“Well, as a matter of fact, father—I want you to know everything without any concealment—”
“I know you do, old man. I know you do.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, that’s just a bit of useful swank. The names we’re trading under are swagger names and we think it sounds better.”
“Occleve sounds pretty good to me, Huggo. We’ve been a good long way on Occleve, the Occleves.”
“Well, that’s what they think, father, and of course, as I’ve told you, they know infinitely more about business than I do. They’ll explain the whole thing to you any time you like. It’s all absolutely above-board, father.”
“My dearest old boy, don’t talk like that. Of course it is. We’re only so grieved, your mother and I, that you should have had such a setback so early. But remember, old man, the great thing is not to let your wife suffer. No pinching or screwing for her, Huggo. Always your wife first, Huggo. We’ll give you at the rate of three hundred a year just until all’s going swimmingly, and that’s to keep Lucy merry and bright, see?”
It was shortly after that it all came out that the thing was a ramp, the motor-car business never in existence; shortly after that it came out Huggo was neglecting his wife; shortly after that the high words to Rosalie, telling her how his wife had deceived him; shortly after that that the syndicate, amazingly prosperous, moved into offices better situated and handsomely appointed; shortly after that it came out that the business of the syndicate was in some way connected with company promotion.
Harry, seen among these developments, was not the man he used to be. He was at the crest of his career at the Bar, working enormously and earning richly, but the old bright, cheery way had gone from Harry. There was permanently upon his face, and there was intensified, the beaten look that Rosalie first had seen on that night, in the war, when there had been the Huggo drinking business and when for the first and only time he had spoken passionately to Rosalie. When he now was at home he used to sit for long periods doing nothing, just thinking. When sometimes, home earlier than he, Rosalie saw him coming up the street towards the gamboge door she noticed, terribly, the bowed shoulders, the weary gait, the set, careworn face. She used to run down then to the famous gamboge door and open it and greet him and his face used to light up in the old way, but it was not the same face, and the effect of its radiation therefore not the same. It was not that the face was older. It was that its aspect was changed.
He used to look up from that chair where he sat just thinking, when Doda, butterflied for the evening, butterflied across the room, and used to say, “Out again, Doda?” He then would relapse back into his thoughts. He had a habit of getting up suddenly and rather strangely wandering about from room to room of all the principal rooms of the house, just standing at the door of each, and looking in (they were all empty of inhabitants), and then coming back and sitting again in the chair and just sit, thinking.
It used to pain the heart of Rosalie.
She said more than once when he returned from such a tour, “Dear Harry, looking for anything?”
He’d say rather heavily, “No; no, dear. Just having a look around.”
It used to pain the heart of Rosalie.
But he used to be enormously brightened up when Benji came home. Benji was just at Oxford then, eighteen. He was a different man when Benji was at home. He used to say, “Rosalie, that boy’s going to make a name for himself in the world. My heart’s wrapped round that boy, Rosalie. Ay, me! I wish he’d been our eldest, Rosalie.”
That was because he couldn’t tear away the wrappings of his heart from about his eldest. Men can’t.
It used to pain the heart of Rosalie.
Of course, with everything now known, Huggo was forgiven. Huggo was prosperous now, almost aggressively prosperous. He kept a car. The syndicate, whatever it actually did, was obviously doing enormously well. What was the good of being stupid and unkind to the boy now that, at last, he had found his feet? But Huggo scarcely ever came to the house. He had virtually left Lucy. Lucy lived on in the originally-taken furnished flat in Bayswater. Huggo had rooms somewhere, no one quite knew where, and lived there. Rosalie used to get Lucy to the house sometimes, but Lucy was never at her ease on these visits, and Doda, who sympathized entirely with Huggo in the matter, very much disliked her and would not meet her. Lucy was in bad health and she was going to have a baby. Her health and her condition made her look much more common than she used to look.
Then the baby was born; a little girl. Poor, grateful Lucy called it Rosalie. She told Rosalie that Huggo said he didn’t care what the baby was called. He was very angry about the baby. “He was worse than usual when he was here last week,” said Lucy. “I think he’s got something on his mind. I think he’s worrying about something. Oh, he was sharp.”
Lucy was very ill with the birth of her baby. She didn’t seem able to pick up again from her confinement. She kept her bed. Then, suddenly, she developed pneumonia. The maternity nurse, paid by Rosalie, was still in attendance. Rosalie sent in another nurse, and on that same night, going straight to the sick bed from Field’s, and then coming home very late, told Harry, who was waiting up for her, that the worst was feared for Lucy. She then said, “Harry, if anything happens, I think we’ll have that baby here. It will practically be a case of adopting the child.”
