“DEAR MR. ULFORD,—I am grieved to play you false, but I am tootired to-night to come on. Probably you are amusing yourself. Iam sitting here alone over such a dull book. One can’t go to bedat twelve, somehow, even if one is tired. The habit of the season’sagainst early hours and one couldn’t sleep. Be nice and come in forfive minutes on your way home, and tell me all about it. I know youpass the end of the square, so it won’t be out of your way.—Yoursvery sincerely, V. H.”
After writing this note Lady Holme hesitated for a moment, then she went to a writing table, opened a drawer and took out a tiny, flat key. She enclosed it in two sheets of thick note paper, folded the note also round it, and put it into an envelope which she carefully closed. After writing Leo Ulford’s name on the envelope she rang again for the footman.
“Take this to Eaton Square,” she said, naming the number of the house. “And give it to Mr. Ulford yourself. Go in a hansom. When you have given Mr. Ulford the note come straight back in the hansom and let me know. After that you can go to bed. Do you understand?”
“Yes, my lady.”
The man went out.
Lady Holme stood up to give him the note. She remained standing after he had gone. An extraordinary sensation of relief had come to her. Action had lessened her pain, had removed much of the pressure of emotion upon her heart. For a moment she felt almost happy.
She sat down again and took up a book. It was a book of poems written by a very young girl whom she knew. There was a great deal about sorrow in the poems, and sorrow was always alluded to as a person; now flitting through a forest in the autumn among the dying leaves, now bending over a bed, now walking by the sea at sunset watching departing ships, now standing near the altar at a wedding. The poems were not good. On the other hand, they were not very bad.
They had some grace, some delicacy here and there, now and then a touch of real, if by no means exquisite, sentiment. At this moment Lady Holme found them soothing. There was a certain music in them and very little reality. They seemed to represent life as a pensive phantasmagoria of bird songs, fading flowers, dying lights, soft winds and rains and sighing echoes.
She read on and on. Sometimes a hard thought intruded itself upon her mind—the thought of Leo Ulford with the latch-key of her husband’s house in his hand. That thought made the poems seem to her remarkably unlike life.
She looked at the clock. The footman had been away long enough to do his errand. Just as she was thinking this he came into the room.
“Well?” she said.
“I gave Mr. Ulford the note, my lady.”
“Then you can go to bed. Good-night. I’ll put out the lights here.”
“Thank you, my lady.”
As he went away she turned again to the poems; but now she could not read them. Her eyes rested upon them, but her mind took in nothing of their meaning. Presently—very soon—she laid the book down and sat listening. The footman had shut the drawing-room door. She got up and opened it. She wanted to hear the sound of the latch-key being put into the front door by Leo Ulford. It seemed to her as if that sound would be like theleit motifof her determination to govern, to take her own way, to strike a blow against the selfish egoism of men. After opening the door she sat down close to it and waited, listening.
Some minutes passed. Then she heard—not the key put into the hall door; it had not occurred to her that she was much too far away to hear that—but the bang of the door being shut.
Quickly she closed the drawing-room door, went back to the distant sofa, sat down upon it and began to turn over the poems once more. She even read one quite carefully. As she finished it the door was opened.
She looked up gaily to greet Leo and saw her husband coming into the room.
She was greatly startled. It had never occurred to her that Fritz was quite as likely to arrive before Leo Ulford as Leo Ulford to arrive before Fritz. Why had she never thought of so obvious a possibility? She could not imagine. The difference between the actuality and her intense and angry conception of what it would be, benumbed her mind for an instant. She was completely confused. She sat still with the book of poems on her lap, and gazed at Lord Holme as he came towards her, taking long steps and straddling his legs as if he imagined he had a horse under him. The gay expression had abruptly died away from her face and she looked almost stupid.
“Hulloa!” said Lord Holme, as he saw her.
She said nothing.
“Thought you were goin’ to the Blaxtons to-night,” he added.
She made a strong effort and smiled.
“I meant to, but I felt tired after the opera.”
“Why don’t you toddle off to bed then?”
“I feel tired, I don’t feel sleepy.”
Lord Holme stared at her, put his hand into his trousers pocket and pulled out his cigarette-case. Lady Holme knew that he had been in a good humour when he came home, and that the sight of her sitting up in the drawing-room had displeased him. She had seen a change come into his face. He had been looking gay. He began to look glum and turned his eyes away from her.
“What have you been up to?” she asked, with a sudden light gaiety and air of comradeship.
“Club—playin’ bridge,” he answered, lighting a cigarette.
