I
He had only to seclude his mind in order to imagine himself in the train
again, to hear its steady beat, and to sway monotonously with its
rocking. As soon as he had isolated himself in this day-dream, he was
impervious to the sights and sounds that washed round on the outskirts
of his consciousness. He was safely withdrawn. He sat staring, not at
the green baize of the card-table, where his wife, with white, plump,
be-ringed hands, under the strong light thrown down by the shaded lamp,
set out the neat rows of shiny cards for her Patience; he sat staring,
sheltered within the friendly shadows, not at this evening security of
his home, but out through the rectangular windows of the train, that
framed the hard blaze of the southern country, the red rocks and the
blue sea; the train curving in and out of tunnels, round the sharp
promontories, disclosing the secrets of little bays, the pine-trees
among the boulders, and the blackened scrub that betokened a previous
hillside fire.
Opposite him, _she_ slept, curled up in the corner of the seat, very
young and very fragile under the big collar of soft fur of her coat
thrown over her to keep off the dust. He had wished that she would look
out of the window with him; he knew how she would sit up, and the quick
impatient gesture by which she would dash the hair out of her eyes, but
she slept so peacefully, so like a child, that he would not wake her. He
bent forward, knocking the ash of his cigarette off against the
window-ledge, to get a better view out of the window; and every little
creek, as the curving train took it out of view, he pursued with
regretful eyes, knowing that he would not pass that way again. This
forlorn and beautiful coast, whose every accident was so faithfully
followed by the train, this coast, every bit of it, was a party to his
happiness, and he had been reluctant to let it go.
How his heart ached! Perhaps it was not wholesome to have trained his
mind to enter so readily, so completely, into that world of
recollections? He dragged himself out:
“Patience going well?”
“Not very well to-night.”
He drifted away again, before he well knew that he had drifted. Not to
the train this time—his memories were illimitably various. (The time had
been when he could not trust himself to dip into them, those memories
that were now perpetually his refuge, his solace, and his pain.) An
hotel bedroom. What hotel?—it didn’t matter. All hotel bedrooms were
alike; all Paradise, so long as they had contained _her_. In what
spot?—that didn’t matter, either; somewhere warm and gaudy; all their
escapades had been in southern places. Somewhere with bougainvillæa
ramping over creamy houses, somewhere with gay irresponsible negroes
selling oranges out of immense baskets at the street corners. She had
never tired of the gash of their white teeth in their black faces as
they grinned. She would stop to buy their oranges just to get the grin.
And some of them could juggle with oranges, which made her laugh and
turn to him in delight and clap her hands. He clenched his fingers
together, out of sight, as he lounged in the depths of his arm-chair.
That hotel bedroom! Her clothes.... He used to kneel on the floor beside
her open dressing-case, lifting out her clothes for her, because she was
too lazy to unpack for herself. She watched him through her eye-lashes,
amused at his complaints which so ill concealed his joy in her
possessions; then she would catch his head and strain it hungrily
against her. They were always violent, irresistible, surprising, those
rare demonstrations of hers, and left him dizzy and abashed. That hotel
bedroom! Always the same furniture; the iron bedstead under the draped
mosquito curtains that were so oddly bridal; the combined wash-stand and
chest of drawers (the drawers incorrigibly half-open and spilling the
disorder of her garments, her ribbons, and her laces), the hanging
wardrobe with the long looking-glass door, the dressing-table littered
with her brushes, her powder, and her scent bottles. The evenings—he
would come noiselessly into her room while she lingered at her mirror,
in her long silk nightgown, her gleaming arms lifted to take the pins
out of her hair; and after standing in the doorway to watch her, he
would switch off the electric light, so that the open window and the
dark blue sky suddenly leapt up, deep, luminous, and spangled with gold
stars behind her. Then the coo of her voice, never startled, never
hasty: a coo of laughter and remonstrance, rather than of displeasure;
and he would go to her and draw her out on to the balcony, from where,
his arm flung round her shoulders and her suppleness yielding
contentedly to his pressure, they watched the yellow moon mount up above
the sheaves of the palm-trees, and glint upon a shield of distant water.
