‘What has <i>she</i> been doing?’ he asked, suddenly indifferent, for the
having of babies hadn’t entered his consciousness as anything
dangerous; if it were, the whole place wouldn’t be littered with them.
Mrs. Mitcham stared at him out of red-rimmed eyes.
‘Doing, sir?’ she repeated, stung by the careless way he spoke; and for
the first and last time in her life sarcastic, she said with dignified
rebuke, ‘Only dying, sir.’
It was his turn to stare, his eyes very wide open, while dismay, as all
that this dying meant became clear to him, stole into them. ‘Dying? That
girl? Do you mean----’
‘Dead, sir,’ said Mrs. Mitcham, her head well up, her gaze, full of
rebuke and dignity, on his.
Too late to go down that night. No trains any more that night. But there
was the motor-bicycle. Catherine--Catherine in grief--he must get to her
somehow....
And once again Christopher rushed westwards to Catherine. Through the
night he rushed in what seemed great jerks of speed interrupted by
things going wrong, every conceivable thing going wrong, as if all hell
and all its devils were in league to trip him up and force him each few
miles to stand aside and look on impotently while the hours, not he,
flew past.
She hadn’t sent for him. She was suffering and away, and hadn’t sent for
him. But he knew why. It was because she couldn’t bear, after all the
things he had said about Virginia, to smite him with the fact of her
death. Or else she herself was so violently hit that she had been
stunned into that strange state people got into when death was about,
and thought no longer of what was left, of all the warmth and happiness
life still went on being full of, but only of what was gone.
But whatever she was feeling or not able to feel, she was his, his wife,
to help and comfort; and if she was so much numbed that help and
comfort couldn’t reach her, he would wait by her side till she woke up
again. What could it be like down there, he asked himself as the black
trees and hedges streamed past him, what could it possibly be like for
Catherine, shut up in that unhappy house, with young Virginia dead? That
girl dead. Younger by years than himself. And her husband.... ‘Oh,
Lord--my Catherine,’ he thought, tearing along faster and faster, ‘I
must get her out of it--get her home--love her back to life----’
Pictures of her flashed vivid in his mind, lovely little pictures, such
as had haunted him with increasing frequency the longer his holiday
without her dragged on; and he saw her in them with the eye of starved
passion, a most lovely little Catherine, far, far prettier than she had
ever been in her prettiest days,--so sweet with her soft white skin, so
sweet with her soft dark hair, so sweet with her soft grey eyes, and her
face lit up with love,--love all and only for him. And he who had
thought, those last days before Scotland, that there was too much love
about! He all but swerved into a ditch when he remembered this piece of
incredible folly. Well, he knew now what life was like for him away from
her: it was like being lost in the frozen dark.
He got to Chickover about five in the morning, just as the grey light
was beginning to creep among the trees. He couldn’t go and rouse that
sad house so early, so he stopped in the village and managed, after much
difficulty, to induce the inn to open and let him in, and give him water
and a towel and promise him tea when the hour should have become more
decent; and then he lay down on the horsehair sofa in the parlour and
tried to sleep.
But how sleep, when he was at last so near Catherine? Just the thought
of seeing her again, of looking into her eyes after their four weeks’
separation, was enough to banish sleep; and then there was the anxiety
about her, the knowledge that she must be crushed with sorrow, the
effort to imagine life there with that poor devil of a husband....
At half-past seven he began to urge on breakfast, ringing the bell and
going out into the beer-smelling passage and calling. With all his
efforts, however, he couldn’t get anything even started till after
eight, when a sleepy girl came downstairs and put a dirty cloth on the
table and a knife or two.
He went out into the road and walked up and down while the table was
being laid. He wouldn’t question any one there, though they all of
course could have told him about Virginia’s death and what was happening
at the house. And they, supposing he was a stranger,--as indeed he was
and hoped for ever to be in regard to Chickover--did not of themselves
begin to talk.
He knew nothing; neither when she died, nor when she was buried. Perhaps
she hadn’t been buried yet, and in that case he wouldn’t be able to get
Catherine away, as he had hoped, that very day. He found himself trying
not to think of Virginia,--he owed her so many apologies! But only
because she was dead. Who could have supposed she would die, and put
him, by doing that, in the wrong? One had to talk as one felt at the
moment, and it wasn’t possible to shape one’s remarks with an eye to the
possibility of their subject dying. Yet Christopher was very sorry, and
also sore. He felt he had been a brute, but he also felt she had taken
an unfair advantage of him.
He switched his thoughts off her as much as he could. Poor little thing.
And such fine weather, too,--such a good day to be alive on; for by this
time the September sun was flooding Virginia’s village, and the
dew-drenched asters in the cottage gardens were glittering in the light.
Poor little thing. And poor devil of a husband. How well he could
understand <i>his</i> misery. God, if anything were to happen to Catherine!
He drank some tepid tea and ate some unpleasant bread and
butter--Stephen evidently hadn’t succeeded in making the village
innkeeper good, anyhow--and then, feeling extraordinarily agitated, a
mixture of palpitating love and excitement and reluctance and fear, and
all of it shot with distress because of Virginia, he started off through
the park, cutting across the grass, going round along the back of the
kitchen-garden wall to the lodge gates, and walking up the avenue like
any other respectful sympathetic early caller; and when he turned the
bend and got to the point where one first saw the house he gave a great
sigh of thankfulness, for the blinds were up. The poor little thing’s
funeral was over, then, and at least he wasn’t going to tumble, as he
had secretly feared, into the middle of that.
