by Hugh Walpole
“The fact is that since our marriage we’ve never got to know each other in the least. We talk and go to places together and you give me things and I give you things — and that’s all. I don’t know you and now, after to-day, I can’t trust you — —”
He coloured a little at that, but said nothing.
She went on, rather fast and her breath coming between her words: “But I’m not going to be so silly as to make a scene because I saw you kissing Nita Raseley. She’s simply not worth thinking about, — but you ought to be straighter to me all the way round. If you’ve wanted to be kind to me as you say, then you might have taken me more into your life — —”
“Well,” said Roddy slowly, “if you’d managed to love me a bit, Rachel, things might be different.”
This answer was so utterly unexpected that it took her like a blow. That Roddy should attack her when he had, only a few hours before, been discovered so abominably!
“What do you mean, Roddy?” she stammered angrily. “Love you? But — —”
“Yes,” he persisted doggedly, “I know when you accepted me you said you didn’t and I know that I hadn’t any right to expect it, but I believe if you hadn’t thought me such a silly ass and hadn’t looked all the time as though you were just indulgin’ my silly fancies until somethin’ more sensible had come along, things might have been different. I’m the sort of feller,” Roddy said, choosing his words carefully, “that you could have made anythin’ out of, Rachel. I’m weak in some ways — most men are — and when a thing comes dancin’ along lookin’ ever so temptin’, why, then I generally have to go after it. But you could have kept me, Rachel, more than anyone I’ve ever known — —”
She was not touched nor moved, only angered that he, so obviously in the wrong, should attempt justification.
“Yes,” she said hotly. “And I suppose in another moment you’ll be telling me that it’s silly of me to be angry at what I saw this afternoon?”
He thought it out a moment, then answered: “No, it was perfectly natural of course — only I don’t think you ought to mind much. If you really cared, you wouldn’t. It don’t matter really so much what I do if I still like you best. Moments don’t count — it’s what goes on all the time that matters. Why, I might kiss a hundred women and still you’d be the only woman who mattered to me. I’ve never cared for one so long before,” he added simply.
Then as she said nothing he went on: “I’ve never been sort of educated — never cared enough for anyone to give things up. I would have given things up for you if you’d wanted me to, but you didn’t really — —”
“Aren’t we a little off the point, Roddy?” she flung back. “The point is how are we going to get along all the years and years we’ve got in front of us? What are we going to do?”
“Everybody’s just the same,” said Roddy quietly. “It takes a lot of years before married people settle down. We can’t expect to be any different — —”
But although he spoke so quietly he watched her, hoping for some yielding on her part; in an instant, had she come to him, she would have seen a Roddy whom she had never seen before and from that moment onwards would have had a power over him that nothing could have shaken.
So delicately hung the balance between them. But she was filled with a sense of her own wrongs, her loneliness, the injustice of it all. At that moment all affection for Roddy had left her, she would only have been glad if she had known that she was never to see him again. His slow voice, his way of thinking out his sentences, his thick clumsy hands and his red face, everything came to her now as a continuation of the chains that she had worn all her days.
She got up and confronted him —
“Yes,” she said fiercely, “that’s exactly it. Life is to be like everyone else. We’re to say the things, do the things that our neighbours say and do. Because your friends at Brooks’s kiss their wives’ friends, therefore you are to do so. Because the men you know never say what they mean and lie about everything they do, therefore you do the same. Oh! I know! Haven’t I heard it all my life? Haven’t my precious family lived on lies? You’ve caught it all from my delightful grandmother! I congratulate you!”
“What if I have?” he said. “She’s a friend of mine, Rachel. She’s been dashed good to me — You’re not to say a word against her.”
“I hate her,” Rachel cried passionately. “All my life she’s been over me — for years she’s been my enemy. If she stands for everything that you believe, then it isn’t any wonder that we have nothing in common, that you should be proud of this afternoon, that — that — —”
She was biting her lips to keep back the tears. Over his face had crept a sulky obstinate look that might have told her, had she seen it, that she was driving him very far.
“She’s fine,” he said. “She’s made England what it is. You’re all for ideas, Rachel, and for Truth and lots of things, but you’re difficult to live with.”
“Very well, Roddy. Thank you. Now we know how we stand. I at least owe Nita a debt for having cleared up the situation. If you find it difficult with me I can at least return the compliment — and I have at any rate this added advantage, that I speak the truth.”
As he looked at her across the room he saw in her that same figure that he’d seen once just before proposing to her — someone foreign, unknown — He felt as though he were quarrelling with a stranger....
She turned and went.
For a long while he stood gazing into the fire, his hands in his pockets. How had it all happened? Why had they let it come to that kind of quarrel when they might so easily have prevented it?
And she, crying bitterly in her room, asked herself the same question.
CHAPTER IV
RACHEL — AND CHRISTOPHER AND RODDY
I
Christopher had snatched his first holiday for two years and was abroad during the January of 1899 when the Seddons were in town.
