Mrs. Clarke looked up from a letter written in a large boyish hand which
had just been brought out on the terrace of the fountain by the butler.
“Jimmy will be here on Thursday--that is, in Constantinople. The train
ought to be in early in the morning.”
Her eyes rested on Dion for a moment; then she looked down again at the
letter from Eton.
“He’s in a high state of spirits at the prospect of the journey. But
perhaps I oughtn’t to have had him out; perhaps I ought to have gone to
England for his holidays.”
“Do you mean because of me?” said Dion.
“I was thinking of cricket,” she replied impassively.
He was silent. After a moment she continued:
“There are no suitable companions for him out here. I wish the Ingletons
had a son. Of course there is riding, swimming, boating, and we can make
excursions. You’ll be good to him, won’t you?”
She folded the letter up and put it into the envelope.
“I always keep all Jimmy’s letters,” she said.
“Look here!” Dion said in a hard voice. “I think I’d better go.”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
“Have I asked you to go?”
“No, but I think I shall clear out. I don’t feel like acting a part to a
boy. I’ve never done such a thing, and it isn’t at all the sort of thing
I could do well.”
“There will be no need to act a part. Be with Jimmy as you were in
London.”
“Look at me!” he exclaimed with intense bitterness. “Am I the man I was
in London?”
“If you are careful and reasonable, Jimmy won’t notice any difference.
Hero worship doesn’t look at things through a microscope. Jimmy’s got
his idea of you. It will be your fault if he changes it.”
“Did you tell him I should be here during the holidays?”
“Yes.”
“I can’t help that,” he said, almost brutally.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that you answered for me before you knew where I should be.”
He got up from the straw chair on which he was sitting, almost as if he
meant to go away from her and from Buyukderer at once.
“Dion, you mustn’t go,” she said inflexibly. “I can’t let you. For if
you go, you will never come back.”
“How do you know that?”
“I do know it.”
They looked at each other across the fountain; his eyes fell at last
almost guiltily before her steady glance.
“And you know it too,” she said.
“I may go, nevertheless. Who is to prevent me?”
She got up, went to the other side of the fountain, and put her hand
behind his arm, after a quick glance round to make sure that no eyes
were watching her. She pushed her hand down gently and held his wrist.
“Do you realize how badly you sometimes treat me?” she said.
“Yes.”
She pulled his soft cuff with her little fingers.
“I do realize it, but I can’t help it. I have to do it.”
“If I didn’t know that I should mind it much more,” she said.
“I never thought I had it in me to treat a woman as I sometimes treat
you. I used--to be so different.”
“You were too much the other way. But yours is a nature of extremes.
That’s partly why I----”
She did not finish the sentence.
“Then you don’t resent my beastliness to you?” he asked.
“Not permanently. Sometimes you are nice to me. But if you were ever
to treat me badly when Jimmy was with me, I don’t think I could ever
forgive you.”
“I dread his coming,” said Dion. “I had much better go. If you don’t let
me go, you may regret it.”
In saying that he acknowledged the power she had already obtained over
him, a power from which he did not feel sure that he could break away,
although he was acutely aware of it and sometimes almost bitterly
resented it. Mrs. Clarke knew very well that most men can only be held
when they do not know that they are held, but Dion, in his present
condition, was not like any other man she had known. More than once in
the earliest stages of their intimacy she had had really to fight to
keep him near her, and so he knew how arbitrary she could be when her
nature was roused.
Sometimes he hated her with intensity, for she had set herself to
destroy the fabric of his spirit, which not even Rosamund had been able
entirely to destroy by her desertion of him. Sometimes he felt a sort of
ugly love of her, because she was the agent through whom he was learning
to get rid of all that Rosamund had most prized in him. It was as if he
called out to her, “Help me to pull down, to tear down, all that I built
up in the long years till not one stone is left upon another. What I
built up was despised and rejected. I won’t look upon it any more. I’ll
raze it to the ground. But I can’t do that alone. Come, you, and help
me.” And she came and she helped in the work of destruction, and in an
ugly, horrible way he loved her for it sometimes, as a criminal might
love an assistant in his crime.
