SAM was vilely dull about it all at first: his comprehension, stuck in the mud, failed utterly to rise to the occasion, but before long; he was looking back with horror on his turgid mental processes when she told him that they would come away together.
He had a shadow, not more than a shadow of excuse for his preposterous misunderstanding of her ease. Sam followed the crowd, accepted readymade their principles and their lack of principles, their morality and their immorality, and to the crowd he followed the theory was faithfulness and the practice as much licence as they could take without being found out. They made a boast rather than a secret of their affairs with a shopgirl or a typist, he had never had an affair and was flattered to think that he was to have one now.
He thought that an affair was rather a manly thing to have.
When Effie spoke, he had a great surprise, then cheapened her insultingly. He decided that he had been wrong about her. After all, she was nothing more than a pretty typist with whom he was going to have his first affair, who was going to give him the opportunity to join in that sly boasting in hotel smoke-rooms which was the habit of his crowd. He, too, would rank amongst the sportsmen.
But, even at his worst, he had the grace to doubt that this was of the same kind as those other affairs. It had a lowest common measure with them, but—Effie! Cheapen her as he would, he could not think of her as cheap enough for that. When others did this thing it was, surely, that they were giving rein to grossness: it was at least charitable to assume that the women of their amours were of coarser grain than their wives, and Effie’s was not the coarser grain. He drifted, acquiescing and puzzled, through the fog of his perplexity.
Illumination came to him, not in the crowded railway carriage, but in the trap which drove them from the station to the Inn. It came, he thought, miraculously, but perhaps the miracle was nothing more than that a man sees clearly in Westmoreland, and sees through dirt in Manchester. He worshipped Effie who was sacrificing all to him, and with abasement at the thought that he had meant, with his pitiful achievements, to surprise her.
He, shepherded to joy at the Marbeck Inn had set out to surprise Effie! That was what made it, from the first dawn of understanding, a perfect wonder-tale. He had not calculated this; it happened, like a dream, in the air, unrooted in prevision. But that was all it had, except its rapt intensity, of the quality of dream. It was dreamlike because it was more vivid than his experience of life, but it was life. Only, he had not known these things about life before. He had underestimated life.
The Inn lay in a saucer of the hills at the end of a road which led to nowhere. As a road, it finished at the Inn and went on only as a rough cart-track which dwindled and divided into two trails across the passes. The fells came down in grandeur to the Inn—it wasn’t a place from which one looked at distant hills, but one where the hills were intimately there—and half a mile away there was the Lake.
They were twelve miles from a station, at the end of the world, alone with happiness. Of course, there were other people at the Inn, but Sam and Effie were alone: they two with the heather and the bracken and the pines: they two with love.
The crowd has not discovered Marbeck. The Inn, the Church, the Vicarage, down by the Lake the Hall, a farmhouse or two along the road, and that is all. Six miles away there is a post-office.
He had followed the crowd on his rare holidays. He knew Blackpool Promenade and Morecambe and the things to do at Douglas. Here, one did not do those things. One walked and climbed and lay extended on the heather or in the perfect isolation of high bracken, and bathed in the Lake or the streams or the tarns, haphazard, naked, where one liked and when one liked; and all the time one breathed the air.
It needed no thunderous knocking on the door to get her out of bed into the Marbeck air. Sam would go for an early dip in the pool below the Inn where two streams cascaded into a swimmable basin, and when he returned she would be up or ready to get up that he might brush her hair, or not up that she might play at being peevish and be lifted out of bed by him.
And the food, the good rough plenty of the Marbeck Inn! They ate of it prodigiously and carried to the hills parcels of sandwiches and cakes and cheese, shamelessly large, which they emptied to the last crumb, and eked out in the woods with raspberries and nuts.
She took him on the Lake, with a rod borrowed from the Inn, and showed him how to fish. He relished it amazingly, catching little but the spirit of the thing, happy because of the green reflection of the woods in the water and because of her. His restlessness found pause in a boat with Effie and she noted with a keen delight that he did not envy the expert basket of the postman who cycled to Marbeck in the mornings and fished till he cycled away with the letters in the afternoon. She registered as a happy gain that he did not want to shine, or try to beat that seasoned fisher at his game. Nor did the posts distract them. They had no letters there.
They bathed continually, for it was hot, and here again he made no effort to excel, but let it be admitted that she was the better swimmer. How much the better she did not let him know. She knew that he found the water here a purer element than in the old Blackfriars Baths where he had learnt when he was at school, and she tired less rapidly than he did. But he was wondrously content to own inferiority.
She had a deep symbolic faith in bathing. They were here to wash his mud away, and water was cleaner than talk. Talk, indeed, was but a surface pattern of their time. They hardly needed it, except as levity to mitigate a deep communion which sometimes grew almost intolerably sweet.
It was Blea Tarn, one of the many of that name, which they made peculiarly theirs, their favourite bathing-place, their best lunch-room. Effie stretched herself luxuriously on the close-cropped turf, at peace in mind and body.
“Sam,” she asked, “have you noticed that Frump at the Inn? She sits behind me at dinner.”
“No,” said Sam truthfully. “When I’m with you I notice nobody else. And I don’t know how you saw her if she sits behind you.”
“Eyes in the back of my head,” she explained. “You have them when you’re a woman. Do you mind if I give her a shock?”
“You would if she could see you now,” he said. “Yes, but she doesn’t deserve it,” said Effie complacently. She surveyed herself and Sam did the same. She pleased them both, taking her sun-bath there on the mossy turf. “But I may shock her?”
“You may do anything,” he said.
“Thank God for that,” said Effie joyously, and something glittered in the sun and fell with a splash far into the tarn. “Too deep to dive for it,” she decided. “Bang goes a shilling and I’m glad. I never liked pretence.”
