ONE morning Strange came into his wife’s boudoir with his whip in his
hand, and a light overcoat on his arm.
“I am going out beyond Highgate,” he said, “to see a pointer pup, it is
a pretty drive, would you like to come?”
She had been thinking with a sort of dread of the hours that must run
before the darkness came, and of the numbers of times she would be
expected to smile, to return brilliant answers to dull questions, and
generally to keep up her superb deception.
She had a dozen engagements but she decided to go with him.
He drove a high mail-phaeton that ran very lightly.
“That Highgate hill is a bad one,” he said as they were starting, giving
the brake a sharp tug, “I don’t think this will cave in easily,
however.”
“Besides, Hengist and Horsa can be trusted anywhere,” said Gwen, who
knew nothing of ordinary nervousness.
“I wouldn’t trust anything in horseflesh down a steep hill with the
brake off. Look down that mesh of streets! Taking it in patches there
isn’t a more hideous, sordid, mean hole in the world than this London,
just look through that lane!”
Gwen gave a shrug of disgust.
“It’s all frightful and gray and deadly dull, but that never strikes me
as the worst part of life in these places. It is the hideous want of
privacy that revolts me, and the awful nearness of one human creature to
another, the sheer impossibility of thinking, or feeling, or looking,
except under observation, the horrible indecent openness of life.”
“What do you know about it?” he asked laughing.
“Oh, I have done slumming in my time, under Mrs. Meades’ wing. I like
new experiences, you know. We saw a great many frightful things while
the craze lasted, but the worst of all was a cobbler’s _ménage_. He had
a wife and seven children, and they lived in two rooms, he never went
out, that man, neither did his wife; she squatted on the floor all day
and cleaned things with a patent soap which smelt worse than they did,
and he saw all she did and thought and felt; the awful hunted look of
that woman was a thing to dream of.
“While Mrs. Meades talked—‘religion’ she called it—the cobbler sewed
leather, and glanced now and again at his wife in a way to make your
blood freeze, and then he would hold up his awl in a ghastly fashion,
and grin at her over it; it was no bit of steel he was gloating over, it
was his wife’s soul held up on that awl.
“But putting husbands and wives out of the question,” she went on, “this
appalling nearness of living is most horrible. One must feel for ever on
a dissecting table, having one’s most hidden nerves pulled out one by
one.”
“They have no nerves, and they don’t experiment on one another, those
people; they don’t live enough for that, they exist in a smoky thick
atmosphere of indifference.”
“That man did experiment, and his wife was not indifferent; she was
nerves and nothing else.”
“These were exceptions.”
“The worst tragedies are made out of exceptions.”
“Probably, exceptions are mostly unnatural.”
“It is not unnatural to object to have one’s sensations flayed alive!”
“Such sensitiveness is unnatural to a low under-fed semi-sentient state
of life, such people have enough to do to keep body and soul together,
without considering them apart.”
“But I contend they do consider them apart, they do make
investigations.”
“Yes, into the vices of their betters, which have a perennial interest
for them as being beyond their reach. You won’t catch them as a rule
classifying one another and flaying souls. These are the distractions of
the leisure classes.”
“Then,” said Gwen, “I wish I had been born in the other class.”
“To what purpose?” said her husband, “you would have been an exception.”
“Oh, then,” she said impatiently, “I shall in future reserve all my pity
for the exceptions, and retain my normal hardness of heart for the other
crowd. I never could get universal philanthropy to appeal to me, and
it’s comfortable to put one’s want of humanity on a reasonable basis.
But those generations of square pegs in round holes, they worry one! And
yet people speak of a just God!”
“Poor God! What should we do without that universal scape-grace? As if
He had anything to do with the matter! The fathers have trusted to
chance, and the children suffer.
“But at any rate whether the fathers or God are the real scape-goats
it’s quite original nowadays to profess faith in justice, and to refrain
from railing against the Almighty, so we’ll let God and heredity have a
rest; besides, we are losing the pauper scent and getting that of the
country—did you catch that whiff? I am glad we are down this hill, the
horses are unaccountable.”