And there were other nights: so many, he might take his choice amongst
them. Carnival nights, when she fled away from him and became a spirit,
an incarnation of carnival, and the sweep of her dancing eyes over his
face was vague and rapid, as though he were a stranger she had never
seen before. He used to feel a small despair, thinking that any domino
who whirled her away possessed her in closer affinity than he. And when
he had at last thankfully brought her back into her room at the hotel,
with confetti scattered over the floor, fallen from her carnival
clothes, whose tawdry satin and tinsel lay thrown across a chair, then,
although he could not have wished her sweeter, she still kept that
will-o’-the-wisp remoteness, that air of one who has strayed and been
with difficulty recaptured, which made him wonder whether he or anyone
else would ever truly touch the secret of her shy and fugitive heart.
“How funny you are, Paul. You haven’t turned over a page of your book
for at least twenty minutes.” Not a rebuke—merely a placid comment.
Another set of Patience nicely dealt out.
After that he turned the pages assiduously, it wouldn’t do to be caught
dreaming. Then came the relapse....
She had flitted away from him; yes, the day had come when she had
flitted. He had known, always, somewhere within himself, that it would
come. To whom had she gone?—he didn’t know; he hadn’t tried to find out,
perhaps to no one; and, anyway, the fate of her body, passionately as he
had loved it, didn’t seem so vital a matter; what mattered was the flame
within her; he couldn’t bear to think that she should have given anyone
_that_. Not that he was fatuous enough to suppose that he had ever had
it. Oh, no!—he was far too humble, too diffident in his mind. He had
worshipped her all the more because he knew there was something in her
withdrawn, the eternal pilgrim, the incorrigible truant. He knew that he
could never have loved any woman who hadn’t that element in her, and
since he had only found it once, quite logically he had never loved but
once. (He had been young then. It had been easy enough for his relations
to pick holes in her: “Flighty,” they had said, and, snorting, “She
takes the best years of his life and then throws him aside,” and to all
their comments he had never answered once, but had looked at them with
deeply wounded eyes, so that they wondered uneasily what thoughts were
locked in his heart. Nor had they ever got any information out of him;
all their version of the story had been pieced together from bits of
gossip and rumour; correct in the main as to facts, but utterly at sea
as to essentials. But as he disdained to set them right, they were never
any the wiser.) Never loved but once; and here he was, fifty,
prosperous, even envied by other men, going daily about his affairs,
dining well, talking rationally, a certain portliness in his manner
which his figure had escaped.... He and his wife, a commendable couple;
a couple that made one disbelieve in anarchy, wild oats, or wild
animals. People smiled with the satisfaction of approval when they came
into a room; here were security, decorum; here were civilization and
politeness; here was a member of the civic corporation, a burgher to
admire and to respect. He had a grave, courtly manner, slightly
indulgent towards women, which they found not unattractive, although
they knew that he varied it towards none of them, whether plain or
pretty, staid or skittish. There was always the same grave smile on his
lips, always the same sustained, controlled interest in his eyes;
attention, perhaps, rather than interest; the line was a difficult one
to draw. The type of man who made other men say, “Wish we had more
fellows like him,” and of whom the women said amongst themselves, “A
puzzling man, somehow, isn’t he? So quiet. One never knows what he is
really thinking, or whether he isn’t laughing at us all. Do you suppose,
though, that he has ever really _felt_?”
The madcap things she did! He recalled that evening at the railway
station, when under the glare of the arc-lights she had danced up to a
ticket-collector—she in her little travelling hat and her furs and the
soft luxury that always seemed to surround her: “When does the next
train start?” “Where for, miss?” “Oh, it doesn’t matter where for—just
the next train?” And they had gone to Stroud.
“This Patience never seems to come out,” said the voice proceeding from
under the lamp.
“No, dear?”
“No. I think I shall have to give it up for an easier one. It’s so
irritating when things won’t go right.”
