Peter managed to get away from the Foreign Office next day, in the
absence of anything to detain him, an hour or so before his usual time,
and arriving at the gilded gates of the battlemented lodge of Howes
while the warm October twilight still lingered in the sky, he got out to
walk across the mile of park that separated him from the house. His
truant evening in town last night, the plunge into the froth and noise
and chatter, had quieted some sort of restlessness, had assuaged some
sort of hunger, and he was still licking the chops of memory, content in
a few minutes now to “wipe his mouth and go his journey” again. He just
had the sense of having enjoyed an evening out, of having lolled in the
old familiar tap-room, with the usual habitués, over a pot of beer,
while a friendly barmaid (this was Mrs. Trentham) made the usual jokes
over the counter as she served him. Some of these seemed to have sounded
better by electric light, so to speak, than did the timbre of their
memory in the dusky crimson of the dying day, and he recalled the
welcome of screams and shrieks she had given to Nellie and himself when,
at his insistence, they had visited her in the box opposite. She
threatened when she learned they had already dined alone (appearing so
very late at the play) to send anonymous letters to Silvia and Philip.
There was a judge in the divorce court, she added, who was much devoted
to her, and would no doubt give her admission for the two cases when
they came on. The robust wit of Lord Poole had ably seconded her.
Then, with the exception of Nellie, who had to go home to put an end to
Philip’s solitary evening, they had all gone back to Wardour House,
where Peter promised some sort of scratch supper, and Nellie, finding
that her husband had already gone to bed, joined them again. It had been
altogether a pleasant ridiculous evening which had made itself in this
impromptu and accidental manner an ordinary human evening. Just twice
there had for Peter been a slight check, a signal momentarily against
him--once when he found that Nellie had left again, very soon after her
reappearance at supper, without a word to him; once when, without
warning, it had entered his mind that at just about this time, the night
before, he had seen his bedroom door open, and Silvia’s face look in on
him as he lay with closed eyelids, feigning sleep. That was rather a
dreadful thing to have done....
He paused a moment on the bridge that crossed the lake, looking at the
image of the house duskily reflected on its far margin. There was
someone coming towards him along the path that led by the edge of the
lake, and joined the road here, and before his eyes had time to tell him
who it was, she waved a hand at him, without the screams, without the
violent gesticulations by which Mrs. Trentham the night before had made
herself known. She quickened her pace as he answered her signal, and in
three minutes more he had joined her.
“The chauffeur told me you had walked from the lodge,” she said, “so I
came to meet you. You’re early.”
Peter kissed her.
“I’ll go away again, shall I?” he said.
“No; as you’ve come, you can stop,” she said.
“And what did you do with yourself last night? Not all alone, I hope:
you found somebody?”
Peter smiled at her.
“Somebody?” he said. “Crowds! First of all, Nellie rang up at the F.O.,
saying that she had been going to the play with Philip, but that he had
a cold. So would I? We dined at home, and talked so long with elbows on
the table that we didn’t get to the play till towards the end of the
second act.”
“Ah, that was luck to find Nellie,” said Silvia. “I was afraid you might
have a horrid lonely evening. And then?”
“Then just one act of _Downstairs_. But one act was better than four.
There had been railway whistles and flags waving from the box opposite.”
“That was Mrs. Trentham,” said Silvia.
“It was. So we swept in her lot--the usual one--with Lord Poole, who
told me to kiss you for him, and they all came to supper at home.
Really, that plan of keeping the house open was an admirable one. It’s
awful fun; we talked and smoked and laughed until everyone melted away.”
She saw (and loved to see) the brightness and briskness of him; she
heard (and loved to hear) his cheerfulness and alacrity.
“Oh, I am glad you had a nice evening,” she said. “I nearly telephoned
to say I was coming up to keep you company. But then I thought I had
better stop and--and try to make myself disagreeable at home.”
“Did you succeed, darling?” asked Peter.
Exactly then it struck Silvia that if Peter had dined, had sat “so long”
with elbows on the table, and had got to the theatre in time for
anything at all, he could not have been detained very late at the
Foreign Office. She instantly drew down, with a rush and a rattle, some
mental blind in front of that. She shut it out: she did not choose to
see it.
“Yes, pretty well,” she said. “Mother went to bed at ten, anyhow, which
is early for her, so I must have been fairly successful.”
