Dolores

by Ivy Compton-Burnett

  As they drove to the dwelling in the narrow street, which had not the power to strike him as it was, for its sufficing through the years to his mother and himself—he grasped her hand.

  “We are home—at the home we are to share together,” he said. “Welcome, my little one.”

  Poor Perdita! Her pliant nature had been bending in the last hour to the lot that was at hand. She had been picturing with dawning of hope the untried experience of ordering a household, and knowing herself the mark of glances as the mate of the genius. Her eyes, gazing through the dusk as the wheels slackened, took on a half-frightened look; and remained fastened on the scene before them. Her husband’s touch and tones recalled her to the moment’s needs.

  As one in a dream, she felt her feet on the narrow pavement. As one in a dream, she saw a bent figure hasten down the steps, with eyes that seemed to miss herself for their rivetted gaze on the figure in the carriage. As one in a dream, she stood, and looked, and was silent. Claverhouse stooped from the carriage gropingly, with his hands on the sides of its doorway; but missed the step, and violently stumbled as he gained a footing on the pavement. Perdita felt herself pushed aside; and saw the old servant spring to support his staggering form; while, still as through a dream, she heard a startled utterance.

  “Ah!—See!—move, madam. He is not safe without watching.”

  It was only the happening of a moment. The next, her husband was standing at her side; and Julia was speaking some words of respectful greeting, as if the disturbance had been unreal. But Perdita, as she walked up the jagged steps into the narrow dwelling, felt a sense of being jarred so deep and complex, that she could hardly sustain it; and in the dim passage she stood with the eyes of a tortured dumb creature, speaking no word, and making no movement towards chamber or staircase. Her husband, though his eyes were turned to her face, saw nothing in it that was not well. But other eyes saw.

  “You are tired, madam,” said Julia. “You will be glad of some rest.”

  “Yes, yes, she is weary,” said Claverhouse. “Come upstairs with us, Julia, and show your mistress how things are done for her. Come, little one. We shall not have you weary long.”

  He mounted the staircase with the ungainly quickness which marked his movements on ground he knew, and which brought another change to Perdita’s eyes, as they saw it for the first time. She followed slowly, and without words. As she entered the room prepared for them, she found him standing just within the door, turning his head with eager groping.

  “Ah! this room!” he was saying. “It has seen much, Julia! Where my mother was lying a year ago! A year ago.”

  Julia made no reply, but her face said much; and Perdita, in hearing these words of an unmeaning past, felt the pang of a sufferer awaking from darkened days with memory dead. She was jarred by an intuitive knowledge, that the silence of the old servant was considerate feeling for herself.

  “Perhaps you will show me what is needful, Julia; and then we will not trouble you further,” she said; speaking with courteous, cold authority, but with a knowledge that the sentence was to be numbered in her store of memories, as the first she had uttered under her own roof.

  Julia gave one glance at the wan young face; and then spoke with respectful brevity, put some keys into Perdita’s hand, and left the room. As she moved about the kitchen, her face was as neutral as if she felt herself watched. Her thoughts would have borne any searching in their worthiness of the years behind her. No unloving feeling assailed her for this young creature, who was to straiten her world in straitening her place in her master’s lot. In her faithfulness she closed her heart against it; and even had pity not come to her with help, would have held it closed. But the pity did not only help. As she attended the husband and wife at their evening meal, noted their words and their silence, and watched the sharpened face of the bride of a day, her heart misgave her for both. And there came a different pity, with a different, deeper pang. It was only her eyes that saw that the face was sharpened. Her long dread was growing surely into a swift and certain sorrow.

  “Well, Julia,” said Claverhouse, as the meal went its way, “I see you are still a good housewife. I am bringing my little one into safe keeping. I can trust you to care for her, when I am earning the bread?”

  Julia’s mute signs of submission were ready and full. No service for her master was hard.

  “Well, my pretty one,” said Claverhouse to Perdita, “you are weary to-night. You are a tender nursling for us to care for. Julia, it is the second charge you will have fulfilled for me.”

