“I understood her.” Without glancing at him, I knew that he watched me.
“She killed something in me. It’s resurrected every now and then; but
it’s a ghost. Oh--I understood her!”
I stood in the window looking out at scudding clouds, which raced by
in thin streamers of grey. Eva might have been drifting past, looking
in on us, listening for what we might say. My eyes at once blinded
by tears, I stammered: “Don’t! Don’t! I don’t want to hear what you
have to say. Why did you come here?” And I said to myself “I feel that
there’s a dreadful mistake, somewhere.”
For he was insisting: “You knew, didn’t you, that Spencer Mapes
followed her to Hollywood? You knew it all along, didn’t you?” He gave
a short laugh. “It’s so plain. And I shouldn’t have been surprised.”
I came back from the window. “I knew that he was out there, and that it
hadn’t necessarily to do with Eva. Why shouldn’t he go out there? What
are you driving at?”
But if in fact he was driving at anything beyond his hurt bewilderment
he did not at once acknowledge it. I thought that actually he had come
to tell me about their rupture, and that face to face with me he slid
against his will into his old-time habit of thinking aloud on Eva’s
tremendous spell upon him. There was nothing to do but let him talk.
Whatever question might be in his mind about Spencer Mapes must wait.
“Perhaps I’d better take it up with the statement that until the night
of her return I didn’t know that she was thinking of leaving me. She
had said nothing of the sort in her letters. I was so bucked at her
getting back. I had been lonelier than I had realized. She didn’t
look well; said she’d caught cold on the train, and the change from
the warm climate of the Coast was already making it worse. It was
horrible weather--one of those persistent rains when April is cold.
The trees were in bud, but they were lashing, I remember, beating
against the windowpanes. Strange--how one remembers things like that. I
don’t believe I can ever again bear to hear branches scraping against
windowpanes. Her cheeks were bright red; and yet she looked exhausted.
I suggested telephoning for a doctor, but she said ‘Don’t be absurd. I
want to talk to you.’ She came and patted my cheek. You know how she
used to say--in the most impersonal way--‘Darling old Nick’?” His pause
was lengthy. When he did go on with it, I had the feeling of listening
to thoughts instead of to words. “I never, in the course of our married
life, had the conviction of having touched her in the flesh. It used
to make me shy with her. And that last night she had a more than ever
silvery laugh. I felt as if all my life I must stand a way off from
her, looking at her with my arms hanging. It was the swift precision
of her reply to what I asked her: ‘Of course I love you.’” He sat
tapping a cigarette on the back of his hand. His eyes were fixed on the
cigarette, as if it were an important thing. When he again looked at
me, he said: “I find this very difficult.”
Panic seized me. “Don’t tell me--please don’t tell me----” I doubted
that I could bear it. The wind was moaning, going around and around my
tower room. I felt as if Eva were more intently looking in, as if she
were reproaching me with “How can you listen to things against me?” I
put my hand over my mouth to stifle a shriek. But his voice droned on,
and beat my nerves into a dulled peace.
“I was so glad the surface of her writing-table had been polished for
her home-coming; because she leaned against it: her hands rested on it.
She was leaning back against the desk, but her shoulders were thrust
forward; she gave me the impression of being prepared for me to charge
at her and therefore in need of solidarity behind her. That room of
hers had a glow, hadn’t it? The glow shone on her, and her hair----” He
paused. “She was an unapproachable saint. But a man can’t derive solace
from the evidence of his eyes.” His pause, this time, was longer. “By
the way, I noticed that her eyes were extraordinarily brilliant. She
never removed them from my face; they were so still that they were like
the eyes of a vision.” He had wondered, he said, if she wished for
ardour, or if she fearfully anticipated it. She had seemed suspended
between two menaces.
“She wanted help!” I cried to him. “Can’t you see that she wanted help?”
I saw, now, that there were new lines on his face. His mouth was more
like his mother’s. He would be a grim man, soon. He asked me if I had
ever noticed how easily she waved aside the point of view of another?
