by James Hilton
Ward nodded understandingly. “He ought to be teetotal. Otherwise he’ll make rather a fool of himself some time when it matters.”
She went on, in the way in which a fond mother describes the intricate characteristics of her child’s minor ailments: “I don’t know why it is that a few glasses of port affect him…Other people can drink twice as much. I can myself. I was brought up on Hungarian wines that are nearly as strong as whisky.”
He answered: “Were you! It’s a good job I wasn’t. I should have murdered somebody by now if I had been. Do you know why I’m teetotal? It’s not any faddist reason, I assure you. It’s because I’m afraid of what I should do if I got drunk. I’ve got a hard enough job to keep myself properly controlled as it is, without loosening my grip with alcohol. You don’t know me, Mrs. Monsell. But take my advice, anyway—get Philip to knock off strong drink.”
“I will if I can,” she answered. And she added, whimsically: “All the same I can’t imagine Philip ever getting drunk enough to kill anybody.”
There was an almost regretful note in her voice. And at that moment, when perhaps both of them were wondering what on earth they were going to talk about, Philip slowly and rather ludicrously opened his eyes. “Ah, what was I saying?” he began vaguely, blinking round him. “I forget…Anyway it doesn’t matter…Suppose we have a little music? Stella, my dear, would you mind singing something for us?”
And Ward added meaningly: “Yes, do. Please.”
She went to the piano and sat perfectly still for a moment, wondering what she should sing. At last, smiling slightly, she began, not a Hungarian song, but an English ballad of the sentimental drawing-room variety. She sang it flagrantly, blatantly, emphasizing all its trite phraseology and equally trite cadences. And at the conclusion she swung round on the piano-stool and asked Philip what he thought about it.
“Rather pretty,” he replied vaguely.
“And you?” she went on, turning inquiringly to Ward.
He answered: “My opinion about music is of no value…But personally I didn’t like it.”
“Neither did I.” She tossed her head and added defiantly: “I don’t know what made me sing it. I don’t know what’s making anybody do anything to-night…And…if Philip will only manage to keep awake I don’t very much care…”
She looked at both of them, one after the other, and her lower lip began to tremble as if she were going to cry. But on the very brink of disaster she gave a sharp, hard little laugh and shrugged her shoulders. There was something uncanny in the suddenness of it, as if she had summoned energy to throw off fetters of wrought iron and had found them only gossamer.
* * *
CHAPTER XI
I
For over six months they did not see Ward again, except once when he was lecturing at the Orpheus Hall in Wigmore Street, and they were among the audience. He had written to Philip enclosing a couple of tickets and explaining that he had arranged to deliver a series of lectures on his polar experiences. “I’m rather nervous about it,” he wrote, “because I’m absolutely no good at public speaking. So I hope you’re not bored…” Philip read this to Stella and suggested that they should take advantage of the invitation. “Of course, it’s perfectly true, what he says, he’s no good at public speaking. But still…”
They went to the lecture. The hall was packed, and hundreds could not gain admittance. Stella hardly expected to be bored, but she did not expect the extraordinary success that followed. It was true that Ward did not know the art of public speaking. But then, he did not attempt to make a public speech. He just talked—quietly, winsomely, without the merest pencil note, for just over an hour and a quarter. The intimacy of it all was fascinating. At the close a mob of enthusiasts waited to ask him questions and chat with him, but Philip, contrary to Stella’s expectation, did not suggest waiting behind at all. “He’ll be too busy to bother with us,” he said. “I suggest that we get some tea and then catch the next train back.”
He seemed curiously discomfited about something.
That was the last time they saw him for many months. He did not write or call, and Philip, apparently, did not ask him; Stella occasionally suggested an invitation, but nothing came of it. She learned, however, that Ward had taken up a private West-End practice in Manchester Square, and was fast becoming fashionable. This development rather surprised her; she could not imagine him in the rôle of the smart society medico. “Money,” was Philip’s explanation. “When a man has such amazing luck as he’s had, he’s a fool if he doesn’t make the most of it.”
