CHAPTER XLII
NATURE SMILES
About eleven o’clock Lizzie Straker’s restlessness overflowed into action. She got up, whispered something to Joan Gaunt, and was about to push her way through the young fir trees when the elder woman called her back.
“We must keep together.”
“I can’t loaf about here any longer. I’m catching cold. And I promised to keep a look-out in the lane.”
Joan Gaunt brought out her electric lamp and glanced at her watch.
“It is only just eleven.”
“He said he might be here early.”
Obviously Lizzie Straker meant to have her way, and her having it meant that Joan and Eve had to break camp and move into the timber track that joined the lane. The night was fairly dark, but Joan Gaunt had taken care to scatter torn scraps of white paper between the clump of firs and the woodland track. A light wind had risen, and the black boughs of the firs swayed vaguely against the sky. The sandy track was banked with furze, broom, and young birch trees, and here and there between the heather were little islands of short sweet turf that had been nibbled by rabbits. Joan Gaunt and Eve spread their coats on one of these patches of turf, while Lizzie Straker went on towards the lane to watch for Galahad.
Eve heard the turret clock at Fernhill strike twelve. The wind in the trees kept up a constant under-chant, so that the subdued humming of Kentucky’s car as it crept up the lane was hardly distinguishable from the wind-song overhead. Two beams of light swung into the dark colonnade, thrusting yellow rays in among the firs, and splashing on the gorse and heather. The big car was crawling dead slow, with Lizzie Straker standing on the step and holding on to one of the hood-brackets. Jones, the chauffeur, was driving.
“Here we are.”
Lizzie Straker jumped down excitedly.
“It was a good thing I went. He’d have missed the end of the lane. Wouldn’t you, old sport?”
“I was looking for you, you know, and not for sign-posts.”
“Get along, sir! You’re not half serious enough.”
“That’s good. And me asking for penal servitude and playing the hero.”
He climbed out.
“You had better turn her here, Jones, so that we shall have her nose pointing the right way if we have to get off in a hurry. Hallo, Miss Gaunt, you ought to be out in the Balkans doing the Florence Nightingale! What!”
Lizzie Straker was keeping close to him, with that air of ownership that certain women assume towards men who are faithful to no particular woman.
“Is Miss Carfax with you?”
Lizzie laughed.
“Rather! She’s here all right. We are going to make her do the lighting up to-night.”
“Plenty of inflammable stuff here, Miss Carfax. You can include me if you like.”
But the joke did not carry.
The chauffeur had turned the car and put out the lamps. The war material was stored in a big locker under the back seat, and consisted of a couple of cans of petrol, half a sack of shavings, and a bundle of tow. The chauffeur passed them out to Kentucky, who had taken off his heavy coat and thrown it into the car.
“Now then, all ready, comrades?”
“Joan knows the way!”
Eve’s mute acceptance of the adventure was not destined to survive the night-march through the fir woods. She was walking beside Joan Gaunt, who led the attacking party, Lizzie Straker shadowing Lawrence Kentucky, Jones, the chauffeur, carrying the petrol cans and bringing up the rear. The grey sandy track wound like a ribbon among the black boles of the firs, whose branches kept up a sibilant whispering as the night wind played through them.
It struck Eve that they were going in the wrong direction.
“We are walking away from Fernhill!”
Joan Gaunt snapped a retort out of the darkness.
“We are not going to Fernhill.”
Eve was puzzled. She might have asked in the words of unregenerate man, “Then where the devil are you going?”
In another moment she had guessed at their objective, remembering Canterton’s cottage that stood white and new and empty, under the black benisons of the tall firs. Her cottage! She thought of it instantly as something personal and precious, something that was symbolical, something that thesepétroleusesshould never harm.
“What are you going to burn this time?”
“A new house that belongs to the Cantertons of Fernhill.”
Eve’s sense of humour was able to snatch one instant’s laughter from the unexpectedness of the adventure. What interplay life offered. What a jest circumstances were working off on her. She was being challenged to declare herself, subjected to a Solomon’s judgment, posed by being asked to destroy something that had been created for the real woman in herself.
She was conscious of a tense feeling at the heart, and a quickening of her breathing. The physical part of her was to be embroiled. She heard Lizzie Straker giggling noiselessly, and the sound angered her, touched some red spot in her brain. She felt her muscles quivering.