“I say!” Sam protested, and then fell silent comprehendingly.
She looked at him and greeted his silence with a nod. “I shan’t catch cold,” she said, holding up her finger where the wedding ring had been. “I feel better now I’m rid of that.”
The remarkable fact was that Sam understood. His education had progressed and he knew that it was not for the Frump at the Inn that she shed the imitation wedding ring which for form’s sake he had suggested she should wear: it was for him. The ring was counterfeit, it was a false symbol of something which was not true: it had no place in the Marbeck scheme.
She curled up happily like a stroked cat, partly in sheer physical well-being, partly in gladness at her scheme’s success. “And to think,” she crooned, “that I am a wicked woman!”
“Effie,” he pleaded, taking her hand. “Don’t.”
“As if I care,” she said, rolling over on to her back and taking his hand with her to shade her eyes. “I might have been doing this all my life.” Indeed, in her perfect absence of embarrassment, she might. “Wicked!” She shied a stone after the wedding ring into the tarn and laughed at a world well lost. “The Frump won’t understand, my dear, but I think you do.”
“I think I do,” said Sam, but the fullness of understanding had not come to him yet.
Something, indeed, of her fineness he did perceive, but not its whole, its utter selflessness. He saw, roughly, what she was after: that it was here, in Westmoreland when she made her sacrifice, here when she lay beside him in the sun that she expressed in deed what she had been baffled to express in Manchester. She had brought him away from the murk and the fog and the place where they rather like dirt than otherwise because dirt means money, to where nature was beautiful. She had shown him beauty there, her beauty and the beauty of sacrifice and the beauty of things. She had taught him that there was beauty in the world. “We’ll never go back,” he cried.
“No. Not back,” she said. “But we will go to Manchester.”
“No. No. We’ll build a tabernacle here.”
“Here? No. We’ve been lawless here. We’ll go to Manchester.”
It rang in his ears like the trump of doom. So far they had marched in thought together, and he imagined that in her scheme they were to be together to the end. He thought her purpose was that they two were to work together to give shape to beauty—and no bad exercise in perception, either, for Sam Branstone.
That was her purpose, but, as she saw it, they were not to work together in the sense he meant. Her spirit was to go on with him, but she herself would stand aside, denying herself the right and the joy of sharing his work with him in physical partnership. She would have done her share at Marbeck: she was a sign-post whose direction he was to follow but which he left behind, not a guide to go with him on his way: and she thought she was content with that.
She renounced and she imagined that of the two of them it was she who was the realist and he who was romantic, he was romantic because he wanted her with him and she the realist because she remembered Ada. She was not jealous of Ada no’; if she could not bless Ada, neither did she damn her. Ada had never held him as Effie held him now. She thought it satisfied her to know that she held him, and to let the days slip past uncounted. Nothing is infinite except our human capacity for self-deception.
For the present, for the Marbeck heyday, it did satisfy her, and she went about the business of her tutelage with the unruffled serenity of fulfilled purpose, almost involuntarily now, thinking little, feeling everything in the passionate intensity of her sacramental love. It would end and she would suffer: meantime there were only so many days and it was no use impairing finite days with regrets that they were not infinite.
Thought was for before and afterwards, not for now when she crusaded for the soul of Sammy Branstone with the mystic rapture of a trance, joyful like the other sorts of true religion. She would wake up, but she would have taught Sam his lesson; she would have given him his gleam; and she was selfless after that....
Of course she may have deceived herself. There is spiritual love, but Effie was flesh and blood.
Sam, at any rate, was not etherealizing things. He did not appreciate the happiness of renouncing happiness. He wanted it to last, to go on with the gay days on the hills when she put health into his body and health into his mind, when it was all a high-spirited riot without an undertow. For hours on end, they lived their lives unclouded by a thought... rude, rough, exhilarating exercise on the glamorous fells like that illustrious day when they climbed the Pike and lost themselves in mist and found themselves again just where they wished to be, on the downward trail by Corner Tarn to Yorkdale: then on the steamer down the Lake, and the lonely moonlight walk across the Moor to Branley, where the trap from the Inn met them and took them, comfortably tired, to Marbeck and a giant’s feast. And there were other days, more leisured, on their Lake or in the woods when more seemed to happen in his soul and less in his body; and their day of Bathes, in five well separated tarns, with a makeweight bathe in the Marsland Beck for luck. He wanted it to last. He had intoxication of the hills, of her, of everything.
He had not seen, he would not and he could not, see the possibility of her leaving him. He did not know that leaving him was as fundamental a part of her plan as coming to him.
“We’ll go hack to Manchester,” she said, and it seemed to him that he was ordered hack to hell. “That’s where your business is,” she added, a little wickedly.
Business! Hadn’t she shown him the ugliness of his business, and the beauty of Marbeck? Why should they ever leave the hills? He had all the extremity of a convert.
Effie would say no more, and now, as the end of their time grew near, the magic seemed to him less magical, because he had to leave it, because she would not stay for ever in that lonely place, but wanted him to go where other men lived, in an ugly town, where he had a business she had taught him to despise, and responsibilities, and Ada.
He plunged to gloom. What was the use of knowing that there was light if he must go back to darkness? Was it not treachery in her to come so far with him, then leave him to himself?
“Effie!” he pleaded, and she consented to make things clear.
“Don’t you see, Sam? We’ve done what we came here to do. You’ve seen, you know, and you will not slide back. I won’t allow you to.”
“You won’t allow! Then you’ll be there?”
“I hope my spirit will be always there,” she said. “Do you doubt that?”
