“When two have set their minds on each other, a hundred cannot
keep them apart.”--_English Proverb._
The confidence of two young married women is amongst the most
interesting experiences to be obtained; but it is about as easy to get
at by an outsider as a Masonic ceremony of initiation. For a time they
are bound to skirmish over the surface of facts, and compare notes on
their households. From this they may advance to their husbands, but it
is not till they reach Themselves and their own point of view that they
are really instructive. Had Mrs. Ritchie Stern been remaining in Key
Island, it is possible that she and Mrs. Lewin might have reached that
stage when a broken sentence conveys more to the sympathetic hearer
than a whole explanatory treatise would do to one who had not the key
to such mysteries. But the hours she spent at the bungalow were too
contracted for this; only the stress of their mutual circumstances
could have made them get as far as stage number two, for they did talk
of their husbands.
“I am glad Alaric has gone with Captain Stern,” Leoline said frankly,
because she had something to conceal in her piteous knowledge of Ally.
“It makes the journey at least so much less tedious. And I hope they
will be pals--that is my husband’s inevitable word, so you must excuse
it.”
“It is so much more expressive than friends, or even chums,” said Mrs.
Ritchie pensively. “To ‘pal’ always suggests a comfortable arm-in-arm
state of intimacy, eh?”
“Exactly! Ally makes friends rather easily.” The last words were almost
abrupt.
“I don’t think Ritchie is so good at that as at listening. If you know
what I mean, other men make friends with him, and he listens. I should
think Captain Lewin was always very popular.”
“Invariably. I cannot remember, on looking back through my life, any
single person who knew Ally and disliked him.”
“It is rather a fatal gift at times,--if you do not mind my saying so.”
Chum did not answer directly. She spoke with a touch of unintentional
wistfulness. “Captain Stern gave me a sense of such innate control.
He is like one of those Biblical examples that are greater by reason
of ruling themselves than the noisier men who take cities. It always
struck me as such a very sane ideal.... I hope he will be a friend of
Ally’s!”
Mrs. Ritchie looked at her with the full bounty of her nature, and her
words were not so irrelevant as they seemed.
“My eldest boy is like me rather than his father, and I am quite sorry!
It is dreadful to have to look out for your own little failings, and
recognise them. They seem such much more nasty little things in some
one else; and yet I always know that they are just mine.”
“You must hate leaving the children!” said Mrs. Lewin slowly--just as
Blanche had meant her to do.
“Yes!” she responded. “But I would rather have them, though on the
other side of the world. Just as I would rather have my sailor, even
though I cannot always follow his ship.”
“Captain Lewin has a great objection to having children while he is on
foreign service--particularly in a hot climate,” said Leoline quietly.
She was looking down, her long lashes a brown shadow on her unflushed
cheeks, and her manner was too composed for resignation. Suddenly she
raised her eyes with a flash that seemed to come all across the room to
Mrs. Ritchie.
“I was so awfully disappointed!” she said, almost in a whisper. “At
first I longed for one----”
Her voice trailed into silence. Mrs. Ritchie held her breath. The hint
of being contented with things as they were now frightened her.
“You will not always be abroad--at least in such places as this,” she
said hurriedly.
“No. One begins to see though, that there are more selfish advantages
to be gained from married life without a nursery. It isn’t that Ally
doesn’t want children--he will some day. But then--I mightn’t, you see.”
“You will,” said Mrs. Ritchie consolingly. “Let alone the feeling you
will have that you ought to (I wish we didn’t have these feelings, but
women keep the conscience of the household, always!), you will want to
because it is natural. You needn’t be afraid.” She waited a minute,
meeting those shining eyes steadily, and reiterated, “You needn’t be
afraid.”
Leoline turned her face to the window, and looked across the garden,
with its hot, dusty roses, to the latched gate through which Ally had
gone to, and come from, Government House. At the gate a shadow stood,
and a voice said, under breath, “I never came this way--before!” She
thought of the child denied her because of Ally’s selfish fear of
discomfort, and the safeguard of its presence in her arms now; for she
might be called in this a good woman, that had she been a mother, she
would not have been afraid, not even of that dangerous proximity. As
it was, in spite of Blanche Stern’s presence throughout the day, there
was a horribly lonely feeling about the bungalow, and after the rush of
her departure had died away, the empty rooms seemed as if they listened
for a step. The fear of being alone and of listening also made Leoline
Lewin insist on riding down to the harbour again to see her off, and
for the second time in twenty-four hours she found herself loitering
about on the wharf among the walls of coal, waiting with that horrible
sense of departure for the boat to start. There is nothing more trying
to those left behind than one of these lingering “send-offs”--the going
on board and forced little conversations with one ear always attentive
for the bell and “Any more for the shore?”--the interminable time of
standing about on the quay while the mails are got in, and the boat
turns so very slowly from the shore--the waving of handkerchiefs, and
hollow cheering, and then the going home with a blank feeling that life
is just the same in its dull grooves, and all the chance of movement
and adventure has gone out with the ship beyond the horizon line. It
is a particularly depressing ceremony in Key Island, whose inhabitants
feel it a prison at the best of times, but it seems to possess a kind
of hideous fascination to the residents, who never let a boat depart
without thronging on the quay and wishing vainly that they were going
with her.