He shot a glance at her sideways as he spoke, a glance that was meant to be crafty. If she had not been excited and horribly jealous, such a glance would probably have amused her, even made her laugh. Fritz’s craft was very transparent. But she could not laugh now. She knew he was telling her the first lie that had occurred to him.
“Lucky?” she asked, still preserving her light and casual manner.
“Middlin’,” he jerked out.
He sat down in an armchair and slowly stretched his legs, staring up at the ceiling. Lady Holme began to think rapidly, feverishly.
Had he locked the front door when he came in? Very much depended upon whether he had or had not. The servants had all gone to bed. Not one of them would see that the house was closed for the night. Fritz was a very casual person. He often forgot to do things he had promised to do, things that ought to be done. On the other hand, there were moments when his memory was excellent. If she only knew which mood had been his to-night she thought she would feel calmer. The uncertainty in which she was made mind and body tingle. If Fritz had remembered to lock the door, Leo Ulford would try to get in, fail, and go away. But if he had not remembered, at any moment Leo Ulford might walk into the room triumphantly with the latch-key in his hand. And it was nearly half-past twelve.
She wished intensely that she knew what Fritz had done.
“What’s up?” he said abruptly.
“Up?” she said with an uncontrollable start.
“Yes, with you?”
“Nothing. What d’you mean?”
“Why, you looked as if—don’t you b’lieve I’ve been playin’ bridge?”
“Of course I do. Really, Fritz, how absurd you are!”
It was evident that he, too, was not quite easy to-night. If he had a conscience, surely it was pricking him. Fierce anger flamed up again suddenly in Lady Holme, and the longing to lash her husband. Yet even this anger did not take away the anxiety that beset her, the wish that she had not done the crazy thing. The fact of her husband’s return before Leo’s arrival seemed to have altered her action, made it far more damning. To have been found with Leo would have been compromising, would have roused Fritz’s anger. She wanted to rouse his anger. She had meant to rouse it. But when she looked at Fritz she did not like the thought of Leo walking in at this hour holding the latch-key in his hand. What had Fritz done that night to Rupert Carey? What would he do to-night if—?
“What the deuce is up with you?”
Lord Holme drew in his legs, sat up and stared with a sort of uneasy inquiry which he tried to make hard. She laughed quickly, nervously.
“I’m tired, I tell you. It was awfully hot at the opera.”
She put some more ice into the lemonade, and added:
“By the way, Fritz, I suppose you locked up all right?”
“Locked up what?”
“The front door. All the servants have gone to bed, you know.”
No sooner had she spoken the last words than she regretted them. If Leo did get in they took away all excuse. She might have pretended he had been let in. He would have had to back her up. It would have been mean of her, of course. Still, seeing her husband there, Leo would have understood, would have forgiven her. Women are always forgiven such subterfuges in unfortunate moments. What a fool she was to-night!
“That don’t matter,” said her husband, shortly.
“But—but it does. You know how many burglaries there are. Why, only the other night Mrs. Arthur came home from a ball and met two men on the stairs.”
“I pity any men I found on my stairs,” he returned composedly, touching the muscle of his left arm with his right hand.
He chuckled.
“They’d be sorry for themselves, I’ll bet,” he added.
He put down his cigarette and took out another slowly, leisurely. Lady Holme longed to strike him. His conceited composure added fuel to the flame of her anxiety.
“Well, anyhow, I don’t care to run these risks in a place like London, Fritz,” she said almost angrily. “Have you locked up or not?”
“Damned if I remember,” he drawled.
She did not know whether he was deliberately trying to irritate her or whether he really had forgotten, but she felt it impossible to remain any longer in uncertainty.
“Very well, then, I shall go down and see,” she said.
And she laid the book of poems on a table and prepared to get up from the sofa.
“Rot!” said Lord Holme; “if you’re nervous, I’ll go.”
She leaned back.
“Very well.”
“In a minute.”
He struck a match and let it out.
“Do go now, there’s a good dog,” she said coaxingly.
He struck another match and held it head downwards.
“You needn’t hurry a feller.”
He tapped his cigarette gently on his knee, and applied the flame to it.
“That’s better.”
Lady Holme moved violently on the sofa. She had a pricking sensation all over her body, and her face felt suddenly very hot, as if she had fever. A ridiculous, but painful idea started up suddenly in her mind. Could Fritz suspect anything? Was he playing with her? She dismissed it at once as the distorted child of a guilty conscience. Fritz was not that sort of man. He might be a brute sometimes, but he was never a subtle brute. He blew two thin lines of smoke out through his nostrils, now with a sort of sensuous, almost languid, deliberation, and watched them fade away in the brilliantly-lit room. Lady Holme resolved to adopt another manner, more in accord with her condition of tense nervousness.