Meanwhile at Chassingford nothing happened. Nothing, she felt, ever did happen or ever could happen in such a place. Philip toiled on, speechmaking and writing pamphlets that nobody, so far as she could gather, ever read; his incessant activities and keen passionless enthusiasm stirred hardly a ripple on the calm surface of the constituency. In the old days his political ambitions had stirred her to enthusiasm merely because they had been his; now she regarded them coldly merely because they were political.
The fact was, both she and he were changing. She was becoming restless—intolerably and intolerantly restless. There were days when the sombre routine of the Hall shrouded her in complete and ineffable melancholy, and there were other days when the serene beauty of the country-side gave her glimpses of a new world that beckoned her to leave the old. Days came when she felt that she had so far hardly begun to live, and nights followed when she felt that she was slowly and painfully dying. The life of Chassingford had tamed her without her noticing it; now, when she did notice it, she was more than tamed; she was a prisoner. More and more, as she lived her life at Chassingford, there came to her the wistful sights and echoes of childhood, until she almost lived on the shores of the Danube again, amidst a riot of sounds and colours that gave miraculous ease to her senses.
“Philip,” she told him once, “I’m simply starving for colour…”
“We’ll have the house painted,” he replied solemnly.
She thought he was joking, but in a few days the decorators came round -and took possession of the house. His idea of colour was all sombre browns and greys. Her idea, which she carried out in her own particular rooms, was orange and black and gold and flaming red. When it was finished she asked him what he thought about it. He said it hurt his eyes.
She replied quietly: “Do you think heaven would hurt your eyes, Philip?”
He stared at her uncomprehendingly.
II
He also was changing. He was developing a pompous, almost a formidable dignity. He looked out upon the world with calm and unflinching eyes; in whatever he had set his mind upon he would not give way. “Well, at any rate, he’s a sticker,” said a jovial political opponent to Stella. “You can’t help admiring him.”
“Or fearing him,” Stella added to herself.
She did fear him. She feared him because he would not let even failure fail. His failures now were no longer pathetic to her; they were grim, sinister, terrible—almost, in a way, successful. He had not conquered adverse fortune; he had wearied her. He was still a joke in Chassingford, but because he was a stale joke people no longer laughed at him. When Stella heard his quavering high-pitched voice shrill in the midst of some village hall a tenth part filled, she did not feel sorry for him because his audience was so small; she felt appalled by the significance of the fact that even such an audience was giving him a vague but respectful hearing. He was actually succeeding, without triumph and without even dignity, but succeeding nevertheless. But his shrill impotent voice was a symbol of a success which, if it should in the end come to him, she felt she would not be able to endure, because the impulse of it was somehow sinister and inhuman.
He still had all the trappings of weakness—he still stammered when he spoke to strangers, was still awkward when introduced, was still incapable of dealing adequately with any situation that required tact. But, by means of long experience, he had acquired a sort of technique in making a fool of himself; nobo
dy could “talk down” a crowd better after losing his dignity before it. He was growing stronger out of his very weakness, and it was a kind of strength that frightened her.
During the autumn they left Chassingford for a while and lived in the Kensington flat while Mrs. Monsell was perambulating abroad. Philip had to be in Chassingford a great deal, so that for a time Stella became one of those rather forlorn women who spend their afternoons in bustling department stores and exotic tea-shops. London seemed to her just as devoid of happenings as Chassingford, but the vacuum was a more interesting one.
One night after a severe rainstorm Philip came back from Chassingford wet to the skin. A chill developed, and by the evening of the next day medical attendance seemed advisable. Of course she thought of Ward. She looked up his name in the telephone directory, but there seemed to be hundreds of Wards. Not one of them, however, was a doctor living in. Manchester Square; but there was a Doctor Ward in Bethnal Green Road, East. This could hardly be the Ward she knew, but she called up the number, thinking that perhaps the Bethnal Green man might be able to tell her the address of his namesake.