“I should try an easier one to-morrow.”
“To-morrow? Oh, I see, you want to go to bed. I must say, I should
rather have liked to try it this evening, but if you want to go to
bed....”
“No, dear, of course not; try your Patience by all means.”
“No, dear; I wouldn’t dream of it, as you want to go to bed. Besides,
to-morrow will do just as well. You will go round, won’t you, and see
that everything is properly locked up?”
“But I am dragging you to bed when you don’t want to go.”
“Not a bit, Paul, I assure you; it is quite all right. I am really quite
sleepy myself. I should have liked to try the Patience, perhaps, but
to-morrow will do just as well.”
He held the door open gravely for her, but there were several things she
must attend to before leaving the room: the fire must be poked down so
that no spark could be spat out on to the hearth-rug; the drawer of her
writing-table must be locked so that the housemaid should not read her
letters or examine her bills when dusting the room before breakfast on
the following morning; and the book which she had been reading must be
replaced in the bookcase. He endured all this ritual without betraying
any irritation, watching even the final pats which she gave to the
cushions of his chair.
“It’s quite all right, Paul, dear; of course one can’t help crumpling
cushions when one sits on them, and what are they there for but to be
sat on?”
She bustled out of the room, calling back to him as she mounted the
stairs: “You won’t forget to lock up, will you?”
He had remembered to lock up now for twenty years. He went methodically
about the business, looking behind curtains to see whether the shutters
were closed, testing the chain on the front door. All that paraphernalia
of security! He felt sometimes that the cold, the poor, and the hungry
were welcome to the embers of his drawing-room fire, to the silver off
his sideboard, and to the remains of the wine in his decanters. And as
he stood for a moment at the garden door, looking up the gravel path of
his trim little garden, and felt the biting cold beneath the slip of new
moon, he wondered with a sort of anguish where _she_ was, whether she
was sheltered and cared for, or whether in her gay improvident way she
had gone down and under, until on such a winter’s night as this there
remained no comfort for her but such as she might find among the mirrors
and garish lights of a bar, in such fortuitous company as she might
charm with a vivacious manner and an affectation of laughter. She had
from time to time been haunted by a premonition of such things, he
remembered; a mocking wistfulness had come into her voice when she said,
“You’ll always be all right, Paul, you were born prosperous; but as for
me, I’ll end my days among the dregs of the world—I know it, so think of
me sometimes when you sit over your Madeira and your cigar, won’t you?
and wonder whether my nose isn’t pushed against your window in the hopes
that the smell of your cooking might drift out to me,” and when she had
said these things he had put his hand over her mouth to stop the words
he couldn’t bear to hear, and she had laughed and had repeated, “Well,
well, we’ll see.”
He shut the door carefully and shot the bolt into its socket. Very cold
it was—silly of him to stand at the open door like that—hoped he hadn’t
got a chill. Lighting his candle in the hall, he switched off all the
electric lights and climbed the stairs to bed; a nice fire warmed his
dressing-room, and his pyjamas were put out for him over the back of a
chair in front of the fire; he undressed, thinking that he was glad he
wasn’t a poor devil out in the cold. His wife was already in bed, and by
the light of her reading-lamp he saw the curlers that framed her
forehead, and the feather-stitching in white floss-silk round the collar
of her flannel nightgown.
“What a long time you’ve been, Paul. I was just thinking, I shan’t be
able to try that Patience to-morrow evening, because we’ve got the
Howard-Ellises coming to dinner.”
“So we have. I’d quite forgotten. We must give them champagne,” he said
mechanically; “they’ll expect it.”
He got into bed, turned out the lamp, and lay down beside his wife,
staring into the dark.
