But then she knew that this was not true. He was only determined not to speak of his trouble and he was afraid that she would force him to do so. Perhaps it was because she already knew too much. Or perhaps it was that thing that Maude had said:
“You’re the last person …”
Could that be true? She groped dimly for the sequence, understanding and yet not able to state it.
“He doesn’t want to think about me … to be near me … because of the child …”
Not because another woman was dead, but because he had lost courage. He would not take upon himself, any more, the responsibility of seeing that other women did not die. Other women, and Ellen among them, must depend upon the wit and courage of men who were not afraid of such a burden. Stupid men, perhaps; inferior to Dick in skill. But able to carry their part in the heavy burden of the world’s work, able to give their best, while Dick’s so much finer best must rot unused. These were better men than Dick, and he knew it. A world peopled with Dicks would be a sorry place: it was the Clarkes and the Thrings who really mattered.
And he was afraid that she knew this. He was afraid she would despise him because he had failed, not merely to save Mrs. Briggs, but to survive a defeat to his own vanity. And how large a part had that vanity played in this power which he had of impressing himself upon the world?
Well … they were going to find out.
There was nothing that she could say. He would have to settle this for himself. It was his fence. If he could take it, then everything would be quite all right between them. If he could not, then nothing would ever make it right again. She loved him and she would always love him, but she would have to learn to be ashamed of him.
Without another word she rose and went over to wedge the window which was rattling a little. Then she knelt down beside her own bed to say her prayers. She repeated to herself the Lord’s Prayer, the Collect for the week, and the formula which she had used every night since her confirmation. And then, incoherently, she began to implore for help, burying her face in the quilt which had grown wet with her tears. She asked that strength might be given to Dick, that she might be made able to think of something sensible to say, that something might happen to take all this off his mind; that Louise might not find out, that Dr. Thring should write and say that he would have done just the same, and that Dick might consent to go and see a neurologist in the autumn.
“But Lord, Thou knowest how much he would hate explaining it all to another doctor …”
Corbett would be the best man to go to. Dick liked him and believed in him as much as he believed in any of them. If only … but she was supposed to be praying. She tried to collect her thoughts, and found that the worst thing had happened, for she was quite sure that nobody had listened. It had been a vague fear for some time, and now it had become a conviction. She was an atheist. She believed neither in the Committee of Four nor in that other, remoter, Deity, to whom she had never tried to pray.
She rose from her knees, blew out the candle and got into bed.
“Good night, Dick.”
Her voice was flat and weary. Dick’s answer came out of the darkness:
“Good night, dear.”
As she lay there a certain comfort returned to her. She became once more aware of the passage of time. Soon they would go to sleep and to-morrow they would wake up, and new things, all sorts of things, might come into their lives, so that nothing would turn out as they had expected. And, anyhow, this moment would not go on for ever. It would be over sometime; it would be in the past. She must fortify herself against it as if it had been physical pain, like childbirth or toothache. It must be lived through.
“I must just get along as best I can,” she thought, as she curled up her cold toes in her night-gown. “It’s no use worrying. Anything may happen, not just the things one is afraid of. I must do the best I can and not worry. Keep them off him if I can. Not speak about it till he wants to. Let him see he’s quite safe about that. If he isn’t any better by the end of the summer, remember there’s always Corbett. And not bother any more about God. This is no moment to worry about that. I’ll think all that out later on sometime. If I’m an atheist, and it looks like it, well, I must just be one. Much better if only I can manage not to think. If I start thinking I shall make mistakes. I’ve thought enough. I’ve made up my mind what to do, and now I must stop thinking and do it. Now I ought to go to sleep. That’s the next thing. I’ll count sheep through a gap …”
She fell asleep very soon after.
Dick, in the darkness, turned and tossed and wondered if she was still awake, and if he had hurt her, and if he was now as low a thing in her eyes as he was in his own.
