started hostile. Naturally, as I'm about the only Kimpton of three
generations they pitched their expectations high. They'd like me to
have a husband with a pedigree a yard long.'
"I felt Milly was rather over-emphasising the county family side of
the Kimptons--her father was a veterinary surgeon near Wimborne--but
I did not appreciate the qualities in Fanny's bearing and furniture
that were putting Milly into this self-assertive mood.
"They went on to talk with a certain flavour of unreality of the
hygienic and social advantages of Regent's Park. 'It's easy to get
to for one's friends,' said Milly. 'And quite a lot of interesting
people, actors and critics and writers and all that sort of people,
live round and about there. Of course Harry will want to know more
and more of the artistic and literary world now. I expect we'll have
to have a Day for them and give them tea and sandwiches. It's a
bore, but it's necessary, you know. Harry's got to know people.'
"She smiled at me between pride and patronage.
"'Harry's going up in the world,' said my sister.
"'That's what makes it all so wonderful,' said Milly. 'He's a
wonderful brother for you.'
"She began to praise the beauty of Fanny's flat, and Fanny offered to
show her all over it. They were away some time and I went to the
window, wishing stupidly after the manner of a man that they could
somehow contrive to be a little different and a little warmer with
each other. Didn't they both love me and shouldn't that be a bond of
sisterhood between them?
"Then came tea, one of Fanny's wonderful teas, but I was no longer
the indiscriminate devourer of teas that I had been. Milly praised
it all like a visiting duchess.
"'Well,' said Milly at last with the air of one who has many
appointments, 'it's time to go I'm afraid....'
"I had been watching Fanny very closely throughout this visit and
contrasting her guarded and polished civilities with the natural
warmth of her reception of Hetty, half a year before. I felt I could
not wait for another occasion before I had a word or two with her.
So I kissed her good-bye--even her kiss had changed--and she and
Milly hesitated and kissed, and I went down past the landing with
Milly and heard the door close above. 'I've left my gloves,' I said
suddenly. 'You go on down. I won't be a moment.' And I darted back
upstairs.
"Fanny did not come to the door immediately.
"'What is it, Harry?' she said, when she appeared.
"'Gloves!' said I. 'No! Here they are in my pocket. Silly of me!
... You _do_ like her, Fanny? You think she's all right, don't you?
She's a little shy with you, but she's a dear.'
"Fanny looked at me. I thought her eyes were hard. 'She's all
right,' she said. 'Quite all right. You'll never have to divorce
_her_, Harry.'
"'I didn't know. I want you to--like her. I thought--you didn't
seem quite warm.'
"'Silly old Harry!' said Fanny, with a sudden return to her old
manner. And she took me and kissed me like a loving sister again.
"I went down two steps from the door and turned.
"'I'd hate it,' I said, 'if you didn't think she was all right.'
"'She's all right,' said Fanny. 'And it's Good Luck to you, Harry.
It's---- You see it's about Good-Bye for me. I shan't be seeing
very much of you now with that clever wife of yours to take you
about. Who's so _well_-connected. But Good Luck, old Brudder! Oh!
_always_ Good Luck!'
"Her eyes were brimming with tears.
"'God send you are happy, Harry dear--after your fashion. It's--it's
different....'
"She stopped short. She was weeping.
"She banged her door upon me, and I stood puzzled for a moment and
then went down to Milly."
CHAPTER THE SEVENTH
LOVE AND DEATH
§ 1
"In the two years that followed I learnt to love and trust my
stiff-spirited wife more and more. She was very brave in a conscious
and deliberate way, very clear-headed, very honest. I saw her fight,
and it was not an easy fight, to bring our son into the world, and
that sort of crisis was a seal between man and woman in those days
even as it is to-day. If she never got to any just intuitions about
my thoughts and feelings I did presently arrive at a fairly clear
sense of hers. I could feel for her ambitions and humiliations. She
worked hard to make our home bright and efficient. She had a taste
for sound and 'solid' things and temperate harmonies. In that old
world, encumbered with possessions and with an extreme household
autonomy, servants were a very important matter indeed and she
managed ours with just that measured kindliness and just that
avoidance of intimacy that was needed by the social traditions of the
time. She had always been intelligently interested in the internal
politics of Thunderstone House and she showed the keenest desire for
my success there. 'I'll see you a director before ten years,' she
said. And I worked very hard indeed and not merely for ambition's
sake. I really understood and believed in the educational importance
of that great slovenly business. Newberry came to recognise in me a
response to his own ideas. He would consult me about new schemes and
the modification of old procedure. He relied on me more and more and
talked with me more and more frequently. And it is a queer thing to
recall that by a sort of convention between us we never mentioned or
alluded to my sister Fanny in any of our discussions.
