against her; she had been patient, gentle.
“I don’t hold you,” he grumbled.
It was a long time since she had seen him like this; usually he was
assertive and complacent. How slight a thing it took to disturb him!
His complacency was only a façade, a painted hoarding propped up by
struts,--theatrical, like everything else about him. But she really
bothered very little with him, now that she had found him out.
“Oh, yes, Richard,” she said, to pacify him and to be done with the
argument.
“But I say no,” he cried, hitting his fist on the arm of his chair.
“You’re for ever looking out of the window, and sometimes when I speak
to you, you answer beside the point. I married you to get a wife, not a
woman languishing like a captive in my house.”
She laughed at that, quite amusedly, and he felt he had been foolish.
Still he would not abandon his point.
“That fellow would only have to beckon ...” he grumbled.
“Lovel again?” asked Clare.
“You enjoy saying his name.”
“I do not,” said Clare quietly.
“No,” he said, staring at her, “perhaps you do not.”
Perhaps she did not. Perhaps the very name was pain to her. But he must
go wrangling on at her.
“Lovel wouldn’t keep you indoors, perhaps you think.--He would let you
out into the snow,--take you out into it himself perhaps.”
She only looked at him. He went on, more judicial now; deliberate, less
blatantly bad-tempered.
“Yet, after all, I don’t know why you hold such a good opinion of
this fellow Lovel. He sticks to no trade,--he gets a country girl
into trouble and has to marry her,--not a very creditable record, it
seems to me.” He was leaning back in his chair, with his finger-tips
together. “And, judging by his stock, he has no right to beget
sons,--better if he did not associate with women at all,--such people
should be allowed to die out.”
“So Mrs. Quince was saying. Perhaps he feels the same himself,” said
Clare in a contained voice.
“It looks like it! a child born after four months of marriage. I
am bound to say, my dear, your suggestion isn’t very convincing.
But there, what should you know of the lusts of these country young
men? Animals, merely. Forgive me if I seem self-righteous. I feel
strongly,--very strongly.” He leaned forward and patted her. “You can
understand that I don’t like to think of my Clare contaminated by such
company.”
“You mean Lovel?”
“Most certainly I mean Lovel.--Why do you look at me so darkly, Clare?”
“Did I look at you darkly? I didn’t mean to. My thoughts were far away.”
“And where....”
“Ah, Richard, mayn’t I have my thoughts to myself?”
“By all means, Clare. I hope, my dear, that no one has ever accused
me of being a tyrant. Of course your thoughts are your own.--But you
don’t resent, do you, the things I have been saying of Lovel?”
“I am only tired of the whole subject.”
“Yes,--of course,--naturally,--I quite understand that. Mrs. Quince is
an old gossip. I must tell her that it really doesn’t interest you to
be informed every time a woman in the village has a baby. It doesn’t
does it?”
“No, of course not,--but don’t say anything to Mrs. Quince, I beg you.”
“But I can’t have my wife bothered by my old gossip of a housekeeper. I
daresay she meant it well, thinking you were interested in Lovel.”
“Richard, please,--let us leave Lovel now,--I shall begin to scream if
I hear his name mentioned again, I warn you.”
“Clare. You try to joke, but the idea of saying that wouldn’t come into
your head if there were not some truth in it.”
“Well, I told you I was tired of the subject.”
“You are talking now like an irritable woman.”
“Am I? But I _am_ a woman, and not a man, and therefore I daresay as
irritable as all other women.”
“You mean that men can be every whit as irritable,--myself, for
example.”
“Now you are putting words into my mouth that I never said. Is it a
guilty conscience, Richard?”
“You persist in joking when I want you to be serious!”
“Oh, Richard, what a childish conversation. Instead of sitting here and
talking, let us....”
“Well, what? Let us what?”
“Nothing, I’ve thought better of it.”
“Let us go out, you were going to say. Always the same folly! Have you
any idea of the depth of the snow? Out, indeed!”
“I never said it.”
“No, but you thought it.--Ah, if I say that, you will ask again if you
mayn’t have your thoughts to yourself. There are moments when I don’t
know how to deal with you, Clare.” He knew his own injustice, but his
querulous jealousy pricked him on. “Any other woman would be content to
sit by her own fireside this bitter day with the man she had married so
short a time ago.”
