Anne and her husband walked home in silence across the Park, grateful for
its darkness. Majendie could well imagine that she would not want to
talk. He made allowance for her repulsion; he respected it and her
silence as its sign. She had every right to her resentment. He had let
her in for the Hannays, who had let her in for the inconceivable
encounter. On the day of her divorce Sarah Cayley had removed herself
from Scale, and he had shrunk from providing for the supreme
embarrassment of her return. He had looked on her as definitely,
consummately departed. She had disappeared, down dingy vistas, into
unimaginable obscurities. He pictured her as sunk, in Continental
abysses, beyond all possibility of resurgence. And she had emerged (from
abominations) smiling that indestructible smile. The incident had been
unpleasant, so unpleasant that he didn't want to talk about it. All the
same, he would have done violence to his feelings and apologised for it
then and there, but that he really judged it better to let well alone. It
was well, he thought, that Anne was so silent. She might have had a great
deal to say, and it was kind of her not to say it, to let him off so
easily.
Anne's interpretation of Majendie's silence was not so favourable. After
being exposed to the pain and insult of Lady Cayley's presence she had
expected an immediate apology, and she inferred from its omission an
unpardonable complicity. Any compliance with the public toleration of
that person would have been inexcusable, and he had been more than
compliant, more than tolerant; he had been solicitous, attentive,
deferent. And deference to such a woman was insolence to his wife. Anne
was struck dumb by the shameless levity of the proceedings. The two had
behaved as if nothing had happened, or rather (she bitterly corrected
herself) as if everything had happened, and might happen any day again
(she inferred as much from his silence). It would--it would happen. _Her_
intentions were, to Anne's mind, unmistakable; that was plainly what she
had come back for. As to his intentions, Anne was not yet clear. She had
not made up her mind that they were bad; but she shuddered as she said to
herself that he was "weak." He had come at that woman's call; he had hung
round her; he had waited on her at her bidding; at her bidding he had sat
down beside her; he had listened to her, attracted, charmed, delighted;
he had talked to her in the low voice Anne knew. How could she tell what
had or had not passed between them there, what intimacies, what
recognitions, what resurrections of the corrupt, ill-buried past? He had
been "weak--weak--weak." Henceforth she must reckon with his weakness,
and reckoning with it, she must keep him from that woman by any method,
and at any cost! It was something that he had the grace to be ashamed of
himself (another inference from his silence). No wonder, after that
communion, if he was ashamed to look at his wife or speak to her.
He went straight to Edith when they reached home, and Anne went upstairs
to her bedroom.
She had a great desire to be alone. She wanted to pray, as she had
prayed in that room at Scarby on the morning of her discovery. Not that
she felt in the least as she had felt then. She was more profoundly
wounded--wounded beyond passion and beyond tears, calm and self-contained
in her vision of the inevitable, the fore-ordained reality. She had to
get rid of her vision; it was impossible to live with it, impossible to
live through another hour like the last. Her desire to pray was a
terrible, urgent longing that consumed her, impatient of every minute
that kept her from her prayer. She controlled it, moving slowly as she
took off her outdoor clothes and put them decorously away; feeling that
the force of her prayer gathered and mounted behind these minute
obstructions and delays.
She knelt down by her bed. She had been used to pray there with her eyes
fixed upon the crucifix which he had given her. It hung low, almost
between the pillows of their bed. Now she closed her eyes to shut it from
her sight. It was then that she realised what had been done to her. With
the closing of her eyes she opened some back room in her brain, a hot
room, now dark, and now charged with a red light, vaporous and vivid,
that ran in furious pulses, as it were the currents of her blood made
visible. The room thus opened was tenanted by the revolting image of Lady
Cayley. Now it loomed steadily in the dark, now it leapt quiveringly into
the red, vaporous light. She could not see her husband, but she had a
sickening sense that he was there, looming, and that his image, too,
would leap into sight at some signal of her unwilling thought. She knew
that that back room would remain, built up indestructibly in the fabric
of her mind. It would be set apart for ever for the phantom of her
husband and her husband's mistress. By a tremendous effort of will she
shut the door on it. There it must be for ever, but wherever she looked,
she would not look there; much less allow herself to dwell in the unclean
place. It was not to think of that woman, his mistress, that she had gone
down on her knees. To think of her was contamination. After all, the
woman had no power over her inner life. She was not forced to think of
her. She had her sanctuary and her way of escape.
