Elsdon nodded his head meditatively. “A strange, unhappy creature!” he said sadly.
The Colonel snorted. “A very dangerous woman,” he said, “especially to those she took a fancy to.”
Chapter XIV
Eric and Daphne, driving back from Lannery to London, stopped for dinner at the little hotel where they had had tea on the previous afternoon, and, having finished dinner, they sat and drank coffee in the lounge. Eric felt blissfully happy. “You won’t forget,” he said, “to write and tell Aunt Emily how much you enjoyed your week-end.”
“No, Eric,” said Daphne, “I won’t forget.”
“Nor to tell her that your ruined life isn’t ruined any longer.”
Daphne considered this suggestion. “I may perhaps mention,” she said, “that restorations have begun.”
“Only begun?” he pleaded.
“Well, I might tell her, if it wasn’t indiscreet, that her nephew’s a perfect pet.”
“And that you’re happy?”
“Yes, that too.”
“And tell me, Daphne, do you think we ought to be starting?”
“By all means, if you want to.”
His eyes, earnest, darkly glowing, searched hers. “I want to do only what you want. If we are to get to Town to-night, we ought to start now.”
“And if we don’t?”
“We could start at half-past six tomorrow morning.”
“An early morning drive! That would be rather nice,” she said gaily, ignoring his seriousness.
“You mean it? Seriously? You’d like us to spend the night here?”
She smacked him gently on the cheek. “Why are you making such a solemn business of it, you old donkey?”
“Because I want you to make your own choice. I’m not urging you.”
She laughed. “O, aren’t you, with those blazing brown eyes of yours?”
He stood up. “Then I think we’d better start,” he said conclusively.
But Daphne didn’t stir. “I’ve said already, Eric, that I think it would be nice to drive in the morning.”
Chapter XV
In the weeks that followed, it seemed to Eric that he and Daphne had found the perfect life. Daphne, as it happened, had received an unusual number of orders and during all the hours that Eric was at his office she was busy making sketches, choosing materials, and writing letters, so that their meetings after the day’s work was over came as a delightful contrast, a rapturous escape into an Earthly Paradise. Sometimes they went to a theatre or a concert, but for the most part they were content to sit and talk. About what? In later days Eric could never recall a word of what they had said. They talked for the pure pleasure of talking to each other, like two birds on a bough pouring out their irrepressible delight in one another alternately or simultaneously in effortless improvisations. When the week-end came, they set off for the country in Eric’s car, discovered a room in some cottage or village inn, walked all Sunday and drove back to London and work in the early hours of Monday morning. It seemed to Eric that he had come to life for the first time, and when he looked back on his existence in the days before that meeting with Daphne in the Haymarket he saw it as little more than a dull, groping, unsatisfied search after fulfilment.
So the days and weeks went by and it never occurred to him to ask himself if there could be any limit to this enchanting life, or whether in the course of time it might die as a butterfly dies at the end of its season, or become, for one or both of them, stale or insufficient. His spirits never flagged, nor did Daphne’s, until one evening, five or six weeks after their visit to Lannery, when, hurrying round to her flat after work, he found her for the first time out of humour. At first he noticed nothing more than that she was less talkative than usual, but after dinner he realised that she was restless and preoccupied. His liveliness no longer met with the usual response. It was as if she had suddenly grown ten years older. “Is there anything the matter, Daphne?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she replied thoughtfully. “Perhaps, and perhaps not.”
“O, well,” he said carelessly; “if it’s as vague as that, why bother?” He put his arm round her. “Are you feeling unwell?”
“Not a bit,” she said.
“Then what is it?”
“I’m worried, Eric.”
“Worried? What about? Too much work?” She laughed joylessly. “My dear, I like too much work, when I can get it.”
“Too little work then? You’re not worried about money, are you, Daphne?” he asked, eager to abolish that particular worry at a word from her.
But she shook her head. “O, good God, no! I never worry about money: I’m not a millionaire.”
“Then it’s simply imagination?”
She gave a wan smile. “It may be. I hope so. Don’t let’s talk about it.”
