by Hugh Walpole
He was interrupted by the opening of the nursery door and, turning, the men saw Clare with the light of the passage at her back, standing in the doorway. Her cloak was trailing on the floor — around her her pink filmy dress hung like shadows from the light behind her. Her face was white, her eyes wide.
“What — ?” she whispered in the voice of a frightened child.
Peter crossed the room, and took her with him into the passage, closing the door behind him.
She clung to him, looking up into his face.
“Stephen’s very bad, dear. No, it’s something internal—”
“And I went out to a party?” her voice was trembling, she was very near to tears. “But I was miserable, wretched all the time. I wanted to come back, I knew I oughtn’t to have gone.... Oh Peter, will he die? Oh! poor little thing! Poor little thing!”
Even at that moment, Peter noticed, she spoke as though it were somebody else’s baby.
“No, no, dear. It’ll be all right. Of course it will. Mitchell’s here, he’ll pull him through. But you’d better go and lie down, dear. I promise to come and tell you if anything’s the matter. You can’t do any good — there’s an excellent nurse!”
“Where’s Mrs. Kant?”
“I dismissed her this evening for lying to me. Go to bed. Clare — really it’s the best thing.”
She began to cry with her hands up to her face, but she went, slowly, with her cloak still trailing after her, to her room.
She had not, he noticed, entered the nursery.
III
He went back and sat down again in the arm-chair by the fire. Poor Clare! he felt only a great protecting pity for her — a strange feeling, compounded of emotions that were unexpectedly confused. A feeling that was akin to what he would have felt had she been his sister and been insulted by some drunken blackguard in the street. Poor Clare! She was so young — simply not up to these big grown-up troubles.
Those little cries had ceased — only every now and again an echo of a moan — so slight was the sound that broke the silence. The hours advanced and there settled about the house that chilly ominous sense of anticipation that the early morning brings in its grey melancholy hands. It was a little house but it was full, now, of expectancy. Up the stairs, through the passages, pressing against the windows there were many presences waiting for the moment when the issue of this struggle would be decided. The air was filled with their chill breath. The struggle round the bed was at its height. On one side doctors, nurses, the father, the mother — on the other that still, ironic Figure, in His very aloofness so strong, in His indifference so terrible.
With Peter, as the grey dawn grew nearer, confidence fled. He was suddenly conscious of the strength and invisibility of the thing that he was fighting. He must do something. If he were compelled to sit, silently, quietly, with his hands folded, much longer, he would go mad. But it was absurd — Stephen, about whom he had made so many plans, Stephen, concerning whom there had been that struggle to bring about his very existence ... surely all that was not now to go for nothing at all.
If he could do something — if he could do something!
There were drops of sweat on his forehead — inside his clothes his body was hot and dry and had shrunk, it seemed, into some tiny shape, like a nut, so that his things hung loosely all about him.
He could not bear that dark cavernous nursery, with the faint lights and the stairs and passages beyond it so crowded with urgent silence!
He caught Mitchell on the shoulder.
“How is it?”
“Oh! we’re fighting it. It’s the most rapid thing I’ve ever known. If we only could have operated! Look here, go and lie down for a bit — I’ll let you know if there’s any change!”
He went to his dressing-room, all ghostly now with the first struggling light of dawn. He closed the door behind him and then fell down on his knees by the bed, pressing his face into his hands.
He prayed: “Oh! God, God, God. I have never wanted anything like this before but Stephen is more to me, much, much more to me than anything that I have ever had — more, far more than my own life. I haven’t much to offer but if you will let me keep Stephen you can have all the rest. You can send me back to Bucket Lane, take my work, anything ... I want Stephen ... I want Stephen. God, he is such a good boy. He has always been good and he will make such a fine man. There won’t be many men so fine as he. He’s good as gold. God I will die myself if he may live, I’m no use. I’ve made a mess of things — but let him live and take me. Oh! God I want him, I want him!”
He broke into sobs and was bowed down there on the floor, his body quivering, his face pressed against the bed.
