by Alec Waugh
Eagar clicked his tongue impatiently against his teeth.
“I was beside myself, I know. Don’t imagine that I’ve not been ashamed enough over it.”
“Precisely, but our object is to persuade the Judge that it was an act over which there was no need for you to feel overpoweringly ashamed. It must look like… well, how shall I put it?… as though it had been a logical and merited rebuff. Therefore I think it will be necessary to show that you had strong reasons for suspecting that it was with the intention of flirting with this young man that your wife had left the dancing room; I think you should be able to show that you had good cause for jealousy, that your wife knew you were jealous, had played upon your jealousy, had taunted you with it, that she knew very well that there was only one interpretation of the word charming, that her words were a deliberate provocation. I think that we ought to be able to prove that.”
Eagar smiled ruefully. “I daresay we ought. But I’m afraid that’s one of the things we shan’t be able to do.”
“No?”
“The only thing about my wife’s behaviour that gave me even the slightest satisfaction was the certainty that she never gave me any real cause for jealousy.”
Mr. Ephraim raised his eyebrows whimsically.
“The husbands who can make that boast, Mr. Eagar, are extremely few.”
“My wife was an exceptional woman.”
“Still…”
And there was a pause, during which a number of times Mr. Ephraim nodded his head slowly forward. He appeared to have no doubts as to what was in his mind, but only as to how what was there was to be expressed. “Even so,” he said at last, “if what you say is true, and no doubt it is, it is hardly possible that a wife moving in such circles, cannot sometimes have found herself in circumstances that might be misunderstood: circumstances that you might know to be innocent, but which would have seemed compromising to a less trusting husband.”
“It’s possible. I’ve never bothered.”
“It is more than possible, Mr. Eagar. It is highly probable that your wife has at some time or another placed herself thoughtlessly or not as the case may be, in a situation that would make her liable to the most grave suspicion. I think that the evidence of such an incident would make your case practicably unbreakable.”
“And I, Mr. Ephraim, would see myself dead before I would make use of it.”
Mr. Ephraim made no reply. He was used to such outbursts. He wriggled a little forward in his chair and placed his right hand sympathetically and confidingly on his left. His head cocked a little to one side. He could afford to wait.
“My wife,” Eagar continued hotly, “is not that sort of woman. And I do not propose to have her held up to court as one.”
Mr. Ephraim nodded as though he were completely in agreement with his client’s attitude.
“You prefer,” he said, “to be blackguarded yourself?”
“Is it a question of blackguarding?”
“It is a question of your being convicted before the world as a man who is not fitted for the privilege of a wife’s loyalty. If he is cruel to her and unfaithful, she demands the law’s protection, and the law, in giving her that protection, accepts her view of him. It isn’t a pleasant business. It is not a position in which one would be anxious to place oneself. You may say that two blacks do not make a white, but most men are anxious to see their good name protected. I don’t want to bring any pressure to bear on you, I am not here to influence a client but to advise him of the facts. And I say that if you want to defend yourself against these accusations you would be enormously strengthening your chances if you could support your contentions by some concrete incident, provided, of course, you can find one, of such a nature as I have mentioned.
“Don’t bother to decide now, Mr. Eagar. There is no hurry. We have quite a number of weeks ahead of us. Let me know any time how you feel about it.”
§
It was close upon seven when Eagar reached his home. And the spring day that had been overcast since morning was closing in a disconsolate dusk. The plane trees in the square were drooping moodily; the murmur of the traffic was low and menacing. There were no welcoming lights behind the curtained windows; for the rooms that faced the gardens had been mainly Marian’s, and were now rarely used. And the heart of Herbert Eagar was heavy as he stood in the hall turning over the indifferent letters that the day’s post had brought him. He was tired, and he was lonely. He would have given much for a little warmth, a little kindliness; for someone who would let him be. He was so weary of fighting: and his whole life seemed to have been nothing else. With his family first of all, then with his employers, afterwards with his associates. Everybody you met was trying to get something out of you or else you were trying to get something out of them. You were scheming, planning, watching. There was continued tension. You could never relax, never be at ease. And when you married it was the same thing over again. A woman wanted something out of you, you wanted something out of her. There was the scheming, the bargaining, the watching. Never any tranquillity, never any peace.