Harry agreed.
“I’d get in a nurse for her, the new little Rosalie.” She sighed.
“Yes, yes,” said Harry.
She said after a little, “Harry, the nurseries in use again!”
He sat there as he was always sitting, thinking.
She went over to him. “Dear, won’t you like the nurseries to be in use again?”
He said slowly, “I will, very much, Rosalie. It’s lonely, these empty rooms. I will very much—in some ways.”
Rosalie knew what Harry meant. She touched his hand. “Dear, I think it can be made different.”
Harry knew what Rosalie meant. He pressed the hand that touched his own. “That’s all right, Rosalie. That’s all right, dearest.”
Rosalie was down early next morning. She desired an early breakfast and to go on to see Lucy before Field’s. It might be necessary to stay the day with Lucy. There was also Huggo. What was Huggo doing? Overnight Rosalie had seen Doda, come in late from an evening with a very intimate friend of hers always known, through some private joke of Doda’s, as “the foreign friend.” The foreign friend, not in the least foreign but English, was a young married woman living apart from her husband. Doda had brought her to the house once. She was very pretty and a cheery soul. She would have been called fast when Rosalie was a girl. In 1921 she would almost, in the manner she presented to Rosalie, have been called slow. Doda and she were greatly attached.
Doda, overnight, going straight upstairs to bed, had said, “Have you seen Huggo to-day? He’s in a scrape of some sort.”
“Oh, Doda, what kind of a scrape?”
“He didn’t tell me. I ran into him quite by chance coming away from a theatre with the foreign friend. We both thought he was rather badly rattled.”
“Was he going on to Lucy? Did he know Lucy was very ill indeed?”
Doda said, “I don’t know. He didn’t tell me. Is she?” and indifferently passed upstairs.
Rosalie at her early breakfast was thinking what news the day would give of Lucy and of Huggo. She was suddenly, by Huggo in person, brought intelligence of both. She heard the door bell ring and in a minute Huggo surprisingly broke into the room. He had kept his hat on. He looked white, drawn and very agitated. He shut the door behind him. “Lucy’s dead.”
Tears sprang into the eyes of Rosalie, “Oh, my poor Huggo!”
He made a gesture. “Oh, that’s no good! Look here, mother, will you look after things over there for me? That’s all I’ve come in to say. Will you see to everything and will you take the kid? I can’t stop.”
He made to go.
“Huggo, of course I will. But you’ll be there? Are you going there now?”
“I’m not. I’m going away.”
“Going away?”
His hand was on the door. “Yes, going away. Look here, there’s another thing. If any one comes here for me will you say you haven’t seen me? It’s important. It’s vital.”
“Huggo, what is the matter?”
“You’ll jolly soon know. You may as well know now. Then you’ll realise. If you want to know—the police are after me.”
He was gone.
In the Book of Job it all happened, to Job, in the apparent compass of one piece of time not broken by diurnal intervals, not mitigated by recuperative cessations between blow and blow. It seemed to Rosalie that it was like that it happened also to her. There seemed no interval. It seemed to her wrath on wrath, visitation upon visitation, judgment upon judgment.
It seemed to her that she was no sooner come down out of the Old Bailey—her hand touching at things for support, her vision vertiginous, causing the solid ground to be in motion, her ears resonant, crying through her brain the words she saw in Huggo’s look as they removed him; it seemed to her she was no sooner out from there than she was at the telephone and summoned by the foreign friend and was there with Doda and was in process of “Oh, Doda!”—“Oh, mother!”; it seemed to her she was no sooner out from that than she was with that burly messenger, going with him, returning from him. There were days and nights walled up in weeks and months between these things, but that is how they seemed to Rosalie.
The syndicate was laid by the heels, one here, one there, Huggo in France, very shortly after the warning that had put Huggo in flight. The syndicate went through the police court where was unfolded a story sensational with surprising sums of money, captivating with ingenuity of fraud covered up by fraud to help new fraud again. The syndicate stood in the dock at the Old Bailey. Those two of the syndicate described by the prosecution and by the judge as the principals were sentenced to three years’ penal servitude. “You,” said the judge, addressing with a new note in his voice the third prisoner, “You, Occleve, stand in a different—”
Rosalie began to pray.