“When I ask you to do a thing, Fritz, you might have the decency to do it,” she said sharply. “You’re forgetting what’s due to me—to any woman.”
“Don’t fuss at this time of night.”
“I want to go to bed, but I’m not going till I know the house is properly shut up. Please go at once and see.”
“I never knew you were such a coward,” he rejoined without stirring. “Who was at the opera?”
“I won’t talk to you till you do what I ask.”
“That’s a staggerin’ blow.”
She sprang up with an exclamation of anger. Her nerves were on edge and she felt inclined to scream out.
“I never thought you could be so—such a cad to a woman, Fritz,” she said.
She moved towards the door. As she did so she heard a cab in the square outside, a rattle of wheels, then silence. It had stopped. Her heart seemed to stand still too. She knew now that she was a coward, though not in the way Fritz meant. She was a coward with regard to him. Her jealousy had prompted her to do a mad thing. In doing it she had actually meant to produce a violent scene. It had seemed to her that such a scene would relieve the tension of her nerves, of her heart, would clear the air. But now that the scene seemed imminent—if Fritz had forgotten, and she was certain he had forgotten, to lock the door—she felt heart and nerves were failing her. She felt that she had risked too much, far too much. With almost incredible swiftness she remembered her imprudence in speaking to Carey at Arkell House and how it had only served to put a weapon into her husband’s hand, a weapon he had not scrupled to use in his selfish way to further his own pleasure and her distress. That stupid failure had not sufficiently warned her, and now she was on the edge of some greater disaster. She was positive that Leo Ulford was in the cab which had just stopped, and it was too late now to prevent him from entering the house. Lord Holme had got up from his chair and stood facing her. He looked quite pleasant. She thought of the change that would come into his face in a moment and turned cold.
“Don’t cut up so deuced rough,” he said; “I’ll go and lock up.”
So he had forgotten. He took a step towards the drawing-room door. But now she felt that at all costs she must prevent him from going downstairs, must gain a moment somehow. Suddenly she swayed slightly.
“I feel—awfully faint,” she said.
She went feebly, but quickly, to the window which looked on to the Square, drew away the curtain, opened the window and leaned out. The cab had stopped before their door, and she saw Leo Ulford standing on the pavement with his back to the house. He was feeling in his pocket, evidently for some money to give to the cabman. If she could only attract his attention somehow and send him away! She glanced back. Fritz was coming towards her with a look of surprise on his face.
“Leave me alone,” she said unevenly. “I only want some air.”
“But—”
“Leave me—oh, do leave me alone!”
He stopped, but stood staring at her in blank amazement. She dared not do anything. Leo Ulford stretched out his arm towards the cabman, who bent down from his perch. He took the money, looked at it, then bent down again, showing it to Leo and muttering something. Doubtless he was saying that it was not enough. She turned round again sharply to Fritz.
“Fritz,” she said, “be a good dog. Go upstairs to my room and fetch me some eau de Cologne, will you?”
“But—”
“It’s on my dressing-table—the gold bottle on the right. You know. I feel so bad. I’ll stay here. The air will bring me round perhaps.”
She caught hold of the curtain, like a person on the point of swooning.
“All right,” he said, and he went out of the room.
She watched till he was gone, then darted to the window and leaned out.
She was too late. The cab was driving off and Leo was gone. He must have entered the house.
BEFORE she had time to leave the window she heard a step in the room. She turned and saw Leo Ulford, smiling broadly—like a great boy—and holding up the latch-key she had sent him. At the sight of her face his smile died away.
“Go—go!” she whispered, putting out her hand. “Go at once!”
“Go! But you told me—”
“Go! My husband’s come back. He’s in the house. Go quickly. Don’t make a sound. I’ll explain to-morrow.”
She made a rapid, repeated gesture of her hands towards the door, frowning. Leo Ulford stood for an instant looking heavy and sulky, then, pushing out his rosy lips in a sort of indignant pout, he swung round on his heels. As he did so, Lord Holme came into the room holding the bottle of eau de Cologne. When he saw Leo he stopped. Leo stopped too, and they stood for a moment staring at each other. Lady Holme, who was still by the open window, did not move. There was complete silence in the room. Then Leo dropped the latch-key. It fell on the thick carpet without a noise. He made a hasty, lumbering movement to pick it up, but Lord Holme was too quick for him. When Lady Holme saw the key in her husband’s hand she moved at last and came forward into the middle of the room.
