by Hugh Walpole
That return had been at the end of October; from then until the end of November he waited, expecting that she would write to him; still, by this anticipation, were Mrs. Pont and Mrs. Pont’s world kept at bay.
No word came. Driven now to take some step that would shatter this silence, he wrote to her a long letter about nothing very much, only something that would bring him a line from her.
For ten days now he had waited and there had come no word. As these first flakes of snow softly, relentlessly, fell past his window the nebulous cloud of all the uncertainties, disappointments, rebellions, of this pointless wasted thing that men called Life crystallized into form— “I’m no good — Life, like this, it’s impossible — I’m no good against it — I’d better climb down....”
And here the irony of it was that he’d never climbed up.
The awful moments in Life are those that threaten us by their suspension of all action. “Just feel what’s piling up for you out of all this silence,” they seem to say. Breton’s trouble now was that he did not know in what direction to move. His relation to Rachel was so nebulous that it could scarcely be called a relation at all.
He only knew that she alone was the person for whom now life was worth combating. He had told her in his letter that she could help him, and the absence of an answer spoke now, in this threatening silence, with mighty reverberating voice. “She doesn’t care.”
Well then, who else is there? Almost he could have fancied that his grandmother, there in the Portland Place house, was withdrawing from him all the supports in which he trusted.
Now the snow, falling ever more swiftly, ever more stealthily, seemed to be with him in the room, stifling, choking, blinding.
He felt that if he could not find company of some kind he would go mad, and so, leaving the storm and the silence behind him in his room, he went to find Lizzie Rand.
II
Lizzie Rand did not conceal from herself now that she loved him. So long had her emotional life been waiting there, undesired, that now it could be kept by her utterly apart from her daily habit, but it became a flame, a fire, that lighted with its splendid warmth and colour the whole of her accustomed world. She indulged it now without restraint, through the long dark autumn she had it treasured there; she did not, as things then were, ask for more than this splendid knowledge that there was now someone upon whom she loved to spend her care. She had not loved to spend it upon her mother and sister, but that had been a duty defined and necessary. Now everything that she could do for Breton was more fuel to fling to her flame. That further question as to whether he might care for her she kept just in sight, but nevertheless not definite enough to risk the absolute challenge.
At least, now, as the weeks passed, he sought her company more and more. She helped him, she cheered and comforted him, enough for her present need.
Even, beyond it all, could she survey herself humorously. This the first love affair of her life made her smile at her capture and defeat.
“Well, I’m just like the rest — And oh! I’m glad, I’m glad that I am.”
Finally she knew that there was still a step that might be taken, between them, at any moment. He had, she knew, something to tell her. Again and again lately he had been about to speak and then had caught the impulse back.
This too she would not examine too closely, but from the moment that he should demand from her definite concrete assistance, from that moment she would be to him what she knew no one now living could claim to be.
Breton was glad when the little maid told him that Mrs. Rand was out, but that Miss Lizzie was at home. He saw her in the warm cosy room, sitting before the fire with her toes on the fender and her skirts pulled up, drying her shoes.
She looked up and smiled at him and told him to sit down, but did not move from her position.
“Mother’s out at a matinee with Daisy. I got away early this afternoon. Do you hate snow, Mr. Breton?”
“I hate it to-day. I’ve got the dumps. I had to find someone to talk to or I’d have gone screaming into the street — —”
“Couldn’t find anyone better, so took me — thank you for the compliment. But I like the snow. Your pool’s more like a pool now than ever, Mr. Breton.”
He went across to the window and stood there looking at the little square now white with the gaunt trees rising black from the heart of it and the grey houses that hemmed it in. Over it the snow, yellow and grey and then delicately white, swirled and tossed.
He came back and sat down beside her and wondered at her neat comfort and air of calm control of all her emotions and desires.
She, looking at him, saw that he was ill. Dark lines beneath his eyes, his cheeks pale and an air of picturesque melancholy that made her want first to laugh at him and then mother him.