Harry would not attend the trial. He had done all that could be done, and of his position there was very much that he was able to do, and had attended the police court during the initial proceedings. He would not go to the Old Bailey. He would not go out. He would not read the papers. He used to sit about the house. “My son a felon.... My boy a felon. My son.... My eldest son....”
Rosalie was given a seat in the floor of the court on the first days of the hearing. On the day when the verdict was to be given and sentence passed she could not bear that. An usher, much pitying, obtained her a place in the gallery. She looked down immediately upon her Huggo. Her hands, upon the ledge before her, were all the time clasped. Her eyes alternately were in her hands and on her Huggo. Her heart moved between her Huggo and her God.
“You, Occleve, stand in a different position. . . .”
She began to pray. All of her being, all of her soul, all of her life, with a spiritual and a physical intensity transcending all that her body and her mind had ever known, was in apotheosis of supplication. “O God the Father! O God the Father! O God the Father!”
Her Huggo! Those words that only in snatches she heard were being addressed to her Huggo.
“... Your counsel has most eloquently pleaded for you.... You bear an honoured name.... You bear a name held in these precincts in honour, in esteem, in love, in admiration.... You have had a good home, a great and a noble father, a distinguished and devoted mother....”
That suppliant crouched lower in her supplication.
“... You have been the dupe, you have been the tool, you have been in large part, as your counsel has pleaded, and as I believe, the unsuspecting agent.... Nevertheless, the least sentence I can pass on you—”
“O God the Father, the Father!”
“... is six months’ imprisonment.”
That boy, whose head had been hung and eyes downcast, lifted his head and raised his eyes and gave one look into the eyes of that suppliant for him that sat above him. There was recalled by that suppliant a look that had passed from the place of accusation to the place of assembly in the place called the Sanhedrin.
Her Huggo!
They took him away.
Doda didn’t stop going out. She seemed to go out more. The pain within that house, brought there by Huggo, seemed to make that house more than before unbearable to Doda. She often spent the night, or the week end away, staying with the foreign friend, she generally said. She would have nothing whatever to do with the baby now installed in the house. She never would go near it. Once she passed it in the hall in its perambulator. She stopped and stooped over the face of lovely innocence that lay there and gazed upon it with an extraordinary intensity. She drew back with a sharp catch at her breath and sharply stepped away and turned and ran very quickly upstairs. After that when she chanced to pass the child, she turned aside and would not look upon the child. She began not to look well, Rosalie thought. There often was upon her lovely face a pinched and drawn expression, disfiguring it. On the rare occasions when she was in to dinner she sat strangely moody. There only was a moodiness about that table then; but the moodiness of Doda was noticeable to Rosalie. She ate hardly at all. She sometimes would get up suddenly before a meal was ended and go away, generally to her own room. Very many times Rosalie would seek anxiously to question her, but apart from the independence which commonly she maintained towards Rosalie, Doda seemed very much to resent solicitude upon her health. “What should be the matter? I look perfectly well, don’t I?”
“Doda, you don’t. I’ve noticed it a long time.”
“Well, I am perfectly well. If I wasn’t I’d say so.”
Strike on!
Rosalie was called up on the telephone by the foreign friend. It was the evening, about ten o’clock. Doda was away for a week at Brighton with the foreign friend. She was due back to-morrow. Harry was out with Benji. Benji was nineteen then and was home on vacation from Oxford. Harry never could bear Benji out of his sight when Benji was home. In the affliction that had come upon them, he seemed to cling to Benji. Rosalie had persuaded him that evening to go with Benji to a concert. Harry said the idea of anything like that was detestable to him, but Rosalie had pleaded with him. Just a little chamber concert was different. It would do him so much good to have an evening away and to hear a little music and Benji would love it. Harry allowed himself to be persuaded and went off arm-in-arm with Benji. He always put his arm in Benji’s when he walked with Benji.
Rosalie was waiting for them when the telephone bell rang and she was spoken to by the foreign friend.
It then happened like this.
The voice of the foreign friend was very alarmingly urgent. “Would she come and see Doda at once, at once, at once?”
The voice struck a chill to the heart of Rosalie. “But where are you? You’re at Brighton, aren’t you? Are you speaking from Brighton?”
“No, no. At my flat. At my flat.”
“But what is it? What is it? Why don’t you tell me what it is?”
“It’s an—it’s an—.” The voice stammered and hesitated.