“Mr. Ulford’s come to tell me about the Blaxtons’ dance,” she said.
She spoke in her usual light voice, without tremor or uncertainty. Her face was perfectly calm and smiling. Leo Ulford cleared his throat.
“Yes,” he said loudly, “about the Blaxtons’ dance.”
Lord Holme stood looking at the latch-key. Suddenly his face swelled up and became bloated, and large veins stood out in his brown forehead.
“What’s this key?” he said.
He held it out towards his wife. Neither she nor Leo Ulford replied to his question.
“What’s this key?” he repeated.
“The key of Mr. Ulford’s house, I suppose,” said Lady Holme. “How should I know?”
“I’m not askin’ you,” said her husband.
He came a step nearer to Leo.
“Why the devil don’t you answer?” he said to him.
“It’s my latch-key,” said Leo, with an attempt at a laugh.
Lord Holme flung it in his face.
“You damned liar!” he said. “It’s mine.”
And he struck him full in the face where the key had just struck him.
Leo returned the blow. When she saw that, Lady Holme passed the two men and went quickly out of the room, shutting the door behind her. Holding her hands over her ears, she hurried upstairs to her bedroom. It was in darkness. She felt about on the wall for the button that turned on the electric light, but could not find it. Her hands, usually deft and certain in their movements, seemed to have lost the sense of touch. It was as if they had abruptly been deprived of their minds. She felt and felt. She knew the button was there. Suddenly the room was full of light. Without being aware of it she had found the button and turned it. In the light she looked down at her hands and saw that they were trembling violently. She went to the door and shut it. Then she sat down on the sofa at the foot of the bed. She clasped her hands together in her lap, but they went on trembling. Pulses were beating in her eyelids. She felt utterly degraded, like a scrupulously clean person who has been rolled in the dirt. And she fancied she heard a faint and mysterious sound, pathetic and terrible, but very far away—the white angel in her weeping.
And the believers in the angel—were they weeping too?
She found herself wondering as a sleeper wonders in a dream.
Presently she got up. She could not sit there and see her hands trembling. She did not walk about the room, but went over to the dressing-table and stood by it, resting her hands upon it and leaning forward. The attitude seemed to relieve her. She remained there for a long time, scarcely thinking at all, only feeling degraded, unclean. The sight of physical violence in her own drawing-room, caused by her, had worked havoc in her. She had always thought she understood the brute in man. She had often consciously administered to it. She had coaxed it, flattered it, played upon it even—surely—loved it. Now she had suddenly seen it rush out into the full light, and it had turned her sick.
The gold things on the dressing-table—bottles, brushes, boxes, trays—looked offensive. They were like lies against life, frauds. Everything in the pretty room was like a lie and a fraud. There ought to be dirt, ugliness about her. She ought to stand with her feet in mud and look on blackness. The angel in her shuddered at the siren in her now, as at a witch with power to evoke Satanic things, and she forgot the trembling of her hands in the sensation of the trembling of her soul. The blow of Fritz, the blow of Leo Ulford, had both struck her. She felt a beaten creature.
The door opened. She did not turn round, but she saw in the glass her husband come in. His coat was torn. His waistcoat and shirt were almost in rags. There was blood on his face and on his right hand. In his eyes there was an extraordinary light, utterly unlike the light of intelligence, but brilliant, startling; flame from the fire by which the animal in human nature warms itself. In the glass she saw him look at her. The light seemed to stream over her, to scorch her. He went into his dressing-room without a word, and she heard the noise of water being poured out and used for washing. He must be bathing his wounds, getting rid of the red stains.
She sat down on the sofa at the foot of the bed and listened to the noise of the water. At last it stopped and she heard drawers being violently opened and shut, then a tearing sound. After a silence her husband came into the room again with his forehead bound up in a silk handkerchief, which was awkwardly knotted behind his head. Part of another silk handkerchief was loosely tied round his right hand. He came forward, stood in front of her and looked at her, and she saw now that there was an expression almost of exultation on his face. She felt something fall into her lap. It was the latch-key she had sent to Leo Ulford.
“I can tell you he’s sorry he ever saw that—damned sorry,” said Lord Holme.
And he laughed.
Lady Holme took the key up carefully and put it down on the sofa. She was realising something, realising that her husband was feeling happy. When she had laid down the key she looked up at him and there was an intense scrutiny in her eyes. Suddenly it seemed to her as if she were standing up and looking down on him, as if she were the judge, he the culprit in this matter. The numbness left her mind. She was able to think swiftly again and her hands stopped trembling. That look of exultation in her husband’s eyes had changed everything.
