Isabel Pervin was listening for two sounds—for the sound of wheels on
the drive outside and for the noise of her husband’s footsteps in the
hall. Her dearest and oldest friend, a man who seemed almost
indispensable to her living, would drive up in the rainy dusk of the
closing November day. The trap had gone to fetch him from the station.
And her husband, who had been blinded in Flanders, and who had a
disfiguring mark on his brow, would be coming in from the outhouses.
He had been home for a year now. He was totally blind. Yet they had
been very happy. The Grange was Maurice’s own place. The back was a
farmstead, and the Wernhams, who occupied the rear premises, acted as
farmers. Isabel lived with her husband in the handsome rooms in front.
She and he had been almost entirely alone together since he was
wounded. They talked and sang and read together in a wonderful and
unspeakable intimacy. Then she reviewed books for a Scottish newspaper,
carrying on her old interest, and he occupied himself a good deal with
the farm. Sightless, he could still discuss everything with Wernham,
and he could also do a good deal of work about the place—menial work,
it is true, but it gave him satisfaction. He milked the cows, carried
in the pails, turned the separator, attended to the pigs and horses.
Life was still very full and strangely serene for the blind man,
peaceful with the almost incomprehensible peace of immediate contact in
darkness. With his wife he had a whole world, rich and real and
invisible.
They were newly and remotely happy. He did not even regret the loss of
his sight in these times of dark, palpable joy. A certain exultance
swelled his soul.
But as time wore on, sometimes the rich glamour would leave them.
Sometimes, after months of this intensity, a sense of burden overcame
Isabel, a weariness, a terrible _ennui_, in that silent house
approached between a colonnade of tall-shafted pines. Then she felt she
would go mad, for she could not bear it. And sometimes he had
devastating fits of depression, which seemed to lay waste his whole
being. It was worse than depression—a black misery, when his own life
was a torture to him, and when his presence was unbearable to his wife.
The dread went down to the roots of her soul as these black days
recurred. In a kind of panic she tried to wrap herself up still further
in her husband. She forced the old spontaneous cheerfulness and joy to
continue. But the effort it cost her was almost too much. She knew she
could not keep it up. She felt she would scream with the strain, and
would give anything, anything, to escape. She longed to possess her
husband utterly; it gave her inordinate joy to have him entirely to
herself. And yet, when again he was gone in a black and massive misery,
she could not bear him, she could not bear herself; she wished she
could be snatched away off the earth altogether, anything rather than
live at this cost.
Dazed, she schemed for a way out. She invited friends, she tried to
give him some further connexion with the outer world. But it was no
good. After all their joy and suffering, after their dark, great year
of blindness and solitude and unspeakable nearness, other people seemed
to them both shallow, prattling, rather impertinent. Shallow prattle
seemed presumptuous. He became impatient and irritated, she was
wearied. And so they lapsed into their solitude again. For they
preferred it.
But now, in a few weeks’ time, her second baby would be born. The first
had died, an infant, when her husband first went out to France. She
looked with joy and relief to the coming of the second. It would be her
salvation. But also she felt some anxiety. She was thirty years old,
her husband was a year younger. They both wanted the child very much.
Yet she could not help feeling afraid. She had her husband on her
hands, a terrible joy to her, and a terrifying burden. The child would
occupy her love and attention. And then, what of Maurice? What would he
do? If only she could feel that he, too, would be at peace and happy
when the child came! She did so want to luxuriate in a rich, physical
satisfaction of maternity. But the man, what would he do? How could she
provide for him, how avert those shattering black moods of his, which
destroyed them both?
She sighed with fear. But at this time Bertie Reid wrote to Isabel. He
was her old friend, a second or third cousin, a Scotchman, as she was a
Scotchwoman. They had been brought up near to one another, and all her
life he had been her friend, like a brother, but better than her own
brothers. She loved him—though not in the marrying sense. There was a
sort of kinship between them, an affinity. They understood one another
instinctively. But Isabel would never have thought of marrying Bertie.
It would have seemed like marrying in her own family.
Bertie was a barrister and a man of letters, a Scotchman of the
intellectual type, quick, ironical, sentimental, and on his knees
before the woman he adored but did not want to marry. Maurice Pervin
was different. He came of a good old country family—the Grange was not
a very great distance from Oxford. He was passionate, sensitive,
perhaps over-sensitive, wincing—a big fellow with heavy limbs and a
forehead that flushed painfully. For his mind was slow, as if drugged
by the strong provincial blood that beat in his veins. He was very
sensitive to his own mental slowness, his feelings being quick and
acute. So that he was just the opposite to Bertie, whose mind was much
quicker than his emotions, which were not so very fine.
