by E. H. Young
“May I congratulate you?” he said solemnly. “For the mother of sons, this is a happy day.”
She had reached the hall and, slowly lifting her head and lowering her eyelids, she said quietly, “I knew my sons could not last for ever, but I hoped England would,” and she stood there while he wished her a disconcerted good night and, in his hurry, stumbled over the steps.
He was vexed about that; he was vexed because he had not stood his ground and assured her that England was safe for many years to come; there was a written guarantee for that. Instead, he had accepted what seemed like a scornful dismissal and unable, for once, to put a nattering interpretation on her manner, he went to find what comfort he could from his wife.
She looked up from her sewing. “Well,” she said, “I suppose you found it satisfactory.”
“Satisfactory? Oh yes, yes, a great achievement. A wonderful personal triumph. Enormous enthusiasm!” He fidgeted about the room but, gradually, he found something soothing and sympathetic in the movements of her plump, dexterous hands. “But I was treated myself with very little courtesy,” he said.
“I am surprised,” said Mrs. Blackett.
“Nothing surprises me in that woman. I was shut up alone with her schoolboy son, if you please!”
“She did not invite you. You were making use of her. You have never shown her much courtesy yourself.”
“I have already given you a reason for that,” he said, pursing his lips.
“Yes, and isn’t it possible,” she said, with a little catch in her voice as she bent over her sewing, “isn’t it possible that she too is doing her best to behave as she should?” She did not look up because she knew the mixture of primness and gratification of his expression, his lips a little moist, would be more than she could bear, and then, without conscious intention, moved by all the warring emotions of the last weeks, a cruel desire to hurt him and yet, it might be, to save him and at the same time to cleanse herself of the poison in her mind, she did look up. She knew the moment had come and she was going to speak at last and she gave him that full glance of which she was so sparing, in which he saw, for the first time, a resemblance to Rhoda’s steady stare, and his silly smile stiffened into an uncertain one.
“And the strange thing is,” he said, “you don’t seem to mind.”
“Mind!” she echoed. “Mind what?”
“Surely you can’t ask me to be more explicit. I should have thought you had been explicit enough yourself.”
She let her sewing drop from her hands. “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” she said. “You see, you don’t really live in the same world as I do.”
“Not entirely,” he agreed. “I live in two worlds. In one I get my living—and yours, and there you and I and the children meet, but into the other, the one in which I ought to have lived all the time, I can fortunately retreat when I choose. But why laugh? Why cry? Particularly, why laugh?”
“Because you are such a fool, Herbert,” she said gently. “Such a fool.”
“Yes, I know.” This was a disadvantage he had to bear. “I know I am an unworldly fool.”
“That sounds very nice,” she said, “but it isn’t what I meant and it isn’t true. Your world is made and entirely occupied by Herbert Blackett and anyone else who sees him as he sees himself. But nobody does, nobody. How could they? The reason you don’t like Rhoda is because she sees someone quite different and you know it.”
He stared at her in amazed alarm. “Bertha,” he said, and when he spoke he let out more breath than voice, “Bertha, have you gone mad? Do you know what you are saying?”
“Yes, indeed, I do,” she said pitifully. Now that she had begun she must go on but she found it was more difficult than she had expected. She had believed that when she could contain herself no longer all her pent-up feelings would burst out in a happily angry flood. Now, faced with his anxious astonishment, she found it necessary to harden herself, to remember his bland self-satisfaction, the caresses she hated, his skill in giving everything a significance which ministered to his self-esteem, his complacent misapprehension of her character.
“I have been studying you very carefully for years,” she said,
“I am aware of that. I have not been ungrateful. Materially, I have had every possible consideration, but wasn’t that your fair share of the labour and your duty? And one does not live by bread alone,” he said, and he saw her smiling, for this stupidity strengthened her. “However, you have not been yourself lately, I think you ought to see a doctor, and I shall ignore the cruel things you have been saying. You will be sorry for them when you are calmer and I shall try to forget them.”
“You won’t succeed in doing that,” she said, “but you’ll do what you always do.”
“Forgive?” he suggested, trying to smile kindly.
“What you are doing already.”
“I am trying to do that.”
“You will avoid the truth,” she said. “But how can you help it? You don’t know what it is. Do I? Does anyone?” she asked a little wildly.
“Now Bertha, quietly, quietly,” he said. “I can explain it all. You have worried yourself, quite unnecessarily, about this fear of war, and my unfortunate sister has worn you out. Now you must go to bed,” and Mrs. Blackett in a despairing whisper, said, “I’m afraid it’s hopeless.” She had not properly realized that the faults of which she meant to tell him were the very ones which would make the telling useless. “And yet,” she said, “I don’t feel I can live in all this falseness any longer.”
“Oh Bertha, how absurd you are,” he said gently. “There is no falseness. I have never said a word to Mrs. Fraser I should not have liked you to hear and I have given her no opportunity to say one. I know you have been a little jealous but I didn’t think that would do you any harm!”