“Spirit?” he said. “You’re overrating me. You’re asking more than I can give. I cannot give what isn’t there.”
“I’ve put it there,” she said. “You cannot fail. You can’t forget.”
* “I’d not forget, but I should fail. It’s we, my dear. Not I alone, but you and I. Without you I am lost.”
She made a great concession. “Then, if you’re sure——”
“Quite sure,” he said, and she decided to indulge his weakness.
“Then don’t dismiss your secretary. Then I’ll be there.”
“As secretary?”
“Of, of course.” She spoke impatiently. All else was at the end.
That only made it more impossible than ever. She was to be there—and not to be there. There, in his office where he would see her every day, where he had only to stretch out his hand to touch her, and where he was not to touch, where he was to forget that he had ever touched. He wanted her, all of her, the touch, the glow, the life of her, and she offered—what? A sexless wraith, a spiritual guide, her presence in asceticism.
“No,” he said. “No. I’d rather die than that.”
“Oh, death is a good arrangement, Sam, but well be brave.”
“There are limits even to bravery.”
“No,” said the realist. “There are none.”
So she sent him, though he did not know that the suggestion came from her, to gather strength in the peace of the everlasting hills. She sent him to Hartle Pike to think, to see that she was right. He would remember Ada there.
He did remember Ada, but it seemed to him, when he tried to sum up his recollections, that Ada was not the woman who counted in his life. The women who counted were before Ada and after Ada. They were Anne and Effie.
In the gathering dusk on Hartle Pike he tried to be cool about it and to see things in proportion. Effie had the supreme advantage of immediacy. It wasn’t easy, whilst he lived encircled by her glamour, to see Ada at all.
But he had been Ada’s husband for ten years, a long time, more than a quarter of his life. In all those years there must be something which he could positively remember of her, some definite characteristic; something, at any rate, which was individual to her. He searched and found nothing. She had less individuality in his mind than his sideboard. He supposed that she kept house, or did she? Didn’t he recall that the cook’s wages went up one year, and that the cook became cook-housekeeper? In that case, and he felt certain of it now, Ada did nothing. He was equally certain that she was nothing. Since he had grown accustomed to her demands for money, she was not even an irritant. She was a standing charge, like the warehouse rent.
Quite suddenly, as he lingered over that definition of his wife, “a standing charge,” he saw that it was double-edged. It cut at him, and shrewdly.
Ada, like Effie, was a woman, and he knew from Effie what a woman could be. There must, at least, have been possibilities in Ada. Dear God, what had he done with them if she was nothing now? That was the charge—that he had married her and that she was nothing: that he had permitted her to become nothing. He could summon no witness for his defence, he remembered no occasion when he had fought for Ada, as Effie had fought for him. And as to sacrifice——! Yet he was supposed to have loved Ada.
He could have howled for very shame, he could not, in fairness, think that Ada had given him anything, but writhed that he had thought just now of Anne and Effie as the two women who counted in his life. They were the women who gave. Was he to take all from women and render nothing to a woman in return? If he could say of Ada, his wife these last ten years, that she did not count, then he was very much to blame and the path was clear before him. He saw to where the gleam that Effie gave him pointed. To Ada. It annoyed him desperately that it should point to Ada.
He began to descend the hill in a cold fury. The world was hideous, Marbeck an illusion, Effie a fool. No: Effie was right. One could not run away from facts and hide one’s head amongst the hills, and say there were no facts. She had not brought him there to obscure facts, but to reveal them.
It remained to face them, to return to Manchester with new knowledge and new courage. It needed courage to turn his back on Marbeck, to go away from happiness to Ada.
He stamped upon that thought, as on a snake. It was disloyalty to Effie who had sacrificed to him and shown him all the beauty of her sacrifice. He, too, would sacrifice and find a beauty in it.
He found it extraordinarily difficult to meet Effie, and spent an unnecessarily long time with the landlord of the Inn. Then he went in to her.
“I’m leaving,” he stammered. “I couldn’t stay another night. By driving fifteen miles I can catch the South Mail at midnight. I’ve arranged for you to come to-morrow.”
He jerked each sentence out painfully.
Effie met his eyes with her serene gaze. “That’s infinitely best,” she said. “I’m proud of you.”
He had seen! It was her victory, complete and unequivocal, and she was proud of him and of herself. He had got rid of mud and he had seen beauty. Now he was facing the facts as she would have him face them, clear-eyed, without romance. Like her, he was a realist, and she was glad... glad.
But when he went up to their room to pack his bag, Effie left the Inn quickly and walked hard. She must put space between them: space, that she might cry unheard. It seemed to her that if he heard her crying he would not go, and she wanted him to go. She was a realist. She was... stifling her sobs amongst the heather; triumphing in victory on Marbeck Ridge.
She won, as she had said that she would win. But there were limits to her bravery.
THE theory that Satan is a subtle devil is one which will not bear examination. He is a crude fellow, theatrical, Mephistophelean. It may, of course, be only because his experience of human nature has made a cynic of him, and certainly his interferences do not as a rule lack success because they want delicacy. He attacked Sam with a blatant effrontery which suggested that he thought Sam’s a contemptuously easy case.
Sam reached Manchester very early in the morning, and spent the rest of his broken night in a lugubrious hotel near the station. Manchester hotels rarely make for gaiety, but it is wonderful what even a short night will do in the way of altering a point of view.
He expected to be depressed at the very air of Manchester, and, instead, he sniffed at it as Mr. Minnifie had once relished the odours of Greenheys, with an exile’s greed. He knew that he ought to feel a loathing of the office, but found that he opened the letters with more than his usual zest. He knew that it was wrong, all wrong, and checked his itching fingers.
There have been prisoners who, when offered freedom, have pleaded to remain in the familiar cell.