14
ELISSA KOEBEL was as good as her word, for she came very early next morning. The life of the courtyard had scarcely begun and most of the party were still up in their towers. From the kitchen quarters came faint sounds of activity, but an early morning stillness lay upon the little paved square, with its well in the middle, and the empty doorways, and the pigeons fluttering about the grey battlements.
This stillness was very soon broken by Elissa. She perched herself upon the edge of the well and began to warble folk-songs in the clear mountain voice of the Sennerin:
Ich grüsse dich
Zehn tausend mal!
Du himmelschöne Ziller Thal!
The rousing echoes were flung from wall to wall, and the pigeons rose up in a startled flock. Nor were the castle towers quite impervious to sound. The slit windows on the stairs let in a great deal of Elissa’s yodelling.
In the keep all the children were just getting up. They began joyfully to yodel, too, until Muffy had to say:
“For goodness’ sake … if you must sing, sing properly.”
Louise and Gordon turned to one another with infatuated smiles, as they leapt out of bed and began to dress.
“Another golden day,” murmured Gordon.
“It’s too good to be true,” said Louise. “And to-day they are really going to meet at last.”
A faint chill descended upon Gordon’s rapture. He was not so very anxious to see Elissa falling in love with Guy Fletcher. To his mind they all did very well as they were.
Maude and Barny were having a scene in the bedroom and spared very little attention to the yodelling outside.
“You might have let me know how you felt about it before,” Barny was saying. “I thought you quite approved.”
“I didn’t want to annoy you. I thought if I really let you know how nervous I should be, and then Dick didn’t come, and the whole plan fell through, I should just have annoyed you for nothing.”
“I’ve written for my boots and climbing tackle. You seemed quite enthusiastic … I can’t understand …”
“I know, darling. Of course you must go. I’ve no business to be nervous. I must learn to get over it. Only will you just not tell me when you do go? If I don’t know you’re doing it, then I can’t be frightened. You just slip off and climb if you want to, and I shan’t know till it’s over, so I shall be spared all those awful visions of you lying with your back broken at the bottom of a precipice.”
“Of course I shan’t go if you feel like that about it,” said Barny coldly. “Only I do think you might have…. Good God! Is that damned woman here already?”
“Barny!”
“I beg your pardon, Maude. But I do wish you’d say what you mean or mean what you say. It’s impossible ever to know where one is with you. I quite thought …”
“Oh, now you’re cross! How dreadful!”
“No, I am not cross. I only …”
“O Hojo! Ho-jo! Ho-jo!
Mein Heimatland, Tirol!
Tirol!
Mein Heimatland, Tirol!”
“Oh, Tirol my backside!”
“Barny, you’re disgusting! How can you say you’re not cross?”
Over in the other tower, Guy Fletcher and Kerran both woke up with a jerk. Their first emotion was one of discomfort
upon beholding one another, for they disliked having to share a room. Kerran’s prosperous pink face peered cautiously over the blanket at Guy’s pale square one. And then they realised what it was that had roused them.
“Does she come every day?” asked Guy appalled.
“She does.”
“Good heavens!”
They said no more, but for the first time in their lives a small spark of sympathy began to flicker between them.
Dick, in the room below, was the only person to be taken by surprise. He was already up and had begun to shave. When Elissa gave tongue he started violently and asked:
“What the devil is that?”
Ellen, who was only half awake, said drowsily that it must be Madame Koebel.
“You know! I told you about her. I wrote about her.”
She sat up in bed and rubbed her eyes. And then, as their unhappy plight came back to her, she gave him a quick, anxious look. He turned away at once. In the shaving glass he saw that he had scratched his chin, and as he dabbed at the cut with a towel he swore under his breath. This propinquity, and these loving anxious looks, were more than he could bear.
“Did you write about her? I forget.”
Ellen’s letters were undramatic, and he had had no accounts of Elissa save from her. He now learnt for the first time of her friendship with Louise, and he was greatly surprised.
“What is she like?” he wanted to know.
Ellen reflected.
