There was nobody in the orchard. Harriott Leigh went out, carefully,
through the iron gate into the field. She had made the latch slip into
its notch without a sound.
The path slanted widely up the field from the orchard gate to the stile
under the elder tree. George Waring waited for her there.
Years afterwards, when she thought of George Waring she smelt the sweet,
hot, wine-scent of the elder flowers. Years afterwards, when she smelt
elder flowers she saw George Waring, with his beautiful, gentle face,
like a poet’s or a musician’s, his black-blue eyes, and sleek,
olive-brown hair. He was a naval lieutenant.
Yesterday he had asked her to marry him and she had consented. But her
father hadn’t, and she had come to tell him that and say good-bye before
he left her. His ship was to sail the next day.
He was eager and excited. He couldn’t believe that anything could stop
their happiness, that anything he didn’t want to happen could happen.
“Well?” he said.
“He’s a perfect beast, George. He won’t let us. He says we’re too
young.”
“I was twenty last August,” he said, aggrieved.
[Illustration]
“And I shall be seventeen in September.”
“And this is June. We’re quite old, really. How long does he mean us to
wait?”
“Three years.”
“Three years before we can be engaged even— Why, we might be dead.”
She put her arms round him to make him feel safe. They kissed; and the
sweet, hot, wine-scent of the elder flowers mixed with their kisses.
They stood, pressed close together, under the elder tree.
Across the yellow fields of charlock they heard the village clock strike
seven. Up in the house a gong clanged.
“Darling, I must go,” she said.
“Oh stay—Stay _five_ minutes.”
He pressed her close. It lasted five minutes, and five more. Then he was
running fast down the road to the station, while Harriott went along the
field-path, slowly, struggling with her tears.
“He’ll be back in three months,” she said. “I can live through three
months.”
But he never came back. There was something wrong with the engines of
his ship, the _Alexandra_. Three weeks later she went down in the
Mediterranean, and George with her.
Harriott said she didn’t care how soon she died now. She was quite sure
it would be soon, because she couldn’t live without him.
Five years passed.
[Illustration]
The two lines of beech trees stretched on and on, the whole length of
the Park, a broad green drive between. When you came to the middle they
branched off right and left in the form of a cross, and at the end of
the right arm there was a white stucco pavilion with pillars and a
three-cornered pediment like a Greek temple. At the end of the left arm,
the west entrance to the Park, double gates and a side door.
Harriott, on her stone seat at the back of the pavilion, could see
Stephen Philpotts the very minute he came through the side door.
He had asked her to wait for him there. It was the place he always chose
to read his poems aloud in. The poems were a pretext. She knew what he
was going to say. And she knew what she would answer.
There were elder bushes in flower at the back of the pavilion, and
Harriott thought of George Waring. She told herself that George was
nearer to her now than he could ever have been, living. If she married
Stephen she would not be unfaithful, because she loved him with another
part of herself. It was not as though Stephen were taking George’s
place. She loved Stephen with her soul, in an unearthly way.
But her body quivered like a stretched wire when the door opened and the
young man came towards her down the drive under the beech trees.
She loved him; she loved his slenderness, his darkness and sallow
whiteness, his black eyes lighting up with the intellectual flame, the
way his black hair swept back from his forehead, the way he walked,
tiptoe, as if his feet were lifted with wings.
He sat down beside her. She could see his hands tremble. She felt that
her moment was coming; it had come.
“I wanted to see you alone because there’s something I must say to you.
I don’t quite know how to begin....”
Her lips parted. She panted lightly.
“You’ve heard me speak of Sybill Foster?”
Her voice came stammering, “N-no, Stephen. Did you?”
“Well, I didn’t mean to, till I knew it was all right. I only heard
yesterday.”
“Heard what?”
“Why, that she’ll have me. Oh, Harriott—do you know what it’s like to be
terribly happy?”
She knew. She had known just now, the moment before he told her. She sat
there, stone-cold and stiff, listening to his raptures; listening to her
own voice saying she was glad.
Ten years passed.
* * * * *
Harriott Leigh sat waiting in the drawing-room of a small house in Maida
Vale. She had lived there ever since her father’s death two years
before.
