LOVE TO THE "VALSE TRISTE"
1
It was all, when one looked back upon it, the rankest melodrama. The
darkness, the flaming lamp, Craven's voice and eyes, Bunning . . .
it had all arranged itself as though it bad been worked by a master
dramatist. At any rate there they now were, the three of them--Olva,
Bunning, Craven--placed in a situation that could not possibly stay
as it was. In which direction was it going to develop? Bunning had no
control at all, it would be he who would supply the next move . . .
meanwhile in the back of Olva's mind there was that banging sense of
urgency, no time to be lost. He must see Margaret and speak before
Rupert spoke to her. Perhaps, even now, Craven was not certain. If he
only knew of how much Craven was sure! Did he feel sure enough to speak
to Margaret?
Meanwhile the first and most obvious thing was that Bunning was in a
state of terror that threatened instant exposure. The man was evidently
realizing that now, for the first time, he had a big thing with which he
must grapple. He must grapple with his devotion to Olva, with his terror
of Craven, but, most of all, with his terror of himself. That last was
obviously the thing that tortured him, for, having now been given by the
High Gods an opportunity of great service, so miserable a creature did
he consider himself that he would not for an instant trust his control.
He was trying, Olva saw, with an effort that in its intensity was
pathetic to prove himself worthy of the chance that had been offered
him, as though it were the one sole opportunity that he would ever be
given, but to appear to the world something that he was not was an art
that Bunning and his kind could never acquire--that is their tragedy.
It was the fate of Bunning that his boots and spectacles should always
negative any attempt that he might make at a striking personality.
On the night after the "Rag" he sat in Olva's room and made a supreme
effort at control.
"If you can only hold on," Olva told him, "to the end of term. It's only
a week or two now. Just stick it until then; you won't be bothered with
me after that."
"You're going away?"
"I don't know--it depends."
"I don't know what I should do if you went. To have to stand that awful
secret all alone . . . only me knowing. Oh! I couldn't! I couldn't! and
now that Craven--"
"Craven knows nothing. He doesn't even suspect anything. See here,
Bunning"--Olva crossed over to him and put his hand on his shoulder.
"Can't you understand that your behaviour makes me wish that I hadn't
told you, whereas if you care as you say you do you ought to want to
show me how you can carry it, to prove to me that I was right to tell
you---"
"Yes, I know. But Craven---"
"Craven knows nothing."
"But he does." Bunning's voice became shrill and his fat hand shook on
Olva's arm. "There's something I haven't told you. This morning in Outer
Court he stopped me."
"Craven stopped you?"
"Yes. There was no one about. I was going along to my rooms and he met
me and he said: 'Hullo, Bunning.'"
"Well?"
"I'd been thinking of it--of his knowing, I mean--all night, so I was
dreadfully startled, dreadfully startled. I'm afraid I showed it."
"Get on. What did he say?"
"He said: 'Hullo, Bunning!'"
"Yes, you've told me that. What else?"
"I said 'Hullo!' I was dreadfully startled. I don't think he'd ever
spoken to me before. And then he looked so strange--wild, as though he
hadn't slept, and white, and his eyes moved all the time. I'm afraid he
saw that I was startled."
"Do get on. What else did he ask you?"
"He asked me whether I'd enjoyed last night. He said: 'You were with
Dune, weren't you?' He cried, as though he wasn't speaking to me at all:
'That's an odd sort of friend for you to have.' I ought to have been
angry I suppose, but I was shaking all over . . . yes . . . well . . .
then he said: 'I thought you were in with all those pi men,' and I just
couldn't say anything at all--I was shaking so. He must have thought I
looked very odd."
"I'm sure he did," said Olva drily. "Well it won't be many days before
_you_ give the show away--_that's_ certain."
What could have made him tell the fellow? What madness? What---?
But Bunning caught on to his sleeve.
"No, no, you mustn't say that, Dune, please, you mustn't. I'm going to
do my best, I am really. But his coming suddenly like that, just when
I'd been thinking. . . . But it's awful. I told you if any one suspected
it would make it so hard---"
"Look here, Bunning, perhaps it will help you if you know the way that
I'm feeling about it. I'll try and explain. All these days there's
something in me that's urging me to go out and confess."
"Conscience," said Bunning solemnly.
"No, it isn't conscience at all. It's something quite different, because
the thing that's urging me isn't urging me because I've done something
I'm ashamed of, it's urging me because I'm in a false position. There's
that on the one side, and, on the other, I'm in love with Rupert
Craven's sister."
Bunning gave a little cry.
"Yes. That complicates things, doesn't it? Now you see why Rupert Craven
is the last person who must know anything about it; it's because he
loves his sister so much and suspects, I think, that I care for her,
that he's going to find out the truth."