“Oh, don’t be so ridiculous!” she cried. She was angry now and not more for herself than for the other woman. “As though I should care! As though she would look at you except to laugh at you! I know she thinks you are a conceited prig and that ought to have been very humiliating for me but, as it happens, it isn’t. I just don’t care! And you think she was resisting temptation when she left you to-night! Yes.” She spoke quickly, giving him no chance to interrupt her. “The temptation to tell you what she thinks of people who are rejoicing, as you are, to-day. She couldn’t very well do that in her own house and so she left you. That was the only temptation she had, I can assure you.”
“If that explanation comforts you, let us leave it at that,” he said. “You are not fit, just now, for argument,” and speaking very slowly and clearly, as though he wanted to force some sense past the delirium of a feverish patient, he said, “There is nothing at all for you to worry about. Do you hear that, Bertha? Nothing at all. Let me take you up to bed. A good night’s rest and then the doctor in the morning. Come,” he said, going towards her with outstretched hands.
“No, no,” she said, and he was not resentful. He knew that people even a little overwrought shrank from those nearest to them, and he saw that he would have to be very gentle with her for a time, though when had he been anything else?
“I might have known this would happen,” she said, “that you wouldn’t listen. It won’t do you any good but it will do me a great deal. It has amused me, all these years, deceiving you, but I can’t bear it any longer. It makes me feel so wicked.”
“Deceiving me?” he cried. And into his mind there rushed the extraordinary possibility that such ideas as those with which he had played had taken form and substance in his wife’s actions, and strangely enough, the very outrageousness of the thought gave it a horrid probability. “You’re not telling me,” he said in a hollow voice, “that you have been unfaithful to me?” He put his hands over his face and from behind them his muffled voice asked, “Who is it? Is it Lindsay?” and he heard her say sharply, “Don’t!”
He took a peep at her through his fingers which shook a little. She seemed quite calm, her lips were set in their usual half-smiling curves. She had never changed the way in which she wore her hair. Parted in the middle, it was drawn back softly from her smooth forehead as it had been when he first saw her and he could believe that what had attracted him then might well attract someone else. When he could forget himself he was not stupid and the difference he perceived in her as she leaned forward, looking beyond him, was a positive quality instead of the negative one to which he was accustomed and there crept upon him a conviction of her perfect self-control, worse than his suspicion of mild insanity.
“What are you thinking of?” he asked, dropping his hands.
“Of you,” she said.
“There’s no one else?”
“No, no. There are more ways than one of being unfaithful. And all that side of me was killed in Florence.”
“In Florence?”
“I loathed it. I’ve gone on loathing it. No, of course you didn’t know. You have never known the first thing about me. You have never troubled to find out. You were happy, so I must be happy. You were charmed with yourself, I must be charmed with you. And I’ve let you think so. I liked to see how stupid, how self-satisfied you could be.”
“I don’t believe it! You don’t know what you’re saying. You said you loved me. Why did you marry me?”
“I was so ignorant,” she said quietly. “And then I had so poor an opinion of myself that I think anyone reasonably presentable would have done. But perhaps I ought to have gone on pretending, so that you could go on being happy. I wonder. You are not a bad man,” she said, hating her own patronizing tone. “You work hard and I’m sure you are honourable in your business and you do all you can for the children, in your own way, definitely in your own way.” She sighed. “That’s just it. For you, there’s only one way. You are not self-indulgent in the usual sense, but how you indulge yourself in every other! You can’t see a pretty woman without thinking you must attract her and protect yourself! I think that annoys me more than anything else because it’s so fatuous and so untrue. And you’ve never thought of me as a separate person. That,” she said, “is why you can’t retort with nasty things about me now. There are plenty, but you don’t know what they are. For you, I haven’t a character. I’m an appendage, but I’ve been thinking about you intensively for nearly twenty years.”
He stood up and began to move about the room with short, agitated steps painful to see and when she said sternly, “Sit down, Herbert. You must listen. This is the first and last time,” it was painful that he obeyed her, going with uncertainty to his chair, and she felt sorry for him when she saw his cheeks drawn under his eyes and his over-red lips sagging.
“And do you know,” she said, and now her manner was friendly and confidential, “how it all started, this frightful conceit of yours? I think I do.”
She paused but he did not speak. Mad or sane, what did it matter? He had dropped into that dark little pit from which, a short time ago, he had turned his gaze.
“I expect you were predisposed that way,” she said, “but I think you had to make yourself a protective covering when you got out of going to the war.”
That roused him “War!” he cried. “It is a wicked, hateful thing and I was right.”
“But you told me at the time it was your painful duty to stay at home. It wasn’t. But I was so simple, I believed you.”
“It’s the duty of every man,” he stammered, “to oppose it.”
“But you didn’t do that,” she said quietly. “I could have understood that. And now the very word enrages you. And you hate Piers Lindsay because he went and bears the marks of it. Your principles are not really finer than other people’s. And you’re thankful for what’s happened now because, somehow, it seems to justify you. And the hide you began to make for yourself then has grown thicker and thicker every day. And I don’t suppose I’ve penetrated it,” but he had gone and whether she had merely irritated his surface or made a hole in his defensive armour she did not know. She heard the slamming of the front door, but she was not alarmed. He would not do anything desperate. He would probably return with everything arranged in his mind to his own satisfaction and she was not satisfied with herself. She felt rather ashamed, but she knew she felt more kindly towards him than she had done since their wedding day and could see him simply now as another faulty human creature like herself.