“I suppose I must be getting old,” he thought as he walked slowly up the stairs. There had been a time when conflict delighted him.
He took his bath slowly, and as he lay back in the cooling water his eyes resting on the white tiling, with its glass shelves, its mirrors, its rows of bottles, he remembered how as a young man of twenty-five, during a week-end visit to an employer’s house, he had seen such a bathroom, wide, and white and warm, for the first time. Its space and comfort had seemed to him the apex of civilized enjoyment, the symbol of success. “One day,” he had said, “I’ll be having a house with a bath like that in it.”
Eagar smiled ruefully at the memory. He wished life was as simple a business now, wished that he could see it still in definitely marked stages, could look in the same spirit as he had once looked at a bathroom and later at electric broughams, at a steam yacht say, and think, “My word, I’ll have one of those one day!” Life was easy when one could feel like that, when one could set oneself objectives and work towards them. But a time came when you realized that such standards of success were relative: when you found yourself in a vacuum, with nothing definite to work for, not knowing what you wanted. “I wish,” he thought, “that I could find myself once again really wanting something.”
Ah, but he knew well enough the thing he wanted when he sat down to the lonely dinner in the silent, dark-panelled room. If only there were a woman at his side with the candle-light falling on her shoulders, and on the diamonds gleaming in her hair; a woman who would smile kindlily at him, would listen to what he had to tell her of the day’s happenings, who would encourage him, with whom he could discuss his plans, the plans that would no longer be his but theirs. A woman who would be tender and sympathetic, whose loving of him would sweeten life so that the old strain and tension would be drained from it. If only he had a wife like that! If only Marian had been a wife like that! There was nothing he would not have done for her, had she been. Nothing he would not have given her. She could have had her own way in everything. He would have slaved himself to the bone for her. If only she had been that sort of wife!
And, after all, why shouldn’t she have been? He wasn’t, surely, such a monster as all that. Other people didn’t find him so. If only she had tried a little, such a very little, had met him even a twentieth of the way, but she hadn’t. She had been wilful, selfish, frivolous; she had looked on him and her marriage with him as one of the frocks you wore for a season and then chucked aside. That was all he had meant to her. And now she was going to drag him through the courts, she was going to have him labelled before the whole world as a bully and an adulterer, as a man so foul that his wife had to call in the law’s protection. That was her return for all he had given her, all that he had been prepared to give her. It was unjust; it was monstrously, unthinkably unjust.
The butler was removing a plate, was handing a dish to him. He helped himself to a cutlet, but
he knew that he could not eat it. His loneliness and the sense of an injustice done to him mingled stiflingly with his obstinacy, his masculine vanity, his refusal to let go without a struggle. He could not eat. Impatiently he pushed away his plate, rose to his feet and left the room.
He was no more able to read than he had been to eat. He could not endure the dark, book-lined library, and all that his sitting in that room symbolized of failure and frustration. Better to face the long empty drawing-room, striding among its ghosted memories; the drawing-room in which they should have been sitting quietly side by side as wives and husbands used. Why couldn’t she have been decent to him? What had he done to deserve such treatment: to be left like that without warning, to be threatened with a divorce suit of that nature? The things he had put up with from her; her neglect, her coldness, her lack of sympathy! and she had imagined, he supposed, that he would just sit still and let her denounce him to the world as an adulterer and a bully. And there was that dandified young whipper-snapper of a solicitor talking about there being nothing he could do about it! Trying to put that bluff across; on a man like himself too. These Southerners! Well, she and he would find out their mistake right enough. For a good deal he was prepared to stand, but not for that. He’ld show her that he could hit as well as she: if they were going to start dirt flinging, well, so was he. She wasn’t going to escape that way. What was it Ephraim had said about a woman who had led her kind of life having been certain to place herself now and again in an ambiguous position? No doubt she had. And if she had, he’ld ferret it out all right.
