II

Ten days to wait till the Sunday after. It was only Friday night. He

would see her in between, of course, at <i>The Immortal Hour</i>, and might

perhaps manage to take her home again, but would he be able in these

snippets of time, these snatches, these beginnings interrupted by the

curtain going up or the lights going down, to find out from her who and

what was Stephen? It was intolerable to have at last come across her and

instantly to find oneself up against Stephen.

Dismal were his conjectures as he was rattled home by the taxi so lately

made sweet by her presence. Stephen couldn’t be her brother, for nobody

made appointments ahead and carried them out so conscientiously with

brothers; and he couldn’t be her uncle or her nephew, the only two

remaining satisfactory relationships, because she had said he was as old

as she was. Who, then, and what was Stephen?

A faint hope flickered for an instant in the darkness of his mind:

sometimes uncles were young; sometimes nephews were old. But the thing

was too feeble to give warmth, and almost immediately went out. All

Stephens should be stoned, he thought. It was what was done with the

first one he had ever heard of; pity the practice hadn’t been kept up.

How happy he now would have been except for Stephen. How happy, going

to see her the next Sunday but one, going really to see her and sit down

squarely with her by himself in a quiet room and look at her frontways

instead of for ever only sideways, and she without the hat that

extinguished such a lot of what anyhow was such a little. He might even,

he thought, after a bit, after they had got really natural with each

other--and he felt he could be more natural with her, more happily

himself than with any one he had ever met--he might even after a bit

have sat on the floor at her feet, as near as possible to her little

shoes. And then he would have told her all about everything. God, how he

wanted to tell somebody all about everything--somebody who understood.

There wasn’t anybody <i>really</i> for understanding except a woman. It

didn’t need brains to understand; it didn’t need learning, and a grind

of education and logic and scientific detachment, and all the confounded

rig-out Lewes, who shared his rooms with him, had. Such things were all

right as part of a whole, and were more important, he was ready to

admit, than any other part of it if one <i>had</i> the whole; but a man

starved if that was all--just starved. Life without a woman in it, a

woman of one’s own, was intolerable.

His face as he opened the door with his latchkey was gloomy. Lewes would

be sitting in there; Lewes with his brains. Brains, brains....

Christopher had no mother or sister, and as long as he could remember

seemed to have been by himself with males--uncles who brought him up,

clerics who prepared him for school, again uncles with whom he played

golf and spent the festivals of the year, Christmas, Easter, and

Whitsuntide; and here in his rooms Lewes was waiting, always Lewes,

making profound and idiotic comments on everything, and wanting to sit

up half the night and reason. Reason! He was sick of reason. He wanted

some one he could be romantic with, and sentimental with, and poetic,

and--yes, religious with, if he felt like it, without having to feel

ashamed. And how extraordinarily he wanted to touch--to touch lovely

soft surfaces, to feel, to be warm and close up. He had had enough of

this sterile, starved life with Lewes. Three years of it he had had,

ever since he left Balliol,--three years of coming back in the evenings

and finding Lewes, who hardly ever went out at night, sunk deep in his

chair, smoking in the same changeless position, his feet up on the

chimney-piece, lean, dry, horribly intelligent; and they would talk and

talk, and inquire and inquire, and when they talked of love and

women--and of course they sometimes talked of love and women--Lewes

would bring out views which Christopher, whose views they used to be

too, only he had forgotten that, considered, now that he had come to

know Catherine, as so much--the word was his--tripe.

He shut the door as quietly as possible, intending to go straight to bed

and avoid Lewes for that evening at least. He had been injudicious

enough after the first time he sat next to Catherine and made friends

with her to tell Lewes about it when he got back, and to tell him with

what he quickly realised was unnecessary warmth; and naturally after

that Lewes asked him from time to time how things were developing.

Christopher almost immediately left off liking this, and liked it less

and less as he liked Catherine more and more; and among many other

things he afterwards regretted having told Lewes in the excitement of

that first discovery, was that she was the woman one dreams of.