Was it like that with him, he wondered, as had as that, the jail-fever so ineradically in him that he must breathe the tainted air to live? But, was he offered freedom? He had to go to Ada, who was a mill-stone and implied the other mill-stones. Unless she was not a mill-stone, unless he could alter her. In the meantime, at all events, she was not altered, she wanted the things which she had always wanted; and the office was their source. It seemed to him that he was still in prison, with the difference that he now knew that it was prison. He found little comfort in the knowledge.
His gaze returned to the pile of correspondence. There seemed nothing else for it to do, and he saw an envelope, addressed not to the firm, but to himself, which sent the blood whirling to his head in simple premonition of its contents. From the postmark (S.W.—Satan’s Work?) he saw that it had only come that morning and had not been waiting his arrival. He thought of that as of a portent. Suppose he had stayed another day at Marbeck! He might have been too late.
It was a careful letter, but the facts were that, owing to the sudden death of Sir Almeric Pannifer, the seat tor the Sandyford Division of Marlshire was vacated. Mr. Morphew, who had reduced Sir Almeric’s majority in that agricultural constituency to three hundred was, for private reasons, unable to stand again (“I know these private reasons,” thought Sam. “Morphew considers he has earned a walkover next time”), but Headquarters were of opinion that a resolute candidate of strong personality, etc....
In short, he was offered the opportunity to be the figurehead in a demonstration for the Liberal Party. It was no more than that. Morphew had doubtless nursed the constituency like a mother, and if at the landslide of the last election he had done no better than to come within three hundred of his opponents’ votes, the chances of a stranger’s capturing the seat were negative. But it was the stepping-stone, theliaisonbetween obscurity and the House of Commons. It was what he had aimed at.
He tried to believe that the letter did not exhilarate him as it would have done a fortnight earlier, and Satan, the connoisseur of good resolutions, smiled his age-long smile.
He looked across at Effie’s chair. “My spirit will be always with you,” she had said; he wondered if it were there now, and tried to see her. Surely now, if ever, was her time; now when he had so lately left her, when her scent was in his nostrils and her voice in his ears. Her voicewasin his ears. He heard it clearly. She spoke one word, “Renounce.”
“Yes, but, my dear,” he argued, “I have renounced. I’ve renounced you. I’ve come back here and I’m going to Ada, to plumb the depths of her, to find the good in her, and drag it to the top. I’m going to dive for pearls,” he grew almost picturesque as he cited his intentions towards Ada in his defence, “and I shall grow short of breath. I’m not doubting that the pearls are there, because Ada’s a woman, and so are you, but I know that they lie deep and I want breath for such a dive as that. I’ve renounced you, and I’m going to make a woman of her; don’t I deserve some recompense to make amends? It’s here beneath my hand, and I have only to say ‘Yes.’ Effie,” he pleaded, “if you knew what this meant to me, you wouldn’t frown. It’s not backsliding.” He denied that it was backsliding, well knowing that it was. “It’s politics, I know, and you don’t like politics. You told me women knew about politics now. Oh, but you don’t know, you don’t. Smile at me, Effie, smile as I have seen women smile when men talked of golf. I know we men are babies, and so do you. Give me my game. It’s nothing but a hobby, like golf, but this is mine, and I want it so much. Ada is my work and this is my play, and just as necessary. It will not be a hindrance to what I have to do for Ada, it will be a help. Effie, tell me that I may have my help.”
He tried to blarney a consenting smile out of the figure of Eflie he imagined sitting in her chair. He had no difficulty in imagining her there; he saw her, too easily, too really to imagine a false Effie. He could not imagine, try as he would, that he had won consent from her. He was too near the real Effie for that. And Effie said “Renounce.”
Then his cashier came into the office and routine swallowed him for the day. A score of little points had arisen in his absence and must be discussed and settled. The thought occurred to him that if he telegraphed to London in the morning, Headquarters would hear from him as soon as if he wrote to-day. They might expect a wire to-day; well, they would not get it. He crammed the letter into his pocket and decided that he would sleep upon it before he sent them his reply.
And if Satan still smiled it was wistfully, as if he regretted his lost subtlety; but there was still Ada, the married woman.
If Ada was nothing else, she was a married woman; in a world where many fail, she had succeeded; she had got married, and, like other people who have reached their earthly paradise, she did not know what to do when she got there, and did nothing. She stopped growing when she married.
The emptiness of her life was a thing to marvel at. She slept and ate and shopped. She was spared the ordinary duties of running a house, and the trials of servants, because the cook, an elderly, reliable woman, took (it seemed) a fancy to Sam and became a fixture first and a housekeeper second, taking from Ada’s shoulders the burden of engaging her underling. She had two “At homes” a week, and went to other people’s “At homes.” On Sunday, she went to church, where one can display new clothes to a larger audience than at the largest private “at home.” She killed the evenings somehow, in company with a friend, or with the fashion papers.
Evenings interested her little; they were the time when Sam was often, but not too often, at home. He was not, strictly, a nuisance, because he never asked her, after a first experiment, to entertain a business acquaintance, and did that at hotels. Nor did he ask her to entertain him. Usually, he read a manuscript, or worked out costs or did something which made no demand on Ada, except that she be reasonably quiet. She was very quiet with Sam, for the reason that she had nothing to say.
She did not go out much in the evenings and told her friends that this was because she liked to be at home with her husband. They were supposed to deduce an idyll of conjugal bliss where proximity was perfect happiness. The real reasons were, first, pure laziness and, second, her shoulders. Other married women might expose their shoulders in low-cut dresses, but not Ada. It wasn’t modest. Her shoulders were ugly.