"Does she care for you?" Bunning brought out huskily.
"I don't know. That's what I've got to find out."
"Because it all depends on that. If she cares enough it won't matter
what you've done, and if she doesn't care enough it won't matter her
knowing because you oughtn't to marry her. Oh," and Bunning's eyes
as they gazed at Olva were those, once more, of a devoted dog: "she's
lucky." Then he repeated, as though to himself, in his odd husky
whisper: "Anything that I can do . . . anything that I can do . . ."
2
On the next evening, about five o'clock, Olva went to the house in
Rocket Road. He went through a world that, in its frosty stillness,
held beauty in its hands like a china cup, so fragile in its colours, so
gentle in its outline, with a moon, round and of a creamy white, with a
sky faintly red, and stiff trees, black and sharp.
Cambridge came to Olva then as a very lovely thing. The Cambridge life
was a lovely thing with its kindness, its simplicity, its optimism. He
was penetrated too with a great sadness because he knew that life of
that kind was gone, once and for ever, from him; whatever came to him
now it could never again be that peace; the long houses flung black
shadows across the white road and God kept him company. . . .
Miss Margaret Craven had not yet come in, but would Mr. Dune, perhaps,
go up and see Mrs. Craven? The old woman's teeth chattered in the cold
little hall. "We are dead, all of us dead here," the skins on the walls
seemed to say; "and you'll be dead soon . . . oh! yes, you will."
Olva went up to Mrs. Craven. The windows of her room were tightly closed
and a great fire was blazing; before this she lay stretched out on a
sofa of faded green--her black dress, her motionless white hands, her
pale face, her moving eyes.
She had beside her to-day a little plate of dry biscuits, and, now and
again, her hand would move across her black dress and break one of these
with a sharp sound, and then her hand would fall back again.
"I am very glad to see you. Draw your chair to the fire. It is a chill
day, but fine, I believe."
She regarded him gravely.
"It is not much of life that I can watch from this room, Mr. Dune. It is
good of you to come and see me . . . there must be many other things for
you to do."
He came at once to the point.
"I want your permission to ask your daughter to marry me, Mrs. Craven."
There was a long silence between them. He seemed, in his inner
consciousness, to be carrying on a dialogue.
"You see," he said to the Shadow, "I have forestalled you. I shall ask
Margaret Craven this evening to marry me. You cannot prevent that . . .
you _cannot_."
And a voice answered: "All things betray Thee Who betrayest Me."
"You have known us a very short time, Mr. Dune." Mrs. Craven's voice
came to him from a great distance.
He felt as though he were speaking to two persons. "Time has nothing to
do with falling in love, Mrs. Craven."
He saw to his intense amazement that she was greatly moved. She, who
had always seemed to him a mask, now was suddenly revealed as suffering,
tortured, intensely human. Her thin white hands were pressed together.
"I am a lonely, unhappy woman, Mr. Dune. Margaret is now all that is
left to me. Everything has been taken from me. Rupert--" Her voice
was lost; very slowly tears rolled down her cheeks. She began again
desperately. "Margaret is all that I have got. If I were left alone it
would be too much for me. I could not endure the silence."
It was the more moving in that it followed such stern reserve. His own
isolation, the curious sense that he had that they were, both of them,
needing protection against the same power (it seemed to him that if he
raised his eyes he would see, on the opposite wall, the shadow of
that third Presence); this filled him with the tenderest pity, so that
suddenly he bent down and kissed her hand.
She caught his with a fierce convulsive movement, and so they sat in
silence whilst he felt the pulse of her hand beat through his body, and
once a tear rolled from her cheek on to his wrist.
"You understand . . ." she said at last. "You understand. I have always
seen that you know. . ." Then she whispered, "How did you know?"
"Know?" He was bewildered, but before she could speak again the door
opened and Margaret Craven came in.
She moved with that restrained emotion that he had seen in her when he
had first met her. She was some great force held in check, some fire
that blazed but must be hidden from the world, and as she bent over
her mother and kissed her the embrace had in it something of passionate
protest; both women seemed to assert in it their right to quite another
sort of life.
He saw that his moment with Mrs. Craven had passed. That fire, that
humanity had gone from her and she lay back now on her sofa with the
faint waxen lids closed upon her eyes, her hands thinly folded, almost a
dead woman.
Margaret kissed her again--now softly and gently, and Olva went with her
from the room.
3
He was prepared to find that Rupert had told her everything. He thought
that he saw in the gravity and sadness of her manner, and also in the
silence that she seemed deliberately at first to place between them,
that she was waiting for the right moment to break it to him. He felt
that she would ask him gravely and with great kindness, but that, in the
answer that he would give her, it must be all over . . . the end. The
pursuit would be concluded.