“Not proved,” said Peter. “She may have been sleepy. It’s a sleepy
place, you know.”
“I know,” she said. “Two nights ago I came and looked into your room, as
I had not heard you come to bed, and there you were, fast asleep.”
“Snoring, I suppose you’ll tell me?” said he.
This point about detention at the Foreign Office, with time yet to dine
and confabulate and go to the theatre, had struck him too. He had meant
it to be assumed that he had telephoned to signify the knowledge that he
would be detained, and now by this stupid inadvertence in giving the
account of his evening, he had shown, for all who cared to think, that
he had not been detained. But Silvia apparently had quite missed that,
or she would surely have said something to that effect; as it was, she
had passed it by: it was out of sight by now, behind another--well,
another misunderstanding.
She proceeded to put a further corner between her consciousness and it.
“No, I don’t say snoring,” she said. “Oh, Peter, your father has told me
how delightful, how angelic you were to him, about his stopping on here
till we go back to London. It touched him very much.”
She took his arm. “It touched me too, dear,” she said, “and I must tell
you that it furnished a reason--one out of several--why I came to meet
you. I’ve got a confession----”
Peter guessed what this reason was and what the confession. When he
made a plan he was quite accustomed to find it work itself out as he had
meant. But now in the very apex of its success he felt ashamed of it. If
it came to confessions he could make his contribution. He interrupted
her.
“I don’t care about that reason,” he said. “Tell me the other ones
instead.”
“The other ones will come afterwards,” she said, “if you want to hear
them then. This has got to come first, so don’t interrupt, darling. I
_will_ tell you: it’s an affair of conscience.”
“And I’m a conscientious objector,” said he. As it became more and more
certain in his mind what Silvia’s confession was, the less he wanted to
hear it, though he himself, patting his own back for his cleverness, had
contrived the plan of which this was the logical sequel. But when he did
that he had not yet pretended to be asleep one night nor, on another,
telephoned his detention in town.
Silvia went on with a gentle but perfectly determined firmness.
“I’ve misjudged you altogether, Peter,” she said, “and I’ve _got_ to
confess. For days now--more days than I like to number--I have been
watching you, looking for something I missed in you. I thought you were
unkind and sarcastic and cynical about your father, and what he told me
of the manner in which you welcomed his proposal to stop on here
convinced me how utterly I had been wronging you. It was owlishly stupid
of me to suppose you could be like that, and, what was worse, it was
brutally unloving.”
Peter laughed.
“Any more big words coming?” he asked. “Owlish, stupid, brutal,
unloving? That’s you all over. Have you murdered anybody?”
She shook her head.
“It’s no use making light of it,” she said, “It was stupid, it was
unloving of me. I thought that because you saw certain absurdities and
unrealities about your father, you saw nothing but them, and were
impatient and untender with him. Do you forgive me for being such a
fool?”
Peter tried to imagine himself telling her that she had been perfectly
right throughout: that only a piece of trickery on his part, in getting
his father to give an account of the welcome his proposition had met
with, had deluded her into thinking she was wrong. But his vanity, the
thought of the sorry figure he would present, made it quite impossible
to contemplate so fundamental an honesty. Short of being honest, he had
better be superb.
He stopped, facing her, knowing well the effect his physical presence
had on her.
“You darling, there’s one thing I don’t forgive you for,” he said, “and
that is for being such a fool as to think there was anything for me to
forgive.”
Even as he made this neat phrase, the truth of it came home to him.
There was indeed nothing for him to forgive. She gave a long sigh.
“Oh, you must teach me to be generous,” she said.
Peter felt himself unutterably mean at that moment. But the thing was
done; he had been superb as well as dishonest, and if honesty had been
too high for his vanity to attain to, it was just as incapable of
demolishing the golden image of himself that he had set up for Silvia.
Then there was the point concerning his apparent slumber two nights ago;
there was the point concerning his telephone last night.... He wished
intensely that she hadn’t asked him to teach her generosity.
“Now for the other reasons why you came to meet me,” he said. There
would be balsam and food for his vanity here. He had the grace to
recognize that even while he asked it.
“Because I wanted to see you,” said she.
“I like that reason. Have you any more of that brand?”
