CHALLIS'S INSIPID RETURN HOME. WHAT HAD IT ALL BEEN, THIS DREAM? OLD
LINKS WITH BYGONES. HOW CONFESS, AND TO WHAT? OF A FIRE GOD GAVE FOR
OTHER ENDS
Mr. Challis gave Lord Felixthorpe's chauffeur half-a-sovereign when he
was landed at the Station. This was because he stood in such awe of
that great man that he doubted if so haughty a soul would brook a tip
at all. However, it not only brooked it, but changed it immediately
for nine shillings in silver and eightpence in coppers and a glass of
bitters at the Barleymow, opposite the Station. So Challis felt easy,
and wondered to himself that so small a matter should disquiet him,
with all his great perplexities on hand. How on earth did Napoleon
Bonaparte contrive to exist?
However, all the perplexities came back in force as soon as he was off;
indeed, he was almost sorry no small distraction occurred during his
flight home. For he was alone nearly all the way to Euston; the many
who nearly entered his carriage seeming to condemn him on inspection,
and choosing every other carriage on its merits. The porter who put his
valise on a cab at the terminus seemed callous and preoccupied; and the
driver, when told to go to the nearest Metropolitan Station, struck him
as too unsympathetic when he said: "Which will you have--King's Cross
or Gower Street? It don't make no difference to _me_," not without some
imputation of weakness of character. Also, this cabman appeared to form
a lower opinion of his fare when the latter chose Gower Street than he
would have had he chosen King's Cross.
By the time Challis had described a large segment of the Inner Circle,
and had waited a quarter of an hour at Gloucester Road for a Wimbledon
train, he had resolved that nothing would ever induce him to try that
route again. Then a distasteful thought struck him:--should he ever
make the same journey again? "Much better not," said he to himself;
and kept on repeating it to himself till he had found his seat in the
Wimbledon train, the gear of which caught the phrase, and seemed to
repeat it to itself all the way to East Putney.
He had wired to Marianne: "Am coming home on business may come to lunch
but don't wait Titus." The "may come to lunch" struck him as making
this "business" seem plausible, without definite disingenuousness.
He wanted to account for himself, and to make his sudden return a
very matter-of-course occurrence. One thing was odd about it--and it
was odder still that it never struck him as odd--that he should be
so solicitous about not giving his wife an unnecessary start. He was
just what he had always been in respect of his constant consideration
of Marianne's comfort in small matters, and had never admitted to
himself that his affection for her had varied as a necessary result of
his infatuation for Judith. Had it done so, of necessity? It may not
have--or it may. Psychological problems need not occupy a narrative of
facts. This is one that might easily land us in an attempt to formulate
an exact Definition of Love. Better beware in time! Leave the question
in a condition of Metaphysical Equilibrium.
How Challis would have welcomed, just at this turning-point of his
relations with Marianne--scouting as he did the idea of a rupture, so
far--a thorough heart-whole _accolade_ at the front garden-gate of
the Hermitage! What an all-important factor in the moulding of the
days to come would have been an unqualified, unmitigated, unreserved
embrace--even before the cabman! Such a one as Penelope would have
given Ulysses, if he had come back recognizable: a greeting to send the
memories of all Calypsoes flying like chaff before the wind! Yes--even
the appearance of Penelope on the threshold, revealing that Ulysses
was just in time for lunch, only he must make haste, as it had been
kept back to the very last minute, and he must keep all his news till
afterwards. Any little thing of this sort--a note, spelt anyhow--a
scribble on the slate in the hall, where you can write messages if
there's a pencil--the slightest tradition of a consciousness of
tea-to-come on the part of the departed, when departing--even a caution
that you are not to spill, because it's a clean tablecloth--_anything_,
in fact, rather than the dull, neglected, flat reality of Challis's
return!
Remembering how his last arrival at home had fallen through, he had
organized a surprise in his own mind. He had so light a valise this
time--one carries less wardrobe in hot weather--that it would be no
encumbrance. He would discharge his cab, and let himself in with his
latchkey.
The cabman's expression was one of dissatisfaction with his career,
but acquiescence in fifty-per-cent. beyond the tariff. He said it was
coming on a drizzle, and drove away. Then Challis had to give up the
surprise. For the garden-gate was shut to and locked--"because of the
boys," no doubt--and he had to ring. He kept his finger on the electric
bell, to show that his mind was made up as to coming in; whereupon
Harmood appeared bearing a key. Challis did not complain that she had
not kissed him, but he did think she might have been warmer.