“Would it be the cottage?”
Her doubts were soon set at rest, for Joan Gaunt turned aside along a broad path that led through a dense plantation. It was thick midnight here, but as the trees thinned Eve saw a whiteness shining through—the white walls of Canterton’s cottage.
For the moment her brain felt fogged. She was trembling on the edge of action, yet still held back and waited.
The whole party hesitated on the edge of the wood, the women and Lawrence Kentucky speaking in whispers.
“Seems all right!”
“Silent as the proverbial tomb!”
“I’ll go round and reconnoitre.”
He stole off with jerky, striding vehemence, pushed through a young thuja hedge, and disappeared behind the house. In two minutes he was back again, spitting with satisfaction.
“Splendid! All dark and empty oh. Come forrard. We’ll persuade one of the front windows.”
They pushed through between the soft cypresses and reached the lawn in front of the cottage where the grey stone path went from the timber porch to the hedge of yews. Kentucky and the chauffeur piled their war-plant in the porch, and being rapid young gentlemen, lost no time in attacking one of the front windows.
“We are not going to burn this house!”
Eve hardly knew her own voice when she spoke. It sounded so thin, and quiet, and cold.
Lizzie Straker whisked round like a snappy terrier.
“What did you say?”
“This house is not going to be burnt.”
“What rot are you talking?”
“I mean just what I say.”
“Don’t talk bosh!”
“I tell you, I am in earnest.”
Lizzie Straker made a quick movement, and snatched at Eve’s wrist. She thrust her face forward with a kind of back-street truculence.
“What d’you mean?”
“What I have said.”
“Joan, d’you hear? She’s trying to rat. What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing. Only I have ceased to believe in these methods.”
“Oh, you have, have you!”
Even in the dim light Eve could see the expanded nostrils and threatening eyes.
“Let my wrist go!”
“Not a bit of it. What’s this particular house to you? What have you turned soft for? Out with it. I suppose there’s a man somewhere at the back of your mind.”
There was a sound in Lizzie Straker’s voice that reminded Eve of the ripping of calico.
“I am simply telling you that this cottage is not going to be burnt.”
“Joan, d’you hear that? You—you can’t stop it!”
Eve twisted free.
“I have only to shout rather strenuously. The Fernhill people are on the alert. Unless you tell Mr. Kentucky, or Galahad as you please to call him——”
Lizzie Straker sprang at her like a wild cat.
“Sneak, rat, moral prostitute!”
Eve had never had to face such a mad thing, a thing that was so tempestuously and hysterically vindictive. Lizzie Straker might have been bred in the slums and taught to bite and kick and scratch like a frenzied animal.
“You beast! You sneak! We shan’t burn the place, shan’t we? Leave her to me, Joan, I say. I’ll teach her to play the traitor!”
Eve was a strong young woman, but she was attacked by a fanatic who was not too furious to forget the Japanese tricks she had learnt at a wrestling school.
“I’ve got you. I’ll pin you down, you beastly sneak!”
She tripped Eve and threw her, and squirming over her, pinioned Eve’s right arm in such a way that she had her at her mercy.
“You little brute, you’re breaking my arm!”
“I will break it, if you don’t lie still.”
Joan Gaunt had been watching the tussle, ready to intervene if her comrade were in danger of being worsted. Lawrence Kentucky and the chauffeur had their heads inside the window that they had just succeeded in forcing, when the porch door opened suddenly, and a man rushed out. He swung round, pivoting by one hand round one of the corner posts of the porch, and was on the two men at the window before they could run. To Joan Gaunt, who had turned as the door opened, it was like watching three shadows moving against the white wall of the cottage. The big attacking shadow flung out long arms, and the lesser shadows toppled and melted into the obscurity of mother earth.
“Lizzie, look out!”
Joan Gaunt had plenty of pluck, but she was sent staggering by a hand-off that would have grassed most full-backs in the kingdom. Canterton bent over the two women. One hand gripped Lizzie Straker’s back, crumpling up the clothes between the shoulder blades, the other went under her chin.
“Let go!”
