[_To HAROLD NICOLSON_]
It was delightful to be back in England after two and a half years. Two
and a half years of India, of pomp and circumstance and being envied, of
heat and homesickness and loneliness. How starved she had felt--starved
of little intellectual coteries with their huge intellectual
sensations--starved of new books and old pictures and music, of moss
roses and primroses and bluebell woods, starved even into the
selfishness of coming home, urged away by Robert, who did not know how
to be selfish. Thinking of him made her feel very tender and very small.
His iron public spirit, his inevitable devotion to duty, unconscious and
instinctive and uncensorious, combined with a guilty sense that her
youth and beauty had been uprooted by him, and put into a dusty distant
soil. He was more convinced than any one of the importance of books and
music and intellectual interests (he never read and did not know one
note from another) because they were important to her and had therefore
received a consecration they could never have had by merely being
important to him. It was all so very simple--What she admired was
beautiful; what she laughed at was funny; what she loved was divine--And
she belonged to him--Robert. It was a miracle that found him every night
on his knees in humble gratitude. She had, he thought, been so
wonderfully good, walking on his red baize carpets as if they were
fields of flowers, learning Sanscrit with passion and pretending, with
what seemed to him complete success, and to them, absolute failure, that
she liked Anglo-Indian women. When one by one his staff were
incapacitated by love, he never complained. It made them of course
useless, but how could they help falling in love with her? It would have
been so unnatural if they had not. And when she told him--and to do her
justice she knew that she was telling him the truth--that she was not
worthy to do up his shoe laces--he would laugh and kiss her hand and
send up a little internal prayer to God to be able to do something to
deserve his wife.
No wonder he was always urging her to go home--haunted as he was by the
feeling of having put her in a prison and, no wonder, not having his
iron character, she had finally succumbed--as she so often succumbed to
his unselfishness.
How she was loving England! The wet, heavy air--the sky curtained with
clouds--the drenched leaves--the saturated flowers--the damp breathing
earth--the distant lethargic sun. She could feel a pulse in the sopping
soil and her heart beat with it.
Finding her friends too was such an adventure. What struck her most
about them was that they seemed so stationary. There they were, just as
she had left them, doing the same things, thinking the same things,
saying the same things--fixed points with their lives revolving round
them, seeming to have lost the capacity for independent motion.
She and Robert were not like that. Thank God, they were still pilgrims.
After all, her life had been a big spacious thing in spite of India,
because of India and, even more, because of Robert. Only she did not
want to think about it now. Just to go on repeating to herself: "I'm at
home. I'm in England."
And she was going to stay with St. John. How excited she would have been
four years ago. How her heart had beaten when she heard his footsteps,
how she had thrilled when he had said "dear" to her. She remembered the
care he had taken of her, the beautiful considerate devotion he had
always shown her when she was longing so passionately for other things,
trying with all her might and main to make him lose his head. _How_
badly she had behaved. She could wonder now dispassionately whether he
had _ever_ been in love with her. On the whole, she thought, he never
had. If she had not been married--it was a silly "if." The most he had
said was "you make things very difficult," not a very satisfactory
avowal when you came to think it over calmly. But she remembered how it
had thrilled her at the time--what a blank cheque of possibilities it
had seemed. She remembered, too, the evening when he had talked
seriously to her--very gently, very tenderly, very gravely. She had
thought he was going to say, "I don't want to be made unhappy," and,
instead, he had said, "I don't want you to be unhappy." That had been a
nasty one. How she had lashed him with her tongue! What inexhaustible
reserves of icy acid she had brought forward.
She had tried to hurt him as much as ever she could. How hurt had he
been? She wondered. It was all such very ancient history. And yet he had
gone on being fond of her. Fonder and fonder--men were so odd.
So many things had happened since then. She had been away and he had
lost an uncle and inherited a property. And now she was going to stay
with him. Last time they had met, two years ago, he had talked to her as
if they had had a boy and girl affair thirty years before. She had been
very much amused but she had hidden it; hiding your amusement was an
essential part of being fond of St. John--a rule of the game, so to
speak. That was one of the delightful things about him; to like him at
all you had to be really devoted to him and when you had reached that
stage, all of the qualities that would have been intolerable in other
people became subtly lovable. Somehow they seemed to creep under your
wing, compelling you to give them the protection of your own intimate
understanding. It was impossible not to make pets of St. John's defects.
Ariadne remembered the way he had always tried to keep her out of moral
draughts, how he had hated to see her in a room with any one of a
doubtful reputation, how her habit of taking off her hat in motors in
towns got on his nerves.
"But if it tires my head," she would say, and he would explain very
seriously what an intimate gesture it was.
Then as she always rested before dinner, people would come to tea with
her in her bedroom. St. John didn't like it at all. There was to him
something inherently disreputable about the horizontal. If she were too
tired to sit up in an armchair, she was too tired to see any one--except
him, of course, who understood her (which was just what he didn't do).