But from such a type of love there are terrible reactions. During these
reactions Dion had treated Cynthia Clarke abominably sometimes, showing
the hatred which alternated with his ugly love, if love it could
properly be called. He hated her in such moments for the fierce lure she
had for the senses, a lure which he felt more and more strongly as
he left farther behind him the old life of sane enjoyments and of the
wisdom which walks with restraint; he hated her for the perversity which
he was increasingly conscious of as he came to know her more intimately;
he hated her because he had so much loved the woman who would not make
a friend of her; he hated her because he knew that she was drawing him
into a path which led into the center of a maze, the maze of hypocrisy.
Hitherto Dion had been essentially honest and truthful, what men call
“open and above-board.” He had walked clear-eyed in the light; he had
had nothing dirty to hide; what his relations with others had seemed
to be that they had actually been. But since that first night in the
pavilion Cynthia Clarke had taught him very thoroughly the hypocrisy a
man owes to the woman with whom he has a secret liaison.
He still believed that till that night she had been what the world calls
“a straight woman.” She did not ape a rigid morality for once betrayed
by passion, or pretend to any religious scruples, or show any fears of
an eventual punishment held in reserve for all sinners by an implacable
Power; she did not, when Dion was brutal to her, ever reproach him with
having made of her a wicked or even a light woman. But she made him feel
by innumerable hints and subtleties that for him she had exchanged a
safe life for a life that was beset with danger, the smiled-on life of
a not too conventional virtue for something very different. She seemed
sometimes uneasy in her love, as if such a love were an error new to her
experience.
Jimmy was her chief weapon against Dion’s natural sincerity. Dion
realized that she was passionately attached to her boy, and that
she would make almost any sacrifice rather than lose his respect and
affection. Nevertheless, she was ready to take great risks. The risks
she was not prepared to take were the smaller risks. And in connexion
with them her call for hypocrisy was incessant. If Dion ever tried to
resist her demands for small lies and petty deceptions, she would look
at him, and say huskily:
“I have to do these things now because of Jimmy. No one must ever have
the least suspicion of what we are to each other, or some day Jimmy
might get to know of it. It isn’t my husband I’m afraid of, it’s Jimmy.”
If Dion had been by nature a suspicious man, or if he had had a wider
experience with women, Mrs. Clarke’s remarkable ingenuity in hypocrisy
would almost certainly have suggested to him that she was no novice in
the life of deception. Her appearance of frankness, even of bluntness,
was admirable. To every one she presented herself as a woman of strong
will and unconventional temperament who took her own way openly, having
nothing to conceal, and therefore nothing to fear. She made a feature
of her friendship with the tragic Englishman; she even dwelt upon it
and paraded it for the pretense of blunt and Platonic friendship was the
cloud with which she concealed the fire of their illicit relation. The
trip on the “Leyla” to Brusa had tortured Dion. Since the episode in
the pavilion a more refined torment had been his. Mrs. Clarke had not
allowed him to escape from the social ties which were so hateful to him.
She had made him understand that he must go among her acquaintances
now and then, that he must take a certain part in the summer life
of Therapia and Buyukderer, that the trip to Brusa had been only a
beginning. More than once he had tried to break away, but he had not
succeeded in his effort. Her will had been too strong for his, not
merely because she did not fear at moments to be fierce and determined,
but because behind her fierceness and determination was an unuttered
plea which his not dead chivalry heard; “For you I have become what I
was falsely accused of being in London.” He remembered the wonderful
fight she had made then; often her look and manner, when they were alone
together, implied, “I couldn’t make such a fight now.” She never said
that, but she made him float in an atmosphere of that suggestion.
