WHAT was bound to happen had happened. Olifant the Galahad, out for
grails, as Triona, and indeed as Olivia had pictured him, had lost his
head, poured out a flow of mad words, and flung his arm about her and
kissed her passionately. She had been caught, had half-surrendered;
released, she had put hands to a tumultuous bosom and staggered away
from him. And there had followed a scene enacted for the
twenty-billionth time on the world’s stage. She had grown weak and
strong by turns. At last she had said: “If you love me, go now and let
me think it over and all that it means.”
And he had gone, passion yielding to his courteous consideration of her,
and she was left alone in the drawing-room, staring through the open
French windows at the May garden.
Since her return from the South of France, she had felt the thing
coming. In October, as soon as Myra had returned from her holiday, fear
had driven her from Medlow. The hunger in the man’s eyes proclaimed an
impossible situation. The guest and host position she had changed after
the first few weeks. Brother and sister and herself kept house
together—on the face of it a sensible and economical arrangement. Mr.
Trivett and Mr. Fenmarch, once more financial advisers, commended it
with enthusiasm. The summer had passed happily enough. The _modus
vivendi_ with the sections of Medlow society respectively symbolized by
Landsdowne House and Blair Park had arranged itself automatically. She
found conferred upon her the Freedom of each. The essential snobbery of
English life is a myth kept alive by our enemies. It is true that the
squire and the linen-draper do not ask each other and their families to
dinner. Their social worlds are apart. They don’t want to ask each other
to dinner. They would never dream of asking each other to dinner, one no
more than the other; they respect each other too mightily. But a dweller
in both worlds, such as Olivia, Trivett-ed and Gale-d though she was on
the one side, yet on the other, the wife of the famous Alexis Triona and
the friend of the Olifants, folks whose genealogy was lost somewhere in
a Pictish bonfire of archives, can wander up and down the whole social
gamut at her good pleasure. Besides she herself does not mix the
incompatible. A mere question of the art of life, which Olivia, with her
London experiences found easy of resolution. So, in the mild and mellow
way on which Medlow prided itself, she had danced and tennis-ed and
picnic-ed the summer through. On the Blair Park side—she wondered
laughingly at their unsupercilious noses—Blaise Olifant and his sister
accompanied her in the gentle festivities. Each day had brought its
petty golden dust—the futile Church bazaar, the tennis tournament, the
whist-drive of which old John Freke, the linen-draper father of Lydia,
had made her a lady-patroness, the motor-run into quaint Shrewsbury, on
shopping adventure in quest of crab or lobster unobtainable in Medlow—a
thousand trivial activities—to the innocent choking of her soul, to use
Matthew Arnold’s figure, and an inevitable forgetfullness. Everything
had gone well until October. Then she had taken prudent flight with Myra
to the France and Italy which she had never seen—and there she had
stayed till the beginning of May.
It was Mrs. Woolcombe who insisted on her return to Medlow. Where else
should she return after her wanderings but to her own home? At first
everything was just as it used to be. Then, on a trivial cause—an
insult offered her by an Italian in Venice which she had laughingly
recounted—the passion of Blaise Olifant had suddenly flamed forth.
She was frightened, shaken. He had given her the thrill, which, in her
early relations with him she had half contemptuously deemed impossible.
She found herself free from sense of outrage. She bore him no
resentment. Indeed she had responded to his kiss. She was not quite
sure, within herself, whether she would not respond again. The
communicated thrill completed her original conception of him as the very
perfect gentle knight. For after all, knights without red-blood in their
veins might be gentle, but scarcely perfect.
If she were free, she would marry him out of hand, without further
question. He had always dwelt in a tender spot of her heart. Now he had
slipped into one more warm, smouldering with strange fires. But she was
not free. She stood at once at the parting of the roads. She must go
back to a wandering or lonely life, or she must defy conventions.
She went out into the ivy-walled garden, and walked up the central path,
between the beds of wallflowers and forget-me-nots and the standard
roses just bursting into leaf. What could she do? Once she had laughed
scornfully at the idea of love playing any part in her life. She had not
reckoned with her youth. And now she stared aghast at the vista of
lonely and loveless years.