The voice that answered her was a woman’s.
“Oh, yes, I am Doctor Ward’s dispenser…He used to live in Manchester Square…yes—” the voice sounded rather amused—“Doctor Ward the explorer, certainly…I’m not sure that he could find time to come out so far as Kensington…you see, most of his work is round about here…Oh, I see—a friend? Very well, I’ll ask him when he comes back—he’s engaged at present…”
Half an hour later the telephone bell rang in the small room, that served as study and work-room for Philip. Stella, answering the call, heard Ward’s voice, strong and gruff like the bark of a big dog, “Yes? That you, Mrs. Monsell? Ward speaking…Philip not well? Right, I’m coming…Immediately, of course…”
That was all.
When she told Philip whom she had sent for he seemed displeased. “Why not a local man? Fancy dragging the fellow all the way from Bethnal Green!”
“Oh!” she exclaimed quickly. “So you knew he’d moved to Bethnal Green? Why didn’t you tell me?”
He looked at her curiously as he replied: “Perhaps because it didn’t occur to me that you were so deeply interested in his affairs.”
III
She would never, could never forget the weeks that followed. They were a strange dreamlike interlude, full of light and shadow, sound and silence; and, in and about them all, Philip weak and pitiful, Ward strong and immense. The contrast soothed her. On that dark rainy night when Ward told her brusquely that Philip was suffering from acute pneumonia, that his temperature was a hundred and four and his pulse a hundred and sixty, and that as near as possible would be the margin between life and death—at that sharp challenging moment her senses cleared and she was a calm warrior marshalling her forces for victory. “You said once that I should make a good nurse,” she told Ward. “Very well, I shall nurse Philip. And I shan’t let him die.”
She said that with quiet confidence, and Ward replied, just as quietly: “I don’t believe you will.”
The days passed like drab phantoms, with nothing alive in them but the firelight flickering in the bedroom and the autumn rains lashing the windows. Philip, almost lost amidst the shadows of the dark days, could hardly speak, could only breathe heavily, and cough, and stare at her with dim, suffering eyes. She loved him now as she had loved him at first; he was a child, a baby, and she was a strong mother fighting his battles for him and protecting him from a hard world. A great calm was on her as the battle progressed, and as she urged herself to fight yet more and more strenuously—the calm as of, perhaps, the motherhood she had missed. For a whole week of days and nights she hardly slept at all, even in the arm-chair by the fire; yet nature armed her with a strength that renewed her every hour and every minute. The restlessness left her: she was radiant, serene, brimful of a deep and tranquil love that was finding at last an outlet. There was even a change in her appearance; she looked a mother, and the soft fire-glow gave her body a curving beauty that it had seemed never to possess before.
Ward came twice a day. He said very little, was always curt, would waste no time in idle conversations. He came dressed in rough tweeds that seemed oddly at variance with his profession; once he told her very brusquely why he had left Manchester Square. “Couldn’t stand fashionable women with fashionable complaints. Couldn’t stand a morning-coat and top-hat. Prefer the East-End people who don’t bother me till they’re really ill…”
Then at last there came the morning when she stood with him in the small entrance-hall of the flat, and he told her that for the future he would call only once a day, in the evenings.
“I suppose that means he’s out of danger?” she queried eagerly.
He answered: “Yes, I think I can say he’s out of danger now.”
She looked at him with vague, swimming eyes. She was speechless with joy, and smiled stupidly. She stood still for some moments, grappling with this fierce overwhelming joy, and also with a new feeling that she could not analyse, but which seemed somehow to rob her of her strength.
He said simply: “You’ve saved his life.”
“And you also,” she replied, with sudden passionate eagerness.
There was a long silence. Then it was, when the battle was over and the fight won, that she could open her eyes at last and see the fighter who had stood shoulder to shoulder with her and had helped her to victory. She looked at him, slowly and carefully, as if she had never seen him before.