"I changed a good deal during my first two and a half years of
married life. I matured and hardened. I became a man of the world.
I was put up for and elected a member of a good club and developed my
gift for talk. I met a widening variety of people, and some of them
were quite distinguished people, and I found they did not overawe me.
I possessed a gift for caustic commentary that gained me some
reputation as a wit, and I felt a growing interest in the showy and
sterile game of party politics. My ambitions grew. I was active; I
was self-satisfied. I had largely forgotten my intense sexual
humiliation. But I was not a very happy man. My life was like a
handsome, well-appointed room with a north light; the bowls were full
of cut-flowers but the sunlight never came in."
§ 2
"For two years and a half I saw nothing of Hetty and it was not my
fault that I ever saw her again. I did everything I could to
eradicate her from my existence. I destroyed her photographs and
every little vestige of her that might distress me by its memories.
If I caught myself in a reverie in which she figured I forced my
attention to other things. Sometimes when I made a new success I had
a flash of desire that she should witness it. Ugly, I agree, but is
it not what we still are--except for civilisation? She came back
sometimes in dreams, but they were anger-soaked dreams. And I
cultivated my pride and love for Milly. With increasing prosperity
Milly's skill in dressing herself developed; she became a very
handsome, effective woman; she gave herself to me with a smiling
sense of temperate and acceptable giving.
"In those days we had not learnt to analyse our motives. We were
much less observant of ourselves than men and women are to-day. I
had set my mind upon loving Milly and I did not realise that the
essential thing in loving is a thing beyond our wills. Fanny and
Hetty I loved by nature and necessity, but my days were now far too
completely apportioned between work and Milly for much companionship
with Fanny to survive, and Hetty in my heart was like one of those
poor shrivelled corpses of offending monks they walled up in the
monasteries during the Age of Christendom in Europe. But I found now
a curious liveliness in my interest in women in general. I did not
ask what these wanderings of attention signified; I was ashamed of
them but I gave way to them. Even when I was in Milly's company I
would look at other women and find a vague excitement if the intent
of my glances was returned.
"And I began to read novels in a new spirit, though I did not know
why I was taking to novels; I was reading them, I see now, for the
sake of the women I found in them. I do not know, Sunray, whether
you realise how much the novels and plays of those days served to
give men and women love-phantoms with whom they made imaginative
excursions. We successful and respectable ones went our dignified
and satisfied ways, assuaging the thin protests of our starved
possibilities with such unsubstantial refreshment.
"But it was because of that wandering eye for women that I
encountered Hetty again. It was in the springtime that I came upon
her, either in March or very early April, in some public gardens
quite near to Chester Terrace. These gardens were not in my direct
way from the underground railway station, which took me to and fro
between home and business and my house, but I was in no hurry for
Milly's tea-party and the warmth and sunlight drew me to this place
of blossom and budding green. They were what we should call spring
gardens nowadays, small but cleverly laid out for display with an
abundant use of daffodil, narcissus, hyacinth, almond-blossom and the
like, with hard paths and seats placed to command happy patches of
colour. On one of these seats a woman was sitting alone with her
back to me looking at a patch of scyllas. I was struck by the
loveliness of her careless pose. Such discoveries of the dear beauty
that hides in the world would stir me like a challenge and then stab
me with pain. She was dressed very poorly and simply, but her dingy
clothing was no mor than the smoked glass, one uses to see the
brightness of the sun.
"I slackened my pace as I went past and glanced back to see her face.
And I saw the still face of Hetty, very grave and sorrowful, Hetty,
no longer a girl but a woman, looking at the flowers and quite
unheedful of my regard.
"Something greater than pride or jealousy seized me then. I went a
few steps farther and stopped and turned, as though no other thing
was possible.
"At that she became aware of me. She looked up, doubted, and
recognised me.
