“I don’t think I shall love you,” she said firmly.
His hands were on her hair, her cheeks, her neck, her breasts.
“Oh, darling,” she said with tears in her eyes, and he took her in his arms again. Outside a horse and cart stamped by and seemed to be passing through her head. She broke free.
“No, Fonty.”
“There is no ‘No’.”
“There is, Fonty. You must promise to be good. If you will be good I will love you. It is tragic, for I cannot do anything else.”
“What are we going to do?” he said nervously.
“I wish I could know” she said, lying back in the armchair, dazed and heavy with tiredness. Her wide eyes were frightened. She had seen the face of her mother, and Dufaux saw in Crystal’s face the lineaments of his wife. “Always, it seems, where I am,” she said, patting her dress, “there are—complications?”
“Why did you start all this,” he exclaimed, half suspiciously.
She smiled at him mysteriously.
“Fonty, you have a funny piece of hair falling over your forehead.”
He brushed his hair back, irritably.
“That is better. Oh dear, Fonty, I don’t know. Everything seems unreal and untrue to-day. I wanted to sing and dance and do all sorts of silly things.”
“So this is a silly thing,” he said tenderly. “It is absurd that I love you, but I cannot marry you.”
“‘Miss Lance’,” she said, trying heroically to escape again into fantasy, “I make love very strangely, but that is because, experienced as I am, I have never been in such a situation before.” She failed. “Oh, Fonty, I believe I do love you. Now that isn’t absurd. But you don’t love me.” Crystal had her hand across her eyes and looked between her long fingers at him. His despair and bewilderment vanished at this.
“I do love you, you darling. I don’t care a damn for anyone. I do love you! It is quite simple. We can stay with the company a little longer and then go to London. I know lots of people. We’ll get a job in town. I can get you a job at ten pounds a week like a shot. It’s as easy as falling off a log. Managers will give their eyes for you. Then eventually I can get a divorce.”
“As much as ten pounds a week, do you really think?” asked Crystal, sitting up and dropping her hands from her eyes.
He was surprised to see she was thinking of the money, but she read his thoughts:
“I am cynical, Fonty.”
“You are.” He laughed uncomfortably. “But it would be fun living with a cynic.”
“Would it be very wicked to live with me? It would be very short, Fonty, after all. You would soon desert me,” she said slyly, “and then you could be virtuous again.”
“But what are we going to do?” he said, evading her.
“Oh dear, Fonty, I don’t think I shall live with you. I shall go to see my lovely Marquès at Seville instead.”
They circled round the subject which was uppermost in their minds like two birds afraid of alighting. The strain was broken by the entry of Mrs. Askew, Dufaux’s landlady. She was a sighing, swaying drudge, who stopped to say a few words everytime she put something on the table.
“Eh, bairns,” she said, affectionately, “You have been riding horses.”
She came back with a dish.
“Askew’s ruin, I call them. Horses, you know.” She sighed, and after a long time smiling at Crystal and Dufaux she said:
“I’ve known Mr. Dufaux a long time, duckie. He always comes to me. You know who looks after you, don’t you? Been coming here for years and never been disappointed. Have you, love? And how’s the little lady?”
“Splendid, Mrs. Askew, thank you,” Dufaux said coldly.
Mrs. Askew sighed out of the room.
“My wife stayed here with me when we were touring with Alexander Sidcup,” he said, straining towards sincerity, “the year before she left me.”
“Life is very strange,” Crystal murmured, taking her hand away from his.
“Life is Mrs. Askew,” he said. “Always here and Askew’s ruin.”
All through that night Crystal lay in her bed, wondering. When she closed her eyes, her mother’s face was there, smiling; and Crystal opened them again and again to scatter the vision and to say aloud in the strange darkness of the room, “These wives, these terrible wives.” And the argument was repeated, “We could go to London and we could both have plenty of money and live in a tiny flat.… I wish it were all true.…”
The company travelled north east towards a mining town by the sea.
“We’ve finished with those cathedral towns, thank God,” said Melford, eating a banana and waving to the landscape with it. “This is all I dare eat.”
“You’ll starve,” said Mrs. Hawkins, kindly.
