“Nothing. I only know that you’re married, and that you have children, and that you are at the beginning of your career.”
“My career!” he ejaculated bitterly. “I shall never have a career. Let’s be honest about it. You are a writer yourself — you know as well as I do that I shall never rise above the second-rate now. Once, I might have done so — I should have done so. I made the fatal mistake. I married.” She bent her brown head as though in acquiescence, but still she did not look at him.
“I was twenty-four,” said Julius Palliser. “I had no money, of course. My first novel was just out, and the reviews — well, at this distance of time I don’t mind saying that the reviews were colossal. One might have been excused for supposing oneself on the high road to fame and fortune. The book had no real sale, of course, but my publishers said that didn’t matter — I’d been recognized, as they put it. They were anxious for me to write something else, of the same calibre, and I was wild to do it. I had the idea — it was all there. And then” — his voice flattened suddenly—” well, then I suppose I fell in love. Cecil — my wife — was a year or two older than I was. She had literary tastes — in fact she wrote herself, a little — and she was enthusiastic about my book. I thought, for a few mad weeks, that I had met my ideal — that we had everything in the world in common. I took her by storm — carried everything before me. Her people were very badly off — they knew that we neither of us had any money, and they wished us to wait. Cecil, herself, was doubtful. She wasn’t madly in love with me, as I was with her — but still, she did care. Only she wanted to wait. It was I who wouldn’t. Oh, I’ve only myself to thank. It was I who made the mistake. I married her out of hand, took her off to a couple of furnished rooms in Hampstead — and set to work to write my second novel.
“It wasn’t as good as the first one. That was inevitable, I suppose. I was living through my first tremendous emotional adventure, and the force that ought to have been going into the novel, was going into that. Still, it wasn’t bad. It had good reviews, although not as good as the first one had had.
“It sold even fewer copies.
“Cecil had started a baby, and that was an expense. — Besides, it meant that we’d have to move out of the furnished rooms. — We found a flat in the end — and we had to get the furniture for it — and things for the baby — and then Cecil had to go into a private ward at the Maternity Hospital. She was very ill, the whole time, and had to see the doctor again and again, and he ordered her special food and so on, and I didn’t know which way to turn for money. Of course, the young genius who prostitutes his gifts that he may keep the pot boiling, is an old story. I don’t want to imply that it was any-think like that. But I had to do hack work — anything that I could get — reviewing — short stories, light articles — everything for which I could hope to get a guinea or two. I wrote a third novel, at breakneck speed, but I took it to another publisher. I knew well enough that it was another class of book altogether, and needed a different kind of advertising. It got it, too, and sold fairly well. And instead of cursing myself, I was thankful to get some of our bills paid.”
Palliser fell silent, in his turn staring at the electric fire.
Thelma Fontaine spoke very slowly and softly.
“I understand, you know. I can see how it happened. I’ve always been poor, and I know how dreadfully one needs money. And of course, you had others dependent on you.”
“We had four children in five years,” he told her grimly. “Cecil wanted them — and after that first year, as a matter of fact, we kept our heads above water. I made a very small income, but still, it was an income. “We were able to get a house — the house we’re in now — miles away — beyond Earl’s Court. It’s cheap, and large enough to hold us all. The two boys go to a day school, and my wife looks after the little girl. We lost the elder one four years ago. Pneumonia. Nowadays, I can just keep level with expenses, and that’s all. Cecil isn’t interested in anything but the children. We get on one another’s nerves. It’s not her fault, exactly, and I don’t think it’s mine. We’ve nothing in common. She doesn’t care any more about books, nowadays — she says she’s too tired to read. I have to work like a black, of course, and I’m not proud of the stuff I produce. And then I look back, and think what I might have done, if I hadn’t tied the noose round my own neck, just when I was at the very beginning of everything.”
“One doesn’t know—” she murmured.
“One doesn’t know,” he echoed, with an edge of passion in his voice. “I can see now — looking back — that I actually met Cecil at the psychological moment when a career — a real career — was opening in front of me. I was young, I could have put all my time and all my strength into my work, and could have afforded to wait for success — to do without pot boiling. And instead of that, at twenty-four I took on the responsibility for other lives — I deliberately shackled myself, so that I could never be free again.”
Julius Palliser actually groaned, as he struck one hand with the palm of the other.
The violence of the action seemed to relieve him. “I don’t think that a creative artist should ever marry at all,” he said, much more quietly.
“The whole atmosphere of domesticity is all wrong. At home, it’s one endless round of discussion about the servant, and the children, and illnesses, and tradespeople, and expenses. Cecil isn’t any happier than I am, I don’t suppose. She’s never got over the loss of little Margery. And she worries about the other children, day and night. They’ve all got a tendency to croup, and coughs. They’ve got it from Cecil — she’s asthmatic. You’d laugh, if I tried to tell you the sort of effect that the sound of a cough has on me nowadays.”
