CHAPTER V
On the day after the return of the “Leyla” from Mudania, Mrs. Clarke asked Dion if he would dine with her at the Villa Hafiz. She asked him by word of mouth. They had met on the quay. It was morning, and Dion was about to embark in the Albanian’s boat for a row on the Bosporus when he saw Mrs. Clarke’s thin figure approaching him under a white umbrella lined with delicate green. She was wearing smoked spectacles, which made her white face look strange and almost forbidding in the strong sunlight.
“I can’t come,” he said.
And there was a sound almost of desperation in his voice.
“I can’t.”
She said nothing, but she stood there beside him looking very inflexible. Apparently she was waiting for an explanation of his refusal, though she did not ask for it.
“I can’t be with people. It’s no use. I’ve tried it. You didn’t know—”
“Yes, I did,” she interrupted him.
“You did know?”
He stood staring blankly at her.
“Surely I—I tried my best. I did my utmost to hide it.”
“You couldn’t hide it from me.”
“I must go away,” he said.
“Come to-night. Nobody will be there.”
“It isn’t a party?”
“We shall be alone.”
“You meant to ask people?”
“I won’t. I’ll ask nobody. Half-past eight?”
“I’ll come,” he said.
She turned away without another word.
Just after half-past eight he rang at the door of the villa.
As he went into the hall and smelt the strong perfume of flowers he wondered that he had dared to come. But he had been with Mrs. Clarke when she was in horrible circumstances; he had sat and watched her when she was under the knife; he had helped her to pass through a crowd of people fighting to stare at her and making hideous comments upon her. Then why, even to-night, should he dread her eyes? His remembrance of her tragedy made him feel that hers was the one house into which he could enter that night.
As he walked into the drawing-room he recollected walking into Mrs. Chetwinde’s drawing-room, full of interest in the woman who was in sanctuary, but who was soon to be delivered up, stripped by a man of the law’s horrible allegations, to the gaping crowd. Now she was living peacefully among her friends, the custodian of her boy, a woman who had won through; and he was a wanderer, a childless father, the slayer of his son.
Mrs. Clarke kept him waiting for a few minutes. He stood at the French window and listened to the fountain. In the fall of the water there was surely an undertune. He seemed to know that it was there and yet he could not hear it; and he felt baffled as if by a thin mystery.
Then Mrs. Clarke came in and they went at once to dinner.
During dinner they talked very little. She spoke when the Greek butler was in the room, and Dion did his best in reply; nevertheless the conversation languished. Although Dion had so few words to give to his hostess he felt abnormally alive. The whole of him was like a quivering nerve.
When dinner was over Mrs. Clarke said to the butler:
“Osman will make the coffee for us. He knows about it. We shall have it in the pavilion.”
The butler, who, although a Greek, looked at that moment almost incredibly stolid, moved his rather pouting lips, no doubt in assent, and was gone. They saw him no more that night.
They walked slowly from terrace to terrace of the climbing garden till they came to the height on which the pavilion stood guarded by the two mighty cypresses. There was no moon, and the night was a very dark purple night, with stars that looked dim and remote, like lost stars in the wilderness of infinity. From the terraces came the scent of flowers. In the pavilion one hanging lamp gave a faint light which emphasized the obscurity. It shone through colored panes and drew thick shadows on the floor and on sections of the divans. The heaps of cushions were colorless, and had a strange look of unyielding massiveness, as if they were blocks of some hard material. Osman stood beside one of the coffee-tables.
As soon as his mistress appeared he began to make the coffee. Dion stayed upon the terrace, and Mrs. Clarke went into the pavilion and sat down.
The cypresses were like dark towers in the night. Dion looked up at them. Their summits were lost in the brooding purple darkness. Cypresses! Why had he thought of cypresses in England in connexion with Mrs. Clarke? Why had he seen her standing among cypresses, seen himself coming to her and with her in the midst of the immense shadows they cast? No doubt simply because he knew she lived much in Turkey, the land of the cypress. That must have been the reason. Nevertheless now he was oppressed by a weight of mystery somehow connected with those dark and gigantic trees; and he remembered the theory that the past, the present and the future are simultaneously in being, and that those who are said to read the future in reality possess only the power of seeing what already is on another plane. Had he in England, however vaguely, however dimly, seen as through a crack some blurred vision of what was already in existence? He felt almost afraid of the cypresses. Nevertheless, as he stood looking up at them, his sense almost of fear tempted him to make an experiment. He remained absolutely still, and strove to concentrate all his faculties. After a long pause he shut his eyes.