He was conscious that Clare had joined him. She must have heard him from her room. He tried as he felt her body pressed against his, to pull himself together, but the crying now had mastered him and he could only feel her pushing with her hand to find his — and at last he let her take his hand and hold it.
He heard her whisper in his ear.
“Peter dear, don’t — don’t cry like that. I can’t bear to hear you like that. I’m so miserable, Peter. I’ve been so wicked — so cross and selfish. I’ve hurt you so often — I’m going to be better, Peter. I am really.”
At that moment they might have come together with a reality, an honesty that no after-events could have shaken. But to Peter Clare was very far away. He was not so conscious of her as he was of those presences that thronged the house. What could she do for him now? Afterwards perhaps. But now it was Stephen — Stephen — Stephen —
But he let her hold his hand and he felt her hair against his cheek, and at last he put his arm around her and held her close to him, and she, with her face against his, went fast asleep. He looked down at her. She looked so young and helpless that the sight of her leaning, tired and beaten, against him, touched him and he picked her up, carried her into her room and laid her on her bed.
How light and tiny she was!
He was conscious of his own immense fatigue. Mitchell had told him that he would wake him; good fellow, Mitchell! He lay down on the bed in his dressing-room and was instantly asleep.
He was outside Scaw House. He was mother-naked and the howling wind and rain buffeted his body and the stones cut his feet. The windows of the house were dark and barred. He could just reach the lower windows with his hands if he stood on tiptoe.
He tapped again and again.
He was tired, exhausted. He had come a long, long way and the rain hurt his bare flesh. At last a candle shone dimly behind the dark window. Some one was there, and instantly at the moment of his realising that aid had come he was conscious also that he must, on all accounts, refuse it. He knew that if he entered the house Stephen would die. It depended on him to save Stephen. He turned to flee but his father had unbarred the door and was drawing him in. He struggled, he cried out, he fought, but his father was stronger than he. He was on the threshold — he could see through the dark ill-smelling hall to the door beyond. His father’s hand fastened on his arm like a vice. His body was bathed in sweat, he screamed ... and woke to find the room dim in the morning light and Mitchell shaking him by the arm.
IV
He was still dreaming. Now he was in the nursery. Clare was kneeling by Stephen’s bed. One doctor was bending down — the nurse was crying very softly.
He looked down on his son. As he looked the little face was, for an instant, puckered with pain. The mouth, the eyes, the throat struggled.
The tiny hands lifted for a moment, hung, and then like fluttering leaves, fell down on to the counterpane. Then the body was suddenly quiet, the face was peaceful and the head had fallen gently, sideways against the pillow.
At that moment of time, throughout the house, the Presences departed. The passages, the rooms were freed, the air was no longer cold.
At that moment also Peter awoke. Mitchell said: “The boy’s gone, Westcott.”
Peter, turning his back upon them all, drove from him,
so softly that they could scarcely hear, but in a voice of agony that Mitchell never afterwards forgot: —
“I wanted him so — I wanted him so.”
CHAPTER XII
A WOMAN CALLED ROSE BENNETT
I
The days that followed were dead — dead in more than any ordinary sense of the word. But perhaps it was Peter who was dead. He moved, ate, drank, even wrote his reviews, slept — he thanked gravely all those who offered him condolences — wrote letters in answer to kind friends.... “Dear S —— It was just like you to write so kindly and sympathetically....” And all this time he was without any kind of emotion. He was aware that there was something in the back of his brain that, were it once called upon to awake, might stir him into life again. What it would tell him he did not know, something about love, something intensely sorrowful, something that had occurred very probably to himself. He did not want to live — to think, to feel. Thinking meant pain, meant a sudden penetrating into that room shrouded now by heavy, black curtains but containing, were those curtains drawn, some great, phantasmal horror.
He was dimly aware that the people about him were frightened. Clare, Bobby Galleon, Cardillac. He knew that they would be glad for him to draw those curtains aside and penetrate into that farther room. That was unkind of them. He had no other emotion but that it was unkind of them. Beyond that unkindness, they did not exist.
