There were two cups to drink, for he had to put the cup of death to her
lips. He told her all as they walked in the garden that afternoon; of
the growing gravity of symptoms, the interview with the great specialist
to whom his own doctor, unwilling to pronounce a final verdict, had sent
him. He begged her to spare him further interviews. He was to die, that
was evident; and doctors could do nothing for him. If pain came he
promised that he would take what relief they had to give.
She leaned her head against his shoulder, weeping and weeping as they
walked.
They were two lovers again, lovers shut into the straitest, most
compassed paradise. On every side the iron walls enclosed them; there
were no distances; there was no horizon. But within the circle of doom
blossomed the mazy sweetness; the very sky seemed to have narrowed to
the roofing of a bower.
To be in love again; to feel the whole world beating like a doubled
pulse of you-and-I to and fro between them. She must weep, and he, with
this newly born self, must know to the full the pang and bitterness; but
the moments blossomed and smiled over the dread; because the dread was
there. Sir Walter passed away like a shadow. Kitty saw him and came to
her husband from the interview with a composure that almost made him
laugh. It would have hurt her feelings for him to laugh at her, and he
listened gravely while she told him that Sir Walter, now, was going to
accept the big post in India that, for her sake, he had been on the
point of refusing. He was going away that very night. She had been
perfectly frank with him; she had explained to him--"quite simply and
gently" said Kitty--that she had been very foolish and had let her
friendship for him, her fondness, and her loneliness mislead her; yes,
she had told him quite simply that he would always be a dear, dear
friend, but that she was in love with her husband.
The poor toy. The child, with placid hands and unpitying eyes, had
snapped it across the middle and walked away from it. He didn't need her
to say it again; he saw that she had ceased completely to love Sir
Walter. "And weren't you sorry for him at all?" he asked.
"Sorry? Of course, dear, how can you ask?" said Kitty. "I was as tender
as possible. But you know, I can't but feel that he deserved punishment.
Oh, I know that I did, too!--don't think me hard and self-righteous. But
see--see, darling, what you have saved me from! Remember what he wanted
me to do. Oh--it was wrong and cruel of him. I shall never be able to
forgive him, just because I was so weak--just because I did listen."
"Ah, do forgive him--just because you were so strong that you never let
him guess that you were weak," said Holland. He was very sorry for Sir
Walter. And he was conscious, since he might not smile outwardly, of
smiling inwardly over the ruthlessness of women towards the man, loved
no longer, who has tarnished their image in their own eyes. The angel
held him fast in Paradise, but something in him, a mere sense of humour,
the humour of the outer world, perhaps, escaped her at moments, looked
down at her, at himself, at Paradise, and accepted comedy as well as
tragedy. It was only to these places of silence, loneliness and
contemplation that Kitty did not come.
She shared sorrow and joy. She guessed too well at the terrors; she
would be beside him, her very heart beating on his, through all the
valley of the shadow; he would be able to spare her nothing, and even in
death he would not be alone. And she was joy. The years of pining and
lassitude, the toying with danger, the furnace of affliction that, in
the library, had burned the dross from her soul, all had made another
woman of Kitty from his girl-bride of six years before. She was joy; she
knew how to make it, to give it. She surprised him continually with her
inventiveness in rapture. When fear came upon them, she folded it from
him with encircling arms. When fear passed, she seemed to lead him out
into the dew and sunlight of early morning and to show him new paths,
new flowers, new bowers of bliss. All artifice, all self-centred
dreaminess, all the littler charms, dropped from her. She was as candid,
as single-minded, as passionate as a newly created Eve, and she seemed
dowered with a magic power of diversity in simplicity. There was no
forethought or plan in her triumph over satiety. Like a flower, or an
Eve, she seemed alive with the instinctive impulse that grows from
change to change, from beauty to further beauty. Holland, summer-day
after summer-day, was conscious only of joy and sorrow; of these, and of
the still places where, sometimes, he seemed to hover above them. The
serpent of weariness still slept.
