‘Then…’ Nancy began. Her blue eyes were full of horror: her brows were tight above them; the lines of pain about her mouth were very distinct. In her eyes the whole of that familiar, great hall had a changed aspect. The andirons with the brass flowers at the ends appeared unreal; the burning logs were just logs that were burning and not the comfortable symbols of an indestructible mode of life. The flame fluttered before the high fireback; the St Bernard sighed in his sleep. Outside the winter rain fell and fell. And suddenly she thought that Edward might marry some one else; and she nearly screamed.
Leonora opened her eyes, lying sideways, with her face upon the black and gold pillow of the sofa that was drawn half across the great fireplace.
‘I thought,’ Nancy said, ‘I never imagined… Aren’t marriages sacraments? Aren’t they indissoluble? I thought you were married…and…’ She was sobbing. ‘I thought you were married or not married as you are alive or dead.’
‘That,’ Leonora said, ‘is the law of the Church. It is not the law of the land…’
‘Oh yes,’ Nancy said, ‘the Brands are Protestants.’
She felt a sudden safeness descend upon her, and for an hour or so her mind was at rest. It seemed to her idiotic not to have remembered Henry VIII and the basis upon which Protestantism rests.153 She almost laughed at herself.
The long afternoon wore on; the flames still fluttered when the maid made up the fire; the St Bernard awoke and lolloped away towards the kitchen. And then Leonora opened her eyes and said almost coldly:
‘And you? Don’t you think you will get married?’
It was so unlike Leonora that, for the moment, the girl was frightened in the dusk. But then, again, it seemed a perfectly reasonable question.
‘I don’t know,’ she answered. ‘I don’t know that anyone wants to marry me.’
‘Several people want to marry you,’ Leonora said.
‘But I don’t want to marry,’ Nancy answered. ‘I should like to go on living with you and Edward. I don’t think I am in the way or that I am really an expense. If I went you would have to have a companion. Or, perhaps, I ought to earn my living…’
‘I wasn’t thinking of that,’ Leonora answered in the same dull tone. ‘You will have money enough from your father. But most people want to be married.’
I believe that she then asked the girl if she would not like to marry me, and that Nancy answered that she would marry me if she were told to; but that she wanted to go on living there. She added:
‘If I married anyone I should want him to be like Edward.’
She was frightened out of her life. Leonora writhed on her couch and called out: ‘Oh, God!…’
Nancy ran for the maid; for tablets of aspirin; for wet handkerchiefs. It never occurred to her that Leonora’s expression of agony was for anything else than physical pain.
You are to remember that all this happened a month before Leonora went into the girl’s room at night. I have been casting back again; but I cannot help it. It is so difficult to keep all these people going. I tell you about Leonora and bring her up to date; then about Edward, who has fallen behind. And then the girl gets hopelessly left behind. I wish I could put it down in diary form. Thus: On the 1st of September they returned from Nauheim. Leonora at once took to her bed. By the 1st of October they were all going to meets together. Nancy had already observed very fully that Edward was strange in his manner. About the 6th of that month Edward gave the horse to young Selmes, and Nancy had cause to believe that her aunt did not love her uncle. On the 20th she read the account of the divorce case, which is reported in the papers of the 18th and the two following days. On the 23rd she had the conversation with her aunt in the hall – about marriage in general and about her own possible marriage. Her aunt’s coming to her bedroom did not occur until the 12th of November…
Thus she had three weeks for introspection – for introspection beneath gloomy skies, in that old house, rendered darker by the fact that it lay in a hollow crowned by fir trees with their black shadows. It was not a good situation for a girl. She began thinking about love, she who had never before considered it as anything other than a rather humorous, rather nonsensical matter. She remembered chance passages in chance books – things that had not really affected her at all at the time. She remembered someone’s love for the Princess Badrulbadour.154 She remembered to have heard that love was a flame, a thirst, a withering up of the vitals – though she did nor know what the vitals were. She had a vague recollection that love was said to render a hopeless lover’s eyes hopeless; she remembered a character in a book who was said to have taken to drink through love; she remembered that lovers’ existences were said to be punctuated with heavy sighs. Once she went to the little cottage piano that was in the corner of the hall and began to play. It was a tinkly, reedy instrument, for none of that household had any turn for music. Nancy herself could play a few simple songs, and she found herself playing. She had been sitting on the window seat, looking out on the fading day. Leonora had gone to pay some calls; Edward was looking after some planting up in the new spinney. Thus she found herself playing on the old piano. She did not know how she came to be doing it. A silly lilting wavering tune came from before her in the dusk – a tune in which major notes with their cheerful insistence wavered and melted into minor sounds, as, beneath a bridge, the high-lights on dark waters melt and waver and disappear into black depths. Well, it was a silly old tune…
It goes with the words – they are about a willow tree, I think:
Thou art to all lost loves the best
The only true plant found.