"She watched me with that motionless face of hers as I came and sat
down beside her. I spoke in a voice of astonishment on the edge of a
storm of emotion. 'Hetty,' I said, 'I couldn't go past you!'
"She did not answer immediately. 'Are you---?' she began and
stopped. 'I suppose we were bound to meet again,' she said, 'sooner
or later. You look as if you had grown, Harry. You look well and
prosperous.'
"'Do you live in this part of London?' I asked.
"'Camden Town just now,' she said. 'We move about.'
"'You married--Sumner?'
"'What did you expect me to do? What else was there to do? I've
drunk my cup to the dregs, Harry.'
"'But---- You had the child?'
"'It died--it died all right. Poor little mite. And my mother died
a year ago.'
"'Well, you've got Sumner.'
"'I've got Sumner.'
"At any time before that meeting I should have exulted over the death
of Sumner's child, but in the presence of Hetty's misery that old
hatred would not come back for its gratification. I was looking at
her face which was so familiar and so changed, and it was as if I
woke up again to love for her after two years and a half of
insensibility. What a beaten and unhappy thing she was--she whom I
had loved and hated so bitterly.
"'It seems a long way back now to Kent, Harry--and mother's farm,'
she said.
"'You've parted with it?'
"'Farm and furniture--and mostly it's gone. Sumner bets. He's
betted most of it away. It's hard, you see, to find a job but easy
to fancy a winner. Which doesn't win....'
"'My father used to do that,' I said. 'I'd like to shoot every
race-horse in England.'
"'I hated selling the farm,' she said. 'I sold the farm and came
into this dingy old London. Sumner dragged me here and he's dragging
me down. It's not his fault; it's how he's made. But when a spring
day comes like this----! I think of Kent and the winds on the Downs
and the blackthorn in the hedges and the little yellow noses of the
primroses and the first elder leaves coming out, until I want to cry
and scream. But there's no getting out of it. Here I am. I've come
to look at these flowers here. What's the good? They just hurt me.'
"She stared at the flowers.
"'My God!' I said, 'but this hurts me too. I didn't expect----'
"'What did you expect?' she asked, and turned that still face of hers
to me and silenced me.
"'I don't see that it should hurt you,' she said. 'I brought it on
myself. You didn't do it. It happened to me. It was my fault.
Though why God made me love beautiful things--and then set a trap for
me and made me fool enough to fall into it----!'
"Silence fell between us.
"'Meeting you like this,' I began presently, 'makes me see things--so
differently. You see--in those old days--in some ways you seemed so
much stronger than I was. I didn't understand.... I see---- This
makes me feel---- I ought to have taken better care of you."
"'Or shown me mercy. I was dirty and shameful--yes. All that. But
you were merciless, Harry. Men are merciless to women. I did--all
through--I loved you, Harry. In a way I've always loved you and I
love you now. When I looked up and saw it was you coming back to
me---- For a minute you were just like the old Harry. For a
moment---- It was like Spring coming real.... But it's no good
talking like that now, Harry. It's too late.'
"'Yes,' I agreed. 'Too late....'
"She watched my face through a long pause. I weighed my words when I
spoke. 'Up to now,' I said, 'I've never forgiven. Now---- Now I
see you here I wish--I wish to God--I had forgiven you. And made a
fight for it with you. We might---- Suppose, Hetty, suppose I had
forgiven you----?'
"'Harry dear,' she said softly, 'you don't want to be seen here
making a woman cry. We won't talk of that. Tell me about yourself.
I've heard you married again. A beautiful woman. Sumner saw that I
heard of that. Are you happy, Harry? You look prosperous, and
everyone isn't prosperous these post-war times.'
"'That's all so-and-so, Hetty. I work hard. I've got ambitions.
I'm still a publisher's assistant at the old place but I'm near to
being a director. I'm high up. My wife---- She's a dear and a
great help to me.... Somehow meeting you ... My God! Hetty, what a
mess we made of things! It's all very well, but the second time of
marrying isn't like the first. You and I---- I'm a sort of blood
brother to you and nothing can change it. The wood--that little wood
where you kissed me! Why did we smash it up, Hetty? Why did we do
it? Two fools who'd got so precious a thing! That's all past. But
hate is dead between us. That's past too. If there was anything I
could do for you now I would do it.'