  Julia’s face showed momentary lighting; but she moved about in silence.

  Perdita made an effort to lay aside her weary unresponsiveness. She leaned from her place at the table’s head, and laid her hand in her husband’s.

  “Ah, my little one,” he said, returning the caress. “There is only one whom I could see in that place. I could say no more to you.”

  The tone was too much for Perdita’s overwrought feelings. Her lips trembled and her eyes filled; and she sat with her eyes bent on her plate. Her husband smiled into her face, but could not mark its change, and Julia seemed not to see it. Till the end of the meal the silence was unbroken—the silence that was an easy, daily thing to the one—so different to the other.

  When Julia was clearing the table, there was a knock at the outer door.

  Claverhouse sprang to his feet, and was about to answer the summons; but Julia was before him in the passage, with unconscious eagerness to be spared his groping for the fastenings. The tall, grey-headed figure hesitated to cross the threshold.

  “I—I—Mr Claverhouse wrote and asked me to come to-night; but—but I know it is his first evening at home with—with Mrs Claverhouse. Perhaps——”

  “Ah, Soulsby! I was thinking you had forgotten,” said the deep voice from the inner doorway. “Come in, come in. This is a different picture from what you are used to seeing here—and a prettier one, is it not so? I am glad for you to know my wife. I have told her much of you.”

  Soulsby gave Perdita a swift glance, and greeted her with a nervous uneasiness, which somehow left him his full distinction of bearing; his habit of silence on his own experience holding him from giving any sign, beyond his look into her face, that he did not meet her as a stranger. Then, seating himself, as he was bidden, he looked from one face to the other.

  Claverhouse’s words gave him a sense of surprise.

  “Well, Soulsby, I have done little since I saw you last; but I am going to get to wasting the paper to-morrow. A holiday is the thing for courting days, even for a scribbling old fellow; but I am beginning to long for the scribbling. And I must be at my other business—the earning of the bread. I have a reason for doing that in earnest.” He laid his hand on Perdita’s.

  Soulsby looked at Perdita.

  “You—you take great interest in your husband’s work, Mrs Claverhouse?”

  “Oh, yes; it is everything to me,” said Perdita, with a soul-sinking feeling, that she had no choice but to give this account of her seeking this life.

  “You—you have had a long journey,” said Soulsby, with a gentle deference, in which a note of perplexity was barely suppressed. “You are weary, I fear. I should not have disturbed you to-night.”

  “Oh, no; I should have been sorry for you not to come. It has been my great wish to meet you,” said Perdita, speaking in her weariness simply for the ears of her husband.

  “Ah, little one, you are certainly weary. Your voice is quite faint,” said Claverhouse. “Go up to your rest. Do not stay for me. Julia will do what you need for you.”

  Perdita gave the guest her hand in silence, not daring to speak, and passed through the door, as he held it open; her husband remaining in his place.

  Soulsby walked back slowly to his seat.

  “Your wife looks very frail,” he said, in the easier tones which came to him with disturbed feeling.

  “Yes, she is a fragile creature,” said Claverhouse. “She has ear
ned her living with her brains; and it has been a lot unfit for her. I am thankful to feel her freed from the need to toil.”

  “She—I suppose—what will she do while you are working?” said Soulsby, struggling with the instinct to be blunt. “She—she has interests of her own, of course. I—I meant—your life is hardly one which will bring her the usual pleasures of youth.”

  “No, no, indeed; many young creatures would find it a dreary lot,” said Claverhouse. “But she is different from others. She has no thought for what is called pleasure. If she could, she would not seek it. Her life has been monotony and effort; and it is enough for her to be free. She is a lover of books in her woman’s way—an innocent lover as yet—prettily blind; but I shall teach her to understand. There is no one else I could see in my mother’s place.”

  “She—you—she will enter into your work, as you do it?” said Soulsby.

  “I shall teach her,” said Claverhouse. “Little by little she will learn; and she will find it no burden to help me, when the years are heavy.”