“Oh, speak! Oh, speak.”
She could hear the voice gulping.
“Oh, please do speak!”
“Doda isn’t very well. Doda’s very ill. It’s an—it’s an accident.”
“I’ll come. I’ll come.”
“Is Mr. Occleve there?”
“He isn’t. He’s out.”
“Can you get him?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know. I can’t think. Oh, tell me. Tell me.”
“Will you leave a message for him to come at once?”
“At once. At once.”
She wrote a message for Harry and she picked up a wrap and she ran out hatless to find a cab.
She found a cab and went to Doda.
This all happened as quickly as bewilderingly. It was not like a dream, and it was not like a nightmare. It was like a kind of trance to Rosalie.
The foreign friend was not seen at the flat. She was in some other room and did not appear. She said afterwards, and proved, that she had been away the previous night, leaving Doda at the flat, and had returned to find her—as she was found; and had immediately called the nearest doctor and then Doda’s mother.
It was the doctor that opened the door to Rosalie. He was a Scotchman; a big and rugged man, all lines and whiskers and with a rugged accent.
He said, “You’rre her mother, arren’t ye? Where’s her father?”
“He’s coming. Where is my child?”
The doctor jerked his head towards a wall. “She’s yon.”
“Tell me, please.”
He pushed a chair towards her but she shook her head. “Please tell me.”
“Ye’ll want your courage.” He again indicated the chair. She again shook her head. “It’ll try ye. She’s dying.”
The lips of Rosalie formed the words: “Tell me.” There was no sound in her.
The doctor said, “I cannot tell ye. It is for your husband to hear.”
The heart of Rosalie stood still. She put both her hands upon her heart and she said to the doctor, “Tell me. I am strong.”
The doctor looked upon Rosalie intently and he said: (he was perhaps dexterously giving her time that she might weld herself) he said, “Ye’ll need be strong. Ye look sensible. Ye’ll need be sensible.” He said, “There’s been before me here another—There’s been a creature here before me. There’s been blackguarrd work here. There’s been—that poor child there...” He told her.
She moaned: “O God, be merciful!”
That child, as that night went, was in delirium. She seemed to lie upon a bed. She lay, in fact, upon the altar of her gods, of self, of what is vain, of liberty undisciplined, of restless itch for pleasure, and of the gods of Rosalie, a piteous sacrifice to them. You that have tears to shed prepare to shed them now. Or if you have no tears, but for emotion only sneers, do stop and put the thing away. It is intolerable to think to have beside that bed, beside that child, beside that Rosalie, your sneers. It’s not for you, and you do but exacerbate the frightful pain there’s been in feeling it with them.
Rosalie was all night with that child. Harry was there upon the other side upon his knees and never raised his head. Benji was there that loved his sister so. Across the unblinded window strove a moon that fought with mass on mass of fierce, submerging clouds as it might be a soul that rose through infinite calamity to God. That child was in much torment. That child was in delirium and often cried aloud. That child burned with a fever, incredible, at touch of her poor flesh, to think that human flesh such flame could hold and not incinerate. That child in her delirium moaned often names and sometimes cried them out. Nicknames that in the sexless jargon of her day and of her kind might have been names of women and might be names of men. Darkie, Topsy, Skipper, Kitten, Bluey, Tip, Bill, Kid. Names, sometimes, more familiar. Once Huggo; once father; once loud and very piteously, “Benji, Benji, Benji, Benji, Benji!”
She never once said mother.
She calmed and a long space was mute. The moon, its duress passed, stood high, serene, alone. The doctor breathed, “She’s passing.” That child raised her lids and her eyes looked out upon her watchers.
Rosalie cried, “Oh, Doda!”
That child sighed. “Oh, mother!”
There was no note of love. There was of tenderness no note. There only was in that child’s sigh a deathly weariness. “Oh, mother!” That child passed out.
They came home in the very early morning. Rosalie was in her working room. She had some things to do. She wrote to Mr. Field a letter of her resignation from Field’s Bank. She only wrote two lines. They ended, “This is Final. I have done.”
She sealed that letter and she moved about the room unlaying and as she unlaid, destroying, all evidences, all treasures, all landmarks, all that in any way referred to or touched upon her working life. There were cherished letters, there were treasured papers. She destroyed them all. From one bundle, not touched for years, dust-covered and time-discoloured, there came out a battered volume. She turned it over. “Lombard Street.” She opened it and saw the eager underlinings and saw the eager margin notes, and ghosts... (it’s written earlier in these pages). She rent the book across its perished cover and pressed it on the fire and on to the flames in the fire. “I have done.”
