The victory was complete. The sudden collapse of the firms caused a
sensation all over the country. The newspapers were ringing with his
name. He was the hero of the hour. At Ecclesby he was the hero for
all time. His first appearance after the announcement of the terms
of settlement was a signal for extravagant demonstration. Men shouted
themselves hoarse, and fought to shake hands with him. Women wept upon
each other’s necks and shrilled out blessings. One, mad with joy, threw
her arms around him and kissed him. A torch-light procession, headed by
two frenzied bands, playing “See the Conquering Hero comes,” carried him
in triumph through the streets.
For the time his heart glowed with the intoxication of success and
popular worship. But when the shouts of the crowd had ceased ringing in
his ears, the glow faded like a false glamour, and left him face to face
with grim realities, before which all else seemed shadowy. As soon as
he reached London, he went with whirling thoughts to Queen’s Court
Mansions.
What he should say to Lady Phayre he did not know. All that he had
defined was a fierce hunger to see her again, a wild longing to throw
himself at her feet. The dormant passion of the man had awakened and
shook him to the depths of his nature. His love for her had flowed
so calmly, had quickened so imperceptibly, had maintained so smooth
a surface with passionate depths so unsuspected, that when the sudden
chasm met its course, it dashed down an overwhelming cataract that swept
him headlong into unknown abysses. The blood swirled through his veins
as he stood waiting outside the familiar door. The servant opened it.
Lady Phayre was unwell, was not receiving any visitors. “Is she in bed?”
asked Daniel rudely.
“She is keeping her room, sir.”
“Tell her that I wish to see her.”
The servant retired, and returned with the message that Lady Phayre
could not possibly receive, and would not be well enough to do so for
some time. He had to depart, raging with disappointment. He went home,
shut himself up in his room, and wrote to her. The days passed, and he
received no reply. A second letter met with similar treatment. Then he
called again. This time neither the electric bell, nor the little brass
knocker, caused the door to be opened. At the entrance to the Mansions
he met the porter, who told him that Lady Phayre had locked up her flat
for six months, and had gone to the south of France.
Then, and then only, did Goddard realise his lost paradise. He had been
buoyed up with hopes that if he could but have speech with her he could
win his pardon, his right of entry into the bit-over of Eden that she
inhabited. Now she had closed the gates. If the porter had been the
angel of the flaming sword, Goddard could not have looked at him with
more hopeless acquiescence.
He wandered for some time aimlessly through the streets. Life seemed
as drear as the murky November afternoon that was merging into a wet,
dismal night. He had finished his routine duties for the day, had
hurried through them feverishly in view of his visit to Lady Phayre. He
walked on to Piccadilly Circus. There he stopped, debated for a moment
what he should do. A Bayswater ’bus had just drawn up at the end
of the lumbering line, and the conductor was vociferating loudly. He
shouted into Goddard’s face--
“Now, then! Nottin’ ’Ill, sir. Room inside.”
Goddard turned away quickly. He could not go home. The thought of
Lizzie, foul and drunken, caused a red cloud to pass before his eyes. In
his present mood it would be well not to see her.
He made his way to his club, mounted to the quiet library, where he
would be undisturbed by the chatter of acquaintances, and pulling up an
arm-chair before a fire-place in a dark corner, gave himself up to the
grim task of reconstructing his life. A new devastating element had come
into his sphere--Lizzie. In the days before his friendship with Lady
Phayre his wife had counted for little in his earnest life. He regretted
her unhappiness, did what lay in his power to remedy the irremediable
mistake of his marriage; but never desiring freedom, the bond scarcely
troubled him. Even during the sweetness of his intercourse with Lady
Phayre it had galled him but little. She was so far above him, the
feelings with which he regarded her were so new to his almost original
experience that he had not realised that he loved her after the common
way of men. In the serenity of Lady Phayre’s atmosphere Lizzie counted
for no more than the little bare top-room in which he had once lived,
his early memories of hardship and struggle with poverty. But now when
the idyll was over, when he felt the man’s fierce passion for the woman
that was lost to him, the other woman who stood between counted as a
terrible, resistless force.
He gazed with set features into the fire. It faded, and in its place
rose the scene of that night when the two women had met. One face noble,
intellectual, pure in outline; the other, sodden, coarse, and bestial.
He gripped the arms of his chair, and a half groan came from his lips.
A loathing of the woman to whom he was bound arose within him like a
nausea.
Then anger shook him--anger at the folly of his marriage; anger at the
coarse nature of his wife, at her father’s drunkenness, at the pretty
baby face that had caught his raw fancy--anger, too, at Lady Phayre. Why
had she sought him out? Why had she lured him on to enslave himself to
her? Anger at her scorn of him, at her fine-lady sensitiveness that was
revolted at the sight of a drunken shrew. Anger at her having led him
into the fool’s paradise only to eject him ignominiously.
A slight tap on his shoulder aroused him. He started round: the anger
that was hot within him turned against the disturber. It was Gleam.