“No,” said Thelma Fontaine, and at last she turned her eyes upon him. “Oh no, I shouldn’t laugh. How can you say that? It symbolizes everything for you — the sound of a cough. You’re right, you know. A creative artist should never marry. You ought to have been free — always.”
“My God — yes!” said Julius Palliser.
His tortured mind again envisaged the opportunity offered to his youth and his talent and the perversity that had swept it aside.
“If one could go back—”
He was scarcely certain, in his preoccupation, whether he had uttered the futile aspiration aloud. He almost hoped that he had not. It was so futile.
But Thelma Fontaine would understand.
Meeting her dark, tragic gaze with his own, there was renewed within him the magical flood of comfort and relief that he had felt in first realizing the extent to which she understood.
II
It was easier to endure life with Cecil, after each time spent with Thelma.
The remembrance of her pervaded him like a glow, and made it possible to bear with Cecil, and her monotonous, exasperating tale of petty anxieties and trivial vexations.
It was November, and she was asthmatic. She was always asthmatic, intermittently, from October until late March or April. The house was permeated with the smell of the papers that she burnt, and the steams that she inhaled, without deriving any apparent relief from either.
The children had colds, too. The boys, coughing noisily, were kept away from school, and meek little dismal Prudence trailed about the house in their wake, in constant search for elusive squares of butter-muslin, hygienically substituted for handkerchiefs during periods of epidemic.
There were moments in which Palliser, with absolute shuddering, contemplated his family circle, unable to avoid viewing them as Frankenstein monsters, called into life by himself. Actually they had, every one of them, been bound into the fabric of his existence by his own act.
He had insisted upon making Cecil his wife. He had begotten children.
Summoned, as it were, out of the void, they were now definite, corporeal entities, dependent upon himself for everything, and they would remain so, as far as Palliser could see, until his youth and powers were gone, his gift of writing out of date, his natural love of life
crushed and exterminated.
With futile, incredulous ragings at his own folly, he reminded himself that there had, positively, been a time when he had been free, on the very verge of real success, and with no responsibilities beyond that of his own talent. If he could only put the clock back twelve years, and go on from the time just before his marriage — what might he not make of life! Why, he could have been a rich man by now!
And close personal relationships would not have been lacking either. They were, indeed, essential to his temperament.
But the passing infidelities of which he had been technically guilty towards Cecil scarcely came under the heading of close personal relationships. They had rather been in the nature of anodynes.
So he told himself, in the retrospect, slightly slurring over the fact that the type that attracted him, and to whom he was attractive, was always the intellectual, physically frigid, woman. Thelma Fontaine was like that — he was certain of it — virtuous by inclination.
What a friendship he and she might enjoy, with the tastes that they had in common, and her marvellous intuitive understanding of the unique agony that his life had become! Cecil was coughing again, the low, choked sound that rasped his nerves so unbearably.
It was nine o’clock.
But not too late.
Palliser snatched at his hat and his overcoat, and fled to Thelma Fontaine’s flat — its quiet, its solitude a deux, its atmosphere of profound understanding.
It became his habitual refuge.
Suddenly, or was it perhaps by degrees unperceived because of his preoccupation — Palliser was at the limits of his endurance again. Cecil, incredibly, made a scene.
Pale, asthmatic, untidy, and yet not without a strange dignity, she faced him one evening after the children had gone to bed.
It was natural to divide time into such categories, in surroundings so blatantly domestic.
“Julius, how much longer is this going on? I’m ill and unhappy, the children are ill — you don’t need them, and you don’t need me. Let me take them away — and go.”
“Go?”
He stared at her, incredulous.
“Into the country,” she said recklessly. “We could live on very little, and you could afford to allow me something, now. Or — —”
A dull crimson flooded her face, and she burst into tears.
An unbelievable suspicion came slowly to life within him.
“Cecil, can you possibly mean that — there’s somebody else?”
The words, as he uttered them, astonished himself. She didn’t know any men, even, and — poor soul — she was no longer attractive — Besides, he was certain that she still cared for him. Why should she not?
But, in an astonishment so great that it actually rendered him speechless, he heard her reply:
“I couldn’t help it, Julius. Indeed, it was only a few days ago that I really knew — though he’s always been so kind — but he never, never — —”
“In Heaven’s name, who is it?”
She looked at him in moist, unbecoming resentment.
“I thought you knew. Dr. Jamieson.”
The doctor! The only man she ever saw! A wild desire to laugh momentarily gripped him. Jamieson was so respectable, so spare and dry and Scotch — kind, too, and with curiously compassionate eyes. He must have pitied Cecil — but ——
“D’you mean he’s in love with you?” Palliser blurted out.
Cecil nodded her head, still looking at him with that resentful expression.
“But, good Heavens — !”
Her lips tightened.
“He’s the man I ought to have married. You wouldn’t understand, but I’m not stupid, and afraid to say anything, with him. We’ve talked for hours and hours — he’s always been lonely, too. I could make him happy.”
“Perhaps you’ve forgotten,” said Palliser bitterly, “that you’re my wife.”