From the first the two men did not like each other. Isabel felt that
they _ought_ to get on together. But they did not. She felt that if
only each could have the clue to the other there would be such a rare
understanding between them. It did not come off, however. Bertie
adopted a slightly ironical attitude, very offensive to Maurice, who
returned the Scotch irony with English resentment, a resentment which
deepened sometimes into stupid hatred.
This was a little puzzling to Isabel. However, she accepted it in the
course of things. Men were made freakish and unreasonable. Therefore,
when Maurice was going out to France for the second time, she felt
that, for her husband’s sake, she must discontinue her friendship with
Bertie. She wrote to the barrister to this effect. Bertram Reid simply
replied that in this, as in all other matters, he must obey her wishes,
if these were indeed her wishes.
For nearly two years nothing had passed between the two friends. Isabel
rather gloried in the fact; she had no compunction. She had one great
article of faith, which was, that husband and wife should be so
important to one another, that the rest of the world simply did not
count. She and Maurice were husband and wife. They loved one another.
They would have children. Then let everybody and everything else fade
into insignificance outside this connubial felicity. She professed
herself quite happy and ready to receive Maurice’s friends. She was
happy and ready: the happy wife, the ready woman in possession. Without
knowing why, the friends retired abashed and came no more. Maurice, of
course, took as much satisfaction in this connubial absorption as
Isabel did.
He shared in Isabel’s literary activities, she cultivated a real
interest in agriculture and cattle-raising. For she, being at heart
perhaps an emotional enthusiast, always cultivated the practical side
of life, and prided herself on her mastery of practical affairs. Thus
the husband and wife had spent the five years of their married life.
The last had been one of blindness and unspeakable intimacy. And now
Isabel felt a great indifference coming over her, a sort of lethargy.
She wanted to be allowed to bear her child in peace, to nod by the fire
and drift vaguely, physically, from day to day. Maurice was like an
ominous thunder-cloud. She had to keep waking up to remember him.
When a little note came from Bertie, asking if he were to put up a
tombstone to their dead friendship, and speaking of the real pain he
felt on account of her husband’s loss of sight, she felt a pang, a
fluttering agitation of re-awakening. And she read the letter to
Maurice.
“Ask him to come down,” he said.
“Ask Bertie to come here!” she re-echoed.
“Yes—if he wants to.”
Isabel paused for a few moments.
“I know he wants to—he’d only be too glad,” she replied. “But what
about you, Maurice? How would you like it?”
“I should like it.”
“Well—in that case—— But I thought you didn’t care for him—”
“Oh, I don’t know. I might think differently of him now,” the blind man
replied. It was rather abstruse to Isabel.
“Well, dear,” she said, “if you’re quite sure—”
“I’m sure enough. Let him come,” said Maurice.
So Bertie was coming, coming this evening, in the November rain and
darkness. Isabel was agitated, racked with her old restlessness and
indecision. She had always suffered from this pain of doubt, just an
agonizing sense of uncertainty. It had begun to pass off, in the
lethargy of maternity. Now it returned, and she resented it. She
struggled as usual to maintain her calm, composed, friendly bearing, a
sort of mask she wore over all her body.
A woman had lighted a tall lamp beside the table, and spread the cloth.
The long dining-room was dim, with its elegant but rather severe pieces
of old furniture. Only the round table glowed softly under the light.
It had a rich, beautiful effect. The white cloth glistened and dropped
its heavy, pointed lace corners almost to the carpet, the china was old
and handsome, creamy-yellow, with a blotched pattern of harsh red and
deep blue, the cups large and bell-shaped, the teapot gallant. Isabel
looked at it with superficial appreciation.
Her nerves were hurting her. She looked automatically again at the
high, uncurtained windows. In the last dusk she could just perceive
outside a huge fir-tree swaying its boughs: it was as if she thought it
rather than saw it. The rain came flying on the window panes. Ah, why
had she no peace? These two men, why did they tear at her? Why did they
not come—why was there this suspense?
She sat in a lassitude that was really suspense and irritation.
Maurice, at least, might come in—there was nothing to keep him out. She
rose to her feet. Catching sight of her reflection in a mirror, she
glanced at herself with a slight smile of recognition, as if she were
an old friend to herself. Her face was oval and calm, her nose a little
arched. Her neck made a beautiful line down to her shoulder. With hair
knotted loosely behind, she had something of a warm, maternal look.
Thinking this of herself, she arched her eyebrows and her rather heavy
eyelids, with a little flicker of a smile, and for a moment her grey
eyes looked amused and wicked, a little sardonic, out of her
transfigured Madonna face.