Not a motion of her hands, and yet she would have definitely waved
away what she did not wish to consider. She had said: “I’ve always been
honest with you.” There was something ominous in this: he had not, at
the moment, wanted her to be honest. An idea that had always been at
the back of his head sprang to the front of his consciousness: she had
never wanted to be a wife, had, when one came down to it, resented
being a wife. When she shook her head, over his questions, he felt her
shaking off all consideration of her life with him.
I asked why he insisted on telling me this, and he said simply: “She
told you.”
“Not after she had seen you. She might never have told me these details
of the break with you.”
But he said: “Oh, yes, she would.” He was increasingly agitated,
and through his emotion became reluctant to go fully into what
nevertheless he doggedly told me. I reflected that if I refused to
hear him out he would tell his mother. He had arrived at the stage
where he was impelled to tell some mute and horrified woman. He became
self-hypnotized, almost acting the ensuing scene between himself and
his wife.
It had been a strange and cruel feature of it that her tea roses were
more humanly pitying than she; for they had given out to him a breath
of home. “And don’t you think, Dinah, that sometimes a merciful lie
is the act of a compassionate God?” He did not say what he had wished
her to lie about. Each minute had been as long as a man’s life. There
had been a drag in time itself that dulled the nerves. For she was so
clear and direct, when she made her wishes plain, that she might not
have realized it was her husband to whom she made such a proposal.
He had asked what she wished him to do, and she had said “Nothing.
What on earth should I wish you to do?” However, it had seemed not to
impress him, that she thus sacrificed his future freedom while claiming
her own: there was something more dreadful on his mind. Telling me of
it--and not telling me the black thing in his mind--he paced the length
of my room, his head bent and his gaze on the floor. He could not, for
a while, rouse himself from a creeping paralysis of the senses. He must
have so paced when he cautioned himself to have patience with her. He
had said to her--speaking with great self-control, he assured me: “I
acknowledge I don’t see what you mean. You’re usually inconsistent; but
this time you’ve gone beyond the reasoning faculties of a mere man.” He
said that he listened to his own voice, and that it had not revealed
his rising fury. And then he was aware that his voice had flattened,
and that he was assuring her that she should have her divorce. “Only
make it as quiet as possible, on account of my mother.”
She had stared at him, he reported; he had noticed that her eyes had
blared wide open. “Can’t you understand,” she had demanded impatiently,
“that I don’t want a divorce? That I don’t need a divorce? Why should
I want a divorce, when God knows I’ve had enough of marriage?” She had
immediately changed to softness, and had added: “I think we could be
friends. We’d be so much better friends if we were separated.”
He said he had then roared at her: “God, Eva!” And she had advanced,
tentatively, as if not sure whether she wished it: “We could have
Christmas together; and we might write to each other.” As he told
me this, his voice followed his wrath to a higher pitch. “I said to
her: ‘It’s Mapes, I daresay.’ I had just heard, incidentally, that he
was out there. And she laughed--laughed heartily, as if I were trying
to be amusing. It got me. I’ll admit that at once I knew how I had
always feared Mapes. I think I struck my fist on her writing-table,
and shouted ‘Christ!’ My voice was so loud that it made me jump. When
I cleared my throat--because suddenly it had closed up--the rasp of it
seemed, in my ears, to beat against the mountain of her meaning, and
fall, and come back at me to hurt my head. ‘There’s nothing left,’ I
said to her. I spoke in a new queer soft voice: maybe she didn’t hear.
And then--I remember, now--I kept on saying: ‘Now then, let’s get this
straight. I’m rather at sea. Let’s be sensible.’” He stared at me with
almost ludicrous surprise. “For was it sensible, for her to keep on
with ‘Do be nice about it, Nick?’”
“I’m trying to make out why you couldn’t understand,” I said.
“What did she want?” he shouted. “What under heaven did she want?” To
this he eventually added: “She didn’t want me. I couldn’t fool myself
that she wanted me; in fact, she said plainly that what she wanted with
me was a safe harbour, to which she could set sail when in distress.
That’s not the right thing for a woman to say to her husband. It came
down to this, that she meant to stay away from me except when she
should need me to pull her out of trouble. She didn’t need me around
every day.”