He believed that she loved him. Sometimes he compared her love with the
affection which Rosamund had given him, and then it seemed to his not
very experienced heart that perhaps intense love can only show itself
by something akin to degradation, by enticements which a genuinely
pure nature could never descend to, by perversities which the grand
simplicity and wholesomeness of goodness would certainly abhor. Then a
distortion of love presented itself to his tragic investigation as
the only love that was real, and good and evil lost for him their true
significance. He had said to himself, “Let the spirit die that the body
may live.” He had wished, he still wished, to pull down. He had a sort
of demented desire for ruins and dust. But he longed for action, on
the grand scale. Small secrecies, trickeries, tiptoeing through the
maze--all these things revolted that part of his nature which was,
perhaps, unchangeable. They seemed to him unmanly. In his present
condition he could quite easily have lain down in the sink of Pera’s
iniquity, careless whether any one knew; but it was horribly difficult
to him to dine with the Ingletons and Vane at the Villa Hafiz, to say
“Good night” to Mrs. Clarke before them, to go away, leaving them in
the villa, and then, very late, to sneak back, with a key, to the garden
gate, when all the servants were in bed, and to creep up, like a thief,
to the pavilion. Some men would have enjoyed all the small deceptions,
would have thought them good fun, would have found that they added a
sharp zest to the pursuit of a woman. Dion loathed them.
And now he was confronted with something he was going to loathe far
more, something which would call for more sustained and elaborate
deception than any he had practised yet. He feared the eyes of an
English boy more than he feared the eyes of the diplomats and the
cosmopolitans of varying types who were gathered on the Bosporus during
the months of heat. He detested the idea of playing a part to a boy. How
could a mother lay plots to deceive her son? And yet Mrs. Clarke adored
Jimmy.
Rosamund and Robin started up in his mind. He saw them before him as he
had seen them one night in Westminster when Rosamund had been singing
to Robin. Ah, she had been a cruel, a terribly cruel, wife, but she had
been an ideal mother! He saw her head bent over her child, the curve of
her arm round his little body. A sensation of sickness came upon him, of
soul-nausea; and again he thought, “I must get away.”
The night before the day on which Jimmy was due to arrive, Mrs. Clarke
was in Constantinople. She had gone there to meet Jimmy, and had started
early in the morning, leaving Dion at Buyukderer. When she was gone he
took the Albanian’s boat and went out on the Bosporus for a row. The man
and he were both at the oars, and pulled out from the bay. When they had
gone some distance--they had been rowing for perhaps ten minutes--the
man asked:
“Ou allons-nous, Signore?”
“Vers Constantinople,” replied Dion.
“Bene!” replied the man.
That night Mrs. Clarke had just finished dinner when a waiter tapped at
her sitting-room door.
“What is it?” she asked.
“A gentleman asks if he can see you, Madame.”
“A gentleman? Have you got his card?”
“No, Madame; he gave no card.”
“What is he like?”
“He is English, I think, very thin and very brown. He looks very
strong.”
The waiter paused, then added:
“He has a hungry look.”
Mrs. Clarke stared at the man with her very wide-open eyes.
“Go down and ask him to wait.”
“Yes, Madame.”
The man went out. When he had shut the door Mrs. Clarke called:
“Sonia!”
Her raised voice was rather harsh.
The bedroom door was opened, and the Russian maid looked into the
sitting-room.
“Sonia,” said Mrs. Clarke rapidly in French, “some one--a man--has
called and asked for me. He’s waiting in the hall. Go down and see who
it is. If it’s Mr. Leith you can bring him up.”
“And if it is not Monsieur Leith?”
“Come back and tell me who it is.”
The maid came out of the bedroom, shut the door, crossed the
sitting-room rather heavily on flat feet, and went out on to the
landing.
“Shut the door!” Mrs. Clarke called after her.
When the sitting-room door was shut she sat waiting with her forehead
drawn to a frown. She did not move till the sitting-room door was opened
by the maid and a man walked in.
“Monsieur Leith,” said the maid.
And she disappeared.
“Come and sit down,” said Mrs. Clarke. “Why have you come to Pera?”
“I wanted to speak to you.”
“How tired you look! Have you had dinner?”
“No, I don’t want it.”
“Did you come by steamer?”
“No, I rowed down.”
“All the way?”
He nodded.
“Where are you staying?”
“I haven’t decided yet where I shall stay. Not here, of course.”