“She’s queer. She’s quite interesting. I mean, she seems to have travelled about a good deal and seen a lot. And I must say she does sing beautifully.”
“But all this about her being such a rake, I mean? Is that all moonshine? I suppose it must be, or Louise wouldn’t have her here. Or Gordon either.”
“Oh!” said Ellen, opening her eyes very wide. “I don’t know. Maude thinks it isn’t. Not moonshine, I mean. She thinks Louise is making a terrible mistake. And she thinks that Madame Koebel is … is drawing off Gordon.”
“Drawing off!”
Dick began to laugh, both at the idea and at Ellen’s idiom. It was with a briskened sense of anticipation that he finished dressing and went down into the courtyard. His attention had been diverted by this unexpected little drama, and he felt that the presence of Elissa in the castle might make everything a great deal easier than he had expected.
He wanted to get out of the room and away from Ellen. All night he had kept on repeating to himself that it was impossible to remain shut up with her like this. He ought never to have come to Inishbar. He ought to go away. But his will to do anything seemed to have vanished. If he could make the effort to go he might equally make the greater effort, pull himself together, and put this dark interlude behind him. Both courses required a moral struggle.
“Thank heaven for Madame Koebel,” he thought.
Louise and Gordon were both in the courtyard already, and they too were sitting on the edge of the well. They were examining the peasant dress which Elissa had put on that morning. She, it seemed, was in an earthy mood. She had assumed the full, homespun petticoat and the shawl worn by the barefoot women of Killross, and her golden braids were wound neatly round her head. She would sing nothing but Volksliede. Even her face seemed to have broadened, to have become rosier and more bucolic. She radiated good humour and physical well-being, laughed loudly, swung her slender bare feet to and fro, and stared about her with the unabashed, animal liveliness of the comely savage. Gordon and Louise, who knew how she loved to dramatise every role, admired and applauded. When they presented Dick they both looked at him anxiously, as if to demand his instant appreciation. But it was impossible ever to know what Dick thought of anybody. His long, cold face had about as much expression as a block of granite. He returned Elissa’s bold survey with one short, but observant glance, and sat down without a word upon the wall beside her.
She said smiling:
“But we have met before.”
He could not remember that they had, but he did not trouble to deny it. In one way it was perfectly true. He had met her before. There had been something of her in every woman who had ever roused his sensuality. And he had no doubt but that she had met him before, frequently, in other men. Their understanding, on that point, was complete. It had been instantaneous.
Her strange, wild eyes, that unabashed regard which had given Kerran such a turn, held a message which could not be mistaken. He looked at the rest of her, swiftly, and flashed his own message back.
Now he sat beside her on the wall, and marvelled, with mingled relief and dismay, at his own amazing insensibility. She had turned away from him and was talking in German to Louise, but he knew that she was aware of him with every nerve in her body. She was his for the taking: he was perfectly certain of that. And he did not want her. The inertia which had brought him to Inishbar, which was going to keep him there, had put a bridgeless gulf between them. He was too sick at heart to want anything or anybody. He was as safe from all carnal desires as St. Simon on the top of his pillar.
And he thought, sardonically amused, of her fury when she should find this out. For his message, flashed in that instant of greeting, had been an impudent deception. He would not have sent it if he had not known that he was safe. If he had not been safe he would not have been there at all. He was not likely to betray his poor Ellen in this particular way because he was betraying her in every other way. He was allowing his life, and hers, to go to pieces. If the spectacle of her misery last night could not reclaim him, then his case was surely hopeless.
“No, no, my dear,” he mentally informed the lady at his side. “I’m a good husband. You just wait and see what a good husband I am!”
