in the grimace that made his lips twitch. And yet she was shameless—abominable.
"The ten minutes are almost up," he said, "and I suppose you came here to consult me."
He knew that she had not. She had come because he was a tantalizing object, because she could not credit his invincibility, which was a challenge to her. She laughed, shrugging her shoulders.
"You are an 'orrible fellow! You think of nothing but diseases and wickedness. I wonder if you 'ave ever 'ad a good time yourself—ever laughed, like I do, from ze 'eart?"
He looked away from her. He felt for a moment oddly uneasy and distressed.
"No, I don't suppose I have."
"Ah,c'est dommage, mon pauvre jeune homme. But you don't like me.What can I do?"
"I don't expect you to do anything."
"Not my business,hein? No one 'ave any business 'ere who 'ave not got an illness. Ver' well. I will 'ave an illness—a ver' leetle one. No, not ze tummy-ache.C'est vieux jeu ca. But a leetle sore throat. You know about throats,hein?"
"My specialty," he said smiling back at her with hard eyes.
"Bien, I 'ave a leetle sore throat—fatigue plutot—'e come and 'e go. I smoke too much. But I 'ave to smoke. It's no good what you say."
"I'm sure of that," he said.
He made her sit down in the white iron chair behind the screen and, adjusting his speculum, switched on the light. He was bitterly angry because she had forced this farce upon him. He felt that she was laughing all over. The pretty pinkness of her open mouth nauseated him. He thought of all the men who had kissed her, and had been ruined by her as though by the touch of a deadly plague. He pressed her tongue down with a deliberate roughness.
"You 'urt," she muttered. But her eyes were still amused.
"A great many people get hurt here," he said contemptuously, "and don't whine about it."
2
Ten minutes later they sat opposite each other by his table. She was coughing and laughing and wiping her eyes.
"C'est abominable," she gasped, "abominable!"
He waited. He could afford to wait. He had the feeling of being carried on the breast of a deep, quiet sea. He could take his time. Her laughter and damnable light-heartedness no longer fretted and exasperated him. Rather it was a kind of bitter spice—a tense screwing up of his exquisite sense of calm power. She was like a tigress sprawling in the sunshine, not knowing that its heart is already covered by a rifle. He prolonged the moment deliberately, savouring it. In that deliberation the woman in the hospital, Francey Wilmot, Cosgrave, and a host of faceless men who had gone under this woman's chariot wheels played their devious, sinister parts. They goaded him on and justified him. He became in his own eyes the figure of the Law, pronouncing sentence, weightily, without heat or passion or pity.
"You do it on purpose," she said, "you make me cough."
He arranged his papers with precise hands.
"I'm sorry—I know you came here as a joke. It isn't—not for you. It's serious." He saw her smile, and though he went on speaking in the same quiet, methodical tone, he felt that he had suddenly lost control of himself. "Medical science isn't an exact science. Doctors are never sure of anything until it has happened. But speaking with that reservation I have to tell you that your case is hopeless—that you have three—at the most four months——"
She had interrupted with a laugh, but the laugh itself had broken in half. She had read his face. After a long interval she asked a question—one word—almost inaudibly—and he nodded.
"If you had come earlier one might have operated," he said. "But even so, it would have been doubtful."
Already many men and women had received their final sentence here in this room, and each had met it in his own way. The women were the quietest. Perhaps their lives had taught them to endure the hideous indignity of a well-ordered death-bed without that galling sense of physical humiliation which tormented men. For the most part they became immersed in practical issues—how the news was to be broken to others, who would look after the house and the children, and how the last scene might be acted with the least possible inconvenience and distress for those who would have to witness it. Some men had raved and stormed and pleaded, as though he had been a judge whose judgment might be revoked: "Not me—others—not me—not to-day—years hence." They had paced his private room for hours, trying to get a hold over themselves, devastated with shame and horror at the breakdown of their confident personalities. Some had risen to an impregnable dignity, finer than their lives. One or two had laughed.
And this woman?
He looked up at last. He thought with a thrill that was not of pity, of a bird hit in full flight and mortally hurt, panting out its life in the heather, its gay plumage limp and dishevelled. The jewels and outrageous dress had become a jest that had turned against her. A shadow of the empty, good-humoured smile still lingered on a painted mouth palsied with fear. She was swaying slightly, rhythmically, backwards and forwards, and rubbing the palms of her hands on the carved arms of her chair, and he could hear her breath, short and broken like the shallow breathing of a sick animal. And yet he became aware that she was thinking—thinking very rapidly—calling up unexpected reserves.
"Trois—mois—trois mois. Well, but I don't feel so ill—I don't feel ill at all—per'aps for a leetle month—just a leetle month."
He had no clue to her thought. She looked about her rather vaguely as though everything had suddenly become unreal. There were tears on her cheeks, but they were the tears of her recent laughter. She rubbed them off on the back of her hand with the unconscious gesture of a street child.
"I suffer much?"
"I'm afraid so. Though, of course, anyone who attends on you will do his best."