But before she could get there she had to struggle against the fatigue
which came of her effort not to think. Once she would have resigned
herself to this physical lassitude, mistaking it for the sinking of the
soul in the beatific self-surrender. But Anne's sufferings had brought
her a little further on her path. She had come to recognise that supine
state as a great danger to the spiritual life. It was not by lassitude,
but by concentration that the intense communion was attained. She lifted
her bowed head as a sign of her exaltation.
And as she lifted it, she caught, as it were, the approach of triumphal
music. Words gathered, as on wings, from the clean-swept heavenly
spaces--they went by her like the passing of an immense processional:
"Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting
doors, and the King of Glory shall come in...." It came on, that heavenly
invasion, and all her earthly barriers went down before it. And it was as
if something strong in her, something solitary and pure, had cloven its
way through the mesh of the throbbing nerves, through the beating
currents of the blood, through the hot red lights of the brain, and had
escaped into the peaceful blank. She remained there a moment, in the
place of bliss, the divine place of the self-surrendered soul, where
mortal emptiness draws down immortality.
She said to herself, "I have my refuge; no one can take it from me.
Nothing matters so long as I can get there."
She rose from her knees more calm and self-contained than ever, barely
conscious of her wound.
So calm and so self-contained was she at dinner that Majendie had an
agreeable rebound; he supposed that she had recovered from the abominable
encounter, and had put Lady Cayley out of her head like a sensible woman.
Edith had received his account of that incident with a gravity that had
made him profoundly uncomfortable; and his relief was in proportion to
his embarrassment. Unfortunately it gave him the appearance of
complacency; and complacency in the circumstances was more than Anne
could bear. Coming straight from her exaltation and communion, she was
crushed by the profound, invisible difference that separated them, the
perpetual loneliness of her unwedded, unsubjugated soul. They lived a
whole earth and a whole heaven apart. He was untouched by the fires that
burnt and purified her. The tragic crises that destroyed, the spiritual
moments that built her up again, passed by him unperceived. If she were
to tell him how she had attained her present serenity of mind, by what
vision, by what effort, by what sundering of body and soul, he would not
understand.
And that was not the worst. She had learnt not to look for that spiritual
understanding in him. It mattered little that her unique suffering and
her unique consolation should remain alike ignored. The terrible thing
was that he should have come out of his own ordeal so smiling and so
unconcerned; that he could have sinned as he had sinned, and that he
could meet, after seven years, in his wife's presence, the partner of his
sin (whose face was a revelation of its grossness)--meet her, and not be
shaken by the shame of it. It showed how lightly he held it, how low his
standard was. She recalled, shuddering, the woman's face. Nothing in the
visions she had so shrunk from could compare with the violent reality.
For one moment of repulsion she saw him no less gross. She wondered,
would she have to reckon with that, henceforth, too?
She looked up, and met across the table the engaging innocence that she
recognised as the habitual expression of his face. He had no idea of what
dreadful things she was thinking of him. She put her thoughts from her,
admitting that she had never had to reckon with that, yet. But it was
terrible to her that, while he forced her to such thinking, he could sit
there so unconscious, and so unashamed. He sat there, bright-eyed,
smiling, a little flushed, playing with a light topic in a manner that
suggested a conscience singularly at ease. He went on sitting there,
absolutely unembarrassed, eating dessert. The eating of dinner was bad
enough, it showed complacency. But dessert argued callousness. She had
wondered how he could have any appetite at all. Her dinner had almost
choked her.