She never went to see Peter, who had given her offence by suggesting the blessedness of work. He had dared to lecture her, a married woman, and she let fly at him in such fashion that he never tried again, he deplored his weakness, but he gave her up. The cobbler’s child is the worst shod, and something analogous often happens with the daughters of the clergy: Ada was, perhaps, the worst of Peter’s flock. He knew and, knowing the hopes he had had of this marriage, suffered at its failure, but silently, confessing impotence. There were always books in which he could forget, and the peace which had come to his house since Ada left it. It is not easy to be saintly all the time, and her outrageous attack had been, humanly speaking, unpardonable.
“There must be something in her,” he told himself, as he left the office, “and I’ve to find it.”
The day had, naturally, after an absence, been unusually busy, and had given him no time to think. He was bursting with intention, but it was vague, unformed, though urgent and doubly urgent because of the letter in his pocket. If he could make a woman of Ada, if that evening he could make a fair start, perhaps he could conjure up the figure of Effie, his ghostly counsellor, with a smile on her face consenting to his standing for the seat.
“Oh,” Ada greeted him, “I thought you were not coming back till Saturday.”
“I wasn’t,” he said. “Something changed my plan a little. I wanted to get home.”
She looked at him resentfully. There was no reason why he should not change his plan and come home two days before she expected him, but she resented the unexpected. And there was something about him which appeared strange.
“Tell me you are glad to see me,” he said.
“Well, it wasn’t to be till Saturday,” she repeated stupidly.
“Are you thinking of dinner?” he asked. “Kate will manage something.”
She was not thinking of dinner, and no doubt Kate would manage something. It was Kate’s business.
“You’re wearing funny clothes,” she said.
“Country clothes,” he explained. “You see, I’ve been in the country.”
“Oh.” She was not curious.
“Yes. In the country. It was rather beautiful, Ada.”
“I nearly went with Mrs. Grandage to the ‘Métropole,’ at Blackpool, but I don’t like dressing for dinner.”
“Blackpool’s not beautiful,” he said. “Ada, I want to talk to you, and I hardly know how to begin, except that I want you to understand that I’m in earnest. It’s a serious matter.”
“Money?” said Ada, sitting up sharply in her chair.
“Not money. We’ve both been wrong about money, I think. We’ve both taken it too seriously.”
“If you’re going to tell me that something has gone wrong with your money, it’s very serious indeed.”
“It hasn’t. No. This is a larger thing than money. I want, if I can, to alter things between us, Ada. How can I put it? There’s your father——”
“I never want to hear his name again,” she interrupted. “He insulted me.”
“You go to church, you know; you listen to him there.”
“People would talk if I didn’t go. I needn’t listen to him when I am in church.”
“He’s a good old man. I’m sorry we have drifted from him. But I’ll not press that now. If the rest comes right, that will come right with it. It might even come so right as to include my mother.”
“My word!” she said, “youaredigging up the past. I don’t see how you could call things right when they include me with a charwoman.”
“Ada!” he protested.
“It’s what she is.”
“By her own choice. But please forget that, Ada. Yes, it’s true that I am digging in the past. I want to go back to see where we went wrong.”
“Went wrong? When who went wrong?”
“Why, you and I.”
“I didn’t know we had gone wrong.” She looked at him. “You look well,” she decided, “but you can’t be.”
“I am better than I’ve ever been,” he said, “and stronger, and if need be I shall use my strength, but I hope the need won’t come for that. Ada, can you tell me this? Can you tell me what it is you want?”
“You’re sure it’s all right about your money?” she asked anxiously.
“Yes, of course it’s right,” he said impatiently.
“Then I don’t know that I want anything. I could do with more, naturally. Who couldn’t?”
“More money. Not more beauty? Not a new purpose? Not something to live for?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Sam. You’re very strange to-night.”
“I hardly know myself,” he confessed. “I know it’s all confused, and I ought to have got things out of the tangle before I spoke to you. But I thought you might have seen and so be able to help me out. No: that’s all right, Ada,” he went on as she glared at him indignantly. “I’m blaming no one but myself. It’s my responsibility. You don’t see it yet, and I must make you see.”
“If a thing’s there, I can see it.”
“Oh, it’s there,” he said. “We can both see that. It’s only the cure for it that isn’t plain.”
“What’s there?”
“The failure of our marriage, if I must put it into words.”
“Failure! But wearemarried. What do you mean?” What Ada meant was that the ring was on her finger and the marriage certificate in her desk. Failure in marriage, if it meant anything to her, meant failure to get married, a broken engagement, and since their engagement had not been broken, since they had been formally and legally married in church, there could be no failure.
“We didn’t exult in marriage,” he tried.
“Exult? I’m sure I was the proudest woman in the parish the day I married you.” It was true. “But afterwards, afterwards!”
“Oh,” she cried, “are you throwing it in my teeth that I didn’t have a baby? Was that my fault?”
“No, no. But it might have saved us, all the same, and when the baby did not come we made no effort to save ourselves. There’s a light somewhere in every one of us and you and I have quenched our lights. They may be small, they may not be a great light like your father’s, or... or the light which I have seen in the country, they may be nothing but a feeble glow, and we can only give our best. You and I have not given ours. We have not tried to find our light, but now—now that we have discovered what has been wrong with us all this while—we can try, and together. We can all of us give something to the world, not children in our case, but the something else which we were made to give. We don’t know what it is that you can give and I can give, and we’ve left it late to begin to find out, but it is not too late, is it, Ada? Ada,” he pleaded, “it is not too late?”