"Mrs. Challis never said, sir," was her brief testimony in reply to
"Where was your mistress going?" The uncompromising roughness of "your
mistress" may have widened the gulf between them. A suggestion that
perhaps Mrs. Steptoe knew was met by the concession, "I could ask Mrs.
Steptoe." Delay then resulted, as Mrs. Steptoe, though absolutely in
ignorance, wished to produce a sort of meretricious effect of giving
information, and had to make talk while she thought out spurious data.
"No, sir, I couldn't say Mrs. Challis ever said a word to me, not this
morning. Not if you was to ask. But yesterday morning she did say, 'ash
what there was of the chicken, and stew the scrag-end of the neck for
the kitchen-dinner to-day...."
"Well!--and did she say where she was going? That's the point."
"I was coming to that, sir!" Mrs. Steptoe was reproachful. "The
scrag-end of the neck for the kitchen-dinner to-day, because she might
be going to Tulse Hill. And the young ladies would certainly be going
to Mrs. Eldridge's all day. And this morning she says to me to have a
piece of rump-steak in the house in case."
"In case I came." But Mrs. Steptoe had intended a complete sentence.
Challis concluded: "That's where she's gone, I expect! And the children
are away?"
"The young ladies, sir." Thus Harmood, the stickler for the
proprieties. To whom Challis says, "Very well!--Get me some
lunch--steak--anything!" and goes to his room to wash, leaving Mrs.
Steptoe recapitulating.
* * * * *
Was ever a blanker home-coming? Challis began to suspect he would
certainly make hay of his life, unless some _deus ex machina_ came into
it. Was he a _dignus vindice nodus_? He put the question aside to read
accumulated letters, kept back by request. Then lunch was on table, and
life seemed suddenly as usual. But no Marianne, so far!
The drizzle "it" had "come on" made a dreary outlook from the house,
and a sense of the absence of the children a conscious cause of
dreariness within. No consolation could be found in the distant voices
of the two servants at loggerheads in the basement. "Probably one
specific loggerhead," thought Challis, as he gave real thought and care
to the filling of a pipe he meant to enjoy. Because a certain incisive
repetition, which seemed to relate to the same theme, conveyed the
idea of diametrically opposed opinions, intemperately advocated by
street-door knocks. A lull would come when Harmood brought him a cup of
coffee--fresh-made, he hoped--and he would then hint broadly that the
discussion was needlessly audible. "Keep the kitchen-door shut" is the
usual formula.
The coffee came. It was ower good for banning and ower bad for
blessing, like Rob Roy; only certainly not so strong. So thought
Challis to himself--all such thoughts are his, not the story's--as
he submitted to it. But he found a satisfaction for the ban he had
withheld, in an increased acerbity of manner in his allusion to the
kitchen-door. He called it out to Harmood as she departed, having
sipped the coffee in the interim. "Yes, sir," said Harmood, speaking as
though butter would not melt in her mouth.
However, the kitchen-door closed, and the discussion went on as though
both the knockers' families had had a baby. It would not interfere with
the pipe.
What was all this that had happened? He found himself asking space
this, as he watched the smoke curling away, and changing to the smell
he meant to let out of the window before Marianne came back. Now
that he was here again, in his old surroundings, he could live back
into them, and think of that intoxication of last night--only last
night!--as nothing but a strange, bewitching dream. Never was man more
susceptible to surroundings than Challis. Turn where he might, some
trifle or other brought back his old days to him.
There, upon the chimney-piece, in defiance of modern taste, were
certain treasures that had never found a place on a dust-heap because
of their various associations with "poor Kate." The parian candlesticks
at either end--religiously mended whenever chipped, and one of them
obliged to submit to a rivet--did he and Kate not buy them in Oxford
Street, and were they not therefore precious? The Swiss haymakers,
carved in wood, that were an early present of Marianne's to her sister,
were they not--although, of course, they were not high art, and you
might sneer at them--things Kate had valued, and on that account never
to be discarded or forgotten? The ingenious ship under a glass cover,
with chenille round its base, whose hull was muscle-shells, and whose
rigging spun glass, was it not a precious inheritance of past ages,
treasured with curses, because every time it was moved it tumbled over,
and had to be taken from its shelter and made the subject of unskilful
experiments with sealing-wax and gum-arabic? Each had its tale of
a former time. And everything that said a word about Kate added a
postscript about her sister.
