At last one day he had the happiness of possession again. He had exactly
the sensation one gets when some hitherto intractable piece of a machine
one is putting together, clicks neatly and beyond all hoping, into its
place. He found himself working in the old style, with the hours
slipping by disregarded. He sent out Durgan to get him tobacco and tea
and smoked-salmon sandwiches, and he stayed in the laboratory all night.
He went home about half-past five, and found a white-faced, red-eyed
Marjorie still dressed, wrapped in a travelling-rug, and crumpled and
asleep in his study arm-chair beside the grey ashes of an extinct fire.
In the instant before she awoke he could see what a fragile and pitiful
being a healthy and happy young wife can appear. Her pose revealed an
unsuspected slender weakness of body, her face something infantile and
wistful he had still to reckon with. She awoke with a start and stared
at him for a moment, and at the room about her. "Oh, where have you
been?" she asked almost querulously. "Where _have_ you been?"
"But my dear!" he said, as one might speak to a child, "why aren't you
in bed? It's just dawn."
"Oh," she said, "I waited and I waited. It seemed you _must_ come. I
read a book. And then I fell asleep." And then with a sob of feeble
self-pity, "And here I am!" She rubbed the back of her hand into one eye
and shivered. "I'm cold," she said, "and I want some tea."
"Let's make some," said Trafford.
"It's been horrible waiting," said Marjorie without moving; "horrible!
Where have you been?"
"I've been working. I got excited by my work. I've been at the
laboratory. I've had the best spell of work I've ever had since our
marriage."
"But I have been up all night!" she cried with her face and voice
softening to tears. "How _could_ you? How _could_ you?"
He was surprised by her weeping. He was still more surprised by the
self-abandonment that allowed her to continue. "I've been working," he
repeated, and then looked about with a man's helplessness for the tea
apparatus. One must have hot water and a teapot and a kettle; he would
find those in the kitchen. He strolled thoughtfully out of the room,
thinking out the further details of tea-making all mixed up with
amazement at Marjorie, while she sat wiping her eyes with a crumpled
pocket-handkerchief. Presently she followed him down with the rug about
her like a shawl, and stood watching him as he lit a fire of wood and
paper among the ashes in the kitchen fireplace. "It's been dreadful,"
she said, not offering to help.
"You see," he said, on his knees, "I'd really got hold of my work at
last."
"But you should have sent----"
"I was thinking of my work. I clean forgot."
"Forgot?"
"Absolutely."
"Forgot--_me!_"
"Of course," said Trafford, with a slightly puzzled air, "you don't see
it as I do."
The kettle engaged him for a time. Then he threw out a suggestion.
"We'll have to have a telephone."
"I couldn't imagine where you were. I thought of all sorts of things. I
almost came round--but I was so horribly afraid I mightn't find you."
He renewed his suggestion of a telephone.
"So that if I really want you----" said Marjorie. "Or if I just want to
feel you're there."
"Yes," said Trafford slowly, jabbing a piece of firewood into the glow;
but it was chiefly present in his mind that much of that elaborate
experimenting of his wasn't at all a thing to be cut athwart by the
exasperating gusts of a telephone bell clamouring for attention.
Hitherto the laboratory telephone had been in the habit of disconnecting
itself early in the afternoon.
And yet after all it was this instrument, the same twisted wire and
little quivering tympanum, that had brought back Marjorie into his life.