And she sat waiting for him to finish, hardly looking at him, detached,
saint-like, and still.
At last her silence struck him as a little ominous. He had distinct
misgivings as they turned into the study for coffee and his cigarette.
Anne sat up in her chair, refusing the support and luxury of cushions,
leaning a little forward with a brooding air.
"Well, Nancy," said he, "are you going to read to me?"
(Better to read than talk.)
"Not now," said she. "I want to talk to you."
He saw that it was not to be avoided. "Won't you let me have my coffee
and a cigarette first?"
She waited, silent, with a strained air of patience more uncomfortable
than words.
"Well," said he, lighting a second cigarette, and settling in the
position that would best enable him to bear it, "out with it, and get it
over."
"I want to know," said she, "what you are going to do."
"To do?" He was genuinely bewildered.
"Yes, to do."
"But about what?"
"About that woman."
He was so charmed with the angelic absurdity of the question that he
paused while he took it in, smiling.
"I can't see," he said presently, "that I'm called upon to take action.
Why should I?"
She drew herself up proudly.
"For my sake."
He was instantly grave. "For your sake, dear, I would do a great deal.
But"--he smiled again--"what action should I take?"
"Is it for me to say?"
"Well, I hardly know. I should be glad, at any rate, if you'd make a
suggestion. I can't, for instance, get up and turn the lady out of her
own sister's house. Do you want me to do that? Would you like me to--to
take her away in a cab?"
There was a long silence, so awful that he forced himself to speak. "I am
extremely sorry. It was, of course, outrageous that you should have had
to sit in the same room with her for five minutes. But what could I do?"
"You could have taken _me_ away."
"I did, as soon as I got the chance."
"Not before you had"--she paused for her phrase--"condoned her
appearance."
"Condoned her appearance? How?"
"By your whole manner to her."
"Would you have had me uncivil?"
"There are degrees," said she, "between incivility and marked attention."
He coloured. "Marked attention! There was nothing marked about it. What
could I do? Would you, I say, have had me turn my back on the unfortunate
woman? That would have been marked attention, if you like."
"I don't know what I would have had you do. One has no rules beforehand
for inconceivable situations. It was inconceivable that I should have met
her as I did, in your friend's house. Inconceivable that I should meet
such people anywhere. What I do ask is that you will not let me be
exposed in that way again."
"That I certainly will not. The Ransomes did their best to get her out
of the room to-day. They won't annoy you. I can't conceive why they
called--except that they have always been rather fond of me. You can't
hold people accountable for all the doings of all their relations, can
you?"
"In this case I should say you could--perfectly well."
"Well, I don't, as it happens. But you needn't have anything to do with
them; not, at least, while she's living in their house."
"It was in the Hannays' house I met her. But I'm not thinking of myself."
"I'm thinking of you, and of nothing else."
"You needn't," said she, cold to his warmth. "I can take care of myself.
It's you I'm thinking of."
"Me? Why me?"
"Because I'm your wife and have a right to. It's out of the question that
I should call on Mrs. Hannay or receive her calls. I must also beg of you
to give up going there, and to the Ransomes, and to every place where you
will be brought into contact with Lady Cayley."
He stared at her in amazement. "My dear girl, you don't expect me to cut
the Ransomes because she isn't brute enough to turn her sister out of
doors?"
"I expect you to give up going to them, and to the Hannays, as long as
Lady Cayley is in Scale. Promise me."
"I can't promise you anything of the sort. Heaven knows how long she's
going to stay."
"I ought not to have to explain that by countenancing her you insult me.
You should see it for yourself."
"I can't see it. In the first place, with all due regard to you, I don't
insult you by countenancing her, as you call it. In the second place, I
don't countenance her by going into other people's houses. If I went into
her house, you might complain. She hasn't got a house, poor lady."
She ignored his pity. "In spite of your regard for me, then, you will
continue to meet her?"