"Death so ugly—so sad."
"Not always," he said.
It was true. She had been a beast of prey all her life. Now it was her turn to be overtaken and torn down. Only sentimentalists like Francey Wilmot could see in her a cause for pity or regret.
They sat opposite each other through a long silence. He gave her time. He showed her consideration. He thought of the pale-blue chauffeur waiting in the biting cold of a winter's afternoon. Well, he would be alive after she had become a loathsome fragment of corruption. He was revenged—they were all revenged on her now.
She fumbled with her gold and jewelled bag.
"What do I owe,Monsieur le docteur?"
"Three guineas."
She put the money on the table.
"That is ver' little for so much. I think—when I can't go on any more—I come to your 'ospital. You take me in,hein? I 'ave a fancy."
He made an unwilling movement. It revolted him—this obtuseness that would not see that he hated her.
"I can't prevent your coming if you want to. You would be more in your element in your own home. Even in their private rooms they don't allow the kind of things you're accustomed to. There are regulations. Your friends won't like them."
She looked up at him with a startled intentness.
"Mes pauvres amis—I 'ave so many. They won't understand. They say: 'That's one of Gyp's leetle jokes.' They won't believe it—they won't dare."
She gave him her hand, and he touched it perfunctorily.
"It's as you like, of course. You have only to let me know."
"You are ver' kind."
He showed her to the door, and rang the bell for the servant. From his vantage point he saw the pale-blue chauffeur hold open the door of the pale-blue limousine. A few loiterers gaped. By an ironical chance a barrel-organ in the next street began to grind out the riotous, familiar gallop. It sounded far-off like a jeering echo:
"I'm Gyp Labelle;If you dance with meYou dance to my tune. . ."
A danse macabre. He wondered if she had brains or heart enough to appreciate the full bitterness of that chance. He could see her, in his mind's eye, cowering back among the pale-blue cushions.
The next morning he received a note from her and a ticket for the first night of "Mademoiselle Pantalonne"—"with her regards and thanks."
3
He went. In the morning he had tossed the ticket aside, scornful and outraged by such a poor gesture of bravado. But the night brought the old restlessness. He was driven by curiosity that he believed was professional and impersonal. It was natural enough that he should want to see how a woman of her stuff acted under sentence of death. But once in the theatre h e became aware of a black and solitary pride because he alone of all these people could taste the full flavour of her performance. He had become omniscient. He saw behind the scenes. Whilst the orchestra played its jaunty overture he watched her. He saw her stare into her glass and dab on the paint, thicker and thicker, knowing now why she needed so much more, shrinking from the skull that was beginning to peer through the thin mask of flesh and blood. He foresaw the moment, probably before the footlights, when the naked horror of it all would leap out on her and tear her down. Even in that she would no doubt seek the consolation of notoriety. It would be in all the papers. If she had the nerve to carry on people would crowd to see her, as in the Roman days they had crowded to the circus (gloating and stroking themselves secretly, thinking: "It is not I who am dying"). Or she would seek dramatic refuge in her absurd palace and surround herself with tragic glamour, making use of her own death as she had used the death of that infatuated and unhappy prince.
And yet he was sick at heart. In flashes he saw his own attitude as something hideous and abnormal. Then again he justified it, as he had always justified it. He found himself arguing the whole matter out with Francey Wilmot—a cool and reasoned exposition such as he had been incapable of at the crisis of their relationship. ("This woman is a malignant growth. Nature destroys her. Do you pretend to feel regret or pity?") But though he imagined the whole scene—saw himself as authoritative and convincing—he could not re-create Francey Wilmot. She remained herself. Her eyes, fixed on him with that remembered look of candid and questioning tenderness, blazed up into an anger as unexpectedly fierce and uncompromising. And he was not so strong. He had overworked all his life. Starved too often. The ground slipped from under his feet.
It was a poor, vulgar show—a pantomime jerry-built to accommodate her particular talent. She walked through it—the dumb but irresistible model of a French atelier, who made fools of all her lovers, cheated them, sucked them dry and tossed them off with a merry cynicism. When the mood took her she danced and her victims danced behind her, a grotesque ballet, laughing and clapping their hands, as though their cruel sufferings were, after all, a good joke. Neither they nor the audience seemed to be aware that she could not dance at all, and that she was not even beautiful.
It was an old stunt, disguised with an insolent carelessness. The producers had surely grinned to themselves over it. "We know what the public likes. Rubbish, and the older the better. Give it 'em." She even made her familiar entry between the curtains at the back of the stage, standing in the favourite attitude of simple, triumphant expectation, and smiling with that rather foolish friendliness that until now had never shaken her audiences from their frigidity. To them she had always been a spectacle, a strange vital thing with a lurid past and a dubious future, shocking and stimulating. They would never have admitted that they liked her. But tonight they gave her a sort of ashamed welcome. Perhaps it was the dress she wore—the exaggerated peg-top trousers and bonnet of a conventional Quartier Latin which made her look frank and boyish. Perhaps it was something more subtle. Stonehouse himself felt it. But then, he knew. He saw her as God saw her. If there was a God He certainly had His amusing moments.