“Cathedral towns are the worst dates,” continued Melford, throwing the peel under the seat. “When you go to one of those high falutin’ Church shows once a week, you’ve had all the theatre you want. Coal miners, they’re the best audiences. Used to sitting in the darkness. And no religion.”
“My brother is a bishop,” said Geelong, seeing his opportunity, “and he says what’s wrong with the Church is …”
Miss O’Malley nodded to the corridor where Dufaux and Crystal were standing and winked:
“She’s a young devil. She’ll find herself out of her depth.”
But Crystal and Dufaux swaying luxuriously with the motion of the train were unaware of the talk behind their backs.
“The sea, Fonty.” Crystal spread out her arms as though they were wings. “You stand there and there is nothing in your way. You are free!”
“If the sea could only free us!” he said.
“It will!” she cried triumphantly. Then more doubtfully. “Perhaps it will.”
“My wife may have died!” he said bitterly laughing.
“I have been trying not to think about that for days, Fonty. What am I to do? It keeps on coming back. But surely it can’t be wicked to love you?”
“You are so good.”
This was in the train. She felt his words draw something hot and unreal out of her spirit, as though he had taken away the sheath from a sword that was inside her. The unsheathed sword was naked now. “I love him,” her thought exclaimed. “This is a war.”
“I don’t know what is good,” she said sharply.
“Nor do I.”
“But we know what we know,” she said. He took her hand. They stood for a while in silence, then she laughed at him.
“And you, Fonty, who have seduced so many women! How have you done it? Come along. Try and remember. You must not forget these things. They are so important. You are blushing!”
“He really does love me,” she thought, all day. “But he can’t marry me, that is the end of it.”
As the train poured north-eastward the sky and land hardened, and the glittering air seemed to be pricked by the infinitesimal points of a myriad frosty needles. There was war in the air. The earth seemed to be struck dumb. The sky was dead and opaque. The long curves of the moors lay like iron, and the fields were metalled with frost. The trees were as fine as wire and the towns stood up with their sharpened roofs and steeples, like armed encampments. The metallic quality was in everything. All protruding landmarks, woods that echoed like attics, and farm-houses frozen into the land, the chimneys of the mines, seemed so brittle that you could snap them off in your fingers. All voices were loudened and made more urgent, and, in the silence that widened every hour, all voices and objects appeared to become more distant from one another. Human beings crouched round the warmth of their own bodies. You could almost see voices as you see men. At Mineanchor where they arrived after dark, the shops were closed, the streets empty and glistening with ice. There was a bitter smell of coal in the air. Dufaux and Crystal got away from the other members of the company and walked to their rooms alone. Dufaux had arranged for Crystal to be next door to him. They walked unsteadily over the icy pavement.
“Fain would
I climb but fear to fall,” quoted Dufaux.
“If thy heart fail thee, climb not at all,” laughed Crystal nervously, clutching at him. He kissed her.
At the top of the street the sky seemed blacker, and hollower as though a great cavern had opened. Suddenly a foghorn sounded and was answered by a harsher and nearer one. The town was stamped with the sound and brought for a moment to life.
“The sea, Fonty. Listen!”
He listened.
“I am so glad,” she said quietly.
“We are free,” he remembered her words.
She thought, “We are. We are free!” In that darkness it was true.
She parted from him at the door of the house and refused to see him again that evening. She scarcely spoke to him the next day, as he was occupied in the theatre, and during the play she did not dare to look at him. He searched for her behind the scenes, and she remained in her dressing-room talking to the others. After the second house she dressed very quickly. She paused in the passage. The air was frozen. When the stage door-keeper came with his keys there was snow on his boots. Miss O’Malley pushed past her. “Someone’s coming” she sang joyfully. Her eyes were radiant, and the big lips which she tried to pout loosened into wide uncontrollable smiles. “Whoops, girls,” she said, as she lulled open the door. “It’s snowing like a wedding.” She put up her umbrella and stepped unsteadily over the cobbles.