“Four months,--getting on for half a year.”
“I see,--you have found the time long. If you entered a little more
into my interests, instead of having your own thoughts to yourself so
much, my dear, perhaps you would find it pass quicker, and it would be
more companionable.”
Clare thought that he looked at her almost with hatred. She was herself
too indifferent to be interested either one way or the other.
“I shall be glad when this accursed snow is melted and gone,” he added,
“and you will perhaps be a little less restless.”
At that moment Mrs. Quince came in, looking perturbed.
“There is Olver Lovel downstairs, madam, asking to see you,--I didn’t
know what to say,--he seems so bent upon it,--but he looks like a
scarecrow, that he does, with his coat torn and his hat stove in, and
bits of straw all over him as though he had spent the night sleeping in
a barn.”
Clare rose.
“Where is he, Mrs. Quince?”
Calladine started forward with a detaining hand.
“No, Clare, you can’t see this man,--let me speak to him first,--at
least it’s not right, not safe, for you to see him.”
“And he says he must speak to Mrs. Calladine alone, sir,” Mrs. Quince
put in.
“Of course I shall see him,” said Clare.
Calladine grew agitated. “Mrs. Quince, you need not wait; please leave
the room. Now, Clare, understand: it is against my wishes that you see
this man. Let me go down and find out what he wants, and then if I find
that he is quiet and reasonable I will allow you to interview him in my
presence. He has probably come to beg, in which case I can give him a
few shillings as well as you can, and send him away.”
Clare faced him. “Please let me pass, Richard; I am sorry to do
anything against your wishes, but I intend to speak to Olver,--and
alone.”
“Let me make myself quite clear: it is not only against my wishes, but,
since my wishes fail to touch you, also against my orders.”
“I am sorry, Richard, but I mean what I said.”
He blustered; she remained quiet; in their first encounter he was no
match for her.
“You disobey me deliberately, then?”
“This is a case in which I must use my own judgment.”
“You will not expect me to receive you back into my favour afterwards.”
She smiled a little.
“Really, Richard, I am afraid I must take the risk of that.”
“Go, then,” he said, stepping dramatically aside, “go, in direct
defiance.” Still he did not quite expect her to flout his authority,
and remained amazed when she passed him and went swiftly out of the
room.
Left to himself, he made a movement to follow her, but drew back. Let
her go, to her Lovels and her secret life: he had never really held
her. Let her go, to the summons which had come, and to which she had
so instantly responded. He himself, from the moment Olver Lovel’s name
had been pronounced, had dwindled to nullity; he had ceased, on the
spot, to exist for her. All these months, she had lived with him, a
stranger, away from her kind. And he recalled Mrs. Quince’s description
of Olver,--“he looks like a scarecrow, that he does,”--this emissary
from Nicholas Lovel to his, Calladine’s wife.
Calladine strode up and down the room. She was downstairs now with
Olver; what was he saying to her? What was in the future, haunted by
the presence of Lovel as the past had never been? How should they
ever get rid of Lovel now, standing between them? That uncomfortable
presence of Lovel in the past, at which Calladine had pecked and
nagged, was nothing to his dominion over the future. Surely he had been
mad not to take Clare’s acquaintance with the poacher as a matter of
course? mad to harass her as he had harassed her that morning? By his
own folly he had created the spectre, the giant, of the situation. He
strode up and down, hitting fist against palm in his vexation. Then he
grew afraid; what if the poacher should not restrict his poaching to
game alone? What if he should entice Clare by the occult powers with
which the countryside credited him? Occult powers, or human powers, it
was all one. Calladine felt his helplessness; he was weak, wordy, he
could be set aside. They would set him aside, those two.
He was an ill-used man. Self-pity nearly brought tears to his eyes.
Life used him ill: first the woman who had fooled him, now Clare.