  Soulsby was silent. He knew by the voice what was meant by the heaviness of the years. His misgiving for the helpless thing, he had seemed to see sacrificed in blindness, was lost in dread for the other—helpless no less—whose good he held of greatest worth. No word had passed between him and the playwright of the latter’s failing sight; though the thoughts of each had long been read by the other. In this strange experience of meeting his friend on his marriage day, he felt an impulse to break the long reserve.

  “Sigismund,” he said—he had never used the baptismal name except in moments of significance—” should you not consult an oculist?”

  Claverhouse gave a start, and was silent; his features contorting. “Have I not consulted one?” he muttered. “Have I not made my appeal to every one I have heard of? You think me a child or a madman. Which am I, because I am blind? Should I let my life slip from me, without putting out one hand to save it?”

  “What?” said Soulsby, in low, agitated tones.

  “What?” said Claverhouse with bitter mimicry,—continuing after the word in a broken voice. “Do you want me to explain—to put it into words?”

  Soulsby was silent, his over - sensitiveness holding him tongue-tied, his face telling of deep trouble.

  Claverhouse was also silent; keeping his eyes averted from the face of his friend, as though with shrinking to show himself anew the vanity of seeking to read what it told. Minutes passed before the silence was broken.

  “I am going to begin to write to-morrow,” he said, with the constraint of passing to an easy subject from one which has moved unwilling emotion. “The conception I told you of has grown. I shall be able to work it out quickly.”

  Soulsby responded in a similar spirit; and the talk went on as of old, with the sad, deep difference beneath, till the minute for parting.

  As Claverhouse rose to bid his friend farewell, he seemed to hesitate, as though on the point of some words.

  “I—I have faced the future, as far as what we spoke of goes,” he said, with a painful effort to save the next meeting from cloud. “It has taken me years to do it; but it is done now. I shall just go on, finding my happiness in the work that yields it; and what help I shall grow to need my wife will give. Do not let this trouble you, Soulsby. Come to-morrow at the same hour.”

  Soulsby dared not ask if the sad-faced wife knew of what was before her. He wrung the playwright’s hand, as he had never wrung it before; seeking to give in the grasp what his lips could not speak, and his face spoke vainly; and Claverhouse turned to the chimney-piece, and covered his face with his hand.

  In the upper chamber Perdita lay, with sleepless, suffering eyes. When she entered the room, she had sunk on her knees by the bed; and in the relief of solitude shed the tears of her weariness of body and soul. But as the shallower griefs were wept away, the others that were not to be met by tears, seemed to press more heavily. It was before her—and it had never been faced—the living the years out of sight of the creature, whose consciousness, mirrored in her own, had hitherto sustained her in her struggling. She rose to her feet, and stood rigid and dry-eyed, while her being seemed going out in unimaginable yearning; until the thought that her husband might be with her, with question of her tardiness in seeking rest, forced her to the effort of ceasing from struggle before she was exhausted, and the unconscious respite of bodily movement. She put off her garments and laid them aside; and making signs about the room of what she would have done in quietude of spirit, lay down in the bed for further fellowship with grief As her starving passion became exhausted by its own outcrying, she lay yielding her dulled powers to a survey of the life before her—the life in which the domestic ordering which had arrested her woman’s eagerness, had grown to a sordid labour in a cramping sphere, to be shrunk from, and left to serving hands; in which the content of knowing herself watched as the fellow of genius, had grown to shame in walking in sight, that had marked the conditions of this lot; in which the sustaining effort of feigning grasp of her husband’s aims, for maintenance in his eyes of the character she had sought, had grown to a stretch of wearying struggle, spreading over the weeks without respite or goal.

  When her husband came to the room, she feigned sleep without effort; finding it the one thing yet in her power, to lie as if life was gone from her limbs. He came to the bedside, and caressed her hair, and kissed her lips. She felt the wandering touch of his hands, and his lips groping for her own; but she made no response in body or mind, almost feeling that she had lost the power of stirring or feeling a pang. Through the hours of the night she lay thus; fearing to move or weep, lest she should rouse the sleeper at her side, and dreading sleep for herself, that it must bring a new awakening to all she now had power to face.