Eric fell silent. What could have happened? Had Roy appeared on the scene again? A cold anxiety stirred like a little snake inside him. He inspected her from under his eyebrows, but did not like to ask her.
She caught his eye and laughed. “Don’t glower at me like that,” she said; “you look like a private detective.”
Her laugh reassured him and made him laugh too. For the rest of the evening things seemed a little better.
It had been arranged, some days before, that they were to go to the theatre on the following evening. They were to dine first at Daphne’s flat, and Eric was on the point of starting when his telephone bell rang.
It was Juliet who spoke. “Is that you, Eric? Daphne has asked me to tell you that she can’t go to the show this evening.”
“Can’t go?” he replied. “Is there anything the matter?” Once again, as when Daphne had failed to turn up at the garage, Eric had a sudden sinking of the heart.
“Well, yes,” came Juliet’s precise tones, “there is. I can’t ... er . . .”
“No, of course not,” he said; “but what about dinner? Am I to come along? I was just starting.”
“She didn’t say. Yes, I think you’d better come along.”
“Isn’t she there?” Eric asked.
“Yes, she’s here.”
A horrible sensation, half fear, half exasperation, crept through him. “Then can’t she come to the telephone?”
“You’d better come along. I’m just going out.” To escape from the suspense as quickly as possible Eric took a taxi. Was it another of those inexplicable whims of hers? When he arrived, would he find her, as last time, all smiling and ready for him? Well, if he did, he would not take it as mildly as last time. He would let her know that he wasn’t going to be treated like that. She had no right to submit him to these minutes of awful anxiety.
But when he arrived she did not meet him. He found the door unlatched, pushed it open and shut it behind him. He found her in the sitting-room, seated in an armchair. She did not turn her head when he entered and did not move when he went to her chair. Her face was grim and blotched as if she had been weeping. “What’s the matter, Daphne?” he asked anxiously, kneeling down beside her.
She turned a stubborn face towards him. “Can’t you guess?” she said. Her voice was hard and resentful.
“No,” he said at last. “Why should I be able to guess?”
“I’m going to have a child,” she said.
The news struck him like a physical blow. “But it’s impossible,” he said.
She made an angry gesture. “What’s the good of your kneeling there telling me it’s impossible, when I’ve told you it is so?”
“You’re sure?”
She turned away her face in exasperation. “What’s the good of asking idiotic questions? ‘Are you sure?’ Would I say it if I wasn’t sure?”
He tried to take her hand, but she snatched it away. Her harshness wounded him and checked his sympathy. “You know as well as I do that it’s very unlikely,” he said. “That’s why I couldn’t believe it. But if you’re sure, well . . .!”
He went over to the window and stood looking out.
He had accepted the fact, faced it and in a few moments he had made his decision. He turned to Daphne. “Listen, Daphne,” he said gently; “it’ll be quite all right. We’ll get married at once, as soon as ever I can get a licence.”
Yes, he had decided and he was content. He felt a strange, warm thrill at the thought of the child. And yet, buried, almost inaudible, beneath his conscious happiness, a voice in the depths of his heart cried out against the cruel trick that chance had played him, extinguishing finally his impossible hope of a life with Joan. He was deliberately tying himself for life to Daphne: his children would be hers, not Joan’s. None the less, he was glad he could accept what was inevitable, and he would see to it that he
and Daphne were happy together. But Daphne had not replied. He put his hand on her shoulder. “So it’s all right, isn’t it?” he said. “We’ll get married, won’t we?”
She shook off his hand and turned on him furiously. “Marry you? Do you think I want to marry you? I’m not in love with you; never was.”
Her anger roused his, but he restrained himself. “But what can we do, Daphne, if we’re ... if you’re going to have a child?”
“I’m not going to have it,” she said. “Nothing would induce me to.”
He stared at her, horrified and afraid. “But how can you . . .?” He broke off. “Listen, Daphne. Even if you won’t marry me, we’ll manage. I’ll manage everything: you shan’t have any worry about it. And when the child’s born, I’ll take it over and provide for it, if you want to be free of it. You shall be perfectly free, if you want to be.”