“I have been looking round the club for some one to dine with. Come
along,” he said in his friendly way.
But Goddard glowered at him. At that moment Gleam seemed to belong
to the other side of the great gulf, and he hated him with the old
class-hatred. He looked so spick and span with his evening dress, and
gold eye-glass, and meticulously trimmed head. His manner was so easy,
giving the impression of freedom from sordid cares. He had no foul
drunken wife dragging him down. He could meet Lady Phayre on a level.
He could offer her marriage, and she could but take the offer as a
compliment. A sense of personal degradation filled Goddard’s soul, and
he hated himself for hating Gleam. In a moment, however, he came to his
senses, but not before Gleam had rallied him on his confusion.
“Caught you napping, eh? Well--will you dine?”
“No,” said Goddard, rising from his chair. “Not to-night. I ought to
have got out of this half-an-hour ago.”
He made a pretence of stretching himself as if he had been asleep. Gleam
looked at him with his quick glance.
“You have been overworking yourself. Take care. You great strong men
break with a crash. Go away and have a rest.”
“Like Lady Phayre,” said Goddard, in the bitterness of his heart.
“Quite so. That confounded strike of yours did for her. What the dickens
we’re to do without her I don’t know.”
“Life will go on just the same, I suppose. No one is indispensable.”
He laughed mirthlessly. A faint flush rose in Gleam’s dry cheeks.
“You’re talking treason, Goddard. You certainly do want a rest.”
“One wants a devil of a lot of things one can’t get,” said Goddard.
“I want my dinner, and I’m going to get it,” replied Gleam
good-humouredly. “Goodbye.”
He went out of the library, took his place in the lift. His eyes
twinkled, and he smoothed his moustache abstractedly. Then a little
exclamation broke from him.
“I wonder!” said he.
“Did you speak, sir?” said the lift-porter.
“Eh?” replied Gleam. “Yes; I wonder--I wonder why I have come down to
the basement when I wanted the dining-room floor.”
But Goddard could not sit any longer in the library. The brooding spell
was over, and its place was taken by feverish unrest. He left the Club,
went out into the streets, and began to walk rapidly. Whither was he
going? He did not care. A vague idea that he could free himself of his
madness by physical exercise prompted him. He had a faint recollection
of a scene in a penny dreadful read in his board-school days--a scene
where the hero, to bring calmness to his throbbing brain, mounted his
horse and galloped at whirlwind speed over miles and miles of moorland,
in frenzied chase, until the noble animal’s heart burst and he staggered
and fell, throwing his rider, who broke his neck. But Goddard walked--up
the hurrying Strand and Fleet Street, through the fast-emptying City;
eastwards, up Fenchurch Street, the Whitechapel Road, Mile End Road,
jostling through the crowded thoroughfares that reeked with the odour
of fried-fish, naphtha from costers’ barrows, and the day’s sweat of the
toiling population; down Whitehouse Lane and Stepney High Street on
to Ratcliffe Highway. The squalor and misery of it all touched the
ever-responsive chord in his nature, awoke the demagogue in him to
sympathy with the people. The East End had never appeared to him so
terrible, so crushing in its vast unloveliness. Mile after mile it was
just the same--the same stench, the same stunted men; the same anemic
girl-mothers; the same foul, fringed, and feathered women of the street;
the same bestial talk that seemed to hang continuously on the air; the
same scenes of drunken brawling outside the public-houses; the same
dreamy, endless tram-cars, smoothly gliding past this hubbub and swelter
of humanity on the pavement; and everywhere the same joyless
struggle for the four sole ends of life--food, raiment, shelter, and
forgetfulness.
Goddard felt a strange and stern comfort in steeping his soul in these
wide waters of bitterness. He went on and on, through brawling companies
of sailors, swarthy Lascars, and the land-scum that clings round the
seafaring life; past evil-smelling marine stores, live-stock dealers
dissonant with the screeching of parrots, slop-shops, low eating-houses,
scented from afar, even through the general stench, by the miasmic
exhalations from basement gratings. At the end of the Highway he turned,
retraced his steps, went through the foul river-side slums, crossed the
Commercial Road, struck northwards, up dark, narrow streets, where the
flare and turmoil of the great arteries were perceived but faintly, and
the minor privacies of life were in sordid evidence. Through streets of
sweaters’ dens he could see the vague forms of the workers behind the
blindless windows. Once he stopped and counted--thirty in one small,
gas-lit room.
To carry on the combat with the powers of evil that enthralled this
hideous city, his life needed little reconstruction. He thought of Lady
Phayre, clenched his stick, and swung it furiously.
“I’ll go on with my work, and she can go to the devil!” he said.
And he walked on through the endless streets.