There was a much larger gathering to see Mrs. Ritchie off than there
had been for the _Greville_. The Gilderoys, Captain Nugent, the Arthur
Whites, Miss Denver, Mrs. Clayton with the gunner’s boy in tow,--Mrs.
Lewin counted them over with wearied eyes and found none missing
save the Churtons. They were not there and Captain Gilderoy amicably
suggested that Diana had got a headache from too many céhos, and the
Major was forced to stay away to cover her indisposition.
“But does she drink, Captain Gilderoy?” Mrs. Clayton asked eagerly, her
pretty vulgar face thrust up to his. She had experienced the roughness
of Diana’s manner when there was no need to be ingratiating, and sought
for the joints in her armour.
“I didn’t say that, Mrs. Clayton!” Captain Gilderoy raised his cynical
eyebrows, and smiled as a dog snarled, on one side of his mouth. His
“smiling acquaintance” with Mrs. Clayton had developed, with no desire
on his part, to a more conventional one, and a further knowledge of
her had intensified his sentiments with regard to her rather than
otherwise. He disliked Mrs. Clayton every bit as much as he did Mrs.
Churton, and his comments on her freedom from social restrictions
were at least as withering as on Diana, but that Eva Clayton had not
the capacity to guess. “I did not say she drank,” he said in his most
pleasant manner, “but she has the advantage of a strong head! She can
take two drinks to my one; I have seen her get through two tumblers of
whiskey and soda when I stopped prudently at the second.”
“You don’t say so!” Mrs. Clayton’s loud, vacant laugh jarred after
Gilderoy’s polished words--he spoke charmingly, and his voice was deep
and rather sweet,--and she caught her gunner by the arm.
“Mr. Rennie, listen! Captain Gilderoy says that Mrs. Churton
drinks--that’s why she isn’t here to-day. She can toss off five
whiskeys faster than the men. Disgusting, isn’t it!”
Young Rennie was a fresh-faced boy, with eyes which still danced
carelessly with youth. All Mrs. Clayton’s tuition had not yet left its
impress on his smooth, flushed face, but it was tainting his tongue.
“By Jove!” he said. “What fun! I’ll have a drinking match with her one
night--get her well on and stake glass for glass.”
“Yes, do,” Mrs. Clayton said eagerly. “It would be so amusing!” and
Miss Denver turned round and laughed too, but without spite. She was
a very tall girl, whose clothes were always a bad copy of the last
garrison lady’s who had come to the Station, and there was a certain
exuberance about her that made women--nice women--say that she had
something maternal even in her generous girlhood. Men, being coarser
or more practical, called her a finely-built girl, and thought of the
children she might bear them.
Leoline Lewin heard the comments on Di and the laughter, and moved
by instinct a little nearer Mrs. Stern. Perhaps she was out of tune
with her world to-day, but it seemed to her as if the whole of her
surroundings were shoddy,--the very tone of the people was like
the little native huts with their lack of stability and general
uncleanness. When Brissy Nugent appeared at her side, as if her
husband’s absence constituted him her cavalier, she turned away almost
like a pettish child with a feeling of aversion to his familiar burnt
face and immaculate riding dress. She felt as if she knew exactly
what he was going to say, too, before he said it; but all Brissy’s
conversation appeared the inevitable.
“Old Ally Sloper must be somewhere about lat. 20 by now, I suppose,”
he said, as they stood at the liner’s stern, waiting with melancholy
patience to say good-bye to Mrs. Ritchie.
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“Hope you won’t be very lonely.”
“Do you?” For the life of her she could not avoid the little ironical
question.
“Pity I’m not a woman, and then I could come up and stay with you and
keep you company--eh? Wouldn’t there be a lot of talk?”
“If you were a woman?”
“No, as we are. You knew what I meant, Mrs. Lewin.”
Oh, this wearisome talk that led nowhere, and always had a vacant laugh
in it. And the sameness of the fringe of ravenalas lifting solemn hands
along the shore--and the blue bay--and the zinc-roofed, gim-crack town.
