he looked down into the eyes that swam with moisture.
“You nearly broke my life, Christine,” he said, with a hardly achieved
attempt at harshness.
“I want to forget it,” she answered. “To believe--for just one
hour--that I made your life, as I wanted to help make it. Oh, Harry,
Harry, I love you--I have always loved you, wherever I have been and
whatever I have done--and I want to believe, oh, for just such a little
minute, that my love was not really in vain. I just had to come!”
He pressed his hand over his eyes, did not answer.
She pointed to the comrade chair by the fireside.
“Harry--Harry dear--sit down and talk to me as we ought to have been
able to sit and talk--old married lovers with never a cloud between us.”
“Oh--don’t!” he said. “Don’t, Christine!” He burst out with a sudden
anger. “Why have you come back? I--I wanted to forget, forget always.”
She reached for his hand, touched it with fingers that were still cold.
“And we are going to forget--going to forget it quite, for just a
little hour, Harry, Harry darling!”
Her voice, on the old remembered note of fondness, touched him with a
strange power. Something crumbled in him.
He sat down suddenly in the indicated chair, stared, he also, into the
fire.
“It’s a bitter mockery, Christine!”
“No,” she answered. “It’s the real thing--for just once--the real
thing.”
They sat in silence for long moments where the clock ticked loudly. She
stretched her hand out to him.
“Harry! Hold my hand in yours--like you used to do--in the old days
before you married me. It will help so much. Can you remember it?--the
old touch that used to thrill?”
He obeyed without a word, took her little palm between his two large
hands, pressed it close. Its death-like coldness struck him and, in
defiance of it, he emphasized his contact. With a sudden tenderness
that was awkwardly unpractised, he endeavoured to instil a little of
his own warmth into it. As he did so, he felt as it were a sluice-gate
open in him. A long-repressed sentimentality asserted itself, invaded
his lonely soul like a flood. He looked at her. If only--his protective
secondary personality, dominant for so many years, reacted jealously,
perverted his regret--if only she could have understood him a little
more!
It was she who spoke.
“I’m so proud of you, Harry--so proud of your success!”
He almost started--remembering how he had hoped that she would read
his name in the newspapers, in a vindictive desire that she should
regret what she had thrown away. He saw, suddenly, that it was only her
opinion that had ever really mattered to him.
“My dear,” he said, feeling himself a tolerant old man who could afford
to be kind from his altitude, “perhaps if I had never known you, I
should never have worked so hard.”
She smiled at him as though there were no irony in his words, but only
a beautiful truth.
“Harry--Harry darling!” she murmured. “I have helped--helped a little,
haven’t I? My love has been what you said it would be--the vital force
on which you could always draw? Do you remember that, the night we
were engaged?”
This cool assumption of a dream, utterly opposed to the facts, startled
him. He looked at her, and had not the heart to contradict. Suppose it
had been so? Could he surrender himself to this make-believe which she
was playing with an almost childish simplicity? It was suddenly very
tempting to him.
“I remember, my dear--and I promised,” his voice broke a little while
he hesitated on a self-reproach, “never--never to cut myself off from
it--never to say the harsh word which you warned me would freeze your
sensitive little soul.”
“And you never have, Harry,” she murmured, softly. “You’ve always
remembered--always been gentle and kind and loving--all these long
years of happiness together.”
His eyes felt sympathetically uncomfortable as he looked into hers,
moist in the firelight.
“Twenty-seven years, dear,” he said, caressingly, consciously
defiant of the jealous self that watched. He had taken the plunge.
“Twenty-seven years last week since we married.”
She nodded her head in acquiescence.
“We’ve had our life-time, Harry dear--and we have not wasted it, have
we? Every year has been full, full to the brim, with sympathy and
love.” She sighed, gazing into the fire. “And that’s the only thing in
life that matters--the only thing. Success without love would have been
very barren to you, wouldn’t it, Harry?” Her eyes came round to him.
“Dead Sea fruit, my darling,” the illusion was almost perfect to him,
the irony without bitterness, scarcely perceived, “dust and ashes at
the core.” He smiled at her from a strangely sentimental self that was
almost foreign to him and yet his own. “Christine, without you I should
not really have lived.”
She answered him with a movement of the fingers now warm between the
hands still holding them.