* * * * *
"Tell me, dearest," said Kitty one day--how they talked and talked about
themselves, recapturing every mutual memory, analysing long-forgotten
scenes and motives, explaining themselves, accusing themselves, for the
joy of being forgiven--"Tell me; you loved me so much that you were
willing to give me up to him, to make me happy, and to save me;--but, if
you hadn't been going to die--oh darling!--then you would have loved me
too much to give me up, wouldn't you?"
His arm was about her, a book between them--unread, it usually was
unread--and they were sitting in the re-consecrated summer-house; Kitty
had insisted on that punishment for herself, had knelt down before her
husband there and, despite his protest, had kissed his hands, with
tears; the summer-house had become their sweetest retreat.
He answered her now swiftly, and with a little relief for the obvious
answer: "But then I couldn't have set you free, dear."
"No;" Kitty mused. "I see. But--would the fear of losing me have made
you _re-fall_ in love with me? You know you only re-fell, darling, only
knew how much you cared when you thought I was deceiving you, lying to
you, in saying that I loved you; but you would have loved me--not in
that dreadful, big, inhuman way--but loved _me_, just _me_--loved me
enough to fight for me, wouldn't you?"
He looked into her adoring, insistent eyes and a little shadow of memory
crossed his mind. Was she an altogether unambiguous angel? Was it there,
the subtlety, in her eyes, her smile; something sweet, insinuating,
insatiable? And as she fondled him, leaning close and questioning, it
was as though a little eddy of dust from the outer world blew into
Paradise through an unguarded gate. Well, why should not the dear angel
have a little dust on its shining hair? It was a foolish angel, as he
knew; and it lived for love, as he knew; and women who did that and who
didn't get loved enough grew to look subtle--he remembered the swift
train of thought. But Kitty was loved enough, so that there must be no
subtlety to make her beauty stranger and less sweet, and in Paradise one
forgot the outer world and need not consider it again; it was done with
him and he with it, so that he answered, smiling, "I would have loved
you for yourself; I would have fought for you."
"And won me," she murmured, hiding her face on his breast. "Oh, Nick, if
only it had been sooner, sooner."
Her suffering sanctified even the shadow; but he remembered it;
remembered that the dust had blown in. It lay, though so lightly, on the
angel's hair, on the blossoms, on the bowers, and it made him think, at
times, of the outer world, of his old judgments and values. He would
have had to fight for her, of course; he would have had to save her; but
it wouldn't have been because he had "re-fallen." That was a secret that
he kept from Kitty; it belonged to the contemplative region of thought,
where he was alone. And in Paradise, it seemed, one was forced to tell
only half-truths.
Their ties with the outer world were all slackened during these days. No
one knew the secret of the doomed honeymoon. The one or two friends who
dropped in upon them for a night seemed like quaint marionettes crossing
a stage that now and then they agreed to have set up before the bower.
These figures, their own relation to them, quickened the sense of
secrecy and love. Their eyes sought each other past unconscious eyes;
they had lovers' dexterities in meeting unobserved by their guests, gay
little escapades when they would run away for an hour drifting on the
river or wandering in the woods. And the formalities and chatter of
social life--all these queer people interested in queer things, people
who used the present only for the future, who were always planning and
looking forward,--made the hidden truths the sharper and sweeter.
Nothing, for the two lovers, was to go on. That was the truth that made
the marionettes so insignificant and that made their love so deep. There
was, for them, no looking forward, no adapting of means to ends. There
were no ends, or, rather, they were always at the end. And there was
nothing for them to do except to love each other.
"I feel sometimes as if we had become a Pierrot and a Pierrette,"
Holland said to her. "It's for that, I suppose, that a Pierrot is such
an uncanny and charming creature;--the future doesn't exist for him at
all."
Kitty, who had always been a literal person, and whose literalness had
now become so beautifully appropriate,--for what is literalness but a
seeing of the fact as standing still?--Kitty tried to smile but begged
him not to jest about such things.
"I'm not jesting, darling. I'm only musing on our strange state. It's
like a fairy-tale, the life we lead."