But the imagined diversion of this dialogue was not to last for long. The commonplace features of his colleague, Ensor Thring, peered sideways round a corner at him. He heard Thring’s neat little voice saying something, just not audible. It was Thring’s face and Thring’s voice which would haunt him for ever. He could forget a woman’s face, rigid in death. He could forget the sobs of a desolate husband. But there would still be Thring, squinting at him sideways, whispering inaudible things: and in the white glare, the suffocating heat of the theatre (he felt a wrench of nausea when he thought of that light and the heat) there would be myriads of Thrings: Thring on the table, Thring giving the anæsthetic, Thring’s face squinting under a nurse’s cap, Thring whispering and pushing in the students’ gallery….
He sought, with shaking hands, in his pocket for a pipe and a tobacco pouch. Elissa, aware of the movement, turned round to look at him.
“You are very sad this morning,” she said. “Why is that?”
Already she was aware of something amiss. She had discovered the gulf across which their messages had flown and now she was running up and down, in search of a bridge. Poor Elissa!
Louise interposed, exclaiming:
“Here is Guy Fletcher.”
She jumped up and went to meet the reluctant Guy, who had just appeared at the door of his tower staircase. Gordon followed her more slowly, wishing in secret that Guy Fletcher were somewhere else. For a few seconds Dick and Elissa were left to wage their silent battle by the well.
Elissa’s eyes said:
“But how is this? How is this?”
“Find out.”
“Am I not desirable?”
“You are.”
“Then you must take me or run away from me.”
“Not at all. I don’t want you.”
“You do.”
“I do not.”
“I am stronger than you.”
“Are you? We shall see.”
“Quite right, my friend. We shall see. In the end you will either take me or run away from me.”
Thring’s voice filled up the silence with an inaudible comment, and Louise brought up Guy Fletcher to be introduced. Those eyes which Barny had said were like a basilisk or an odalisk—Maude could not remember which—were turned for a moment in Guy’s direction. Dick wat
ched, as he filled his pipe, and saw how Guy shied like a nervous horse. He thought:
“That’s what I ought to have done. There, but for a touch of accidie, goes Dick Napier.”
15
ELLEN might have spared herself a great deal of anxiety, for nobody asked what had happened to Dick. Nobody, indeed, saw anything amiss with him. On the very first day he took his place among the Vergil reading group, and he perversely insisted upon tackling that passage in Book X of the Æneid, which gives particulars of the Lydian fleet. Louise and Elissa, assured by him that Professor Grier had said this was one of the finest passages in the whole poem, waded obediently through the long list of ships and men, noted that Ilva is an island, rich in the Chalybes unexhausted mines, and that not all the sons of Mantua were of the same blood. They would rather have stuck to Dido, but they were afraid of admitting this, and thought well of themselves for being able to appreciate so virile a theme.
The Elissa epoch was at its zenith and even the powers of Nature herself seemed to smile upon the idyll. Day after day the sun travelled slowly across a cloudless sky. It was shining when they woke up in the mornings, and they lived in its benign radiance from dawn to dusk. The island echoed with happy voices, the laughter of children, song and music, and the splash of oars. Louise could feel that her ideal existence had come into being. At last she had escaped from the Woodstock Road. She was living in a world of elfin beauty, she had friends and laughter and song, days of endless sunshine, long, tender twilights, a whole procession of enchanted moments. The barometer in the gate house was set at fair. Maude saw to the housekeeping. There seemed to be no reason why this pleasant dream should ever stop. For more than a week she was able to forget that it could not go on for ever.
And even when she did remember that time passes, it was to experience an emotion of poetic sadness. She did not envisage the return to Oxford in the autumn. She could imagine no middle distance, only a far, romantic future when, in a passionless reverie, she might look back at these days of her vitality and youth. That future had a sentimental link with the present, and she could face it without rebellion—even yield herself to its mood when Elissa, who had discovered a copy of Moore’s Melodies in the drawing-room music cabinet, warbled such airs as Oft in the Stilly Night and The Harp That Once, full of a plangent regret for the past. Louise, listening, knew that she too might some day “feel as one who treads alone some banquet hall deserted.” When Elissa was singing she could never see the future in less noble terms.
A Long Time Ago Page 16