“Hengist actually looks like kicking,” said Gwen.
“Bell, get off, will you, I believe there’s a fly somewhere I can’t
spot.”
“Sure enough, three on ’em, sir; and them horses is mortal thin-skinned
since their clipping yesterday.”
“What a duffer I was,” said Strange to his wife, “not to look at them
before we started, they are probably not half groomed and are tickling
like the deuce, and I can’t even have the satisfaction of swearing about
it properly, as I was every bit as careless myself.”
A quick little conviction shot into Gwen, that whatever God and the
general ruck of fathers might be, her husband was just enough.
This silenced her for two solid miles. When they got near the Inn,
Strange suggested that they had better stay and lunch there.
“Oh, yes, it really doesn’t matter,” she said.
“I wonder what does, in her present mood!” thought Strange, as he helped
her down.
As ill-luck would have it, a wretched faint feeling she had experienced
once or twice before, came on her, and she reeled a little in her
husband’s hands.
He looked at her in the most utter astonishment, he hadn’t fathomed her
yet it seemed.
“Are you ill?” he asked.
She blushed suddenly.
“No, my foot got twisted in my shoe-lace.”
“The girl is lying,” he thought, with a most unpleasant shock.
He brought her into a small, clean, quaint old room, fragrant with
mignonette, a bunch stood in a glass on the cottage piano and there was
a long green box full of it on the window-sill.
“Now sit in here in the shade,” he said, “and take off your hat, and
rest.”
He stood for a moment and watched her, then he arranged the pillows on
the couch and made her lie down, with an involuntary protecting manner
quite unlike his usual airs of equality and sexlessness.
That lie had made her all at once so young to him, so infinitely
pathetic.
He could have taken her in his arms like a little child, and hushed her
to sleep.
When he had gone she clenched her hands in a rage.
“One can’t call one’s soul one’s own with such a man!” she muttered,
“it’s bondage worse than death. Talk of that cobbler, he’s not the only
man who holds his wife’s soul on an awl—oh, the horrible, horrible,
horrible indecency of marriage without love! And this vile pretence of
fair living!” she went on, sitting up and staring out of the window,
“the jokes we have together, and the talks!”
She got up and went about the room examining the curiosities, the
stuffed birds, and the shells, and the awful oleographs.
“What’s this?” she said, lifting the glass from some glittering object,
but she dropped it as if it stung her.
“Ah, why did I touch it? I am sick to death of everything.”
She went over to the sofa and flung herself back among the cushions.
It was a great slab of frosted wedding-cake, kept over for the first
christening.
“Oh, it’s all a most frantic joke!” she said. “Here he comes, I must sit
up and play to my audience, knowing all the time the audience sees into
the marrow of my bones.”
She was not perhaps quite sane, as saneness goes, all through their
lunch, but she was strangely brilliant, her eyes flashed with a queer
fluttering light, her lips were soft and mobile, and she ate her chicken
with a will, and only that her natural fineness of nature restrained
her, she would have seized the big old cut-glass decanter of wine and
have drained it at a gulp. But she kept the curb well on and never once
flagged in her course, which surprised herself even more than it did her
husband.
But when he went out to see the horses put in she had a little private
collapse all to herself.
It was hotter than ever and the flies grew more troublesome, but it was
all very fresh and green.
“I never knew this part was so pretty,” she said as they were driving
through a chestnut-bordered lane. Talking was an effort but it seemed a
less exhaustive one than sitting there mute under her husband’s
reflections.
“It’s pretty,” he said absently, “and almost as little known as Central
Africa; look at the indifferent calm estate of those cows, they might
live in the desert for anything they know of the noise of life.”
“Yes, and here we are in the thick of genteel barbarism,” said Gwen, as
they turned into the high road. “It is well for the cows that they live
by sight, not by imagination; it’s a horrid anomaly, the cows and the
country, and not a hundred yards away ’Arry rampant.”
“I believe I like the combinations, still life, and life in the
struggle, and ’Arry everywhere, from cradle to grave, his cemetery not a
stone-throw away.”