“Sit down, I want to speak to you,” she said.
She was surprised by the calm sound of her own voice.
Lord Holme looked astonished. He shifted the bandage on his hand and stood where he was.
“Sit down,” she repeated.
“Well!” he said.
And he sat down.
“I suppose you came up here to turn me out of the house?” she said.
“You deserve it,” he muttered.
But even now he did not look angry. There was a sort of savage glow on his face. It was evident that the violent physical effort he had just made, and the success of it, had irresistibly swept away his fury for the moment. It might return. Probably it would return. But for the moment it was gone. Lady Holme knew Fritz, and she knew that he was feeling good all over. The fact that he could feel thus in such circumstances set the brute in him before her as it had never been set before—in a glare of light.
“And what do you deserve?” she asked.
All her terror had gone utterly. She felt mistress of herself.
“When I went to thrash Carey he was so drunk I couldn’t touch him. This feller showed fight but he was a baby in my hands. I could do anything I liked with him,” said Lord Holme. “Gad! Talk of boxin’—”
He looked at his bandaged hand and laughed again triumphantly. Then, suddenly, a sense of other things than his physical strength seemed to return upon him. His face changed, grew lowering, and he thrust forward his under jaw, opening his mouth to speak. Lady Holme did not give him time.
“Yes, I sent Leo Ulford the latch-key,” she said. “You needn’t ask. I sent it, and told him to come to-night. D’you know why?”
Lord Holme’s face grew scarlet.
“Because you’re a—”
She stopped him before he could say the irrevocable word.
“Because I mean to have the same liberty as the man I’ve married,” she said. “I asked Leo Ulford here, and I intended you should find him here.”
“You didn’t. You thought I wasn’t comin’ home.”
“Why should I have thought such a thing?” she said, swiftly, sharply.
Her voice had an edge to it.
“You meant not to come home, then?”
She read his stupidity at a glance, the guilty mind that had blundered, thinking its intention known when it was not known. He began to deny it, but she stopped him. At this moment, and exactly when she ought surely to have been crushed by the weight of Fritz’s fury, she dominated him. Afterwards she wondered at herself, but not now.
“You meant not to come home?”
For once Lord Holme showed a certain adroitness. Instead of replying to his wife he retorted:
“You meant me to find Ulford here! That’s a good ‘un! Why, you tried all you knew to keep him out.”
“Yes.”
“Well, then?”
“I wanted—but you’d never understand.”
“He does,” said Lord Holme.
He laughed again, got up and walked about the room, fingering his bandages. Then suddenly, he turned on Lady Holme and said savagely:
“And you do.”
“I?”
“Yes, you. There’s lots of fellers that would—”
“Stop!” said Lady Holme, in a voice of sharp decision.
She got up too. She felt that she could not say what she meant to say sitting down.
“Fritz,” she added, “you’re a fool. You may be worse. I believe you are. But one thing’s certain—you’re a fool. Even in wickedness you’re a blunderer.”
“And what are you?” he said.
“I!” she answered, coming a step nearer. “I’m not wicked.”
A sudden, strange desire came to her, a desire—as she had slangily expressed it to Robin Pierce—to “trot out” the white angel whom she had for so long ignored or even brow-beaten. Was the white angel there? Some there were who believed so. Robin Pierce, Sir Donald, perhaps others. And these few believers gave Lady Holme courage. She remembered them, she relied on them at this moment.
“I’m not wicked,” she repeated.
She looked into her husband’s face.
“Don’t you know that?”
He was silent.
“Perhaps you’d rather I was,” she continued. “Don’t men prefer it?”
He stared first at her, then at the carpet. A puzzled look came into his face.
“But I don’t care,” she said, gathering resolution, and secretly calling, calling on the hidden woman, yet always with a doubt as to whether she was there in her place of concealment. “I don’t care. I can’t change my nature because of that. And surely—surely there must be some men who prefer refinement to vulgarity, purity to—”
“Ulford, eh?” he interrupted.
The retort struck like a whip on Lady Holme’s temper. She forgot the believers in the angel and the angel too.
“How dare you?” she exclaimed. “As if I—”
He took up the latch-key and thrust it into her face. His sense of physical triumph was obviously dying away, his sense of personal outrage returning.
“Good women don’t do things like that,” he said. “If it was known in London you’d be done for.”
“And you—may you do what you like openly, brazenly?”
“Men’s different,” he said.