“If the far future is even now in being,” he said mentally, “let me look upon it now.”
He saw nothing; but immediately he heard the sound of wind among pine trees, as he had heard it with Rosamund in the green valley of Elis. It rose in the silent night, that long murmur of eternity, and presently faded away.
He shuddered and turned sharply towards the pavilion.
Osman had gone, and Mrs. Clarke was pouring the coffee into the tiny cups.
“There’s no wind, is there—is there?” he asked her.
She looked up at him.
“But not a breath!” she said.
After a pause she added:
“Why do you ask such a thing?”
“I heard wind in—in the tops of trees,” he almost stammered.
“That’s impossible.”
“But I say I did!” he exclaimed, with violence. “In pine trees.”
“There are no pine trees here,” she said, in her husky voice. “Sit down and have your coffee.”
He obeyed her and sat down quickly, and quickly he took the coffee-cup from her.
“Have a little mastika with it,” she said.
And she pushed a tall liqueur-glass full of the colorless liquid towards him.
“Yes,” he said.
As he drank he looked out sideways through the wide opening in the pavilion. There was not a breath of wind.
“I can’t understand why I heard the noise of wind in pine trees,” he forced himself to say.
“Seemed to hear it,” she corrected him. “Perhaps you were thinking of it.”
“But I wasn’t!”
A jeweled gleam from the lamp fell upon one side of her face. She moved, and the light dropped away from her.
“What were you thinking of?” she asked.
“Of the future.”
“Ah!”
“That’s why it is inexplicable.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t let us talk about it any more,” he said, in an almost terrible voice. “I must have had an hallucination.”
“Have you ever before thought you were the victim of an hallucination?” she asked.
“Yes. Several times I have seen the eyes of my little boy. I saw them a few nights ago in the stream that flows through the Valley of Roses, just after Sir Carey had left me.”
“Don’t look into water again except in daylight. It is the night that brings fancies with it. If you gaze very long at anything in a dim light you are sure to see something strange or horrible.”
“But an hallucination of sound! I must go away from here! Perhaps in some other place—”
But she interrupted him inflexibly.
“Going away would be absolutely useless. A man can’t travel away from himself.”
“But I can’t lead a normal life. It’s impossible. Those horrible nights on the ‘Leyla’——”
He stopped. The effort he had made during the trip to Brusa seemed to have exhausted the last remnants of any moral force he had still possessed when he started on that journey.
“I had made up my mind to begin again, to lay hold on some sort of real life,” he continued, after a pause. “I was determined to face things. I called at Therapia. I accepted Lady Ingleton’s invitation. I’ve done all I can to make a new start. But it’s no use. I can’t keep it up. I haven’t the force for it. It was hell—being with happy people.”
“You mean the Ingletons. Yes, they are very happy.”
“And Vane, who’s just engaged to be married. I saw her photograph in his cabin. They were all—all very kind. Lady Ingleton did everything to make me feel at ease. He’s a delightful fellow—the Ambassador, I mean. But I simply can’t stand mingling my life with lives that are happy. So I had better go away and be alone again.”
“And lives that are unhappy?”
“What do you mean?”
“Can’t you mingle your life with them, or with one of them?”
He was silent, looking towards her. She was wearing a very dark blue tea-gown of some thin material in which her thin body seemed lost. He saw the dark folds of it flowing over the divan on which she was leaning, and trailing to the rug at her feet. Her face was a faint whiteness under her colorless hair. Her eyes were two darknesses in it. He could not see them distinctly, but he knew they were looking intent and distressed.
“Haven’t you told me I look punished?” said the husky voice.
“Are you unhappy?” he asked.
“Do you think I have much reason to be happy?”
“You have your boy.”
“For a few weeks in the year. I have lost my husband in a horrible way, worse than if he had died. I live entirely alone. I can’t marry again. And yet I’m not at all old, and not at all finished. But perhaps you have never really thought about my situation seriously. After all, why should you? Why should any one? I won my case, and so of course it’s all right.”
“Are you unhappy, then?”
“What do you suppose about me?”
“I know you’ve gone through a great deal. But you have your boy.”
There was a sound almost of dull obstinacy in his voice.
“Some women are not merely mothers, or potential mothers!” said an almost fierce voice. “Some women are just women first and mothers second. There are women who love men for themselves, not merely because men are possible child-bringers. To a real and complete woman no child can ever be the perfect substitute for a husband or a lover. Even nature has put the lover first and the child second. I forbid you to say that I have my boy, as if that settled the question of my happiness. I forbid you.”
