Then, a week later, Harry died. That might have meant grief, wrecking
and inexpressible, for she discovered that she was still his. Love lay
in her, indestructible as an element. It was true that passion was gone
from her for ever, but that had been merely an alloy added to it by
nature when she desired to use it as currency to buy continuance, and
love itself had survived. She might have lacerated herself with mourning
for the fracture of their marriage and the separation of their later
years had it not been for the beautiful thing that had happened the
afternoon before he died. It was so beautiful that she hardly ever
rehearsed its details to herself, preferring to guard it in her heart as
one guards sacred things, preserving it immaculate even from her own
thoughts. It had lifted the shame from her destiny. She perceived that
the next day, when Richard came in and stood stumbling with the handle
of the door, instead of running to the table, though she had arranged it
specially, as if this were a birthday, with four candles instead of two,
and had baked him a milk loaf for a treat, and had cut the last
Michaelmas daisies from the garden and set them in blanched mauve clouds
about the dark edges of the room.
"Mother, the squire's dead," he said at length. That she knew already.
She had divined it early in the afternoon, when the village people began
to go past the house in twos and threes, walking slowly and turning
their faces towards her windows. "Yes, dear," she answered evenly.
"Mother, is it true that the squire was my father? All the other boys
say so." She had anticipated this moment for years with terror, because
always before it had seemed to her that when it came she must break down
and tell him how she had been shamed and abandoned and cast away to
infamy, and she had dreaded that this might make him frightened of life.
But because of what had happened the day before she was able to smile,
as if they were talking of happy things, and say slowly and delightedly,
"Yes, you are his son." He walked slowly across the room, knitting his
brows and staring at her with eyes that were at once crafty and awed, as
children's are when they perceive that grown-ups are concealing some
important fact from them, and harbour at once a quick, indignant
resolution to find out what it is as soon as possible, and a slow,
acquiescent sense that the truth must be a very sacred thing if it has
to be veiled. At her knee he halted, and shot sharp glances up at her.
But the peace in her face made him feel foolish, and he said in an
off-hand manner: "Mummie, Miss Lawrence says my map of the Severn is the
best," and then turned to look at the tea-table. "Ooh, mums, milk-loaf!"
She could see as he continued that all was well with him. The squire had
been his father: but it evidently was not anything to make a fuss about;
it seemed funny that he and mother hadn't lived together, but grown-ups
were always doing funny things; anyway, it seemed to be all right....
As she sat and teased him for making such an enormous meal, and
rejoicing silently because he had passed through this dangerous moment
so calmly, it struck her that Roger also would participate in the
benefits brought by the beautiful happening of the day before. Now that
her past life had been made not humiliating, but only sad, she would no
longer feel angry with him because he reminded her of it. That night she
wrote to Susan Rodney and asked her to bring him back during the week
before Christmas.
* * * * *
Marion, groaning, pressed the button of the electric clock that stood on
the table by her bedside, and looked up at the monstrous white dial it
threw on the ceiling. Half-past one. She rolled over and cried into the
pillow, "Richard! Richard!" She had already been three hours in bed.
There were six more hours till morning, six more hours in which to
remember things, and memory was a hot torment, a fire lit in her
brainpan.
* * * * *
When, three days later, she received Peacey's letter saying that he
would not allow the child to go back to her she felt nothing but relief.
It was disgusting, of course, to get that letter, to have to read so
many lines in that loathsome, large, neat, inflated handwriting, but she
took it that it meant that those toys which he had sent Roger every six
months were not, as she thought, mere attempts to torture her by
reminding her of his existence, but signs that he had really wanted to
be a father to his son, and that now that Harry was dead he was
declaring his desire freely. That made her very happy, for she knew that
love from the worst man on earth would be more nourishing for the boy
than her insincerity. She did not tell Richard, because she could not
have borne to see how pleased he would look, but she went about the
house light-heartedly for winter days, bursting with song, and then
penitently checking herself and planning to send Roger extravagant
presents for Christmas, until Susan Rodney's letter came. She had sat
with it open on her lap, feeling sick and wondering in whose care she
could leave Richard while she went down to Dawlish and fetched the poor
little thing away, for quite a long time, before it occurred to her that
Harry had never told her the secret by which he held Peacey in
subjection. Immediately she realised that Peacey knew this. Out of his
cold, dilettante knowledge he had known that when she and Harry met they
would not be able to speak his name for more than one minute. She wished
she were the kind of woman who fainted from fear. The clock ticked, and
not less steadily beat her heart, and nothing came to distract her from
looking into the face of this fact that she had now no power over Peacey
and he knew it.
Then she huddled forward towards the fire, which no longer seemed to
heat her, and Susan's letter fell from her lap into the fender. She
picked it up, crying, "Oh, my baby, how little I care for you!" and
struck herself on the forehead as she reflected how many expedients
would have suggested themselves to her if it had been Richard who was
being maltreated down at Dawlish. She sat down and wrote a lying letter
to Peacey, threatening him with the disclosure of the secret she did not
know, and then, because the grandfather clock twanged out three and she
knew the post was collected five minutes past, she ran out into the
windy afternoon bareheaded. The last part of the distance, down the High
Street, she ran, but she got into the grocer's shop too late and found
Mr. Hemming just about to seal the bag. "Oh, Mr. Hemming!" she gasped.