Presently Blaise Olifant came from his study and advanced to meet her.
He said: “Can you speak to me now?”
“Yes—now,” she answered.
“I’ve behaved like any blackguard. You must forgive me, if you can. The
Italian cad who made me see red was not very much worse than myself.”
There was a smile in her dark eyes as she looked up at him.
“There’s all the difference in the world. I disliked the Italian very
much.” She touched his sleeve. “You are forgiven, my dear friend. It’s
all my fault. I oughtn’t to have come back.”
“You’re the most wonderful of women,” said he.
The most wonderful of women made a little wry movement of her lips.
“It’s all a might-be and a can’t-be,” she said in a low voice.
“Do you suppose, my dear, I don’t know that? If it could be, do you
think I should regret losing my self-control?”
She said. “If it’s any consolation to you—perhaps I lost mine too.
We’re both human. Perhaps a woman is even more so than a man. That’s why
I went away in October—things were getting impossible——”
“Good God!” he exclaimed, “I thought you were bored to death!”
A little laugh could not be restrained. The blindness of man to
psychological phenomena is ever a subject for woman’s sweet or bitter
mirth. But it was not in his heart to respond.
“Then you do care for me a little?”
“I shouldn’t be standing here with you now, if I didn’t. I shouldn’t
have made the mistake of coming back, if I hadn’t wanted to see you.”
“Mistake?” He sighed and turned a step away. “Yes. I suppose it was. I
should have been frank with Mary and shewn her that it was
impossible—for me.”
“It would be best for me to go to-morrow,” said Olivia.
“Where?”
“London. A hotel. Any old branch.” She smiled. “I must settle down
somewhere sooner or later. The sooner the better.”
“That’s monstrous,” he declared with a flash in his eyes. “To turn you
out of your home—I should feel a scoundrel.”
“I don’t see how we can go on living together, carrying on as usual, as
though nothing had happened.”
For a few moments they walked up the gravelled path in silence, both
bareheaded in the mild May sunshine.
“Listen,” he said, coming to a pause. “I’m a man who has learned
self-control in three hard schools—my Scotch father’s, science, war. If
I swear to you, on my honour, that nothing that has passed between us
to-day shall ever be revived by me in look or word or act—will you stay
with us, and give me your—your friendship—your companionship—your
presence in the house? It was an aching desert all the time you were
away.”
She walked on a pace or two, after a hopeless sigh. Could she never
drive into this unworldly head the fact that women were not sexless
angels? How could their eyes forever meet in the glance of a polite
couple discussing the weather across a tea-table? She could not resist a
shaft of mockery.
“For all of your philosopher father and science and war—I wonder, my
dear Blaise, how much you really know of life?”
He halted and put a hand on her slim shoulder.
“I love you so much my dear,” said he, “that I should be content to hang
crucified before you, so that my eyes could rest upon you till I died.”
He turned and strode fast away. She followed him crying “Blaise!
Blaise!” He half turned with an arresting arm—and even at that moment
she was touched by the pathos of the other empty sleeve——
“No, don’t—please.”
She ran hard and facing him blocked his way.
“But what of me? What of my feelings while I saw you hanging crucified?”
That point of view had not occurred to him. He looked at her
embarrassed. His Scottish veracity asserted itself.
“When a man’s mad in love,” said he, “he can’t think of everything.”
She took his arm and led him up the gravelled path again.
“Don’t you see, dear, how impossible it all is?”
“Yes. I suppose so. It must be one thing or the other. And all that is
good and true and honourable makes it the other.”
Tears came at the hopelessness of it. She seized his hand in both of
hers.
“What you said just now is a thing no woman could forget to the day of
her death.”
She kissed the hand and let it drop, stirred to the inmost. What was
she, ineffectual failure, to command the love of such a man? He stood
for a while looking into the vacancy of the pale blue sky over the
ivy-clad wall. Before her eyes garden and house and wall and sky were
blotted out; and only the one tall figure existed in the scene. Her
heart beat. It was a moment of peril, and the moment seemed like an
hour.