He heard her breathing quickly. Then she added:
“But how could you be expected to understand women like me?”
The intensity of her sudden outburst startled him as the strength of the current in the Bosporus had startled him when he plunged into the sea from the Albanian’s boat.
“You have been brought up in another school,” she continued slowly, and with a sort of icy bitterness. “I forgive you.”
She got up from the divan and went out upon the terrace, leaving him alone in the pavilion, which seemed suddenly colder when she had left it.
He did not follow her. A breath from a human furnace had scorched him—had scorched the nerve, and the nerve quivered.
“You have been brought up in a different school.” Welsley and Stamboul—Rosamund and Mrs. Clarke. Once, somewhere, he had made that comparison. As he sat in the pavilion it seemed to him that for a moment he heard the cool chiming of bells in a gray cathedral tower, the faint sound of the Dresden Amen. But he looked out through the opening in the pavilion, and far down below he saw lights on the Bay of Buyukderer, the vague outlines of hills; and the perfume that came to him out of the night was not the damp smell of an English garden.
An English garden! In the darkness of a November night he stood within the walls of an English garden; he heard a cry, saw the movement of a woman’s body, and knew that his life was in ruins. The woman fled, but he followed her blindly; he sought for her in the dark. He wanted to tell her that he had been but the instrument of Fate, that he was not to blame, that he needed compassion more than any other man living. But she eluded him in the darkness, and presently he heard a key grind in a lock. A friend had locked the door of his home against him in order that his wife might have time to escape from him.
Then he heard a husky voice say, “My friend, it will have to come.” And, suddenly it came.
He broke down absolutely, threw himself on his face on the divan with his arms stretched out beyond his head, grasped the cushions and sobbed. His body shook and twitched; his face was contorted; his soul writhed. A storm that came from within him broke upon him. He crashed into the abyss. Down, down he went, till the last faint ray from above was utterly blotted out. She whom he had loved so much sent him down, she who far away had given herself to God. He felt her ruthless hands—the hands of a good woman, the hands of a loving mother—pressing him down. Let her have her will. He would go into the last darkness. Then, perhaps, she would be more at ease; then, perhaps, she would know the true peace of God. He would pay to the uttermost farthing both for himself and for her.
Outside, just hidden from him by the pavilion wall, Mrs. Clarke stood in the shadow of one of the cypresses, and listened. The trip on the “Leyla” had served two purposes. It was better so. When a thing must be, the sooner it is over the better. And she had waited for a very long time. She drew her brows together as she thought of the long time she had waited. Then she moved and walked away down the terrace. She had heard enough.
She went to the far end of the terrace. A wooden seat was placed there in the shadow of a plane tree. She sat down on it, rested her pointed chin in the palm of her right hand, with her elbow on her knee, and remained motionless. She was giving him time; time to weep away the past and the good woman who had ruined his life. Even now she knew how to be patient. In a way she pitied him. If she had not had to be patient for such a long time she would have pitied him much more. But he had often hurt her; and, as Lady Ingleton had said, she was by nature a cruel woman. Nevertheless she pitied him for being, or for having been, so exclusive in love. And she wondered at him not a little.
Lit-up caiques glided out on the bay far beneath her. A band was playing on the quay. She wished it would stop, and she glanced at a little watch which Aristide Dumeny had given her, and which was pinned among the dark blue folds of her gown. But she could not see its face clearly, and she lit a match. A quarter-past ten. The band played till eleven. She lit a cigarette and stared down the hill at the moving lights in the bay.
She had made many water excursions at night. Some of them—two or three at least—had been mentioned in the Divorce Court. She had had a narrow escape that summer in London. It had given her a lesson; but she still had much to learn before she could be considered a past mistress in the school of discretion. Almost ever since she could remember she had been driven by the reckless spirit within her. But she had been given a compensation for that in the force of her will. That force had done wonders for her all through her life. It had even captured and retained for her many women friends. Driven she had been, and no doubt would always be, but she believed that she would always skirt the precipices of life, and would never fall into the abysses.
The timorous and overscrupulous women were the women who missed their footing, because, when they made a false step, they made it in fear and trembling, with the shadow of regret always dogging their heels. And yet, now Jimmy was getting a big boy, even she knew moments of fear.
She moved restlessly. The torch was luring her on, and yet now, for an instant, she was conscious of holding back. August was not far off; Jimmy was coming out to her for his holidays. Suppose, after all, she gave it up? A word from her—or merely a silence—and that man in the pavilion close by would go away from Buyukderer and would probably never come back. If, for once in her life, she played for safety?