‘No woman is ever the woman one dreams of,’ said Lewes, who was thirty,

so knew.

‘You wait till you’ve seen her, old man,’ Christopher said, nettled;

though it was just the sort of thing he had freely said himself up to

the day before.

‘My dear chap--see her? I?’

Lewes made a fatigued gesture with his pipe. ‘I thought you long ago

realised that I’m through with women,’ he said.

‘That’s because you don’t know any,’ said Christopher, who wasn’t liking

Lewes at that moment.

Lewes gazed at him with mild surprise. ‘Not know any?’ he repeated.

‘Not intimately. Not any decent ones intimately.’

Lewes continued to gaze.

‘I thought,’ he said presently, with patient mildness, ‘you knew I have

a mother and sisters.’

‘Mothers and sisters aren’t women--they’re merely relations,’ said

Christopher; and from that time Lewes’s inquiries were less frequent and

more gingerly, and mixed with anxiety. He was fond of his friend. He

disliked the idea of possibly losing him. He seemed to him to be well on

the way to being in love seriously; and love, as he had observed it, was

a great sunderer of friendships.

He heard him come in on the Friday night, and he heard him go, so

unusually, into his room after that careful shutting of the front door,

and he wondered. What was the woman doing to his friend? Making him

unhappy already? She had made him more cautious already, and more

silent; she had already come down between them like a deadening curtain.

Lewes moved slightly in his chair, and went on with Donne, whom he was

reading just then with intelligent appreciation tinged with surprise at

the lasting quality of his passion for his wife; but he couldn’t, he

found, attend to Donne as whole-heartedly as usual, for he was listening

for any sounds from the next room, and his thoughts, even as his eyes

read steadily down the page, were going round and round in a circle

something like this: <i>Poor Chris. A widow. Got him in her clutches. And

what a name. Cumfrit. Good God. Poor Chris.</i> ...

From the next room there came sounds of walking up and down--careful

walkings up and down, as of one desiring not to attract attention and

yet impelled to walk--and Lewes’s thoughts went round in their circle

faster and more emphatically than ever: <i>Poor Chris. A widow. Cumfrit.

Good God.</i> ...

The worst of it was, he thought, shutting up Donne with a bang and

throwing him on the table, that on these occasions friends could only

look on. There was nothing to be done whatever, except to watch as

helplessly as at a death-bed. And without even, he said to himself, the

hope, which sometimes supports such watchers, of a sure and glorious

resurrection. His friend had to go through with it, and disappear out of

his, Lewes’s, life; for never, he had observed, was any one the same

friend exactly afterwards as before, whether the results of the

adventure were happy or unhappy. <i>Poor Chris. A widow. Clutches.</i> ...

The sounds of walking about presently left off. Lewes would have liked

to have been able to look in and see for himself that his unfortunate

and probably doomed friend was safely asleep, but he couldn’t do that;

so he lit his pipe again and reached over for Donne and had another go

at him, able to concentrate better, now that the footsteps had left off,

but still with a slightly cocked ear.

What was his surprise at breakfast next morning to see Christopher

looking happy, and eating eggs and bacon with his usual simple relish.

‘Hullo,’ he couldn’t help saying, ‘you seem rather pleased with life.’

‘I am. It’s raining,’ said Christopher.

‘So it is,’ said Lewes, glancing at the window; and he poured out his

coffee in silence, because he was unable to see any connection.

‘I can chuck that beastly golf,’ Christopher explained in a moment, his

mouth full.

‘So you can,’ said Lewes, well aware that up to now Christopher had

looked forward with almost childish eagerness to his Saturdays.

‘I’ve been out already and sent a telegram to my uncle,’ said

Christopher.

‘But I thought on occasions like this,’ said Lewes, ‘when the weather

prevented golf, you still went down and played chess with him.’

‘Damn chess,’ said Christopher.

And in Lewes’s head once more began to revolve, <i>Poor Chris. Cumfrit.

Clutches.</i> ...