But he found himself clapping her with the rest, and that made him angry and afraid. It seemed that he could not control his actions any more than his thoughts. The whole business had got an unnatural hold over him. He half got up to go, and then realized that he was trying to escape.
It was jolly music too. That at any rate her producers had toiled at with some zeal. Incredibly stupid and artless and jolly. Anyone could have danced to it. And she was a gutter-urchin, flinging herself about in the sheer joy of life (with death capering at her heels). He watched her, leaning forward, waiting for some sign, the faltering gesture, a twitching grimace of realization. Or was it possible that she was too empty-hearted to feel even her own tragedy, too shallow to suffer, too stupid to foresee? At least he knew with certainty that in that heated, exhausted atmosphere pain had set in.
He became aware that the sweat of it was on his own face—that he himself was labouring under an intolerable physical burden. He knew too much. (If God had His amusing moments he had also to suffer, unless, as Mr. Ricardo had judged, he was a devil.) She was facing what every man and woman in that theatre would have to face sooner or later. How? She at any rate danced as though there were nothing in the world but life. With each act her gestures, her very dress became the clearer expression of an insatiable, uncurbed lust of living. At the end, the orchestra, as though it could not help itself, broke into the old doggerel tune that had helped to make her famous:
"I'm Gyp Labelle."
She waltzed and somersaulted round the stage, and as the curtain fell she stood before the footlights, panting, her thin arms raised triumphantly. He could see the tortured pulse leaping in her throat. He thought he read her lips as they moved in a voiceless exclamation:
"Quand meme—quand meme."
The audience melted away indifferently. They, at any rate, did not know what they had seen.
And the next day he had another little note from her, written in a great sprawling hand. She had made all her arrangements, and she thought she had better reserve rooms in his hospital in about six weeks' time for about a month. After that, no doubt, she would require less accommodation.
A silly, fatuous effort, in execrable taste.
1
Robert Stonehouse took a second leave that he could not afford and went back to the grey cottage on the moors, and tramped the hills in haunted solitude. The spring ran beside him, a crude, bitter, young spring, gazing into the future with an earnest, passionate face, full of arrogance and hope, and self-distrust. His own frustrated youth rose in him like a painful sap. He was much younger than the Robert Stonehouse who, proud in his mature strength, had dragged an exhausted, secretively smiling Cosgrave on his relentless pursuit—young and insecure, with odd nameless rushes of emotion and desire and grief that had had no part in his ordered life.
The hills had changed too. They had been the background to his exploits. They had become brooding, mysterious partners whose purpose with him he had not fathomed. The things that ran across his path, the quaint furry hares and scurrying pheasants had ceased to be objects on which he could vent his strength and cunning. They were live things, deeply, secretly related to him and to a dying, very infamous woman, and his levelled gun sank time after time under the pressure of an inexplicable pity. He had stood resolutely aloof from life, and now it was dragging him down into its warmth with invisible, resistless hands. Its values, which he had learnt to judge coldly and dispassionately, weighing one against another, were shifting like sand. He seemed to stand, naked and alone, in a changing, terrifying world.
In those days the papers in their frivolous columns, were full of Gyp Labelle. Her press-agent was working frenziedly. It seemed that she had quarrelled with her manager, torn her contract into shreds, and slapped his face. There were gay doings nightly at the Kensington house—orgies. One paper hinted at a certain South African millionaire.
A last fling—the reckless gesture of a worthless panic-stricken soul, without dignity.
Or perhaps she had found that his diagnosis had been a mistake. Or she would not believe the truth. Or she was drugging herself into forgetfulness. Perhaps she might even have the courage to make an end before the time came when forgetfulness would be impossible.
He returned to town, drawn by an obsession of uncertainty. He found that she had arrived at her rooms in the hospital with the shrivelled old woman and the macaw and a gramophone.
She had signed the register as Marie Dubois.
"It is my real name," she explained, "but you couldn't have a good time with a name like that—voyons! Only one 'usband and 'eaps of babies."
She was much nearer the end than he had supposed possible. The last month had to be paid for. She lay very still under the gorgeous quilt which she had brought with her, and her hand, which she had stretched out to him in friendly welcome, was like the claw of a bird. "Everyone 'ere promise not to tell," she said. "I'm just Marie Dubois. Even ze undertaker—'e must not know. You put on ze stone: 'Marie Dubois, ze beloved daughter of Georges and Marianne Dubois, rag-pickers of Paris.' That will be a last leetle joke, hein?"
"It's as you wish," he said coldly.
He forced back the natural questions that came to him. He had a disordered conviction that he was fighting her for his sanity, for the very ground on which he had built his life, and that he dared not yield by so much as a kindly word. He did what lay in his power for her with a heart shut and barred.