The three women in the shop turned round and looked at her curiously,
and she perceived that if she betrayed her agony now she would lose all
the ground she had gained during the past few years by her affectation
of well-being. If it leaked out, as it certainly would, unless she at
once lowered the present temperature of the moment, that a few days
after Harry's death she had been excitedly sending a letter to Peacey,
the village people would go through her story all over again to try to
find out what this could possibly mean, and would remember that it was a
tragedy, and once more she would be the victim of that hostility which
the happy feel for the unhappy. Yet she found herself making a queer
distraught mask of her face and saying theatrically, "Oh, Mr. Hemming,
_please_, please let this letter go ..." and, when he granted the
favour, as she knew quite well he would have done to just half as much
imploration, she went out of the shop breathing heavily and audibly.
"Why am I like this?" she asked herself. "Ah, I see! So that I can say
afterwards that I did everything I could to get him back, even to the
extent of turning people against me, and can settle down to being happy
with Richard. Oh, Roger, I am a cold devil to you...." She was indeed.
For when she received Peacey's letter saying blandly that there was
nothing in his life of which he need feel ashamed, and realised that the
game was up and she was powerless, she was glad. She sat down and wrote
her bluffing answer, a warning that if the child was not sent back
within a week she would come down to Dawlish and fetch it, with an
infamous fear lest it might be efficacious. And when Peacey wrote back,
pointing out that Richard was legally his child, and that he would be
taken out of her custody if she went on making this fuss about Roger,
she chose immediately. She tore the letter into small pieces and dropped
them into the heart of the fire, and knelt by the grate until the flame
died. Though the boy was still out at school she lifted up her voice and
cried out seductively, serenely, "Richard! Richard!"
What is this thing, the soul? It blows hot, it blows cold, it reels
with the drunkenness of exaltation for some slight event no denser than
a dream, it hoods itself with penitence for some act that the mind can
hardly remember; and yet its judgments are the voice of absolute wisdom.
She did not care at all for Roger. When at nights she used to see in the
blackness the little figure standing in his shirt, beating the dark air
with his fists, as Susan told her he used to do when Peacey woke him
suddenly out of his sleep to frighten him, her pity, was flavourless and
abstract. That she had unwittingly sent the child to its doom caused her
no earthquake of remorse but a storm of annoyance. Yet she knew every
hour of the day that her soul had taken a decision to mourn the child in
some way that would hurt her.
One afternoon, a month or so after their happy, lonely Christmas, when
she was playing balls in the garden with Richard, the postman came up
and handed her another letter from Susan Rodney. Though Peacey had
forbidden her to write to Susan Rodney, so that she had never been able
to explain why she did not come and fetch Roger, he allowed Susan to
write to her. Weekly Marion received letters cursing her cruelly in not
coming, written in an honest writing that made them hurt the more. She
took it and smiled in the postman's face. "Well, how is Mrs. Brown
getting on with the new baby?" When he had gone she gave it to Richard
and told him to go and drop it in the kitchen fire. While he was away
she stood and stared down at the acid green of the winter grass, and
wondered what she had missed by not reading the letter, what story of
blows delivered cunningly here and there so that they did not mark, or
of petting that skilfully led up to a sudden feint of terrifying temper;
and suddenly she was conscious of a fret in the air, and said
wonderingly, "It is far too early for the Spring. We are hardly into
February yet." But the fret had been not in the air but in herself, and
the change of season it had foreboded had been in her own soul.
That very night she had begun to have bad dreams. Twice before the dawn
she was stoned down Roothing High Street, even as seven years before men
looked at her from behind glazed, amused masks; and she had put up her
hand to her head and found that a stone had drawn blood; and Mr.
Goode's kind voice said something about, "A bit of boys' fun, Mr.
Peacey," and she had stared before her at a black, broadclothed bulk. In
the morning she woke sweating like an overdriven horse, and said to
herself, "This is the worst night I have spent in all my life. Pray God
I may never spend another like it."
But henceforward half her nights were to be like that. By day her soul
walked like a peacock on its green lawn, proudly, pompously,
struttingly, because she was the mother of this gorgeous son. There was
no moment of her waking life that he did not gild, for either he had not
long gone out and had turned at the gate to wave good-bye with a gesture
so dear that when she thought of it she dug her nails into her palms in
an agony of tenderness, or he was just coming back and she must get
something ready for him. Even after he had gone to school he built her a
bulwark against misery which endured till the night fell, for in the few
hours that remained after she had finished the work she had now
undertaken on the farm she read his letters over and over again. They
were queer and disturbing and delicious letters, and they hinted that
there was a content in their relationship which had never yet been put
into words, for they were full of records of his successes in class and
at games.