She looked at the clock. “If you want to wash your hands before dinner you’d better do it now,” she said, “or you will be late.” She rose, but before she left him, she had a moment of illumination. She thought she saw what he was driving at, that he must have seen some happy family while he was away and came back with the cry of the child less man on his lips. “I suppose this means,” she said, “that you want me to adopt a child. That’s what you mean by giving. Well, I won’t do it, Sam. I’ve something else to do with my time than to look after another woman’s brat.”
“What have you to do?” he asked. “What is it that you want to do?”
“To eat my dinner,” she said. She had a healthy appetite. Perhaps that was why she wanted nothing else.
He stood by the door when she had gone, and his hand strayed to his pocket as though it sought a talisman. He felt the letter crinkle, then tore his hand away. Ada was work for a man. There wasn’t room for Ada and for politics. “Deeply regret private reasons compel total withdrawal from politics.” Yes, that was the wording of the telegram which he would send: it was best to be thorough, and, plainly, the man who had Ada in hand had no time to spare on a hobby or an ambition or whatever it was that politics represented for him. He had other work to do in the world.
He stamped upon the ruins of a hope which came to birth ten years ago, and which he had carried with him in his heart of hearts and, as the letter in his pocket proved, not a fool’s hope either. Yes, he had loved that hope which was born on his honeymoon.
It occurred to him that in all he had said, or tried to say, to Ada he had not mentioned love. It had not seemed the right word for use in a conversation with Ada, but, he reflected savagely, he had loved his hope of politics from the time of the honeymoon onwards: and from that time he had not loved Ada.
Was that true? Had he neglected the substance for the shadow, used love upon his hope and not upon his wife? If he had his talk with her again, could he honestly begin it in another way? Could he begin with love? He knew that he could not, and squared his shoulders to the fact. It was a case, then, for the more courage. What was it Effie had said? “There are no limits to bravery.” He wondered, but he meant to see.
And Satan’s smile had faded. There is more joy amongst the devils over one sinner who back-slideth.... But not this time, Mephistopheles! Effie was winning still.
EFFIE and Sam knew that they ought to be happy in the weeks which followed, because to be good is, theoretically, to be happy: but they were not happy. Sam, indeed, was less unhappy than Effie because he had sunk into one of those leaden, numbed moods of his which he knew of old as the stage preliminary to his brightest inspirations, and he could wait resignedly if not happily for the inspiration to emerge.
Decidedly, he thought, he needed inspiration, He had to discover Ada, to search for her reality, and, having found it, to drag it out and set it in the forefront of her being. A big task: one whose success he must not jeopardize again by rushing at her prematurely without distinct plan. He had only made her suspicious of him by his first impulsive attempt, and time must undo the mischief before a return to the attack was either discreet or opportune.
He waited, but he did not savour life. When he had quickened Ada, life would, no doubt, be worth the living, but, meantime, it dragged. He told himself that he was too young yet at this new business of giving to feel the joy of it. Certainly, he was not joyful, but he was resolute. There was a grim tightening of the lips and a dogged look in the eyes which proclaimed that this was Samuel, the son of Anne. In this mood he could eat Dead Sea apples and feel they were a proper diet. Politics had gone, and with them any interest in the Council. And he did not know what to do about his business. He wanted to ask Effie, and Effie was not there to be asked.
It was not that she did not want to be there or that she did not suffer for her absence. Effie was not numb, and she suffered keenly, but she thought her absence strengthened Sam. When he came down from Hartle Pike with his resolution formed she took it that her scheme, as she had planned it, was complete and that she could forget her weak concession to return to the office. She was to be there in spirit, and spirit is strong though flesh is weak. Effie at the office in the flesh would have wanted to hug Sam and to kiss him, things which it is unbefitting to do in well-conducted offices. And, of course, she suffered. She had always known that she would suffer, but not that it would be as bad as this.
The office was a temptation every day: to go there was to be with him, it was to find alleviation for her fever, it was to be at peace: but it was also to fling away hard-won success, and she resisted. That resistance engrossed her. It was all that she was capable of doing; it demanded all her strength.
The obvious, the practical thing, if she was not to go to Sam’s office, was to go to someone else’s, to work, both as an antidote and as a means of livelihood, and she could not rouse herself to do it. She pawned some of the jewellery which remained to her, memorials of her father’s lavish past, sent the weekly dole to her mother and lived upon the rest. She had sunk to this, Effie the crusader, Effie the advocate of courage! With Mélisande, she told herself she was not happy. She was not happy, she was not well, and she wanted, wanted Sam. She stayed at home lest she should go to him and ruin all that she had done. It could not last and she knew it could not last, but neither did she see the end of it.
Then began the game of consequences: the moves of two pieces, one a pawn, the other the knight called Dubby Stewart.
It is a frumpish world, a world where the Frumps, of one or other sex or of neither sex, in one or other of their manifestations, have a great deal to do with the ordering of things. That is why it is politic, for one’s ease, never to ignore the Frumps and never, never to challenge them by an act of gallant defiance such as shying an imitation wedding ring into the waters of Blea Tarn.
Effie held, of course, that since she was in any case defying the Frumps it was honest to defy them in form as well as in substance, but it is only certain kinds of honesty which are the best policy.
The Frump who sat behind Effie at meals at the Inn (her name was Miss Entwistle) had doubted the genuineness of that ring, and when it disappeared her doubts went with it. The hussy, she saw, had realized that her ring deceived nobody, and was brazening it out in the shameless way of hussies.
Women are wicked, but men are only weak; so that, though Miss Entwistle faced Sam at dinner from the next table, it was some days before she could spare her attention from the back of the greater sinner and transfer it to the face of the lesser. She could stare to her heart’s content; it did not matter to Sam, who had only eyes for Effie: and the stare of Miss Entwistle was very persistent indeed. It was rude, but it was also pensive. It seemed to be looking for something it could not find.
