Kitty was unaccustomed to the processes of thought; she considered
reason to be of the same general quality as coal-mining, a useful
industry safely left in the hands of experts. She did not foresee
trouble. She came against the corners of adverse facts as those who walk
unwarily in the dark bruise themselves against unexpected obstacles.
When she went to bed the night after her quarrel with Anthony she found
herself exposed to one of these unexpected spiritual bruises. She could
not sleep. It was a soundless, mild June night. The garden lay gray and
still under her window. There was no darkness; only a long suspension of
light. Nothing was alive but Kitty. She drew on a scarlet dressing-gown
and leaned out of the window.
It must be rather funny, she thought, being dead. If it was only
stillness, like the gray shadow of the lawn, one wouldn’t mind very
much, and there would be no pain and no bother. You wouldn’t have to
decide anything.
She was not in severe pain to-night. Those singular paroxysms which
seized her chest and her right arm, and made her feel like a creature
caught in a trap, were mercifully holding off.
It was clever of Anthony to guess that there was something the matter
with her, perhaps it was that odd little lump under her arm which had
made one shoulder look higher than the other. She had examined her neck
very carefully before she went to bed and noticed nothing herself.
Kitty had never taken the least precaution about her health. She knew
nothing about illness except that it was very bad for people’s looks.
She did not think a lump under her arm could be an illness. If the pain
got too bad, she would not stand it, but she wouldn’t be bothered with
doctors and operations. All the wild things she loved and knew lived
freely, and when their time came, went into bushes and died. Of course
it wouldn’t be as simple as that for her, but you could make it fairly
simple.
A bat flickered by, heavily drooping like a sagging leaf. Kitty moved a
little and watched the darker shadow of the shrubbery swallowing its
tiny form.
She liked the thin vague darkness melting away into the sky; there
seemed nothing that could hurt you in it. After all, she’d had a good
time, and a long life was merely the fading down of good times.
“I don’t find anything new in it,” her father had assured her. “Nor do I
think the facts I already know worth the attention one has more or less
to give them. I survive from habit, and so, I believe, do most people.”
Kitty did not think habit worth survival. She wished to live a hundred
lives, each of them different, and she had tried only one, and it was
very much the same. The worst of it was, if you went into one kind of
life thoroughly, it seemed to dish you for all the others. Hers for
instance—she hadn’t quite realized before how it had dished her for
people like Anthony’s mother.
Kitty’s practice had always been to eat her cake and have it. She had
eaten and forgotten; and when she wanted fresh cake, it was always
there. It was true that there had been occasional breakdowns in this
system; but on the whole she had lived the life she had chosen, with
very few rebuffs and no remorse. It was rather absurd at this time of
day to begin to want a different kind of life.
Perhaps it had been a mistake to take up Anthony. She hadn’t seen at the
beginning why they shouldn’t just have fun—her kind of fun.
But Anthony had his own kind of fun. He thought about right and wrong,
though he wasn’t a bit religious. Kitty never thought about right and
wrong if she could help it. She didn’t see what it had got to do with
her and Anthony. Why couldn’t it be left to people who went to church
and liked it? When Anthony had told her about his work as if it was a
sacred obligation, she supposed it was because he had not had any
opportunity of going to musical comedies for a long time, and had
nothing else to talk about. She thought he was mad when he explained to
her that if in the future it came to a choice between having to give up
his profession or Pannell, he would give up Pannell. She hoped that he
would get over it as soon as his overstrung nerves had become more
normal.
But Anthony had got steadily more normal, and he had not got over it. He
really wanted to do his work more than he wanted a good time. It was,
oddly enough, his idea of a good time. He kept coming back to it when he
ought to have been amusing Kitty. He actually appeared to think he was
amusing her. It was part of Anthony’s idea of fun. The rest of his fun
was loving her—loving her in a way that disturbed everything else.
Anthony was more anxious to protect her than to please her, and he was
apparently more anxious still that she should do right. He never had
accepted the convenience of her recklessness. If he had, he might have
been with her now in this emphatic night stillness, and then she would
have told him everything. There would have been no barriers. But Anthony
did not know this. It was hidden from him by his implacable innocence!
He did not know what he might have had, or, if he continued indefinitely
the part he had chosen, what would happen to him.
But Kitty knew. She knew that she would drag him under, and involve his
life, so that the work he loved would be hindered, and his life caught
away from the people and customs which belonged to him. He would become
a part of the circle of her lawlessness.
He could think what he liked, that was the worst of thought it had so
much margin, but that narrow path experience was against Anthony.
Kitty knew that out of certain situations certain facts arise, they do
not happen as you like, they happen as they must; thought does not save
any man’s steps from the abyss unless he turns away from it.
It seemed to Kitty, as she sat huddled up on the window-sill, that the
gray light over the fields had changed a little. The shadows were darker
in it, and there was a sense of movement in the air, as if the earth was
coming back to life. A long way off she heard the call of a bird.