She brought a little of her world and her whole outlook with her. On the last day that she was able to be up she dressed herself in a gay mandarin's coat with a Chinese woman's trousers, and tried to do her dance for the benefit of a shocked and fascinated matron. Every morning she wore a new cap to set off the deepening shadow of dissolution.
By the open fire the old woman embroidered ceaselessly.
"She is making—'ow you call it?—my shroud. You see—with ze blue ribbons. Blue—that's my colour—my lucky colour. As soon as I could speak I ask for blue ribbons in my pinafore."
"I should have thought your mind might be better occupied now," he retorted with brutal commonplaceness.
She winked at him.
"Oh, but I 'ave 'ad my leetle talk withMonsieur le Cure. 'E and I are ze best of friends, though I never met 'im before. 'E understand about ze blue ribbons. But Monsieur Robert is too clever."
"It seems so," he said scornfully.
She questioned him from out of the thickening cloud of morphia. "You don't believe in God?" And then as he shook his head she smiled sleepily. "Well, it is still possible 'e exist,Monsieur—Monsieur le docteur."
She lay quiet so that he thought she had fallen asleep, but the next moment her eyes had opened, widening on him with a startling wakefulness. It was as though her whole personality had leapt to arms, and bursting through the narcotic, stood free with a gay and laughing gesture. "As to God—I don't know about 'im, but I exist—I go on. You bet your 'at on that, my friend. I don't know where I go—but I go somewhere. And I dance. And if St. Peter sit at ze golden gates, like they say in ze fairybook, I say to 'im: ''Ave you ever seen ze Gyp Galop?' And then I dance for 'im and ze angels play for me"—she nodded wickedly—"not 'ymn tunes."
She was serious. She meant it. If she survived she survived as what she was or not at all. And looking down on her wasted, tortured body, Stonehouse had a momentary but extraordinarily vivid conviction that what she had said was true. She would persist. Whatever else happened, Gyp Labelle would go on having a good time. She could not be extinguished. There was in her some virtue altogether apart from the body—a blazing vitality, an unquenchable, burning spirit.
He felt his hatred of her wither before it.
"And 'e say: 'You dance ver' bad, Gyp, but you make me laugh. You go on and dance to ze others.' For 'e know who I am. My poor parents they make ze mistake. They think: ''Ere is such a ver' nice, good littlebebe, and so they call me after myMaman, who is ver' nice and good too, and who love me ver' much—Marie—Marie Dubois."
She turned her head towards the old woman bending lower and lower over her fine work, and, smiling at her, fell asleep.
He returned, one night, to the hospital in the hope of being able to work in the laboratory, and instead, coming to her room, he went in. The action was so unpremeditated and unmotivated that he had closed the door before he knew what he had done. But the excuse he framed in his confusion was never uttered, for he had the right to appear dumbfounded. She sat, propped up like a painted wraith against a pile of gorgeous cushions, and all about her was scattered a barbarous loot of rings and bracelets, of strings of pearls, of unset stones, diamonds and emeralds, heaped carelessly on the table at her side, and twinkling like little malevolent eyes out of the creases of her coverlet.
The old woman wrote toilingly on a slip of paper. "Sh! This is ver' solemn. I could not sleep, and so I make my testament." She put her finger to her lips as though her whisper were only a part of a playful mystery and beckoned him, and he went towards her, reluctant, yet unresisting like a man hypnotized. He had a childish longing to touch all that colour, to take up great handfuls of it and feel its warmth and let it drip through his fingers. The death that stared out of her painted face, the silence and grim austerity of her surroundings made that display of magnificence a fantastic parable. The stones were the life that was going from her. She picked up each one in turn and caressed it, and held it to the light, remembering who knew what escapade, what splendid, reckless days, what tragedy. And yet there was no regret and surely no remorse in her farewell of them.
"Ma Vieille—she make a list of all. They will be sold—for ze children of Paris—zegamins—as I was—for a good time." She held out her hand: "C'est joli, n'est ce pas?"
He looked unwillingly. It was a black opal, and as she moved it it seemed to come to life, and a distant resentful fire gleamed out of its sullen depths.
"Yes. But you oughtn't to have all—all this stuff about. No one could be held responsible——"
"What does it matter? If someone take it—someone 'ave it. It won't worry me. 'Ere, I tell you something—a story,hein, to amuse you? You remember our leetle dinner and 'ow I would not tell about ze Grand Duke and ze black opal? Well, I tell you now. It don't matter any more."
"No. You're doing yourself harm. You ought to sleep."
"I don't want to—I can't. It is 'orrible to lie awake in ze dark and—— And you, too, Monsieur Robert, you don't feel you sleep much to-night,hein?"
"No."
"Alors—'ere we are—two poor fellows shipwrecked—we make a leetle feast together—a feast of good stories. You say you don't like me ver' much. But that isridiculenow. One only 'ates when one is afraid, and you aren't afraid any more of poor Gyp."
"Was I ever?" he demanded.