The sound of the band on the quay—there had been a short interval of silence—came up to her again. Forty minutes more! She would give that man in the pavilion and herself forty minutes. She could see the lights which outlined the kiosk. When they went out she would come to a decision. Till then, sitting alone, she could indulge in a mental debate. The mere fact that, at this point, she debated the question which filled her mind proved Jimmy’s power over her. As she thought that she began to resent her boy’s power. And it would grow; inevitably it would grow. She moved her thin shoulders. Then she sat very still.
If only she didn’t love Jimmy so much! Suppose she had lost her case in the Divorce Case and Jimmy had been taken away from her? Even now she shuddered when she thought of the risk she had run. She remembered again the period of waiting when the jury could not come to an agreement. What torture she had endured, though no one knew it, or, perhaps, ever would know it! Had not that torture been a tremendous warning to her against the unwise life? Why go into danger again? But perhaps there was no danger any more. A man who has tried to divorce his wife once, and has failed, is scarcely likely to try again. Nevertheless she was full of hesitation to-night.
This fact puzzled and almost alarmed her, for she was not given to hesitation. She was a woman who thought clearly, who knew what she wanted and what she did not want, and who acted promptly and decisively. Perhaps she hesitated now because she had been forced to remain inactive in this particular case for such a long time; or perhaps she had received an obscure warning from something within her which knew what she—the whole of her that was Cynthia Clarke—did not consciously know.
The leaves of the plane tree rustled above her head, and she sighed. As she sat there in the purple darkness she looked like a victim; and for a moment she thought of herself as a victim.
Even that man in the pavilion who was agonizing had said to her that she looked “punished.” She had been surprised, almost startled, by his flash of discernment. But she was sure he thought that matter only a question of coloring, of emaciation, of the shapes of features, and of the way eyes were set in the head.
When would the lights far below go out? She hated her indecision. It was new to her, and she felt it to be a weakness. Whatever she had been till now, she had certainly never been a weak woman, except perhaps from the absurd point of view of the Exeter Hall moralist. Scruples had been strangers to her, a baggage she had not burdened herself with on her journey.
Jimmy! That night Dion Leith had told her that he had seen the eyes of his boy in the stream that flowed through the Kesstane Dereh. She looked out into the purple night, and somewhere in the dim vastness full of mysteries and of half revelations she saw the frank and merciless eyes of a young Eton boy.
Should she be governed by them? Could she submit to the ignorant domination of a child who knew nothing of the complications of human life, nothing of the ways in which human beings are driven by imperious desires, or needs, which have perhaps been sown in ground of flesh and blood by dead parents, or by ancestors laid even with the dust? Could she immolate herself before the altar of the curious love which grew within her as Jimmy grew?
She was by nature perverse, and it was partly her love for Jimmy which pushed her towards the man who killed his son. But she had not told that even to herself. And she never told her secrets to other people, not even when they were women friends!
The lights on the kiosk on the quay went out. Mrs. Clarke was startled by the leaping up of the darkness which seemed to come from the sea. For her ears had been closed against the band, and she had forgotten the limit she had mentally put to her indecision. Eleven o’clock already! She got up from her seat. But still she hesitated. She did not know what she was going to do. She stood for a moment. Then she walked softly towards the pavilion. When she was near to it she stopped and listened. She did not hear any sound from within. There was nothing to prevent her from descending to the villa, from writing a note to Dion Leith asking him to leave Buyukderer on the morrow, and from going up to her bedroom. He would find the note in the hall when he came down; he would go away; she need never see him again. If she did that it would mean a new life for her, free from complications, a life dedicated to Jimmy, a life deliberately controlled.
It would mean, too, the futile close of a long pursuit; the crushing of an old and hitherto frustrated desire; the return, when Jimmy went back to England after the holidays, to an empty life which she hated, more than hated, a life of horrible restlessness, a life in which the imagination preyed, like a vulture, upon the body. It would mean the wise, instead of the unwise, life.
She stood there. With one hand she felt the little watch which Dumeny had given her. It was cold to the touch of her dry, hot hand. She felt the rough emerald set in the back of it. She and Dumeny had found that in the bazaars together, in those bazaars which Dumeny changed from Eastern shops into the Arabian Nights. Dion Leith could never do such a thing for her. But perhaps she could do it for him. The thought of that lured her. She stood at the street corner; it was very dark and still; she knew that the strange ways radiated from the place where she stood, but there was no one to go with her down them. She waited—waited. And then she saw far off the gleam of the torch from which spring colored fires. It flitted through the darkness; it hovered. The gleam of it lit up, like a goblin light, the beginnings of the strange ways. She saw shadowy forms slipping away stealthily into their narrow and winding distances; she saw obscure stairways, leaning balconies full of soft blackness. She divined the rooms beyond. And whispering voices came to her ears.