Then suddenly in the way that she looked at him he knew that she had
been told nothing.
"I'm afraid that mother is very unwell. I'm afraid that you must have
found her so."
"If she could get away---" he began.
"Ah! if we could all get away! If only we could! But we have talked of
that before. It is quite impossible. And, even if we could (and how glad
I should be!), I do not know that it would help mother. It is Rupert
that is breaking her heart!"
"Rupert!"
For answer to his exclamation she cried to him with all the pent-up
suffering and loneliness of the last weeks in her voice--
"Ah, Mr. Dune, help me! I shall go mad if something doesn't happen;
every day it is worse and I can't grapple with it. I'm not up to it.
If only they'd speak out! but it's this silence!" She seemed to pull
herself together and went on more quietly: "You know that Rupert and I
have been everything to one another all our lives. We have never had
a secret of any kind. Until this last month Rupert was the most open,
dearest boy in the world. His tenderness with my mother was a most
wonderful thing, and to me!--I cannot tell you what he was to me. I
suppose, for the very reason that we were so much to one another, we
did not make any other very close friends. I had girls in Dresden, of
course, and there were men at school and college for whom he cared,
but I think there can have been few brothers and sisters who were so
entirely together in every way. A month ago that all ceased."
She flung her head back with a sharp defiant movement as though the
memory of it hurt her.
"I've told you this before. I talked to you about it when you were
here last. But since then he has become much worse and I am afraid that
anything may happen. I have no one to go to. It is killing my mother,
and then--you were a friend of his."
"I hope that I am now."
"That is the horrible part of it. But it seems now that all this
agitation, this trouble, is directed against you."
"Against me"
"Yes, the other evening he spoke about you--here--furiously. He said
you must never come here again, that I must never speak to you again.
He said that you had done dreadful things. And then when I asked him he
could not tell me anything. He seemed--and you must look on it in that
light, Mr. Dune--as though he were not in the least responsible for what
he said. I'm afraid he is very, very ill. He is dreadfully unhappy, and
yet he can explain nothing. I too have been very unhappy, and mother,
because we love him."
"If he wishes that I should not come here again---" Olva began.
"But he is not responsible. He really does not know what he is doing.
He never had the smallest trouble that he did not confide it to me, and
now---"
"I have noticed, of course," Olva said "that lately his manner to me has
been strange. I would have helped him if he would let me, but he will
not. He will have nothing to say to me . . . I too have been very sorry
about it. I have been sorry because I am fond of Rupert, but also--there
is another, stronger reason--because I love you, Margaret."
As he spoke he got up and stood by her chair. He saw her take in his
last words, at first with a wondering gravity, then with a sudden
splendour so that light flooded her face; her arms made a little
helpless gesture, and she caught his hand.
He drew her up to him out of her chair; then, with a fierce passionate
movement, they held one another and clung together as though in a
desperate wild protest against the world.
"You can't touch me now--I've got her," he seemed to fling at the blank
face of the old mirror.
It was his act of defiance, but through his exultation he caught the
whisper--it might again have been conveyed to him through the shrill
shivering notes of the "Valse Triste"--"Tell her--tell her--now. Trust
her. Dear son, trust Me . . . it must be so in the end."
"Now," he heard her say, "I can stand it all."
"When you came into this room weeks ago," she went on, "I loved you;
from the very first instant. Now I do not mind what any one can do."
"I too loved you from the first instant."
"You were so grave. I tried at first not to think of you as a person at
all because I thought that it was safer, and then gradually, although I
fought against you, I could not keep you out. You drove your way in. You
understood so wonderfully the things that I wanted you to understand.
Then Rupert and mother drove me to want you more and more. I thought
that you liked me, but I didn't know. . . ." Then with a little shiver
she clung to him, pressing close to him. "Oh! hold me, hold me safe."
The room was now gathering to itself that dusk that gave it its
strangest air. The fire had fallen low and only shone now in the
recesses of the high fireplace with a dull glimmer. Amongst the shadows
it seemed that the Presence was gravely waiting. As Olva held Margaret
in his arms he felt that he was fighting to keep her.
In the dark hollow of the mirror he thought that he saw the long white
road, the mists, the little wood and some one running. . . .
It seemed to him that Margaret was not there, that the room was dark and
very heavy, that some bell was ringing in his ear. . . . Then about
him a thousand voices were murmuring: "Tell her--tell her--tell her the
truth."
With a last effort he tried to cry "I will not tell her."
His lips broke on her name "Margaret." Then, with a little sigh,
tumbling forward, he fainted.