Then, resuming her air of womanly patience—she was really fatally
self-determined—she went with a little jerk towards the door. Her eyes
were slightly reddened.
She passed down the wide hall, and through a door at the end. Then she
was in the farm premises. The scent of dairy, and of farm-kitchen, and
of farm-yard and of leather almost overcame her: but particularly the
scent of dairy. They had been scalding out the pans. The flagged
passage in front of her was dark, puddled and wet. Light came out from
the open kitchen door. She went forward and stood in the doorway. The
farm-people were at tea, seated at a little distance from her, round a
long, narrow table, in the centre of which stood a white lamp. Ruddy
faces, ruddy hands holding food, red mouths working, heads bent over
the tea-cups: men, land-girls, boys: it was tea-time, feeding-time.
Some faces caught sight of her. Mrs. Wernham, going round behind the
chairs with a large black teapot, halting slightly in her walk, was not
aware of her for a moment. Then she turned suddenly.
“Oh, is it Madam!” she exclaimed. “Come in, then, come in! We’re at
tea.” And she dragged forward a chair.
“No, I won’t come in,” said Isabel, “I’m afraid I interrupt your meal.”
“No—no—not likely, Madam, not likely.”
“Hasn’t Mr. Pervin come in, do you know?”
“I’m sure I couldn’t say! Missed him, have you, Madam?”
“No, I only wanted him to come in,” laughed Isabel, as if shyly.
“Wanted him, did ye? Get you, boy—get up, now—”
Mrs. Wernham knocked one of the boys on the shoulder. He began to
scrape to his feet, chewing largely.
“I believe he’s in top stable,” said another face from the table.
“Ah! No, don’t get up. I’m going myself,” said Isabel.
“Don’t you go out of a dirty night like this. Let the lad go. Get along
wi’ ye, boy,” said Mrs. Wernham.
“No, no,” said Isabel, with a decision that was always obeyed. “Go on
with your tea, Tom. I’d like to go across to the stable, Mrs. Wernham.”
“Did ever you hear tell!” exclaimed the woman.
“Isn’t the trap late?” asked Isabel.
“Why, no,” said Mrs. Wernham, peering into the distance at the tall,
dim clock. “No, Madam—we can give it another quarter or twenty minutes
yet, good—yes, every bit of a quarter.”
“Ah! It seems late when darkness falls so early,” said Isabel.
“It do, that it do. Bother the days, that they draw in so,” answered
Mrs. Wernham. “Proper miserable!”
“They are,” said Isabel, withdrawing.
She pulled on her overshoes, wrapped a large tartan shawl around her,
put on a man’s felt hat, and ventured out along the causeways of the
first yard. It was very dark. The wind was roaring in the great elms
behind the outhouses. When she came to the second yard the darkness
seemed deeper. She was unsure of her footing. She wished she had
brought a lantern. Rain blew against her. Half she liked it, half she
felt unwilling to battle.
She reached at last the just visible door of the stable. There was no
sign of a light anywhere. Opening the upper half, she looked in: into a
simple well of darkness. The smell of horses, and ammonia, and of
warmth was startling to her, in that full night. She listened with all
her ears, but could hear nothing save the night, and the stirring of a
horse.
“Maurice!” she called, softly and musically, though she was afraid.
“Maurice—are you there?”
Nothing came from the darkness. She knew the rain and wind blew in upon
the horses, the hot animal life. Feeling it wrong, she entered the
stable, and drew the lower half of the door shut, holding the upper
part close. She did not stir, because she was aware of the presence of
the dark hindquarters of the horses, though she could not see them, and
she was afraid. Something wild stirred in her heart.
She listened intensely. Then she heard a small noise in the
distance—far away, it seemed—the chink of a pan, and a man’s voice
speaking a brief word. It would be Maurice, in the other part of the
stable. She stood motionless, waiting for him to come through the
partition door. The horses were so terrifyingly near to her, in the
invisible.
The loud jarring of the inner door-latch made her start; the door was
opened. She could hear and feel her husband entering and invisibly
passing among the horses near to her, in darkness as they were,
actively intermingled. The rather low sound of his voice as he spoke to
the horses came velvety to her nerves. How near he was, and how
invisible! The darkness seemed to be in a strange swirl of violent
life, just upon her. She turned giddy.
Her presence of mind made her call, quietly and musically:
“Maurice! Maurice—dea-ar!”
“Yes,” he answered. “Isabel?”
She saw nothing, and the sound of his voice seemed to touch her.
