He knew that nothing could ever possibly happen to him again and so he
sat on his sofa waiting--for death, he supposed, having excluded every
other possibility. He didn't want to die, he didn't want to do anything,
to eat or drink or feel or think--above all, he didn't want to move. He
had shut his eyes trying to shut out the room. Every bit of it was
saturated in her, everything had been consecrated--contaminated, it
seemed to him now--by her touch. There wasn't a patch of carpet or
chintz that didn't belong to her intimately and exclusively. Every
object in the room seemed to pose her and add to the interminable
picture gallery of his memory. He opened his eyes and saw an uncut
pencil. Here, at any rate, was something new and independent--neutral
territory, unsharpened it was an unloaded pistol and he wanted to shoot.
At her? He was bound to miss. His bitterness was no medium through which
to recapture her magic and without it he would merely be forcing a lay
figure to perform vulgar and meaningless antics. And if he tore her to
bits, it would be an indictment of himself, not of his gentlemanliness,
that had long ceased to mean anything to him--but of his taste. Wearily,
he shut his eyes. It was no good thinking when your mind had become a
circle--a very small circle. He remembered something she had once said,
"The future looks like the present, stretching interminably ahead in the
shadow of the past." She had always understood everything, so she didn't
deserve to be forgiven anything.
The front door bell rang and at once, he felt sick and faint. A ring
still excited him as much as it had done in the days when it might have
been hers. It was a ridiculous state of nerves that he had never been
able to get out of.
A moment later she was in the room.
An absolute limpness had come over him. If his life had depended on it,
he couldn't have lifted his hand. The surface of his mind examined every
detail of her--the intense whiteness of her face and the severe
blackness of her clothes, the fact that she wore no jewel of any sort,
not even a ring--except, of course, her wedding-ring. He had never seen
it before and it seemed a gaudy splash of colour out of harmony with the
rest of her.
She took off her hat and laid it on the table. Then she walked to the
window, touching the things she passed with a little caressing gesture.
He noticed that she picked up the unpointed pencil and he felt a little
desolate feeling, as if he had lost his only friend.
Suddenly, she turned round, "I am leaving England to-morrow," she said.
He shivered at her velvety voice, as he would have shivered had his hand
touched suede. "Well," his voice was too natural to be natural, "you
don't want to say good-bye to me again, do you?"
"Is there such a thing as 'good-bye,'" she mused; "won't this room
always be a part of my life? Can one end anything? A chapter, a
paragraph, a sentence even? Doesn't everything one has ever done go on
living in spite of subsequent events?"
Relentlessly he brought her down from her generalisations.
"You have ended my life," he said.
"Oh, no." She was sitting beside him on the sofa. Gently and tentatively
she put her hand on his. "Take it away," he said roughly, miserably,
conscious that he was behaving like a hero of melodrama, and then more
quietly, "can't you spare me anything?"
"I never could spare any one anything, could I? Not _even_ myself?"
He resisted the wistful pleading of her eyes, taking a savage pleasure
in their tired look. No doubt the preparations for her journey had
exhausted her. Her hand was lying limply on the arm of the sofa.
"What does it feel like to wear a wedding-ring?" he asked harshly.
"It feels so strange at first. One keeps catching sight of it and being
made to feel different by it. Somehow, it really matters, it really
seems to mean something."
"Indeed?" He was ashamed of the cheap cynicism of his tone. It wasn't
what he had meant to say.
She waited a few minutes and then she got up and put on her hat, deftly
arranging her veil with almost mechanical quickness and skill. Then she
pulled on her gloves. How well he knew the swift deliberateness of her
movements. Without turning round she left the room. He heard her go into
the dining-room.... A few minutes later, he heard her come out again. He
heard her open and shut the front door.... He went to the open window.
Would she look up? Surely that was the test of whether or not she was
still the same--the eternal. In the past, whatever had happened between
them, she had never been able to resist that final peep, half to see
whether he was there, half to send up a little tiny semi-binding glance
of reconciliation. Sometimes, when he had been very angry with her he
had watched from behind the curtains. To-day, he was at the open window,
waiting to send her the smile which was to obliterate the past
half-hour, the past six months. It was not to be so much a smile as a
look, a benediction.
She got into her taxi. Through the far window she told the driver where
to go. She never glanced behind her, she never glanced up.
He shut the window with a shiver. "The end," he murmured.
X