Chapter LIV
Miss Spanner had said there would be trouble across the road one day and it had come for Mr. Blackett, though not in the way she had planned and, if she had heard of it or of a much more exciting domestic drama, it would not have diverted her, that night, from her alternating anger and despair as she thought of her fellow countrymen cheering as a victory what was an inglorious defeat. The colour returning to Rosamund’s cheeks when Piers Lindsay arrived in the evening, her restlessness calmed, the sense she did not try to hide of something almost like content, had not stirred Miss Spanner to anxiety, because these changes were unobserved. She was not looking for signs and portents in her own small affairs. Passages from the Old Testament she knew so well were sounding in her ears, words of lamentation and denunciation.
“What luck!” she had exclaimed suddenly.
“Luck?” Rosamund said in sceptical surprise.
“Getting the Bible translated when we did,” Miss Spanner said.
The words, even without the aptness she found in them were a solace denied to Rosamund. She had her own in Felix’s freedom and Lindsay’s love, but whatever alleviations they could find, neither of these women, who laid no claim to wisdom, who were without any special training, these ordinary products of the ideas on which they had been nurtured, Rosamund, unobtrusively by her father, Miss Spanner through her books and both in the traditions of their country, would ever be shaken in their conviction that those traditions had been forsworn. But, exhausted by the emotions of the day, they were both asleep before Mr. Blackett had returned from wandering through the streets.
Exactly where he went he never rightly knew. He heard the front door bang behind him with an awful sound of finality and it seemed to him that it was Bertha who had thrust him out, her rough hand which had slammed the door on him, that hand hitherto so soft and deft, and for a time he proceeded in a queer shambling trot, very different from the normal, assured gait of Mr. Herbert Blackett. And those cruel words had come from her whose speech had seldom been less gentle than her words! It was no wonder he moved with such uncertainty for he felt that the ground was shaking under his feet. Yet he could not believe all this had really happened. It must be a nightmare. He could not live without the steady foundations on which he had built his life, without his supports and props and, since he was quite certainly alive, he must surely be under some delusion. This questionably happy idea soon deserted him. Here, when he lifted his dropped head, he saw houses and streets he knew, taking on none of the fantastic shapes incident to dreams and, realizing that he was indeed awake, he straightened his back though he did not slacken his pace. He pushed past merry groups of people who were celebrating their release from fear; he heard distant sounds of revelry from the city and the shouting and the laughter added to the confusion in his mind and this very gradually cleared to the necessity of accepting a horrible reality. He could not change it, for all his adroitness, into anything but what it was. He did not try to defend himself against anything his wife had said. Whether it was true or false was not his present concern. What had brought a great lump of misery into his chest, what drove him round about the roads of Upper Radstowe, was the thought of the woman whose fancied love and admiration had been the unacknowledged background to his life. She had been hating and despising him for years, his wife, who had made a home which had seemed as near perfection as it could be and to which he must eventually return. For, he asked himself, standing still and breathing hard, as
though he had temporarily evaded his pursuers and could afford a moment’s rest, what else could he do? And as he stood there, instinctively seeking the shadow of a drooping tree, it seemed to him, who was rarely imaginative except about himself, that the world must be thronged with people who, for a while, might wander in the protective darkness of the night but, sooner or later, must go back to houses they hated, to houses where they were not wanted, because there was no other shelter for them, and he was one of them, like some sad old dog who had been beaten for a fault he did not know he had committed, but must trundle home meekly to his kennel.
Stealthily, he put his key in the lock and found he need not turn it. The door was opened for him.
“Why, Bertha, Bertha!” he stammered in meek surprise, remembering that, in all their days together, she had never been at a door to welcome him.
“I was listening for you,” she said, and when she saw the queer, homeless look he had, she was aghast at her presumption in tampering with another person’s soul and she knew that if he was humiliated, so was she, but sensibly she said, “Shall we go into the kitchen and have something hot to drink?” and hearing the new friendliness in her own voice, she gave him an amused, questioning glance, as though to ask whether he heard it too, and with, as it were, an uncertain wag of his tail, he followed her down the basement stairs for, again, what else could he do?
An hour or two later, Miss Spanner was roused by the opening of her door. She turned on the light beside her bed and, starting up, exclaimed in alarm, “Why, Felix, what’s the matter?”
“Good God!” was the reply, and immediately, with great presence of mind, Miss Spanner reduced the room to darkness and for a long time after the door had been shut again, she sat up in bed, leaning forward, her thin arms stretched out in front of her. Somewhere beyond her door was an all too evident sign and portent in her own small affairs, and they were very small, she kept reminding herself. They were of no importance, nor was she, and she insisted on subduing her anxiety when she remembered that many, very many, other people as obscure as herself, were doomed to suffering compared with which anything that might happen to her was much less than a pinprick and, indirectly, she was partly responsible for that suffering, she deserved the pinprick, and in that sincere belief she fell asleep at last and waked to see Rosamund entering with the early morning tea.