Just before Christmas, after three weeks in London, Silvia was driving
down alone to Howes, in preparation for the party which was to arrive
next day. Peter would come then: he had got a devastating cold, and it
was far wiser, in this grim inclemency of weather, that he should not
come down with her to-day, only to come up again for his work next
morning. It was much more sensible--Silvia had suggested it--that he
should nurse his cold that evening, and, well wrapped up, make a single
instead of a double journey to-morrow. But that piece of good sense was
subsidiary to the fact that she did not want, just for this evening, to
be alone with him; even if his cold had not supplied an excellent
argument in favour of this plan, she would have suggested her own
solitary departure.
Wilton, the correct virginal Wilton, sat opposite her on the front seat.
Wilton had, at the start, deposited herself next the chauffeur, but
Silvia had made her come inside. But there was little use, so thought
Wilton, in coming inside, if her mistress still kept both windows open.
The sleet had turned to uncompromising snow, and Silvia seemed to notice
it no more than if she were a Polar bear. Eventually, as the car flowed
up the long hill through Putney, Wilton had been able to stand the
draught no longer.
“You’ll be catching a worse cold than Mr. Mainwaring’s, ma’am,” she
said, “if you sit in that draught.”... That made it more comfortable.
Silvia roused herself for a moment.
“His man doesn’t take such care of him as you do of me, Wilton,” she
said.
“And so much pneumonia about, ma’am,” observed Wilton encouragingly.
* * * * *
Silvia began to think consecutively, starting not from far back, but
from the immediate past. Nellie had lunched with her alone, just before
she started, for Mrs. Wardour had been out, and Nellie had hailed this
_tête-à-tête_ as the most delightful thing that could have happened.
Nellie had been at Wardour House, too, the night before for a concert;
during this month of December, hardly yet three weeks old, she had been
there half a dozen times, for Mrs. Wardour, resuming her social
activities with extraordinary vigour after four months in the country,
had, without the aid of any godmother, turned December into June.
“You know the real name of this delicious house, darling,” Nellie had
said. “Everyone calls it the New Jerusalem, because its gates are never
shut day or night. Your mother brings light into the darkest homes of
the upper classes. There’s such dreadful discontent among them: if it
wasn’t for people--angels--like your mother, they would all go and live
in converted garages or in country cottages, and pretend to be the
proletariat. It’s being amused and entertained that keeps the upper
class together; otherwise they would be the leaders of Bolshevism. The
Order of the British Empire now! Why isn’t she the only Dame in it? The
stability of the upper class depends on her, and the King depends on the
upper class, and the Empire, in fact, if you see what I mean. I’m not
quite sure that I do, but I do mean something. We should all have
groaned and grumbled if your mother hadn’t set such a brilliant
example.”
With Nellie’s brilliant presence and charm to help out this engaging
nonsense, it was a cheerful scintillation. Last June, so Silvia told
herself, she would vastly have enjoyed such a month as she had just
spent, and Nellie’s _résumé_ of it made her wonder whether she--only
she--had been dull and unappreciative....
The snow was driven against the glass which Wilton had put up: she could
hear it softly tap at the window....
“And Peter!” Nellie had said. “What have you done to him, darling, or
rather what haven’t you done to him? Everybody--I think I told you so
once--used to be devoted to Peter: we used all to be in love with him,
for he was so priceless, so marvellous, in not caring one atom for
anybody. How long did it take you, do tell me, to discover his heart?
Did you mine for it, and dredge for it, and blow up all the rocks round
it? Or did you get an aeroplane and fly up to it. Perhaps, after all, it
was in the sky--so tremendously remote that nobody ever thought of
looking for it there. You and Peter, up in the blue like the queen bee
and her lover! How wildly romantic! Or were you there, and did he fly up
to you? You met in the blue, anyhow, and left us all staring up after
you till our eyes watered with the glare.”
Silvia, as the car hooted its way through Kingston, did not concern
herself to recall with what small accompaniment she had sustained those
arpeggios. She must have said something, for Nellie had gone on talking,
talking.... Silvia had blinked before that brilliant vitality, which so
decorated all that lay under its beams; but for the first time, when
she spoke like that about herself and Peter, the light hurt her. It
dazzled rather than illuminated, and when it fell on certain dark places
it did not illuminate them, it only showed up their blackness. She, with
Nellie’s light, Nellie’s impressions, to help her, peered into them.
Such glimpses as she caught between the dazzle and the darkness made her
turn away with protest against this bull’s-eye that now seemed to
intrude on privacy. What, after all, had her relations with Peter to do
with Nellie?