All the time she was feeling the watch with its rough uncut emerald.
Government came upon her. She felt, as often before, a great hand catch her in a grip of iron. She ceased to resist.
Still holding the watch, she went to the opening in the pavilion.
The hanging lamp had gone out. For a moment she could only see darkness in the interior. It looked empty. There was no sound within. Could the man she had been thinking about, debating about, have slipped away while she was sitting under the plane tree? She had been thinking so deeply that she had not heard the noise of the band on the quay; she might not have heard his footsteps. While she had been considering whether she should leave him perhaps he had fled from her.
This flashing thought brought her back at once to her true and irrevocable self, and she was filled instantly with fierce determination and a cold intense anger. Jimmy was forgotten. He was dead to her at that moment. She leaned forward, peering into the darkness.
“Dion!” she said. “Dion!”
There was no answer, but she saw something stir within, something low down. He was there—or something was there, something alive. She went into the pavilion, and knelt down by it.
“Dion!” she said.
He raised himself on the divan, and turned on his side.
“Why are you kneeling down?” he said. “Don’t kneel. I hate to see a woman kneeling, and I know you never pray. Get up.”
He spoke in a voice that was new to her. It seemed to her hot and hard. She obeyed him at once and got up from her knees.
“What did you mean just now when you asked me whether I couldn’t mingle my life with an unhappy life? Sit here beside me.”
She sat down on the edge of the divan very near to him.
“What do you suppose I meant?”
“Do you mean to say you like me in that way?”
“Yes.”
“That you care about me?”
“Yes.”
“You said you willed me to come out to Constantinople. Was it for that reason?”
She hesitated. She had an instinctive understanding of men, but she knew that, in one way, Dion was not an ordinary man; and even if he had been, the catastrophe in his life might well have put him for the time beyond the limits of her experience, wide though they were.
“No,” she said, at last. “I didn’t like you in that way till I met you in the street, and saw what she had done to you.”
“Then it was only pity?”
“Was it? I knew your value in England.”
She paused, then added, in an almost light and much more impersonal voice:
“I think I may say that I’m a connoisseur of values. And I hate to see a good thing flung away.”
“I’m not a good thing. Perhaps I might have become one. I believe I was on the way to becoming worth something. But now I’m nothing, and I wish to be nothing.”
“I don’t wish you to be anything but what you are.”
“Once you telegraphed to me—‘May Allah have you in His hand.’”
“I remember.”
“It’s turned out differently,” he said, almost with brutality.
“We don’t know that. You came back.”
“Yes. I was kept safe for a very good reason. I had to kill my child. I’ve accomplished that mission, and now, perhaps, Allah will let me alone.”
She could not see his face or the expression in his eyes clearly, but now she saw his body move sharply. It twisted to the right and back again. She put out her hand and took his listlessly, almost as she had taken it in Mrs. Chetwinde’s drawing-room when she had met him for the first time.
“Your hand is like fire,” he whispered.
“Do you think I am ice?” she whispered back, huskily.
“Once I tried to take my hand away from yours.”
“Try to take it away now, if you wish.”
As she spoke she closed her hand tenaciously upon his. Her little fingers felt almost like steel on his hand, and he thought of the current of the Bosporus which had pulled at his swimming body.
To be taken and swept away! That at least would be better than drifting, better than death in the form of life, better than slinking in loneliness to watch the doings of others.
“I don’t wish to take it away,” he said.
And with the words mentally he bade an eternal farewell to Rosamund and to all the aspirations of his youth. From her and from them he turned away to follow the gleam of the torch. It flickered through the darkness; it wavered; it waited—for him. He had tried the life of wisdom, and it had cast him out; perhaps there was a place for him in the unwise life. He felt spiritually exhausted; but there was within him a physical fever which answered to the fever in the hand which had closed on his.
“Let the spirit die,” he thought, “that the body may live!”
He put one arm round his companion.
“If you want me——” he whispered, on a deep breath.
His voice died away in the darkness between the giant cypresses, those trees which watch over the dead in the land of the Turk.
She had said once that the human being can hurt God.
Obscurely he wished to do that.
CHAPTER VI
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.