"A leetle—per'aps? You think to yourself: 'If I love 'er——!'Bah, that is all finished. Come, I tell you my funny story."
He had laughed. He was incredulous of himself. He sat on the edge of her bed listening to her whisper, a tortured whisper which she made supremely funny—a mock-conspirator's whisper which drew them close to one another in an outrageous intimacy.
"At any rate you had made a good enemy that time," he said.
She panted.
"Ah no—no. 'E 'ave a fine sense of humour, Monsieur ze Grand Duke. 'E laugh too. 'E say—'Gyp—you are ze ver' devil 'erself!' 'Ere, but this ruby—I don't care much for rubies—but this one 'ave a real fine story."
And so one by one the stones were taken up and held a moment, some to be discarded with a name or a forgetful shrug, and some to linger a while longer whilst she recalled their little ribald histories. And it seemed to Robert Stonehouse that gradually the room filled with invisible personages who, as the jewels dropped from her waxen fingers into the gaping box, bowed to her and took their leave. And at last they were all gone but one. He seemed to hear them, their footsteps receding faintly along the corridors.
She held an unset pearl in her hand.
"This one 'ave a ver' nice leetle story. A brigand give it me when 'e 'old up ze train between Mexico City and ze coast. A fine fellow—with a sombrero and a manner!" (She looked past Stonehouse, smiling, as though she too saw the shadow twirling its black moustache and staring back at her with gallant admiration.) "And brave too,nombre de Dios! And 'e bow and say: 'One does not take ransom from Mademoiselle Labelle. One pays tribute.' And 'e give me this to remember 'im by—as I give it you, Monsieur Robert."
He stood up sharply.
"No—I—I don't care for that kind of thing."
"For your wife, then!"
"I am not married."
"But one day per'aps? You love someone,hein?" (Had she wilfully forgotten? She studied his face with a wicked curiosity. He could not answer her.) "Give it 'er then—Monsieur Robert—pour me faire plaisir."
"There is no one to give it to."
"But there was——"
He tried desperately to regain the old sarcastic inflection.
"No doubt it seems inevitable to you."
"Tell me about 'er.Voyons, if you can't keep me alive,Monsieur mon docteur, you might at least amuse me."
"There is nothing to tell. I will give you something that will make you sleep."
"I do not want to sleep. That is bad, ugly sleep that you give me. So you quarrel. What you quarrel about, Monsieur Robert? Another woman?"
The sheer, grotesque truth of it drove him to an ironical assent.
"As you say, another woman——"
"Oh, la la! So there was once upon a time a ver' serious young man who forget to be quite serious.Voyons—you 'ave to tell me all now—just as I tell you."
He turned on her then. In five brief, savage sentences he had told her of Frances and the woman in the hospital. And when he had done he read her face with its tolerant good-humour, and the full enormity of it all burst over him like a flood of crude light. He turned away from her stammering:
"I've no business here—I've no business to be your doctor—or anyone's doctor. I think I must be going mad."
She shook her head.
"No—no—only too serious,mon pauvre jeune homme. But I like your—your Francey. I think she and I be good friends some'ow. She would see things 'ow I see them."
(He thought crazily:
"Yes, she would sit by you and look over your shoulder at your rotten life, and say: 'So that's the way it seems to you? And you're right. It's been a splendid joke.'")
"One of these days you be friends again too. And then you give 'er my leetle pearl. Say it's from Gyp, who is sorry she made so much trouble. Why not? You think it make her sad? It is not for that I give it you. It is to give you pleasure too."
He was labouring under an almost physical distress. She was poking fun at him, at herself, at death. She was making him a partner of thieves and loose women. And yet:
"It must not make you sad at all. When you see it you laugh—just as you laugh when I dance because I dance so ver' bad. Look 'ere, I 'ave something that you give me too." She dived back into the box and brought out a shilling lying side by side with the pearl in the palm of her open hand. "You tell 'er—that was all poor Gyp was worth to you, Monsieur Robert."
He had taken it. She tried to laugh out loud, triumphantly, the famous laugh. And then grey agony had her by the throat. She turned her face from him to the wall.
He felt that the old woman had risen. She was moving towards them. He said quietly:
"At least I can relieve you."
She made a passionate, absolute gesture of refusal. An astonished nurse had entered. He gave brief instructions. He said good-night, not looking at the limp, quiet figure on the bed, and went out.
He knew that he had seemed competent, unhurried and unmoved as befitted a man to whom death was the most salient feature of life.
But he knew also that he had fled from her.
In the crowd that went with him that night were Francey Wilmot and Connie Edwards and Cosgrave and all the people who had made up his youth. There were little old women who were Christines, and even James Stonehouse was there, tragically and hopefully in search of something that he had never found. Any moment he might turn his face towards his son, and it would not be hideous, only perplexed and pitiful.
It was as though an ugly, monstrous mass had been smashed to fragments whose facets shone with extraordinary, undreamed-of colours.