The streets were slippery with the newly-fallen snow, and at some
corner, while they were still passing through houses, there was a
furious hooting of the horn outside, which to Silvia at that moment was
not so much a warning of danger ahead on the road, as of danger lying
somewhere deep within herself. They came to a dead stop, which made
Wilton scream faintly and clutch the jewel-case, and for a yard or two
they slid backwards. All that, too, seemed instantly translated in her
mind into interior action, and, keeping pace with it, she slid a little
farther back in her journey of thought.
She brought out from the locked cupboard of her very soul, where she had
turned the key on it, one particular moment. It was yesterday that she
had put it there. She was in a room of a house in Welbeck Street, and at
the end of the consultation the great man, jovial and kindly, had got up
from his chair, and smoothed the pillow of a sofa on which she had lain
just before.
“Be quite active,” Dr. Symes summed up, “without overtiring yourself.
Appetite good? That’s all right. Just go on with your ordinary life.
What? No: no doubt of any kind. Your husband well? A cold? Everyone’s
got a cold.”
Silvia paused over that while a wheel of her car slipped and skidded.
Soon it hit the ground again. But in that pause she faced the fact that
she had not told Peter. She meant to last night, but--but.... He had
bewailed his cold; he had accepted her proposal that he should stop in
London to-night. He had waved his hand at her and left her, not kissing
her for fear of giving her his cold. But that was not the reason--it was
only the excuse--for not telling him. She had welcomed it, at the time,
as an adequate excuse; but if she had not found any such, she would have
done without it.
For a second or two her thought paused, merely contemplating this fact
as if looking at some picture. It seemed quite incredible that she had
not gone straight to him with her news, blurted it, whispered it, kissed
him with it. Yet if he had been sitting here now instead of Wilton, in
this privacy of snow and twilight-travel, she knew that she would again
be struggling, and in vain, to tell him.
From that point she swept back to one morning in October. It was then
that some seed of knowledge which had previously lain dormant in her
soul began to sprout. For two months now she had been conscious of its
growth, and for two months she had steadily refused to acknowledge it.
Her relations with him had been of the most normal and friendly, but the
fact, as she saw now, of his content and tranquillity was sunshine and
rain to the growth of it. Then, at the news Dr. Symes had given her, it
burst into bitter blossom, and she could ignore it no longer.
Peter had never loved her: he had never, in finding her, lost himself.
Mentally and sympathetically she knew that he liked her--liked her, she
was prepared to say, immensely; physically she attracted and satisfied
him. To think that he had married her “for” her money would be an
exaggerated and hysterical estimate; her wealth had not been a
counterweight that overcame some opposing disadvantage, but it was, so
she now believed, a determining factor. Without it he would not have
sought her.
It seemed odd to herself how little that mattered. Her wealth was an
advantage--so, too, was her beauty; and even if he had married her “for”
her wealth, that would have seemed to her no worse than if he had
married her “for” her beauty, or “for” (had she been witty) her wit, or
“for” any quality whatsoever of mind or body. All these were advantages,
pleasant circumstances; but all of them, singly or together, compared
with love, were no more than the bright shells on the seashore compared
with the sea.
It was just here that she blamed him with a bitterness that appalled
her; it was this that had made it possible for her to accept any excuse
(or if necessary to have done without one) for not telling him what she
had learned yesterday. He had bidden her shut her eyes, and picking up a
shell had held it to her ear, and had told her that what she heard there
was the sea.... He had looked, he had spoken, he had acted as if he
brought close to her that splendid shining vastness. She had trusted
him, and had listened with all the rapture of love to that murmuring.
Therein he had cheated her, passed off on her a “fake” which, had she
not been blinded by his hand over her eyes, he knew she must have
recognized as such.
There was just one excuse for him; she hesitated to adopt it, because
while it excused him, it far more terribly accused him. It was that he
did not know what love meant. From the very first, from the day when he
had asked her to marry him, he had not known. She had told him that all
she wanted in the world was to be allowed to love him, and he had never
seen that her surrender presupposed his own. He could not burn in her
love without being alight himself. There was the root of it all, his
ignorance.
At that, compassion deep as love itself inundated her bitterness, not
diluting it, but from its very nature neutralizing it. Sorrow was there,
but “without sorrow” (who had said that?) “none liveth in love.” Not as
by one drop out of the whole ocean was her love for him diminished; but,
while he did not understand, he ploughed his way in drought and desert:
he could not reach her.