“Hello!” she answered cheerfully, straining her eyes to see him. He was
still busy, attending to the horses near her, but she saw only
darkness. It made her almost desperate.
“Won’t you come in, dear?” she said.
“Yes, I’m coming. Just half a minute. _Stand over—now!_ Trap’s not
come, has it?”
“Not yet,” said Isabel.
His voice was pleasant and ordinary, but it had a slight suggestion of
the stable to her. She wished he would come away. Whilst he was so
utterly invisible she was afraid of him.
“How’s the time?” he asked.
“Not yet six,” she replied. She disliked to answer into the dark.
Presently he came very near to her, and she retreated out of doors.
“The weather blows in here,” he said, coming steadily forward, feeling
for the doors. She shrank away. At last she could dimly see him.
“Bertie won’t have much of a drive,” he said, as he closed the doors.
“He won’t indeed!” said Isabel calmly, watching the dark shape at the
door.
“Give me your arm, dear,” she said.
She pressed his arm close to her, as she went. But she longed to see
him, to look at him. She was nervous. He walked erect, with face rather
lifted, but with a curious tentative movement of his powerful, muscular
legs. She could feel the clever, careful, strong contact of his feet
with the earth, as she balanced against him. For a moment he was a
tower of darkness to her, as if he rose out of the earth.
In the house-passage he wavered, and went cautiously, with a curious
look of silence about him as he felt for the bench. Then he sat down
heavily. He was a man with rather sloping shoulders, but with heavy
limbs, powerful legs that seemed to know the earth. His head was small,
usually carried high and light. As he bent down to unfasten his gaiters
and boots he did not look blind. His hair was brown and crisp, his
hands were large, reddish, intelligent, the veins stood out in the
wrists; and his thighs and knees seemed massive. When he stood up his
face and neck were surcharged with blood, the veins stood out on his
temples. She did not look at his blindness.
Isabel was always glad when they had passed through the dividing door
into their own regions of repose and beauty. She was a little afraid of
him, out there in the animal grossness of the back. His bearing also
changed, as he smelt the familiar, indefinable odour that pervaded his
wife’s surroundings, a delicate, refined scent, very faintly spicy.
Perhaps it came from the pot-pourri bowls.
He stood at the foot of the stairs, arrested, listening. She watched
him, and her heart sickened. He seemed to be listening to fate.
“He’s not here yet,” he said. “I’ll go up and change.”
“Maurice,” she said, “you’re not wishing he wouldn’t come, are you?”
“I couldn’t quite say,” he answered. “I feel myself rather on the _qui
vive_.”
“I can see you are,” she answered. And she reached up and kissed his
cheek. She saw his mouth relax into a slow smile.
“What are you laughing at?” she said roguishly.
“You consoling me,” he answered.
“Nay,” she answered. “Why should I console you? You know we love each
other—you know _how_ married we are! What does anything else matter?”
“Nothing at all, my dear.”
He felt for her face, and touched it, smiling.
“_You’re_ all right, aren’t you?” he asked, anxiously.
“I’m wonderfully all right, love,” she answered. “It’s you I am a
little troubled about, at times.”
“Why me?” he said, touching her cheeks delicately with the tips of his
fingers. The touch had an almost hypnotizing effect on her.
He went away upstairs. She saw him mount into the darkness, unseeing
and unchanging. He did not know that the lamps on the upper corridor
were unlighted. He went on into the darkness with unchanging step. She
heard him in the bathroom.
Pervin moved about almost unconsciously in his familiar surroundings,
dark though everything was. He seemed to know the presence of objects
before he touched them. It was a pleasure to him to rock thus through a
world of things, carried on the flood in a sort of blood-prescience. He
did not think much or trouble much. So long as he kept this sheer
immediacy of blood-contact with the substantial world he was happy, he
wanted no intervention of visual consciousness. In this state there was
a certain rich positivity, bordering sometimes on rapture. Life seemed
to move in him like a tide lapping, and advancing, enveloping all
things darkly. It was a pleasure to stretch forth the hand and meet the
unseen object, clasp it, and possess it in pure contact. He did not try
to remember, to visualize. He did not want to. The new way of
consciousness substituted itself in him.
The rich suffusion of this state generally kept him happy, reaching its
culmination in the consuming passion for his wife. But at times the
flow would seem to be checked and thrown back. Then it would beat
inside him like a tangled sea, and he was tortured in the shattered
chaos of his own blood. He grew to dread this arrest, this throw-back,
this chaos inside himself, when he seemed merely at the mercy of his
own powerful and conflicting elements. How to get some measure of
control or surety, this was the question. And when the question rose
maddening in him, he would clench his fists as if he would _compel_ the
whole universe to submit to him. But it was in vain. He could not even
compel himself.