She was restless. She kept on looking at the clock to see if it was
four, the hour that Oscar Wade had appointed. She was not sure that he
would come, after she had sent him away yesterday.
She now asked herself, why, when she had sent him away yesterday, she
had let him come to-day. Her motives were not altogether clear. If she
really meant what she had said then, she oughtn’t to let him come to her
again. Never again.
She had shown him plainly what she meant. She could see herself, sitting
very straight in her chair, uplifted by a passionate integrity, while he
stood before her, hanging his head, ashamed and beaten; she could feel
again the throb in her voice as she kept on saying that she couldn’t,
she couldn’t; he must see that she couldn’t; that no, nothing would make
her change her mind; she couldn’t forget he had a wife; that he must
think of Muriel.
To which he had answered savagely: “I needn’t. That’s all over. We only
live together for the look of the thing.”
And she, serenely, with great dignity: “And for the look of the thing,
Oscar, we must leave off seeing each other. Please go.”
“Do you mean it?”
“Yes. We must never see each other again.”
And he had gone then, ashamed and beaten.
She could see him, squaring his broad shoulders to meet the blow. And
she was sorry for him. She told herself she had been unnecessarily hard.
Why shouldn’t they see each other again, now he understood where they
must draw the line? Until yesterday the line had never been very clearly
drawn. To-day she meant to ask him to forget what he had said to her.
Once it was forgotten, they could go on being friends as if nothing had
happened.
It was four o’clock. Half-past. Five. She had finished tea and given him
up when, between the half-hour and six o’clock, he came.
[Illustration]
He came as he had come a dozen times, with his measured, deliberate,
thoughtful tread, carrying himself well braced, with a sort of held-in
arrogance, his great shoulders heaving. He was a man of about forty,
broad and tall, lean-flanked and short-necked, his straight, handsome
features showing small and even in the big square face and in the flush
that swamped it. The close-clipped, reddish-brown moustache bristled
forwards from the pushed-out upper lip. His small, flat eyes shone,
reddish-brown, eager and animal.
She liked to think of him when he was not there, but always at the first
sight of him she felt a slight shock. Physically, he was very far from
her admired ideal. So different from George Waring and Stephen
Philpotts.
He sat down, facing her.
There was an embarrassed silence, broken by Oscar Wade.
“Well, Harriott, you said I could come.” He seemed to be throwing the
responsibility on her.
“So I suppose you’ve forgiven me,” he said.
“Oh, yes, Oscar, I’ve forgiven you.”
He said she’d better show it by coming to dine with him somewhere that
evening.
She could give no reason to herself for going. She simply went.
He took her to a restaurant in Soho. Oscar Wade dined well, even
extravagantly, giving each dish its importance. She liked his
extravagance. He had none of the mean virtues.
It was over. His flushed, embarrassed silence told her what he was
thinking. But when he had seen her home he left her at her garden gate.
He had thought better of it.
She was not sure whether she were glad or sorry. She had had her moment
of righteous exaltation and she had enjoyed it. But there was no joy in
the weeks that followed it. She had given up Oscar Wade because she
didn’t want him very much; and now she wanted him furiously, perversely,
because she had given him up. Though he had no resemblance to her ideal,
she couldn’t live without him.
She dined with him again and again, till she knew Schnebler’s Restaurant
by heart, the white panelled walls picked out with gold; the white
pillars, and the curling gold fronds of their capitals; the Turkey
carpets, blue and crimson, soft under her feet; the thick crimson velvet
cushions, that clung to her skirts; the glitter of silver and glass on
the innumerable white circles of the tables. And the faces of the
diners, red, white, pink, brown, grey and sallow, distorted and excited;
the curled mouths that twisted as they ate; the convoluted electric
bulbs pointing, pointing down at them, under the red, crinkled shades.
All shimmering in a thick air that the red light stained as wine stains
water.
And Oscar’s face, flushed with his dinner. Always, when he leaned back
from the table and brooded in silence she knew what he was thinking. His
heavy eyelids would lift; she would find his eyes fixed on hers,
wondering, considering.
She knew now what the end would be. She thought of George Waring, and
Stephen Philpotts, and of her life, cheated. She hadn’t chosen Oscar,
she hadn’t really wanted him; but now he had forced himself on her she
couldn’t afford to let him go. Since George died no man had loved her,
no other man ever would. And she was sorry for him when she thought of
him going from her, beaten and ashamed.