It was through his constant affection for her and his gentleness, rather
than through any failure in these, that the realization of this had come
to her. She did not believe that she wearied him; she knew that she
attracted him physically, that he was faithful to her not on principle,
but by inclination, and yet all this was nothing. He had not begun (say
for a minute or two) by loving her, and then dropped into mere
affection, mere desire: simply he had never loved her at all as she
understood loving. He did not love anybody else, and Silvia, so far from
being consoled by that thought, found herself passionately wishing that
he did. He might love Nellie, or that fool of a woman who screamed; for
then, at any rate, he would know what love meant, and they would have
common ground to meet on, though that very ground parted them. That
might ruin her own life, which already she had given into his cool,
careful hands; and if only, by smashing it to atoms, he could find his
soul’s salvation!
There were problems ahead, and how they should be solved she did not
know: she only knew what the upshot must be. Inconceivably dear as the
mere touch of his hand was to her, she knew that never again, unless he
learned what love was, or she forgot it, could hand clasp hand and mouth
meet mouth. Not again could she give him those symbols of the infinite
as the playthings for enjoyment. All that she had or was, was his,
except just that; unless he loved her, the banners of her love must stay
unfurled. Somehow she must let him know that, just as, somehow and soon,
she must let him know about what she learned yesterday.
As the car turned in through the park gates the snow beat in from the
other window. It fell unheeded on her face and hands, till Wilton,
encouraged to take care of her, drew up the sash.
* * * * *
Peter’s head on her shoulder, his breath coming soft and slow through
his mouth.... Peter’s eyes close to hers, so that if he winked his
eyelashes brushed her cheek.... Peter’s arm lying languid and relaxed
across her bosom.... She would give her body to be burned for him, but
not with such burning as this. Anyone, not she alone, could supply such
need as his; none could supply hers but he, and he only if he loved her.
Loving him as she did, she could not (so the leaping firelight in her
bedroom that night illuminated it for her), she could not shut out her
ideal in some burning chamber of its own, and take the rest of her, in
ordinary human manner, to him, nor could she take from him, even though
it was the highest he could give, anything that made its approach on
some other plane. He must want her as she wanted him, surrendered and
lost, and found again in a new completeness, before they could come
together as lovers. She conjectured that she was singular, exceptional
in this: most men, most women gave what they could and got what they
could. But there was no compromise possible for her that could produce
this easily negotiable felicity. She could not, and if she could she
would not, have accepted that in exchange for this drawn sword that lay
between Peter and her. She had to tell him that.... She had to tell him
also that the fruit of love on the one side, of affection on the other,
was ripening. She must wait her occasion for that; some moment must be
seized upon when he was most himself, most nearly, that is to say, what
she had once thought him.
She had nothing of her own; all was his. That was her one inestimable
possession, that she had given him all. Whatever happened, her utter
penury was the one thing she must cling to.
* * * * *
Peter had rung up Dr. Symes before he left the Foreign Office that
evening, asking for five minutes of his time at any hour of morning or
afternoon next day. Perhaps it was rather fussy to consult a physician
over a cold, but really there never had been such a cold. Dr. Symes gave
you a cabalistic slip of paper which, being duly interpreted, proved to
be some marvellous tonic stuff, or, when he had felt a pulse, and looked
at a tongue, and tapped you on a stomach or made your knee jump in a
curious manner, he even more probably told you that you had the
constitution of an armadillo, and roared you out of his room for wasting
his time. With a week of uncles and aunts ahead, even though Nellie was
to partake in the secret joys of them, Peter felt he would like some
robust reassurance of that sort. Or, on the other hand, since there
never was such a cold----
These speculations, as he drove to Welbeck Street next morning, were cut
short by his arrival and his internment in a waiting-room. There were
several persons there, reading illustrated papers with sad faces, who
looked up when he entered, and thereafter regarded him with evident
suspicion, fearing, so Peter figured it, that he might, though the
latest arrival, be summoned before those who had waited longer. This, in
fact, happened, and to the accompaniment of sour looks he was conducted
down a long passage into the consulting room. As he went he considered
whether he slept well, and whether he had a feeling of oppression on his
chest, or a pain in his right side.
“How-de-do?” said Dr. Symes. “I’ve managed to squeeze you in between two
of my patients, and I can give you just a couple of minutes, which will
be quite enough. Naturally you wanted to see me. Well, there’s nothing
that should give you a moment’s anxiety at present. Don’t think about it
at all, and don’t let your wife think you’re thinking about it.”
He turned backwards over the leaves of his engagement book.