Tonight, however, he was still serene, though little tremors of
unreasonable exasperation ran through him. He had to handle the razor
very carefully, as he shaved, for it was not at one with him, he was
afraid of it. His hearing also was too much sharpened. He heard the
woman lighting the lamps on the corridor, and attending to the fire in
the visitor’s room. And then, as he went to his room he heard the trap
arrive. Then came Isabel’s voice, lifted and calling, like a bell
ringing:
“Is it you, Bertie? Have you come?”
And a man’s voice answered out of the wind:
“Hello, Isabel! There you are.”
“Have you had a miserable drive? I’m so sorry we couldn’t send a closed
carriage. I can’t see you at all, you know.”
“I’m coming. No, I liked the drive—it was like Perthshire. Well, how
are you? You’re looking fit as ever, as far as I can see.”
“Oh, yes,” said Isabel. “I’m wonderfully well. How are you? Rather
thin, I think—”
“Worked to death—everybody’s old cry. But I’m all right, Ciss. How’s
Pervin?—isn’t he here?”
“Oh, yes, he’s upstairs changing. Yes, he’s awfully well. Take off your
wet things; I’ll send them to be dried.”
“And how are you both, in spirits? He doesn’t fret?”
“No—no, not at all. No, on the contrary, really. We’ve been wonderfully
happy, incredibly. It’s more than I can understand—so wonderful: the
nearness, and the peace—”
“Ah! Well, that’s awfully good news—”
They moved away. Pervin heard no more. But a childish sense of
desolation had come over him, as he heard their brisk voices. He seemed
shut out—like a child that is left out. He was aimless and excluded, he
did not know what to do with himself. The helpless desolation came over
him. He fumbled nervously as he dressed himself, in a state almost of
childishness. He disliked the Scotch accent in Bertie’s speech, and the
slight response it found on Isabel’s tongue. He disliked the slight
purr of complacency in the Scottish speech. He disliked intensely the
glib way in which Isabel spoke of their happiness and nearness. It made
him recoil. He was fretful and beside himself like a child, he had
almost a childish nostalgia to be included in the life circle. And at
the same time he was a man, dark and powerful and infuriated by his own
weakness. By some fatal flaw, he could not be by himself, he had to
depend on the support of another. And this very dependence enraged him.
He hated Bertie Reid, and at the same time he knew the hatred was
nonsense, he knew it was the outcome of his own weakness.
He went downstairs. Isabel was alone in the dining-room. She watched
him enter, head erect, his feet tentative. He looked so strong-blooded
and healthy, and, at the same time, cancelled. Cancelled—that was the
word that flew across her mind. Perhaps it was his scars suggested it.
“You heard Bertie come, Maurice?” she said.
“Yes—isn’t he here?”
“He’s in his room. He looks very thin and worn.”
“I suppose he works himself to death.”
A woman came in with a tray—and after a few minutes Bertie came down.
He was a little dark man, with a very big forehead, thin, wispy hair,
and sad, large eyes. His expression was inordinately sad—almost funny.
He had odd, short legs.
Isabel watched him hesitate under the door, and glance nervously at her
husband. Pervin heard him and turned.
“Here you are, now,” said Isabel. “Come, let us eat.”
Bertie went across to Maurice.
“How are you, Pervin,” he said, as he advanced.
The blind man stuck his hand out into space, and Bertie took it.
“Very fit. Glad you’ve come,” said Maurice.
Isabel glanced at them, and glanced away, as if she could not bear to
see them.
“Come,” she said. “Come to table. Aren’t you both awfully hungry? I am,
tremendously.”
“I’m afraid you waited for me,” said Bertie, as they sat down.
Maurice had a curious monolithic way of sitting in a chair, erect and
distant. Isabel’s heart always beat when she caught sight of him thus.
“No,” she replied to Bertie. “We’re very little later than usual. We’re
having a sort of high tea, not dinner. Do you mind? It gives us such a
nice long evening, uninterrupted.”
“I like it,” said Bertie.
Maurice was feeling, with curious little movements, almost like a cat
kneading her bed, for his place, his knife and fork, his napkin. He was
getting the whole geography of his cover into his consciousness. He sat
erect and inscrutable, remote-seeming Bertie watched the static figure
of the blind man, the delicate tactile discernment of the large, ruddy
hands, and the curious mindless silence of the brow, above the scar.
With difficulty he looked away, and without knowing what he did, picked
up a little crystal bowl of violets from the table, and held them to
his nose.