“I know what’s the matter with you,” she said, nodding her head.
“What?”
“Something to do. That’s what you want.” She turned towards him, looking at him with a little smile and yet with grave seriousness in her eyes. “Oh! Mr. Breton, why don’t you? What is the use of sitting here month after month, doing nothing, just waiting for something to happen — something that can’t happen unless you make it? Things don’t fall into people’s mouths just because they sit with them open.”
He coloured. “Everybody’s always scolding me,” he said. “Christopher — you — everybody. Nobody understands — how difficult....”
He broke off. So intangible were his difficulties that no words would define them, and yet, God knew, they were real enough.
“I know—” she said, nodding her head. “It’s the thought of them all at Portland Place that’s holding you back. You began by fancying that you wanted to cut their throats, and you still wouldn’t mind slaughtering them if only they in their turn would do something definite. It’s their doing nothing that just holds you up. But really as long as your grandmother’s alive I’m afraid that it’s no good thinking of them. When she’s dead — and she can’t live for ever — anything may happen. Meanwhile why not show them what you can do?”
“But what can I do?” he answered her fiercely. “I’ve never been brought up to do anything — except what I oughtn’t — There’s my arm and one thing and another — Besides, there’s more than that in it, Miss Rand. It’s the fact that — well, that there’s nobody that cares that’s — so freezing. If only somebody minded — —”
As he spoke Rachel rose, beautifully, wonderfully, before him. There, as she had been on that first day when she had had tea there, bending forward, listening, her dark wondering eyes on his face.
Lizzie at the sound of the appeal in his voice had felt her heart expand, beat, so that her body seemed to hold, suddenly, some great possession that hurt her by its force and urgency.
But she answered almost sharply:
“Nonsense, Mr. Breton. Excuse me, but I’ve no patience with that kind of thing. People are meant to stand alone, not to go leaning about for other people’s support. You’re cursed with too much imagination, Mr. Breton, and you remember too clearly everything that’s happened before. Begin now, as though you were born yesterday, and startle the family by your energy — —”
“Now you’re laughing at me,” he said hotly. “I dare say I deserve it, but I don’t feel as though I could stand — very much of it from anyone to-day — —”
Then he was astonished by the sudden softness of her voice. “No, no, please,” she said; “I understand so well. But indeed you have got friends who believe in you. Dr. Christopher, myself, if you’ll count me, and lots more. You’ll win everyone in time if you’re not impatient and don’t despair. Don’t think of your grandmother too much. The mere fact of your not seeing her makes you imagine her as something portentous and dreadful, and she weighs you down, but she isn’t really anything at all. She can’t stop one’s energies if one’s determined to let them go. Please, please don’t think I’m laughing. I only want to help — —”
“I know
you do,” he answered warmly, “I owe you more than I can say. All these last weeks you and Christopher have been the two people who’ve held the world together for me. But there’s more than you know, Miss Rand. There’s — —”
He bent towards her. She knew that the confidence was at last to be hers. It needed her strongest control to prevent the trembling of her hands. His eyes were alight, his whole body eloquent. At the thought of what he might be about to tell her the room turned before her.
Voices in the little hall. Then the door opened and in came Mrs. Rand and Daisy. They had been to the play — Such nonsense. One of these new, serious plays with long, long conversations — Mrs. Rand wanted tea. Daisy wanted admiration.
Between Lizzie and Breton the precious cup had fallen, smashed to the tiniest atoms.
Meanwhile aimless conversation was more than he, in his present mood, could endure.
He made some excuse and, scarcely knowing what he did, found his hat and coat and went out into the square.
III
There had come to him one of those agonies of loneliness that no argument, no reasoning can destroy.