But she was not done with and she had the feeling that she was not done with. She said to Harry, “This is not the children’s tragedy. This is my tragedy. These were not the children’s faults. These were my transgressions. Life is sacrifice. I never sacrificed. Sacrifice is atonement. It now is not possible for me to atone.”
She was on her knees beside his chair. He stroked her hair.
There was an inquest. Harry went. She stayed at home and Benji stayed with her to be with her. Benji was not to be consoled. His mood was very dreadful. A report was printed in the evening paper before Harry came home. Benji read it and told Rosalie a witness, a man, had been arrested on the coroner’s warrant. Benji said, “I think I’ll go out now, mother, for a little.”
Later in the afternoon when Rosalie was with Harry a maid came into the room and looked at Harry and saw how sunk he was in his chair and so went to Rosalie and whispered to her. Rosalie went out. There was a man wished to see the master. Rosalie spoke to him. He was a large, burly man with a strong face. He looked like, and was, a police officer in plain clothes. Rosalie heard what he began to say and said she would go with him. In the cab, the man told her about it. All his sentences began with or contained “The young gentleman.”
“The young gentleman... the prisoner, when the young gentleman came rushing in, happened to be in the charge-room writing out a statement.... The young gentleman, before any one could stop him, rushed at this prisoner and caught him by the throat and threw him and the table over and banged the man’s head against the floor, fair trying to kill him. They got the young gentleman off. They ought to have arrested the young gentleman, and they did most earnestly wish they had of arrested him, and blamed themselves properly that they didn’t arrest him. But they felt cruelly sorry for the young gentleman and they got him outside and let him go and no more said. Of course, as madam knew, the police office wasn’t very far from Gower Street station, the underground station with them steep stairs leading straight down from the street to the platform, as madam might be aware.... The young gentleman was seen by witnesses, whose names were took, to come rushing down these stairs on to the platform as if some one was after him.... The young gentleman come rushing down and there was a train just coming in, and whether he couldn’t stop or whether he.... There’s some say one thing and some say the other.... Whichever way it was the young gentleman....”
Rosalie did her errand with the man and then came back to Harry. She had to tell Harry.
He was sitting in his chair. He had an open book on his knees. She saw, as one notices these things, it was a Shakespeare. She stood up there at the door before him and she said, “Harry—Benji!”
He saw it in her face.
He groaned.
He took the book off his knees and fumbled it, and with a groaning mutter dropped it: “‘Unarm, Eros, the long day’s work is done.’”
She came to him and saw, as one sees things, above his head the picture he had hung when raven was his hair and radiant his face, and had hit his thumb, and jumped, and cried out, “Mice and Mumps!” and had laughed and wrung his hands, and cried out, “Mice and Mumps!” and laughed again. She came to him and saw him wilt and crumple in his chair, and could have sworn she saw the iron of his head, that had been raven, go grey anew and greyer yet. She came to him and she said, “Harry—Benji—an accident—not an accident—on the railway—killed.”
His voice went, not exclamatorily, but in a thick mutter, as one agrope, in sudden darkness, befogged, betrayed. “My God, my God, my God, my God, my God!”
She fell on her knees; and on her arms and on his lap she buried then her face.
He suddenly stooped to her, and caught his arms about her, and raised her to him, and pressed his face to hers, and held her there; and his cry was as once before, passionately holding her, his cry had been; then from his heart to her heart, now from the abysses of his soul to her soul’s depths, “Rosalie! Rosalie!”
There was to have been some more of it; but there, they’re in each other’s arms, and one has suffered so with them one cannot any more go on. One’s suffered so! One has looked backward with her. The heart must break but for a forward glimpse:—
They’re all right now. Huggo’s in Canada. He writes every week. They’re all right now. That other Rosalie that they brought in is looking after them. She’s looking after them, that elf, that sprite, that tricksy scrap, that sunshine thing. She calls Harry father and Rosalie she calls mother. She has all her meals with them. There’s no nurse. It’s breakfast she loves best. She’s on the itch all breakfast. When breakfast’s done she’s off her chair and hopping. She trumpets in her tiny voice, “Lessons! Lessons!” She trumpets in her tiny voice, “Lessons, lessons! On mother’s knee! On mother’s knee!”