*****
It is a simple way to rid ourselves of burdens, to consign them to
Avernus, and ship them on the waters of Lethe. Unfortunately it is not
always successful. They are apt to be elusive, like the vampire in the
Indian story which Vikram could not keep in his sack. They slip from the
hold of the dark ship, and return to the shoulders of the consigner. But
in this Goddard’s pride allowed no confession of failure. He blustered
himself into the belief that Lady Phayre was no more to him than Hecuba
was to the First Player, thus playing the hypocrite to himself with
morose and stubborn futility. He plunged into his work with redoubled
energy, grew angry when he found that it did not give him the old
sufficing happiness, and obstinately refused to allow the simple,
obvious cause.
And then the new element of discord in his life had to be accepted and
harmonised. Lizzie was going from bad to worse. He brought Emily to live
in the house to take permanent charge of her. Together they tried to
mitigate the evil, to circumvent her in her plans for obtaining drink;
but she was more than their equal in cunning. The disease had laid its
everlasting grasp upon her. She sank daily in degradation. Daniel
could not cheat himself into the fancy of freedom from this burden of
loathing. Yet he was a man with a keen sense of justice. The more his
heart revolted, the more doggedly did he repress outward manifestation.
He bore her reproaches silently, strove to render her lot less bitter.
“I believe you’re an angel from heaven, Daniel,” said Emily once. She
always had looked up to him with reverential adoration. “How you can put
up with her I don’t know. You’re a living angel if ever there was one.”
“You think so, do you, Em?” he answered with a rough laugh, rather
touched. “Well, go on thinking so. It won’t do me any harm.”
Only once did Lizzie refer to the night of Lady Phayre’s visit. It was a
Sunday evening. Emily had gone to church, and had left the two together
in the drawing-room. Daniel was smoking a pipe over a book, and Lizzie
was engaged with some needlework--a rare occupation. She had been less
fretful that day, had even asked him to sit with her. Gradually, as
Daniel read, her efforts with her needle became spasmodic. There were
intervals of gazing into the fire, and sudden resumptions of industry.
Then she rose, moved about the room, idly examining nicknacks and
fidgeting with furniture. At last she left the room, and entered her
bedroom that adjoined.
Suddenly Daniel’s attention was arrested by a sharp tinkling sound. He
started to his feet and went quickly to join Lizzie. It was as he had
suspected. By the half-light of the dim-burning gas he saw her thrusting
a bottle beneath some garments in a trunk. A glass half full of spirits
was close by on the mantelpiece.
“Lizzie! How can you?” he cried.
She turned upon him in a fury.
“How dare you come in here! How dare you spy upon me! If I want to drink
I’ll drink. What business is it of yours if I kill myself?”
She seized the glass, had already put it to her lips, when he strode
forward and dashed it from her hand.
“You won’t do it to-night anyhow, Lizzie,” he said calmly.
She broke into a torrent of angry speech.
When the drink or passion was upon her, she used the vernacular of the
Sunington streets--of her own home, for the matter of that. He waited
until there was a lull in the tempest.
“I’ll have the bottle anyway,” he said, turning to the trunk.
But that was the signal for a fresh outburst. She sat upon the trunk,
swore he should never have it while she lived, prepared to defend her
property by physical means. Goddard shrugged his shoulders, and sat down
upon the bed.
“All right,” he said; “I’ll wait.”
Then she burst into hysterical sobbing. She wished she was dead. She
hated him. He was a brute. That was all he lived for--to keep the spy
upon her when he wasn’t making up to other women.
“Do you think I’m a fool?” she cried, suddenly taking her hands from her
face and turning to him. “Do you think I don’t know? I don’t interfere
with you: why should you interfere with me? Only don’t bring your women
to this house. Do you think I don’t know your goings on? You are worse
than I am. I don’t pretend. You are a dirty blackguard. You think I
don’t know all about your Rhodanthes and things?”
He started as if she had struck him, for a moment lost the command
over himself that he had maintained through all the ordure of words. He
regained it with a violent effort, clutching the counterpane fiercely,
until his finger-nails were turned back. He understood now how a man
could beat a woman. If he lost the hold over himself, he would rush to
her and beat her--beat her until she lay senseless. Perhaps she almost
expected it, for she paused at the last words, and looked at him
half-coweringly, half-defiantly. So their eyes remained fixed on one
another in the dim-lit room. Then she shuddered with body and lips, and
uttering a low cry hid her face. A terror had taken possession of her.
She was conquered.
Daniel rose from the bed, went to her, and took her by the arm.
“Go into the next room,” he said sternly, and she obeyed.
He joined her after he had disposed of the disputed whisky-bottle.
And there they sat in an appalling silence, until Emily came back from
church, and relieved him of his charge.
That was the last time that Lizzie referred to Lady Phayre. He wondered
how she had learned her name--that name Rhodanthe, which he had ever in
his mind--which, save this once, he had never heard uttered aloud.
It was a curious freak of fate’s irony that, on this one occasion, it
should have been uttered by his wife’s lips. The circumstance embittered
him still more against her.
A few weeks after this the long-expected vacancy in the Hough division
occurred, and Goddard was definitely chosen as the Radical candidate.
In the very beginning of his electoral campaign he received news from
London that the terrible drink illness had fallen upon his wife.