She was certain, before he was, of the end. Only she didn’t know when
and where and how it would come. That was what Oscar knew.
It came at the close of one of their evenings when they had dined in a
private sitting-room. He said he couldn’t stand the heat and noise of
the public restaurant.
She went before him, up a steep, red-carpeted stair to a white door on
the second landing.
From time to time they repeated the furtive, hidden adventure. Sometimes
she met him in the room above Schnebler’s. Sometimes, when her maid was
out, she received him at her house in Maida Vale. But that was
dangerous, not to be risked too often.
Oscar declared himself unspeakably happy. Harriott was not quite sure.
This was love, the thing she had never had, that she had dreamed of,
hungered and thirsted for; but now she had it she was not satisfied.
Always she looked for something just beyond it, some mystic, heavenly
rapture, always beginning to come, that never came. There was something
about Oscar that repelled her. But because she had taken him for her
lover, she couldn’t bring herself to admit that it was a certain
coarseness. She looked another way and pretended it wasn’t there. To
justify herself, she fixed her mind on his good qualities, his
generosity, his strength, the way he had built up his engineering
business. She made him take her over his works and show her his great
dynamos. She made him lend her the books he read. But always, when she
tried to talk to him, he let her see that _that_ wasn’t what she was
there for.
“My dear girl, we haven’t time,” he said. “It’s waste of our priceless
moments.”
She persisted. “There’s something wrong about it all if we can’t talk to
each other.”
He was irritated. “Women never seem to consider that a man can get all
the talk he wants from other men. What’s wrong is our meeting in this
unsatisfactory way. We ought to live together. It’s the only sane thing.
I would, only I don’t want to break up Muriel’s home and make her
miserable.”
“I thought you said she wouldn’t care.”
“My dear, she cares for her home and her position and the children. You
forget the children.”
Yes. She had forgotten the children. She had forgotten Muriel. She had
left off thinking of Oscar as a man with a wife and children and a home.
He had a plan. His mother-in-law was coming to stay with Muriel in
October and he would get away. He would go to Paris, and Harriott should
come to him there. He could say he went on business. No need to lie
about it; he _had_ business in Paris.
He engaged rooms in an hotel in the rue de Rivoli. They spent two weeks
there.
For three days Oscar was madly in love with Harriott and Harriott with
him. As she lay awake she would turn on the light and look at him as he
slept at her side. Sleep made him beautiful and innocent; it laid a
fine, smooth tissue over his coarseness; it made his mouth gentle; it
entirely hid his eyes.
In six days reaction had set in. At the end of the tenth day, Harriott,
returning with Oscar from Montmartre, burst into a fit of crying. When
questioned, she answered wildly that the Hotel Saint Pierre was too
hideously ugly; it was getting on her nerves. Mercifully Oscar explained
her state as fatigue following excitement. She tried hard to believe
that she was miserable because her love was purer and more spiritual
than Oscar’s; but all the time she knew perfectly well she had cried
from pure boredom. She was in love with Oscar, and Oscar bored her.
Oscar was in love with her, and she bored him. At close quarters, day in
and day out, each was revealed to the other as an incredible bore.
At the end of the second week she began to doubt whether she had ever
been really in love with him.
* * * * *
Her passion returned for a little while after they got back to London.
Freed from the unnatural strain which Paris had put on them, they
persuaded themselves that their romantic temperaments were better fitted
to the old life of casual adventure.
Then, gradually, the sense of danger began to wake in them. They lived
in perpetual fear, face to face with all the chances of discovery. They
tormented themselves and each other by imagining possibilities that they
would never have considered in their first fine moments. It was as
though they were beginning to ask themselves if it were, after all,
worth while running such awful risks, for all they got out of it. Oscar
still swore that if he had been free he would have married her. He
pointed out that his intentions at any rate were regular. But she asked
herself: Would I marry _him_? Marriage would be the Hotel Saint Pierre
all over again, without any possibility of escape. But, if she wouldn’t
marry him, was she in love with him? That was the test. Perhaps it was a
good thing he wasn’t free. Then she told herself that these doubts were
morbid, and that the question wouldn’t arise.