She looked at the glare of sunlight on Maitso and Mitsinjovy, and her
eyes ached, and then at the black walls of coal to cool them, as she
had done hundreds of times before. They were all in the rat-trap, and
her fellow rats were no better off than she--save that perhaps the
others had not the soul-haunting sweet dread that she had put behind
her all day. For when she was free of these people and went back alone
to the bungalow, there was nothing to prevent her thinking of the
nearness of Government House, and the short cut through the grounds,
while all the rooms listened for a step.
She heard Hamilton Gurney urging some one to come and drink a final
cého with the U.C.L. men, and her heart sank, for this was always a
last ceremony. Then Mrs. Stern came up and said good-bye, her blue
eyes very large and gentle, with their strange gift of divination, and
by a mutual impulse the two tall women kissed each other. Even after
the boat had swung out into the harbour and passed between the gates,
Leoline stood watching it as she had the _Greville_ that morning, as if
it carried away yet another barrier of her safety, and lingered to chat
with one and another of her acquaintance. Captain Gilderoy came up to
ask her if she were selling any of the ponies--she could not ride three
during Captain Lewin’s absence, and he rather fancied Snapshot. She
caught at the discussion, and suggested his coming over one day to look
at Nanton, Ally’s last purchase.
“Will you come back with me now, you and Mrs. Gilderoy?” she said, with
a strange eagerness. “And dine? I am very much alone.”
“Thanks, I wish we could, but we are bound to the Jacksons’.”
“Are they at By-Jovey? Another night then.”
“Thanks.”
No hope of rescue there! They all seemed to be engaged, those who
had useful wives, and the unattached men she would not ask, with the
pattern of Mrs. Clayton and Miss Denver before her eyes; for, as Mrs.
Clayton passed her with Mr. Rennie, Leoline heard the latter say,
“I’ve got the hump with that boat going--haven’t you? Let’s go up to
the Denvers’ and make a noise!” Mrs. Lewin’s lips curled a little. She
would not make her house into a recreation ground for the idle men of
the Station, even though of better manners and more intellectual tastes
than this fresh-faced boy, who after all, was harmless enough in his
ill-breeding. “Let’s go up to the Denvers’ and make a noise” was no
worse than “Let us drop in on Mrs. Lewin because her husband is away.”
No, such help as that would not do. She must face it alone.
The shadow of Tsofotra, the Sunset Gate, stretched far across the
sea as she gathered up her reins and rode home by herself, with so
little attention to the way she went that Liscarton took advantage to
snatch a hasty supper from the low bushes and tall grass, munching as
he went, and expectant of a call to order that did not come. Mrs. Lewin
had other thoughts to fill her mind, and as she sat at her solitary
dinner, she faced the new problems of her existence with saddened
eyes. It seemed to her as if her life “were all read backward,” and
her intentions twisted by providence to a horrible issue. She had
been honest in her desire to spur her husband on to success, and her
first efforts to attract Gregory had been actually on his behalf; but
where had she gone astray? For the original strategy of arousing his
interest for Ally’s sake, coupled with a little innocent enjoyment
of her own power no doubt, had gradually altered its quality to a
personal pleasure in the companionship of a stronger nature, and so
she had drifted to this dangerous brink of a new relation between
them. Looking back, it seemed to her as if all the mischief had sprung
from that night when she left her husband in a drunken sleep to cover
his incapacity as best she might with the Administrator. And yet that
night at least she had hardly realised that Gregory existed as a man:
he was nothing but a power to be feared. She could not see the natural
development of the situation from the affinity of such natures as
Gregory’s with her own, which was its feminine complement. All that her
mind could grasp was the plain fact that bound in duty and honour to a
man to whom she had submitted the most sacred rights of her womanhood,
her very nature yearned treacherously away from him to another who
stood for ever beyond the pale. Alaric had shown himself a weak man,
and represented the failure of her life; but it was her instinct to
hide her failures, and to make the best of her own action in marrying
him, rather than to ask the world’s sympathy and justify herself in
infidelity. Where neither teaching nor principles would triumph over
Nature, her dear self-respect stands like a guardian angel to such a
woman as Leoline Lewin, and becomes a giant virtue.
She took some work and moved into the further room when her dinner
was over, a very gracious feminine figure with the atmosphere of
civilisation about her dainty gown and _chic_ head, contrasting
strangely with the lawless tropical world outside the open windows.
All the danger of the sensuous Earth seemed to be threatening her out
of the night and its insinuating scents,--all the safety of convention
to be inside the pretty room with its electric light where she sat.