“Yes, as you know, I saw her the day before yesterday,” he said. “All
healthy and normal. But don’t be fussed yourself, and certainly spare
her all fuss. Of course, as I told her, there’s no doubt at all. Let
her--if she doesn’t want to, _make_ her--lead an ordinary active, normal
life.”
Peter had arrived by this time.
“My wife?” he asked.
Dr. Symes gave his great rollicking laugh.
“Yes, and your grandmother, too, for that matter,” he said. “Don’t let
her confuse child-bearing with invalidism. They’re radically opposed.
Mind you, the way she spends these months is important. Make her go out,
make her busy and employed. Don’t let her get fancies into her head that
she must coddle herself; there’s no greater mistake.”
“I see,” said Peter.
“Just use your common sense,” said the doctor. “She’s got to bear a
healthy child, and so she’s got to be just as fit as we can make her.
But take care of her too. What’s her age now? Twenty-two, I suppose.
Well, regard her as a woman of forty in robust health. Make her behave
like an older woman than she is.”
He rang a bell that stood on his table.
“I’ve told you everything,” he said. “You look fit enough, anyway,
though you’ve got a bit of a cold, haven’t you? Getting down into the
country for Christmas, eh? Change of air. I wish I was going to get
some.”
He looked at his table of appointments.
“Ask Mrs. Lucas to step this way,” he said to the maid. “Good-bye. Good
luck.”
As Peter drove down to Whitehall he kept detached, as by some dexterous
jerk, such part of his mind as dealed in emotion, and contemplated with
the same isolation, as through his closed car-window he looked out on
the snow-slushy street, what he had just learned. He wanted to
assimilate it before in any sense he studied it, and to do that he had
first to wipe off his sheer surprise, which stood like condensed vapour
on the glass of this astounding picture which had just been presented to
him. Again and again he had to wipe that away before he could get any
clear vision of the fact itself, that Silvia knew that she was with
child and had not told him. When he had assimilated that he could
perhaps arrive at what it meant.
The glass was clear now; he had got it, and the enigma of it all stared
him in the face; and the more he contemplated it the greater grew his
bewilderment as to the meaning of it. How often, with the hesitation of
an intensity that choked utterance, had she said a word or two, given
him a glance, a smile that conveyed better than any stamped symbol of
speech, what the incarnation of their union, his and hers, would be to
her. She had wondered how, just how, she would tell him; no one knew
into what shapes such joy would crystallize. And now it had come and she
had not told him at all. Except for a trivial visit of his own, a
superficial, unnecessary visit, he would still be ignorant. She had
chosen to leave him in ignorance of what he had learned by accident.
Nellie had often told him that he went walking in the wet woods and
telling nobody, and Silvia, in some frank chaffing discussion, had
affirmed that she knew precisely what Nellie meant. Certainly, thought
Peter now, it was likely enough she did know. Had anyone ever gone
solitary so far into the wet woods as Silvia? Had anyone ever so
immeasurably told nobody?
He searched back through his impressions and memories of these last two
months to see if he could discover any clue that should lead him to an
interpretation. As far as he knew, their relations had been uniformly
harmonious, without hitch or check; there had been no sign, no warning
of any sort on her part of an emotional change. As for himself----
Yes, there had been a change. A change was here, and as it was not in
her it must be in him. Some psychical pigment, grain after grain, had
been dropping, continually dropping, into his clean cup of life, each
sinking down into it quietly, lying there at the bottom. Now it seemed
that the astonishment of this morning’s discovery had violently stirred
up the whole, and the whole, so he saw, was tinged with the colour of
that which had been dissolving in the cool depths. For often and often,
increasingly and ever more vividly--here was the dropping of those
grains of colour--he had had the image of Silvia moving splendidly on
sunny heights, the rays from which shone down on him through rent clouds
and patches of blue. There those grains had settled, dissolving perhaps,
but only locally tinging minute remote areas of his consciousness: they
had not affected the full contents of the cup, that clear, cool,
untroubled self of his. Now with this rough shaking and stirring, he was
suffused with the colour of them. There, high above, was Silvia and her
splendour, felt now, not only recognized. He had scrambled to his feet
(was that it?), stung into standing, finger on mouth, instead of
remotely contemplating. The ray that had merely shone on him now shone
in him, and its light pierced the fogs of his egoism. It was the news
itself, beyond doubt, not Silvia’s withholding of it, which gave him
that enlightenment, for to his feminine nature the fact of his impending
fatherhood struck more intimately than it would have done on one more
virile. It evoked, too, a dormant virility; his fatherhood was the
sequel of another relationship. Clearer shone the ray; he must climb, he
must go to her, he must give....