One evening Oscar called to see her. He had come to tell her that Muriel
was ill.
“Seriously ill?”
“I’m afraid so. It’s pleurisy. May turn to pneumonia. We shall know one
way or another in the next few days.”
A terrible fear seized upon Harriott. Muriel might die of her pleurisy;
and if Muriel died, she would have to marry Oscar. He was looking at her
queerly, as if he knew what she was thinking, and she could see that the
same thought had occurred to him and that he was frightened too.
Muriel got well again; but their danger had enlightened them. Muriel’s
life was now inconceivably precious to them both; she stood between them
and that permanent union, which they dreaded and yet would not have the
courage to refuse.
After enlightenment the rupture.
It came from Oscar, one evening when he sat with her in her
drawing-room.
“Harriott,” he said, “do you know I’m thinking seriously of settling
down?”
“How do you mean, settling down?”
“Patching it up with Muriel, poor girl.... Has it never occurred to you
that this little affair of ours can’t go on for ever?”
“You don’t want it to go on?”
“I don’t want to have any humbug about it. For God’s sake, let’s be
straight. If it’s done, it’s done. Let’s end it decently.”
“I see. You want to get rid of me.”
“That’s a beastly way of putting it.”
“Is there any way that isn’t beastly? The whole thing’s beastly. I
should have thought you’d have stuck to it now you’ve made it what you
wanted. When I haven’t an ideal, I haven’t a single illusion, when
you’ve destroyed everything you didn’t want.”
“What didn’t I want?”
“The clean, beautiful part of it. The part _I_ wanted.”
“My part at least was real. It was cleaner and more beautiful than all
that putrid stuff you wrapped it up in. You were a hypocrite, Harriott,
and I wasn’t. You’re a hypocrite now if you say you weren’t happy with
me.”
“I was never really happy. Never for one moment. There was always
something I missed. Something you didn’t give me. Perhaps you couldn’t.”
“No. I wasn’t spiritual enough,” he sneered.
“You were not. And you made me what you were.”
“Oh, I noticed that you were always very spiritual _after_ you’d got
what you wanted.”
“What I wanted?” she cried. “Oh, my God—”
“If you ever knew what you wanted.”
“What—I—wanted,” she repeated, drawing out her bitterness.
“Come,” he said, “why not be honest? Face facts. I was awfully gone on
you. You were awfully gone on me—once. We got tired of each other and
it’s over. But at least you might own we had a good time while it
lasted.”
“A good time?”
“Good enough for me.”
“For you, because for you love only means one thing. Everything that’s
high and noble in it you dragged down to that, till there’s nothing left
for us but that. _That’s_ what you made of love.”
Twenty years passed.
* * * * *
It was Oscar who died first, three years after the rupture. He did it
suddenly one evening, falling down in a fit of apoplexy.
His death was an immense relief to Harriott. Perfect security had been
impossible as long as he was alive. But now there wasn’t a living soul
who knew her secret.
Still, in the first moment of shock Harriott told herself that Oscar
dead would be nearer to her than ever. She forgot how little she had
wanted him to be near her, alive. And long before the twenty years had
passed she had contrived to persuade herself that he had never been near
to her at all. It was incredible that she had ever known such a person
as Oscar Wade. As for their affair, she couldn’t think of Harriott Leigh
as the sort of woman to whom such a thing could happen. Schnebler’s and
the Hotel Saint Pierre ceased to figure among prominent images of her
past. Her memories, if she had allowed herself to remember, would have
clashed disagreeably with the reputation for sanctity which she had now
acquired.
For Harriott at fifty-two was the friend and helper of the Reverend
Clement Farmer, Vicar of St. Mary the Virgin’s, Maida Vale. She worked
as a deaconess in his parish, wearing the uniform of a deaconess, the
semi-religious gown, the cloak, the bonnet and veil, the cross and
rosary, the holy smile. She was also secretary to the Maida Vale and
Kilburn Home for Fallen Girls.
Her moments of excitement came when Clement Farmer, the lean, austere
likeness of Stephen Philpotts, in his cassock and lace-bordered
surplice, issued from the vestry, when he mounted the pulpit, when he
stood before the altar rails and lifted up his arms in the Benediction;
her moments of ecstasy when she received the Sacrament from his hands.