The words and the satisfied way in which they were said made Lady Holme feel suddenly almost mad with rage. The truth of the statement, and the disgrace that it was truth, stirred her to the depths. At that moment she hated her husband, she hated all men. She remembered what Lady Cardington had said in the carriage as they were driving away from the Carlton after Mrs. Wolfstein’s lunch, and her sense of impotent fury was made more bitter by the consciousness that women had chosen that men should be “different,” or at least—if not that—had smilingly given them a license to be so. She wanted to say, to call out, so much that she said nothing. Lord Holme thought that for once he had been clever, almost intellectual. This was indeed a night of many triumphs for him. An intoxication of power surged up to his brain.
“Men’s made different and treated differently,” he said. “And they’d never stand anything else.”
Lady Holme sat down again on the sofa. She put her right hand on her left hand and held it tightly in her lap.
“You mean,” she said, in a hard, quiet voice, “that you may humiliate your wife in the eyes of London and that she must just pretend that she enjoys it and go on being devoted to you? Well, I will not do either the one or the other. I will not endure humiliation quietly, and as to my devotion to you—I daresay it wouldn’t take much to kill it. Perhaps it’s dead already.”
No lie, perhaps, ever sounded more like truth than hers. At that moment she thought that probably it was truth.
“Eh?” said Lord Holme.
He looked suddenly less triumphant. His blunt features seemed altered in shape by the expression of blatant, boyish surprise, even amazement, that overspread them. His wife saw that, despite the incident of Leo Ulford’s midnight visit, Fritz had not really suspected her of the uttermost faithlessness, that it had not occurred to him that perhaps her love for him was dead, that love was alive in her for another man. Had his conceit then no limits?
And then suddenly another thought flashed into her mind. Was he, too, a firm, even a fanatical, believer in the angel? She had never numbered Fritz among that little company of believers. Him she had always set among the men who worship the sirens of the world. But now—? Can there be two men in one man as there can be two women in one woman? Suddenly Fritz was new to her, newer to her than on the day when she first met him. And he was complex. Fritz complex! She changed the word conceit. She called it trust. And tears rushed into her eyes. There were tears in her heart too. She looked up at her husband. The silk bandage over his forehead had been white. Now it was faintly red. As she looked she thought that the colour of the red deepened.
“Come here, Fritz,” she said softly.
He moved nearer.
“Bend down!”
“Eh?”
“Bend down your head.”
He bent down his huge form with a movement that had in it some resemblance to the movement of a child. She put up her hand and touched the bandage where it was red. She took her hand away. It was damp.
A moment later Fritz was sitting in a low chair by the wash-hand stand in an obedient attitude, and a woman—was she siren or angel?—was bathing an ugly wound.
AFTER that night Lady Holme began to do something she had never done before—to idealise her husband. Hitherto she had loved him without weaving pretty fancies round him, loved him crudely for his strength, his animalism, his powerful egoism and imperturbable self-satisfaction. She had loved him almost as a savage woman might love, though without her sense of slavery. Now a change came over her. She thought of Fritz in a different way, the new Fritz, the Fritz who was a believer in the angel. It seemed to her that he could be kept faithful most easily, most surely, by such an appeal as Robin Pierce would have loved. She had sought to rouse, to play upon the instincts of the primitive man. She had not gone very far, it is true, but her methods had been common, ordinary. She had undervalued Fritz’s nature. That was what she felt now. He had behaved badly to her, had wronged her, but he had believed in her very much. She resolved to make his belief more intense. An expression on his face—only that—had wrought a vital change in her feeling towards him, her conception of him. She ranged him henceforth with Sir Donald, with Robin Pierce. He stood among the believers in the angel.
She called upon the angel passionately, feverishly.
There was strength in Lady Holme’s character, and not merely strength of temper. When she was roused, confident, she could be resolute, persistent; could shut her eyes to side issues and go onward looking straight before her. Now she went onward and she felt a new force within her, a force that would not condescend to pettiness, to any groping in the mud.
Lord Holme was puzzled. He felt the change in his wife, but did not understand it. Since the fracas with Leo Ulford their relations had slightly altered. Vaguely, confusedly, he was conscious of being pitied, yes, surely pitied by his wife. She shed a faint compassion, like a light cloud, over the glory of his wrongdoing. And the glory was abated. He felt a little doubtful of himself, almost as a son feels sometimes in the presence of his mother. For the first time he began to think of himself, now and then, as the inferior of his wife, began even, now and then, to think of man as the inferior of woman—in certain ways. Such a state of mind was very novel in him. He stared at it as a baby stares at its toes, with round amazement, inwardly saying, “Is this phenomenon part of me?”