"A gleam of the old humour came, 'If you could kill Sumner,' she
said, 'and smash the world and destroy the memories of three years
... It's no good, Harry. I ought to have kept myself clean. And
you--you might have been gentler with me.'
"'I couldn't, Hetty.'
"'I knew you couldn't. And I couldn't foresee that my blood would
betray me one evening. And here we are! Like meeting after we are
dead. Spring comes now but it comes for other people. All these
little crocus trumpets--like a brass band it is--they are trumpeting
up the next lot of lovers. Better luck to them!'
"We sat still for a time. In the background of my mind Milly and her
assembled tea-cups became evident as a faint urgency. 'You're late,'
she'd say.
"'Where are you living, Hetty?' I asked. 'What is your address?'
"She shook her head after a moment's thought. 'Better you shouldn't
know.'
"'But somehow I might help.'
"'It would only disturb us all. I've got my cup--of dirty water--to
drink. I've got to stand what I'm in for. What could you do to help
me?'
"'Well,' said I, 'my address anyhow is easy to keep in mind. It's
just what it was when we---- In the days when we lived----
Thunderstone House it is. Some day there might be something----'
"'It's good of you.'
"We stood up face to face, and as we stood there a thousand
circumstances vanished and nothing remained but our hurt and injured
selves. 'Good-bye, Hetty,' I said. 'Good luck.'
"Our hands met. 'Good luck to you, Harry. It's no good, but I'm
glad we met like this. And to find you forgive me a little at last.'"
§ 3
"That meeting had a profound effect upon me. It banished much
aimless reverie from my mind; it unlocked the prison in which a whole
multitude of forbidden thoughts had been confined. I thought
enormously of Hetty. They were vague and impossible thoughts; they
came in the night, on the way to business, even during slack moments
in business hours; rehearsals of dramatised encounters, explanations,
magic turns of circumstances that suddenly restored our lost world to
us. I tried to suppress these cloudy imaginations but with little
avail; they overspread my mental skies in spite of me. I can't tell
you how many times I walked through those gardens in Regent's Park;
that detour became my normal route from the station to my home. And
I would even go out of my customary way along some side-path because
I had caught a glimpse far off, between the tree-branches and the
flower-beds, of a solitary woman. But Hetty never came back there.
"In my brooding over Hetty a jealousy and hatred of Sumner developed
steadily. I do not think I had any desire for Hetty myself but I
wanted intensely to get her away from him. This hostility to Sumner
was the ugly undertow of my remorse and re-awakened love of Hetty.
He was the evil thing that had deprived me of Hetty. I did not
reflect for a moment that it was I with my relentless insistence upon
divorce that had forced her back to him.
"And all this dreaming and brooding and futile planning, all this
body of desire for something more to happen between Hetty and myself,
went on without my breathing a word of it to any living soul. It was
on my conscience that it was disloyal to Milly, and I even made a
half-hearted attempt to tell Milly that I had met Hetty and been
shocked at her poverty and unhappiness. I wanted to bring her into
my own state of mind and have her feel as I did. I threw out a
remark one day--we had gone to Hampstead Heath for a walk one
afternoon--that I had once walked along that ridge by the Round Pond
with Hetty during my last leave. 'I wonder how she is living now,' I
said.
"Milly did not answer immediately, and when I looked at her her face
was flushed and hard. 'I hoped you had forgotten her,' she said in a
suffocated voice.
"'This brought it back to me.'
"'I try never to think of her. You don't know what that woman meant
to me--the humiliation.
"'It was not only for myself,' she added. 'It was for you.'
"She said no more but it was manifest how terribly the mere name of
Hetty had disturbed her."
"Poor little things!" cried Firefly. "How insanely jealous you all
were!"
"And I did not go to Fanny and tell her about Hetty for a time. I
had misrepresented Hetty to her as a figure of common depravity and I
found it difficult to put that right. Nowadays I did not see so much
of Fanny as I had formerly done. She was living half-way across
London from me. Her relations with Newberry were now much more
public than they had been and she had developed a circle of
acquaintances who cared for her. But this publicity made Milly more
stiff towards her because she feared that a scandal would be made
about Fanny in relation to my position in the firm of Crane &
Newberry. Near Pangbourne, Newberry had taken a bungalow and there
Fanny would spend whole weeks at a time, quite out of our range.