Clare’s kindness to him had been a dalliance, while she had nothing
better to do; it had evaporated at the mention of a name. He hated
her, he hated Lovel, he hated the Downs and the snow. Glittering and
cold, without compromise; he did not understand the Downs and the
winter, but Clare and Lovel understood them. What was Olver saying to
Clare? Calladine felt his life finished; and through his perfectly
genuine anguish he did not fail to perceive the romantic value of his
situation. He fell into a chair, and remained there with his legs
extended as he gazed despondently on the floor before him.
Clare would tell him nothing. He foresaw that, and his foresight
was justified. She came back, immeasurably far removed from him. He
wanted to ignore her return, to remain stiff with dignity, but it was
not long before his curiosity weakened him. “Well, you are not very
communicative. I see that you have no desire to make amends for the
distress you have caused me. Was the poacher’s message, then, too
sacred,--too personal,--to be imparted to me?”
Clare’s eyes, when she turned them on him, were narrowed with pain.
“Richard, must you ask me questions now? I have come back to you; I ask
you only to leave me to myself.”
But that was precisely what he could not do.
“You ask a good deal, don’t you, in asking that? I see you white and
shaken, yet I am not to know the cause. You ask a good deal of my
forbearance, indeed. I am not to know what messages another man sends
you. I am not to know what is going on, nearly under my nose, but kept
away from me. I am to be defied by my wife, and then kept in ignorance
by her. This is the state of affairs we have come to in one short
morning! What has happened to us? it bewilders me.... I insist upon
knowing,--I _will_ know,--has that half-wit come to you with a message
from his brother?”
“No,” said Clare.
“How you have to force even that one monosyllable from your lips!
What, he came on his own initiative? Clare, you are not speaking the
truth.--Yes, I am sure you are; I beg your pardon. You distract me by
your coldness. Clare, forgive me, I scarcely knew what I was saying.”
“Don’t touch me,” said Clare, recoiling, “for pity’s sake don’t touch
me now.”
“I am a very unhappy man,” said Calladine, falling again into his
chair and taking his head between his hands. “I am indeed an unhappy
man,--what am I to do with my life?”
He remained for some time with his head sunk between his hands, then,
glancing up to see what effect his attitude might have had upon Clare,
he found her gazing out of the window.
“I see,--you forget my very presence,” he said reproachfully, and his
sense of injury was doubled. But because his distress was genuine,
although he could not refrain from rhetoric, he followed her across the
room in a tormented way, and tried to see into her face. “Clare, speak
to me; I am not angry, only unhappy. There is something now in your
mind which I do not share; you live in a half-hour which is secret from
me.--Or have you always,” he cried suddenly, “lived in hours I knew
nothing of?”
Mrs. Quince peeped in through the door.
“Ah, that’s good,” she said in a relieved tone; “I wasn’t easy so long
as I thought Mrs. Calladine was with that scamp,” and she retired.
“Even the servants, you see, Clare, are concerned for you.”
“Mrs. Quince, far from being concerned,” Clare said, returning briefly
to a consciousness of Calladine and of the house that held her, “is
full of delight.”
“Clare, these bitter words from you! you are changed indeed, or am I
seeing you as you are for the first time? I begin to look back at these
four months as at a long delusion; I am utterly bewildered. You are
withdrawn to an unbelievable distance from me; I feel it, yet I cannot
say what has taken place. This morning, we were close to one another;
we were, as it seemed, enclosed by our little room, leisured, snug,
sheltered; now, I am striving to reach you, and am held off.” His words
beat without meaning against Clare’s isolation; she could not emerge at
all from the tumult of the terrible scene she had endured from Olver.
She looked, indeed, at Calladine, intently, as though she were trying
to bring herself back to the importance of his world, but her eyes were
empty.