He knew that the word which took lightly what was so immense would,
after her confession, cause her to smile. It was of the species which
she had thought cynical, and which she now knew was just the everyday
garb in which affection and tenderness clothed themselves.
“Because it seemed so long since I saw you,” she said. “Oh, Peter,
there’s only one reason really which matters. Because I love you.”
... And that brought home to him a meanness, a dishonesty against which
all the rest was but feathers in a scale weighted on the other side with
the world itself. Often before now he had known how unintelligibly great
that was; now for the first time he was irritated at himself for his
want of comprehension with regard to it. He was accustomed to understand
things to which he gave his mind, but here his mind was brought to a
dead stop by this great shining wall that was unscalable and
impenetrable. But, to be honest, was his irritation quite confined to
himself, or did that shining wall from its very incomprehensibility
provoke a portion of it?
Silvia seemed to herself to miss something in his silence, but with
Peter there, nothing could really be missing....
“How often I say that,” she whispered; “but how often I feel that
there’s nothing else worth saying.”
“More of that brand,” said he.
“Not a drop. We must go in. You haven’t seen your father yet, and after
that you must have your bath.”
“And after that you must send your maid away, so that we can get a few
minutes’ sensible conversation,” said Peter.
“I’ll begin it now,” said she. “Sometimes, you know, your bath goes to
your head, and you’re not quite as serious as you might be.”
“Say I’m drunk and have done with it,” suggested he.
“Very well; sometimes your bath makes you tipsy. But while you’re sober,
I want you to promise me something.”
“Shall I like it?” asked Peter prudently. “It isn’t to spend a week with
Uncle Abe or anything of that kind?”
“Nothing of that kind. Poor Uncle Abe! You’ll like it. At least, you’ll
find you’ll like it; you’ll know it does you good.”
“That’s not the same thing,” objected he. “It does me good to get up
bright and early, so as to start for town without hurrying, but I hate
it.”
Silvia laughed.
“It will relieve you of that to some extent,” she said. “Oh, do be quick
and promise instead of making such a fuss!”
“Right. But if you’ve deceived me, I’ll never trust you again. I
promise.”
“Well, for as long as we are here I want you to spend at least one night
in the week in town.”
“I shall do nothing of the kind,” said he. “I don’t care an atom about
my promise. Pish for my promise! And how will it relieve me? Oh, I see.
But I shan’t--unless you come too, that’s to say.”
Silvia stopped.
“Now listen to me,” she said. “You enjoyed last night immensely. It’s
perfectly natural that you should have. I should think you were ill if
you hadn’t.”
“How do you know I enjoyed it? I never said so,” said he.
“You did better than that. You beamed all over your atrocious
countenance when you told me about it. You were obliged to stop in town,
and being obliged you found, and you know it perfectly well, that it was
a sort of night out. You saw your friends: you had a beano.”
Silvia kept her finger on the cord of the blind she had chosen to pull
down in her mind. She refused with a sublime intellectual dishonesty to
look at the fact that Peter certainly could have come down here by
dinner time if he had time to dine early in town; she would not see it.
Already, so she told herself, she had once fallen into an owlishly
stupid error and worse, by doubting him, by watching him; now at least
she could repair that to some extent by the supreme honesty of trusting
him without question. Something had happened to keep him in town, and it
was no business of hers to think of that at all. He had said he was
detained at the Foreign Office, and, for her, he was detained there. She
held her eyes open to the intensest light of all, which was that of her
own love, and the more it blinded her to everything else the better. It
was only creatures like bats (and owls), things of the night, that were
blinded by the dayspring.
“You enjoyed it: you had a beano,” she repeated. “Why not say so?”
Peter hesitated, but for a reason that she had refused to entertain the
existence of. The fact, now shiningly clear, that Silvia had never so
remotely seen that he could easily have got down here in time for
dinner, made it unintelligibly and unreasonably needful for him to tell
her so. There was something sordid in not doing so. Had she shown the
smallest suspicion of it, he would probably have explained it away in
some ingenious manner.
“Yes, I enjoyed it,” he said. “That was why I did it. I could easily
have got down here in time for dinner.”
Up went the blind at that with a snap and a whirr, and Silvia’s face,
beaming and delighted, smiled out at him.
“Oh, Peter, how lovely of you to tell me,” she cried. “Of course, I
guessed, only I wouldn’t guess. There’s just the joy of it all.”