– That sort of thing. It is Herrick,155 I believe, and the music with the reedy, irregular, lilting sound that goes with Herrick. And it was dusk; the heavy, hewn, dark pillars that supported the gallery were like mourning presences; the fire had sunk to nothing – a mere glow amongst white ashes… It was a sentimental sort of place and light and hour…
And suddenly Nancy found that she was crying. She was crying quietly; she went on to cry with long convulsive sobs. It seemed to her that everything gay, everything charming, all light, all sweetness, had gone out of life. Unhappiness; unhappiness; unhappiness was all around her. She seemed to know no happy being and she herself was agonizing….
She remembered that Edward’s eyes were hopeless; she was certain that he was drinking too much; at times he sighed deeply. He appeared as a man who was burning with inward flame; drying up in the soul with thirst; withering up in the vitals. Then, the torturing conviction came to her – the conviction that had visited her again and again – that Edward must love some one other than Leonora. With her little, pedagogic sectarianism she remembered that Catholics do not do this thing. But Edward was a Protestant. Then Edward loved somebody…
And, after that thought, her eyes grew hopeless; she sighed as the old St Bernard beside her did. At meals she would feel an intolerable desire to drink a glass of wine, and then another and then a third. Then she would find herself grow gay… But in half an hour the gaiety went; she felt like a person who is burning up with an inward flame; desiccating at the soul with thirst; withering up in the vitals. One evening she went into Edward’s gunroom – he had gone to a meeting of the National Reserve Committee.156 On the table beside his chair was a decanter of whisky. She poured out a wine-glassful and drank it off.
Flame then really seemed to fill her body; her legs swelled; her face grew feverish. She dragged her tall height up to her room and lay in the dark. The bed reeled beneath her; she gave way to the thought that she was in Edward’s arms; that he was kissing her on her face that burned; on her shoulders that burned, and on her neck that was on fire.
She never touched alcohol again. Not once after that did she have such thoughts. They died out of her mind; they left only a feeling of shame so insupportable that her brain could not take it in and they vanished. She imagined that her anguish at the thought of Edward’s love for another person was solely sympathy for Leonora; she deter
mined that the rest of her life must be spent in acting as Leonora’s handmaiden – sweeping, tending, embroidering, like some Deborah, some medieval saint – I am not, unfortunately, up in the Catholic hagiology.157 But I know that she pictured herself as some personage with a depressed, earnest face and tightly dosed lips, in a clear white room, watering flowers or tending an embroidery frame. Or, she desired to go with Edward to Africa and to throw herself in the path of a charging lion so that Edward might be saved for Leonora at the cost of her life. Well, along with her sad thoughts she had her childish ones.
She knew nothing – nothing of life, except that one must live sadly. That she now knew. What happened to her on the night when she received at once the blow that Edward wished her to go to her father in India and the blow of the letter from her mother was this. She called first upon her sweet Saviour – and she thought of Our Lord as her sweet Saviour! – that He might make it impossible that she should go to India. Then she realized from Edward’s demeanour that he was determined that she should go to India. It must then be right that she should go. Edward was always right in his determinations. He was the Cid; he was Lohengrin; he was the Chevalier Bayard.