Close on the heels of that, and swiftly as reflection answers light,
came the remembrance, lost for that moment, that Silvia had withheld the
knowledge from him. He could guess now with a conjecture that verged on
certainty what the reason for that was, and his egoism, his deep-rooted
vanity, returned and reinforced, cried out against the outrage of it.
She from those heights, shining no longer, but merely superior, looked
down on him, and judged him unworthy to share that white joy which
crowned and enveloped her love. All his pride stiffened at the thought.
He knew how to walk in the wet woods, sufficient unto himself.
* * * * *
Of intention Peter had started from London rather late, so that he
should find the little party already assembled. His father, he rested
assured, would have taken on himself the mantle of host, and would be
wearing it far more superbly than he. That he found to be the case: John
Mainwaring had complete possession of the place and all the members of
what was, with the exception of Nellie and her husband, the same unique
little family gathering which had preceded Peter’s marriage. There was
Aunt Eleanor, stout and seal-like, there was a column of locomotive
floral decoration around Aunt Joanna, there was Uncle Abe, now possessor
of three monstrous cartoons, and Uncle Henry, the possessor of a nice
stiff brandy and soda, for tea still continued to burn his heart. The
cartoons, in fact, and the original sketches were the subject, as Peter
entered, of debate between the aunts, to the glory and honour of their
creator, who sat in clouds of incense. Mrs. Wardour had already got
reconciled to the fact that her sister had been the purchaser, and bore
it well.
“Lovely they look,” said Aunt Joanna; “all three in a row, with the
rest to come opposite. Many a half-hour do I spend at my buhl
writing-table there, not getting along at all with my correspondence by
reason of looking at them. I’m sure I don’t know which I like best.”
“Tea, Peter?” asked Silvia. She had looked up at his entry; now she kept
her eyes on her tray.
“Yes, indeed,” said Aunt Eleanor, “I’m sure they look very fine, Joanna.
Three already finished! That’s wonderful. I suppose, Mr. Mainwaring,
you’ll be soon wanting to borrow the fourth of my sketches?”
“Dear lady, I hesitate. I positively hesitate to ask you,” said he, “for
I know how you will hate parting with it even for a week or two. But
without it I can never paint the larger version. The inspiration, the
first rapture, is there; I must study it again.”
Aunt Eleanor turned triumphantly to Nellie.
“You must positively come to see those sketches, Mrs. Beaumont,” she
said. “I have all the original sketches of Mr. Mainwaring’s great
cartoons. Such a treat!”
“I’m sure they’re charming,” said Nellie.
“Charming indeed! Masterpieces! Such fire! Such inspiration as never
could be realized again.”
“The three great cartoons,” said Aunt Joanna firmly, while the floral
decorations trembled, “fill up the whole side of Sir Abe’s last addition
to our house. A new wing, I may call it, with bedrooms above.”
“My sweet little sitting-room,” said Aunt Eleanor absently. “All the
sketches: the fire....”
“Yes, dear, and as I was telling you, the great cartoons,” said Aunt
Joanna. “That was what I was telling you.”
Uncle Henry made a diversion. He liked peace and plenty. “Capital good
brandy this,” he said. “You should try my plan, Abe. Have a drop of
brandy and leave the tea alone. A’most a pity to put soda into it.”
(He had not put much.)
“Well, I don’t say you’re not right, Henry,” said Uncle Abe. “But to my
mind what’s given me at my dinner, if it’s a drop of something good,
tastes all the better if I haven’t had---- There’s some old dry Pétiot
now. There’s a wine! You must get on the right side of Peter for that.”
Silvia handed Peter his cup.
“And your cold’s better?” she asked.
“‘Bout the same, thanks.”
Nellie more than once had tried to catch Peter’s eye in order to
telegraph to him her rapt appreciation of the family. But though Peter
had met her glance, he had nothing to send in reply.
“I see the whole history of the war in my sketches,” proclaimed Aunt
Eleanor. “News from headquarters, I call them. Such insight! And the
fourth, dear Joanna, the submarine, you know. Ah, no, you haven’t seen
that yet, but if Mr. Mainwaring’s cartoon from it comes up to the
sketch, there’ll be something for you to look at.”
“Capital good brandy,” said Uncle Henry. Something had to be said.
Peter drifted away from the tea-table and established himself next
Nellie.
“So you got down all right,” he said.
She let a circular sweeping glance pause infinitesimally four times,
once for each of the aunts and uncles.