“Nor I, Harry, without you. You and I were each other’s Destiny.”
He, too, nodded his head solemnly.
“Yes, dear,” he agreed. “I believe that.”
“And, thank God, we have not thwarted it, Harry. We have enjoyed it to
the full.”
He pressed her hand tightly for his only answer. Dream or reality, was
it? He had almost lost the power to distinguish. He looked into her
face, softly happy and somehow nobler and purer than he had ever known
it, pressed her hand again in a vague necessity to substantiate the
tangible actuality of her presence. It was really Christine sitting
there, filling that usually empty chair, breathing with slight rise and
fall of her bosom as she gazed into the fire. And if the other were a
dream--the happy past that she called up in imagination--just an old
man’s dream, why he would allow himself, that sentimental self in him
that none but himself had ever seen, the happiness of the illusion to
the full. There was none to ridicule him for a childish make-believe,
unworthy of his dignity.
“Christine,” he said, gently, “are you happy?”
She smiled at him upon her sigh.
“Very happy, dear.”
Again there was a silence between them. Presently she looked up once
more.
“It’s splendid the way Phil is getting on, isn’t it, dear?”
He glanced at her from his own dream, uncomprehending. She went on, as
though discussing a subject thoroughly familiar.
“Do you remember we said we would call him Philip--our first boy--long
before we had him? When we used to talk about him, in those first happy
months of being together, it didn’t seem possible that it could ever be
really true, did it, dear? And yet there he is--twenty-four years old!
It’s difficult for me to think that I ever could have been his mother.
When I look at him, so tall and big, it seems impossible that he could
once have been my baby.”
He stared at her. What was she talking of? They had never had a child.
Then it came to him----
“Yes, dear. He’s a fine chap.”
She smiled at him gratefully.
“I think we were right to let him marry, don’t you, dear? I know
he’s very young--but it’s perhaps better than if he waited until he
became set in his own habits and could no longer share the youthful
high-spirits of his dear little wife--as you very nearly waited too
long, didn’t you, dear? Another year or two of getting wrapped up in
your own ambitions and you might have crushed all the young life out of
me.” Her tone was dreamily sincere.
“Don’t, Christine!” he said, thickly. “I know a lot of it was my
fault----”
“Shh!” she soothed him with a gesture of her disengaged hand. “We’re
talking about Phil and his charming little wife. She’s just the sort of
girl I would have chosen for him, Harry. Young, sensible, pretty, with
eyes that look you straight in the face--and she loves him, Harry, like
I loved you, with all her young soul.”
He made a little choking sound and pressed her hand--so warm and loving
now!--with a convulsive tightness.
“And soon, Harry,” she went on, “we shall be grandparents, you and
I--looking forward beyond the next generation to the one after--_living
forward_. Life is very wonderful, isn’t it, dear, in its continuity?
Our little lives cease, but something of us goes on and on, in
generations that we can’t even imagine. Oh, it’s very wonderful!” She
sighed. “To think we might have missed it all, if we had not loved!”
“Christine!” He could scarcely speak. “You’re torturing me!”
“Shh!” she said. “It’s all real--it’s all real _now_. Everything else
was a bad dream from which we have waked together.”
“If only we could keep awake!” he said, pressing her hand in his as
though he would never let it go.
She looked at him archly.
“You were always pessimistic, Harry, weren’t you? Do you remember
how you used to say we should never have the little girl for whom we
longed, just because we longed for her so much? And now there’s Jeanie!
Jeanie who’ll be having her twenty-first birthday in a month or two!
And you are proud of her, aren’t you, Harry? Of course you are! We are
both proud of such a daughter, just the daughter we imagined.”
He closed his eyes.
“I remember--I remember how we used to talk of the daughter we were
going to have. It seems very long ago, Christine, those first months of
our life together.”
She smiled.
“And there she is, all our dreams of her coming true, asleep upstairs
and very likely herself dreaming of the woman’s life that is opening
before her. She’s very real to you, isn’t she, Harry?”
He forced himself to speech with an effort.
“Yes, dear. Go on.”
