“That woman!” she cried. “He’s not come back.”
I assured her that the Radolins were gone back home. She stared at me
and began to cry. She cried and cried, and I did not try to stop her.
She was not only desolate and miserable, but bitter and angry. ‘So long
as she can be angry,’ I thought, ‘she’ll get over it. One is not angry
under a death-blow.’
At last she had cried her misery out, but not her anger or dismay. What
was she to do? I tried to persuade her that Frank would turn up in time
for them to start to-morrow evening. He was probably trying to work
the thing out of his system; she must look on it as a fever, a kind of
illness. She laughed wildly, scornfully, and went out.
Weymouth did not turn up, but the morning brought me a letter,
enclosing a cheque for three hundred pounds, a note to his wife, and a
sealed envelope addressed to the headmaster of his Public School.
The letter to me ran as follows:
“OLD MAN,
“I admit that I am behaving like a cad; but it’s either this or
the sweet waters of oblivion; and there’s less scandal this way. I
have made up some story for my chief; please post it. The cheque
is for all my substance except some fifty pounds. Take care of it
for my wife; she’ll get another five hundred, about, out of the
turnover of our house. She will go to her father, no doubt, and
forget me, I hope. Do, please, like a good fellow, see her safely
on board. It’s not likely that I shall ever come back to England.
The future is quite dark, but where _she_ is, there I must be.
Poste restante Constantinople will find me, so far as I know at
present. Good-bye!
“Your affectionate
“F. W.”
I did see Jessie Weymouth on board her ship, and a precious business it
was.
A week later I, too, started for Constantinople, partly because I had
promised Mrs. Weymouth, partly because I could not reconcile myself
to the vision of my friend in the grip of his passion, without a job,
almost without money.
The Radolins inhabited an old house on the far shore almost opposite
the Rumeli Hissar. I called on them without warning, and found Hélène
Radolin alone. In a room all Turkish stuffs and shadowy lights, she
looked very different from her desert self. She had regained her pale
languor, but her face had a definite spirit, lacking when I first saw
her. She spoke quite freely.
“I love him; but it is madness. I have tried to send him away; he will
not go. You see, I am a Catholic; my religion means much to me. I must
not go away with him. Take him back to England with you; I cannot bear
to see him ruin his life like this for me.”
I confess to looking at her with the wonder whether it was religion or
the lack of l. s. d.
“Ah!” she said. “You don’t understand; you think I am afraid of poverty
with him. No! I am afraid of losing my soul, and his.”
The way she said that was extraordinarily impressive. I asked her if
she saw him.
“Yes; he comes. I have to let him. I cannot bear the look on his face
when I say ‘No.’” She gave me his address.
He had a garret in a little Greek hotel, just above Galata--a
ramshackle place, chosen for its cheapness. He did not seem surprised
to see me. But I was startled. His face, shrunken and lined, had a
bitter, burnt-up look, which deepened the set and colour of his eyes
till they looked almost black. A long bout of disease will produce just
that effect.
“If she didn’t love me,” he said, “I could bear it. But she does. Well!
So long as I can see her I shall stand it; and she’ll come--she’ll come
to me at last.”
I repeated her words to me; I spoke of his wife, of England--no memory,
no allusion, no appeal touched him.
I stayed a month and saw him nearly every day; I did not move him by
one jot. At the end of that month I should never have known him for
the Frank Weymouth who had started out with us from Mena House on
New Year’s Day. Changed! He was! I had managed to get him a teaching
job through a man I knew at the Embassy--a poor enough job--a bare
subsistence. And, watching my friend day by day, I began to have a
feeling of hatred for that woman. Yet I knew that her refusal to
indulge their passion was truly religious. She really did see her lost
soul and his, whirling entwined through purgatory, like the souls of
Paola and Francesca in Watts’ picture. Call it superstition, or what
you will, her scruples were entirely genuine, and, from a certain point
of view, quite laudable.
As for Radolin, he took it all precisely as if there were nothing to
take; smooth and debonair as ever--a little harder about the mouth and
eyes, and that was all.
The morning before I went home I made my way once more up the
evil-smelling stairs to my friend’s garret. He was standing at the
window, looking down over the bridge--that tragic bridge of Galata
where the blind and halt used to trade, perhaps still trade, the sight
of their misfortunes. We stood there side by side.
“Frank,” I said, “this can’t go on! Do you ever look at yourself in the
glass?”
No smile can be so bitter as a smile that used to be sunny.
“So long as I can see her I shall last out.”
“You surely don’t want a woman to feel she’s lost her soul, and is
making you lose yours? She’s perfectly sincere in that.”
“I know. I’ve given up asking. So long as I can see her, that’s all.”
It was mania!
That afternoon I took a boat over to the Radolins. It was April--the
first real day of spring, balmy and warm. The Judas-trees of the Rumeli
Hissar were budding, the sun colouring the water with tints of opal;
and all the strange city of mosques and minarets, Western commerce and
Oriental beggary, was wonderfully living under that first spring sun.
I brought my boat up to the Radolins’ landing-stage, and got out. I
mounted the steps, greened over by the wash of the water, and entered
their little garden courtyard. I had never come this way before, and
stood for a moment looking through the mimosas and bougainvillæas for
a door that would satisfy formality. There was a grille to the left,
but to reach it I would have to pass in front of the wide ground-floor
window, whence I had sometimes looked out over the water to the Rumeli
Hissar. My shoes made no noise on the marble path, but what I saw in
the room stopped me from trying to pass.
Hélène Radolin was sitting perfectly still in a low chair sideways to
the window, her hands on her lap, her eyes fixed on the tiled floor,
where a streak of sunlight fell. In the curve of her grand piano,
resting his elbows on it, Weymouth was leaning back, equally still,
gazing down at her. That was all. But the impression I received of life
arrested, of frozen lava, was in a way terrible. I stole back down the
steps into my boat, and out on to the opal-tinted waters.
I have nothing more to tell you of this business. The war came down on
us all soon after. Rumours I have heard, but I know nothing, as they
say, of my own knowledge. Yet it has seemed to me worth while to set
down this record of a ‘stroke of lightning’ in days when people laugh
at such absurdities.
1921.