“Of course not. Dion, sit down.”
He sat down heavily.
“If you haven’t decided about an hotel, where is your luggage?”
“I haven’t brought any.”
She said nothing, but her distressed eyes questioned him.
“I started out for a row. The current set towards Constantinople, so I
came here.”
“I’m glad,” she said.
But she did not look glad.
“We can spend a quiet evening together,” she added nonchalantly.
“I didn’t come for that,” he said.
He began to get up, but she put one hand on him.
“Do sit still. What is it, then? Whatever it is, tell me quietly.”
He yielded to her soft but very imperative touch, and sat back in his
chair.
“Now, what is it?”
“I’m sure you know. It’s Jimmy.”
She lowered her eyelids, and her pale forehead puckered.
“Jimmy! What about Jimmy?”
“I don’t want to be at Buyukderer while he’s with you.”
“And you have rowed all the way from Buyukderer to Constantinople,
without even a brush and comb, to tell me that!”
“I told you at Buyukderer.”
“And we decided that it would be much jollier for Jimmy to have you
there for his holidays. I depend upon you to make things tolerable
for Jimmy. You know how few people there are near us who would trouble
themselves about a boy. You will be my stand-by with Jimmy all through
his holidays.”
She spoke serenely, even cheerfully, but there was a decisive sound in
her voice, and the eyes fixed upon him were full of determination.
“I can’t understand how you can be willing to act a lie to your own boy,
especially when you care for him so much,” said Dion, almost violently.
“I shall not act a lie.”
“But you will.”
“Sometimes you are horribly morbid,” she said coldly.
“Morbid! Because I want to keep a young schoolboy out of--”
“Take care, Dion!” she interrupted hastily.
“If you--you don’t really love Jimmy,” he said.
“I forbid you to say that.”
“I will say it. It’s true.”
And he repeated with a cruelly deliberate emphasis:
“You don’t really love Jimmy.”
Her white face was suddenly flooded with red, which even covered her
forehead to the roots of her hair. She put up one hand with violence and
tried to strike Dion on the mouth. He caught her wrist.
“Be quiet!” he said roughly.
Gripping her wrist with his hard, muscular brown fingers he repeated:
“You don’t love Jimmy.”
“Do you wish me to hate you?”
“I don’t care. I don’t care what happens to me.”
She sat looking down. The red began to fade out of her face. Presently
she curled her fingers inwards against his palm and smiled faintly.
“I am not going to quarrel with you,” she said quietly.
He loosened his grip on her; but now she caught and held his hand.
“I do love Jimmy, and you know it when you aren’t mad. But I care for
you, too, and I am not going to lose you. If you went away while Jimmy
was out here I should never see you again. You would disappear. Perhaps
you would cross over to Asia.”
Her great eyes were fixed steadily upon him.
“Ah, you have thought of that!” she said, almost in a whisper.
He was silent.
“Women would get hold of you. You would sink; you would be ruined,
destroyed. I know!”
“If I were it wouldn’t matter.”
“To me it would. I can’t risk it. I am not going to risk it.”
Dion leaned forward. His brown face was twitching.
“Suppose you had to choose between Jimmy and me!”
He was thinking of Robin and Rosamund. A child had conquered him once.
Now once again a child--for Jimmy was no more than a child as yet,
although he thought himself important and almost a young man--intruded
into his life with a woman.
“I shall not have to choose. But I have told you that a child is not
enough for the happiness of a woman like me. You know what I am, and you
must know I am speaking the truth.”
“Did you love your husband?” he asked, staring into her eyes.
“Yes,” she replied, without even a second of hesitation. “I did till he
suspected me.”
“And then----”
“Not after that,” she said grimly.
“I wonder he let you do all you did.”
“What do you mean?”
She let his hand go.
“I would never have let you go about with other men, however innocently.
I thought about that at your trial.”
“I should never let any one interfere with my freedom of action. If a
man loves me I expect him to trust me.”
“You don’t trust me.”
“Sometimes you almost hate me. I know that.”