“I’ve never forgotten it, for one instant.”
“And the mother of my children.”
At that her face worked violently.
“I’ll never leave the children, never. He knows that. If it weren’t for them—”
“You mean you’d have gone off with him?”
She nodded again, the same ungraceful gesture that yet carried conviction with it.
So she would have taken his honour, too, as she had taken his youth, and his talent, and his joy.
Suddenly he felt himself growing furious. He shouted at her.
“You’ve given me nothing — nothing — you’ve taken everything away from me — and you stand there and tell me that you’re aiming to break up my home — to desert your children and mine—”
“No!” she wailed. “You don’t understand. He wants to marry me — he wants you to set me free — and to let me keep the children. You’ve never cared for them, and you only cared for me at the very beginning. He’s different. He wants the children, he’s fond of them — he just wants to make a home for me and for them.” The monstrousness of it almost deprived him of speech.
“You think any man would saddle himself with three children—”
“It’s the only way he can get me,” she said, with a simplicity that was almost stupendous. “And he’s rich, Julius.”
“Ah-h—”
His swiftly-drawn breath was a taunt, and she winced at it.
“It’s not that — it’s not that. But we’ve been a drag on you, the children and I — you’ve said so many and many a time — and our home is an unhappy one, Julius — it’s been unhappy for a long, long while, and things won’t ever come right between us now. The children aren’t happy, like children ought to be, and they’re ill in London.
He wants to take us to the country — to live there always — and you’d be free too. What does it matter what other people think? If you’ll only do it—”
A spasm of coughing shook her, and the noise of it tore at his nerves as he waited until he could hear himself speak.
“What other people think has nothing to do with it. I’m the last man on earth to let that consideration go for anything. What you’re asking me to do is to hand over my wife and my children to another man, neither more nor less. Good God, Cecil, I think — I think you must be mad!”
III
“But my dear, dear friend,” urged Thelma Fontaine, “why not be generous, be unconventional — be true to your own most real self, in fact? Let them go!”
She had said the same thing, in different ways, ever since the day, now nearly a week ago, when Julius Palliser had rushed to her, frantic, and she had drawn from him the story of his latest ordeal at the hands of Fate.
After repeatedly repudiating her strange advice with almost hysterical vehemence, Palliser was, actually, coming to feel that she might be right.
He could discuss it calmly.
“You mean that I should allow Cecil to divorce me — arrange it for her, in fact — and let her keep the children and marry this man?” Palliser repeated, still spasmodically incredulous.
“Why not? You are not a conventionalist. You don’t love her, she doesn’t love you.” Palliser winced involuntarily. “As for the children, you say that she can be trusted with them, and that she’d agree — naturally — to anything you might wish about the boys.”
“Oh yes, yes,” groaned Palliser. “They’d spend so many months in each year with me — I stipulated for that. Anything else would be monstrous. Women who do what Cecil is proposing to do, usually lose their children altogether.”
“That’s where you’re so wonderful,” breathed Miss Fontaine softly. “You’re not going to penalize her. It seems to me such a tribute to you, dear Julius, that even your wife, who understands you so little, should have appealed to your generosity as she has done — should have known that you couldn’t, ever, take up the cheap, conventional attitude.”
Palliser began to feel that he couldn’t.
She was right.
Never had she called him “dear Julius”
before, and he felt the words vibrating in the room long after she had spoken them.
“It’s you who are wonderful — Thelma,” he murmured.
Little by little, she brought him to it.
Cecil should have her freedom.
But he refused to relinquish the children wholly. It was intolerable, he felt, that they should grow up supposing their father unworthy.
At first he declared that they must spend six months of every year with him.
Cecil, between paroxysms of tears and of coughing, remarked:
“But how will you manage? They’ll have to have someone — a woman — to look after them. I shall have — there’ll be—” She blushed heavily.
“Prudence is to have a nursery governess, but it would be rather awkward to send her backwards and forwards, wouldn’t it?”
He made a gesture of angry negation.
The impossibility of the situation broke over him again and again, in fresh gusts, and he suffered acutely.
There were times when, in rage and disgust, he realized the horrid, practical truth of Cecil’s objection that it would be difficult for him to arrange for the care of the children, and in one of those moments, apprehensive and unhappy, he suddenly capitulated.
“Keep the children. I’ll send for them some day — to come and stay with me when they’re a bit older. And the boys must write to me—”
“Oh, they shall!” sobbed Cecil. “You are good, Julius. Remember you’ll be free — free to begin again. You’ve often said—”
“For God’s sake, don’t quote me,” cried Julius Palliser. “It’s a ghastly business, all of it, but I suppose I shall see it through.”
He did see it through.
Thelma Fontaine’s sympathy sustained him.
He went daily to see her.
“Do I come too often? If you only knew what I’m going through!”
“I do know.”
“Of course you do.” He kissed her hand reverently. “But for you — I’m living in a nightmare.”
At last the climax of the nightmare was reached — was passed — and left behind.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 551