She gave a hideous laugh. “Thank you! How simple! I’m to have no worry, am I not? No worry over bearing the child? You seem to have forgotten that trifling detail.”
It seemed as if she were deliberately trying to antagonise him, but he must forbear. Whatever she said, he must remind himself that she was in a terrible state of agitation. “Daphne,” he said, “do please try to help me to help you. Say what you’d like me to do.”
“Find out how I’m to get rid of it,” she said brutally.
He stared, frozen to the heart. “Get rid of it? Do you mean you want me to find out about some beastly quack doctor? O,Daphne, we can’t do that.”
“There you are!” she said with fierce scorn. “You land me in this and then you leave me to get myself out of it.”
The blood rushed to his face. For a moment he was stung to retaliation. “I land you in it? How did I land you in it more than you landed yourself?”
Her blue eyes glared with hatred. “If you hadn’t gone on bothering and bothering me . . .”
“That’s a lie, Daphne,” he broke out, “and you know it is. When you pretended you wanted me to stop being in love with you, I took you at your word and determined to cure myself; and when I wrote and told you so, what did you do? You wrote and cursed me for a turncoat.”
He paused, breathless, and in the pause recollected himself. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “But if you go on at me like that, you drive me to defend myself. Let’s keep a check on ... on our nerves and talk it over quietly.”
“A lot of good talking will do,” she said wearily. “But, unless we talk, we shall get nothing done. Now listen! We’ve always got on very well up till now, haven’t we?” He waited, but she made no reply. “Well, why shouldn’t we have a very happy life together?”
She turned away impatiently. “My good Eric, why will you go on at it? I’ve told you I won’t marry you and I’ve told you I won’t have the child. Get that into your head. I’d rather ... I’d rather kill myself.”
They had reached a dead end: there was nothing more to say. Daphne sat huddled in her chair: Eric, with his hands in his pockets, stood with his back to the room staring miserably through the uncurtained window, and silence flowed round them, filled the room, drowned them so deep that it seemed they would never break free of it. In the dark square below, the street-lamps flickered through screens of plane-boughs, swayed before them on the evening breeze. An illuminated dial on a building that rose above the roofs of the square showed twenty-past eight. He turned. “You must eat something,” he said. Daphne made no reply and he added: “I believe you’d rather I went away, wouldn’t you?”
Daphne got wearily out of her chair and went towards the door. “I got some cold things in for supper; you’d better stay and have something,” she said indifferently, and the mere cessation of hostility in her seemed to Eric a sort of kindness. He followed her out of the room and went to the dining-room to draw a bottle of burgundy. A few weeks ago he had had a dozen sent to the flat for festive occasions, and it seemed to him now that a glass of it might help to thaw this frost that had so suddenly frozen all kindness between them. He opened the drawer in the sideboard to get the corkscrew, but he couldn’t find it, and he stood staring into the open drawer, overcome suddenly by their disaster and too unhappy to exert himself to search.
At that moment Daphne came in with a tray. “What are you doing?” she asked sharply.
“I was going to open some burgundy,” he said. “I was looking for . . .”
She put down the tray and turned a horrible smile on him. “I see,” she said. “To celebrate the occasion, I suppose. Well, open it for yourself, if you want it.”
“But you’ll have a little, won’t you?” he said.
“No, thanks!” She went over to where he stood and pushed him aside. Under the drawer there was a small cupboard: she opened it and brought out a half-empty bottle of gin. “This is the way I celebrate the occasion,” she said, uncorking it. She filled a claret-glass and drank it off.
Eric began to take the plates off the tray and set them on the table. When he had finished they sat down. Daphne served the food, handed him his plate, and then helped herself and began to eat. But Eric couldn’t eat. This hideous parody of all their delightful meals together numbed him into a torpor of mind and body. What a fool he had been to stay. He had hoped that her mood would change—that, if he stayed, they might be able to comfort one another and then talk practically and reasonably about what was to be done. But now, what was the good of his sitting there? It wasn’t doing Daphne any good and it was excruciating for him. He pushed back his chair and stood up. “I think I’ll go,” he said.