  At the morning meal she sat sick and silent, unable to swallow food, or to care for Julia’s eyes and thoughts. It was not till it ended, that she awoke to necessity, and forced herself to bend before it.

  “I am a perplexing bride, am I not, Sigismund?” she said, with a feeble grasping at a natural manner. “I think I must be too weak a creature to marry. I have a headache this morning, as retribution for doing so yesterday. You will not mind, if I rest for an hour?”

  Her husband put his hands on her shoulders.

  “Ah, you are a tender thing,” he said. “That is why it is well that you are married. Yes; you go to your rest, while I go to my work. That is the division of labour between us.”

  He pressed his hands on her shoulders, as though seeking some passage to himself of her young responsiveness; and she raised her head with an effort at archness, which recalled the Perdita of the past.

  To him the Perdita of to-day was the same; and she went to solitude, with a sense that his blindness was pushing her from the only cherishing her lot afforded.

  The days began to pass, carrying that lot with daily sameness. Claverhouse gave himself to his work; growing utterly absorbed as its old grip returned, and more than could be spared of his time was demanded by the toil for the bread. The breaks in the life were Soulsby’s evening visits; and except for the hours for food, these were the only times of intercourse of the husband and wife. Beneath it all there was the hopelessness of truth. A want may absorb a life while it remains unfilled, and bear but little filling. Perdita lived joyless days, with privation of all that was good to her thought. Their only change was the growing of her suffering shame in her lot, to the indifference of feeling blunted by bitter use; and she marvelled, now with fierce resentment, now helpless wonder, that he could thus be blind to the claims of her youth.

  For it was true that he went his way in blindness; the blindness of a consciousness so long absorbed in a purpose, that it has lost the power of fair survey of surrounding things. He had taken Perdita from the earning of her bread to freely yielded nurture. There was something repelling to his thought in a woman’s working to live; and he had no doubt that this change in itself was enough for her content. For the definite thing
s that her life gave—they were those which had sufficed to his mother with her stronger needs; and he gave them no thought. He could not but learn that her knowledge of his aims was a thing feigned for his worthier judging of her; but he judged of her tenderly, as a creature calling for tenderness; and as touched her faith and interest held to his trust.

  But it was sad that the trust should be held. Poor Perdita! It seemed to her the hardest thing of her wifehood, that, when he joined her at the end of his hours of toil, the lonely longing for human kindness, which had grown with those hours, should be met by demands for expending herself on the labour whose own demands were bringing that self to starvation. Day after day she raised her eyes from the book or trifling of needle supposed to be holding them, with helpless appeal for some sign of cherishing, or at least undemanding fellowship; and day after day she fought with anger and despair, and forced from herself the weariness of self-dissembling. One evening, when a deeper than her wonted depression was met by stronger eagerness for the alien interest, her spirit faltered; and she met the first appeal with silence, and the question which followed with petulant words.

  Surprised, but hardly wrought upon deeply, he made kindly question of her health or weariness.

  She could not bring her courage to confession of what was pent within her; and, clutching at the second plea, sought the loneliness which seemed to be draining her life.

  The dramatist did not forget the occurrence; but the significance he gave it, though allied to the true one, had nothing of its depth. He made his demands on her interest and sympathy fewer; and formed a habit of trying to afford her what he sought for himself. He would ask her what books she was reading, and talk to her of them with gentle moulding of himself to her needs; or tell her stories of his youth, with his early struggles and ambitions. He even, in the thought of a moment, asked her what friends she had; and bade her seek them if she willed, or bid them to her home. These words she heard with leaping heart. Her soul cried out for Dolores. But her torturing shame on her daily experience, and the passion of pride which was fiercest touching the woman she most loved, wrung an answer from her lips which sealed the straitness of her lot.