Now he had that complete lack of satisfaction in his own performance
which superficial people think to be modesty, though it springs instead
from the sword-stiff extreme of pride; when he made his century in a
school match he was galled by the knowledge that he was not as good a
player as Ranji, and when he was head of the science side his pleasure
was mitigated to nearly nothing by his sense that still he did not know
as much about these things as Lord Kelvin. That he gave her every detail
of all his successes meant, she began to suspect, that he knew they were
both under a ban, and that he was handing her these evidences of his
superiority over the other people as an adjutant of a banished leader
might hand him arrows to shoot down on the city that had exiled him.
When he was home for the holidays he said nothing that confirmed this
suspicion, but she noticed that only when he was with her was his mouth
limpid and confident as a boy's should be; in the presence of others he
pressed his upper lip down on his lower so that it looked thin, which it
was not, with an air of keeping a secret before enemies. She loved this
sense of being entrenched quite alone with him in a fortress of love.
She would not have chosen another destiny, for she did not think that
she would ever have liked ordinary people even if they had been nice to
her.
But that was only her daylight destiny. In the night she staggered down
Roothing High Street under stones, or sat in the brown sunshine of the
dusty room and watched Peacey stroking his fat thigh and talking of his
dear dead mother; or felt his weight thresh down on her like the end of
the world; or took into her arms for the first time the limp body of the
other child. It did not avail her if she fought her way out of sleep,
for then she would continue to re-endure the scene in a frenzy of
memory, and either way she knew the agony that the experience had given
her with its first prick, coupled with the woe that came of knowing that
those things would go on and on, until in the end a little figure in a
nightshirt beat the dark with its fists.
For a time she found solace in thinking that perhaps she was expiating
her involuntary sin in hating her child, and indeed it seemed to her
that when she evoked that little figure she felt something in her heart
which, if she and the frozen substance of her were triturated a little
more by torture, might grow into that proper loving pain which she
coveted more than any pleasure. But that process, if it ever had begun,
was stopped when Richard was fifteen.
It happened, two days after he had come home for the summer holidays,
that in the early part of the night she had again been stoned and that
she had started up, crying out, "Harry! Harry!" She heard the latch of
the door lift, and someone stood on her threshold breathing angrily.
Half asleep, she mumbled, "Harry, it can't be you?..." A voice answered
haltingly, "No," and a match scratched, and Richard crossed the room and
lit the candle by her bedside. She could not see him, for the light was
too strong after the darkness, and she could not quite climb out of her
dream, but she rocked her head from side to side and muttered, "Go to
bed, I'm all right, all right." But he sat down on her bed and took her
hand in his, and said sullenly, "You've been calling out for my father.
Why are you doing that?" She whimpered, "Nothing. I was only dreaming."
But he went on, terrifying her through her veil of sleep. "I know all
about it, mother. The other boys told me about it. And Goodtart said
something once." His hand tightened on hers. "You used to meet him up at
that temple." For a minute he paused, and seemed to be shuddering, and
then persisted, "What is it? Why do you cry almost every night? I've
heard you ever so often. You've got to tell me what's the matter."
She stiffened under the fierce loving rage in his tone and stayed rigid
for a moment. Through her drowsiness there was floating some idea that
the salvation of her soul depended on keeping stiff and silent, but
because she was still netted in the dream, and the beating of the tin
cans distracted her, she could not follow it and grasp it, and soon she
desired to tell him as much as she had always before feared it. In her
long reticence she felt like a suspended wave forbidden to break on the
shore by a magician's spell, and she lifted her hands imploringly to him
so that he bent down and kissed her. It was as if the heat of his lips
dissolved some seal upon her mouth, and she sobbed out: "It's when the
boy touches me with a stick that I can't bear it!"
"What boy did that?"
"I think it was Ned Turk. When I was stoned down Roothing High Street."
"Mother, mother. Tell me about that."
She wailed out everything, while the hand that held hers gradually
became wet with sweat. At the end of her telling she drew her hair
across her face and looked up at him through it. "Have I lost him?" she
wondered. "Harry did not like me so much after horrible things had
happened to me." Then as she looked at him her heart leaped at the sight
of his beauty and his young maleness, and she cried out to herself,
"Well, whether I have lost him or not, I have borne him!"
But she had him always, for presently he bent forward and laid his face
against her hand, and began to kiss it. Then he pulled himself up and
sat hunched as if the story he had heard were a foe that might leap at
him, and almost shouted in his queer voice, which was now breaking,
"Mother, I would like to kill them all! Oh, you poor little mother! I
love you so, I love you so...." He buried his face in the clothes for
one instant and seemed about to weep, and then, conscious of her tears,
slipped his arm behind her and raised her up, and covered her with
kisses, and muttered little loving, comforting things. She crooned with
relief, and until the sky began to lighten and she had to send him back
to bed, sobbed out all the misery she had so long kept to herself. He
did not want to go. That she liked also; and afterwards she slipped
softly into dreamless sleep.
