His creditor, at the hour it suited her, transferred her base of
operations to town, to which impenetrable scene she had also herself
retired; and his raising of the first Two Hundred, during five
exasperated and miserable months, and then of another Seventy piecemeal,
bleedingly, after long delays and under the epistolary whiplash cracked
by the London solicitor in his wretched ear even to an effect of the
very report of Miss Cookham’s tongue--these melancholy efforts formed
a scramble up an arduous steep where steps were planted and missed, and
bared knees were excoriated, and clutches at wayside tufts succeeded and
failed, on a system to which poor Nan could have intelligently entered
only if she had been somehow less ladylike. She kept putting into his
mouth the sick quaver of where he should find the rest, the always
inextinguishable rest, long after he had in silent rage fallen away from
any further payment at all--at first, he had but too blackly felt, for
himself, to the still quite possible non-exclusion of some penetrating
ray of “exposure.” He didn’t care a tuppenny damn now, and in point
of fact, after he had by hook and by crook succeeded in being able to
unload to the tune of Two-Hundred-and-Seventy, and then simply returned
the newest reminder of his outstanding obligation unopened, this latter
belated but real sign of fight, the first he had risked, remarkably
caused nothing at all to happen; nothing at least but his being moved
to quite tragically rueful wonder as to whether exactly some such
demonstration mightn’t have served his turn at an earlier stage.
He could by this time at any rate measure his ruin--with three fantastic
mortgages on his house, his shop, his stock, and a burden of interest
to carry under which his business simply stretched itself inanimate,
without strength for a protesting kick, without breath for an appealing
groan. Customers lingering for further enjoyment of the tasteful remarks
he had cultivated the unobstrusive art of throwing in, would at this
crisis have found plenty to repay them, might his wit have strayed a
little more widely still, toward a circuitous egotistical outbreak, from
the immediate question of the merits of this and that author or of the
condition of this and that volume. He had come to be conscious through
it all of strangely glaring at people when they tried to haggle--and
not, as formerly, with the glare of derisive comment on their overdone
humour, but with that of fairly idiotised surrender--as if they were
much mistaken in supposing, for the sake of conversation, that he might
take himself for saveable by the difference between sevenpence and
ninepence. He watched everything impossible and deplorable happen as in
an endless prolongation of his nightmare; watched himself proceed, that
is, with the finest, richest incoherence, to the due preparation of his
catastrophe. Everything came to seem _equally_ part of this--in complete
defiance of proportion; even his final command of detachment, on
the bench of desolation (where each successive fact of his dire case
regularly cut itself out black, yet of senseless silhouette, against the
red west) in respect to poor Nan’s flat infelicities, which for the most
part kept no pace with the years or with change, but only shook like
hard peas in a child’s rattle, the same peas a ways, of course, so long
as the rattle didn’t split open with usage or from somebody’s act of
irritation. They represented, or they had long done so, her contribution
to the more superficial of the two branches of intimacy--the
intellectual alternative, the one that didn’t merely consist of her
preparing herself for his putting his arm round her waist.
There were to have been moments, nevertheless, all the first couple of
years, when she did touch in him, though to his actively dissimulating
it, a more or less sensitive nerve--moments as they were too, to do
her justice, when she treated him not to his own wisdom, or even folly,
served up cold, but to a certain small bitter fruit of her personal,
her unnatural, plucking. “I wonder that since _she_ took legal advice
so freely, to come down on you, you didn’t take it yourself, a little,
before being so sure you stood no chance. Perhaps _your_ people would
have been sure of something quite different--_perhaps_, I only say, you
know.” She “only” said it, but she said it, none the less, in the early
time, about once a fortnight. In the later, and especially after their
marriage, it had a way of coming up again to the exclusion, as it seemed
to him, of almost everything else; in fact during the most dismal years,
the three of the loss of their two children, the long stretch of sordid
embarrassment ending in her death, he was afterward to think of her
as having generally said it several times a day. He was then also to
remember that his answer, before she had learnt to discount it, had been
inveterately at hand: “What would any solicitor have done or wanted to
do but drag me just into the hideous public arena”--he had always so put
it--“that it has been at any rate my pride and my honour, the one rag
of self-respect covering my nakedness, to have loathed and avoided from
every point of view?”
That had disposed of it so long as he cared, and by the time he had
ceased to care for anything it had also lost itself in the rest of the
vain babble of home. After his wife’s death, during his year of mortal
solitude, it awoke again as an echo of far-off things--far-off, very
far-off, because he felt then not ten but twenty years older. That was
by reason simply of the dead weight with which his load of debt had
settled--the persistence of his misery dragging itself out. With all
that had come and gone the bench of desolation was still there, just as
the immortal flush of the westward sky kept hanging its indestructible
curtain. He had never got away--everything had left him, but he himself
had been able to turn his back on nothing--and now, his day’s labour
before a dirty desk at the Gas Works ended, he more often than not,
almost any season at temperate Properley serving his turn, took his slow
straight way to the Land’s End and, collapsing there to rest, sat often
for an hour at a time staring before him. He might in these sessions,
with his eyes on the grey-green sea, have been counting again and
still recounting the beads, almost all worn smooth, of his rosary of
pain--which had for the fingers of memory and the recurrences of wonder
the same felt break of the smaller ones by the larger that would have
aided a pious mumble in some dusky altar-chapel.