“Her Mr. Spears,” sighed Crystal tolerantly, and waited for her to turn the corner before she herself hurried out. Her love for Dufaux was a heavy and ever-warming wine in her limbs, filling her with power, making her unreal to herself. And the earth too, under its pattering of snow, had become magical, beautiful and unreal. The streets and pavements were whitened by a frail lace that made every footfall stealthy. The black and white houses were like so many magpies. The street corners, where men usually congregated after the public-houses had closed, were deserted. Even the bleak grooves of the tram-lines were nearly covered. Very softly and slowly the crowding flakes were drifting, and she wondered at her own lightness as she broke through the frail blossoms that soundlessly alighted on her coat, were starred there like daisies, sparkled and dissolved into nothing. The trees in the gardens were transformed into fat cushions and bizarre traceries, and in the glow of a lamp she saw thick gusts of snow passing like teased moths. She stopped to see a big flake drift past the lamp and eddy-down towards her until she caught it on the finger of her glove, and there it shone for a second like the diamond of a ring.
“Oh, it is gone!” She felt a pang in her heart. She was thinking of Dufaux.
She walked past her own gate courageously and easily; and quite coldly went up the steps to Dufaux’s house. The door was open. Great weights were pulling her down as she went up the stairs. Her heart was stamping as she entered his room. It was in darkness. He had not come in yet. She sat by the fire trembling and sighing. Her body was swept, as the chords of a harp are swept, by spasms of craving pain and delight For some time she sat dazed, her cheeks burning, and her eyes entranced by the flames of the stoked-up fire. The fire was small and intense. At last she got up and walked about the room and stood at the window. If she could stop the falling of the snow!
Endlessly it crumbled from the sky as she looked up, and danced with that gay but lifeless silence beyond the glass. They were not flakes of snow that she saw, but the minutes of her waiting and hunger, becoming ghosts before her eyes, little men, little faces, armies of little white dead men, turning forever away from her.
It was a small room at the top of the house, with a long dormer window, which overlooking the whitened trees and lawns of the park had by day a clear view of the estuary and the sea. Now the sea was visible only in a black leathery flash, as the lighthouse beam, from the end of the north pier, ticked round in two sharp snatches of light and one full stare that played over the house and printed for a second the intricate shadow of the lace curtains on the walls of the room. But now it throbbed like a pulse. He has not come by this flash. Will he be here by the next? How many more flashes until he comes? She stood at the window watching for him between the warning strokes of the light. She lay on the bed at last, exhausted. Her eyes ached because of the strength of her craving for him, her ears were alert for the sound of him coming up the stairs, her heart seemed to be trapped, now still and resigned, now fluttering and struggling against its imprisonment. She closed her eyes and her mind was swept away.
Then she suddenly rebelled against the humiliation of waiting. With a flash of temper she jumped up and turned on the light. She picked up her bag and her coat and then, seeing a pencil and paper on the table, sat down and scribbled a note. She stuck the pencil into the paper viciously.
“I have been waiting here for you over an hour. Where the devil have you been? Crystal.”
She threw the pencil on the floor, and left the room exclaiming, and gritting her teeth. She ran down the stairs into the street. It was deserted, but she was startled to see a light in her room and the shadow of a woman’s hat on the ceiling of the room. She heard raised voices above as she went up to the room. When she opened the door she saw Dufaux sitting there, and with him her mother.
“Crystal!” said Mrs. Lance bitterly and quietly. “Where have you been?”
Crystal was speechless, but she was on her guard. There was anger in the room. Mrs. Lance’s face was white and hard, and her eyes were lifeless. She seemed to have no lips. Dufaux’s face was patched with red, as if he had been struck. His eyes were bright and his demeanour defiant.
“Your mother …” he began in a sarcastic voice.
“Mr. Dufaux, allow me,” interrupted Mrs. Lance.
“What is the matter, Mummy. Why have you come up?”
“Your mother has come up—” burst out Dufaux.
“I have come up to speak to you,” broke in Mrs. Lance.
“That damned slandering cat of a woman!” exclaimed Dufaux—“you know who I mean—has been writing.”