Yet strangely, for surely it was right that a mother should be solaced
by her son? There shot through her mind just before she slept a pang of
guilt as if she had done some act as sensual as bruising ripe grapes
against her mouth. How can one know what to do in this life? Surely it
is so natural to escape out of hell that it cannot be unlawful; and by
calling "Richard! Richard!" she could now bring her worst and longest
dream to an end. Surely she had the right to make Richard love her; and
she knew that by the disclosure of her present and past agonies she was
binding his manhood to her as she had bound his boyhood and his
childhood. Yet after every time that she had called him to save her from
a bad dream she had this conviction of guilt. She could not understand
what it meant. It was partly born of her uneasy sense that in these
nights she was unwillingly giving Richard a false impression of her
destiny which laid the blame too heavily on poor Harry; because she
could not yet tell the boy of all Peacey's villainy, he was plainly
concluding that what had broken her was Harry's desertion. But it was a
profounder offence than this that she was in some way committing. She
did not know what it was, but it robbed her torment of any expiatory
quality that it might ever have had. For now, when she evoked the little
figure in a nightshirt beating the dark with its fists, she felt
nothing. There was not the smallest promise of pain in her heart. As
much as ever Roger was an orphan.
But worst of all it was to have had the opportunity to settle this
matter for once and for all and to expunge all evil, and to have missed
it. For Roger came back. Richard was seventeen, and had gone to sea. How
proud she had felt the other day when Ellen had asked why he had gone to
sea! He might do many things for his wife, but nothing comparable to
that irascible feat of forcing life's hand and leaping straight from
boyhood into manhood by leaving school and becoming a sailor at sixteen
so that he should be admirable to his mother. During the holidays, when
he formed the intention, she had watched him well from under her lids
and had guessed that his pride was disgusted at his adolescent
clumsiness and moodiness and that he wanted to hide himself from her
until he felt himself uncriticisable in his conduct of adult life. She
had had to alter that opinion to include another movement of his soul
when, as they travelled together to London the day he joined his ship,
he turned to her and said: "My father never saw any fighting, did he?"
She had met his eyes with wonder, and he had pressed the point rather
roughly. "He was in the army, wasn't he? But he didn't see any fighting,
did he?" She had stammered: "No, I don't think so." And he had turned
away with a little stiff-lipped smile of satisfaction. That had
distressed her, but she had a vague and selfish feeling that she would
imperil something if she argued the point. But whatever his motives for
going had been, she was glad that he went, for though she herself was
not interested in anything outside her relationships, she knew that
travel would afford him a thousand excitements that would evoke his
magnificence. The Spring day when he was expected to come home she had
found her joy impossible to support under the eyes of the servant and
the farm-men, for she had grown very sly about her fellow-men, and knew
that it was best to hide happiness lest someone jealous should put out
their hand to destroy it. So she had gone down to the orchard and sat in
the crook of a tree, looking out at an opal estuary where a frail
rainstorm spun like a top in the sunshine before the variable April
gusts. She wondered how his dear brown face would look now he had
outfaced danger and had been burned by strange suns. She had heard
suddenly the sound of steps coming down the path, and she had turned in
ecstasy; but there was nobody there but a pale young man who looked like
one of the East-End trippers who all through the summer months
persistently trespassed on the farm lands. As he saw her he stopped, and
she was about to order him to leave the orchard by the nearest gate when
he flapped his very large hands and cried out, "Mummie! Mummie!" There
was a whistling quality in the cry that instantly convinced her. She
drew herself taut and prepared to deal with him as a spirited woman
deals with a blackmailer, but as he ran towards her, piping exultantly,
"Now I'm sixteen I can say who I want to live with--the vicar says so,"
she remembered that he was her son, and suffered herself to be folded in
his arms, which embraced her closely but without suggestion of strength.
That day, at least, she had played her part according to her duty: she
had corrected so far as possible the sin of her inner being. It had not
been so very difficult, for Roger had shown himself just as
goldenhearted as he had been as a child. He would not speak of the years
of ill-treatment from which he had emerged, save to say tediously, over
and over again, with a revolting, grateful whine in his voice, how hard
Aunt Susan had worked to keep the peace when father had one of his bad
turns. It appeared that for the last two years he had been an apprentice
in a draper's shop at Exeter, and though there he had been underfed and
overworked and imprisoned from the light and air, all that he complained
of was that the "talk was bad." Tears came into his light eyes when he
said that, and she perceived that there was nothing in his soul save
sickly, deserving innocence, and of course this inexterminable love for
her. There would never be any end to that. All through the midday meal
he kept on putting down his fork with lumps of meat sticking on it and
would say whistlingly: "Ooh, mummie, d'you know, I used to think it must
be my imagination you had such a wonderful head of hair. I don't think
I've ever seen such another head of hair."
But he was so good, so good. He said to her in the afternoon as they
walked along the lanes to Roothing High Street, a scene the memory of
which he had apparently cherished sentimentally, "You know, mummie, when
I told Aunt Susan that I was going to run away and find you, she said
that I had better try my luck, but I mustn't be disappointed if you
didn't want me. But I knew you would, mummie...."