His eyes that were glinting now with malice fell on the desk between the windows: the desk where she wrote and kept her letters. Locked, he supposed when she had gone. Yes, to be sure, of course. Heaven knew what she might have hidden there. And she had imagined that to turn a key would be enough protection. She had been so sure that she could trust him; as she could have done, of course, as long as she had let him keep his faith in her. But now…
Eavesdropping. Playing the Peeping Tom. Well, one couldn’t worry about those fine distinctions now. He was fighting, and you didn’t wear gloves against a man who was fighting with bared fists. He had got to find what evidence there was. Had got to… got to… Anyhow, at any cost. He picked up a poker from the grate. With two blows he had smashed the front of the desk to splinters.
§
Two days later James Merrick received a letter from Gray’s Inn Square announcing that in the case of Eagar versus Eagar Mr. Joseph Ephraim accepted service on behalf of the defendant.
IV
The progress of the law is slow. For weeks, ever since he had learnt that Eagar’s suit was to be defended and that Ephraim had been chosen as a solicitor, James Merrick had awaited the proof of the evidence with a feverish impatience. Though he had done nothing to alarm Marian, had assured her that in all probability the defence was no more than a bluff, a gesture to impress the Judge, so that all suspicions of collusion might be removed, he had looked to the outcome with considerable misgiving. The most convincing evidence became quickly vulnerable under cross-examination. And he did not look forward to the prospect of Marian’s appearance in the witness-box. Nor had the letter itself been reassuring.
For some such letter he had been, of course, prepared. He had known from the manner in which Eagar had stormed angrily from the room that Marian’s husband had no intention of sitting quietly and letting himself be divorced without making some gesture of self-protection. He would probably not contest the actual charges, but the issue by maintenance he would fight to the last farthing; that Merrick had been prepared for. Nor had he felt any particular alarm. There was not going to be any squabbling about maintenance. The signature of Joshua Ephraim, however, was not calculated to ensure the feeling of composure. Joshua Ephraim. One did not go to a man like that, or rather a man like Eagar didn’t, unless one had some fairly disagreeable business to transact. “I wonder,” he thought, “what Bradshaw will have to say about it.”
Bradshaw’s reception of the news was much as he had expected. A smile like winter sunlight flickered over the lined and bloodless face. And it was in much the same way that a connoisseur will savour a bouquet of old brandy that Bradshaw pursed his lips forward approvingly. He scented battle, and he was content. A long case full of nice points and doubtful precedents. It was of such stuff that the happiness of Mr. Montgomery Merrick’s managing clerk was made.
“I wonder,” he said, “what line they’ll take. They may attempt to deny the whole thing. I rather hope they do myself. As I warned you, the adultery evidence is by no means conclusive. It’s sufficient, however, to impress a man of the world. And if the Judge thinks they’re lying there, he’ll think they’re lying the whole way through. If they’re shrewd, and Ephraim is shrewd, they’ll admit the adultery and concentrate on the cruelty.”
“But we’ve got plenty of evidence there, surely?” Merrick expostulated.
Bradshaw shook his head.
“As far as it goes,” he said. “Yes. But how far does it go? We have the evidence of one blow. Evidence that I think no court could disregard. But one blow does not constitute cruelty. Cruelty, to be an occasion for divorce, has to be persistent. We have submitted in our petition that a campaign of cruelty culminated in that blow. And if that evidence is not going to be subjected to cross-examination we should be able to maintain that blow as a proof of sustained cruelty. But under cross-examination it would be nothing like so easy. We have nothing to advance but that single blow. We have no other incidents. We might find it difficult to show that that one blow was anything but an isolated incident.