And she had moments of calm happiness when his study door closed on
their communion. All these moments were saturated with a solemn
holiness.
And they were insignificant compared with the moment of her dying.
She lay dozing in her white bed under the black crucifix with the ivory
Christ. The basins and medicine bottles had been cleared from the table
by her pillow; it was spread for the last rites. The priest moved
quietly about the room, arranging the candles, the Prayer Book and the
Holy Sacrament. Then he drew a chair to her bedside and watched with
her, waiting for her to come up out of her doze.
She woke suddenly. Her eyes were fixed upon him. She had a flash of
lucidity. She was dying, and her dying made her supremely important to
Clement Farmer.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
“Not yet. I think I’m afraid. Make me not afraid.”
He rose and lit the two candles on the altar. He took down the crucifix
from the wall and stood it against the foot-rail of the bed.
She sighed. That was not what she had wanted.
“You will not be afraid now,” he said.
“I’m not afraid of the hereafter. I suppose you get used to it. Only it
may be terrible just at first.”
“Our first state will depend very much on what we are thinking of at our
last hour.”
“There’ll be my—confession,” she said.
“And after it you will receive the Sacrament. Then you will have your
mind fixed firmly upon God and your Redeemer.... Do you feel able to
make your confession now, Sister? Everything is ready.”
Her mind went back over her past and found Oscar Wade there. She
wondered: Should she confess to him about Oscar Wade? One moment she
thought it was possible; the next she knew that she couldn’t. She could
not. It wasn’t necessary. For twenty years he had not been part of her
life. No. She wouldn’t confess about Oscar Wade. She had been guilty of
other sins.
She made a careful selection.
“I have cared too much for the beauty of this world.... I have failed in
charity to my poor girls. Because of my intense repugnance to their
sin.... I have thought, often, about—people I love, when I should have
been thinking about God.”
After that she received the Sacrament.
“Now,” he said, “there is nothing to be afraid of.”
“I won’t be afraid if—if you would hold my hand.”
He held it. And she lay still a long time, with her eyes shut. Then he
heard her murmuring something. He stooped close.
“This—is—dying. I thought it would be horrible. And it’s bliss....
Bliss.”
The priest’s hand slackened, as if at the bidding of some wonder. She
gave a weak cry.
“Oh—don’t let me go.”
His grasp tightened.
“Try,” he said, “to think about God. Keep on looking at the crucifix.”
“If I look,” she whispered, “you won’t let go my hand?”
“I will not let you go.”
He held it till it was wrenched from him in the last agony.
* * * * *
She lingered for some hours in the room where these things had happened.
Its aspect was familiar and yet unfamiliar, and slightly repugnant to
her. The altar, the crucifix, the lighted candles, suggested some
tremendous and awful experience the details of which she was not able to
recall. She seemed to remember that they had been connected in some way
with the sheeted body on the bed; but the nature of the connection was
not clear; and she did not associate the dead body with herself. When
the nurse came in and laid it out, she saw that it was the body of a
middle-aged woman. Her own living body was that of a young woman of
about thirty-two.
Her mind had no past and no future, no sharp-edged, coherent memories,
and no idea of anything to be done next.
Then, suddenly, the room began to come apart before her eyes, to split
into shafts of floor and furniture and ceiling that shifted and were
thrown by their commotion into different planes. They leaned slanting at
every possible angle; they crossed and overlaid each other with a
transparent mingling of dislocated perspectives, like reflections fallen
on an interior seen behind glass.
The bed and the sheeted body slid away somewhere out of sight. She was
standing by the door that still remained in position.
She opened it and found herself in the street, outside a building of
yellowish-grey brick and freestone, with a tall slated spire. Her mind
came together with a palpable click of recognition. This object was the
Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Maida Vale. She could hear the droning of
the organ. She opened the door and slipped in.
[Illustration: Then, suddenly the room began to come apart ...]
She had gone back into a definite space and time, and recovered a
certain limited section of coherent memory. She remembered the rows of
pitch-pine benches, with their Gothic peaks and mouldings; the
stone-coloured walls and pillars with their chocolate stencilling; the
hanging rings of lights along the aisles of the nave; the high altar
with its lighted candles, and the polished brass cross, twinkling. These
things were somehow permanent and real, adjusted to the image that now
took possession of her.
