For Hugh, his pleasure in travelling was given an exquisite point by
returning to Lamoir. That was when he seemed to love her most, as he
returned to her. One gets out of the habit of being desirous if one
stays in the home all the time. And Lamoir would be waiting for him,
sweet and still. He thought of her all the time, as he returned towards
her.
Once, nine years ago, he returned to her by night. He had been away from
England for four or five months, and, arriving that evening in London,
he had dined quickly and taken the first train down to Langton Weaver.
It was a cool July night, loaded with stars. He had walked the two
miles from the railway station.
Hugh was happy as he walked. He was conscious of his happiness, of his
health, of his strength. Hugh was forty then, a dry, taut forty. And the
idea of Lamoir, white and supple, was like a temptation that exalted and
ennobled. The sky was almost Italian, Hugh said, the stars were so
unusually clear and bright. He walked, not up the drive towards the
door, but across the lawn towards the three French windows of the
drawing-room. They showed a faint bronze light. Lamoir was there. She
was sitting in a Dorothy chair of old blue velvet, reading. A lamp in a
bowl of yellow amber lit the book, but her face was only a frail
whiteness, and her hair was as though veiled. He pushed open a window
which was unlatched. He called: “Lamoir!”
She made that gesture he knew so well, loved so well. Lamoir would not
be Lamoir without that gesture. Always, at first sight of him returning
to her, she would make that gesture. It was delicious with a lure which
he never could explain. It was as though she was afraid of her love for
him. Towards her heart, the gesture was: but faint, not definite: a hand
like a white bird, fluttering, fluttering vainly, fluttering out of
stillness, fluttering back into stillness--all in a second. Lamoir, you
see, had a weak heart, and that was why, maybe, she was born so still,
to balance the weakness of her heart.
And it was always the same with him when he saw her after an absence.
The world stood still, no living thing moved but Lamoir’s hand and his
infinite desire. The pleasure of seeing her was exquisite, like a pain.
In all his life Hugh had known no woman but Lamoir. Seeing her now, the
earth and sky held only himself and her and the thing that was between
them. That vivid thing with eyes of fire which can be beautiful or
beastly. She troubled him and exalted him, and somehow his love for her
would be stabbed by a queer sense of terror, which he never could
explain. And she was so still, so passive, unknowable. But her eyes, as
he made to touch her, adored him.
She lay beside him a long time in the delicious silence of love before
she spoke and said: “Good-bye, Hugh.”
He thought she must have gone mad. He stared at her, through the
darkness. “Good-bye?” he echoed.
“Yes,” she said, and that was all she said.
He had put out the light in the bowl of yellow amber. He lay in the
darkness, understanding nothing. Then his mind grew darker than the
room, and he just managed to say:
“But, Lamoir, are you mad? Good-bye! What do you mean?”
She did not answer for what seemed a long time. She was a soft darkness
in the dark room, beside him. The night was a blue curtain over the
windows, hung with stars like toys. He touched her, as though to prove
to himself that he was not dreaming. He must be dreaming. But she was
there, beside him, soft, warm: Lamoir, his wife. And the stars on the
windows were as though at his finger-tips, but Lamoir was untouchable.
She was untouchable, suddenly. She was most untouchable when he touched
her. It seemed wrong to touch her. That made him angry. He laughed.
“I’m damned,” he said, “if I understand what all this is about! I come
home after months away, and you say good-bye!”
“I don’t think,” she said, “that I can explain. Not now....”
He laughed. She was going away, and she didn’t trouble to explain why!
He wanted her to say: “Don’t be bitter, please!” But she was silent. She
was beside him, yet her breath came from across the universe. And what
on earth was it all about?
“But do you mean you want to leave me?” he asked, astounded, angry.
She said: “Yes.”
“Lamoir!”
She said: “I can’t bear it any longer, Hugh. I love you too much.”
He repeated idiotically: “You love me too much?”
Now she was standing, a shadow in the darkness, away from him, a million
miles away from him. He was silent. All the inside of him went silent.
Suddenly there were no words, no need for words, no Lamoir, no Hugh,
nothing but the primal nothingness before Adam. He would not hold her
for a moment if she wished to leave him.
“You will understand,” she said. “You see, I want to be free to love
you, and you won’t let me. You will understand that, too. God has given
me no children, Hugh. He has given me only my love for you. That is all
I have, and I have been sacrificing it to you for ten years; but now I
am growing afraid for it, it’s become such a poor, beaten, wretched bit
of a thing, and so I must leave you. I owe that to myself, dear--and to
the you inside you.”
And he said, despite himself, that he loved her. What was so strange was
that, suddenly, he had ceased to feel like her husband, suddenly it
seemed to him inconceivable that he had possessed her countless times.
Inconceivable that he and she had been one, when now they were so apart!
It had seemed so easy then to touch her--now, not a lifetime would
surmount the barriers she had raised between them. He suddenly thought:
“Good Lord, how lucky I’ve been in the past--and I never knew it!”
He was going to touch her, when like a blow on the face he realised that
to touch her would be indecent. She was not his wife. Suddenly,
absurdly, he thought of Soames Forsyte, of John Galsworthy. Hugh had
always disliked Galsworthy for his creation of Forsyte, a man who could
rape his wife.
Lamoir said suddenly: “There will be another chance later on....”
He leapt at that. “Later on? Lamoir, you mean you will come back?”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t mean that. I shall never come back.”
“You will,” he said between his teeth, and with a great effort of will
he took her in his arms.
But afterwards she went away, and she never came back.
V
We were silent for a long time after Hugh had spoken of the way Lamoir
had left him. And then he said: “Of course she was right. I did
understand, later on. That is why I have made no attempt to see her
these last nine years. Love, you see, has many masks. We slip on one or
other of them, and we say, ‘This is love,’ but really it’s only a
fraction of love. And a fraction of love can be the negation of love.
Love is enormous and difficult. We must learn how to love, as we must
learn how to play music. I did not know how. But I shall see Lamoir
soon. I am going to Algeria next week. I have been wanting to go for a
long time, but I must just wait another few days....”
“But, Hugh, why do you wait even one day?” I protested. “Lamoir is
longing to see you, I know she is.”
“Yes. But I must wait four or five days or so. For a sort of
anniversary. My idea, if you won’t laugh at me too much, is to see
Playmate Place again, and then that will give me a clue as to how to
deal with Lamoir when I see her in the flesh. I’m sure it will give me a
clue. And I’m sure I shall see it again, in three or four days from
to-day. I’d like to, immensely. Of course it won’t have changed one bit,
but I wonder if Lamoir and I will have grown up. If we have, it will be
rather a feat to climb that tree, won’t it? Or maybe the tree will have
grown too, though it seemed huge enough at the time. You see, the thing
seems to go in cycles of twenty years, more or less. I saw the garden
for the first time on a June day in my ninth year. I met Lamoir for the
first time on a June day, perhaps the same one, in my twenty-ninth year.
And now I’m forty-nine, and the day falls in three or four or five days’
time. Either, I’m quite sure, I see that garden again on that day, or I
see Lamoir herself, or....”
“Or?” I said. “Or what?”
“Well, God knows!” Hugh smiled, pulling at that stiff grey thing on his
upper lip, and on the dawn of the fourth day from that night Hugh was
found by one of the keepers of Hyde Park lying at the foot of a great
tree near the Albert Gate, dead of a broken neck. At the inquest there
was read out a letter from his wife’s lawyers, which had been delivered
at Hugh’s house on the morning of his death and which he couldn’t,
therefore, have read, saying that they had heard by wire from Algeria
that his wife had died of heart-failure the day before.