HER SON
_To H. M._
I
She awoke that morning earlier than was her wont, emerging from a
delicious sleep into a waking no less pleasant. Lazily she slipped her
hand under her pillows—there were a lot of pillows, all very downy, into
which her head and shoulders sank as into a nest; she liked a lot of
pillows; that was one of her little luxuries, and she was in the habit
of saying, what was one’s own house if not a place where one’s little
luxuries could be indulged?—lazily she slipped her hand under the
pillows, feeling about, and having found what she wanted, pressed the
spring of the repeater watch lying there tucked away. Its tiny,
melodious chime came to her, muffled but distinct. Seven clear little
bells; then two chimes for the half-hour; then five quick busy strokes;
five-and-twenty minutes to eight. Five-and-twenty minutes still before
she would be called. She lay contentedly on her back, with her arms
folded beneath her head, watching the daylight increase through the
short chintz curtains of her windows opposite. The chintz, a shiny one,
was lined with pink; the light came through it, pink and tempered. She
lay wondering whether she should get up to pull the curtains aside, but
she was so comfortable, so softly warm, and in so pleasant a frame of
mind, that she would not break the hour by moving. She had a little
world inside her head to-day making her independent of the world
outside. And besides, she knew so well what she would see, even did she
make the effort and get up to pull the curtains; she would see what she
had seen every day for forty years, the barn with the orange lichen on
the roof, the church tower, the jumbled roofs of the village, the bare
beautiful limbs of the distant Downs; she knew it all, knew it with the
knowledge of love; and yet, in spite of this intimate knowledge, she was
frequently heard to remark that the country had always some new
surprise, some gradation of light one had never seen before, so that one
was always on the look out and one’s interest kept alive from day to
day. The seasons in themselves constituted a surprise to which, in her
five-and-sixty years of life, she had never grown accustomed; she forgot
each beauty as it became replaced by a newer beauty; in the delight of
spring she forgot the etched austerity of winter, and in winter she
forgot the flowers of spring, so it was always with a naïve astonishment
that she recognized the arrival of a new season, and each one as it
became established seemed to her the best. A discovery took some time
before it settled itself into its place in the working of her mind, but,
once there, it held with a gentle obstinacy, and, because there were not
very many of these discoveries, none of them were very far away from the
circling current of her thoughts. Nor was she eager for fresh
acquaintances among her thoughts, any more than for fresh acquisitions
among her friends; just as she liked faces to be familiar, so she liked
ideas to be well-tested and proven before she admitted them to the
privilege of her intimacy; the presence of strangers was an
inconvenience; good manners forbade little jokes from which strangers
were excluded, little allusive or reminiscent smiles in which they could
not share. It followed, logically enough—although she enjoyed the small,
carefully-chosen dinner parties she gave once a fortnight on summer
evenings—that she was really happiest alone with her house and garden,
because, as she said, one never knows anybody so well as one knows
oneself, and even one’s most approved friends are apt to contradict or
to disagree, or to advance unforeseen opinions; to disconcert, in fact,
in a variety of ways impossible to the silent acquiescence of plants or
furniture; and the one person whose constant companionship she would
have chosen, had hitherto been absent.
She was perfectly happy now as she lay waiting for eight o’clock and the
beginning of the day, agreeable anticipations floating in her mind as
her eyes wandered over the comfort of her room, from the chintz curtains
to the bright stoppered bottles and silver on her dressing-table, from
the small bookcase full of nicely-bound books to the row of photographs
on the mantelpiece. All was very still. One of the curtains bellied out
a little in front of an open window. From time to time a smile hovered
over her lips, and once she gave a sigh, and moved slightly in her bed,
as though the very perfection of her thoughts were giving her a
deliciously uneasy rapture. But she never allowed herself to indulge for
long in reveries which, however pleasant they might be, led to nothing
practical. She knew that she had a great deal to see to that morning;
and if all were not done in an orderly way, something would be
forgotten. She stretched out her hand and took from off the table by her
bed a memorandum book, fitted with a pencil and bound in green leather,
across which was written in gilt lettering, “_While I remember it_.”
With the pencil poised above the first fair page, she paused. Would it
be better to execute her business in the village first, or to do what
she had to do about the house? The village first, by all means; if any
of the tradesmen made a mistake, there would be the more time to rectify
their blunder. She began, in her mind, her journey up the village
street, stopping at the stationer’s, the grocer’s, the fishmonger’s.