“I shan’t. I’ll break her arm if——”
But the primitive and male part of Canterton had thrown off the little niceties of civilisation. Thumb and fingers came together mercilessly, and with the spasm of her crushed larynx, Lizzie Straker let go her hold.
“You damned cat!”
He lifted her bodily, and pitched her two yards away on to the grass.
“Come on, you chaps. Collar those two beggars over there!”
There were no men to back him, but the ruse answered. Joan Gaunt had clutched Lizzie Straker, dragged her up, dazed and coughing, and was hurrying her off towards the fir woods. Lawrence Kentucky and Jones, the chauffeur, had also taken to their heels, and had reached the thuja hedge behind the house. The party coalesced, broke through, melted away into the darkness.
Eve was on her feet, breathless, and white with a great anger. She knew that just at the moment that Canterton had used his strength, Lizzie Straker had tried to break her arm.
CHAPTER XLIII
EVE COMES TO HERSELF
Canterton went as far as the hedge, but did not follow the fugitives any farther. He stood there for two or three minutes, understanding that a sensitive woman who had been involved in a vulgar scrimmage would not be sorry to be left alone for a moment while she recovered her poise.
Then he heard Eve calling.
“Where are you?”
He turned instantly, and walked back round the cottage to find her standing close to the porch.
“Ah, I thought you might be following them. Let them go.”
“I wanted nothing better than to be rid of them. Are you hurt?”
“That dear comrade of mine tried to break my arm. The elbow hurts rather badly.”
“Let me feel.”
He went close, and she stretched out her arm and let his big hands move gently over it.
“The landmarks seem all right. Can you bend it?”
“Oh, yes! It is only a bit of a wrench.”
“Sit down. There is a seat here in the porch. I thought you would like it. There is something pleasant in the idea of sitting at the doorway of one’s home.”
“And growing old and watching the oak mellowing. They have left their petrol and shavings here.”
“I’ll dispose of them presently.”
His hands touched hers by accident, but her fingers did not avoid his.
“I did not know that the cottage was to be the victim. I only found out just at the last. How did you happen to be here?”
“Sit down, dear, and I will tell you.”
The quiet tenderness had come back into his voice. He was the comrade, the lover, the father of Lynette, the self-master, the teller of fairy stories, the maker of droll rhymes. Eve had no fear of him. His nearness gave her a mysterious sense of peace.
“What a comfortable seat!”
“Just free of the south-west wind. You could read and work here.”
She sighed wistfully.
“Yes, I shall work here.”
Neither of them spoke of surrender, or hinted at the obvious accomplishment of an ideal. Their subtle understanding of each other seemed part of the darkness, something that enveloped them, and did not need to be defined. Eve’s hand lay against Canterton’s on the oak seat. The lightest of touches was sufficient. She was learning that the light, delicate touches, the most sensitive vibrations, are the things that count in life.
“How did you happen to be here?”
“You had given me a warning, and I came to guard the most precious part of my property.”
“And you were listening? You heard?”
“Oh, everything, especially that wild cat’s tin-plate voice. What of the great movement?”
She gave a subtle little laugh.
“I had just found out how impossible they are. I had been realising it slowly. Directly I got back into the country my old self seemed to return.”
“And you did not harmonise with the other—ladies?”
“No. They did not seem to have any senses, whereas I felt part of the green stuff of the earth, and not a bit of grit under Nature’s big toe.”
“That’s good. You can laugh again.”
“Yes, and more kindly, even at those two enthusiasts, one of whom tried to break my arm.”
“I’m afraid I handled her rather roughly; but people who appeal to violence must be answered with violence.”
“Lizzie Straker always came in for the rough treatment. She couldn’t talk to a crowd without using the poison that was under her tongue. She always took to throwing vitriol.”
“Yes, the business has got into the hands of the wrong people.”
They sat in silence for a while, and it was the silence of two people who lean over a gate, shoulder to shoulder, and look down upon some fine stretch of country rolling to the horizon. It was the togetherness that mattered. Each presence seemed to absorb the other, and to obtain from it an exquisite tranquillity.
Eve withdrew her hand, and Canterton saw her touch her hair.
“Oh!”
“What is it? The arm?”
“No; but my hat and hair.”
He laughed.
“How much more serious. And what admirable distress. I think I can help. Take this.”
He brought out a pocket electric lamp.
