Rachel, however, even after the move abroad so strongly recommended by
her doctor had been made, did not all at once regain her normal
condition. She appeared to be better in health; she was calmer, her
nerves seemed quieter; but a strange dull veil still hung between her
mind and the days immediately preceding the great catastrophe. To what
had happened the day before her father's death she never referred; she
had not asked Rendel anything more about the accusation brought against
him. Once or twice she had spoken of her father as if he were still
there, then caught herself up, realising that he was gone. Was this how
it was always going to be? Rendel asked himself. Would he not again be
able to share with her, as far as one human being can share with
another, his hopes and his fears, or rather his renunciations? Would she
never be able to take part in his life with the sweet, smiling sympathy
which had always been so ineffably precious to him? Those days that she
had lost were just those that had branded themselves indelibly into his
consciousness: the afternoon that Stamfordham had come with the map,
the morning following when it had appeared in the newspaper, the scenes
with Gore, with Stamfordham,--all those days he lived over and over
again, and lived them alone. There was some solace in the thought that
if that time were to be to Rachel for ever blurred, she would never be
able to recall what had passed between herself and her husband after
Rendel had brought on Gore's illness by taxing him with what he had
done. And while he struggled with his memories--would he always have to
live in the past now instead of in the future?--Rachel, who had been
told to be a great deal in the fresh air, passed her time quietly,
peacefully, languidly, lying out of doors. They had deemed themselves
fortunate in securing in the overcrowded town a somewhat primitive
little pavilion belonging to one of the big hotels, of which the charm
to Rachel was that it had a shady garden. Rendel, whose time even during
the period in which he had had no regular occupation had always been
fully occupied, reading several hours a day, making notes on certain
subjects about which he meant to write later, became conscious for the
first time in his life that the hours hung heavy on his hands. It was
with a blank surprise that he realised that such a misfortune, which he
had always thought vaguely could befall only the idlers and desultory of
this world, should attack himself. Life is always laying these snares
for us, putting in our way suddenly and unexpectedly some form of
unpleasantness by which we may have seen others attacked, but from
which unconsciously we have felt that we ourselves should be preserved
by our own merits,--just as when we are in good health we hear of
sciatica, lumbago, or gout, and accept them without concern as part of
the composition of the universe, until one day one of these
disagreeables attacks ourselves, and stands out quite disproportionately
as something that after all is of more consequence than we thought. It
unfortunately nearly always happens that we have to face the mental
crises of life inadequately prepared. We think we have pictured them
beforehand, and according to that picture we are ready, in imagination,
with a sufficient equipment of fortitude and decision to enable us to
encounter them. In reality we mostly do no better than a traveller who
going to an unknown land and climate, guesses for himself beforehand
what his outfit had better be, and then finds it deplorably inadequate
when he gets there. Rendel, during those days of lonely agony in London
that followed the revelations sprung on the public by the _Arbiter_, had
endeavoured to school himself to face what the future might have in
store for him; but he had thought that while he was abroad, at any rate,
the horror that pursued him now would be in abeyance. He had never been
to German baths, he had never been to a fashionable resort of the kind;
he had no idea what it meant. All that he had vaguely pictured was that
it would be some sort of respite from the thing that dogged him now, the
fear--for there was no doubt that as the days went on it grew into a
fear--of coming suddenly upon some one he knew, who would look him in
the face and then turn away. And now that they were at the term of their
journey, installed in their little foreign pavilion, he had become aware
that at a stone's throw from him was a numerous cosmopolitan society,
among whom was probably a large contingent from London. He did not try
to learn their names; he would jealously keep aloof from them. Rachel
had been advised to stay here for four weeks at least. Four weeks, no
doubt, is not very long under ordinary circumstances: he had not
imagined that it might seem almost unendurably long to a man who had
been married less than a year to a wife that he loved. And yet, before
he had been there three days, he was conscious that each separate hour
had to be encountered, wrestled with, conquered, before going on to the
next. He had meant to write: there was a point of administration upon
which he had intended to say his say in one of the Reviews. But somehow
in that sitting-room, with the windows opening down to the garden, the
steady work, which in his own study would have been a matter of course,
seemed almost impossible. Then he thought he would read. He read aloud
to Rachel for part of the day; but he did not dare to choose anything
that was much good to himself, as he had been told that the more
inactive her mind was the better. Something he would have to do; he
would have to organise his daily life in some way that would make the
burden of it endurable. He made up his mind to take long walks--the
hotel and pavilion lay on the outskirts of the town--to go into the
outlying country and explore it on foot. But in the evenings when Rachel
was gone to bed, and when, alone at last, he would try to concentrate
his mind on the study or the writing to which he had been used so
eagerly to turn, another thought that he had been keeping at bay by a
conscious effort would rush at him again and overwhelm him.
In the meantime, at the other side of Bad-Schleppenheim, the hours were
flying fast and gaily. From the moment when the visitors met together at
an early hour in the morning to drink their glasses of Schleppenheim
water, and onwards through the luncheon parties, excursions, walking up
and down, listening to the band, seeing theatricals, or playing Bridge
in the evening, there was never a moment in which they were not
industriously engaged in the pursuit of something. It was mostly
pleasure, though many of them imagined it was health. Many of the people
who in London constituted Society were here, in an inner and hallowed
circle, in the centre of which were many minor and a few major royalties
out of every country in Europe; and revolving round them in wider
circles outside, many other people who, at home just on the verge of
being in Society, revelled in the thought that here, under altered
conditions, and in the enforced juxtapositions of life in a
watering-place, a special talent for tennis, a gift for Bridge, better
clothes than other people, or a talent for private theatricals, would
help them to be on the right side of the line they were so anxious to
cross. Add to these, numbers of pretty girls anxious only to enjoy
themselves, and swarms of young men who had come for the same reason,
and it will be imagined that the atmosphere reigning in the brilliantly
lighted Casino, in and around which the joyous spent their evenings
singing, dancing, wandering in the grounds, was singularly different
from that of the little isolated pavilion where Rendel sat trying to
fashion the picture of his life into something that he could look upon
without a shudder.