The absence of any letter from Rachel seemed to show that she had abandoned him. In all this vast thickly peopled world there was now no one to whom his presence or absence, his fortunes or disasters mattered. The snowstorm gathered him into its folds; the snow fell against his mouth, his eyes, and before him, behind him, around him there was a world deserted of man, houses blind and without life.
The snow might fall now to the end of time. It would creep up and up, falling from the heavens, rising from the earth, swallowing all creation — the end of the world.
He pressed into the park and there under the trees stretching like gallows against the throttling sky temptation to give it all up, to go under and have done with it all, leapt, hot and fierce, upon him. Mrs. Pont and the others were waiting for him. They would be good to him. The Upper World would not hear nor see nor think of his disasters, and slowly, with the others, life would recede, he would crumble and decay and cease to care, and death would come soon enough.
Then the wind smote his face and tore at his coat: the snow died away, beyond the black bare trees a very faint yellow bar threaded the thick grey — promise that the storm was at an end.
Suddenly with the cessation of the storm the long field of white seemed good and restful, and beyond the park the houses showed light in their windows.
The yellow spread through the sky, and stars, very slowly, came and the wind died away.
Courage filled him. Rachel might never come or write or care, but he would make the thought of her the one true thing in his heart, and with that he would do battle so long as he could.
Christopher and Miss Rand ... he thought of them as he trudged his way home — and when he saw the white silence of Saxton Square and the golden sky breaking above its peace and quiet he thought that, for a time longer, he would keep his place and hold his own.
CHAPTER II
A LITTLE HOUSE
“Each in the crypt would cry, ‘But one freezes here! and why? ‘When a heart, as chill, ‘At my own would thrill Back to life, and its fires out-fly? ‘Heart, shall we live or die? The rest ... settle by-and-by!’”
Robert Browning.
I
Rachel at Seddon Court watched, from her window, that first fallen snow.
Seddon Court is about three miles from the town of Lewes and lies, tucked and cornered, under the very brow of the Downs. It is a grey little house, old and stalwart, with a courtyard and two towers. The towers are Norman; the rest of the house is Tudor.
Beyond the actual building there are gardens that run to the very foot of the Downs, with only a patch and an old stone wall intervening. Above the house, day and night, year after year, the Downs are bending; everything, beneath their steady solemn gaze, is small and restless; as the colours are flung by the sun across their green sprawling limbs the house, at their feet, catches their reflected smile and, when the sun is gone and the winds blow, cowers beneath their frown; everything in that house is conscious of their presence.
Rachel had been at Seddon Court for a month and now, at the window of her writing-room, looking across the garden, up into their dark shadows, she wondered at their indifference and monotony. Anyone who had known her before her marriage would be struck instantly, on seeing her now, by a change in her.
Her whole attitude to the world, during her first season in London, had been an attitude of wonder, of expectation, of the uncertainty that comes from expectation.
With that expectation were also alarm, distrust, and it was only when some sudden incident or person called happiness into her face that that distrust vanished.
Now she was older, that hesitation and awkwardness were gone, but with their departure had vanished, too, much of her honesty. Her dark eyes were as sincere as they had ever been, but to anyone who had known her before her attitude now was assumed. Nothing might catch her unprepared, but what experiences were they that had taught her the need for armour?
Sitting in her room looking on to a lawn that would soon be white and to Downs obscured already by the thick tumbling snow, she knew that she was unhappy, disappointed, even alarmed. Suddenly to-day the uneasiness that had been gathering before her throughout the last weeks assumed, on this afternoon, the definite tangibility of a challenge.
“What’s the matter — with me, with everything?... What’s happened?”
Her room, dark green and white, had no pictures, but a long low book-case with grave handsome books, an edition of someone in red with white paper labels and another edition of someone else in dark blue and another in gold and brown, an old French gilt mirror, square, with a reflection of the garden and the foot of the Downs in it, an old Queen Anne rosewood writing-table, some Queen Anne chairs, a gate-legged table — a very cool, quiet room.