“Mr. Dufaux, please be silent,” Mrs. Lance turned to him her eyes of ice. “I had a letter from a certain Miss O’Malley about you and Mr. Dufaux,” said Mrs. Lance calmly. “You can see what she says yourself, and you can tell me if it is true.”
“You needn’t bother to read it,” cried Dufaux, snatching the letter from Mrs. Lance’s hands and squeezing it up into a ball. “She says—”
“That you are Mr. Dufaux’s mistress,” said Mrs. Lance sweetly, but eagerly looking into Crystal’s eyes.
“She is not,” shouted Dufaux.
“Are you?” asked Mrs. Lance disregarding him.
“Mummy, you are absolutely ridiculous,” Crystal said.
“I have never taken anything less than plain answers to plain questions at any time of my life, Crystal, You know me well enough,”
Crystal looked helplessly and beseechingly at Dufaux, who said:
“You have no right to ask Crystal such a question.”
“You haven’t answered. Crystal.” Mrs. Lance stiffened in her chair, and her eyes became small and cruel. She sniffed, and then putting on her gloves and pulling them down finger by finger, but without taking her still eyes off Crystal, she drawled:
“I have not been here many hours, and I do not intend to return till I have got the truth out of you both. You are a married man, Mr. Dufaux, and you can well guess what I feel.”
“Are you proposing blackmail or murder?” asked Dufaux.
“No, I think a horsewhipping,” said Mrs. Lance.
“Oh,” Crystal cried out hysterically, with tears on her cheeks and running to Dufaux’s arms, “Mummy’s ridiculous and mad, Fonty. She is quite mad.” Holding his sleeve she shouted through her tears that burned her words:
“It is true! I am his mistress! And you can’t do anything to us.”
Dufaux pulled himself away from Crystal, and looked at her with a suspicion that became anger.
“It’s a lie! You little devil, Crystal! But you can’t have me this way! O
h no! You deceitful little devil!”
He went to the door, Crystal pulling at his coat and saying:
“Fonty, darling. Fonty, come back. Stay with me. Help me. Don’t stop loving me, Fonty.…”
“I think that to stop all these scenes and all this lying,” said Mrs. Lance casually, “there had better be a medical examination.”
Crystal fainted.
III
Some six months after Crystal’s breakdown at Mineanchor and her immediate separation from Dufaux, she and her mother were living in a small flat at the top of a house in Baker Street. They had moved a few weeks after Crystal’s return at a time when Mrs. Lance was very busy and agitated. She talked mysteriously about good news from her Trustee.
“I have not been wasting my time,” Mrs. Lance had said. “And Mr. Trellis has found me new pupils.”
Crystal had accepted this slight improvement in their fortunes listlessly. She had lain ill. She was still pale and thin, and there was an avidity in the light of her hollowed eyes; and the effect of bodily poverty was accentuated by the finicking doll-like neatness of her clothes. She did not go to see the agents any more, but remained to look after the flat, to read and brood. She quarrelled frequently with her mother about Dufaux, from whom, though Crystal wrote him anguished letters, came no communication.
“Poor little darling,” Mrs. Lance said with triumphant affection at the end of their quarrels. “I do not know what you would do without me.”
For a long time she would not let Crystal out of her sight. Every time the telephone bell rang Mrs. Lance jumped up as quickly as a knitting needle, saying, “That’s for me, Crystal.”
There was an atmosphere of uneasiness in the place. For Crystal the flat was a prison, and she walked from window to window tapping against the glass as though her fingers were pointed moths.
One afternoon there was a knock at the door. Both Crystal and Mrs. Lance started apprehensively and looked at each other, then Mrs. Lance, first always to the door and the telephone and the post, steeling herself for an attack, quietly opened it. Crystal watched her mother. But the visitor was only Mr. Geelong. Crystal went towards him sadly, and he took both her hands in his. His face was clean and smooth as pink sealing-wax in its folds. He seemed neater, sharper and more alive than he had been in the company. He was in fact wearing the smarter clothes he always reserved for London. Mrs. Lance was perturbed and on the defensive. Here was a messenger from Dufaux. Mr. Geelong played the stage aristocrat with both women; he spoke with formality to Mrs. Lance, but to Crystal he was gentle and familiar.
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