“I always carry this at night. It is most useful in a garden. There is an old Venetian mirror hanging at the top of the stairs. While you are at work I will clear away all this stuff.”
“What will you do with it?”
“Pitch the shavings into the coal cellar. The petrol we can use—quite ironically—in an hour’s time.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have been thinking. Go in and look into that Venetian mirror!”
She touched his arm with the tips of her fingers.
“Dear, I trust you. I do, utterly. I couldn’t help it, even if you were not to be trusted.”
“Is that Nature?”
“I think it must be!”
“Put all fear out of your heart.”
She rose and drew apart, yet with a suggestion of lingering and of the gliding away of a dear presence that would quickly return. The light of the pocket lamp flashed a yellow circle on the oak door. She pushed it open and entered the cottage, and climbed the stairs with a new and delightful sense of possession. She was conscious no longer of problems, disharmonies, the suppression of all that was vital in her. A spacious life had opened, and she entered it as one enters a June garden.
Canterton had cleared away Lawrence Kentucky’s war material, and Eve found him sitting in the porch when she returned.
“Very tired?”
“No.”
“May I talk a little longer?”
“Why not!”
She sat down beside him.
“Our comradeship starts from now. May I assume that?”
“I dare to assume it, because one learns not to ask too much.”
“Ah, that’s it. Life, at its best, is a very delicate perfume. The gross satisfactions don’t count in the long run. I want you to do big things. I want us to do them together. And Lynette shall keep us two healthy children.”
She thought a moment, staring into the night.
“And when Lynette grows up?”
“I think she will love you the better. And we shall never tarnish her love. Are you content?”
He bent towards her, and took one of her hands.
“Dearest of women! think, consider, before you pledge yourself. Can you bear to surrender so much for the working life I can give you?”
She answered him under her breath.
“Yes. I want a man for a comrade—a man who doesn’t want to be bribed. Oh, my dear, let me speak out. Sex—sex disgusted me in that London life. I revolted from it. It made me hate men. Yet it is not sex that is wrong, only our use of it. I think it is the child that counts in those matters with a woman.”
His hand held hers firmly.
“Eve, will you grow hungry—ever?”
“For what?”
“Children!”
She bent her head.
“I will tell you. No. I think I can spend that part of the woman in me on Lynette and on you.”
“On me.”
“A woman’s love—I mean the real love—has some of the mother spirit in it. Don’t you know that?”
He lifted her hand and kissed it.
“And may I grumble to you sometimes, little mother, and come to you to be comforted when I am oppressed by fools? You can trust me. I shall never make you ashamed. And now, for practical things. You must be in London to-morrow morning. I have worked it all out.”
“Remember, I am a very independent young woman.”
“Oh, I know! Let me spend myself, sometimes. Have you any luggage at the ‘Black Boar’?”
“No, only my knapsack, which I left in the car.”
“Fancy a woman travelling with nothing more than a knapsack! Oh, Eve, my child!”
“I didn’t like it. I’ll own up. All my luggage is stored with some warehouse people in town. I have the receipts here in my purse.”
“That’s luck—that’s excellent! We must walk round to the Basingford road to miss any of my scouts. You will wait there, say by the Camber cross-roads, while I get my car out.”
He felt for his watch.
“Have you that lamp?”
“It is here on the seat.”
“Just two o’clock. I shall tell my man I’m off in chase of a party who made off in a car. I shall bring you one of my greatcoats and pick you up at the cross-roads. We shall be in London by five. We will get some breakfast somehow, and then knock up the warehouse people and pile your luggage into the back. I shall drive you to a quiet hotel I know, and I shall leave you there. What could be simpler? An independent young woman staying at a quiet hotel, rather bored with London and inclined to resume a discarded career.”
She laughed softly—happily.
“It is simple! Then I shall have to write you a formal letter.”
“Just that.”
CHAPTER XLIV
THE NIGHT DRIVE
Eve, waiting at the Camber cross-roads under the shadow of a yew that grew in the hedgerow, saw an arm of light sweep slowly down the open road before her, the glare of Canterton’s headlights as his car rounded the wooded corner about a quarter of a mile from the Fernhill gates.
She remained in the shadow till she was sure that it was Canterton, and that he was alone.