But if it was over, why hadn’t Catherine sent for him? Or come home? Or
at least written? He remembered, however, that she supposed he was in
Scotland, and of course she would have written to him there; and,
consoled, he went on up the avenue whose very trees seemed sad, with
their yellowing leaves slowly fluttering to the ground at every little
puff of wind.
The front door was open, and the drawing-room door on the other side of
the hall was open too, so that while he stood waiting after ringing the
bell he could see right through to the sunny terrace and garden. The
house was very silent. He could hear no sounds at all, except somewhere,
away round behind the stables, the quacking of a distant duck. Wasn’t
anybody having breakfast? Were they still asleep? If Catherine were
still asleep he could go up to her,--not like the last time when he came
to this place to fetch her, and had to wait in the drawing-room, a
stranger still, a suppliant without any rights.
Kate the parlour-maid appeared. She knew of course, directly she saw
him, that this was the young gentleman Mrs. Cumfrit had married--there
had been talk enough about that at the time in the servants’ hall--and
the ghost of a smile lifted the solemnity of her face, for an ordinary,
healthy young gentleman was refreshing to eyes that for the last week
had witnessed only woe.
‘The ladies are not down yet, sir,’ she said in a subdued voice, showing
him, or rather trying to show him, for he wouldn’t go, into the
drawing-room.
‘The ladies?’ repeated Christopher, not subduing his voice, and the
house, for so many days hushed, quivered into life again at the vigour
of it.
‘Mr. Colquhoun’s mother is staying here, sir,’ said Kate, dropping her
voice to a whisper so as to damp him down to the proper key of quiet.
‘Mr. Colquhoun is still very ill, but the doctor thinks he’ll be quite
himself again when he is able to notice the baby. If you’ll wait in
here, sir,’ she continued, making another attempt to get him into the
drawing-room, ‘I’ll go and tell the ladies.’
‘I’m not going to wait anywhere,’ said Christopher. ‘I’m going up to my
wife. Show me the way.’
Yes, it was refreshing to see an alive gentleman again, and a nice
change from the poor master; though the master, of course, was behaving
in quite the proper way, taking his loss as a true widower should, and
taking it so hard that he had to have a doctor and be kept in bed. The
whole village was proud of him; yet for all that it was pleasant to hear
a healthy gentleman’s voice again, talking loud and masterfully, and
Kate, pleased to have to obey, went up the stairs almost with her
ordinary brisk tread, instead of the tiptoes she had got into the habit
of.
Christopher followed, his heart beating loud. She led him down a broad
passage to what appeared to be the furthermost end of the house, and as
they proceeded along it a noise he had begun to hear when he turned the
corner from the landing got bigger and bigger, seeming to swell at him
till at last it was prodigious.
The baby. Crying. He hoped repenting of the damage it had already found
time to do in its brief existence. But he had no thoughts to spare for
babies at that moment, and when Kate stopped at the very door the cries
were coming out of, he waved her on impatiently.
‘Good God,’ he said, ‘you don’t suppose I want to see the baby?’
She only smiled at him and knocked at the door. ‘It’s a beautiful baby,’
she said, with that odd look of satisfied pride and satisfied hunger
that women, he had noticed, when they get near very small babies seem to
have.
‘Hang the baby--take me to my wife,’ he commanded.
‘She’s here, sir,’ Kate answered, opening the door on some one’s calling
out, above the noise, that she was to come in.
It was Mrs. Colquhoun’s voice. He recognised it, and drew back quickly.
No--he’d be hanged if he’d go in there and meet Catherine in a nursery,
with the nurse and the baby and Mrs. Colquhoun all looking on. But he
didn’t draw back so quickly that he hadn’t caught a glimpse of the room,
and seen a bath on two chairs in front of a bright fire, and three women
bending over it, one in white and two in black, and all of them talking
at once to that which was in the bath, while its cries rose ever louder
and more piercing.
Absorbed, the women were; absorbed to the exclusion of every wish,
grief, longing, or other love, he thought, swift hot jealousy flashing
into his heart. He felt Catherine ought somehow to have known he was
there, been at once conscious of him the minute he set foot in the
house. He would have been conscious of her all right the very instant
she got under the same roof; of that he was absolutely certain. Instead
of that, there was that absorbed back, just as though she had never
married, never passionately loved--every bit as absorbed as the other
one’s, as Mrs. Colquhoun’s, who was an old woman with no love left in
her life except what she could wring out of some baby. And whether it
was because they were both in the same attitude and clothes he couldn’t
tell, but his impression had been the same of them both--a quick
impression, before he had time to think, of a black cluster of grizzled
women.
Grizzled? What an extraordinarily horrid word, he thought, to come into
his mind. How had it got there?
‘Shut that door!’ called out Mrs. Colquhoun’s voice above the baby’s
cries. ‘Don’t you see you are making a draught?’
Kate looked round hesitatingly at Christopher.
‘Come in and shut that door!’ called out Mrs. Colquhoun still louder.
Kate went in, shutting it behind her, and Christopher waited, standing
up stiff against the wall.
He hadn’t expected this. No, it was the last thing he had expected. And
now when Catherine came to him Kate would be there too, following on her
heels; and was it to be a handshake, then, or a perfunctory marital kiss
in the presence of a servant, their sacred, blessed moment of reunion?
But it was not to be quite like that, for though somebody came out and
Kate came with her, somebody small who exclaimed, ‘Oh Chris----!’ and
who seemed to think she was Catherine, she wasn’t Catherine, no, no--she
wasn’t and couldn’t be. What came out was a ghost, a pale little
grizzled ghost, which held out its hands and made as if to lift up its
face to be kissed; and when he didn’t kiss it, when he only drew back
and stared at it, drew back at once itself and stood looking at him
without a word.