"But my back does ache so easily. After all, if I were really ill you
wouldn't mind."
"That is different."
"How ill do I have to be before I can abdicate the perpendicular in the
presence of a young man?" He consoled himself with the thought that she
was extremely, exceptionally innocent. She told him that thousands of
people were extremely, exceptionally innocent. It was a fact which could
never be explained to juries. St. John doubted it. He believed in a vast
number of rules to which all of the people he liked and most of the
people he knew were exceptions.
The train drew up at the platform. Ariadne got out. The footman
explained to her that his Lordship was so very sorry not to be able to
come to the station, but he was attending a cattle show.
"Of course," said Ariadne, and she felt it.
She got into the brougham--it was so characteristic of St. John not to
use a motor in the country--which had that delightful, almost forgotten,
smell of broughams, and drove through an avenue of oaks up to the fine
old Georgian house, dignified and mellow and lived in--a house proud of
its cellar and its stables--of its linen and its silver--a house where
men were men and women were women--where the master hunted and sat on
the Bench, and the mistress embroidered and looked after the
household--each having his separate functions and the one joint one of
propagating the race.
In the hall, St. John's housekeeper, in a black taffetas apron,
welcomed her.
"His Lordship would be most distressed not to have been there when her
ladyship arrived, but the cattle show----"
"Of course," said Ariadne, and hinted at a quite special awareness of
the importance of Cattle Shows.
Her bedroom was immense--there were lavender bags in all the drawers,
and flowers on the dressing table, the fire was lit and there was
boiling water in the shiny pale brass can. Her maid, the housekeeper
explained, was sleeping in the dressing room. On the table by her bed
was a glass box of biscuits, "The Wrong Box," "Omar Khayyam" and Lucas
Malet's last novel.
Ariadne was smiling with happiness. Talk about the joys of the
unexpected, can they compare with the joys of the expected, of finding
everything delightfully and completely what you knew it was going to be?
There was a tap at the door.
"Come in."
"It's I." (St. John never said "It's me.")
She threw open the door.
"Do come in," she said, and then, with a little stab of extra pleasure,
she wondered if he would be shocked by her flimsy pink dressing gown and
her bare feet.
"St. John," she put out both her hands. "I _am_ happy to be here."
He took them and held them quite tight, then he kissed them.
"Little Ariadne," he said.
It was, she supposed, a way of getting over the dressing gown.
"You look younger than ever," he said.
"It's my hair being down," she murmured.
He asked her if she had had a good journey, and whether the housekeeper
had seen that she had everything she wanted.
She asked him if the cattle show had been a success.
He said he really must dress for dinner, and so must she.
"Ariadne," he put his hand on her arm, "it's good to have you here."
There was an emotion welling up in his voice that surprised her. He
turned his back and left the room rather hurriedly. She realised that he
had almost kissed her. Would he have said, "I'm sorry, but you looked
such a baby," or, "Forgive me, it was seeing you again after so long,"
or, "Ariadne, can you forgive me? I lost my head."
She plumped for the baby, and wondered if the visit could conceivably be
going to be a slight strain. In old days there had always been a certain
tenseness about their relationship, made worse by her attempts to
topple over his gentlemanliness. She had felt that if her wish could
have been gratified just once, she would have been released from it and
never have wanted to repeat the experiment. Also a little of the
responsibility would have been his--thus obliterating the irritating
daily spectacle of his untarnished blamelessness.
Of course he had never been in love with her. She had always been buoyed
up by little things she wouldn't even have noticed in some one she
hadn't cared about. If there were acute disquieting moments when the
troublante quality of her loveliness tossed him about
unmercifully--weren't they moments that any stranger might go through
sitting next to her at dinner? No--the truth always had been that he was
really fond of her.
"I'm glad now," she smiled to herself, "how lucky that we can't always
sculpt our own relationships."
She went down to dinner--in the huge hall full of armchairs and cushions
and antlers and comfort St. John stood with his back to the fire smoking
a cigarette which he threw into the grate when he saw her (St. John
invariably threw away his cigarette when you came into the room and then
asked your permission to light a new one. In her mind's eye Ariadne
always saw him opening the door for his wife after a violent scene with
her).
"My dear," she said, "what a divine house."
"The wing you are sleeping in was built by the fifth Lord....
"The staircase was designed by....
"The mantelpieces in the drawing room....
"After dinner I will show you...."
Dinner was announced.
She tucked her hand under his arm.
"Are you going to take me in to dinner, St. John?"
"Of course," he smiled at her.
The dining room was big enough to reduce the immense pieces of Georgian
silver--beautiful they were--to reasonable proportions.
St. John said there were some very fine pieces of Queen Anne which he
would show her.
"There was," she murmured, "nothing like Queen Anne."
The attentiveness of the footman and even of the butler did not seem to
her to be entirely confined to their wants.