Nevertheless her mind mutinied and revolted. She could not leave that house. She imagined that he wished her gone that she might not witness his amours with another girl. Well, she was prepared to tell him that she was ready to witness his amours with another young girl. She would stay there – to comfort Leonora.
Then came the desperate shock of the letter from her mother. Her mother said, I believe, something like: ‘You have no right to go on living your life of prosperity and respect. You ought to be on the streets with me. How do you know that you are even Colonel Rufford’s daughter?’ She did not know what these words meant. She thought of her mother as sleeping beneath the arches whilst the snow fell. That was the impression conveyed to her mind by the words ‘on the streets’. A Platonic sense of duty gave her the idea that she ought to go to comfort her mother – the mother that bore her, though she hardly knew what the words meant. At the same time she knew that her mother had left her father with another man – therefore she pitied her father, and thought it terrible in herself that she trembled at the sound of her father’s voice. If her mother was that sort of woman it was natural that her father should have had accesses of madness in which he had struck herself to the ground. And the voice of her conscience said to her that her first duty was to her parents. It was in accord with this awakened sense of duty that she undressed with great care and meticulously folded the clothes that she took off. Sometimes, but not very often, she threw them helter-skelter about the room.
And that sense of duty was her prevailing mood when Leonora, tall, clean-run, golden-haired, all in black, appeared in her doorway, and told her that Edward was dying of love for her. She knew then with her conscious mind what she had known within herself for months – that Edward was dying – actually and physically dying – of love for her. It seemed to her that for one short moment her spirit could say: ‘Domine, nunc dimittis… Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.’158 She imagined that she could cheerfully go away to Glasgow and rescue her fallen mother.
IV
And it seemed to her to be in tune with the mood, with the hour, and with the woman in front of her to say that she knew Edward was dying of love for her and that she was dying of love for Edward. For that fact had suddenly slipped into place and become real for her as the niched marker on a whist tablet slips round with the pressure of your thumb. That rubber at least was made.
And suddenly Leonora seemed to have become different and she seemed to have become different in her attitude towards Leonora. It was as if she, in her frail, white, silken kimono, sat beside her fire, but upon a throne. It was as if Leonora, in her close dress of black lace, with the gleaming white shoulders and the coiled yellow hair that the girl had always considered the most beautiful thing in the world – it was as if Leonora had become pinched, shrivelled, blue with cold, shivering, suppliant. Yet Leonora was commanding her. It was no good commanding her. She was going on the morrow to her mother who was in Glasgow.
Leonora went on saying that she must stay there to save Edward, who was dying of love for her. And, proud and happy in the thought that Edward loved her, and that she loved him, she did not even listen to what Leonora said. It appeared to her that it was Leonora’s business to save her husband’s body; she, Nancy, possessed his soul – a precious thing that she would shield and bear away up in her arms – as if Leonora were a hungry dog, trying to spring up at a lamb that she was carrying. Yes, she felt as if Edward’s love were a precious lamb that she were bearing away from a cruel and predatory beast. For, at that time, Leonora appeared to her as a cruel and predatory beast. Leonora, Leonora with her hunger, with her cruelty had driven Edward to madness. He must be sheltered by his love for her and by her love – her love from a great distance and unspoken, enveloping him, surrounding him, upholding him; by her voice speaking from Glasgow, saying that she loved, that she adored, that she passed no moment without longing, loving, quivering at the thought of him.
Leonora said loudly, insistently, with a bitterly imperative tone:
‘You must stay here; you must belong to Edward. I will divorce him.’
The girl answered:
‘The Church does not allow of divorce. I cannot belong to your husband. I am going to Glasgow to rescue my mother.’