Pulling up, he saw her coming as a shadow out of the shadows, a slim figure that detached itself from the trunk of the yew.
“All right! Here’s a coat. Get into the back, and curl yourself up. It’s as well that no Peeping Tom in Basingford should discover that I have a passenger.”
Eve put on the coat, climbed in, and snuggled down into the deeply cushioned seat so that she was hidden by the coachwork. The car had not stopped for more than thirty seconds, Canterton holding the clutch out with the first speed engaged. They were on the move again, and, with deft gear-changing, gliding away with hardly a sound.
Eve lay and looked at the sky, and at the dim tops of the trees sliding by, trailing their branches across the stars. She could see the outline of Canterton’s head and shoulders in front of her, but never once did she see his profile, for the car was travelling fast and he kept his eyes on the winding road that was lit brilliantly by the electric headlights. They swept through Basingford like a charge of horse. Eve saw the spire of the church walk by, a line of dark roofs undulating beneath it. The car turned sharply into the London road, and the quickening purr of the engine told of an open throttle.
They drove ten miles before Canterton slowed up and drew to the side of the road.
“You can join me now!”
He leant over and opened the door, and she took the seat beside him.
“Warm enough?”
“Yes.”
He looked at her throat.
“Button up that flap across the collar. That’s it. And here’s a rug. I have had to keep myself glued to the wheel for the last twenty minutes. There is a lot of common land about here, and you never know when a cow or a pony may drop from the skies.”
They were off again, with trees, hedgerows, gates, and cottages rushing into the glare of the headlights, and vanishing behind them.
“Would you like to sleep?”
“No; I feel utterly awake!”
“Not distressfully so?”
“No, not in that way. I have no regrets. And I think I am very happy.”
He let the car race to her full speed along a straight stretch of road.
“I could drive over the Himalayas to-night—do anything. You have a way of making me feel most exultantly competent.”
“Have I? How good. Shall I always be so stimulating?”
He looked down at her momentarily.
“Yes, because we shall not be crushing life to get all its perfume.”
“Restraint keeps things vivid.”
“That’s it—that’s what people don’t realise about marriage.”
She thrilled to the swift motion of the car, and to the knowledge that the imperturbable audacity of his driving was a man’s tribute to her presence.
“I suppose most people would say that we are utterly wrong.”
“It would be utterly wrong, for most people.”
“But not for us.”
“Not for us. We are just doing the sane and logical thing, because it is possible for us to live above the conventions. Ordinary people have to live on make-believe, and pretend they like it, and to shout ‘shame,’ when the really clean people insist on living like free and rational beings.”
“You are not afraid of the old women!”
“Good God! aren’t some of us capable of getting above the sexual fog—above all that dull and pious nastiness? That’s why I like a man like Shaw, who lets off moral dynamite under the world’s immoral morality. All the crusty, nonsensical notions come tumbling about mediocrity’s ears. There are times when it is a man’s duty to shock his neighbours!”
Eve sat in silence for some minutes, watching the pale road rushing towards them out of the darkness. Canterton was not driving the car so strenuously, but was letting her slide along lazily at fifteen miles an hour. Very soon the dawn would be coming up, and the white points of the stars would melt into invisibility.
“We don’t want to be too early.”
“No.”
There was a pause, and then Eve uttered the thoughts of the last half hour.
“One thing troubles me.”
“What is that?”
“Your wife.”
He slackened speed still further, so that he need not watch the road so carefully.
“I feel that I am taking——”
“What is hers?”
“Yes.”
His voice was steady and confident.
“That need not trouble you. Neither the physical nor the spiritual part of me owes anything to my wife. We are just two strangers who happen to be tied together by a convention. I am speaking neither ironically nor with cynicism. They are just simple facts. I don’t know why we married. I often marvel at what I must have been then. Now I am nothing to her, nor she to me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Quite sure. Her interests are all outside my life, mine outside hers. We happen to reside in the same house, and meet at table. We do not quarrel, because we are too indifferent to quarrel. You are taking nothing that she would miss.”
“And yet!”
“Is it the secrecy?”
“In a way.”
“Well, I am going to tell her. I had decided on that.”
She turned to him in astonishment.
“Tell her!”