"But presently a situation developed which sent me post-haste to
Fanny for help and advice."
§ 4
"Suddenly in July, when I was beginning to think I should never hear
from her again, Hetty appealed to me for help. Would I meet her one
evening, she asked, by the fountain in the park near the Zoological
Gardens, and then we could get chairs and she would tell me what she
had in mind. She did not want me to write her a letter, Sumner had
become very jealous of her, and so would I put an advertisement in
the _Daily Express_ with the letters A B C D and giving the hour and
date. I made an appointment for the earliest possible evening.
"Instead of the despondent and spiritless Hetty I had met in the
spring I found a Hetty high strung and excited. 'I want some place
where we shan't be seen,' she said as I came up to her. She took my
arm to turn me about, and led the way towards two green chairs
standing apart a little away from the main walk that here traversed
the park. I noted that she was still wearing the same shabby dress
she had had on our previous encounter. Her manner with me was quite
different from the manner of our former meeting. There was something
familiar and confident about her as though in between she had met me
in imagination a multitude of times--as no doubt she had.
"'You meant all you said, Harry, when we talked before?' she began.
"'Everything.'
"'You will help me if you can?'
"'Everything I can.'
"'Suppose I asked you for some money?'
"'Naturally.'
"'I want to get away from Sumner. I have a chance. I could do it.'
"'Tell me about it, Hetty. All I can do, I will.'
"'Things have changed, Harry, since that day we met. I'd got into a
sort of despairing state. I took whatever came. Seeing you changed
me. I don't know why but it did. Perhaps I was going to change
anyhow. But I can't stand being with Sumner any longer. And there's
a chance now. I shall want a lot of money--sixty or seventy pounds.'
"I thought. 'That's quite possible, Hetty. If you can wait a week
or so. Ten days say.'
"'You see I have a friend, a girl who married a Canadian. She stayed
here to have her child when he went home and now she goes out to him.
She's been ill; she's not very strong and she doesn't want to face
the voyage alone. It would be easy for me to get out there with her
as her cousin and companion. If I had an outfit---- We've discussed
it all. She knows someone who could manage about a passport for me.
In my maiden name. That's the scheme. I could have my outfit sent
to her place. I could slip away.'
"'You'd take another name? Begin again over there?'
"'Yes....'
"I sat considering this project. It pleased me. 'There need be no
trouble about the money,' I said.
"'I can't go on living with Sumner. You never saw him. You don't
know what he's like.'
"'I've heard he was good looking.'
"'Don't I know that face--flushed and weak! He's a liar and a cheat.
He has a conceit he can best everyone. And he's begun drinking. God
knows why I married him. It seemed the natural thing somehow since
you had divorced me. The child had to have a father.... But he
disgusts me, Harry. He disgusts me. I can't go on. I can't endure
it. You can't imagine it--in those little lodgings--in the hot
weather. To keep a maudlin drunken man away from one.... If I
hadn't seen this way out something worse might have happened.'
"'Can't you come away from him at once?' I asked. 'Why should you
ever go back to him?'
"'No. I must get clear away or there will be mischief. And you
mustn't be in it. He'd think of you at once. If he had a hint it
was you. That's what you have to do about the money and everything,
letters or anything--get it to me without your being mixed up with
it. You must get me money, not cheques. We mustn't be seen to meet.
Even about here it's risky. He's got into a gang. He's been getting
deeper and deeper into a rotten set. They blackmail the bookies.
They go about with revolvers. They pass on things to one another.
It grew out of betting and now they call it getting a bit of their
own back.... If they spot you in it, they'll come for you.'
"'Trench warfare in London. I'll risk it.'
"'You needn't risk anything--if we are discreet. If there was some
one I could see--who'd hand things on.'
"I thought at once of my sister Fanny.
"'That would be safe,' said Hetty. 'As safe as could be. And I'd
love to see her again. I loved her when I met her.... But all this
is awful good of you, Harry. I don't deserve a moment's kindness.
"'Nonsense! I pushed you into the dirt, Hetty.'
"'I jumped into it.'
"'Fell into it. It's nothing very much, Hetty, to give you a hand to
get out of it again.'"
§ 5