At her feet with his head resting on her shoe there lay a dog. This dog about a fortnight ago she had found in a field near the house with a kettle tied on to his tail, and his body a confused catastrophe of mud and blood.
She had carried him home; it had needed some courage to introduce him into the household, for Roddy possessed many dogs all of the finest breeds, and this was a mongrel who defied description. He was very short and shaggy and stumpy. He was much too large for a Yorkshire terrier and yet that was undoubtedly his derivation. There was something of a sheep-dog in him and something of a Skye; his hair fell all over his face and, when you could see them, his eyes were brown. His nose was like a wet blackberry and his ears were long and full of emotion; when he ran his short tail, on which the hairs were arranged like branches on a Christmas tree, stuck up into the air and he resembled a rabbit.
In the confusion of the moment Rachel had called him Jacob, because she thought that Jacob was, in the Bible, the “hairy one”.... After all, you could not call a dog Esau.
Yes, to retain him had needed courage. Thinking of Roddy’s attitude to the dog brought so many other attendant thoughts in its train. Roddy in his devotion to animals (and oh! he was devoted), had no room for those that were not of the aristocracy.
Concerning dogs who were mongrels he was kind but thought them much better dead. Unkind he would never be, but the way in which he ignored Jacob was worse than any unkindness.
Jacob, sensitive perhaps from early suffering, knew this and avoided Roddy, ran out of the room when he came into it, showed in every way that he must not expect to rank with the other dogs.
Very characteristic this attitude of Roddy, but very characteristic, too, the affection that Jacob was now receiving from his mistress. There was something that Jacob drew from Rachel that none of the fine, noble dogs of the house was able to secure.... Why?... What, again, was the matter? Why was Rachel unhappy?
Rachel was unhappy, and the answer came quite clearly to her as the room was darkened by the great storm of snow now falling over the Downs and the garden, because marriage with Roddy had not lessened i
n any way that uneasy disquiet that had stirred, without pause, beneath her life before her marriage; that uneasiness had, indeed, during the last three months, increased....
Was this her fault or Roddy’s?
Attacked now by a scrutiny that refused dismissal she delivered herself up to the investigation of these months of her married life.
She knew that she had only once been happy since her marriage — that was on the first evening, when, the noise and clamour of the London wedding having died away, she had walked with Roddy in the peace of the Massiter garden (Lady Massiter had lent her house for the first weeks of the honeymoon), had felt his arm about her, had believed that there had really come to her that comfort and safety for which she longed.
After that there had followed a fortnight of great unreality — the strangest excitement, the most adventurous wonders, but a wonder and excitement that were from herself, the real Rachel Beaminster, most absolutely removed. It was as though she had watched closely but detached the experiences of some other girl. Roddy had, during those times, been a most ardent and passionate lover; she had tried to respond and had hidden, as best she could, her failure.
Then, suddenly, with the time of their going abroad, passion had left him; it had left him as swiftly as the passing of wind over a hill. It was there — it was gone.
But he remained the perfect husband. His kindness, his charm, his simplicity, his affection for her — an affection that could never for an instant be doubted — these things had delighted her. He was now the friend, the strong reliant companion that she had wanted him to be. During those first weeks in Italy and Greece happiness might have come to her had she not been stirred by her remembrance of the earlier weeks. The passion that had been in him, although it had not touched her, now in retrospect lit fires for her imagination. Instantly back to her had come the whole disquiet and unrest. The things that Roddy called from her now, she suddenly discovered with a great shrinking alarm, were all the Beaminster things. All the true emotions, qualities, traditions that made up her secret life were roused in her by their own inherent vitality, never by his evocation of them. He was Beaminster — Roddy was Beaminster. With his kindness and courtesy his eyes saw the world with the eyes of his ancestors, his tongue spoke the language that had in it no sincerity, his heart wished for all the ceremonies and lies that the Beaminster had believed in since the beginning of time.