Not only the bodies of the people drifted with him, but their lives touched his on every side. It became a sort of secret pressure. They were neither great nor beautiful. They were identical with the people he had always seen on the streets and in the hospitals, sickly or grossly commonplace, but he could no longer judge them as from a great distance. He was down in the thick of them. They concerned him—or he had no other concern. He was part of their strangely wandering procession. He looked into their separate faces and thought: "This man says 'I' to himself. And one day he will say: 'I am dying' (as Marie Dubois said it)." And he recognized for the first time something common to them all that was not commonplace—an heroic quality. At least that stark fact remained that at their birth sentence of death had been passed upon them all. Before each one of them lay a black adventure, and they went towards it, questioning or inarticulate, not knowing why they should endure so much, but facing the utter loneliness of that final passage with patience and great courage.
It was not ridiculous that they should demand their immortality, the least and worst of them. Whether it was granted them or not, it was a just demand, and the answer to it more vital than any other form of knowledge. For it was conceivable that one day they would be too strong and too proud to play the part of tragic buffoons in a senseless farce.
In the meantime men might well be pitiful with one another.
"What was it she had said?"
"Nothing that you've gone through is of any use if it hasn't taught you pity."
("Oh, Francey, Francey, if I had told you that Christine was dead would it have helped? Would you have had more patience with me?")
The quiet and emptiness of his own street restored him in some measure to his aloof scepticism. But even then he knew there was a disruptive force secretly at work in him, tearing down stone by stone his confidence and courage. He was afraid of shadows. A bowed figure crouched against the railings of his house checked him as though a ghost had lain in wait for him. He passed it hurriedly, running up the stone steps. The sound of a thin, clear voice calling him made him turn again, his head thrown up in a sort of defiance.
"Monsieur—excuse—excuse—I wait 'ere so long. They tell me you comeback 'ere perhaps. But they don't know I 'ave come. I creep out——Monsieur she cannot sleep—she cannot sleep. They don't do nothing.It is not right. I cannot 'ave it—that she suffer so."
He came back down the steps. He was conscious of having sighed deeply. He looked into the shrivelled, up-turned face, and saw the tears that filled the furrows with a slow moving stream. He had hardly noticed her before. Now she hurt him. A very little old woman. He said briefly, hiding a shaken voice:
"They do all they can. I can do no more."
She reiterated with a peasant's obstinacy.
"I will not 'ave it—I will not—not 'ave it—I cannot bear it."
"Dr. Rutherford is there. I tell you he can do all that can be done.I offered her an injection—she would not have it."
"She pretend—all ze time she pretend. Even before me, 'er mother, she pretend. But I know."
"Her mother!"
He stepped back against the railings, freeing himself fretfully from the hand that clutched his arm.
"If you are her mother she treats you strangely. She treats you like a servant."
"Before others, Monsieur. She is different—of different stuff. We 'ave always understood. If I am to be with 'er it must be as 'er servant. That is our affair. But you are not kind. You let 'er suffer too much. I will not 'ave it."
She drew herself up. She almost menaced him. He saw that she knew. As a physician he had done what lay in his power, but as a human being he had failed utterly and deliberately. Had always failed. And he was aware of an incredible fear of her.
"I will come now," he stammered.
He gave her such sleep that night that it seemed unlikely that she would ever wake again. He knew that he had exceeded the limits of mercy set down by his profession and that the nurse had looked strangely at him. But he was indifferent. It was as though he, too, had been momentarily released.
Nor did he leave her again until the morning, but watched over her, whilst on the other side of the bed the old woman knelt, her face pressed against a still hand, a battered, sullen effigy of grief.
3
From the beginning she had defied the regulations of the hospital, as she had defied the rules of life, with an absolute success. The inelastic, military system bent and stretched itself beneath her good-humoured inability to believe that there could be any wilful opposition, to her desires. The macaw had been a case in point, the gramophone another. After tea the old woman set the instrument going for her, and when the authorities protested, ostensibly on behalf of neighbouring patients, it transpired that the patients rather liked it than otherwise, and there were regular concerts, with the macaw shrieking its occasional appreciation.
She inquired interestedly into her neighbours. She seemed less concerned with their complaints than with their ages, their appearance, and the time when they would return to the outside world. With a young man on her right hand she became intimate. It began with an exchange of compliments and progressed through little folded notes which caused her infinite amusement to a system of code-tapping on the intervening wall, sufficiently scandalous in import, if her expression were significant.
The nurses became her allies in this last grim flirtation, unaware apparently of its grimness.
"Don't you let 'im know I am so bad," she adjured them. "I tell 'im I 'ave a leetle nothing at all, and that I am going 'ome next week to my dear 'usband. I think that make 'im laugh ver' much. 'E is ver' bored, that young man. 'E say if I 'ave supper with 'im, the first night 'e come out 'e won't—'ow you say?—grouse so much. I say my 'usband ver' jealous, but that I fix it some'ow. 'E like that. Promise you won't tell?"
They promised.