At the door he turned. “I’ll do my best to ... to find out . . .”
“You needn’t trouble,” said Daphne. “I’ll look after myself.”
He stood there, helpless and tongue-tied. “I don’t know what you want or what you don’t want,” he burst out in desperation. Then, steadying himself with one hand on the door-post, he turned and went out. As he was putting on his coat in the hall he heard her step behind him and then felt her take hold of his coat to help him on.
“Eric,” she said remorsefully, “I don’t want to make you miserable.”
He turned, but her eyes, though no longer hostile, checked him. He unlatched the front door. “I’ll come to-morrow after work,” he said.
That change in her had brought him an unhoped–for consolation, but before he reached the bottom of the stairs his relief had turned to scepticism. Had she really relented, or was it that she didn’t want to lose her hold on him? In the bus, on his journey home, his mind groped for explanations, for the central impulse which prompted her behaviour. He judged her, as he judged everybody, only by what he knew of his own warm and simple nature. He did not know that there were people who acted from a mass of warring impulses, and the more he searched, the more he was baffled. He was bewildered by the monstrous injustice of her attack on him. She knew, she must know, as well as he did that he was not to blame, that never from first to last had he allowed his desires to run ahead of his care for her. Nor could he see any reason, in what had happened, for the horrible change in her feelings towards him. Surely, in whatever light she regarded it, it ought to have drawn them closer together. She had shown beyond doubt that she loved him: she had even gone so far as to admit it; and then, all in a moment, she had changed from love to h
atred. His mind struggled like a fly in a spider’s web, becoming more entangled the more it struggled.
The lump of coal which he had put on his fire before he went out was not yet half burnt. It was five minutes past nine. He had been away, not for two and a half months, but for two and a half hours. In a moment the care-free, enchanting castle in the air which he and Daphne had made for themselves had crashed to earth, leaving them face to face with the iron reality. But he had not flinched before the reality: after the first shock he had found himself enthralled rather than overwhelmed by it. At that unforeseen result of their love, the plain fact that seemed to him not merely physical but full of an august and tender mystery, he had felt that life had caught Daphne and him in a stern but benevolent grasp. In exchange for their irresponsible, butterfly existence which had collapsed with such appalling suddenness, they had been offered a new life, deeper and more real. He was glad to think that he had been able to accept it willingly and to offer it honestly to Daphne. It was the first crucial test that life had imposed on him and he was glad he had come through it decently. But Daphne had rejected it with horror, and they had been plunged into a second ruin in which he had found only hatred and inexplicable chaos. He dropped into the armchair near the fire. The current of his life, which had so recently broken down its impediments and swept forward in full flow, had been suddenly and ruthlessly wrenched out of its course. His deepest feelings had been lacerated and he was still quivering with the pain of it. It was as if a running engine had suddenly been thrown into reverse. And that was not all. He was tormented by his growing anxiety for Daphne. What could he do? She wouldn’t let him do anything but that one thing against which his nature rebelled—find out some doctor who would consent to help her. The idea not only horrified him; it frightened him. The thing was illegal, he knew, and often dangerous. Heaven only knew what might not happen to her. And yet if he refused to be concerned in it, he would be refusing to help her in the one way in which she had asked for his help. But how was he to set about finding out? He knew of no way except to ask a friend of his who was a doctor. He might tell him where to go, though he thought it very unlikely that he would. More probably he would warn him to have nothing to do with it. Well, anyhow, there was no one else to whom he could turn. He had better ring him up and ask when he could see him; and for the next ten minutes he lay in his chair, trying half-heartedly to overcome the heavy inertia which held him down. It was terrible to feel it his duty to do what everything else in him revolted against; and when at last he had forced himself to ring the doctor up, and the reply came that he was out of Town and would not be back for a fortnight, he went back miserably to his chair and lay there till bedtime.
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