At last he turned and looked at her with his grave smile. She put her
hand on her heart not knowing whether to cry or laugh at the relaxation
of tension.
“You stay here with Mary,” he said gently. “I’ll go away for a change—a
holiday. I need one. There’s an old uncle of mine in Scotland. I’ve
neglected him and his salmon-fishing shamefully for years. How I can
fish with one arm, heaven only knows. I’ve learned to do most things.
It’ll be a new experience. As a matter of fact, I should have gone last
month, if the temptation to wait for you hadn’t been so strong. It’s up
in the wilds of Inverness——”
She made feeble protest. It was she who drove him out of his home. Far
better for her to cut herself adrift from Medlow. But he prevailed. He
would go. In the meantime things might right themselves.
He departed the following morning, leaving Olivia to a new sense of
loneliness and unrest. She lived constantly in the tense moment,
catching her breath at the significance of its possibilities. Unbidden
and hateful the question recurred: if positions had been reversed; if
Blaise had been the lost husband and Alexis the lover, would Alexis have
let her go? Certainly not Alexis. And yet deep down in her heart she was
grateful that she had come scathless through the moment.
The little round of country gaieties went on and caught her up in its
mild gyrations. Mrs. Woolcombe deplored her brother’s absence. He had
been looking forward to the social life with Olivia, especially the
tennis parties. It was wonderful how he had overcome the handicap of his
one arm; the effectual service he had perfected, tossing up the ball
with his racket and smiting it at the dead point of ascent. It had all
been due to Olivia’s encouragement the previous summer; for till then he
had not played for years. But he had been sadly overworked. When a man
cannot sleep and rises up in the morning with a band of iron round his
head, it is obvious that he needs a change. It was the best thing for
Blaise, undoubtedly; but it must be dull for Olivia. So spake Mary
Woolcombe, unaware of kisses and tense moments.
Olivia said to Myra: “This is an idle, meaningless life. We’ll go back
to London and settle down.”
“Will life mean much more when you get there?” asked Myra.
“I can do something.”
“What?”
“How do I know? Why are you so irritating, Myra?”
“It isn’t me,” said Myra.
“What is it, then?”
“A woman wants a man to look after,” said Myra in her unimpassioned way.
“If she can’t get a man she wants a woman. I’ve got you, so I’m not
irritated. You haven’t got either, so you are.”
Olivia flushed angrily and swerved round in her chair before the mirror
on her toilet-table—Myra was drying her hair—as she had dried it from
days before Olivia could remember.
“That’s a liberty, Myra, which you oughtn’t to have taken.”
“I dare say, dearie,” replied Myra unmoved, “but it’s good for you that
somebody now and then should tell you the truth.”
“I want neither man nor woman,” Olivia declared. Myra gently squared her
mistress’s shoulders to the mirror and went on with her task.
“I wonder,” she said.
“I think you’re hateful,” said Olivia.
“Maybe. But I’ve got common-sense. If you think you’re going to London
to stand for Parliament or write poetry and get it printed or run a Home
for Incurable Camels, you’re mistaken, dear. And you’ll have no truck
with women. You’ve never had a woman friend in the world—anyone you’d
die for.”
“Of course I haven’t,” snapped Olivia.
“It’s a man’s woman you are,” continued Myra. “You’ve looked after men
ever since your dear mother was taken ill. It’s what God meant you to
do. It’s all you can do. And you haven’t got a man and that’s what’s
making you unhappy.”
Olivia sprang from her chair, looking with her long black hair ruffled
and frizzed and spreading out around her warm oval face, like an angry
sea-nymph on a rock disputed by satyrs.
“I hate men and everything connected with them.”
“You still hate your husband?” asked Myra looking at her with cold pale
eyes.
“I loathe him. How dare you? Haven’t I forbidden you to mention his
name?”