He was thinner. His shoulders seemed to pierce sharply his clothes; his cheeks were white and hollow, there were dark lines beneath his eyes, dark, grey patches. His legs were not so straight, nor so strong. Moreover his eyes were as though they were covered with a film. Seeing everything they yet saw nothing at all. They passed through the world and were confronted by the heavy, veiling curtains....
This condition lasted for many days. Of all about him none understood him so well as Bobby Galleon. Bobby had always understood him, and now he felt for him with a tenderness that had both the past and the future to heighten its poignancy. It seemed to Bobby that nothing more tragic than the death of this child could possibly have occurred. It filled him with anxiety for the future, it intensified to a depth that only so simple and affectionate a character as his could feel, the love that he had always had for Peter.
He was with him during these days continually, waiting for the relief to come.
“It’s got to come soon,” he said, “or the boy’ll go mad.”
At last it came.
One day about tea-time they were sitting in Peter’s upstairs study. It had been a day of showers and now the curtains were not drawn and a green-grey dusk glimmered beyond the windows.
Peter was writing letters, and as Bobby watched him he seemed to him like some automaton, something wound into life by some clever inventor. The hand moved across the paper — the dead eyes encountered nothing in their gaze, the shoulders were the loosely drooping shoulders of an old man.
“Can you see, Peter?”
“Yes, thanks. Switch on the light if you like.”
Bobby got up and moved to the door. The dusk behind Peter’s face flung it into sharp white outline.
Another shower! The rain at first in single drops, then more swiftly, fell with gentle, pattering fingers up and down the window. It was the only sound, except the scraping of Peter’s pen. The pen stopped. Peter raised his head, listening.
Bobby switched on the light and as he did so Peter in a strangled breathless mutter whispered —
“The rain! The rain! It was like that that night. Stephen! Stephen!”
His head fell on to his hands and he burst into a storm of tears.
II
And now Peter was out to be hurt, hurt more horribly than he could have ever believed possible. It was like walking — as they did in the days of the Ordeal — on red-hot iron, every step an agony. Always there was something to remind him! He could go nowhere, see nobody, summon no kind of recollection out of the past without this coming to him. There were a thousand things that Stephen had done, that he, Peter, had never noticed at the time. He was haunted now with regrets, he had not made enough of him whilst he was there! Ah! had he only known that the time was to be so short! How he would have spent those precious, precious moments! It was as though he had flung away, wilfully, possessions of the utmost price — cast them off as though it had been his very intention to feel, afterwards, this burning regret. The things in the nursery were packed away, but there remained the room, the frieze with the dragons and princesses, the fire-place, the high broad window. Again and again he saw babies in the streets, in the parks and fancied that Stephen had come back again.
The thing had happened to him so swiftly that, behind reason, there lurked the thought that perhaps, with equal suddenness, Stephen would be restored. To come back one afternoon and to find him there! To find him lying there on his back in his cot looking up at the ceiling, to find him labouring unsteadily on his feet, clinging to the sides of his bed and shouting — to find him laughing at the jumping waves in the fire — to find him!... No, never to be found again — gone, hopelessly, cruelly, for no reason, for no one’s good or benefit — simply for some one’s sport.
But, strangely, more than the actual Stephen did he miss the imaginary future Stephen at school, hero of a thousand games, winner of a thousand prizes, the Stephen grown up, famous already at so young an age, loved by men and women, handsome, good.... Oh! the folly of it! No human being could carry all the glories that Peter had designed for his son — no human being, then how much less a Westcott. It might be best after all, young Stephen had been spared. Until every stone of Scaw House was level with the ground no Westcott could be termed safe — perhaps not then.
Now he realised how huge a place in his heart the boy had filled dimly, because as yet he refused to bring it to the open light he was conscious that, during these past two years he had been save for Stephen, a very lonely man. It was odd that Stephen the elder and Stephen the younger should have been the only two persons in his life to find the real inside of him — they, too, and perhaps Norah Monogue. But, otherwise, not Bobby, nor Cards, nor Alice Galleon, nor Mr. Zanti — nor Clare.