“Yes, and what a delicious room,” she said. “You hadn’t told me half.”
Peter was surely rather distrait, she thought. Even now he didn’t catch
the point of her appreciation.
“It’s good panelling,” he said. “There’s more of it in my sitting-room
next door. We’ll go there after tea.”
She held out her cup. “Silvia, darling, one inch more tea, please,” she
said. “An inch. Pure greed.”
Silvia had an absent smile for her but no speech, and took the cup from
Peter’s hand without looking at him till he had turned again towards
Nellie with the desired inch. She then followed him, quick as a lizard,
with one glance of mute raised eyebrows. Nellie got that, too; plucked
it off, put it in her book. She felt that she was surrounded by
interests: there were the priceless uncles and aunts; there was also
something else going on, not so farcical, not farcical at all, perhaps,
but quite as interesting.
“My dear, you have got a cold,” she said to Peter.
“I thought I had,” said he wheezily.
“I rather like having a cold,” she went on. “It’s an excuse for going to
a doctor and being told that one has a brilliant constitution. That’s
Dr. Symes’s cure. You’re a Symite, aren’t you?”
Peter looked right and left, then for a single second straight in front
of him, where Silvia sat.
“Rather,” he said. “We’re all Symites.”
He paused a moment.
“What a pity I didn’t go to see him this morning,” he said very
deliberately, “before I left London. I might have been well by this
time.”
Silvia did not look up: she turned away to Mr. Mainwaring, who was on
her right. Some jerked movement of her hand caused a teaspoon to clatter
from its saucer and fall on the floor.
His father gave a little yodel, adapted to the drawing-room.
“Let me have a word with you sometime, my Peter,” he said.
“Yes. I’ll come to see you before I dress. Just now Nellie and I are
going to have a talk. Will that do? Come, Nellie.”
* * * * *
Peter drew two chairs up to the fire.
“That’s nice,” he said. “Priceless, aren’t they? Aunt Eleanor is really
the most wonderful. Can you bear it for three days, do you think? They
go day after Christmas.”
He lit a cigarette and threw it away again.
“Muck!” he said. “By the way, Nellie, do stop till we go up to town.”
“Oh, my dear, I wish I could,” said she. “But I know Philip’s got some
county business on the twenty-eighth that obliges him to go home.
Something ridiculous about forbidding people to shoot golden orioles, of
which there aren’t any.”
“Can’t you let him go alone?” asked Peter.
“Well; yes, I think I might. I’ll get my mother to go down. Mother will
always go anywhere for board and lodging.”
“Don’t I remember that feeling!” said Peter. “So do stop. I heard Silvia
ask my father.”
Nellie produced an admirable mimicry of Aunt Eleanor’s views on art,
which, however, elicited from Peter only:
“Very funny: yes, very like her,” and he subsided into silence and
fire-gazing again.
“Silvia seemed rather silent,” said Nellie at length.
Peter roused himself.
“Did she?” he said. “The aunts were talking so much that I didn’t
notice it. This is the panelling I spoke to you of, by the way.”
“Charming. Just the same as in the drawing-room, isn’t it?”
“The green drawing-room, please,” said Peter.
“I beg its pardon,” she said.
“Granted, I’m sure,” said he without a smile.
Nellie tried a handful of other topics, and her curiosity to know what
was the matter vastly increased. She had narrowed down the field of her
conjectures to a certainty that, whatever it was, it concerned her host
and hostess. Yesterday at lunch, when she had been alone with Silvia,
she had the first impression of it, yet she had seen Peter that same
evening in town (by way of nursing his cold he had come to the theatre
with her), and he, in spite of that affliction, had been immensely
cheerful, chuckling with prophetic delight at the feast that the uncles
and aunts would spread for them. And he had not seen Silvia since (for
she had already left London) until his entry into the green drawing-room
half an hour ago.
She would much have preferred, as on that evening a month ago, when they
dined alone together in London and he had been so pointedly reticent on
the subject of Silvia, that he should volunteer a statement, but his
reticence then seemed of totally different quality from what it was
now.... She tried one more topic.
“Peter, dear, isn’t it lovely?” she said. “I’m going to have a baby.”
Peter jerked himself upright in his chair. “Really?” he said. “And here
are you telling me that!”
He broke off.
“What’s the matter, my dear?” she said. “There’s something wrong.”
He got up and drove with his foot into the log fire.
“It’s really screamingly funny that you should tell me that,” he said.
Nellie felt that they were getting near it now.
“Funny?” she asked.
“Oh, Lord, I said funny, didn’t I?” said he.