“I didn’t mention his name,” said Myra. “But if you like, I won’t refer
to him again. Sit down and let me put on the electric dryer. Your hair’s
still wringing wet.” She yielded, not with good grace. Myra had her at
her mercy. Dignity counselled instant dismissal of Myra from her
presence. But the washing and drying of her long thick hair had ever
been a problem; so dignity gave way to comfort.
She was furious with Myra. We all are with people who confront us with
the naked truth about ourselves. That was all she was fit for; all that
life had taught her; to look after a man. She stared at the blatant
proposition in the grimness of the night-watches. What else, in God’s
name, was she capable of doing for an inch advancement of humanity? She
had gone forth long ago—so it seemed—from Medlow, to open the
mysterious mysteries of the world. She had opened them—and all the
pearls, good, bad and indifferent, were men. All the ideals; all the
colour and music and gorgeous edifices of life; all the world vibration
of thought and action and joy of which she had dreamed, every manifold
thrill that had run through her being from feet to hair on that first
night in London when she had leaned out of her Victoria Street flat and
opened her young soul to the informing spirit of the vast city of
mystery—the whole spiritual meaning, nay, the whole material reason for
her existence, was resolved into one exquisitely pure, bafflingly
translucent in its mystery of shooting flames, utterly elemental crystal
of sex. Sex, in its supreme purity; but sex all the same.
She was a man’s woman. It was at once a glory and a degradation. Myra
was right. What woman, in the course of her life, had she cared a scrap
for? Her mother. Her mother was a religion. And men? Her chastity
revolted. When had she sought to attract men? Her conscience was clear.
But men had been the terror, the interest, the delight of her life from
the moment she had left the cloistral walls of her home. And even before
that, on a different plane, had she not, while keeping house for father
and brothers, always thought in terms of man?
And now she was doing the same. The emptiness of her prospective life in
London appalled her. The mad liar, her husband, an unseizable, unknown
entity, of whom she thought with shivering repulsion, was away
somewhere, living a strange, unveracious life. The soldier, scholar and
gentleman, who loved her, into whose arms, into whose life, she had all
but fallen, had fled, saving her from perils. Before he returned she
must, in decency and honour, take up her solitary abode elsewhere. Or
else she could terminate his tenancy of “The Towers” and carry on an
old-maidish life in Medlow for evermore. Anyway, a useless sexless thing
for all eternity.
* * * * *
The second post had brought her some letters, a few bills and receipts,
a note from Janet Philimore with whom she kept up a casual
correspondence, and a long untidy screed from Lydia. Lydia had conceived
the idea of visiting Medlow. Her father, old John Freke, whom she had
not seen for years, was ailing. What did Olivia think of the notion?
Olivia, sitting in the little ivy-clad summer-house at the end of the
garden, thought less of the notion than of the amazing lady. To ask her,
an outsider, whether she should come to her father’s bed of sickness!
She made up her mind to write: “Oh, yes, come at once, but wear the
thickest of black veils, so that no one will recognize you.” Her mind
wandered away from the hypothetical visit—London and Lydia again! Just
where she was when she started. Life seemed a hopeless muddle.
“I’m sorry,” said Myra’s voice breaking suddenly on her meditations. She
looked up and beheld Myra more than usually grave and cold. “I’m sorry
to disturb you. But I’ve just had a letter. He’s dead.”
Olivia, with a shock through all her being, started to her feet.
“Dead. My husband?”
“No,” said Myra. “Mine.”
“Oh!” said Olivia somewhat breathless—and sank on the bench again. She
recovered herself quickly.
“I’m sorry, Myra. But after all, it’s a merciful release.”
“God’s mercies are inscrutable,” said Myra.
So, thought Olivia, was Myra’s remark.
“I’ve always loved him, you see,” said Myra. “I suppose you’ll have no
objections to my going to bury him?”
“My dear old Myra,” cried Olivia. “Of course, my dear, you can go—go
whenever you like.”
“I’ll come back as soon as it’s over,” said Myra.
She turned and walked away, and Olivia saw her lean and unexpressive
shoulders rise as though a sob had shaken her.