Not Clare. He faced the fact with a sudden shudder. Now that Stephen was gone he and Clare were face to face — face to face as they had never been since that first happy year of their marriage. That first year of their marriage — and now!
With an instant clenching of his teeth he pulled down the blinds upon that desolating view.
III
With teeth still clenched he set himself to build up his house again. Clare was very quiet and submissive during those first weeks. Her little figure looked helpless and appealing in its deep black; she was prettier than she had ever been in her life before. People said, “Poor Mrs. Westcott, she feels the loss of her baby so dreadfully” — and they didn’t think about Peter. Indeed some people thought him callous. “Mr. Westcott seemed to be so fond of the child. Now I really believe he’s forgotten all about him.” Bobby was the only person in the world who knew how Peter suffered.
Clare was, indeed, after a time, reassured. Peter, after all, seemed not to mind. Did he mind anything? He was so often glum and silent that really you couldn’t tell. Clare herself had been frightened on that night when the baby had died. She had probably never in all her life felt a more genuine emotion than she had known when she knelt by Peter’s side and went to sleep in his arms. She was quite ready to feel that emotion again would Peter but allow her. But no. He showed no emotion himself and expected no one else to show any, for he was ready to share it but in her heart of hearts she longed to fling away from her this emotional atmosphere. She had loved the baby — of course she had loved it. But she had always known that something would happen to it — always. If Peter would insist on having those horrid Cornishmen.... At heart she connected that dreadful day when those horrible men had played about in the nursery with baby’s death. Of course it was enough to kill any baby.
So, ultimately, it all came back to Peter’
s fault. Clare found real satisfaction in the thought. Meanwhile she emphatically stated her desire to be happy again.
She stated it always in Peter’s absence, feeling that he would, in no way, understand her. “It can’t help poor dear little Stephen that we should go on being melancholy and doing nothing. That’s only morbid, isn’t it, mother?”
Mrs. Rossiter entirely agreed, as indeed she always agreed with anything that Clare suggested.
“The dear thing does look lovely in black, though,” she confided to Mrs. Galleon. “Mr. Cardillac couldn’t take his eyes off her yesterday at luncheon.”
Mrs. Rossiter and Jerry Cardillac had, during the last year, become the very best of friends. Peter was glad to see that it was so. Peter couldn’t pretend to care very deeply about his mother-in-law, but he felt that it would do her all the good in the world to see something of old Cards. It would broaden her understanding, give her perhaps some of that charity towards the whole world that was one of Cards’ most charming features. Cards, in fact, had been so much in the house lately that he might be considered one of the family. No one could have been more tender, more sympathetic, more exactly right about young Stephen’s death. He had become, during those weeks almost a necessity. He seemed to have no particular interest of his own in life. He dressed very perfectly, he went to a number of parties, he had delightful little gatherings in his own flat, but, with it all, he was something more — a great deal more — than the mere society idler. There was a hint at possible wildness, an almost sinister suggestion of possible lawlessness that made him infinitely attractive. He was such good company and yet one felt that one didn’t know nearly the whole of him.
To Peter he was the most wonderful thing in the world, to Clare he was rapidly becoming so — no wonder then that the Roundabout saw him so often.
IV
It would need a very acute perception indeed to pursue precisely the train of cause and effect in Mrs. Rossiter’s mind after young Stephen’s death. Her black garments added, in the most astonishing fashion, to her placid flatness. If she had gloried before in an armour that was so negative that it became instantly exceedingly dangerous, her appearance now was terrifying beyond all words. Her black silk had apparently no creases, no folds — it almost eliminated terms and boundaries. Mrs. Rossiter could not now be said to come into a room — she was simply there. One was sitting, gazing it might be at the fire, a looking-glass, a picture or two, when suddenly there came a black shadow, something that changed the colour of things a little, something that obscured certain objects, but scarcely anything more definite. The yellow brooch was definite, cold, stony eyes hung a little above it, over those a high white forehead — otherwise merely a black shadow putting out the fire.