She was almost voiceless now. That she suffered hideously, Stonehouse knew, but not from her. He believed—in the turmoil of his mind he almost hoped—that when she was alone she broke down, but before them all she bore herself with an unflagging gallantry. It was that gallantry of hers that dogged him, that would not let him rest or forget. It demanded of him something that he could not, and dared not, yield.
And she was pitifully alone. The woman in the hospital had not been more forsaken by her world. As to Gyp Labelle she went her way, and the gossip columns cautiously recorded the more startling items of that progress. It was as though some clever hand were building up a fantastic figure that should pass at last into the mists of legend.
Men laughed together over her.
"What poor devil of a millionaire has the woman hobbled now?"
It was the matron who showed Stonehouse an illustrated paper which produced her full-length portrait. She sat on the edge of her absurd fountain and her hand was raised in a laughing gesture of farewell. Over the top was written: "Gyp off to Pastures new," and underneath a message which all the daily papers were to reproduce.
"I want this way to thank all the friends who have been so very kind to me. We have had good times together. I miss you very much. I am going to find new friends now, but one day, I think, I dance for you again. I love you all. I kiss my hands to you.Au revoir, Gyp."
It was her vanity, that insatiable desire to figure impudently and triumphantly in the public eye. He brought the paper to her. But at the moment she was busy tapping feebly on the wall. She winked at him.
"Sh! I tell 'im I go to-day. I make an appointment—next week—ze Carlton Grill—seven o'clock—'e 'ave to wait a long time, ze poor young man. There, it is finished."
He showed her the picture without comment. He had to hold it for her—hold it very close—for she had exhausted herself with that last gesture of bravado. And then, as she smiled, a protest born of gathering distress and doubt burst from him.
"Why do you allow—this—hideous, impossible pretence?"
He could feel the old woman turn towards him like a wild beast preparing to spring. But she herself lay still, with closed eyes. He had to bend down to catch the remote suffering whisper.
"C'est vrai. We 'ave—such good times. And they come 'ere—all those kind people—who 'ave laughed so much—and bring flowers—and pretend it is not true. And they won't believe—and when they see it they won't believe—they won't dare——" She tried to speak more clearly, clinging to his hand for the first time, whilst a sweat of agony broke out upon her face and made ghastly channels through its paint and powder. "Vous voyez—for them—I am—ze good times. They come to me—for good times. When they are too sad—when things too 'ard for them and they cannot believe any more—that ze good times come again—they think of me. 'Voyons, laGyp, she 'ave a good time always—she dance at 'er own funeral!' But if they see me 'ere—like this—they go away—and think in their 'earts: 'Grand Dieu, c'est comme ca avec nous tous—avec nous tous,' and they not laugh with me—any more."
Her hand let go its hold—suddenly.
They sent for him that night. Haemorrhage had set in. There was a light burning by her bedside, for she had complained of the darkness. She wore a lace cap trimmed with blue ribbons, but she had not had strength to paint her lips and cheeks again, and the old woman's efforts had ended pitifully. She had grown very small in the last few hours, and with her thin, daubed face and blood-stained lips, she looked like a sorrowful travesty of the little circus clown who had ridden the fat pony and shouted "Oh la—la!" and blown kisses to the people.
She smiled vaguely in Stonehouse's direction, but she was only half conscious. Her hand strayed over the gorgeous quilt, stroking it with a kind of simple pleasure.
(She was like that, too, he thought—a dash of gay, unashamed colour in the sad scheme of things.)
Towards midnight she motioned to him and whispered something that he could not understand. But the old woman rose heavily from her knees and went over to the gramophone, thrusting aside with savage resolution the nurse who tried to intercept her. Stonehouse himself made an involuntary gesture.
"Why not?" he said. "Let her alone."
He stood close to her and waited. He felt that some part of him was dying with her, that he stood with her before a black partition which was thinning slowly, and that presently they would both know whatever lay beyond.
The macaw fidgeted on its golden perch, craning towards the light and blinking uneasily as though a strange thing had come into the room. The needle scratched under a shaking hand.
"I'm Gyp Labelle;Come dance with me. . ."
He bent over her so that his face almost touched hers.
"I'm sorry—I'm sorry, Gyp."
She turned her head a little, her lips moving. It was evident that she had not really heard. But he knew that she had never borne him malice.
And then suddenly it was over. He had broken through. Beyond were understanding and peace and strange and difficult tears. He loved her, as beneath the fret and heat of passion Cosgrave and all those others had loved her, for what she sincerely was and for the brave, gay thing she had to give. He loved her more simply still as in rare moments of their lives men love one another, saying: "This is my brother—this is my sister." From his lonely arrogance his spirit flung itself down, grieving, beside her mysterious, incalculable good.
He could hear the jolly bang-bang of the drum and the whoop of a trumpet. He could see her catherine-wheeling round the stage, and the man with the bloated face and tragic, intelligent eyes.
"Life itself, my dear fellow, life itself."
And she was dead.