That came from her like the stroke of a bird’s wing, that bore it
through the sunny air. With another stroke she returned to him.
“Now you’ve got no excuse for refusing my beautiful plan,” she said.
“And it _was_ nice of you not to tell me at once: you knew you had to
some time, and it was all the better for keeping. My dear, there’s the
dressing bell. Just go and see your father for a minute: you can talk to
him in the smoking-room after mother and I have gone to bed.”
As Silvia heard through her bedroom door the splashings and the rinsings
and the gurglings which regulated her own speed of dressing, she was
absorbed in the perception of the one thing that was great, and its
myriad manifestations. Up the trunk of the tree and through the branches
and to the remotest ends of the twigs flowed the sap, and all--the
firmness of the trunk, the vigour of the branches, the elasticity of
the twigs, the decoration of flower and leaf and fruit, which made the
tree lovely--were manifestations and embodiments of the sap. If there
was a wound in its bark, the sap healed it; if there was a nest among
its boughs, an external loveliness of life which visited it, it was
still the sap which had fashioned its anchorage. The remotest leaf of
that tower of forest greenery was nurtured by it, and all the being and
the beauty sprang from it.... There was nothing big or little, if you
looked at it in that way, though just now she had decided that only one
thing was big and all the rest was little....
Then came a rare, an unusual splash. Occasionally when Peter began to
stand up in his bath after the hot soaking, he fell down; his foot
slipped on the smooth surface, and this made the rare and enormous
splash. This always caused her a certain anxiety: he might hit his head
against the edge of the bath....
“Just tap at the bathroom door, Wilton,” she said, “and ask if Mr.
Mainwaring is all right.”... But before the chaste Wilton could get as
far as the door, a new splashing began. “It doesn’t matter, Wilton,” she
said.
“Your pearls, ma’am?” asked Wilton.
Then came the tap at the door, and Wilton slid out of the picture.
“I fell down,” said Peter. “I might have hurt myself, but I didn’t. I
wish you weren’t so wonderful.”
“I can’t help that,” said she. “You should have thought of it before.”
Peter began drying his toes.
“I’ve had quite a long talk with my father,” he said, “and all about
you. He thinks you’re wonderful, too. He adores you: they all adore
you, particularly Lord Poole.”
“Peter, don’t be tipsy,” said she.
“I shall be as tipsy as I like. I want to know one thing. Why weren’t
you annoyed with me for saying that I couldn’t get back last night?”
Silvia held out the pearls for him to clasp round her neck.
“If you don’t understand that, you must be tipsy,” she said.
“And if I do?” he asked.
She leaned her head a little back.
“Why, then you understand it all,” she said. “You understand, for
instance, why I insist on your having a night in town every week.”
“Yes, I see. Just that you shall get rid of me now and then,” he said.
“Quite right. You’re as sober as--as a commoner, I suppose.”
She moved in her chair, and one end of her necklace slipped from his
fingers.
“Am I putting them on for dinner,” he asked, “or am I taking them off
for bedtime?”
“Whatever you’re doing, you are being wonderfully clumsy,” said she, as
his fingers, warm and soft from his bath, touched the back of her neck.
* * * * *
She was down before him next morning to give him his breakfast, and,
waiting for him, strolled out on to the terrace. There had been one of
those exquisite early October frosts, and in the air was that ineffable
fragrance derived from absence of smell, the odourless odour of frosted
dew. The sun was already warm with promise of a hot, cloudless day; but
as the heat had not set in motion the weaving of the scents of earth
and grass and flowers which would soon decorate and veil the virginal
beauty of the morning. Last night, when she and Peter had lingered here
in the end of the twilight, the air was not less clear and windless, but
it had been charged with all the myriad scents distilled by the hot
hours of autumn sun. Now there was a precision, a crystalline
quality.... Some such sort of clear sparkle bathed her spirit also: her
love basked in some such virginal beauty of young day, flamelike and
scentless.
All the evening before, from the time when she met Peter by the lake,
she, body and soul and spirit, had been rising towards some new peak of
passion, and the true topmost summit seemed to her now to be where she
stood in this cool brightness, able to see that the upward path which
led here was below her. They had dined after Peter had clasped her
necklace for her; there had been the usual piquet for her and Mr.