“They are sweet-scented,” he said. “Where do they come from?”
“From the garden—under the windows,” said Isabel.
“So late in the year—and so fragrant! Do you remember the violets under
Aunt Bell’s south wall?”
The two friends looked at each other and exchanged a smile, Isabel’s
eyes lighting up.
“Don’t I?” she replied. “_Wasn’t_ she queer!”
“A curious old girl,” laughed Bertie. “There’s a streak of freakishness
in the family, Isabel.”
“Ah—but not in you and me, Bertie,” said Isabel. “Give them to Maurice,
will you?” she added, as Bertie was putting down the flowers. “Have you
smelled the violets, dear? Do!—they are so scented.”
Maurice held out his hand, and Bertie placed the tiny bowl against his
large, warm-looking fingers. Maurice’s hand closed over the thin white
fingers of the barrister. Bertie carefully extricated himself. Then the
two watched the blind man smelling the violets. He bent his head and
seemed to be thinking. Isabel waited.
“Aren’t they sweet, Maurice?” she said at last, anxiously.
“Very,” he said. And he held out the bowl. Bertie took it. Both he and
Isabel were a little afraid, and deeply disturbed.
The meal continued. Isabel and Bertie chatted spasmodically. The blind
man was silent. He touched his food repeatedly, with quick, delicate
touches of his knife-point, then cut irregular bits. He could not bear
to be helped. Both Isabel and Bertie suffered: Isabel wondered why. She
did not suffer when she was alone with Maurice. Bertie made her
conscious of a strangeness.
After the meal the three drew their chairs to the fire, and sat down to
talk. The decanters were put on a table near at hand. Isabel knocked
the logs on the fire, and clouds of brilliant sparks went up the
chimney. Bertie noticed a slight weariness in her bearing.
“You will be glad when your child comes now, Isabel?” he said.
She looked up to him with a quick wan smile.
“Yes, I shall be glad,” she answered. “It begins to seem long. Yes, I
shall be very glad. So will you, Maurice, won’t you?” she added.
“Yes, I shall,” replied her husband.
“We are both looking forward so much to having it,” she said.
“Yes, of course,” said Bertie.
He was a bachelor, three or four years older than Isabel. He lived in
beautiful rooms overlooking the river, guarded by a faithful Scottish
man-servant. And he had his friends among the fair sex—not lovers,
friends. So long as he could avoid any danger of courtship or marriage,
he adored a few good women with constant and unfailing homage, and he
was chivalrously fond of quite a number. But if they seemed to encroach
on him, he withdrew and detested them.
Isabel knew him very well, knew his beautiful constancy, and kindness,
also his incurable weakness, which made him unable ever to enter into
close contact of any sort. He was ashamed of himself, because he could
not marry, could not approach women physically. He wanted to do so. But
he could not. At the centre of him he was afraid, helplessly and even
brutally afraid. He had given up hope, had ceased to expect any more
that he could escape his own weakness. Hence he was a brilliant and
successful barrister, also _littérateur_ of high repute, a rich man,
and a great social success. At the centre he felt himself neuter,
nothing.
Isabel knew him well. She despised him even while she admired him. She
looked at his sad face, his little short legs, and felt contempt of
him. She looked at his dark grey eyes, with their uncanny, almost
childlike intuition, and she loved him. He understood amazingly—but she
had no fear of his understanding. As a man she patronized him.
And she turned to the impassive, silent figure of her husband. He sat
leaning back, with folded arms, and face a little uptilted. His knees
were straight and massive. She sighed, picked up the poker, and again
began to prod the fire, to rouse the clouds of soft, brilliant sparks.
“Isabel tells me,” Bertie began suddenly, “that you have not suffered
unbearably from the loss of sight.”
Maurice straightened himself to attend, but kept his arms folded.
“No,” he said, “not unbearably. Now and again one struggles against it,
you know. But there are compensations.”
“They say it is much worse to be stone deaf,” said Isabel.
“I believe it is,” said Bertie. “Are there compensations?” he added, to
Maurice.
“Yes. You cease to bother about a great many things.” Again Maurice
stretched his figure, stretched the strong muscles of his back, and
leaned backwards, with uplifted face.
“And that is a relief,” said Bertie. “But what is there in place of the
bothering? What replaces the activity?”
There was a pause. At length the blind man replied, as out of a
negligent, unattentive thinking:
“Oh, I don’t know. There’s a good deal when you’re not active.”
“Is there?” said Bertie. “What, exactly? It always seems to me that
when there is no thought and no action, there is nothing.”