How difficult it was to cater for the wants of a man! So long since she
had done it; she had lost the habit. What would he want? The _Times_.
She noted “_Times_,” and added, after a long concentration, “_The
Field_.” Then she remembered that he liked J pens; she herself always
used Relief; how lucky that she had thought of that. There was nothing
else from the stationer’s; of all the ordinary requirements,
writing-paper, blotting-paper, ink, pencils, gummed labels, elastic
bands, envelopes of assorted sizes, she kept in her cupboard an
exhaustive store. The grocer next; and she had already, a long way back,
when she first heard that Henry was coming, made a note that he liked
preserved ginger. She renewed this note, neatly, under the proper
heading in her list: Ginger, Brazil nuts, a small Stilton, anchovies—he
would want a savoury for dinner, and he should have it—chutney. She
could not think of anything else, but once she was in the shop she could
look round and perhaps see something that he would like. She passed on
to the fishmonger’s, and with a delighted smile wrote down, “Herring
roes” and “Kippers.” How amused and pleased he would be when he realized
how well she had remembered all his tastes! Not the taste he had when he
was a little boy, and which she might have remembered out of sentiment;
no, he should see that she had kept pace with his years, and remembered
his preferences as a man up to five years ago, when she had last seen
him.
She had finished now with the village, for all the more staple
requirements had, of course, been ordered at the beginning of the week,
and these were only the extras which she had treasured up to do herself
on the last morning. There was more to be seen to at home. Flowers—no,
she need not make a note of that; she would not forget to do the
flowers. But there were other things which, unless noted, might slip her
memory:
“Order the motor; eggs (brown) for breakfast; honey; fire in his room;
put out the port; put out the cigars; early morning tea.”
At that moment she heard the church clock beginning to strike eight, and
with a knock on the door her maid came in, carrying a little tray in one
hand and a can of hot water in the other. There were a few letters
slipped under the edge of the saucer on the tray, and Mrs. Martin read
them while she drank her tea, but they were not very interesting, only
the annual appeal from the local gardeners’ society—she thought it
unthrifty to send that by post, when it could so easily have been left
by hand—a couple of bills, a bulb catalogue from Holland (“Early every
morning will be seen dozens of parties of men, women and children
tramping up the mountains between France and Spain, singing the popular
song of Harry Lauder, ‘We’re all going the same way, we’ve all gone down
the hills.’ Now perhaps you will ask me why I tell this in a Bulb
Catalogue, and here I will give you the answer: In the valleys of those
beautiful Pyrenees mountains live numerous daffodils, which are the
richest flowering of these garden-friends I ever meeted. Will you not
try a couple of hundred from our stock? and you will be convinced to
have invested fife bob on the good horse.”), and a letter from her
sister in Devon which she put aside to read later on. The maid moved
about the room, putting everything ready very quietly and skilfully. The
curtains were drawn back now, and from her bed Mrs. Martin could see the
wide autumn sky, gold-brown behind the scarlet trail of splay-leaved
Virginia creeper that hung down outside the window. She was glad that it
was neither raining nor windy. She would have the motor opened before it
started for the station.
The day had really begun.
A rising tide of excitement made her want very much to talk to Williams,
but this was against her principles, and she restrained herself. She
kept glancing at Williams whenever the maid’s back was turned, or her
head bent over the linen in the tidy drawers, and opening her lips to
speak, but the remark faded away each time into a nervous smile, which
she concealed by drinking again from her cup of tea. But when Williams
came and stood by her bed to say, “The bath is quite ready, ma’am,” she
could not prevent herself from speaking; she wanted to say, “You know,
it’s to-day, Williams, to-day!” but instead of that she said, with
detachment, “Is it a fine morning, Williams?” and Williams replied,
respectful as ever, “A beautiful morning, ma’am,” but Mrs. Martin, as
she got out of bed and slid her feet into the warmed bedroom slippers
that were waiting for her, felt that between herself and Williams a
perfectly satisfactory understanding existed.