Was it not as well that last night's folly or delirium should rank as
a dream?--was it not best? If only Destiny could have become a visible
Rhadamanthus and driven the nail home, saying, "Now that's settled,
Mr. Challis, and you are not to see Miss Arkroyd of Royd again," and
he could have believed all his experiences of the last eight months
hallucinations! But he could not do so without a warranty, and a
strong one. He happened to know that Royd Hall was still there, in
Rankshire; and that a week-end ticket was sixteen and sixpence. Let him
try to make a dream of that, with Bradshaw ready to rise in evidence
and denounce him! He could not but fail, with all the facts against
him, in an attempt to quench his memories; but the more dreamlike and
unreal they seemed to him, the less guilty he felt of duplicity towards
Marianne. Other men might not have felt so; but this is his story, and
we must take him as we find him.
Would any other man in like case have fashioned, as he did, the
rough-hewn incidents of a scene in which he should make a clean breast
of the whole tormenting dream to his wife, get absolution, and be once
more his natural self, with no reserves? How on earth should he set
about it? that was the thought that started it. Suppose he succeeded
in saying, "Polly Anne, I'm a bad, wicked man, and I've been making
love to Judith Arkroyd, and forgetting my duty to the wife of my bosom
and her kids," would Marianne know what would be a correct attitude
for an injured matron under her circumstances? Would she be able to
say, perjured and forsworn and betrayer, and hence!--ere she did some
correct thing or other? Not she! But suppose instead she were to say,
"Just one minute, till I've done with Harmood, and I shall be able to
listen to you.... Now, what is it?" what on earth would he do then
with the position? Say it all over again, or try a variation, "You
see before you a guilty _et cetera_," or something of that sort? No,
no!--that would never do. Why, part of the awkwardness of the position
was that the word _guilty_ would overweight the confession so terribly.
None of the substantial conditions of broken marriage-vows had been
complied with, and it really would be difficult to know exactly what to
confess to. How could he know that Charlotte Eldridge--for, dramatist
that he was, he knew that lady down to the ground!--would not have
dismissed the case with, "You see, my dear, there really hadn't _been_
anything!"
And all the while the worst of it was that, according to his own canon
of morals, there had been _everything_. He had profaned the temple of
Love, soiled the marble floor, torn some chaplet from the altar; done
something, no matter what, that was making him a secret-keeper from
his wife; that would make him flinch from her gaze. Were other men all
like that? No, certainly not! But then, they were not milksops, but Men
of the World. Also, they worshipped at another temple, down the road,
those merry satyrs; a temple where Pan and Silenus had altars.
No doubt this analysis of his own case, that Challis makes as he gets
on with that pipe--near its end now--and waits to hear his wife's cab
at the gate, would have clashed a good deal with his seeming reckless
speech among men; speech he was apt to get himself a very bad name by,
among precisians! But he was made up of oddities and paradoxes. Is
any light thrown on him by what he is reported to have once said: "I
can't see that it can matter how many wives--or whatever you like to
call them--a man has, if he doesn't care twopence about any of them,
and they all know it"? The funny part of this creed of Challis's about
marriage and his fellow-men was that it caused them to ascribe to _him_
precisely the same morals that he had ascribed to _them_; and that
each one of them, whenever he chanced to speak of it in confidence to
anyone he was not on his guard against, always appeared to disclaim
attendance at the temple down the road for himself, personally; and, in
fact, to suggest that he, exceptionally, had common decency in a corner
somewhere.
No man will ever know--one may say that much safely--how far any other
man is like himself. He is pretty sure to invent a curious monster
for his fellow-man to be, based on all his own worst propensities;
but utterly ignoring that mysterious impulse to fight against them
which he has the egotism to call his better self. He credits himself,
personally, with an inherent dislike of evil, and conceives that his
fellow-man is kept in check by the Decalogue. He ascribes Original Sin
to the race, and credits himself secretly with a monopoly of Original
Virtue.
But it is unfair to go on moralizing in this way, merely because
Marianne does not come back. The justification is that Challis spent
such a long time in useless self-torment over his position; he all
the while believing quite sincerely that real men of the world--say,
broadly speaking, Mr. Brown and Lord Smith--practised double-dealers
that they were in all that relates to womankind, would have dismissed
the whole matter with an experienced smile. In the course of an hour,
however, he endeavored to imitate the spirited demeanour of Mr. Brown
and Lord Smith, and went away to his room to write.