The day dragged away; Calladine continued to clamour fitfully. He could
not leave her alone, and, though she clearly suffered, he, perverse,
must torment her. By adding to her pain, he added to his own, but could
not desist. She answered him very little; a negative, an affirmative
now and then, was all he could get from her; for her part, all that she
wished was that his voice might cease, so that she might have a lull,
a silence, alone with her own mind. Yet it seemed to her that she had,
indeed, a silence at the core of her being, still and inviolate against
his ineffectual clamour, like the stillness in the heart of a cyclone,
where birds poise and sing. At this core, this kernel, this patch of
peace, she dwelt apart; Lovel was there, and so was Olver, Olver with
the urgent hands and fanatical eyes, passing from Lovel to her and
from her to Lovel, almost crushing them up against one another by the
force of his urgency, Olver’s determination was like a menace, becoming
almost malevolent by virtue of its very violence. He overwhelmed, he
terrified her; she had nothing but weak refusal; she had tried to push
him away with hands that had no strength in them. She had covered
her eyes, but he had forced away her hands; she had shut her ears,
but he had screamed past her defences. It was easy to remain deaf to
Calladine’s whining; it had been impossible to shut out the ferocity
of Olver’s attack. And yet, in spite of the din, she was aware of
that core of silence, in which she and Lovel were, with Olver rushing
between.
She and Calladine, Lovel and Daisy, there they were, the four of them,
all separate; and Olver, like a firebrand, a trail of fire, working
between them. They might have had some control, the four, but for this
crazy creature, obsessed by the one idea, not to be reasoned with. He
was the incalculable element; he made the others helpless, taking their
intentions out of their hands and throwing them away.
The danger of Olver,--what if he should see Calladine? What if he
should irrupt into the room and shout irreparable words before she had
time to stop him? The danger of Olver,--what had he said to Lovel?
what to Lovel’s wife? But Calladine and Lovel’s wife alike remained
insignificant; she and Lovel were the two full of meaning, shut up with
the wild, charging Olver in their core of silence.
Vaguely somewhere, she was sorry for Calladine, but he was
insignificant; she could not pause to consider him; where she and Lovel
came together, he faded into that poor wisp drained of blood, that he
had dwindled to on the evening of the circus fire, when she and Lovel
had stood together on the embankment. They shed him; he slipped off,
and only his noise reached them intermittently, scarcely troublesome.
Daisy herself was less unreal than Calladine; Daisy knew suffering too,
Clare supposed; in a clumsy, common way she knew it; blundering, but
human; yes, she could be sorry for the other woman.
But they must be sacrificed, the two, Calladine and Daisy, if matters
came to a head; sacrificed to the blazing reality of herself and Lovel.
Would Olver come again? Would he leave her alone now? Would he give her
a chance to forget the words he had spoken? some of them remained, rang
in her head, brassy, like beaten gongs; fell on her like big sparks
from an anvil, burning. It had been a strange experience, to hear Olver
voice the passion that had upreared itself, always mute, in Lovel.
Olver came again. He came like an avenging angel, inspired, the crazed
creature, by the urgency of his message. Like a reproachful angel he
came to rebuke her, grotesquely disguised in his scarecrow travesty;
the beauty of his selflessness shone through the ramshackle of his
appearance. She scarcely knew whether to find him pathetic or alarming;
she wanted to pity, she could only be disturbed; he disturbed her to
the darkest places of her soul. The fixity of his idea, the strength
of his purpose, his devotion, his anger, raised his simplicity to the
plane of nobleness. She could not answer him; she was abashed before
him.
She was afraid of him, his image pursued her, his upraised hand
denouncing her, his eyes and tongue pouring scorn upon her. At moments
he seemed like fate itself, like a thing she could not escape from.
She never knew at what hour of the day he would come, so all day,
sometimes for two or three days on end, she waited, dreading and
longing for his coming. She could have refused to see him, but had not
the strength; but when she must crush Calladine’s protests, then she
had strength in plenty.
The snow lay deeper than ever, after another heavy fall, upon the
Downs, but although still a prisoner her restlessness had left her:
the life she had wanted came now to her from without. Olver brought
that life; he brought tumult, anguish, but it was life that he brought,
besieging her. And although he was not Lovel’s envoy, still it was
straight from Lovel that he came. His eyes, as they flamed on Clare,
an hour earlier had been filled with Lovel; she could fancy Lovel’s
image still lingering in them. And after he had left her, it was to
Lovel’s presence that he would return; he would hear Lovel’s voice and
see Lovel’s hands, that so haunted her. Once she broke her silence to
ask about Lovel, “What does he do, these days of snow? does he get out?
stay at home?” and Olver answered, “To-day he has been twisting new
snares, and last night he brought home a lamb that still lies by our
fire.”