Her heart was wrung, not so much by his faith in her, which was indeed a
kind of idiocy, as by the sense that, if Susan thought he had better try
his luck with her, his life with his father must have been a hell, and
that he was not complaining of it. Flushing, she muttered, "I'm glad you
knew how I felt, dear," and all day she did not flinch. When it was past
eight, and Richard had not come, she cut for Roger the pastry that she
had baked for the other, and laughed across the table at him as they
ate; and when the door opened and the son she loved moved silently into
the room, looking sleepy and secret as he always did when he was greatly
excited, she stood up smiling, and loyally cried, "Look who's here,
Richard!" She thought as she said it how like she was to a wife who
defiantly faces her husband when one of her relations whom he does not
like has come to tea, and she tried to be amused by the resemblance. But
Richard's eyes moved to the stranger's gaping, welcoming face, hardened
with contempt, and returned to her face. He became very pale. It
evidently seemed to him the grossest indecency on her part to allow a
third person to be present at their meetings, and indeed she herself
felt faint, as she had used to do when she met Harry is front of other
people. But she pulled out of herself a clucking cry that might have
come from some happy mother without a history: "Richard! don't you see
it's Roger!"
Surely, after having been able to keep the secret of what she felt for
him through that torturing moment when she found Richard's displeasure,
she had the right to expect that all would go well. It was loathsome
having him in the house, and she and Richard were hardly ever alone. But
her bad dreams left her. This was life simple as the Christians said it
was, in which one might hug serenity by the conscientious performance of
a disagreeable duty. Yet there came a day, about three weeks after his
coming, when Roger sat glumly at the midday meal and did not talk, as he
had ordinarily done, about the chaps at Exeter, and how there was one
chap who could imitate birds' calls so that you couldn't hardly tell
the difference, and how another chap had an uncle who was a big grocer
and used to send him a box of crystallised fruit at Christmas; and
immediately the meal was finished he rose and left the room, instead of
waiting about and saying, "I s'pose you aren't going for a walk, are
you, mummie?" Relieved by his departure, she had leaned back in her
chair and smiled up at Richard, saying, "How brown you are still!" when
suddenly there had flashed across her a recollection of how Roger's
shoulders had looked as he went out of the room, and she started up to
run out and find him. He was in one of the outhouses, clumsily trying to
carpenter something that was to be a surprise to somebody. He did not
look up when she came in, though he said with a funny lift in his voice,
"Hello, mummy!" She stood over him, watching his work till she could not
bear to look at his warty hands any longer, and then asked: "Roger,
dear, is there anything the matter?" She spoke to him always without any
character in her phrases, like a mother in books. He mumbled, "Nothing,
mummie," but would not lift his head; and after a gulping minute
whimpered: "I want to go back to the shop." "Back to the shop, dear? But
I thought you hated it. Darling, what is the matter?" He remained
silent, so she took his face between her hands and looked into his eyes.
Perhaps that had not been a very wise thing to do.
Marion had dropped her hands and gone back to Richard, and said with
simulated fierceness: "You haven't done anything to Roger that would
make him think that we don't like having him here?" He glanced sharply
at her and recognised that their destiny was turning ugly in their
hands, and he answered: "Of course not. I wouldn't do anything to a chap
who's been through such a rotten time." She thought, with shame, that if
his face had become cruel at her question, and he had answered that he
thought it was time the other went, she would have bowed to his
decision, because he was her king, and she realised that it was no
wonder that Roger had found out. That moment of which she was so proud
because she had said heartily, "Richard, don't you see it's Roger?"
without showing by any wild yearning of the eye that she would have
given anything to be alone with him, had been instantly followed by a
betrayal. For when he had lifted his lips from her cheek and had turned
to greet Roger with courtesy that was at once kind and insincere, he had
left one hand resting on her shoulder as it had been when they embraced,
and his thumb stretched out to press on the pulse that beat at the base
of her throat. If she had been completely loyal she would have moved;
but she had stood quite still, letting him mark how she was not calm and
rejoicing at all, but shaken as by a storm with her disgust at this
loathsome presence. His hand had relaxed and he had passed it
caressingly up her neck. She had let herself sigh deeply; she might as
well have said, "I am so glad you understand I hate him." That was the
first of a thousand such betrayals. The words said between souls are not
heard by the eavesdropping ear, but the soul also can eavesdrop, and
tells in its time. That morning there must have come a moment to the
poor pale boy, as he worked at his silly present in the little shed,
when it was plain to him that the mother and the brother whom he had
thought so kind were vulpine with love of each other, vulpine with hate
of him.
There was no disputing his discovery, since it was true. The only thing
to do was to try to arrange some way of life for him in which he would
have a chance to become an independent person who could form new and
unspoiled relationships. It was, of course, out of the question to send
him back to the shop, but the problem of disposing of him was one that
raised innumerable difficulties which Marion was the less able to face
because her bad dreams had begun again. He had so little schooling that
it was impossible to send him in for any profession. He, himself, who
was touchingly grateful because they were not sending him back to the
shop, chose to be trained as a veterinary surgeon, and he was
apprenticed to old Mr. Taylor at Canewdon. But it turned out that though
he had a passionate love for animals he had no power over them. After he
had been chased round a field three times and severely bitten by a
stallion with whom he had sat up for two nights, Mr. Taylor pronounced
that it was hopeless and sent him home. They tried him as a chemist's
assistant next, and he did well for ten months, until there was that
awful trouble about the prescription. There had been nothing to do after
that save to put him to work as a clerk and give him an allowance that
with his wages would enable him to live in comfort and try to seem glad
when he came home for his holidays.