She got up too, laying a hand on his shoulder.
“My dear, we’re very old friends,” she said.
He turned round to her with some unspoken bitterness souring in his
eyes.
“Then I’ll let you have the joke,” he said. “You tell me that, and yet
my wife, who knows the same thing about herself, has not told me.”
He paused a moment.
“I found it out by accident this morning,” he said. “I went to see Dr.
Symes about my cold--odd that you should have spoken of him--and before
I told him anything he began telling me, and that was what he told me.
Of course, he assumed I knew; thought that I had come to him for some
general directions, which he gave me. Silvia had been to him two days
before. She hasn’t said a word to me. Not a word.”
Nellie heard herself give some ejaculation.
“Now you’re fond of psychological problems,” he said. “Also you’re a
woman, and know how women feel. Under what circumstances, feeling _how_,
in fact, would a woman do that? Interesting point, isn’t it? It’s beyond
me.”
“No quarrel? No misunderstanding? Nothing of that sort?”
“None. I’ve felt she was watching me sometimes. I’ve----”
“Well? Can you describe that? “ she asked.
“I’ve only thought of that this minute,” he said, “and now I don’t
really see any connexion. But when my father knew my mother had gone,
and was posing and posturing as a lost and stricken man, Silvia was
watching me to see, I think, if I had real sympathy, real pity for him.
I did feel then as if I was being tested. But I made that all right. I
did it cleverly. I gave the most cordial welcome to his stopping on
here--Lord, what evenings they were!--for endless weeks, and left him to
tell her about it.”
“Are you quite sure you made it all right?” she asked.
“She told me she had been wrong; she told me she had misjudged me, when
she thought me feelingless,” he said. “But even if she made a
reservation, or reconsidered it, what then?”
Nellie’s hand still rested, now with pressure, on his shoulder.
“And what if Silvia put herself, so to speak, in your father’s place?”
she said. “What if it occurred to her that you had been charming with
_her_, and clever with _her_? Mind, that’s only a guess.”
Again Peter thrust the logs together.
“She trusts me too much,” he said at length, “She loves me too much.”
This time Nellie was silent.
“Well?” said he at length.
“She thinks you’ve been clever with her and charming with her,” she
said. “That’s it. I think that she was quite wrong in keeping this news
from you, but that’s why. Silvia isn’t like us, you must remember. We
may be complicated and clever in our way, but she’s not like that.
There’s something tremendous about Silvia. A simplicity, a splendour.”
“And just when I was beginning to realize that, to adore it, she does
this. I can’t forgive it,” said he.
She felt then, as perhaps never before, the charm of his egoism: it
really was such a charming fellow he was egoistic about.
“My dear, it’s just because you, as you say, are beginning to realize
that and to adore it, that you feel you can’t forgive it. You would
forgive it easily enough if you didn’t care. But put yourself in her
place. Assume, as I feel sure we’re right in assuming, that we have got
at the reason for her not telling you; it is exactly what a woman of
that simplicity and splendour would do. With all there is of her, she
loves you.”
“A charming way of showing it,” said Peter.
“You’re hurt; you’re smarting,” she said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t say
that.”
“She has spoiled everything,” exclaimed Peter. “Just when----”
All through their talk Nellie had been conscious of a dual stirring, not
only in him--that was clear enough--but in herself. Not many weeks ago
she would certainly have had her whole sympathies enlisted on his side.
She would have fanned, secretly and stealthily no doubt, the flame of
his resentment against Silvia, and with the same hidden action have
insinuated into his mind that there was somebody who was eager to
console, to help him to forget--one who gave him a welcome.... Even now
some breath of woodland irresponsibility, the morality of Dryads and
Satyrs, swept over her, with the whispering of wild things and the
stirrings in the bushes. Like sought like there, deriding the
consequences to others. Should she twang that string, let the wind blow
on that harp in the trees, she knew well that something would answer it.
He was hurt and sore; there were woodland balms....
Something within her again jerked back the finger that hovered over the
string, ready to pluck it, and turned her hand into a shield instead,
that prevented the wind from making the harp vibrate. Silvia had her
harp, too, and he had begun, ever so faintly, to vibrate in answer to
Silvia’s harp, and not to hers.... In this second impulse there was
compassion for Silvia, there was motherhood. She made her choice.
“You can’t say that she spoiled it, my dear,” she said. “You know how
she loved you when you asked her to marry you.”
Peter had a frown for this.
“I thought----” he began.
“I know what you thought. Silvia very likely told you that she wanted
just to be allowed----”
“I never told you that,” said he quickly.