“She’s worth all the anxieties we had with her--the anxieties we
never imagined. Do you remember, when she was a little golden-haired
prattler, that awful time when she was ill? Do you remember how I
nursed her, night and day--and how you would come tip-toeing to her
tiny cot and look down upon it, praying with all your soul that she
would not die? I think that was when you first began really to love
her very much, Harry--when you thought you might lose her.” She nodded
her head in dreamy reminiscence, staring into the fire. “I remember
how proud I was when you gave up your work for a day or two because
you felt you could not leave the house while she was in danger. It was
such a miracle for you to do that--like Joshua stopping the sun--and
all because of our tiny little Jeanie. It made me love you, oh, ever so
much more, Harry!”
“Go on!” he said, closing his eyes again. “Go on!”
“And then how proud of her you were while she was at school! She always
had your brains, Harry, didn’t she? Always she was at the top of her
class. I remember”--she smiled--“I used to fear that she might grow too
clever and wear spectacles. But there was just that bit of me--of the
frivolous me--in her, wasn’t there, Harry? And so just like her mother
she grew up to like pretty frocks and look as charming in them as I
used to want to look for you to admire me.”
“Never so charming as you used to look, Christine, when you were
twenty-one,” he said, his eyes lighting up with a genuine memory. “No
one could look prettier than you did.”
Her warm fingers curled in his hard hands and her smile came up to him.
“Thank you, dear. It is nice of you not to forget.”
He breathed a long sigh.
“For every day of twenty-five years, Christine, I have seen you as you
used to look then.” There was an emphasis in his subdued and deliberate
enunciation that was eloquent of past agonies.
“It was the real Christine, Harry, that twenty-one-year-old Christine
who was so proud to be your wife and knew herself to be so unworthy of
you.”
“No, no!” he said, hoarsely. “Not unworthy--I didn’t understand then.
If only I had understood--if I had not been so absorbed in the things I
wanted to do----”
“Shh!” she soothed him. “It was all very beautiful, our life together,
Harry dear. Do you remember the holidays we had alone together? Do you
remember Switzerland, and the great mountains that towered up behind
our hotel, the snow upon their summits orange against deep blue in
the first sunshine of the dawn? Do you remember how we used to wake
up to look at them, and said it was just like the pictures, only
more wonderful because we were actually there? Do you remember being
among the great fields of narcissi, with blue gentian higher up, and
reminding me that this was what you had promised to show me--those
fields on fields of wild flowers which you had seen when you were
a young student, years before? Do you remember the mountain stream
with the big boulders where we ate sandwiches on a little patch of
turf between the rocks, and you kissed me just as those other people
came down the path? I remember--I remember how I went hot all over
and yet was very proud and happy, because it was the first time that
any one else had ever seen you loving me. You used to pretend--do you
remember?--to be a little cold and distant toward me when we were in
company, your dignity much too big to admit that you were in love.”
“Don’t, Christine--don’t!” he murmured, the breath of a soundless sob
escaping him in a broken exhalation. “If only we had had them--those
holidays we meant to have!”
“We did, dear,” she pursued. “We did have them. They’re all
there--among our dreams. Look at them and you will see that they are
true. The memory of them isn’t spoilt by anything that was not just
right. Can’t you call them up again--the holidays we used to promise
ourselves for the days when you were successful? Can’t you see them?
Can’t you see that lovely time in Italy--the big blue lake, with the
yellow houses and the red roofs close under the mountains and fairy
islands in the middle? Can’t you see Venice and the black gondola in
which we sat, urged forward like a living thing over the still water in
which the palaces were reflected? Can’t you call back that wonderful
night of silent peacefulness when, arms around each other, we leaned
out over our balcony and listened to the gondoliers singing to each
other under the stars? Don’t you remember the bridge in Florence where
you stopped and said: ‘This is where Dante met Beatrice’--and we
looked into each other’s eyes and knew that we, too, were a Dante and
Beatrice, born for each other’s love? Don’t you remember, dear? Can’t
you see them, all those wonderful years together, when you and I were
young?”
“Christine, Christine!” he murmured. “If only they were true!”
“They are true, dear--they are true,” she asserted. “They are the
truest things we have--the dreams of our souls which they will dream
again and again long after we have no body. And not only holidays--our
life together had work in it, too, didn’t it, dear?--hard and
successful work. Do you remember the big case which made you famous?”