The memory of their common fight and their common victory was a bond between them. That bond might grow and grow until—
He was speaking. “I’m—I’m more glad than I can say. I’m very fond of Philip.”
“So am I.”
She felt then that he, Ward, was her husband, and that Philip, weak and puny on the bed in the next room, was their child, whom they had watched over and tended together.
And in another moment, with a quick embarrassed smile, he had stepped into the lift and was gone.
IV
Mrs. Monsell, hurriedly interrupted in the midst of a tour in Tunis and Algiers, arrived in London just after Philip had been reported out of danger. Stella saw her from the window as she arrived, heavily furred and cloaked, in a taxi; saw her engage in a sharp and short altercation with the driver with no less sang-froid because, for all she knew, her only son might be lying dead a few yards away. There was something hard and frosty in the look of her, something which, for the first time in her life, Stella actively disliked.
A minute later she was kissing her and telling her that Philip was better. And, incidentally, mentioning Ward. “Oh, so he’s your doctor,” remarked Mrs. Monsell. “You’re in luck, I can see.”
Stella wondered what she meant by that—whether it was merely one of the vaguely cynical remarks that fell so easily from her lips. Soon afterwards mother and son were alone together for some time, while Stella remained in the drawing-room, feeling for some reason or other acutely uncomfortable. She made up her mind that she would go back to Chassingford as soon as ever Philip was well enough.
Coming soundlessly out of the sick-room, Mrs. Monsell greeted the brooding Stella with a calm smile. “Philip has been telling me all about it,” she said.
Something in Stella’s subconscious mind forced her to exclaim sharply: “All about what?”
Mrs. Monsell’s eyes fixed themselves on Stella in a cold relentless stare. “He has been telling me how good you have been to him.” She began to smile as she added: “You and Doctor Ward.”
* * *
CHAPTER XII
I
She insisted on going out of town as soon as Philip was better, and as Mrs. Monsell vastly preferred Kensington to Chassingford the matter was easy to arrange.
Yet almost as soon as the train pulled up at Chassingford’s wind-swept station she wished she were back in London again. It was the hour of twilight; the sky was grey with heavy rain clouds, and the s
tation lamps creaked and jangled as the wind shook them. The stationmaster touched his cap to Philip as they passed the ticket barrier; Philip replied by a sombre smile.
There seemed to her to be an air of melancholy brooding over the place. As the horse-drawn cab squelched through the mud of the station-yard and turned at last into the High Street, she felt a sudden sickening pull of depression—an almost physical sensation that gripped her like pain. The green-white gas lamps of the shops lit up Philip’s face in passing; he was sitting rigidly upright in his corner of the cab. His face was drawn and pale, a witness of the struggle from which he had just emerged; but in his eyes there was a keener, fiercer light, as of, perhaps, the victory won. She had thought at first that after his illness he would need to be nursed and coddled back to health, and she had looked forward to it rapturously. But from the moment that he left his bed she had realised that he was different. He repelled her attentions with frigid politeness; he was colder, sterner—had even the beginnings of power.
During the drive down the long lampless lane from the village to the Hall the darkness fell rapidly, and with it came big drops of rain that blew in through the open window of the cab. “Isn’t it miserable?” she said, hoping for comfort. But he gave her no more than a perfunctory affirmative.
During dinner that night she felt she could cry at the loneliness of it all. She looked at Philip, in his starched shirt and dinner-jacket (he was becoming more and more punctilious in such matters); at Venner, standing at his elbow with the usual featureless benignity; at the rather disappointing dinner served with a kind of morose magnificence; and finally, in the mirror opposite, at herself, thoroughly and completely miserable. She never analysed herself, never tracked down her thoughts and wants to their ultimate foundations; she merely felt, and now she felt dead. She longed for the noisy gaiety of some “popular” restaurant in town, for somebody who would talk to her eagerly about something. Philip was so silent; if he talked at all, it was as a professor delivering a lecture to a rather exasperating pupil.