Mainwaring, and for the latter a triumphant pæan of achievement over
some effect of lightning in the second cartoon, which positively, as he
stood aside as artist and became spectator, appalled him, and before
they settled down to their cards he must needs conduct them to the
masterpiece in question, and let them also feel the cold clutch of fear.
But whatever Mr. Mainwaring did or said, whatever her mother, it was
Peter whom, in this rising tide of flame and self-surrender, Silvia
watched, no longer looking for those signs of tenderness and affection
which (owlish) she had missed, but in the rapturous contemplation of
them. Often she had seen him charming to her mother and to his own
father; but always, so she had thought, she could detect in him
politeness and amenity, the controlling hand of breeding, the practice
of pleasant behaviour. But this evening there had been no “behaviour”
about him at all, he had been radiant with them both, divinely
natural.... He had sat next Mrs. Wardour on the sofa, as the piquet was
in progress, and entertained her with ludicrous but hopelessly
recognizable caricatures of her and his father over their cards; he had
held a skein of her wool, he had mixed her hot water and lemon juice for
her. All these things he had often done before, and they were all
trivial enough.... He was the same with his father, looking over his
hand when so bidden, dutifully observing exactly how to play that
puzzling game; eager to anticipate his wants, chaffing him sometimes,
behaving to him--this again was the wrong word--being to him, rather,
all that his own sonship implied, fulfilling in every word and gesture
the welcome which he had given to the suggestion of his remaining with
them till they went to London. And all that was “the world’s side” which
anyone might see, and behind it in “lights and darks undreamed of” was
that other aspect and reality of him, which was hers alone.... She was
already in bed when she heard him, after his smoking-room chat with his
father, come into his room, and presently, after tapping on her door, he
looked in, coatless and shoeless. She pretended--in parody of what
happened two nights before--to be asleep, and between her eyelids,
nearly closed, she saw a broad smile overspread his face.
“I don’t believe a single word of it,” he remarked.
* * * * *
All this--all it was and all it meant--Silvia now, as she waited for
him, looked at, looked down on even from this crowning pinnacle, as on
upward, ultimate slopes. Even, as in the cool scentless air of the
morning, the miracle of the sunshine on the windless world was more
itself than when its beams had drawn that response of fragrance from all
living things, so shone for her, untroubled with passion and desire, the
essence itself of love in its own crystal globe. Not less precious, now
that it was conveyed to her in no material manifestation, would be the
bodily presence of him through whom that essence was conveyed to her,
who embodied love to her mortal sense, but for ever far more precious
was it now that she, in this pause of content that crowned passion with
a royal diadem, could for the moment see that in loving him she loved
not him alone, but Love itself that “moved the sun and the other stars,”
and being all, gave all....
The duration of the moment in which Silvia reached that point, not
theoretically, but as a felt and experienced reality, was infinitesimal,
just as in significance it was infinite.... At the sound of Peter’s step
on the bare boards of the dining-room just within, the atmosphere of the
summit where she stood grew laden and fragrant with the scents of the
world. She did not come down from it: it did not rise up above her. She
was there still, but she was there in body as well as in spirit, the
fragrance of material sweetness was near her, even as when now she
stepped back into the dining-room, a waft of rose-scent from the
sun-warmed wall smothered her nostrils.
* * * * *
Peter was poking about among dishes on the side table, and gave her a
grunt, neither more nor less, in answer to her salutation. He held that
to be in good spirits at breakfast-time was a symptom that could not be
taken too seriously. By that test there was nothing wrong with him this
morning.
He sat down with an ill-used sigh.
“I’ve got a headache,” he remarked.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said she. “Where?”
“In my left ankle, of course,” said he.
Silvia, passing behind him, just tweaked the short hair at the back of
his neck.
“Oh, don’t finger me,” said Peter angrily.
He gave her so quick a glance that she could scarcely tell whether he
had actually looked at her or not, and went on without pause and without
hurry, clinking out his words like newly-minted coins, separate and
crisply cut and hot.
“Just let me alone sometimes,” he said. “You know how I hate dabbing and
pressing and grasping. You’re the limit, you know.”
He had got her stiff and staring, and still without pause and in
precisely the same voice he went on:
“Don’t let me have to speak to you like that again,” he said. “And don’t
be so owlish, but confess that you’ve fallen into that trap.”