She knew that an end must come; beleaguered, she knew that. She had
pushed life away, but it had followed her, even into her retreat. It
was useless; Calladine was not life; his need of her had not been life.
He was a shadow, a man of pretence, sufficient to himself, with his
own pretences for company. It was only the true solitaries, the really
lonely people, like Lovel, who had absolute need of their chosen loves.
The strong, clamping loves, that fastened on to one another, to lose
their hold only when they lost their hold on life; the unalterable,
ordained loves. She could not justify the argument; her selfishness
towards Calladine remained unjustified. But she knew that that would
not weigh with her; she and Lovel would reach one another when the day
came, even through a stone wall.
Still she could not justify it. She tried to, perfunctorily. She sat
frowning, and saying the words over to herself. Selfishness, duty.
They remained mere words; she could not feel them in her blood, as
she felt her need for Lovel and Lovel’s need for her; they were words
pitted against instinct. Was it love, that need? Was it no more than
that ordinary miracle, love? She thought that it was more. They had
the Downs as a bond between them; the Downs, and all nature, of which
Lovel seemed the spirit, the incarnation. He was the darkness of the
Downs, their threat, their solitude, their intractability; she was
their light, their windiness, their sunlit flanks, their springiness of
turf. United, they formed a whole. There was an essential significance
in Lovel, as there was an essential insignificance in Calladine.
Olver seemed to know these things; he had an untutored insight.
Calladine seemed to know them too, but that was less surprising; with
his subtle, lyrical mind he might well be expected to apprehend, and
apprehending, to drape in wordiness; to give a name; to illuminate
blind impulse by giving a name. Poor Calladine; she watched him,
detached, as he rambled from discovery to definition, tormenting
himself by the beauty of his own phrasing. At moments he viewed them,
herself and Lovel, as a spectator, losing himself in the romanticism he
wove around them; recalled to the fact that it was his own wife of whom
he spoke, he relapsed into the gloom and terror of his pain. For he
lived in terror, impotent terror. And Clare watched him, living herself
in her hours with Olver and in her consciousness of Lovel.
There was the little round mirror she had given to Olver. He always
brought it with him; he told her, chuckling, and tapping its bright
surface with his finger, that he could see her in it even when she was
not present. She did not believe this, but still she half believed it.
“Look into it now,” he said, thrusting it under her eyes, “and you
will see Nicholas.” She shrank back, afraid; he could not persuade her
to look into it, he could not even deride her into looking into it.
“You don’t believe me, yet you won’t look,” he said, “but if you don’t
believe me, why then won’t you look?” He was for ever daring her to
look into it, to find the image of Nicholas. She would not; she did not
believe in the magical properties of the mirror, yet nothing would
induce her to glance into its queer convexity. “I watched the circus in
this, the night Nicholas took you out of the tent,” he said, and she
wondered whether he knew how bound to Lovel she had felt herself that
night; “I watched Nicholas’ wedding in this; I looked in this at him
and Daisy sitting in the kitchen. Look into it now,” he said, offering
it to her again: “maybe you’ll see Daisy nursing her baby; maybe you’ll
see Nicholas twisting snares; maybe you’ll see him riding up on White
Horse Hill, alone, in the snow.”
“Do you remember what I told you once?” he said to her another time,
“that Nicholas could bring you out to him, even at midnight, if he gave
his mind to it?”
She wondered how long this strange period would last; she was not even
impatient; the core of peace and silence within her lay so certain, so
quiet, that she dwelt already as it were serene in the fulfilment of
herself and Lovel.
Calladine came to her door to find it locked against him. He shook the
handle. “Clare! it is I.” A wild winter night; the wind blew along the
passage, lifting the loose matting on the floor, the gas-jet on the
stair flickered and below the well of the staircase was dark. “Clare!”
said Calladine again, shaking the handle.
Her voice within answered him, faint, shut away.
“Yes, I am here; I am in bed.”
She was there! the house contained her at least; she had not fled.
“Let me come in, Clare.”
A long pause, and then her voice again.
“I cannot, Richard.”
“You have locked me out?”
“I am sorry, Richard; I can’t let you in.”