If for Keith those six weeks before the Glove Lane murder trial came on
were fraught with uneasiness and gloom, they were for Laurence almost
the happiest since his youth. From the moment when he left his rooms
and went to the girl's to live, a kind of peace and exaltation took
possession of him. Not by any effort of will did he throw off the
nightmare hanging over him. Nor was he drugged by love. He was in a sort
of spiritual catalepsy. In face of fate too powerful for his will, his
turmoil, anxiety, and even restlessness had ceased; his life floated in
the ether of “what must come, will.” Out of this catalepsy, his spirit
sometimes fell headlong into black waters. In one such whirlpool he was
struggling on the night of Christmas Eve. When the girl rose from her
knees he asked her:
“What did you see?”
Pressing close to him, she drew him down on to the floor before the
fire; and they sat, knees drawn up, hands clasped, like two children
trying to see over the edge of the world.
“It was the Virgin I saw. She stood against the wall and smiled. We
shall be happy soon.”
“When we die, Wanda,” he said, suddenly, “let it be together. We shall
keep each other warm, out there.”
Huddling to him she whispered: “Yes, oh, yes! If you die, I could not go
on living.”
It was this utter dependence on him, the feeling that he had rescued
something, which gave him sense of anchorage. That, and his buried life
in the retreat of these two rooms. Just for an hour in the morning, from
nine to ten, the charwoman would come, but not another soul all day.
They never went out together. He would stay in bed late, while Wanda
bought what they needed for the day's meals; lying on his back, hands
clasped behind his head, recalling her face, the movements of her slim,
rounded, supple figure, robing itself before his gaze; feeling again the
kiss she had left on his lips, the gleam of her soft eyes, so strangely
dark in so fair a face. In a sort of trance he would lie till she came
back. Then get up to breakfast about noon off things which she had
cooked, drinking coffee. In the afternoon he would go out alone and
walk for hours, any where, so long as it was East. To the East there
was always suffering to be seen, always that which soothed him with the
feeling that he and his troubles were only a tiny part of trouble; that
while so many other sorrowing and shadowy creatures lived he was not
cut off. To go West was to encourage dejection. In the West all was like
Keith, successful, immaculate, ordered, resolute. He would come back
tired out, and sit watching her cook their little dinner. The evenings
were given up to love. Queer trance of an existence, which both were
afraid to break. No sign from her of wanting those excitements which
girls who have lived her life, even for a few months, are supposed to
need. She never asked him to take her anywhere; never, in word, deed,
look, seemed anything but almost rapturously content. And yet he knew,
and she knew, that they were only waiting to see whether Fate would
turn her thumb down on them. In these days he did not drink. Out of his
quarter's money, when it came in, he had paid his debts--their expenses
were very small. He never went to see Keith, never wrote to him, hardly
thought of him. And from those dread apparitions--Walenn lying with
the breath choked out of him, and the little grey, driven animal in the
dock--he hid, as only a man can who must hide or be destroyed. But daily
he bought a newspaper, and feverishly, furtively scanned its columns.