She turned her head, with the pathetic gesture grown habitual with her
of late, and hid her eyes on his shoulder. "Oh, darling," she said, "do
you hate to leave me!"
She had felt the moment of detached fancy as separative, and he had now
to soothe her passionate weeping.
He found that there was a certain pendulum-swing of mood in Paradise.
Emotion was the being of this mood, and to keep emotion one must swing.
Either he must soothe Kitty or Kitty must soothe him, or they must
transcend the dark necessities of their case by finding in each other a
joy including in its ecstasy the sorrow it obliterated. This pendulum
swung spontaneously during those first weeks, it swung as their hearts
beat, from need to response. And, at the beginning of the third week, it
was not so much a faltering in the need or the response that Holland
knew, as a mere lessening of the swing;--it didn't go quite so fast or
carry him quite so far. He became conscious of an unequal rhythm; Kitty
seemed to swing even faster and further.
She saw him as dead; that was the urgent vision that lay behind her
demonstrations and ministrations; she saw him as more dead with every
day that passed, and every moment of every day was, to her, of
passionate significance. No one had ever been idealised as he was
idealised, or clung to as he was clung to. The sense of desperate
tendrils enlacing him was almost suffocating, and each tendril craved
for recognition; a lapse, a look, an inattention was the cutting of
something that bled, and clung the closer. Every moment was precious,
and any not given to love was a robbery from her dwindling store. As the
time grew less her need for significance grew greater. Her sense of her
own tragedy grew with her sense of his, and he must share both.
Resignation to his fate was a resignation of her, and a crime against
their love. Holland by degrees grew conscious of keeping himself up to a
mark.
It was then that the blossoms began to look a little over-blown, the
paths to become monotonous, the bowers to grow oppressive with their
heavy sweetness as though a noonday sun beat down changelessly upon
them. The dew was gone, and though Kitty remained a primitive Eve, he
himself knew that in his conscious ardour there hovered the vague
presence of something no longer pure, something unwholesome and
enervating.
She saw him as dead, and the thought of death, always with her, renewed
her pity and her adoration; he knew that his own background lent a charm
enthralling and poignant to his every word, look and gesture. But for
him this charm and this renewal were lacking. He could not feel such
pity, either for her or for himself. She was to live, poor little Kitty,
and, by degrees, the tragedy would fade and the beauty of their last
weeks together would remain with her. There was no cavern yawning behind
Kitty's figure; life, inexorably, showed him her smiling future.
And, for himself; well, if it was tragic to have to die, it was a
tragedy one got used to. He might have felt it more if only Kitty hadn't
been there to feel it so superabundantly for him. No: he could keep up;
he could see to it that the pendulum didn't falter; but he couldn't hide
from himself that its swing was growing mechanical.
By the end of the third week the serpent was awake and walking in
Paradise. Holland was tired; profoundly tired.
He found his wife's eyes on him one day as they sat with books under the
trees on the lawn. He tried to read the books now, though in a casual
manner that would offer no offence to Kitty's unoccupied hands and eyes.
He wanted very much to read and to forget himself--to forget Kitty--for
a little while. It was difficult to do this when such a desultory air
must be assumed, when he must be ready to answer anything she said at a
moment's notice, and must remember to look up and smile at her or to
read some passage aloud to her at every few pages. But he had been
trying thus to combine oblivion and alertness when a longer interval
than usual of the first held him beguiled, and alertness, when it
returned, returned too late. Kitty's eyes made him think of the eyes she
had gazed with on the day of revelation in the library. They were
candid, they were frightened; the eyes of the real child. Now, as then,
they were drinking in some new knowledge; a new fear and an old fear,
come close at last, were pressing on her. He felt so tired that he would
have liked to look away and to have pretended not to see; but he was not
so tired as to be cruel, and he tried to smile at her, as, tilting his
hat over his eyes so that they were shadowed, he asked her what she was
thinking of.
She rose and came to him, kneeling down beside his chair and putting her
hands on his shoulders.