For a moment they stared at one another. He did not at once recognize Connie Edwards, in the puritanical serge frock and with her air of rather conscious sobriety, and he himself stood in the shadow. He thought:
"She's wondering if I'm a tramp." He felt like one, broken and shabby.
"Dr. Wilmot?" he muttered.
She leant closer.
"Oh, hallo—Robert." She corrected herself severely, and held the door wide open. "Dr. Stonehouse—to be sure. Francey's upstairs."
She led the way. It was almost as though she had been expecting him. At any rate, she was not surprised at all. But half-way up the stairs she glanced back over her shoulder.
"I don't usually open the door. I'm her secretary. And a damn good one too. Rather a jest, eh, what?"
"Rather," he said.
And it was really the same room—a fire burning and the faun dancing in the midst of its moving shadows. There was a faint, warm scent of cigarette smoke and a solemn pile of books beside her deep chair. It wouldn't be like Francey to rest under her laurels.
She held both his hands in hers. She wore a loose, golden-brown wrapper such as she had always worn when she had been working hard. She had changed very little and a great deal. If something of the whimsical mysteriousness of her youth had faded she had broadened and deepened into a woman warm and generous as the earth. Her thick hair swept back from her face with the old wind-blown look, and her eyes were candid and steadfast as they had ever been. But some sort of mist had been brushed away from them so that they saw more clearly and profoundly. He thought: "She has seen a great many people suffer. She doesn't go away so often into herself."
He had tried hard, over and over again, to imagine their meeting, but he had never imagined that it would be so simple or that she would say to him, as though the eight years had not happened:
"Why didn't you tell me about Christine, Robert?"
He said:
"It wouldn't have made any difference."
"I've been waiting for you to tell me."
He tried to smile.
"You don't know how difficult it has been to come. I've been prowling past—night after night—trying to think what you'd say to me, if I turned up."
"You might have known."
"I didn't—I don't know even now."
She had made him sit down by the fire and she sat opposite him, bending towards him, with her slim, beautiful hands to the blaze. He felt that she knew, for all the outward signs of his prosperity, that he was destitute. He felt that his real self with which she had always been so much concerned had been stripped naked, and that she was trying to warm and console him. She was wrapping him round with that unchanged tenderness.
"It's—it's the old room!" he said.
But his enmity was dead. He was at peace with it. He had been initiated. He had heard, very faintly it is true, but loud enough to understand, the music to which the faun danced. He was not the outsider any more.
"I wanted it to be the same."
"And the house——"
"I took it as soon as I could get it. I made up my mind to live here, whatever it cost. You see, I was quite sure that you would go past one of these days to have a look at it, and that you would say to yourself: 'Why, there's Francey, after all! I'll go in——'"
But they both drew back instinctively. He blundered into a hurried question. The Gang? What had happened to them all? It seemed that Gertie still lived, defying medical opinion and apparently feeding her starved spirit on the treasures of the Vatican. Howard, who had become a very bad artist and lived on selling copies of the masterpieces to tourists, looked after her.
"But they're not married," Francey said. "Just friends."
He said humbly:
"Well, he's been awfully decent to her."
As to the rest, no one knew what had become of them.
"And you've done splendidly, Robert, better than any of us."
"I've been a failure," he answered, "a rotten failure!"
She accepted the statement gravely, without protest, and that sincerity was like a skilled hand on a wound. It brought comfort where a fumbling kindness would have been unendurable. It made him strangely, deeply happy to know that she would see too that he had failed. "I've never had pity on anyone—not even myself—I've learnt nothing that matters."
For a while they sat silent, looking into the fire, like people who are waiting and preparing themselves for some great event. And presently, without moving, in an undertone he began to tell her about the Marie Dubois who had died, and how he had seen her long ago at the Circus, his first and only circus. He told her about the Circus itself. He did not choose his words, but stammered and fumbled and jumped from one thing to another. He opened his heart and took out whatever he found there, and showed it to her very humbly, just as it was. It seemed certain and imperative that after a little while they should both see the pattern of it all. He told her about his love for his dead mother, and how his father had died and had come back, haunting him in his sleep.
Then he remembered something he had never thought of before—how he had looked up at the window of the room where his father was lying dead, and had wanted to run—run fast.
"But I think I've lived in that dark house all my life," he said, "and I've gone about in it, blustering and swaggering and being hard and strong because I was so desperately afraid—of life, of caring too much, of failing. And now—I've come out."
And then he began to tremble all over and suddenly he was crying helplessly.
She knelt beside him. She drew him into her arms. It was their moment in the green forest over again, but now there was no antagonism in their love. She was the warm, good spirit of the life to which he had become reconciled. They had belonged to one another from the beginning. His fear had stood between them. But she had gone on loving him, steadfastly, because nothing else was possible to her.
"Francey—do you remember—that time we fought one another—over an idiotic stick? I was such a young rotter—I wouldn't own up—that you were stronger than I was."
She took his wet hands and kissed them. It was as though she had said aloud, smiling to herself:
"It's all right now, anyhow, you odd, sad little boy."