February, March and April they spent at Seddon Court, and it was not therefore until early in May that Christopher saw Rachel.
She had dreaded with an almost fantastic alarm this meeting. No other human being knew her so honestly and accurately as did Christopher, and the change in her that he would at once discern would, when she caught the reflection of it in his eyes, mark definitely the sinister country into which these last months had carried her.
It had seemed as though some malign spirit had been determined to make the most of that quarrel that Nita Raseley had provoked.
Both Roddy and Rachel hated scenes — upon that, at least, they were agreed — and from their determination never to have another arose a deliberate avoidance of any plain speaking. Rachel, longing for honesty, found herself caught in a thousand deceits — Roddy, avoiding any kind of analysis, found that everything that he provided in conversation seemed to lead to danger.
He was now always ill at ease in Rachel’s company; he had stood on that fatal evening, more strongly for the Beaminster interest than he had intended, but from his very determination to maintain his new independence, he produced the Duchess for Rachel’s benefit at every turn of the road.
Roddy knew that the Duchess feared that Rachel would lead him from her side and that she received with rejoicing every sign on his part of irritation against Rachel. She had wanted him to marry her granddaughter because that bound him more closely to her, but she had not, perhaps, been prepared for the probable effect of Rachel’s character upon him.
The Duchess therefore made, throughout these months, a third member of their company. Roddy, finding Rachel’s society a growing embarrassment, spent more and more of his time with his animals and his tenants and labourers. But all this time he was conscious, in a dumb way, of unhappiness and a puzzled dismay, so that his very affection for Rachel produced in him a growing irritation that it should be so needlessly thwarted. Things were all wrong and his resentment of his own failure to right them reacted, without his will, upon the very person whom he wished to propit
iate.
For Rachel these months were baffling in their hideous discomfort. Her affection for Roddy was there, but it was swallowed by her desperate efforts to analyse a situation that was, in definite outline, no situation at all.
As Roddy withdrew, her loneliness wrapped her round, and in every day that added to her distance from Roddy she saw the active and malignant agency of her grandmother. She was intelligent enough to be aware that in this constant vision of the Duchess she was outstepping the probabilities; but her early years and the precipitation with which she had been shot out of them into an atmosphere that unexpectedly resembled their own earlier surroundings seemed to point to some diabolical agency.
“Oh! when I get free of this,” had been her earlier cry, and now the foreboding that she was never to be free of it until she died terrified her with its possibility. Imagine her brought up in a stuffy house with windows tightly closed, in full vision of a high road, imagine her promised the freedom of the road at a future time; imagine her liberated, at last, rushing into the new life and finding that, after all, the walls of the house were still about her, and about her now for ever.
Her one reserve during the early months of the year at Seddon had been her letters to Francis Breton. His letters to her had been a series of self-revelation; he had restrained himself in so far as appealing to her simply on the score of their relationship and his enmity to the head of the house. She had replied revealing her sympathy, hinting at rebellion on her own side and feeling, after the writing of every letter, a hatred of her own deceit, a curiously heightened sense of affection for Roddy, above all a conviction that impulses were, of their own agency, working to some climax that she could not, or would not, control.
The foreign blood in her, the English blood in him, baffled their advances toward one another. Everything that Rachel did now seemed to Roddy so close to melodrama that it was best to use silence for his weapon. All Roddy’s actions were to Rachel further illustrations of Beaminster muddle and second-rate personality.
Had Roddy called out of Rachel the great depth of passion and reality that she inherited from her mother her own love of him would have solved everything — but that he could not call from her, nor ever would.
For Rachel, she saw in him now a possibility of perpetual infidelity, and at every suspicion of it her disgust both at herself and him grew because that possibility did not move her more.
They came up to London at the beginning of May and hid, very successfully from the world, the widening breach.
To Rachel, it was sheer terror to discover the thrill that the adjacence of Elliston Square to Saxton Square gave her. In this one self-revelation there was enough to present her with night after night of sleepless misery. She visited the Duchess and found that her presence was continually demanded. Every visit was a battle.
“Show me how you are treating him, whether he cares for you. Have you found him out? Tell me everything — —”
“I will tell you nothing. I will come here day after day and you shall gather nothing from me. I have escaped you.”
“Indeed you have not escaped me. My power over you is only now beginning — —”
No word between them but the most civil. There was no trace in the old woman now of her earlier irony — no sign in Rachel of irritation or rebellion.
But the girl knew that war was declared, that her only ally was one in whose alliance lay, for her, the very heart of danger.
All these things she might hide from the world — from Christopher she knew that she could hide nothing.
II
It was on an early afternoon in May that Christopher had tea with Rachel. He had waited for his visit with very real anxiety; the letters that he had had from her had been unsatisfactory, not because they were actively expressive of unhappiness, but because there was an effort in every word of them — Rachel had never found it difficult to write to him before.