"I shan't if I can help it. But if I must, I must. I can't be rude to
people."
"You can be firm."
He laughed. "What have I got to be firm about?"
"Not meeting her."
"What if I do meet her? I sincerely hope I shan't; but what if I do?"
Her mouth trembled; her eyes filled with tears. He sprang up and leaned
over her, resting his arms on the back of her chair, bringing his face
close to hers and smiling into her eyes.
"No--no--no!" She drew back her head and shrank away from him. He put out
his hand and turned her face to him, gazing into her eyes, as if for the
first time he saw and could fathom the sorrow and the fear in them.
"What if I do?" he repeated.
She tried to push his hand from her, but she could not.
"You stupid child," he said, "do you mean to say that you're still afraid
of that?"
"It's you who have made me--"
"My sweetheart--"
"No, no. Don't touch me."
"What do you mean?" he asked gravely, still leaning over and looking down
at her.
"I mean--I mean--I can't bear it!" she cried, gasping for breath under
the oppression of his nearness.
He realised her repugnance, and removed himself.
"Do you mean," he said, "because of her?"
"Yes," she said, "because of her."
He laughed softly. "Dear child--she doesn't exist. She doesn't exist." He
swept her out of existence with a gesture of his hand. "Not for me at any
rate."
The emphasis was lost upon her. "It's all nonsense to talk in that way.
If she doesn't exist for you, you shouldn't have gone near her, you
shouldn't have sat talking--to her."
"What do you suppose we were talking about?"
"I don't know. I don't want to know. I saw and heard enough."
"Look here, Anne. You wanted me to be rude to her, didn't you? I _was_
rude. I was brutal. She had to remind me that she was a woman. By heaven,
I'd forgotten it. If you're always to be going back on that--"
"I'm not going back. She has come back."
"It doesn't matter. She doesn't exist. What difference does she make?"
She rose for better delivery of what she had to say.
"She makes the whole difference. It's not that I'm afraid of her. I don't
think I am. I believe that you love me."
"Ah--if you believe that--" He came nearer.
"I do believe it. It's to me that it makes the difference. I must be
honest with you. It's not that I'm afraid. It is--I think--that I'm
disgusted."
He lowered his eyes and moved from her uneasily.
"I was horrified enough when I first knew of it, as you know. You know,
too, that I forgave you, and that I forgot. That was because I didn't
realise it. I didn't know what it was. I couldn't before I had seen her.
Now I have seen her, and I know."
"What do you know?" he said coldly.
"The awfulness of it."
"Do you! Do you!"
"Yes--and if you had realised it yourself--But you don't, and your not
realising it is what shocks me most."
"I don't realise it?" His smile, this time, was grim. "I should think I
was in a better position for realising it than you."
"You don't realise the shame, the sin of it"
"Oh, don't I?" He turned to her, "Look here, whatever I've done, it's all
over. I've taken my punishment, and repented in sackcloth and ashes. But
you can't go on for ever repenting. It wears you out. It seems to me
that, after all this time, I might be allowed to leave off the sackcloth
and brush the ashes out of my hair. I want to forget it if I can. But you
are never--never--going to forget it. And you are going to make me
remember it every day of my life. Is that it?"
"It is not." She could not see herself thus hard and implacable. She had
vowed that there was no duty that she would omit; and it was her duty to
forgive; if possible, to forget. "I am going to try to forget it, as I
have forgotten it before. But it will be very hard, and you must be
patient with me. You must not remind me of it more than you can help."
"When have I--?"
She was silent.
"When?" he insisted.
She shook her head and turned away. A sudden impulse roused him, and he
sprang after her. He grasped her wrist as she laid her hand on the door
to open it. He drew her to him. "When?" he repeated. "How? Tell me."
She paused, gazing at him. He would have kissed her, hoping thus to make
his peace with her; but she broke from him.
"Ah," she cried, "you are reminding me of it now."
He opened the door, dumb with amazement, and turned from her as she went
through.