As the monotonous needle passed through and through the silk, she was
schooling herself to fearlessness, and soothing her own nerves by the
occupation, until she ceased to start at a rustle on the garden paths,
and was no longer haunted by that mad fear of one man’s approach. So
composed had she grown at last, that she missed the very step that
she had expected along the stoep, and the opening of the door by the
butler. The first intimation she had that her fate was hard upon her
was Abdallah’s voice announcing the Administrator almost as he withdrew
to his own quarters again.
She put aside the work on her lap carefully, running the needle in and
out the silk that she might not lose it, and rose without hurry, every
precious second gained helping her to recover her breath, which seemed
to have been swept away by the sound of his name. As she came forward
to meet her guest there was not a tremor about her, nothing but the
composed grace of a well-bred woman in her own house.
Gregory had stood still under the electric lamps; the light was strong
in spite of the soft red shades, and it seemed to show them to each
other in merciless revelation. He held out his hand to take hers in
conventional greeting, and let it go again after the legitimate few
seconds during which palm rests in palm. They had not really spoken to
each other, save in broken disturbed sentences, since the Deputation
interrupted his avowal of his reason for sending Lewin away alone. It
seemed to her that they must take it up just there, as if nothing had
intervened, and she sought desperately for something to avert it. The
hours that lay between his whispering voice, saying that he could not
part from her, and the present moment rolled back into nothingness.
They were not, and this sentence to be answered still seemed to hang in
the air.
“I saw Captain Lewin off this morning,” she said baldly, as if proving
that what he had said was true. He could not part from her--well, he
had not. In another sense, the sentence was a warning that questioned
his right to be there. “I saw Captain Lewin off this morning--I am
alone!” added the significant pause.
“I know.” He did not deny the accusation of his having paid her a visit
at this late hour, if she intended to insinuate it. He accepted it
rather, and a clock struck nine in the further room as if to punctuate
and affirm his acceptance.
Then there was one of those strange pauses which seem like the visible
boundary between one phase of existence and another--the possible
crossing the rubicon, the possible drawing back and remaining in
safety. It comes before many a declaration, while Mr. Brown and Miss
Smith are still conscious of their former titles, though the next
instant may convert them into John and Jane to each other.
“Oh, the little more, and how much it is!
And the little less, and what worlds away!
_How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,
Or a breath suspend the heart’s best play,
And life be a proof of this!_”
For just that brief pause Gregory and Leoline stood facing each other
in the strong artificial light. Then, as though drawn by something much
stronger than the restraint of convention, they moved nearer never
breaking that long painful gaze until something that seemed like a
sigh passed through the room, as though for relief that the tension
was relaxed, and their lips met. Neither could tell exactly how that
kiss came about. It was so inevitable, once it was done, that there
seemed no cause for it. The embrace was a thing that belonged to their
lives as much as their vitality. To the woman, however, it was a mental
thing, and seemed a decision of her brain as to what shall become of
all her further life; but the man was conscious of the warmth of her
mouth, the very breath of her life mingling with his.
The modes of artificial society would demand a word of explanation
before such a stride in intimacy between the sexes as is meant by a
kiss. There should be a request for permission to go further--anything
to soften the extreme suddenness of the change of attitude. But Nature
is too ready for us in a crisis; she does not use the acquired power
of speech, but the instinctive one of action. Gregory had said no word
at all of explanation or apology--two ornaments of plain speaking
which belong emphatically to civilisation! He was a savage for the
time being, and used the methods of the primeval man with the single
improvement of gentleness. There was no roughness of passion in that
instinctive embrace; nothing but the irresistible attraction of the two
pairs of lips to each other, until, satisfied, they parted as simply as
they had met.
Almost before she was conscious that he had loosened her Leoline found
that he was leading her across the room to a low-cushioned lounge, his
arm still guiding her, and as she seated herself he sat down beside her
side. His breath came a little thickly, but his iron self-control was
instanced in his quiet voice when he spoke.
“Now we will talk this out!”
“Is there anything to say?” she asked almost in a whisper. Now that the
natural moment was over she shrank before the acknowledgment of her own
action. All her habit of convention came back to her and shamed her
horribly, though she would not deny, even to herself, the new position
she felt she had taken, and still meant to take.
“There is a great deal to say,” he said in that decisive suppressed
voice that had never been more characteristic. “We have neither of us
come to this without thinking what it means.”
“I know. And yet there seem so many other things to hold by--honour,
decency, self-respect, justice (for what has my husband done that he
should be my sacrifice?), perhaps even the fear of God.”
“You will find all these included in what I feel for you. Do you think
I am offering you a little trivial passion--a thing of the senses, that
will only last a day?”