“Just the simple fact that I have an affection for you, and that we are going to be fellow-workers. I shall tell her that there is nothing for her to fear, that we shall behave like sensible beings, that it is all clean, and wholesome, and rational.”
“But, my dear!”
She was overwhelmed for the moment by his audacious sincerity.
“But will she believe?”
“She will believe me. Gertrude knows that I have never shirked telling her the truth.”
“And will she consent?”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“But surely, to a woman——”
“Eve, this sort of problem has always been so smirched and distorted that most people seem unable to see its outlines cleanly. I am going to make her see it cleanly. It may sound strange to you, but I believe she is one of the few women capable of taking a logical and restrained view of it. The thing is not to hurt a woman’s self love publicly. Often she will condone other sorts of relationship if you save her that. In our case there is going to be no sexual, backstairs business. You are too sacred to me. You are part of the mystery of life, of the beauty and strangeness and wonder of things. I love the look in your eyes, the way your lips move, the way you speak to me, every little thing that is you. Do you think I want to take my flowers and crush them with rough physical hands? Should I love them so well, understand them so well? It is all clean, and good, and wholesome.”
She lay back, thinking.
“I know that it looks to me reasonable and good.”
“Of course it is. Not in every case, mind you. I’m not boasting. I only happen to know myself. I am a particular sort of man who has discovered that such a life isthelife, and that I am capable of living it. I would not recommend it for the million. It is possible, because you are you.”
She said, half in a whisper:
“You must tell her before I come!”
“I will!”
“And I shall not come unless she understands, and sympathises, which seems incredible.”
Canterton stopped the car and turned in his seat, with one hand resting on the steering-wheel.
“If, by any chance, she persists in seeing ugly things, thinking ugly thoughts, then I shall break the social ropes. I don’t want to. But I shall do it, if society, in her person, refuses to see things cleanly.”
His voice and presence dominated her. She knew in her heart of hearts that he was in grim earnest, that nothing would shake him, that he would go through to the end. And the woman in her leapt to him with a new exultation, and with a tenderness that rose to match his strength.
“Dearest, I—I——”
He caught her hands.
“There, there, I know! It shan’t be like that. I swear it. I want no wounds, and ugliness, and clamour.”
“And Lynette?”
“Yes, there is Lynette. Don’t doubt me. I am going to do the rational and best thing. I shall succeed.”
CHAPTER XLV
GERTRUDE CANTERTON CAUSES AN ANTI-CLIMAX
“Run along, old lady. Daddy’s going to write three hundred and seventy-nine letters.”
“Oh, poor daddy! And are you going to write to Miss Eve?”
“Yes.”
“Give her my love, and tell her God’s been very nice. I heard Him promise inside me.”
“That’s very sensible of God.”
Lynette vanished, and Canterton looked across the breakfast-table at his wife, who was submerged beneath the usual flood of letters. She had not been listening—had not heard what Lynette had said. A local anti-suffrage campaign was the passion of the moment.
It struck Canterton suddenly, perhaps for the first time in his life, that his wife was a happy woman, thoroughly contented with her discontent. All this fussy altruism, this tumult of affairs, gave her the opportunity of full self-expression. Even her grievances were harmonious, chiming in with her passion for restless activity. Her egoism was utterly lacking in self-criticism. If a kettle can be imagined as enjoying itself when it is boiling over, Gertrude Canterton’s happiness can be understood.
“Gertrude, I want to have a talk with you.”
“What, James?”
“I want to have a talk with you.”
She dropped a type-written letter on to her plate, and looked at him with her pale eyes.
“What is it?”
“Something I want you to know. Shall we wait and turn into the library?”
“I’m rushed to death this morning. I have to be at Mrs. Brocklebank’s at ten, and——”
“All right. I’ll talk while you finish your breakfast. It won’t take long.”
She prepared to listen to him with the patient air of an over-worked official whose inward eye remains fixed upon insistent accumulations of business. It did not strike her that there was anything unusual about his manner, or that his voice was the voice of a man who touched the deeper notes of life.
“Eve Carfax is coming back as my secretary and art expert. She has given up her work in town.”
“I am really very glad, James.”
“Thanks. She got entangled in the militant campaign, but the extravagances disgusted her, and she broke away.”