He had to acknowledge that he could not fix his attention as Mr. Brown
and Lord Smith would have done; but he made a fair show of writing,
too--felt he had got to work again! Marianne would be back to tea; he
was glad of that. He was distinctly not at all sorry to find he was
glad of that. But he was a little annoyed that it had occurred to him
to make the discovery--that he had not left the question dormant.
The noise in the kitchen below was almost inaudible in Challis's room,
but a sense hung about of the remains of an engagement elsewhere.
Challis was conscious that a dropping fire stopped when he rang the
bell at four-thirty, to tell Harmood not to get the tea till her
mistress came back. Harmood consented, provided that the obnoxious
expression was withdrawn. Only she did not put it that way. What she
said was, "To wait for Mrs. Challis, sir?" Had Challis answered, "Yes,
your mistress!" she might have shown a proper spirit. But as he said,
with discretion, "Exactly!" Miss Harmood consented to postpone tea. His
phrase seemed to admit inexactness in the epithet "mistress."
But the young lady was going to make no suggestions. If Mr. Challis
liked to go without his tea, let him! _She_ was not going to attempt to
influence anybody. The hours passed, and ink that might have perished
on a penwiper became a permanent record of thoughts which their writer
always doubted the value of the moment after writing them. But perhaps
they were immortal? No one would ever know till the very end of
Eternity.
Was that actually six o'clock? Well--she wouldn't come now till dinner!
He considered a short walk before she turned up; but the drizzle was
one of those all-pervading drizzles that despise umbrellas, and do
the garden a world of good. One never goes out for a walk in those
drizzles. He would have another pipe, and think it over--perhaps write
a little more presently.
He would have done more wisely to write the little more at once--to
remain hard and fast at his writing-table. For he had not been long
over the second pipe when the summer sun, now on its way to roost, got
a chance to peep through a cloud-rift, and straightway Wimbledon was
aware it was the heart of a rainbow it could not see, however palpable
it might be at Esher. Now, it chanced that just at the moment when
the sudden prismatic glow flooded that vulgar, incorrigible drizzle,
and clothed it in an undeserved radiance, Challis was watching the
crystal beads that chased each other in a line along the under-edge of
a sloping gutter above his window. He was wondering why they held on so
tight--it was so seldom one dropped--when on a sudden they all became
jewels, each with a little complete image of the sun in it, if they
would only have stood still while one looked! And these jewels brought
back a something to his mind. He felt it coming before he could define
it: what was it going to be? Why, of course!--the gleaming beads or
scales or spangles on Judith's dress, last night in the little garden
with the funny name--what was it?----Tophet.
And then it all came back with a rush. He had contrived, in his
home-surrounding, to dodge and evade, as it were, his memory of his
folly of last night for a moment. He had now slipped unawares into
his past; and malicious recollection had brought back this-and-that
that was pleasant in it, but had closed the door against reminders of
all that had been tedious and distasteful in his later married life.
With no Marianne there in the flesh, to call attention to that morose
and jealous temper she had developed in these later years, he had
indulged in the luxury of forgetting it; and had repeopled the empty
house with a cheerful version of its mistress, one that was exactly
what the Marianne of old ought to have grown up into--not very clever,
certainly--not Madame de Staël, by any means--but always good-humoured
and ready to laugh at her own blunders, and gradually outgrowing that
terrible vice of blood, that dire form of Christianity that made it
a wonder to him how his new friend, that good parson-chap at Royd,
should be tarred with the same feather. He had got into a backwater
of the stream of life, and found a happy anchorage for a moment; and
here came the torrent he had escaped, and caught him up and whirled him
away with it, Heaven knows where! Little things make the great things
of life, and no sooner was that miserable gew-gaw that was not even an
expensive article brought across his mind by those jewel-drops flashing
in the sun than he became again the heart-distempered victim of the
image it brought with it--Judith in all her beauty, at its best in the
moonlight. His incipient fit of reconciliation to his home had only
been momentary, and the paroxysm of his disorder that upset it--how
rightly he had spoken of it as a fool's passion!--sent him pacing
to-and-fro across the room, catching at the empty air with nervous
fingers, pressing them mercilessly on his eyes, as though he would
crush out with them the beautiful image of the woman that bewitched him.
This sort of thing is not so uncommon as you, perhaps, think. You have
read of it, of course--best told by Robert Browning, perhaps--how "the
Devil spends a fire God gave for other ends." That was like to be
Challis's case if this went on.