“Does it make any difference when the effect on others is the
same? Some one must suffer through my disloyalty--that is the real
stumbling-block. Will any feeling of yours, however sacred to us both,
alter the fact that I am another man’s wife?”
“Even that is not an impassable barrier. Such ties have been broken
before.”
“You are asking me----”
“I am not asking you for anything you might not give if you were an
unmarried woman--as yet. How am I to make you understand? If I had
wanted you for my mistress I should have told you so long ago. At least
you could only have given me my _congé_. I don’t understand beating
about the bush, if that is all that one wants of a woman, because it
can’t be much loss if she says no--there are a great many more who will
say yes!”
She thought of her husband’s often assertion that “every woman in the
island had had a try for Gregory’s Powder,” and winced to see that he
had appreciated his own power of choice--if he had chosen. She almost
hated her own sex for giving him some ground at least for the brutality
of his speech, and herself for listening to him.
“With you,” he went on, with that same terrible finality of a
statement that could not be questioned, “it is different. I should be
depreciating my own property. Some day I mean to make you my wife”--he
drew a breath, and added her name, as if to say it were a natural
joy--“Leo!” he whispered, the familiar contraction of Leoline giving
her a little thrill of pleasure, even while it seemed dreadful to her
that she felt she had no right to flinch from his bold statement. She
had not thought over the situation without facing such an issue, as he
had seen was inevitable, and she was too honest and too strong herself
to weakly cry out that she had not considered this, or made up her
mind. She had counted the cost to Alaric Lewin and to herself; perhaps
passion weighed down the scale in which she placed her own risk, but
she knew that her decision had been tacitly in favour of such a step
as Gregory prognosticated to her mind by speaking of her as his wife.
There was just one terrible difference in their point of view that she
could not realise; his words simply meant to her the horrible publicity
and degradation of the Divorce Court--but in his mind was that olden
letter of which his own seemed a reflex--
“Set Uriah in the forefront of the battle ... that he may die....”
All the wrong against her husband that was credible to her was done to
his name. That Alaric must suffer from the blow she saw, and knowing no
injury that he had done her, it seemed an intolerable thing that she
meditated in cutting the tie between them. She knew him for a weak man
too; what would be the result, to a nature like his, of her desertion?
If every fibre in her heart had not seemed to her to be rooted in the
man beside her, she would never have permitted herself the choice; but
for the time being her whole soul was in revolt, demanding its desire,
crying out that its very life depended on the chance of happiness.
She could not argue or reason just now; she felt the necessity of her
own being a greater thing than the slighter nature’s pain. Was she
always to be sacrificed to Alaric’s weakness? her heart cried out
impatiently--Ally, who was as easily comforted as a child by a new
toy for the one that had been broken! Within a week of her flight he
would be playing tennis, and petted and consoled by other women for his
unmerited misfortune. She saw him more harshly than ever before, and
her velvet eyes grew sombre as she raised them to Gregory’s watchful
face. There was no remorse or vacillation in him--there would be no
repining word hereafter. What he did he had stood by all his life, and
he neither excused nor forswore himself. He was a hard man at worst--a
strong man at best. Some day she would know him for unscrupulous, but
always and for ever she would love him, because his qualities were the
essential for her, and also because love goes deeper than reason and
outruns rule.
“I am not asking you to take such a step to-morrow or next day,” he
urged in that under-breathed voice, “only it would be unfair not to
set my ultimate goal before you.” Then his manner grew warmer, he half
leaned against her lace-clad shoulder, and his arm stole around her
waist. “Is it so hard to think of me as a husband, darling? I believe
you are half afraid of me as a lover!”
She felt the masculine eyes above her dominating her, and her head
drawn back against his shoulder. As he kissed her again and again,
closing the velvet eyes and holding her lips with his own until she was
breathless, his constraining clasp gradually bound her close to him.
Through the thin linen suit she could feel every tightened muscle of
his body, and for a moment was blinded by his caresses. She had not
realised until then the feebleness of her own passions compared with
his. It seemed as if he were built upon such a gigantic scale that
lesser mortals dwindled beside him as beside one such as the old Greeks
used to believe was endowed by a deity in parentage.
But when she slipped out of her gown that night she was conscious of
a painful soreness, as though her soft elastic flesh had been badly
bruised. There was no mark on the white skin, but she could not pass
her hand down her side without feeling the hurt. It could not have
been a blow, for a blow would have left a visible bruise. Yet her very
muscles ached.
For a moment, as she rubbed her hand softly to and fro over the warm
satin surface of her body, she could not understand the cause. Then her
face flamed. She was half ashamed and half exultant. For she realised
the strength of Gregory’s clasp, and felt as Danaë may have felt in the
grip of her god.