If it has been said of him that when once full submersion, as from far
back, had visibly begun to await him, he watched himself, in a cold
lucidity, _do_ punctually and necessarily each of the deplorable things
that were inconsistent with his keeping afloat, so at present again he
might have been held agaze just by the presented grotesqueness of that
vigil. Such ghosts of dead seasons were all he _had_ now to watch--such
a recaptured sense for instance as that of the dismal unavailing
awareness that had attended his act of marriage. He had let submersion
final and absolute become the signal for it--a mere minor determinant
having been the more or less contemporaneously unfavourable effect on
the business of Drury & Dean of the sudden disappearance of Mr. Dean
with the single small tin box into which the certificates of the
firm’s credit had been found to be compressible. That had been his
only form--or had at any rate seemed his only one. He couldn’t not have
married, no doubt, just as he couldn’t not have suffered the last degree
of humiliation and almost of want, or just as his wife and children
couldn’t not have died of the little he was able, under dire reiterated
pinches, to do for them; but it was “rum,” for final solitary brooding,
that he hadn’t appeared to see his way definitely to undertake the
support of a family till the last scrap of his little low-browed,
high-toned business, and the last figment of “property” in the old tiled
and timbered shell that housed it, had been sacrificed to creditors
mustering six rows deep.
Of course what had counted too in the odd order was that even at the
end of the two or three years he had “allowed” her, Kate Cookham, gorged
with his unholy tribute, had become the subject of no successful siege
on the part either of Bill Frankle or, by what he could make out, of any
one else. She had judged decent--he could do her that justice--to take
herself personally out of his world, as he called it, for good and all,
as soon as he had begun regularly to bleed; and, to whatever lucrative
practice she might be devoting her great talents in London or elsewhere,
he felt his conscious curiosity about her as cold, with time, as the
passion of vain protest that she had originally left him to. He could
recall but two direct echoes of her in all the bitter years--both
communicated by Bill Frankle, disappointed and exposed and at last
quite remarkably ingenuous sneak, who had also, from far back, taken to
roaming the world, but who, during a period, used fitfully and
ruefully to reappear. Herbert Dodd had quickly seen, at their first
meeting--every one met every one sooner or later at Properley, if
meeting it could always be called, either in the glare or the gloom of
the explodedly attractive Embankment--that no silver stream of which he
himself had been the remoter source could have played over the career of
this all but repudiated acquaintance. That hadn’t fitted with his first,
his quite primitive raw vision of the probabilities, and he had further
been puzzled when, much later on, it had come to him in a roundabout way
that Miss Cookham was supposed to be, or to have been, among them for
a few days “on the quiet,” and that Frankle, who had seen her and who
claimed to know more about it than he said, was cited as authority for
the fact. But he hadn’t himself at this juncture seen Frankle; he had
only wondered, and a degree of mystification had even remained.
That memory referred itself to the dark days of old Drury’s smash,
the few weeks between his partner’s dastardly flight and Herbert’s own
comment on it in the form of his standing up with Nan for the nuptial
benediction of the Vicar of St. Bernard’s on a very cold, bleak December
morning and amid a circle of seven or eight long-faced, red-nosed and
altogether dowdy persons. Poor Nan herself had come to affect him as
scarce other than red-nosed and dowdy by that time, but this only added,
in his then, and indeed in his lasting view, to his general and his
particular morbid bravery. He had cultivated ignorance, there were small
inward immaterial luxuries he could scrap-pily cherish even among other,
and the harshest, destitutions; and one of them was represented by
this easy refusal of his mind to render to certain passages of his
experience, to various ugly images, names, associations, the homage of
continued attention. That served him, that helped him; but what happened
when, a dozen dismal years having worn themselves away, he sat single
and scraped bare again, as if his long wave of misfortune had washed him
far beyond everything and then conspicuously retreated, was that, thus
stranded by tidal action, deposited in the lonely hollow of his fate, he
felt even sustaining pride turn to nought and heard no challenge from
it when old mystifications, stealing forth in the dusk of the day’s work
done, scratched at the door of speculation and hung about, through the
idle hours, for irritated notice.
The evenings of his squalid clerkship were all leisure now, but there
was nothing at all near home on the other hand, for his imagination,
numb and stiff from its long chill, to begin to play with. Voices from
far off would quaver to him therefore in the stillness; where he knew
for the most recurrent, little by little, the faint wail of his wife.
He had become deaf to it in life, but at present, after so great an
interval, he listened again, listened and listened, and seemed to hear
it sound as by the pressure of some weak broken spring. It phrased for
his ear her perpetual question, the one she had come to at the last as
under the obsession of a discovered and resented wrong, a wrong withal
that had its source much more in his own action than anywhere else.
“That you didn’t make _sure_ she could have done anything, that you
didn’t make sure and that you were too afraid!”--this commemoration
had ended by playing such a part of Nan’s finally quite contracted
consciousness as to exclude everything else.
At the time, somehow, he had made his terms with it; he had then more
urgent questions to meet than that of the poor creature’s taste in
worrying pain; but actually it struck him--not the question, but the
fact itself of the taste--as the one thing left over from all that had
come and gone. So it was; nothing remained to him in the world, on the
bench of desolation, but the option of taking up that echo--together
with an abundance of free time for doing so. That he hadn’t made sure of
what might and what mightn’t have been done to him, that he had been
too afraid--had the proposition a possible bearing on his present
apprehension of things? To reply indeed he would have had to be able to
say what his present apprehension of things, left to itself, amounted
to; an uninspiring effort indeed he judged it, sunk to so poor a pitch
was his material of thought--though it might at last have been the feat
he sought to perform as he stared at the grey-green sea.