He nodded, a smile of genuine reminiscence on his face.
“The Pembroke case?”
“Yes, dear,” she continued, “the Pembroke case. Do you remember how
hard you worked then?”
“By Jove, I do!” he agreed, with an emphatic little laugh. “I never
worked so hard in my life!”
“Do you remember how I used to sit by the fire here at night, not
daring to make the slightest sound, while you worked at your desk,
going through all those masses and masses of papers in readiness for
the next day of the trial? Do you remember how sometimes you would look
up, not saying a word, but just assuring yourself that I was still
there and going on with your work all the fresher because you saw me?
Do you remember when at last, in the small hours, you finished for the
night, you would come across and kiss me, oh, so quietly, and lay your
head against me for comfort because you were so tired!”
He did not answer. His eyes stared into the fire, his lips thinned in
a tight pressure against each other, as the mental picture of the fact
came up in conflict with this ideality. They had been terrible, those
nights of solitary work.
She continued, undeterred.
“And then, on the last day of the trial, when you had made that great
speech--the first big speech of your career--and got your verdict,
the night when all the newspapers were full of your triumph, do you
remember your home-coming, dear?”
“By Heaven, I do!” he interrupted, with a sudden outburst of
bitterness. “I came home and looked around me--and wished that I were
dead in the hopeless emptiness of it all!”
“No, dear, no!” she corrected him. “You came home and found me waiting
for you in my prettiest dress and we had dinner together, just you and
I alone, because the moment was so big that we couldn’t possibly share
it with any one else. Do you remember how solemn we tried to be, you
and I--you looking so dignified in your evening clothes and I just as
dainty as I could be? And then suddenly you jumped up like a schoolboy
and darted round the table to kiss me--and we kissed and laughed at
ourselves, and kissed and laughed again, every time the servants went
out of the room--a couple of happy children. And I loved you so much
because you were so very clever and yet could be such a boy. And then
we got solemn again as the bigness of it all came over us--real, real
success at last! The paths of all the world seemed open to us, didn’t
they, dear? And we drank to it, success and love! And then, quite close
and looking into my eyes, you said the loveliest thing of all the
lovely things you ever said to me--you said that your great success,
the one success that really mattered to you, was that you had won my
love, my real, real love that bound my soul to yours for ever. Oh,
Harry, I would have died for you that night!”
She ceased and he was silent. The might-have-been came up before him
with intolerable vividness. If one could but begin over again!
“And now,” she gently moved the hand that all this time had lain in
his as they crouched close together over the fire, “and now here we
are--all the years of hard work, so successful that we need not worry
any more, behind us--nothing really important to do except to sit hand
in hand and dream over the happy past, an old Darby and Joan who have
lived their lives----”
He jumped to his feet.
“Christine! Christine!” he cried. “Let us make it true! Let us
forget--forget all the bad dream--go on again together just as if what
you said were true!”
She looked up at him, a strange and awful fear coming into her eyes,
the face that had gained colour going ashen once more.
“Oh, Harry!” she said, in a tone of infinite reproach. “You’ve broken
it! You’ve let go my hand!”
He ignored this infantile remark, went straight to his point in the
brutally over-riding manner characteristic of him.
“Let us forget it, Christine, forget that you ever went away from me.
I’ll never remind you of it. We won’t argue past responsibilities.
We’ll start afresh. Christine, I’m a lonely old man--I want you. I
want you to sit by the fire with me, to talk over, if you like, the
might-have-beens that we threw away, I as much as you. I want you,
anyway. I can’t bear loneliness any more--not now, after you have come
back to me!”
She rose to her feet also, shivering, her eyes closing, biting at her
lower lip as though in suppressed pain. She shook her head.
“No, Harry, not now. I--I must go away now, go back.”
She turned and moved, with a curious detachment from him that reminded
him somewhat of a sleep-walker, toward the door.
He jumped in front of her.
“You shall not go, Christine! You have come back--and you shall not go
again!”
She opened anguished eyes at him.
“Harry,” she said in a tone of profound melancholy, “you know you
cannot keep me like that. Remember the last time you tried to hold me
caged behind a closed door!”
He did remember--the day when, disapproving of some intended excursion,
he had, in a cold passion, turned the key upon her--the day he had come
back to find a broken lock and curt note. He had learned his lesson. He
stood aside from her path, entreated instead of dictating.