“Of course you didn’t. But wasn’t it clear that before you married, she
loved you as a boy loves, with some tempestuous desire of possession?”
“But she’s got me,” said he. “It isn’t as if there were anyone else.”
“I know that, and she knows that for certain. It’s nothing, of that kind
that revolts her.”
“Revolts?” asked he.
“Oh, my dear, short of that, wouldn’t she have told you what she has
known for two days, and suspected long before? But you would be quite
wrong to think that she loves you any less. What you don’t see,
especially, beyond that, is that Silvia has become a perfectly changed
person. She keeps her splendour. Keeps it? Good heavens! I should think
she did. But what she learned the other day quite changes her. She has
become a woman, and she must have not just a man to love, but a man to
love her. You’ve hinted that she’s on the way to get one. That’s the sum
of the consolation I’ve got for you.”
Nellie, having determined, having chosen, was being magnificent just
then, and all the time the Dryad within her scolded and derided her.
“You fool, you conventionalist,” the Dryad shrieked. “He might be yours;
he’s as weak as water, and vain, vain! You want him: wait a few months
and see how you want him! Idiot!”
Nellie heard all that as plainly as she heard the whistle of the wind in
the chimney.
“It won’t be easy,” she said. “You’ve got to get out of yourself, Peter,
a thing, by the way, that I’ve never succeeded in doing. And when you’ve
got out of yourself you’ve got to convince her that you’ve got into
herself. I wouldn’t bet on your chance.”
“Have I been a brute?” asked he.
Nellie hesitated: she had never yet realized how close to love had been
her intimacy with Peter, or how far from love her own marriage-bond. And
now, when, bitterly resenting what Silvia had done, he turned to her....
Peter, in her silence, repeated his question.
“A brute?” he asked, and now his voice shook.
She took her hand briskly off his shoulder. They had stood there like
that, comrades and friends, for ten minutes now, and her fingers had
dwelt on his shoulder, the bone and the muscle of it.
“Not a brute at all,” she said. “You couldn’t be a brute, you darling.
But a liar and a cheat.”
“Ha!” said Peter.
He walked round the room after this, with a whistle for her and him, and
a kick for a footstool that got in his way.
“You don’t help me,” he said. “What’s to be done?”
Somehow, at his absence of resentment at what she had said, and at his
appeal to her for help, the old delightful level of comradeship smoothed
itself out.
“Tell her that you know,” suggested Nellie. “Do it nicely.”
“I couldn’t possibly do it nicely. Confound it all----”
She considered this.
“If you can’t do it nicely, it will only make it worse,” she conceded.
“What then?”
“Wait.”
“For her to tell me?” demanded Peter.
“Yes, or for you just to know. It won’t come to that. Oh, you absurd
people! Shall I tell her that you know?”
Peter thought over this.
“It’s becoming comic,” he said presently. “That’s the silliest thing
you’ve said yet.”
“Perhaps. But it isn’t comic, my dear.”
“I know it isn’t. That’s my ferocious flippancy. Gravediggers.”
“And it isn’t comic for Silvia,” she added.
The spasm of the woodland died away again.
“She hasn’t told me,” said Peter hopelessly. “I can’t get over that.”
“You’ve got to get over that. Otherwise there’s nothing ahead. She’s got
to get over more than that.”
All the worst of him returned.
“You speak as if I hadn’t given her all I had got,” he said.
“You’re getting more, my dear. Keep on getting it, and keep on giving
it.”
Peter looked at the clock.
“Here endeth the first lesson,” he said. “Not even out of the prophets.
I must go and see my father. More acting. Necessary, you know.”
He flung his arms out.
“I daren’t be real,” he said. “No one knows what an abomination I am.”
Quite unexpectedly Nellie felt weary and done for. She pulled herself
together for a final encouragement.
“Ah, what a hopeful sign!” she said.
He lingered a moment.
“Quarter to eight,” he said. “We dine at half-past. Think of the old
quarter-to-eights! Ritz, opera, Mrs. Trentham! Charlie and Bobby and
Tommy and me and you, and Sophy and Ella and any fool you like to
mention. Lord Poole, now----”
“No, that won’t do,” said she. “He was real. I grant you the rest
weren’t. But he was real: he completely enjoyed himself--does still,
bless him!”
“Wish I did,” said Peter. “I used to. And I don’t.”
“You won’t as long as you think about it.”
There was the woodland touch to finish with.
“You’re only ninety, are you?” she said. “Or is it ninety-one?”
“Ninety,” said Peter, grinning.