“Sensible young woman. She might help me down here, especially as she has some intimate knowledge of the methods of these fanatics.”
“It is possible. But that is not quite all that I want to tell you. In the first place, I built the new cottage with the idea that she would come back.”
His wife’s face showed vague surprise.
“Did you? Don’t you think it was a little unnecessary? After all——”
“We are coming to the point. I have a very great affection for Eve Carfax. She and I see things together as two humans very rarely see them. We were made for the same work. She understands the colour of life as I understand it.”
Gertrude Canterton wrinkled up her forehead as though she were puzzled.
“That is very nice for you, James. It ought to be a help.”
“I want you to understand the whole matter thoroughly. I am telling you the truth, because it seems to me the sane and honest thing to do. You and I are not exactly comrades, are we? We just happen to be married. We have our own interests, our own friends. As a man, I have wanted someone who sympathised and understood. I am not making this a personal question, for I know you do not get much sympathy from me. But I have found a comrade. That is all.”
His wife sat back in her chair, staring.
“Do you mean to say that you are in love with this girl?”
“Exactly! I am in love with her.”
“James, how ridiculous!”
Perhaps laughter was the last thing that he had expected, but laugh she did with a thin merriment that had no acid edge to it. It was the laughter of an egoist who had failed utterly to grasp the significance of what he had said. She was too sexless to be jealous, too great an egoist to imagine that she was being slighted. It appealed to her as a comedy, as something quite outside herself.
“How absurd! Why, you are over forty.”
“Just so. That makes it more practical. I wanted you to realise how things stand, and to tell you that I am capable of a higher sort of affection than most people indulge in. You have nothing to fear.”
She wriggled her shoulders.
“I don’t feel alarmed, James, in the least. I know you would never do common, vulgar things. You always were eccentric. I suppose this is like discovering a new rose. It is really funny. I only ask you not to make a fool of yourself in public.”
He looked at her steadily and with a kind of compassion.
“My dear Gertrude, that is the very point I want to impress upon you. I am grimly determined that no one shall be made a fool of, least of all you. Treat this as absolutely between ourselves.”
She wriggled and poked her chin at him.
“Oh, you big, eccentric creature! Falling in love! Somehow, it is so quaint, that it doesn’t make me jealous. I suppose I have so many real and absorbing interests that I am rather above such things. But I do hope you won’t make yourself ridiculous.”
“I can promise you that. We are to be good friends and fellow-workers. Only I wanted you to understand.”
“Of course I understand. I’m such a busy woman, James, and my life is so full, that I really haven’t time to be sentimental. I have heard that most middle-aged men get fond of school-girls in a fatherly kind of way.”
He crushed his serviette and threw it on the table.
“In a way, you are one of the most sensible women, Gertrude, I have ever met.”
“Am I?”
“Only you don’t realise it. It’s more temperament than virtue.”
“I’m a woman of the world, James. And there are so many important things to do that I haven’t time to worry myself about harmless little romances. I don’t think I mind in the least.”
He pushed back his chair and rose.
“I did not think you would. Only we are all egoists, more or less. One never quite knows how the ‘self’ in a person will jump.”
He crossed the room and paused at the window, looking out. His thoughts were that this wife of his was a most amazing fool, without sufficient sexual sense to appreciate human nature. It was not serene wisdom that had made her take the matter so calmly, but sheer, egregious fatuity, the milk-and-water-mindedness that is incapable of great virtues or great sins.
“Have you thought of Lynette?”
“What has Lynette to do with it, James?”
“Oh, nothing!”
He gave her up. She was hopeless. And yet his contempt made him feel sorry.
Her hand had gone out to her papers, and was stirring them to crepitations that seemed to express the restless satisfactions of her life.
“Don’t you over-work yourself, Gertrude?”
“I don’t think so. But sometimes I do feel——”
“You ought to have a secretary, some capable young woman who could sit and write letters for eight hours a day. I can easily allow you another three hundred a year.”
She flushed. He had touched the one vital part in her.
“Oh, James, I could do so much more. And there is so much to be done. My postage alone is quite an item!”
“Of course! Then it’s settled. I’m glad I thought of it.”
“James, it’s most generous of you. I feel quite excited. There are all sorts of things I want to take up.”
He went out into the garden, realising that he had made her perfectly happy.