There was only one way to save Anthony: she could disenchant him, she
could do what he would think despicable. He had fine, stern principles,
but Kitty hadn’t. Her only principle had been to amuse herself; so that
it would be much easier for her to give up hers than for Anthony to give
up his. Kitty did not say, “I must not do wrong even to save Anthony.”
She knew she must do wrong if it _could_ save him. She was thinking only
of him.
The worst of it was that she would have to be really horrible. She
couldn’t put Anthony off with anything less than the complete
disfigurement of herself. He had accepted too much already not to be
willing to accept more, unless it was of such a nature as to shake his
whole faith in Kitty’s character. She must do something which would
violate his taste and make him feel that she was contemptible.
He had forgiven badness, partly because he hadn’t seen it, and partly
because there were excuses which he could put between her and her acts.
He would not forgive her if she could make him despise her.
Kitty hunted in her relentless, clear little mind for an essential
ugliness. There were things she had done which she hadn’t minded at the
time, but which she now realized would hurt her to tell Anthony; she had
not let herself think about these incidents before.
She could remember the time when she had hastened over their
accomplishment because they had jarred some instinct in her, which had
first rebelled and then sunk into acquiescence. They jarred her mind now
to think about, but she faced each incident steadily in turn, to see if
it was ugly enough to disenchant Anthony.
It must be something she had really done which he couldn’t get over,
something that would lash his memory and scar it with a cruel image, and
she must attach this image to herself, so that afterward, when he went
away, he would not crave for her, but be able to say, “Well, thank God,
I saw through her in time!”
Kitty put her head down on the scarlet dressing-gown and shook a little
with dry, reluctant sobs. She did not cry very long or very hard,
because she was afraid of bringing on the pain; but she felt as if her
spirit was buried in a place of tears. She didn’t want Anthony to see
through her, she did not want to see through herself. Why was it that
after she had forgotten all about love, and stamped out the pure and
perfect promise of her early years, love should return and haunt her
with promises as strong as ever, and its attainment impossible? Could
those fugitive, unconnected acts into which she had flung herself from
excitement, and a desire to use her unexplored, untempered powers, close
against her forever any fuller life?
Must she always be a “vagrant,” shut outside those magic walls which
hold mothers and their children, homes, and the rich security of love?
Kitty lifted her head and looked out once more into the mysterious life
of the night. She could hear the distant droning of the frogs in the
water meadows, and watch the mists blown by the strong dawn wind,
flitting in strange shapes across the lawn.
Nature went on her own silent way, clothing in darkness the deepest
processes of life.
Kitty could not expect the assistance of a revelation either from nature
or from man. She had chosen the predatory life of loneliness in which
there is neither sympathy nor companionship, and where the outcast is
pitted against the solidarity of a hostile world.
She could do what she liked and let Anthony take the consequences, or
she could take the consequences and do what she didn’t like. There did
not seem to be any other alternative. Her mind fixed suddenly on a
sufficient incident. There was something she could tell Anthony which
would be certain to send him away. She hadn’t immediately thought of it
because it had seemed trivial at the time, but it wasn’t trivial if she
looked at it in connection with Anthony, and she could make it worse
than it was.
She shrank from proclaiming it because it unfortunately involved
somebody else, though he wasn’t very deeply involved. Kitty could manage
to make him appear almost innocent in comparison with herself, and,
fortunately, it never mattered that a man should be wholly innocent.
Kitty gave a wicked chuckle as she saw in a sudden flash how it would
annoy the person involved. It would be the only amusing point in the
whole affair; and she was perhaps entitled to that much amusement; for
if he was annoyed, she would be ruined in Anthony’s eyes.
Still, it really wouldn’t do just to mess Anthony’s life up for nothing.
It would be awfully dull and horrible sending him away, but it would be
more horrible to smash him up when he’d been awfully good to her. She
wasn’t going to like doing it, of course; she hadn’t liked quarreling
with him on the river. She hadn’t been prepared for that particular
quarrel, or she could have finished the whole thing then. Anthony had
taken her by surprise, and she had been so hurt that her wits had broken
down. She had stopped quarreling when she ought to have gone on. That
was what happened when you got accidentally hurt—it did not happen when
you meant to hurt yourself. You could keep your head then.
As the light broadened out over the fields and ran like silver down the
little river, the pain in Kitty’s arm came on her like a toothache. It
was an extraordinary pain, dull at first and then as fierce as a blow,
and it seemed to hold Kitty so that she was like some thing shaken in an
iron vise. She could not move, and her breathing came uncomfortably, as
if it were being forced through a narrow space.
The attack lasted longer than she had ever known it to last. The sun
came out and drank up all the shadows, and the little shapes of mist
that leaned over the water slipped into the willows; but the land was no
longer real to Kitty. It looked like some foreign country. She was being
held back by a dreadful iron grip, so that she could take no part in it.
The pain dulled down at last, and broken and white-lipped, she struggled
to bed. She said to herself that she must do something about the pain
soon if it didn’t get any better.
Then she fixed her mind on what she had better do to disenchant Anthony.
It was easier to Kitty to put off the thought of death than to put off
the thought of Anthony.