1
Ten days went by.
For Aliette, the trivial round of London continued.
She attended a terrific _tamasha_ of a wedding--all frocks and roses--at
St. George's, Hanover Square; she dined at the Carlton with Hector and a
sumptuous client from the money-making North; she walked the park with
Ponto, her harlequin Dane, who, as though he understood his mistress was
troubled, kept close at heel while she footed it, and thrust a
consolatory nose into her lap whenever she sat down; she played
lawn-tennis at Queen's; she did her household duties at Lancaster Gate,
fighting and defeating a miniature revolution among the female staff.
But her emotions she could neither fight nor defeat.
These emotions were all strange, sweet, disturbing. For the first time
in her life a man obscured the entire mental horizon. Constantly she
thought of Ronnie--imagining him her confidant, her friend, her lover.
Her mind took a whole week to formulate that last definite word; and
even then the word seemed inadequate.
Except for Mary O'Riordan and Mollie, Aliette possessed no intimates of
her own sex. Common gossip, however, credited various women of her
acquaintance with "lovers": some permanent, accepted as institutions by
every one except the husband; some transitory of the season; most merest
"tame-cats," fetch-and-carry men. Hector's wife wanted none of these.
She wanted Ronnie--not an occasional Ronnie, not a clandestine Ronnie,
neither a merely physical nor a merely platonic Ronnie: but Ronnie
himself--all of Ronnie--Ronnie for her very own.
Comprehension of this fact--it came to her with peculiar clarity one
late afternoon at a crowded tea-fight in Mary O'Riordan's house off Park
Lane--brought the woman up short by the head.
She realized herself wholly in love--dangerously, perilously,
passionately in love. And the realization frightened her. It meant the
abandoning of her own fixed point of view. It meant, actually, if not by
intention, sin. At least it ought to mean "sin"--only somehow she could
no longer regard it in that light. If she had not thought of Mary as
sinful, why should she apply a different standard to her own case?
If this immense new tenderness in her, this accentuation of all her
femininity, was "sin"--then nature's self must be sinful. If, by
religion, she belonged body and soul to Hector, forever and ever amen;
if, in the sight of God, his infidelities counted for nothing; if his
occasional desire to possess her (only the night before she had been
subtly aware of that desire's recrudescence) constituted a lifelong
claim--then religion, as she had so far understood religion, must be a
mere code designed in the interest of husbands, and God Himself a mere
male.
2
Meanwhile, to Ronnie's mind, the problem presented itself differently.
Having no formal religion, the aspect of "sin" did not trouble him. He
came, as he imagined in those ten days, to regard the entire question
from a legal point of view. He wanted a woman who belonged to somebody
else; by no manner of means could he possess that woman unless the law
set her free. Her freedom being outside the sphere of practical
politics, one's duty was self-control, forgetfulness.
On the question of self-control there could be no compromise; but to
forget Aliette was a tough job. Mere passion--since their last
meeting--represented only the tiniest fraction of his feelings. Already
she had given him an entirely new outlook--the lover's outlook: so that
he caught himself regarding the faces of his fellows, faces in his club,
at the courts, in the streets, on tubes and in omnibuses, solely from
his own obsessed point of view. What secret, what _emotional_ secret,
concealed itself behind those unemotional English faces? What
sentimental impulse goaded them about town?
"The sentimental impulse" was his mother's favorite phrase. She had used
it no less than five times in her article for the "Contemplatory"--which
article, astutely boomed by Fancourt, had very nearly created a
first-class "stunt."
One paragraph of his mother's seemed peculiarly applicable to the
barrister's problem.
"If," wrote Julia Cavendish, "the Sentimental Impulse--for I will never
consent to regard the unlawful attraction between a married woman and a
man other than her husband as love, the very essence of which is
obedience and self-denial--once comes to be considered a palliation for
adultery, then the entire foundations of family life will be in
jeopardy."
Six months ago Ronnie would have been the first to uphold such a
doctrine. Now he could only find the flaw in it. The gospel according to
Julia Cavendish--argued her son's mind--amounted to this: If a married
woman loves her husband, she merely does her duty. If she doesn't love
him, she must do her duty just the same. Obedience, to a man; and
denial, of one's own inclinations, constitute the whole duty of woman.
In other words: A husband can do no wrong.
And at that precise point in his meditations Ronald Cavendish remembered
certain rumors--heard and forgotten three years since, on his one leave
from the East--about Hector Brunton and a certain red-headed lady of the
stage.
All the same, even admitting certain modifications--a wife's right to
fidelity, for instance,--did not his mother's code form the only
possible basis of society? What reasoning human could substitute the
sentimental impulse for the existing marriage laws? "Free love" would
only mean free license for the unbalanced, the over-sexed, the abnormal,
the womanizer, and the nymphomaniac. Matrimonial bolshevism, in fact!
"Matrimonial Bolshevism," he remembered, was to have been the title of
his mother's next article; but for the moment she had been forced to
give up work. Sir Heron Baynet, the specialist called in by Dot
Fancourt's puzzled doctor, had implored her--so she told Ronnie--to
rest.
"I've got to take care of myself," she said. "Sir Heron says I'm not
exactly ill, but that I'm disposed to illness."
Actually, Sir Heron's words had been far more disturbing; but Julia, who
had never consulted a medicine-man in her life, resented the little
man's seriousness, and pooh-poohed most of his advice.
"Don't worry about me," she went on. "Except for being a little tired, I
feel like a two-year-old."
Ronnie, obsessed with his own troubles, accepted her version of the
interview; and went off to play tennis. Despite all the hair-splitting
and all the self-analysis, despite all the resolves never to see Aliette
again, and all the attempts to bluff himself lawyer against himself man,
the sentimental impulse persisted. And hard physical exercise, he
thought, might help to cure that impulse!