Still she stood staring, and he took one step towards her and flung his
arms close round her neck, pressing her face to his, and then, more
directly, finding and claiming her mouth.
“You utterly divine girl,” he said. “I never dreamed I should take you
in. I did. Kiss me three times to signify ‘Yes,’ and three times more to
signify that you are a darling, and once more to--well, once more.”
“Peter, I thought you were cross with me,” said she, when she could say
anything.
“How perfectly splendid! That joke did come off, didn’t it?”
She could smile again.
“You brute!” she said. “But never take me in over that again, darling.
Anything else; not that.”
* * * * *
Once more before his motor came round they strolled on the terrace
outside. It was thick now with the web of scents, for the sun’s weaving
was busy. The late roses gave their fragrance, and the verbena and the
mignonette, but these were but strung like beads on to the smell of the
damp, fruitful earth. By now Silvia could laugh at herself about that
fierce phantom moment, for never had Peter seemed more utterly hers.
Usually in these early half-hours he was rather silent, rather morose;
to-day, penitent perhaps, or consolatory for the fright--it was no
less--that he had unwittingly given her, there was something of the
bath-intoxication about him.
“If you were in any sense a devoted wife,” he said, “you would drive up
with me, deposit me at the F.O., and then wait three hours for me in the
motor till lunch time. I could give you an hour then, after which you
would wait four hours more and drive back with me. Therefore shall a
woman leave her father and her mother and cleave to her husband.”
“Yes, of course I’ll come,” said she, “if you want me to. You must just
say you really want me.”
He took hold of her elbows from behind and ran her along the terrace.
“Motor-bike,” he observed. “I’m pushing you till you get your sense of
humour working on its own account.”
“It’s working--I swear it’s working,” shrieked Silvia. “Don’t be such a
bully.”
A seat on the balustrade of the terrace seemed indicated after this
violent exercise.
“There’s another thing,” said Peter. “My mental power of association of
ideas is decaying, which is a sign of softening of the brain. Aren’t you
sorry?”
“Is that the brain in your head?” asked she.
“No; in the same place that ached when I had a headache. Left ankle.
Don’t interrupt. But there’s something in this house front, and I
believe it’s the cornice, or whatever they call it, which runs all along
there underneath the windows on the first floor, which--that’s the
cornice--reminds me of some other house.”
Peter pointed to the broad frieze-like band which projected some foot or
so from the wall of the house. It was of Portland stone, amazingly
carved with masks at intervals, and ran, as he had said, just below the
first floor windows from end to end of the façade. Then he gave a yodel
which, consciously or not, was a hoarse and surprising parody of his
father’s favourite method of indicating a general sumptuousness of
sensation.
“That’s done it,” he said. “Just speaking of it has reminded me what it
was. And there’s the motor, bother and blight it, confound and curse
it.”
“And what is the house it reminds you of?” she asked.
“The flat belonging to Nellie’s mother. Just below the windows there ran
a band like that. I noticed it one day last summer. She had said
something about it, but at that point there’s softening of the brain
again. All I said about the motor holds, though.”
“Send it away. Walk up to town instead,” suggested Silvia.
“Likely, with that headache in my ankle. But I would so much sooner sit
here with you than do either.”
* * * * *
Silvia waved to him as he drove off, and waiting, waved again as he
crossed the bridge over the lake. The air was thick with earthy
fragrances now, and her mind with fragrant memories, and among them
there was some new scent, not quite strange to her, but one from which
she had always, whenever it presented itself, turned her head. Now it
insisted on being analysed, on being recognized.
When, half an hour ago, she had just tweaked his hair as she passed him,
his remonstrance, to her ears, had been wholly instinctive and sincere;
he objected to being “fingered.” He had piled that up, so she seemed to
see, making of it a joke against her, until the joke grew preposterous.
Then, ever so convincingly, he had smothered her with kisses. Yesterday
evening, too, how convincing had been, on some other plane, his
“dearness”--that word must serve--with her mother and Mr. Mainwaring. On
one side were bright tokens of affection, and to her of so much more
than affection; on the other that one little hot coin that clinked with
a true ring before, with admirable mimicry of himself, he had showered
out a whole flood of such.
Which was the more real? And where, in these mists, was that austere and
shining summit?