For he was still not quite sure. His suspicion that his mother did not
love him was so strong that, half because his sweetness of nature made
him not want to bother her if his presence really gave her pain, and
half because he could not bear to put the matter to a test, he would not
take a situation anywhere near Roothing. But he liked to come home for
his fortnight's holidays at Christmas, and sit by the hearth and look at
his wonderful mother and comfort himself by thinking that if they were
so kind he must have been wrong. Best of all, perhaps, he liked the Bank
Holidays, when he travelled half the day in a packed carriage to get
there and had only a few hours to spend with her; it was easier to keep
things going when he stayed such a short time, and there was less
misgiving on his face when he waved good-bye from the carriage window
than there was after any of his longer visits. But so far as she was
concerned, all his visits were in essence the same, in that at the end
of each of them she was left standing on the platform with her eyes
following the retreating train and a fear coiling tighter round her
heart. She had always known, of course, that this life for which she was
responsible, and by whose fate she would be judged, would blunder to
ruin, and as the years went on there came intimations, faint as
everything connected with Roger, but nevertheless convincing, which
confirmed her dread. He was always changing his situation and moving
from suburb to suburb, for he would never take a job in the city,
because the noise and crowds in the narrow streets frightened him.
From a bludgeoned look about him, which became more and more marked, she
was sure that he was being constantly dismissed for incompetence, but he
would never admit that. "I'm a funny chap, mummie," he would say
bravely, "I can't bear being shut up in the same place for long." And
she would nod understandingly and say, "Do as you like, dear, as long as
you're happy," because he wanted her to believe him. But she would be
sick with visions of this blanched, misbegotten thing standing smiling
and wriggling under the gibes of normal and brutal men throughout the
inexorably long workday, and then creeping to some mean room where it
would sit and snivel till the night fell across the small-paned window.
And through the sallow mist of her unavailing and repugnant pity there
flashed suddenly the lightning of certainty that some day the thing
would happen. But what thing? She would put her hand to her head, but
she was never able to remember.
And when he was twenty-two and living at Watford something did happen;
though it was not, she instantly recognised, the thing. She herself had
never been angered by it, although she hated telling Richard about it,
but had instantly perceived the pathos of the situation; her mind had
always done its duty by Roger. It told, of course, the most moving story
of loneliness and humiliation and hunger for respect and love that he
should have represented himself to the girl with whom he had been
walking out as a man of wealth and that after a rapturous afternoon at a
flower show he should have taken her to the best jeweller's in Watford
and given her a diamond brooch and earrings, for which, even with his
allowance, he could not possibly pay.
The visit to Watford she had to make to clear things up had seemed at
first the happiest event of all her relationship with Roger. It had been
unpleasant to find him grey with weeping and disgrace, but there had
been victory in forcing herself to comfort him with an exact imitation
of the note of love. It had been ridiculous to face the angry lady in
the case, who wore nodding poppies in her hat and had an immense
rectangular bust and hips like brackets, but it was pleasant to murmur,
"Oh, but he was speaking the truth. I'm quite comfortably off. I've come
to pay the jeweller," and watch the look of amazement on the hot,
high-coloured face giving place to anger and regret as it penetrated
into her that she had really had the chance of marrying a wealthy man,
and that after the things she had said that chance would be hers no
longer. Marion liked hurting the girl because she had hurt Roger. Marion
felt with satisfaction that the pleasure was a feeling a mother ought to
feel.
She liked, too, going into the jeweller's shop and sitting there under
the goggling eyes of the tradesman and speaking in the right leisurely
voice that she had learned from her lover: "Yes, but I don't want you to
take them back. I want to pay for them. There seems to have been some
misunderstanding. There is no difficulty about the money at all. My son
only wanted you to wait till his quarter's allowance came. I have the
money here in notes. If you would count it...." She was playing a
mother's part well; and she rejoiced because the jeweller's eyes were
examining with approval and conviction her beautiful clothes. For she
had begun lately to take great pains over her dressing, partly because
it was pleasant for her who was so smirched with criticism both from
within and without to be above reproach in any matter, but mostly
because she liked to look well in Richard's eyes; that this had served
Roger's end seemed to lift from her a part of her guilt. She hurried
back to give Roger the receipt, and took him in her arms and rocked him
as he sobbed out his ridiculous story: "Oh, mummie, I never would have
done it if I hadn't gone mad. You see, mummie, Queenie's such a glorious
woman...."
But the soul has the keenest ears of any eavesdropper. He sat up
suddenly and lifted her arms off his shoulders and looked at her with
pale, desperate eyes. She clapped her hand across her face and then took
it away again, and said softly: "What is it, dear?" But he had sunk into
a stupor, and had dropped his protruding gaze on the pattern of the
oilcloth on the floor, which he was tracing with the toe of his boot.