There was a new gentleness in Viola, a new tenderness. Both put him—as one lifted and dropped—a step below her. He pulled his bronze moustache over it with vigour.
His wife showed no desire to control his proceedings, to know what he was about. When she spoke of Miss Schley she spoke kindly, sympathetically, but with a dainty, delicate pity, as one who secretly murmurs, “If she had only had a chance!” Lord Holme began to think it a sad thing that she had not had a chance. The mere thought sent the American a step down from her throne. She stood below him now, as he stood below Viola. It seemed to him that there was less resemblance between his wife and Miss Schley than he had fancied. He even said so to Lady Holme. The angel smiled. Somebody else in her smiled too. Once he remarked to the angel,a propos de bottes, “We men are awful brutes sometimes.” Then he paused. As she said nothing, only looked very kind, he added, “I’ll bet you think so, Vi?”
It sounded like a question, but she preferred to give no answer, and he walked away shaking his head over the brutishness of men.
The believers in the angel naturally welcomed the development in Lady Holme and the unbelievers laughed at it, especially those who had been at Arkell House and those who had been influenced by Pimpernel Schley’s clever imitation. One night at the opera, whenTannhauserwas being given, Mr. Bry said of it, “I seem to hear the voice of Venus raised in the prayer of Elizabeth.” Mrs. Wolfstein lifted large eyebrows over it, and remarked to Henry, in exceptionally guttural German:
“If this goes on Pimpernel’s imitation will soon be completely out of date.”
To be out of date—in Mrs. Wolfstein’s opinion—was to be irremediably damned. Lady Cardington, Sir Donald Ulford, and one or two others began to feel as if their dream took form and stepped out of the mystic realm towards the light of day. Sir Donald seemed specially moved by the change. It was almost as if something within him blossomed, warmed by the breath of spring.
Lady Holme wondered whether he knew of the fight between her husband and his son. She dared not ask him and he only mentioned Leo once. Then he said that Leo had gone down to his wife’s country place in Hertfordshire. Lady Holme could not tell by his intonation whether he had guessed that there was a special reason for this departure. She was glad Leo had gone. The developing angel did not want to meet the man who had suffered from the siren’s common conduct. Leo was not worth much. She knew that. But she realised now the meanness of having used him merely as a weapon against Fritz, and not only the meanness, but the vulgarity of the action. There were moments in which she was fully conscious that, despite her rank, she had not endured unsmirched close contact with the rampant commonness of London.
One of the last great events of the season was to be a charity concert, got up by a Royal Princess in connection with a committee of well-known women to start a club for soldiers and sailors. Various amateurs and professionals were asked to take part in it, among them Lady Holme and Miss Schley. The latter had already accepted the invitation when Lady Holme received the Royal request, which was madeviva voceand was followed by a statement about the composition of the programme, in which “that clever Miss Schley” was named.
Lady Holme hesitated. She had not met the American for some time and did not wish to meet her. Since she had bathed her husband’s wound she knew—she could not have told how—that Miss Schley’s power over him had lessened. She did not know what had happened between them. She did not know that anything had happened. And, as part of this new effort of hers, she had had the strength to beat down the vehement, the terrible curiosity—cold steel and fire combined—that is a part of jealousy. That curiosity, she told herself, belonged to the siren, not to the angel. But at this Royal request her temper waked, and with it many other children of her temperament. It was as if she had driven them into a dark cave and had rolled a great stone to the cave’s mouth. Now the stone was pushed back, and in the darkness she heard them stirring, whispering, preparing to come forth.
The Royal lady looked slightly surprised. She coughed and glanced at a watch she wore at her side.
“I shall be delighted to do anything, ma’am,” Lady Holme said quickly.
When she received the programme she found that her two songs came immediately after “Some Imitations” by Miss Pimpernel Schley.
She stood for a moment with the programme in her hand.
“Some Imitations”; there was a certain crudeness about the statement, a crudeness and an indefiniteness combined. Who were to be the victims? At this moment, perhaps, they were being studied. Was she to be pilloried again as she had been pilloried that night at the British Theatre? The calm malice of the American was capable of any impudent act. It seemed to Lady Holme that she had perhaps been very foolish in promising to appear in the same programme with Miss Schley. Was it by accident that their names were put together? Lady Holme did not know who had arranged the order of the performances, but it occurred to her that there was attraction to the public in the contiguity, and that probably it was a matter of design. No other two women had been discussed and compared, smiled over and whispered about that season by Society as she and Miss Schley had been.