"What is the matter, Kitty?" he asked her, as he had asked on that
morning three weeks before.
"Nicholas--Nicholas--are you feeling worse?" she returned.
Holland was surprised and almost relieved. It was no new demand, it was
merely a sharper fear. And perhaps she was right, perhaps he was feeling
worse and the end was approaching. If so, any languor would be taken as
symptomatic of dissolution and not of indifference, and he might relax
his hold. Actually a deep wave of satisfaction seemed to go lapping
through him.
"I don't feel badly, dear," he said, smoothing back her hair. "You know,
I shall suffer hardly any pain; but I do feel very tired."
"In what way tired?" Another alarm was in her voice.
"Bodily fatigue, dear. Of course, one doesn't die without fading."
He felt, when he had said it, that the words, in spite of his care, were
cruel; that she would feel them as cruel; he had gone too fast; had
tried to grasp at his immunity too hastily.
"Nicholas!" she gasped. "You speak as if I were accusing you!"
"Accusing me, darling! How could you be! Of what?"
"Oh, Nick," she sobbed, hiding her face on his breast,--"Am _I_ tiring
you? Do you sometimes want me to go away and to leave you more alone?"
His heart stood still. Over her bowed head he looked at the sunlit trees
and flowers, the hazy glory of the summer day, a phantasmagoric setting
to this knot of human pain and fear, and he said to himself that unless
he were very careful he might hurt her irremediably; he might rob her of
the memory that was to beautify everything when he was gone.
He had found in a moment, he felt sure, just the right quiet tone,
expressing a comprehension too deep for the fear of any misunderstanding
between them. "There would be no me left, Kitty, if you went away. I am
you--all that there is of me. You are life itself; don't talk of robbing
me of any of it; I have so little left."
She was silent for a moment, not lifting her face, no longer weeping.
Then in a voice curiously hushed and controlled she said: "How quiet you
are; how peaceful you are--how terribly peaceful."
"You want me to be at peace, don't you, dear?"
"You don't mind leaving life. You don't mind leaving me," she said.
"Kitty--Kitty----"
She interrupted his protest: "I've nothing to give you but love; I've
never had anything to give you but love. And you are tired of that. You
are going, you are going for ever. I shall never see you again. And you
don't mind! You don't mind!" She broke into dreadful sobs.
Helpless and tormented he held her, trying to soothe, to reassure, to
convince, recovering, even, in the vehemence of his pity, the very tones
of passionate love, the personal note that her quick ear had felt
fading. She sobbed, and sobbed, but answered him at last, in the
pathetic little child language of their first honeymoon that they had
revived and enriched with new, sweet follies. But he felt that she was
not really comforted, that she tried to delude herself.
"You _do_ feel tired--in your body--only in your body?--not in your
soul?" she repeated. "It isn't _I_, it's only _you_."
"It's only I who am dying," he almost felt that, with grim irony, he
would have liked to answer for her complete reassurance. The funny,
ugly, pathetic truth peeped out at him; she would rather have him die
than have him cease to love her.
Soulless sylvan creatures, dryads, nymphs, seemed to gaze from green
shadows among branches; the mocking faces of pucks and elves to tilt and
smile in the breeze-shaken flowers;--that subtle gaze, that sinister
smile, of what did it remind him? All Nature was laughing at him,
cruelly laughing; yet all Nature was consoling him.
His love and Kitty's was a flower rooted in death and contradiction. Not
affinity, not the growing needs of normal life had brought them
together; only the magic of doom and the craving to be loved.
Poor Kitty; she did not know. It was his love she loved, his love she
clung to and watched for and caressed. She did not know it, but she
would rather have him dead than have him loveless. That was the truth
that smiled the sinister smile. One might summon one's courage to smile
back at it, but one was rather glad to be leaving it--and Kitty.
And, in the days that followed, when from the pretence of passion he
could find refuge only in the pretence of dying, disgust crept into the
weariness, he began to wonder when the pretence would become reality. He
began to want to die.