She could not place him and was annoyed because she felt certain she had seen him before. She got up early more than once to read the names on the morning’s letters, but did not find one which she could associate with Sam, and came home to Manchester a disappointed woman. Her failure to identify him spoiled her holiday.
But all things come to her who waits, especially, as the world is made, to Frumps, and Miss Entwistle came by the knowledge she craved one afternoon when her friend Mrs. Grandage took her to Ada Branstone’s “At Home.”
The two photographs of Sam in Ada’s drawing-room were intended to sustain her reputation for perfect domesticity. She couldn’t live without him; she drew her very breath from him when he was there, and from his photographs when he was not. And since one was full-face and the other profile, they supplied Miss Entwistle with reliable identification of the sinner of Marbeck.
It was heavenly. Hers was the power and the glory of initiating a scandal, of exploding a bomb—which would certainly disturb the peace of quite a number of people, of figuring in a maelstrom of backbiting tea-parties as the one authentic eyewitness. It was irresistible, besides plain duty to her injured hostess.
The drop of gall in her brimming honey-pot was that she did not know Ada well enough to tell her the secret by herself, but must share the excitement of that first surprise with Mrs. Grandage. She whispered with her friend for some close-packed, hectic moments, and the two ladies stubbornly outstayed the rest of the callers.
They told Ada with a wonderful tenderness, watching her the while as cats watch mice, and Ada did not disappoint them. She cast no doubt on Miss Entwistle’s story; she did not tell her that she knew Sam was in London at the time because she had had letters from him. Though she had nothing in the world but her marriage, she made no effort to protect its reputation. She exhibited herself to them in all the fury of her jealous rage, so that naturally, seeing her instant belief in what they told her, the ladies formed their own conclusion.
“It is not the first time,” is what the eyes of Mrs. Grandage said, and the eyes of the spinster looked back at her sepulchrally and said, “It never is.”
Ada was married. She had the title of wife, and unfaithfulness on her part was as far removed from her imagination as from her opportunity. She was married to Sam; she was the woman in possession, with the title-deeds in her desk and the seal upon her finger, and this was flagrant outrage. It struck at the roots of her complacency, and complacency was life. Yet she hadn’t the wits to confound these iconoclasts with one little uninventive lie. It needed only that to abash Miss Entwistle—men’s faces are often alike, she knew perfectly well that he was in London: anything would have done, anything would have been better than this abject, immediate betrayal of her citadel. She struck her flag without firing a shot, and lapsed into a slough of inarticulate anger.
“What shall I do? What shall I do?” she wailed as soon as she was able to speak coherently.
“That,” said Miss Entwistle, “that, you poor dear, is your business.”
She had announced the glad tidings, she had found a titillating pleasure in watching Ada’s reception of them and now she was eager to be off, to spread the news, to be the first that ever burst into her friends’ drawing-rooms with word of a glorious scandal. She pleaded another call and escaped to her orgy.
“I’ll make him pay for this,” said Ada viciously.
“My dear,” advised Mrs. Grandage, who had a husband of her own, “I hope you will be tactful.”
“Tactful:” blazed Ada. “Tactful, when—oh! oh!” She screamed her sense of Sam’s enormity.
“Yes, but you know, men will be men.”
“It isn’t men. It’s Sam. After all I’ve done for him! Oh!” and this was a different “oh” from the others. It made Mrs. Grandage look up sharply. “The beast! The beast! This explains it all. Ethel, that man came home to me and asked me to adopt his child. He had the face. Of course I didn’t know it was his own he was speaking of, but I see it now. Ethel, what shall I do?”
They seemed to Mrs. Grandage to be drifting into deeper waters than she had skill to swim in. “I should take advice,” she said, meaning nothing except that neither by advising nor anything else was she going to be entangled in this affair.
“A solicitor’s?” asked Ada, catching at the phrase. “Yes. Naturally. Sam shall be made to pay to the uttermost farthing.” Her idea of legal obligations were, perhaps, not vaguer than other people’s.
“Not a solicitor’s,” said Mrs. Grandage in despair. “At least, my dear, not yet. Your father’s.”
“Yes. My father made me marry Sam. He brought Sam home and threw him at me. I will go to my father. Of course, in any case, I can’t stay here.”
Mrs. Grandage made a last rally for wordly-wisdom. “Couldn’t you bring yourself to see your husband first?” she asked.
“See him!” said Ada heroically. “I will never see him again as long as I live.”
The visitor buttoned her glove. After all, if Ada chose to make a fool of herself it was no business of hers, and she had tried her best, if a resolutely non-committal attempt can be a best. She kissed Ada with real sympathy.
“My dear,” she said, “I’d give a great deal to undo this.” And by “this” she did not mean the peccadillo of Sam Branstone, but the pruriency of Miss Entwistle. She was an experienced woman, and angry with herself for having listened to the temptress and for aiding and abetting her.
When Mrs. Grandage referred in after years to “that woman,” it was understood that she was thinking of Miss Entwistle.
Ada saw her to the door, and went straight to the kitchen.
“Kate,” she said to her cook, “Mr. Branstone has disgraced himself, he’s been unfaithful. I am going to my father’s. Please tell him that I know everything and that I shall not return.” She had no reticence.
“Very well, mum,” said the Capable cook.
The result was that when Sam went into the drawing-room that night, he found Anne Branstone sitting there, darning his socks, and perhaps it was because she was happy that she did not look a day older than when he saw her last; perhaps charring suited her; or perhaps living for an idea had kept her young. The idea was that, some day, Sam would need her.