St. John asked her questions about India, which she answered as she
answered travelling Europeans--correctly, concisely, and without any
frills of vocabulary. It was quite possible, she reflected, that St.
John wanted to know the answers to his questions. That was the worst of
being abroad so much, you were always either trying to tell things it
bored people to hear, or else they were determined to hear things that
it bored you to tell. Her mind wandered to the curious tide-like quality
of interest, the way it advanced and retreated in a conversation.
St. John was explaining what a quiet life he had led. Perhaps, to her,
it would have even seemed dull. (This to him was rhetorical paradox, and
to her an obvious truth.) She did not know, he said, what it meant to
feel that the land belonged to you--to see your own flowers growing,
your own calves being born--to feel yourself surrounded by your own
people, for whose happiness and welfare you were responsible.
Ariadne said that inheritance was a sacred trust (it was wonderful how
easy she found it to talk like St. John).
"Yes," he said, "that is just it--a sacred trust. Why, I hardly ever go
up to London now, and when I do, I feel quite homesick till I get here
again."
They got up from dinner.
"Shall we go and sit in the library?" he said.
They sat one on either side of the fire. She felt like an ancestress or
a family portrait. The rosy haze of her tea-gown looked strange and
alien fluttering in the huge leather armchair.
"What a wisp you look," St. John said. She remembered how satisfactory
her tininess had always been to him. "I think I could blow you away with
a puff of smoke."
"I am a limpet really," she laughed, "think how I have stuck to your
life."
"Thank God," he affirmed fervently.
"Are you still a great flirt, St. John?"
He looked at her in amazement.
"You have surely not forgotten the way you played fast and loose with
me?"
"Ariadne," he was using the firm voice she knew so well, "you mustn't
talk like that."
"But you did. Don't you remember that dinner you gave when we went to
the L----'s ball and you never danced with me till seventeen minutes
past one?"
"My dear, I was saving you up. The joy after all the duties."
"You never told me so."
"There were a lot of things I never told you."
"I tried so hard to make you."
"It was so hard not to."
"St. John," she said, "the things you didn't tell me, were they true?"
"Yes, they were true."
He had got up and knelt by her chair.
She put her hand on his head.
"St. John," she said. Should she tell him that they were not true? That
he was building up a retrospective passion which had never existed? That
what he supposed to have been renunciation and self-control and chivalry
had in reality been a rather tactfully steered uninflammable affection?
Why his voice now was far more broken up and moved than she had ever
heard it before. Of course he had not been in love with her. She had
never realised it as clearly as to-night. For a moment he put his face
in her lap, then he kissed her hands--reverently, in memory of his great
sacrifice.
"May I smoke a cigarette?" he asked.
"Please do."
He went back to his chair.
She was, he said, a wonderful friend.
So, she said, was he.
They talked about his family and her family--a little about their mutual
friends and a lot about friends of his that she had never seen.
They talked about furniture and gardens.
There were, he said, a lot of subjects on which he wanted her advice.
It was all very domestic, their two armchairs and the fire--the dying
fire. He must, she supposed, be imagining that they were married, seeing
her at the head of the table, in the family pew. She wondered if he
would have let her re-set the family jewels. Perhaps his mind had
reached the nursery. He was dreaming of children, his children, her
children, their children.
Dear St. John. She looked at him tenderly. She longed to explain what an
unsuitable wife she would have made him.
"What are you thinking about?" her voice was very gentle.
"I was thinking of the cattle I bought to-day, and wondering what sort
of fencing I should put up at the bottom of the drive. Ariadne, you
remember how gregarious I used to be; well, you can't think how
perfectly happy I am living here alone."
Smiles were popping out of her face shamelessly. No sooner had she kept
one out of her eyes than it reappeared on her lips.
"Dear St. John," she said, "I do love you."
He looked, she thought, a little alarmed.
"Not like that, that is all over."
"Quite over?"
"Quite--are you glad?"
"If it makes you happier," and then, "No, I'm damned if I'm glad."
"Thank you, St. John," she was laughing a little.
He looked puzzled, even rather disappointed.
She had broken the rules and laughed.
"How lucky you didn't say that to me four years ago."
"Don't," he said sharply.
"I'm sorry."
He was lighting her candle.
"To-morrow," he said, "you will choose the colour of the garden gates
and advise me about the fencing."
"That _will_ be fun."
She shivered.
"Are you cold?"
"One is always cold after India."
He took her to the door of her bedroom.
"Good-night--God bless you," he said.
She put her two hands on his shoulders and, bending forward, she kissed
him lightly. It was a cruel way of showing him that she didn't care any
more.
"What a revengeful woman I am, punishing him after all these years," she
thought.
But he didn't see it like that.
"I think I deserve her trust," he said to himself, and then his
thoughts, let out to graze, returned to the subject of fences.
"Robert," wrote Ariadne, "I am homesick for India."