He was also uneasy because he had been against this marriage from the beginning. He did, as he said to the Duchess, know Rachel better than anyone else knew her; he knew her from his love for her, and also from that scientific study that he applied in his profession. And he had found, too, in her, as he had found in Breton, some strain of fierce helplessness, as of an animal caught in a trap, that especially moved his interest and affection —
Was Rachel’s marriage a disaster? If so she had certainly managed to conceal it, for even the Duchess did not know — of that he was sure.
If Rachel were indeed unhappy would she come to him as she used to come to him?
What change had marriage wrought in her?
It was one of those May days when the weather is hot before London is ready. It was a day of tension; buildings, streets quivered beneath a sun in whose gaze there was no kindliness nor comfort. Christopher drove from Eaton Square, where, for some hours he had been engaged in preventing an old man from dying, when both the old man himself and all his friends and relations were convinced that death was the best thing for him —
Sloane Street ran like white steel before his eyes, not dimly veiled as he had so often seen it; Park Lane offered houses that stared with haughty faces upon a world that would, they knew, do anything for money —
Elliston Square itself was white and sterile; the town was, on this afternoon, irritated, sinister ... feet ached upon its pavements and hearts were suddenly clutched with foreboding.
As he ascended in the lift to her flat he knew that, did he find that this marriage was, truly, a misadventure for Rachel, then, until his death, he would reproach himself for some weak inaction, some hesitation when first he had heard that it was to be.
He had protested, but now he felt that he should have done more.
Soon he had his answer to all his questions.
He saw at once that Rachel was no longer the impulsive, nervous girl whom he had always known. She was a girl no longer.
Her eyes greeted him now steadily, she seemed taller and her body was in perfect control — very tall and slim and dark, her cheeks pale but shadowed a little with the shadow deepening beneath her eyes. Her mouth, that had always been too large, had had before a delightful quality of uncertainty, so that smiles and frowns and alarms, distress and happiness all hovered near. It was now grave and composed.
Her limbs had always moved unsteadily and with the awkward lack of control of a child, now there was no kind of impulse, every movement was considered, and that was the first thing that Christopher saw, that nothing that Rachel now did or said was spontaneous.
There was less in her now to remind him of her foreign blood.
The flat was comfortable, but more commonplace than it would have been had it been Rachel’s only.
He kissed her, as he had always done, and he fancied that she clung for a moment to him, as her hands went up to his coat.
He settled his big loose body and looked across at her.
Christopher was no subtle analyser of other people’s emotions. His own feelings were never complicated and he expected life to run on plain and simple lines of likes and dislikes, sorrow, anger, love and hatred. If someone of whom he was fond made a direct appeal to him his simple remedies were often wonderfully useful — he was no fool and he had been brought, during a great number of years, into the most direct relations with men and women, but, if that direct appeal was not made, then he was frightened and baffled.
He was frightened of Rachel now; he knew instantly that instead of appealing she would defend herself from him.... Some mysterious conviction seemed to forebode that he would not be able to help her. He was, essentially, of those who, believing in goodness and virtue and the glorious Millennium, are contented, quite simply, with that belief and might, if they stated those simplicities, irritate the scoffers. But he was saved because he made statements on the rarest occasions and lived his life instead.
Here, however, was a crisis in his relations with Rachel that no platitudes could satisfy. Did he not touch her now he might never touch h
er again.
In a situation that was beyond him he was always hopelessly self-conscious. His love for Rachel was so tremendous a thing in him that a statement of it should surely have been the simplest thing in the world. But he saw in her eyes that to challenge her with— “My dear, you know how I love you. Tell me what’s the matter,” would frighten her to absolute silence. “I’m going to tell you nothing,” she seemed to say to him, “unless you move me in spite of myself. But, if I don’t tell you now I shall never tell you.”
“Well, my dear,” he said, smiling at her, “how are you after all this time?”
“I’m all right,” she answered, smiling back at him. “It is good to see you again. Tell me all about your holiday.”
“Tell me about yours first.”
“Oh! There isn’t very much to tell. I enjoyed it all enormously, of course.”
“What did you enjoy most?”
“Oh! some of the smaller towns — Rapallo, for instance. — Oh! yes, and Bologna was fascinating.”
“Not Rome and Florence?”
“In a way. But there were too many tourists. Rome one’s got to stay in, I’m sure. That first view was disappointing.”
“And how did Roddy — if I may call him Roddy — enjoy it?”
“Immensely, I think. He liked the country better than the towns though.”
“You saw lots of pictures?”
“Heaps. Roddy enjoyed them enormously. I’d no idea he knew so much about them. Oh! it was all lovely, and such colours, such light — London seems like a cellar, even in June.”
There followed then a pause that swelled and swelled between them until it resembled some dreadful monster, horribly stationed there to separate them.
Christopher looked at Rachel, but she refused to meet his eyes.
“I’ve lost her. I shall never see her again!” he thought with despair. Two years ago he would have gone to her, put his arms around her, kissed her and drawn from her at once her trouble.