The half-opened door opened noiselessly to the full. Edward was there. His devouring, doomed eyes were fixed on the girl’s face; his shoulders slouched forward; he was undoubtedly half drunk and he had the whisky decanter in one hand, a slanting candlestick in the other. He said, with a heavy ferocity, to Nancy:
‘I forbid you to talk about these things. You are to stay here until I hear from your father. Then you will go to your father.’
The two women, looking at each other, like beasts about to spring, hardly gave a glance to him. He leaned against the doorpost. He said again:
‘Nancy, I forbid you to talk about these things. I am the master of this house.’ And, at the sound of his voice, heavy, male, coming from a deep chest, in the night with the blackness behind him, Nancy felt as if her spirit bowed before him, with folded hands. She felt that she would go to India, and that she desired never again to talk of these things.
Leonora said:
‘You see that it is your duty to belong to him. He must not be allowed to go on drinking.’
Nancy did not answer. Edward was gone; they heard him slipping and shambling on the polished oak of the stairs. Nancy screamed when there came the sound of a heavy fall. Leonora said again:
‘You see!’
The sounds went on from the hall below; the light of the candle Edward held flickered up between the hand rails of the gallery. Then they heard his voice:
‘Give me Glasgow… Glasgow, in Scotland… I want the number of a man called White, of Simrock Park, Glasgow… Edward White, Simrock Park, Glasgow… ten minutes… at this time of night…’ His voice was quite level, normal, and patient. Alcohol took him in the legs, not the speech. ‘I can wait,’ his voice came again. ‘Yes, I know they have a number. I have been in communication with them before.’
‘He is going to telephone to your mother,’ Leonora said. ‘He will make it all right for her.’ She got up and closed the door. She came back to the fire, and added bitterly: ‘He can always make it all right for everybody, except me – excepting me!’
The girl said nothing. She sat there in a blissful dream. She seemed to see her lover sitting as he always sat, in a round-backed chair, in the dark hall – sitting low, with the receiver at his ear, talking in a gentle, slow voice, that he reserved for the telephone – and saving the world and her, in the black darkness. She moved her hand over the bareness of the base of her throat, to have the warmth of flesh upon it and upon her bosom.
She said nothing; Leonora went on talking…
God knows what Leonora said.
She repeated that the girl must belong to her husband. She said that she used that phrase because, though she might have a divorce, or even a dissolution of the marriage by the Church, it would still be adultery that the girl and Edward would be committing. But she said that that was necessary; it was the price that the girl must pay for the sin of having made Edward love her, for the sin of loving her husband. She talked on and on, beside the fire. The girl must become an adulteress; she had wronged Edward by being so beautiful, so gracious, so good. It was sinful to be so good. She must pay the price so as to save the man she had wronged.
In between her pauses the girl could hear the voice of Edward, droning on, indistinguishably, with jerky pauses for replies. It made her glow with pride; the man she loved was working for her. He at least was resolved; was malely determined; knew the right thing. Leonora talked on with her eyes boring into Nancy’s. The girl hardly looked at her and hardly heard her. After a long time Nancy said – after hours and hours:
‘I shall go to India as soon as Edward hears from my father. I cannot talk about these things, because Edward does not wish it.’
At that Leonora screamed out and wavered swiftly towards the closed door. And Nancy found that she was springing out of her chair with her white arms stretched wide. She was clasping the other woman to her breast; she was saying:
‘Oh, my poor dear; oh, my poor dear.’ And they sat, crouching together in each other’s arms, and crying and crying; and they lay down in the same bed, talking and talking, all through the night. And all through the night Edward could hear their voices through the wall. That was how it went…
Next morning they were all three as if nothing had happened. Towards eleven Edward came to Nancy, who was arranging some Christmas roses in a silver bowl. He put a telegram beside her on the table. ‘You can uncode it for yourself,’ he said. Then, as he went out of the door, he said:
The Good Soldier Page 23