Again Maurice was slow in replying.
“There is something,” he replied. “I couldn’t tell you what it is.”
And the talk lapsed once more, Isabel and Bertie chatting gossip and
reminiscence, the blind man silent.
At length Maurice rose restlessly, a big, obtrusive figure. He felt
tight and hampered. He wanted to go away.
“Do you mind,” he said, “if I go and speak to Wernham?”
“No—go along, dear,” said Isabel.
And he went out. A silence came over the two friends. At length Bertie
said:
“Nevertheless, it is a great deprivation, Cissie.”
“It is, Bertie. I know it is.”
“Something lacking all the time,” said Bertie.
“Yes, I know. And yet—and yet—Maurice is right. There is something
else, something _there_, which you never knew was there, and which you
can’t express.”
“What is there?” asked Bertie.
“I don’t know—it’s awfully hard to define it—but something strong and
immediate. There’s something strange in Maurice’s
presence—indefinable—but I couldn’t do without it. I agree that it
seems to put one’s mind to sleep. But when we’re alone I miss nothing;
it seems awfully rich, almost splendid, you know.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow,” said Bertie.
They talked desultorily. The wind blew loudly outside, rain chattered
on the window-panes, making a sharp, drum-sound, because of the closed,
mellow-golden shutters inside. The logs burned slowly, with hot, almost
invisible small flames. Bertie seemed uneasy, there were dark circles
round his eyes. Isabel, rich with her approaching maternity, leaned
looking into the fire. Her hair curled in odd, loose strands, very
pleasing to the man. But she had a curious feeling of old woe in her
heart, old, timeless night-woe.
“I suppose we’re all deficient somewhere,” said Bertie.
“I suppose so,” said Isabel wearily.
“Damned, sooner or later.”
“I don’t know,” she said, rousing herself. “I feel quite all right, you
know. The child coming seems to make me indifferent to everything, just
placid. I can’t feel that there’s anything to trouble about, you know.”
“A good thing, I should say,” he replied slowly.
“Well, there it is. I suppose it’s just Nature. If only I felt I
needn’t trouble about Maurice, I should be perfectly content—”
“But you feel you must trouble about him?”
“Well—I don’t know—” She even resented this much effort.
The evening passed slowly. Isabel looked at the clock. “I say,” she
said. “It’s nearly ten o’clock. Where can Maurice be? I’m sure they’re
all in bed at the back. Excuse me a moment.”
She went out, returning almost immediately.
“It’s all shut up and in darkness,” she said. “I wonder where he is. He
must have gone out to the farm—”
Bertie looked at her.
“I suppose he’ll come in,” he said.
“I suppose so,” she said. “But it’s unusual for him to be out now.”
“Would you like me to go out and see?”
“Well—if you wouldn’t mind. I’d go, but—” She did not want to make the
physical effort.
Bertie put on an old overcoat and took a lantern. He went out from the
side door. He shrank from the wet and roaring night. Such weather had a
nervous effect on him: too much moisture everywhere made him feel
almost imbecile. Unwilling, he went through it all. A dog barked
violently at him. He peered in all the buildings. At last, as he opened
the upper door of a sort of intermediate barn, he heard a grinding
noise, and looking in, holding up his lantern, saw Maurice, in his
shirt-sleeves, standing listening, holding the handle of a
turnip-pulper. He had been pulping sweet roots, a pile of which lay
dimly heaped in a corner behind him.
“That you, Wernham?” said Maurice, listening.
“No, it’s me,” said Bertie.
A large, half-wild grey cat was rubbing at Maurice’s leg. The blind man
stooped to rub its sides. Bertie watched the scene, then unconsciously
entered and shut the door behind him, He was in a high sort of
barn-place, from which, right and left, ran off the corridors in front
of the stalled cattle. He watched the slow, stooping motion of the
other man, as he caressed the great cat.
Maurice straightened himself.
“You came to look for me?” he said.
“Isabel was a little uneasy,” said Bertie.
“I’ll come in. I like messing about doing these jobs.”
The cat had reared her sinister, feline length against his leg, clawing
at his thigh affectionately. He lifted her claws out of his flesh.
“I hope I’m not in your way at all at the Grange here,” said Bertie,
rather shy and stiff.
“My way? No, not a bit. I’m glad Isabel has somebody to talk to. I’m
afraid it’s I who am in the way. I know I’m not very lively company.
Isabel’s all right, don’t you think? She’s not unhappy, is she?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What does she say?”
“She says she’s very content—only a little troubled about you.”
“Why me?”
“Perhaps afraid that you might brood,” said Bertie, cautiously.