“Sometimes I hate everybody, myself most of all. But I should miss you.
You are the only woman in all the world who wants me now.”
Suddenly a thought of his mother intruded into his mind, and he added:
“Wants me as a lover.”
She got up quickly, almost impulsively, and went close to him.
“Yes, I want you, I want you as a lover, and I can’t let you go. That is
why I ask you, I beg you, to stay with me while Jimmy’s here.”
She leaned against him, and put her small hands on his shoulders.
“How can a child understand the needs of a woman like me and of a man
like you? How can he look into our hearts or read the secrets of our
natures--secrets which we can’t help having? You hate what you call
deceiving him. But he will never think about it. A boy of Jimmy’s age
never thinks about his mother in that way.”
“I know. That’s just it!”
“What do you mean?”
But he did not explain. Perhaps instinctively he felt that her natural
subtlety could not be in accord with his natural sincerity, felt that in
discussing certain subjects they talked in different languages. She put
her arms round his neck.
“I need the two lives,” she said, in a very low voice. “I need Jimmy and
I need you. Is it so very wonderful? Often when a woman who isn’t old
loses her husband and is left with her child people say, ‘It’s all
right for her. She has got her child.’ And so she’s dismissed to her
motherhood, as if that must be quite enough for her. Dion, Dion, the
world doesn’t know, or doesn’t care, how women suffer. Women don’t speak
about such things. But I am telling you because I don’t want to have
secrets from you. I have suffered. Perhaps I have some pride in me.
Anyhow, I don’t care to go about complaining. You know that. You must
have found that out in London. I keep my secrets, but not from you.”
She put her white cheek against his brown one.
“It’s only the two lives joined together that make life complete for
a woman who is complete, who isn’t lopsided, lacking in something
essential, something that nature intends. I am a complete woman, and I’m
not ashamed of it. Do you think I ought to be?”
She sighed against his cheek.
“You are a courageous woman,” he said; “I do know that.”
“Don’t _you_ test my courage. Perhaps I’m getting tired of being
courageous.”
She put her thin lips against his.
“It’s acting--deception I hate,” he murmured. “With a boy especially I
like always to be quite open.”
Again he thought of Robin and of his old ideal of a father’s relation
to his son; he thought of his preparation to be worthy of fatherhood,
worthy to guide a boy’s steps in the path towards a noble manhood. And a
terrible sense of the irony of life almost overcame him. For a moment
he seemed to catch a glimpse of the Creator laughing in darkness at the
aspiration of men; for a moment he was beset by the awful conviction
that the world is ruled by a malign Deity.
“All the time Jimmy is at Buyukderer we’ll just be friends,” said the
husky voice against his cheek.
The sophistry of her remark struck home to him, but he made no comment
upon it.
“There are white deceptions,” she continued, “and black deceptions, as
there are white and black lies. Whom are we hurting, you and I?”
“Whom are we hurting?” he said, releasing himself from her.
And he thought of God in a different way--in Rosamund’s way.
“Yes?”
He looked at her as if he were going to speak, but he said nothing. He
felt that if he answered she would not understand, and her face made him
doubtful. Which view of life was the right one, Rosamund’s or Cynthia
Clarke’s? Rosamund had been pitiless to him and Cynthia Clarke was
merciful. She put her arms round his neck when he was in misery, she
wanted him despite the tragedy that was his perpetual companion. Perhaps
her view of life was right. It was a good working view, anyhow, and was
no doubt held by many people.
“We can base our lives on truth,” she continued, as he said nothing. “On
being true to ourselves. That is the great truth. But we can’t always
tell it to all the casual people about us, or even to those who are
closely in our lives, as for instance Jimmy is in mine. They wouldn’t
understand. But some day Jimmy will be able to understand.”
“Do you mean----”
“I mean just this: if Jimmy were twenty-one I would tell him
everything.”
He looked down into her eyes, which never fell before the eyes of
another.
“I believe you would,” he said.
She continued looking at him, as if tranquilly waiting for something.
“I’ll--I’ll go back to Buyukderer,” he said.