She could get nothing out of him. He obviously did not want her to stay
two or three days with him, as she had proposed to do, but, on the other
hand, he said over and over again as they waited on the platform for her
train, "Mummie, I do love you, mummie. I do love you. And thank you,
mummie...." But she knew that these alterations and inconsistencies of
his mood did not matter to their lives any more than the pitch and roll
of a steamer travelling through rough weather affects its course. For
since that moment when he had stared into her eyes and seen she did not
love him she had known that somewhere, far off, beyond time and space,
there had been set a light to the fuse of that event which she had
always feared ... the event that would destroy them all....
But had it? For after all, nothing dreadful had happened. Roger had
written to her the next day telling her that he would not take his
allowance any more because he did not think he deserved it, and he must
try and be a man and shift for himself, and saying that he was taking a
situation in another town which he did not name. That was the last they
heard of him for a long time, for he came no more to Roothing for his
holidays. Presently, with an exultant sense of release, but with an
increasing liability to bad dreams, she went abroad to join Richard, at
first at the post he held at the Romanones Mines in Andalusia, and then
in Rio de Janeiro. There she was happy. She was one of those Northerners
to whom the South belongs far more truly than it does to any of its
natives. For over those the sun has had power since their birth,
consuming their marrows and evaporating their blood so that they became
pithless things that have to fly indoors for half the day and leave the
Southern sun blazing insolently on the receptive Southern earth. But
with blood cooled and nerves stabilised by youth spent on the edge of
the grey sea, she could outface all foreign seasons. She could walk
across the silent plaza when its dust lay dazzling white under the
heat-pale sky and the city slept; the days of heavy rain and potent
pervasive dampness pleased her by their prodigiousness; and when the
thunderstorm planted vast momentary trees of lightning in the night she
was pleased, as if she was watching someone do easily what she had
always impotently desired to do.
And Richard was so wonderful to watch in this new setting that matched
his beauty, easily establishing his dominion over the world as he had
established it over her being from the moment of his conception. There
was a conflict raging in him which, since it never resulted in
hesitancy, but in simultaneous snatchings at life by both of the warring
forces, gave him the appearance of the calmest exultation. He loved
riding and dancing and gambling so much that his face was cruel when he
did those things, as if he would kill anybody who tried to interrupt him
in his pleasure. But he gave the core of his passion to his work and
disciplined all his days to the routine of the laboratory, so that he
was always cool and remote like a priest. It gave him pleasure to be
insolent as rich men are, but all his insolence was in the interests of
fineness and humility. He was ambitious, so fastidious about the quality
of his work that he rejected half the world's offers to him. And always
he turned aside from his victories and smiled secretively at her, as if
they were two exiles who had returned under false names to the country
that had banished them and were earning great honours. She wished this
life could go on for ever.
But one day Richard came to her as she sat in the dense sweetness of the
flowering orange grove and tossed a letter into her lap. She did not
open it for a little, but lay and looked at Richard through her lashes.
His swarthiness was burned by the sun, and his body was slim like an
Indian's in his white suit, and his lips and his eyes were deceitful and
satisfied, as they always were when he had been with Mariquita de Rojas.
That did not arouse any moral feeling in her, because she did not think
of Richard's actions as being good or bad, but only as being different
in colour and lustre, like the various kinds of jewels; there are
pearls, and there are emeralds. But it made her feel lonely, and she
turned soberly to opening her letter. It was from Roger. He was in
trouble; he had been out of a job for some months; his savings were
gone, and the woman was bothering for her rent; he asked for help. At
first she did not think that she would tell Richard, but recognising
that that was a subtle form of disloyalty to Roger, she said evenly:
"Richard, how can I cable money to Roger? He wants it quickly. And,
Richard, I think I should go home and look after him." Richard had set
his eyes on the far heat-throbbing seas and, after a moment's quivering
silence, had broken into curses. "Oh, don't speak of poor Roger like
that!" she had cried out, and he had answered terribly: "I'm not
speaking of him; I'm speaking of my father, who let you in for all
this." She had muttered protestingly, but because of the hatred in his
face she was not brave enough to tell him that she had made her peace
with his father before he died. Not even for Harry's sake would she
imperil the love between her and her son.
She had gone home a few months later, but, of course, it had been
useless. Roger would never come back to live with her. All she could do
was to sit at Yaverland's End, ready to receive him when he turned up,
as he always did when he had got a new post, to boast of how well he was
going to do in the future. Usually on these occasions he brought her a
present, something queer that wrung the heart because it revealed the
humility of his conception of the desirable; perhaps a glass jar of
preserved fruit salad which had evidently impressed him as looking
magnificent when he saw it in the grocer's shop. She would kiss him
gratefully for it, though every time he came back he was more like the
grey and hopeless men, cousins to the rats, who hang round cab-ranks in
cities.
A regular routine followed these visits. First he wrote happy letters
home every Sunday; then he ceased to write so often; then there was
silence; and then he wrote asking for help, because he had lost his job
and owed money to the landlady. Then she would seek him out, wherever he
was, and pay the landlady, who was usually well enough disposed towards
Roger unless he had tried to win her affections by being handy about the
house, in which case there were extra charges for the plumber and an
irremovable feeling of exasperation. And she would ask him to come home
with her, and not bother about working, but just be a companion to her.
