"When I was a small boy," I said, "there was a big oak press in my
bedroom which used to reflect the firelight until I thought that all
manner of goblins were coming out to attack me. I never got rid of the
idea until I was shewn inside it by daylight--I remember it was full of
the drawing-room summer chintzes;--then I never feared it again. Does it
help you to talk about things, Sonia?"
Her face set itself again, but this time in resolution. For two hours I
listened to the most terribly frank self-revelation that I am ever
likely to hear. Like a sinner worked up to make confession, she told me
of her life from the age of sixteen, when she had fallen romantically in
love with O'Rane and when her mother had, quite properly, told her not
be ridiculous. For years she had been incited--I had almost written
"excited"--to make a great match; she had rushed into an engagement with
an honoured title, half feeling all the time that she was pledged to the
trappings of a man rather than to the man himself; and, when the
engagement ended, she had set herself, like a prisoner at the triangles,
to shew that it did not hurt, that she was not going to allow her
capacity for enjoyment to be killed; and, when her own people looked
askance at her, she had traded her charms among others who fawned on her
and whom she despised. The outbreak of war found her unplaced--without
mission or niche; she had thrown herself into war-work--and broken down,
she had lain useless, neglected and tacitly contemned until she met
O'Rane, blind and icily self-sufficient.
Then she had married him in the delirium of self-immolation, only to
find that his passionate idealism for the future was transmuted into a
white-hot zest to perfect the present. He was prepared to practise the
Sermon on the Mount in a tweed suit and soft hat. For a month she shared
his life as she would have partaken of an impromptu mid-night picnic in
the Green Park. Then a homing instinct had rebelled against the
promiscuous publicity of their life, she had felt that his love for her
was diluted beyond taste by a vague devotion to mankind. She had
treasured slights where no slights were intended and vented
irritabilities where none was justified. His smiling patience had evoked
a sense of hopelessness, followed by a desire for self-assertion. They
had quarrelled, and, rather than admit herself in the wrong, she had
blindly groped for evidence against him which the heat of inconvertible
resentment would torture her into believing. Grayle had supplied it....
She told me unreservedly of the conflicting influences upon her of three
men at the same time. All were in love with her after their kind. O'Rane
himself, most sympathetic with men and least understanding of women,
gave her the keys and cheque-book of his life, imagining that
undemonstrative, uncaressing fidelity would meet with like return;
Beresford offered a romantic devotion which posed her frigidly among
mountain snows and would have sent him through fire to avenge an insult
to his idealised conception. And Grayle had strode in, compelling and
indifferent, slighting and frightening her alternately, at a time when
she was instinctively yearning to be called to order, taken in hand,
shaken and even beaten.
"I was like the 'Punch' picture of the woman in a thunderstorm," she
laughed. "I wanted a man there just to tell me not to make a fool of
myself. Poor David never, never ..."
Grayle desired her until she felt safe in playing with him, then he
neglected her until in pique she set out to try the temper of her
charms; ultimately he terrorised her into a surrender which neither
blind trust nor deaf devotion could compass.
She told me of her mood when she felt that Grayle was overpowering her,
of her drunken willingness to believe what she knew was untrue. She
described her parting with O'Rane as she might have described herself
beating a child because she was out of temper and had to pretend that
someone else was in fault. I was given an unsparing account of her life
in Milford Square, which she entered with an unsubstantial hope that she
would find love and a quivering sense that she had come like a dog to be
beaten. Not a day and night had passed before she found that she had
outstayed her welcome, that she was pressing on him for all his life
what he desired for an unoccupied afternoon. Their life together was
like the record of wife-beating by a besotted husband refined in method
by the play of sarcastic wit on impressionable senses. At last there had
come a day when he put into words the taunt that hitherto lacked only
verbal clarity; she riposted with the charge that he was discarding her
to clear the way to his political ambitions; every hoarded grudge and
bitterness was dragged into the light, unseemly reproaches were uttered
with the knowledge that all were exaggerated and most without
foundation; and in a breathing-space both discovered that the
articulation of such hidden and reserved acerbity made it impossible for
them ever to live together again.
She had walked into the street with his last scurrility stinging her
ears and cheeks until she found herself tearlessly crying. It was no use
crying, when she needed all her wits to decide her next move, all her
composure to face it. A lodging for the night had to be found in some
place where she would not be interrogated, and for long her mind wavered
slowly from one to another of the neighbourhoods in which she had lived
and which all the while she knew were the first for her to
reject--Rutland Gate, Manchester Square, Curzon Street, Westminster. It
was hard to think of anywhere else; one needed a map, one of those easy
maps that were pasted on the walls of Underground stations....
The long recital had exhausted her pent antagonism, and she described
her experiences as General Lampwood's driver with humour and an
occasional preening of her feathers.
"One day I knew I was going to have a child," she threw out abruptly.
"It--it made me quite ill. Then--well, you know the rest. I'm not
complaining. I never thought it was going to be easy or pleasant, but,
if I had my time over again----"
"I think not, Sonia," I said.
"I never expected a bed of roses," she answered haughtily. Then she
suddenly covered her face with her hands. "You mean I'm not through with
it yet? Mr. Stornaway, is it--is it as bad as people say? I'm not a
coward, really; I don't believe I should mind if I _wanted_ it, if I
were praying for a child, if it was going to be a child I should
love.... That was what made me ill. When I first knew and I remembered
the awful day when he turned me out of the house.... I wanted to kill
myself. There was a big motor lorry racing along Knightsbridge, and I
made up my mind to step in front ... as if I hadn't heard it. I stood on
the kerb and put one foot forward.... Oh, but I wanted to live so badly!
I couldn't, I simply couldn't! It was like tearing myself in two with my
own hands. I just had time to think of next spring and all the early
flowers coming up.... And then I knew that I should have to go through
with it!"
Her eyes closed, and she lay without speaking until I made sure that she
was asleep. I was treading lightly to the door when she called out and
asked to be supplied with paper and a pencil.
"You're just in the mood to go to sleep," I protested.
She shook her head obstinately.
"I couldn't sleep, if I tried. You say David's at Loring House?"
"He spent last night there and looked in here this morning for clean
clothes. I've no idea where he is now."
She looked at me with the set, unrevealing expression which I had seen
once or twice already.
"Let me know if he comes in to-morrow," she said.
We had not to wait so long, for O'Rane, behind the pretext of packing
books and clothes for his return to Melton, came in after dinner and
examined me keenly on the condition of his wife. I mentioned that she
had hinted at a desire to see him or at least to know his whereabouts,
and, for all his control of himself, O'Rane's face was transfigured.
"I'm--here now," he said significantly.
"That means I'm to go up and find out if she wants to see you and if
Lady Loring will let her?"
There was a sound of voices, as I knocked at the door--the nurse mildly
begging her patient to go to sleep, Sonia resolutely and not too
petulantly protesting that she had just finished. I delivered myself of
my message, while she sat turning over a pile of manuscript and trying
to read it and listen to me at the same time.
"Will you look at this?" she said at length.
She had written a condensed but pitiless version of the story which she
had told me, starting with the day when she had chosen to believe that
O'Rane was unfaithful to her and ending with the morning when she knew
that she was going to bear Grayle a child.
"It's not very legible," she commented casually. "My writing's not up to
much at the best of times, but when I'm in bed it's hopeless."
"I can read it," I said.
"I want you to read it to David," she went on in the same tone.