“It’s the kind of evidence,” he went on, “that may look very well on paper, but that can be made to look very foolish by a clever counsel. What is it, after all? one blow with the open hand in public? Can’t you hear the cross-examination? ‘How hard was the blow?’—‘Very hard?’—‘Did it knock you down?’—‘No.’—‘Did it make you bleed?’—‘No.’—‘Did you go on dancing afterwards?’—‘Yes.’—‘Do you imagine that it would be possible for a grown man to hit a young girl really hard in anger and yet for that blow to leave no mark, and for the girl to be able to go on dancing afterwards? I suggest to you that this blow, which you describe as an act of such gross inhumanity that you demand the law’s protection against your husband, was no more than a rather impatient push!”
“That’s how he’ll argue, Mr. James,” concluded Bradshaw. “I don’t say it’s hopeless: I merely say that it’s going to be difficult, extremely difficult. It’s a great pity,” he added thoughtfully, “that the blow wasn’t given with a clenched fist.”
§
In no way, however, had Merrick allowed anything of this feeling to appear to Marian. They scarcely ever talked, indeed, of the divorce, not that is to say of its actual details. They spoke of it as something that had to happen, as a date upon the calendar, after which life would grow easier and freer. In the same way that one might say, ‘when the winter’s over I’ll go down to my country cottage,’ she spoke much and eagerly, of all that she would do when her freedom came. It would be the first freedom that she had ever really had. There had been the closely guarded years of her father’s lifetime, the few dazed London months when she had been uncertain of herself and her surroundings, then the captivity of marriage. She had never had a chance of knowing what she wanted to do and doing it. “It’s marvellous,” she cried. “Marvellous! To think of all the things that I’ll be able to do.”
Half their time together was spent in discussing her plans, and as the weeks went by, increasingly she found herself substituting ‘we’ for ‘I.’ “It would be fun for us to do this, wouldn’t it?” she would say. They had grown such friends, she and Merrick, that it was only natural to assume that he would have some share in the new life that was before her. Looking down the avenue of a care-free, golden, imperfectly discerned future, she pictured herself with Merrick as her companion doing the kind of jolly foolish ragamuffin things, peeping
into queer places, making odd expeditions, that are only possible between intimates, because you must have someone you can laugh things over with when the experiment proves a failure, someone you can make jokes with of your discomfitures. “We’ll have plenty of fun together,” she would say. And it was in that spirit of happy confidence, not over-eager to probe into the future, that two or three times a week they dined and danced together, and on Sundays drove out picnicking into the country, letting themselves, meeting by meeting, relax further into the charm of an un-exacting, because sure-based intimacy.
Merrick was not going to have those hours spoilt by the shadow of any legal complications.
Within a very few moments, however, of opening the long envelope that contained the proof of evidence he knew that for a while, anyhow, the security of those hours was at an end.
It was worse than he had expected. Everything was admitted and everything was justified. Adultery had been committed, but under such and such conditions. A blow had been struck, but under such and such conditions. Detail by detail the process of defence was stated. The wilfulness of Marian, her selfishness; her disloyal and unwifely conduct; her attitude towards men that in a set where infidelity was condoned, bordered constantly upon the brink of infidelity. A defence backed up by the testimony of witnesses who had seen her at this and the other party, where such and such things had taken place, who had observed her behaving in a way that Merrick knew to be completely innocent, but that could be made to appear immodest in the witness-box; a defence that presented as its culminating justification a letter to Marian addressed and signed and dated.
MY DARLING ONE,—
So you are to come after all to the show on Sunday and you are to dine here first. We’ll be alone, and I’ll be counting the minutes to eight o’clock. My lovely one, if you only knew how much of my time I spend thinking of you, if you knew what it meant last week to hear you splashing in a bath only three yards off, with just the door between us. My lovely, my tantalizing one, are you never to be snared?