At that, however, he always slowly shook his small, mouse-coloured head.
For he was still not quite sure ... and he feared that he might become
so if he went back and lived with her. As things were, he could
interpret her prompt answer to his call as a sign of affection.
Moreover, he had his poor little pride, which was not a negligible
quality; he never would have sent to her for money if he had not felt so
sorry for his landladies. To admit that he could not earn a bare living
when his brother was making himself one of the lords of the earth would
have broken his spirit.
Knowing these things, she could not beg him over-much to come to her,
but that left dreadfully little to say in the hours they had to spend
together on these occasions. There fell increasingly moments of silence
when, unreminded by his piteousness and her obligations by the good
little pipe of her voice, she was aware of nothing but his
unpleasantness. For he was becoming more and more physically horrible.
As was natural when he lived in these mean lodgings, he was beginning
to look, if not actually dirty, at least unwashed; and there was
something else about his appearance, something tarnished and
disgraceful, which she could not understand till the landlady at
Leicester said to her: "I do think it's such a pity that a nice young
man like Mr. Peacey sometimes don't take more care of himself like he
ought to." Drunkenness seemed to her worse than anything in the world,
because it meant the surrender of dignity; she would rather have had her
son a murderer than a drunkard. She had wondered if the truth need ever
reach Richard, and there had floated before her mind's eye a newspaper
paragraph: "Roger Peacey, described as a clerk, fined forty shillings
for being drunk and disorderly and obstructing the police in the course
of their duty...." She had asked quickly, "What is he like? Does he get
violent?" The woman had answered: "Oh no, mum; just silly-like," and had
laughed, evidently at the recollection of some ridiculous scene.
Oh God, oh God! When she struggled out of her bad dreams she awoke to
something that, having had this confirmation, was now no longer fear,
but a shudder under the breath of a stooping, searching evil. She had
always known that the existence of Richard and herself and Roger was
conditional upon their maintenance of a flawless behaviour. There was
somewhere in the dark conspiring ether that wraps the world an intention
to destroy her for her presumption in being Richard's mother and him for
daring to be Richard--an intention that was vindictive against beauty
and yet was fettered by a harsh quality resembling justice. It could not
strike until they themselves became tainted with unworthiness and fit
for destruction. Now they had become tainted. She knew that Roger's
drunkenness would be obscenely without dignity; she knew that she would
side with her triumphant son and against her son who needed her pity.
They would all be unworthy and they would all be destroyed. Nothingness
would swallow up her Richard. To free herself from her fear she leaped
out of bed and ran to the window, and stared on the white creeks that
lay under the moonlight among the dark marsh islands with a brightness
that seemed like ecstasy, as if they were receiving pleasure from it.
Her thoughts ran along the hillside to the man who lay high above and
excluded from this glittering world in his marble tomb. "Oh, Harry," she
cried, "I'm not blaming you, but if you'd stuck to me it would have been
so different...."
If he had been loyal to her she would have awakened now in a great
house, with many rooms in which, breathing deeply and evenly, there
slept beautiful people who had begun their being in her womb. Harry
would not have died if he had been with her. The procreative genius of
her body would have kept him in life to give her more. Her last-born
child would still have been quite young. It was to him she would have
gone now; if she had wakened she would have found him in the end room, a
boy fair as his father, and having the same look of integrity in joy, of
immunity from sorrow or profound thinking. She would have watched his
face, infantile and pugnacious with dreams of the day's game, until she
longed too strongly to touch him and kiss him. Then she would have
turned and went back along the corridor, between the glorious young men
and women who lay restoring their might for the morrow, not one of them
threatened, not one of them doomed....
Love could have made that of her life if it had not been beaten away.
The thought was bitter. She stared with thin lips at the happy gleaming
tides until it struck her suddenly that love had come back into her
house. It was here now, attending on the red-haired girl, and it would
not be beaten off; it would be cherished, it would be given sacrifices.
Surely if it could have made beautiful her own life, which without it
had been so hideous, it could exorcise Richard's destiny. She fixed her
eyes on the high moon and said as if in prayer, "Ellen.... Ellen...."
There sounded, in the recesses of the house, the ping of an electric
bell.
She looked at the clock by her bedside. It was three o'clock. She said
to herself, with that air of irony which people to whom many strange
things have happened assume when they fear that yet another is
approaching, so that they shall not flatter Fate by their perturbation,
"It's late for anyone to call."
But the ping sounded again; and then the thud of blows upon the door.
She cried out, "Ah, yes!" She knew who it was. It was Roger, come in
rags, come in an idiot hope of escaping justice, after some fatuous and
squalid crime, to destroy Richard and herself. She hurried over to her
wardrobe and drew out her warm dressing-gown and thrust her feet into
slippers, while her lips practised saying lovingly, "Roger, Roger,
Roger! ... Why, it's you, Roger!... Come in. Come in, my boy.... What is
it, my poor lad?..."
She went down through the quiet house and laid her fingers on the handle
of the door; delayed for a moment, and raised her hand to her face and
smoothed from it certain lines of loathing. Bowing her head, she
murmured a remonstrance to some power.
But when she opened the door it was Richard who stood there.