She knew what she had come there for. The service was over. The choir
had gone from the chancel; the sacristan moved before the altar, putting
out the candles. She walked up the middle aisle to a seat that she knew
under the pulpit. She knelt down and covered her face with her hands.
Peeping sideways through her fingers, she could see the door of the
vestry on her left at the end of the north aisle. She watched it
steadily.
Up in the organ loft the organist drew out the Recessional, slowly and
softly, to its end in the two solemn, vibrating chords.
The vestry door opened and Clement Farmer came out, dressed in his black
cassock. He passed before her, close, close outside the bench where she
knelt. He paused at the opening. He was waiting for her. There was
something he had to say.
She stood up and went towards him. He still waited. He didn’t move to
make way for her. She came close, closer than she had ever come to him,
so close that his features grew indistinct. She bent her head back,
peering, short-sightedly, and found herself looking into Oscar Wade’s
face.
He stood still, horribly still, and close, barring her passage.
She drew back; his heaving shoulders followed her. He leaned forward,
covering her with his eyes. She opened her mouth to scream and no sound
came.
She was afraid to move lest he should move with her. The heaving of his
shoulders terrified her.
One by one the lights in the side aisles were going out. The lights in
the middle aisle would go next. They had gone. If she didn’t get away
she would be shut up with him there, in the appalling darkness.
She turned and moved towards the north aisle, groping, steadying herself
by the book ledge.
When she looked back, Oscar Wade was not there.
Then she remembered that Oscar Wade was dead. Therefore, what she had
seen was not Oscar; it was his ghost. He was dead; dead seventeen years
ago. She was safe from him for ever.
* * * * *
When she came out on to the steps of the church she saw that the road it
stood in had changed. It was not the road she remembered. The pavement
on this side was raised slightly and covered in. It ran under a
succession of arches. It was a long gallery walled with glittering shop
windows on one side; on the other a line of tall grey columns divided it
from the street.
She was going along the arcades of the rue de Rivoli. Ahead of her she
could see the edge of an immense grey pillar jutting out. That was the
porch of the Hotel Saint Pierre. The revolving glass doors swung forward
to receive her; she crossed the grey, sultry vestibule under the
pillared arches. She knew it. She knew the porter’s shining,
wine-coloured mahogany pen on her left, and the shining wine-coloured
mahogany barrier of the clerk’s bureau on her right; she made straight
for the great grey carpeted staircase; she climbed the endless flights
that turned round and round the caged-in shaft of the well, past the
latticed doors of the lift, and came up on to a landing that she knew,
and into the long, ash-grey, foreign corridor lit by a dull window at
one end.
It was there that the horror of the place came on her. She had no longer
any memory of St. Mary’s Church, so that she was unaware of her backward
course through time. All space and time were here.
She remembered she had to go to the left, the left. But there was
something there; where the corridor turned by the window; at the end of
all the corridors. If she went the other way she would escape it.
The corridor stopped there. A blank wall. She was driven back past the
stairhead to the left.
At the corner, by the window, she turned down another long ash-grey
corridor on her right, and to the right again where the night-light
sputtered on the table-flap at the turn.
This third corridor was dark and secret and depraved. She knew the
soiled walls and the warped door at the end. There was a sharp-pointed
streak of light at the top. She could see the number on it now, 107.
Something had happened there. If she went in it would happen again.
Oscar Wade was in the room waiting for her behind the closed door. She
felt him moving about in there. She leaned forward, her ear to the key
hole, and listened. She could hear the measured, deliberate, thoughtful
footsteps. They were coming from the bed to the door.
She turned and ran; her knees gave way under her; she sank and ran on,
down the long grey corridors and the stairs, quick and blind, a hunted
beast seeking for cover, hearing his feet coming after her.
The revolving doors caught her and pushed her out into the street.
* * * * *
The strange quality of her state was this, that it had no time. She
remembered dimly that there had once been a thing called time; but she
had forgotten altogether what it was like. She was aware of things
happening and about to happen; she fixed them by the place they
occupied, and measured their duration by the space she went through.
So now she thought: If I could only go back and get to the place where
it hadn’t happened.