It wasn’t a miracle: there was nothing more wonderful about it than the fact that Anne was a very good friend of the cook, Kate Earwalker: but Sam stood gaping helplessly. In his own house, at his age, and after all these years he stood before his mother, the intruder, like a schoolboy who knows himself at fault. She lacked nothing of the old ascendancy.
“Well,” she said, “you’re nobbut happy when you’ve got folks talking of you. But you don’t look thriving on it, neither.”
“Mother,” he gasped, “what’s this?”
“It’s you that will tell me that,” said Anne.
“Where’s Ada?”
“Gone to her father’s, and none coming back, she says. Says you’re unfaithful and told Kate she knows everything. What is it, Sam? What’s everything?”
“Who brought you here?”
“Kate did,” said Anne calmly. “Why, Sam, did you think I’ve lived with nothing better than what George Chappie and the papers told me of you? I’d a fancy for the truth, and it’s not a thing to get from men. Kate’s been a spy, like.”
“Has she!” he cried.
“She has, and you’ll bear no grudge for that. You’d have lived in a pig-sty and fed like a pig if I’d none sent Kate to do for you, but I’ve come myself this time. It looks summat beyond Kate.”
“But what’s happened? What is it?”
“You know better than me what it is. You’ve got folks talking of you and they’ve talked to Ada. Unfaithful, she told Kate, and she’s gone home to Peter’s.”
“She must come back,” said Sam.
“And why?” asked Anne. “Because folk talk? To stop their mouths?”
“No. Because I want her here. They’re talking, are they? Well, they can.”
Anne looked at him. “You don’t care if they do?”
“Why should I?”
“And you a politician?”
“Oh, politics!” he said. “That’s gone.” It had, and, as he saw thankfully, at the right time. He tried to imagine how differently this would have affected him if it had come in the midst of the Sandyford election. Electors postulate respectability in a candidate. But that had gone, and gossip did not matter now. The real things mattered. Ada mattered.
“You’ve had a move on, then,” she said, and neither her look nor tone suggested that she found the move displeasing.
“I daresay,” he said carelessly. “But Ada must come back. I’ve got to get her back.”
“Happen she’ll come and happen she won’t, and I’d have a better chance of knowing which if you’d told me what’s upset her.”
“What did she say?” he asked. “Unfaithful? Yes, it’s true. I’ve been unfaithful for ten years. I’ve never been faithful and I’ve never been fair. I’ve thought of the business and politics when I ought to have been thinking of her. I worked at them and I didn’t work at Ada. Don’t blame Ada, mother. I’ll not have that. You never liked her, and you prophesied a failure. It’s been a failure, but I made it one; I let it drift when I ought to have taken hold. But it isn’t going to be a failure now. I’ve given up the other things and I’ve come back to my job, the job I neglected, the job I did not see was there at all until——” He paused.
“Till what?” she asked.
“Till Effie showed it me.”
“Effie?” she asked. “Oh! Then there’s something in their talk.”
“Something? There’s everything, and everything that’s wrong-headed and abominable. That’s where this hurts me, mother. They’ll be saying wrong things of her, of Effie.” He began to see that gossip mattered.
“What would be the right things to say?” asked Anne dryly. “Who’s Effie? And do you mean her when you say you’ve been unfaithful for ten years?”
“I meant what I said. That I’ve put other things in front of Ada.”
“Including Effie?”
“Effie’s a ray from heaven,” he said.
“Oh, aye,” said Anne sceptically.
“Look here, mother, you’re not going to misunderstand?”
“Not if you can make me understand.”
“I can try,” he said, “and the chances are that I shall fail. The only thing that will make you understand Effie is to see her.”
“Try the-other ways first,” said Anne grimly.
“She made me see. She gave me everything. She gave me herself. I found myself because of her and I’m only living in the light she gave me.” It was difficult to find words for what Effie was and meant to him. “I don’t know if I can ever explain,” he faltered.
“Go on. You’re doing very well.” He was—Anne’s insight helping her.
“It’s like rebirth. It’s as if I’d lived till I met her six months ago with crooked eyesight. I didn’t see straight, and then, mother——” He hesitated as a man will hesitate before voicing a profound conviction, afraid lest he be thought absurd. “Then I found salvation, I’ve been a taker and we’re here to give. I took from you———”
“Leave that,” said Anne curtly. “I know it.”
“And I didn’t,” he replied. “It seems to me that I knew nothing till Effie come.”
“Why do you want Ada back?”
“It’s time I gave to her.”
“Did Effie show you that?”
“Yes.”
Anne was silent for a minute. Then: “I’ll have a look at Effie,” she said. “You can take me to her.”
“I can’t do that,” said Sam. “We’re not to meet.”
She pondered it, and him. “Kate told me you were looking ill,” she said with apparent inconsequence. “Well, if you can’t take me to Effie, I must go alone. I’m going, either road. Give me her address and I’ll go to-morrow.”
He wrote it down. “Effie Mannering,” she read. “Aye,” she said grimly, “I’ll give that young woman a piece of my mind.”
“Mother,” he said, alarmed, “you’ll not be rude to her! You’ve not misunderstood?”
“Maybe,” said Anne, “but I don’t think so. I think I understand that you’ve got your silly heads up in the clouds and it’ll do the pair of you a lot of good to have them brought to earth. I’ll know for sure when I’ve set eyes on her.”
“You’ll see the glory of her, then,” he said defiantly.
“Shall I?” she asked. “If you ask me, Sam, there’s been a sight too much glorification about this business. It shapes to me,” she went on, thwarting the protest which was leaping to his lips. “It shapes to me like a plain case of love. Aye, and love’s too rare a thing in this world to be thrown away. I was never one to waste.”
So Anne Branstone took control, and Sam sat staring at her helplessly like a man who dreams.