For a moment, while she looked at the programme, she thought of the strange complications of feeling that are surely the fruit of an extreme civilisation. She saw herself caught in a spider’s web of apparently frail, yet really powerful, threads spun by an invisible spider. Her world was full of gossamer playing the part of iron, of gossamer that was compelling, that made and kept prisoners. What freedom was there for her and women like her, what reality of freedom? Even beauty, birth, money were gossamer to hold the fly. For they concentrated the gaze of those terrible watchful eyes which govern lives, dominating actions, even dominating thoughts.
She moved, had always moved, in a maze of complications. She saw them tiny yet intense, like ants in their hill. They stirred minds, hearts, as the ants stirred twigs, leaves, blossoms, and carried them to the hill for their own purposes. In this maze free will was surely lost. The beautiful woman of the world seems to the world to be a dominant being, to be imposing the yoke of her will on those around her. But is she anything but a slave?
Why were she and Miss Schley enemies? Why had they been enemies from the moment they met? There was perhaps a reason for their hostility now, a reason in Fritz. But at the beginning what reason had there been? Civilisation manufactures reasons as the spider manufactures threads, because it is the deadly enemy of peace—manufactures reasons for all those thoughts and actions which are destructive of inward and exterior peace.
For a moment it seemed to Lady Holme as if she and the American were merely victims of the morbid conditions amid which they lived; conditions which caused the natural vanity of women to become a destroying fever, the natural striving of women to please a venomous battle, the natural desire of women to be loved a fracas, in which clothes were the armour, modes of hair-dressing, manicure, perfumes, dyes, powder-puffs the weapons.
What a tremendous, noisy nothingness it was, this state of being! How could an angel be natural in it,—be an angel at all?
She laid down the programme and sighed. She felt a vague yet violent desire for release, for a fierce change, for something that would brush away the spider’s web and set free her wings. Yet where would she fly? She did not know; probably against a window-pane. And the change would never come. She and Fritz—what could they ever be but a successful couple known in a certain world and never moving beyond its orbit?
Perhaps for the first time the longing that she had often expressed in her singing, obedient to poet and composer, invaded her own soul. Without music she was what with music she had often seemed to be—a creature of wayward and romantic desires, a yearning spirit, a soaring flame.
At that moment she could have sung better than she had ever sung.
On the programme the names of her songs did not appear. They were represented by the letters A and B. She had not decided yet what she would sing. But now, moved by feeling to the longing for some action in which she might express it, she resolved to sing something in which she could at least flutter the wings she longed to free, something in which the angel could lift its voice, something that would delight the believers in the angel and be as far removed from Miss Schley’s imitations as possible.
After a time she chose two songs. One was English, by a young composer, and was called “Away.” It breathed something of the spirit of the East. The man who had written it had travelled much in the East, had drawn into his lungs the air, into his nostrils the perfume, into his soul the meaning of desert places. There was distance in his music. There was mystery. There was the call of the God of Gold who lives in the sun. There was the sound of feet that travel. The second song she chose was French. The poem was derived from a writing of Jalalu’d dinu’r Rumi, and told this story.
One day a man came to knock upon the door of the being he loved. A voice cried from within the house, “Qui est la?” “C’est moi!” replied the man. There was a pause. Then the voice answered, “This house cannot shelter us both together.” Sadly the lover went away, went into the great solitude, fasted and prayed. When a long year had passed he came once more to the house of the one he loved, and struck again upon the door. The voice from within cried, “Qui est la?” “C’est toi!” whispered the lover. Then the door was opened swiftly and he passed in with outstretched arms.
Having decided that she would sing these two songs, Lady Holme sat down to go through them at the piano. Just as she struck the first chord of the desert song a footman came in to know whether she was at home to Lady Cardington. She answered “Yes.” In her present mood she longed to give out her feeling to an audience, and Lady Cardington was very sympathetic.
In a minute she came in, looking as usual blanched and tired, dressed in black with some pale yellow roses in the front of her gown. Seeing Lady Holme at the piano she said, in her low voice with a thrill in it:
“You are singing? Let me listen, let me listen.”
She did not come up to shake hands, but at once sat down at a short distance from the piano, leaned back, and gazed at Lady Holme with a strange expression of weary, yet almost passionate, expectation.
Lady Holme looked at her and at the desert song. Suddenly she thought she would not sing it to Lady Cardington. There was too wild a spell in it for this auditor. She played a little prelude and sang an Italian song, full, as a warm flower of sweetness, of the sweetness of love. The refrain was soft as golden honey, soft and languorous, strangely sweet and sad. There was an exquisite music in the words of the refrain, and the music they were set to made their appeal more clinging, like the appeal of white arms, of red, parting lips.