“Your toleration is rather overpowering,” remarked Gwen sardonically,
“you speak in the same kindly good-humoured way of ’Arry and of God,
adopting the same heavy-fatherly style to both.”
“I really beg their pardons, but as a matter of fact, I look on them
both as much-maligned beings and as requiring the conscientious
championship of all honest citizens. We judge the two, the Potter and
His clay, by measuring them by our own standards. I think, for my own
part, it’s amazing impudence to sit at one’s ease and damn ’Arry, as is
the vogue now; nearly as much the vogue as sitting at ease and
criticizing the Almighty. I must, however, leave God and man, and
proceed to think chiefly of horses for the present. Look at those brutes
of donkey carts!”
They were just going up the hill which was abnormally crowded. The
donkey carts were ubiquitous.
“I never saw them so thick before,” said Strange, “why, I forgot, of
course, it’s a holiday! I wonder if it will be so crowded down the hill?
Those tram lines are the deuce for hoofs.”
They drove on silently between the rows of quaint old houses, till they
got to the crest of the hill coming down towards Holloway.
“The horses seem steady enough now,” said Gwen.
“Yes, they’re all right—just as well too. Did you ever see such a
crowd!—Phew!”
There was a rustle and a flying glimmer of white from a costermonger’s
cart coming slowly up the hill behind a jaded ass.
It was the _Echo_ of the day before, caught by a sudden flickering
breeze, and carried fantastically to and fro right under the horses’
noses; they threw up their heads and sniffed angrily, but Strange had
them well in hand and soothed their terror gently, and being no fools
the brutes were just realizing the causelessness of their fright, when a
demon got into the breeze, caught the paper in its clutches, and with a
rushing swirl of leaves, dashed it into Hengist’s two eyes right between
the blinkers.
Blinded, tickled, irritated to madness, the horse lashed out wildly,
plunged forward, carrying Horsa with him, and tore down the hill.
They were beyond restraint now, it was only possible to swing them by
sheer strength out of destruction’s way. It was a touch-and-go game from
the first.
Just as they got very nearly down the hill, there was a sudden jarring
click. Gwen saw her husband’s leg drop sharply. He turned one look on
her.
“Brake’s gone!” he shouted, sawing the mouths of the frantic horses till
the veins stood out like cords on his wrists.
He would have felt the whole thing less hideous and awful if even then
he could have seen one sign of failing courage in his wife, if she had
once clutched him, once cried out, once showed an atom of weak
womanhood. But in all the mad tumultuous race with death her calm,
inscrutable, half-scornful face loomed on him, watching each movement of
his, and not one shade paler.
She was more beautiful and less of a woman than she had ever been in all
her life.
They were just at the twist of the hill, the traffic was denser than
ever, the carriage swayed wildly, and the shrill screaming of women was
giving the last touch to the horses’ madness. The final crash was upon
them.
“One last experiment,” thought Strange, laughing aloud in a grim spasm
of humour. “Gwen!” he shouted, “will you kiss me once, as women kiss
men?”
She might have done it without that clause, she changed colour for the
first time, her mouth twitched, she loosed her hands from their
half-mechanical grasp on the seat, and looked in her husband’s face
laughing above her.
No tears ever held the pathos of that laugh.
“Why can’t I kiss him and be done with it?” she thought wildly. “Truth
or lie, what matters it now!”
She moved forward slightly with curved lips, then she looked again, one
little look, but it was enough, her hands fell limp into her lap, and
she shivered from head to foot.
“No!” she shouted, her eyes aflame, “if that had been possible I
shouldn’t have left it until now.”
Then she pulled herself together to show a decent front to death.
The silent laugh on Strange’s face broke into sound, above all the
bedlam of clang and yell, then it ceased suddenly.
Great gouts of blood and foam flew to right and left from the lips and
nostrils of the horses, who were blind now in their anguish.
“Hold tight, Gwen!” roared her husband hoarsely.
The horses swayed and shuddered, screaming with terror.
With one despairing shriek, Bell covered his face.
The swerving wheel caught in the tram-line and then came the end.