“Stay with me, Christine! Stay with me!”
She shook her head.
“I cannot,” she said. “I must go back. It was only for one little hour
I came. We have had it, Harry, and I must go.”
“But you will return? I shall see you again?”
She smiled a wan smile at him.
“Who knows, Harry?”
“Where are you going? Where do you live?”
“Please, Harry!--ask no questions. Let me go.”
There was a dignity about her which silenced him. He opened the door
for her and they went out into the hall. In a dazed preoccupation, he
went up to the outer door and opened it to the night. Then he turned
and perceived her coatless condition.
“Good Heavens, Christine, you can’t go out like that! Wait a minute.
I’ll lend you my fur coat. It’s better than nothing.”
He darted into the adjoining clothes-lobby, returned with the garment.
The hall was empty; the door still open. She had gone.
He ran out and down the drive after her, crying her name: “Christine!
Christine!” There was no response, neither sound nor sign of her. She
had vanished.
Bitterly disappointed, he returned to the house, closed the door behind
him. As he went into the clothes-lobby to replace the unneeded coat he
was startled by the telephone bell.
He hastened to the instrument, picked up the receiver.
“Hallo!--Yes--Yes--what is it? Who are you?--_the police_?” He
repeated the last word in a tone of bewilderment, listened.
“Yes,” he replied, “Yes--Mrs. Christine Arkwright--yes--that is my
wife--yes----”
The silence of the empty hall seemed to envelop him as he listened. He
interjected an impatient exclamation.
“Yes!--you found a letter and traced me--yes!--Go on!--What is it all
about?”
He frowned, contorted his face as though the distant voice was not
clearly audible.
“What?--what do you say?--died suddenly?--I don’t understand.--Where
was this?”
He nodded as though now receiving more intelligible information.
“No--I don’t recognize the address at all! What sort of place is
it?--oh, a second-rate boarding house. Well, I think there must be some
mistake--what?”
He listened again.
“No,” he persisted categorically, “I say I think there must be some
mistake. You say that a Mrs. Christine Arkwright died suddenly in a
second-rate boarding-house--at that address I don’t know--and you’ve
traced me out--I quite understand all that. But I say I have good
reason to think there is a mistake somewhere--it couldn’t be---- What?”
He smiled with a grim superiority as he listened.
“What?--You say there’s no doubt of the identity?”
His brows puckered suddenly in the frown with which he prepared the
annihilation of a stupid and stubbornly insistent witness.
“Now, pay attention, my friend!--When did this event occur?” He
asked the question in the tone of one confident of establishing an
impossibility by a counter fact. There was a moment of pause--and then
his expression changed. “To-night?--_At eleven o’clock?_”
The clock in the study struck, discreetly, twelve.
FROM THE DEPTHS
The S. S. _Upsal_, 2,000 tons, the Swedish ensign at her taffrail,
her one black-spouting funnel still daubed with remains of war-time
camouflage, lifted and plunged doggedly into the teeth of the September
south-west gale that lashed her with cold rain from the streaming
gray clouds which curtained close the foam-topped gray-green waves
into which she crashed with recurrent walls of spray high above her
forecastle, and which mingled in an indistinguishable whelm with
the dirty murk of beaten-down smoke low upon the track of her bared
and racing propeller. The men upon her bridge crouched, oilskins to
their ears, behind the soaked canvas of the “dodger” which protected
them, peering into the mist from which at any moment might emerge
the towering bulk of a liner hurrying up-channel to the hungry ports
of Europe. They were silent. Conversation was a futile effort in the
buffeting blasts that stopped the words in their mouths. The only
sounds were the crash and thud of green water that slid off in foaming
cascades from the forecastle to the well, the harp-like moaning of
the wind-tautened stays, and, in brief lulls, the sizzling of rain
and spray upon the heated funnel and the creaking of boat-gear whose
serviceable character in such a humble “tramp” was a phenomenon
reminiscent of unwonted marine perils that had but recently ceased.
No longer did her look-out scrutinize every flitting patch of foam in
apprehension of the dreaded periscope. The violences of sea and sky
were dangers as of yore. From the depths came now no menace.