This weariness, this irritation, this disgust belonged to life rather
than to death; it was a sharp longing to escape from consciousness of
Kitty--Kitty, alert and agonised in her suspicion. It was a nostalgic
longing for the old, tame, dusty life, his work, his selfless interests.
The month was almost up, and yet he was no worse; was he really going to
last for another month?
He said to Kitty one morning that he must go up to town. Her face grew
ashen. "The doctor! You are going to the doctor, Nicholas?"
"No, no; it's only that Collier is passing through. I heard from him
this morning. He wants to see me."
"Why should you bother and think about work now, darling?"
"Why, dearest, I must be of any use I can until the end."
He tried to keep lightness in his voice and patience out of it.
"Let him come down here. I'll write myself and ask him." She, too, was
assuming something. She, too, was afraid of him, as he of her.
"He hasn't time. He is on his way to the Continent."
"It will be bad for you to travel now. And London in August!" Her voice
was grave, reproachfully tender.
"No, dear, I promise you I will run no risk."
"Promise as much as you will"--now, gaily, sweetly, falsely, but how
pathetically, she clasped her hands about his arm;--"but I couldn't
think of letting you go alone: you didn't really believe I'd let you go
alone, darling: I'll come too, of course. Won't that be fun!--Oh, Nick,
you _want_ me to come! You don't want to get away!"--The falsity broke
down and the full anguish of her suspicion was in her voice and eyes. It
was this sincerity that pierced him and made him helpless--sick and
helpless. He was able now to blindfold its dreadful clear-sightedness by
swift resource: he acted his delight, his gratitude: he hadn't liked to
ask his dearest--all the bother for only a day and night; he had thought
it would bore her, for he must be most of the time with Collier; but,
yes, they would go together, since she petted him so; they would do a
play; he would help her choose a new hat; it would be great fun.
Yet, while he knotted the handkerchief around her eyes, turned her
about and confused her sense of direction, as if in a merry game, he
knew that fear and suspicion lurked for them both in their playing.
He had, indeed, meant to go to the doctor, but now that must be
postponed. The meeting with Collier, his chief at the Home Office, was
his only gulp of freedom. At the hotel Kitty waited, and his heart smote
him when he found her sitting just as he had left her, mute, white,
smiling and enduring. She hadn't even been to her dressmaker's or done
any shopping as she had promised him to do. "I know I am absurd;--I know
you think me, silly;--but I can't--I can't do anything--think
anything--but you!" she said, her lips trembling.
"Absurd, darling, indeed!" he answered, "as if you couldn't think of me
and order a new dress at the same time! You know I told you I wanted to
see you in a pale blue lawn--isn't lawn the pretty stuff?--And what of
the hat? You do want one?--Come, let us go out and I'll help you to
choose it."
But she did not want to go out; she only wanted to sit near him, lean
her head against him, have him make up to her for the hours of
loneliness. He knew that night at the play that she hardly heard a word,
and that when once or twice, he was lured from his absorption and made
to laugh, really forgetting, really amused, his laughter hurt her. She
gazed at the stage with wide, vacant eyes. He felt the strain of being
in town with this desperate devotion beside him worse than the strain of
being shut up with it in the country; for there Kitty need hide and
repress nothing, and his danger of hurting her by forgetfulness was not
so great. He was like a prisoner led about by his gaoler, manacles on
his wrists and ankles and a yoke on his neck; there was a certain relief
in going back to prison where, at all events, one wasn't so tormented by
the sights and sounds of freedom, nor so conscious of chains and the
watchful eye upon one.
"This is the end," he thought, as, in the train, they sat side by side,
holding hands and very silent, but that, from time to time, when their
eyes met, she would smile her doting, hungry smile and murmur:
"Darling."
After this, the prison again; the high walls and stifling sweetness of
Paradise, and then, thank goodness, release.
How strange a contrast to the journey a month ago, when, stunned, shot
through, he had only felt the bliss of home-coming, the longing for the
nest. It was all nest now; there was no space for the fear of death. He
was shut in, smothered by this panting breast of love.