“She needn’t be afraid of that.” He continued to caress the flattened
grey head of the cat with his fingers. “What I am a bit afraid of,” he
resumed, “is that she’ll find me a dead weight, always alone with me
down here.”
“I don’t think you need think that,” said Bertie, though this was what
he feared himself.
“I don’t know,” said Maurice. “Sometimes I feel it isn’t fair that
she’s saddled with me.” Then he dropped his voice curiously. “I say,”
he asked, secretly struggling, “is my face much disfigured? Do you mind
telling me?”
“There is the scar,” said Bertie, wondering. “Yes, it is a
disfigurement. But more pitiable than shocking.”
“A pretty bad scar, though,” said Maurice.
“Oh, yes.”
There was a pause.
“Sometimes I feel I am horrible,” said Maurice, in a low voice, talking
as if to himself. And Bertie actually felt a quiver of horror.
“That’s nonsense,” he said.
Maurice again straightened himself, leaving the cat.
“There’s no telling,” he said. Then again, in an odd tone, he added: “I
don’t really know you, do I?”
“Probably not,” said Bertie.
“Do you mind if I touch you?”
The lawyer shrank away instinctively. And yet, out of very
philanthropy, he said, in a small voice: “Not at all.”
But he suffered as the blind man stretched out a strong, naked hand to
him. Maurice accidentally knocked off Bertie’s hat.
“I thought you were taller,” he said, starting. Then he laid his hand
on Bertie Reid’s head, closing the dome of the skull in a soft, firm
grasp, gathering it, as it were; then, shifting his grasp and softly
closing again, with a fine, close pressure, till he had covered the
skull and the face of the smaller man, tracing the brows, and touching
the full, closed eyes, touching the small nose and the nostrils, the
rough, short moustache, the mouth, the rather strong chin. The hand of
the blind man grasped the shoulder, the arm, the hand of the other man.
He seemed to take him, in the soft, travelling grasp.
“You seem young,” he said quietly, at last.
The lawyer stood almost annihilated, unable to answer.
“Your head seems tender, as if you were young,” Maurice repeated. “So
do your hands. Touch my eyes, will you?—touch my scar.”
Now Bertie quivered with revulsion. Yet he was under the power of the
blind man, as if hypnotized. He lifted his hand, and laid the fingers
on the scar, on the scarred eyes. Maurice suddenly covered them with
his own hand, pressed the fingers of the other man upon his disfigured
eye-sockets, trembling in every fibre, and rocking slightly, slowly,
from side to side. He remained thus for a minute or more, whilst Bertie
stood as if in a swoon, unconscious, imprisoned.
Then suddenly Maurice removed the hand of the other man from his brow,
and stood holding it in his own.
“Oh, my God’ he said, “we shall know each other now, shan’t we? We
shall know each other now.”
Bertie could not answer. He gazed mute and terror-struck, overcome by
his own weakness. He knew he could not answer. He had an unreasonable
fear, lest the other man should suddenly destroy him. Whereas Maurice
was actually filled with hot, poignant love, the passion of friendship.
Perhaps it was this very passion of friendship which Bertie shrank from
most.
“We’re all right together now, aren’t we?” said Maurice. “It’s all
right now, as long as we live, so far as we’re concerned?”
“Yes,” said Bertie, trying by any means to escape.
Maurice stood with head lifted, as if listening. The new delicate
fulfilment of mortal friendship had come as a revelation and surprise
to him, something exquisite and unhoped-for. He seemed to be listening
to hear if it were real.
Then he turned for his coat.
“Come,” he said, “we’ll go to Isabel.”
Bertie took the lantern and opened the door. The cat disappeared. The
two men went in silence along the causeways. Isabel, as they came,
thought their footsteps sounded strange. She looked up pathetically and
anxiously for their entrance. There seemed a curious elation about
Maurice. Bertie was haggard, with sunken eyes.
“What is it?” she asked.
“We’ve become friends,” said Maurice, standing with his feet apart,
like a strange colossus.
“Friends!” re-echoed Isabel. And she looked again at Bertie. He met her
eyes with a furtive, haggard look; his eyes were as if glazed with
misery.
“I’m so glad,” she said, in sheer perplexity.
“Yes,” said Maurice.
He was indeed so glad. Isabel took his hand with both hers, and held it
fast.
“You’ll be happier now, dear,” she said.
But she was watching Bertie. She knew that he had one desire—to escape
from this intimacy, this friendship, which had been thrust upon him. He
could not bear it that he had been touched by the blind man, his insane
reserve broken in. He was like a mollusc whose shell is broken.