He remained stooping and staring up at her, realising the implication of her words only very slowly.
Then it grew clear to him.
As she saw understanding dawning in his face, she uttered a cry of consternation. She came forward and sat down upon the little bedroom chair. She turned to him and began a sentence. “I,” she said, and stopped, with an impatient gesture of her hands. “Oh!”
He straightened himself and stood regarding her. The basket of roses lay overturned between them.
“You thought these came from someone else?” he said, trying to grasp this inversion of the universe.
She turned her eyes, “I did not know,” she panted. “A trap.... Was it likely—they came from you?”
“You thought they came from someone else,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, “I did.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Baynes.”
“That boy!”
“Yes—that boy.”
“Well!”
Lewisham looked about him—a man in the presence of the inconceivable.
“You mean to say you have been carrying on with that youngster behind my back?” he asked.
She opened her lips to speak and had no words to say.
His pallor increased until every tinge of colour had left his face. He laughed and then set his teeth. Husband and wife looked at one another.
“I never dreamt,” he said in even tones.
He sat down on the bed, thrusting his feet among the scattered roses with a sort of grim satisfaction. “I never dreamt,” he repeated, and the flimsy basket kicked by his swinging foot hopped indignantly through the folding doors into the living room and left a trail of blood-red petals.
They sat for perhaps two minutes, and when he spoke again his voice was hoarse. He reverted to a former formula. “Look here,” he said, and cleared his throat. “I don’t know whether you think I’m going to stand this, but I’m not.”
He looked at her. She sat staring in front of her, making no attempt to cope with disaster.
“When I say I’m not going to stand it,” explained Lewisham, “I don’t mean having a row or anything of that sort. One can quarrel and be disappointed over—other things—and still go on. But this is a different thing altogether.
“Of all dreams and illusions!... Think what I have lost in this accursed marriage. And now ... You don’t understand—you won’t understand.”
“Nor you,” said Ethel, weeping but neither looking at him nor moving her hands from her lap where they lay helplessly. “You don’t understand.”
“I’m beginning to.”
He sat in silence gathering force. “In one year,” he said, “all my hopes, all my ambitions have gone. I know I have been cross and irritable—I know that. I’ve been pulled two ways. But ... I bought you these roses.”
She looked at the roses, and then at his white face, made an imperceptible movement towards him, and became impassive again.
“I do think one thing. I have found out you are shallow, you don’t think, you can’t feel things that I think and feel. I have been getting over that. But I did think you were loyal—”
“I am loyal,” she cried.
“And you think—Bah!—you poke my roses under the table!”
Another portentous silence. Ethel stirred and he turned his eyes to watch what she was about to do. She produced her handkerchief and began to wipe her dry eyes rapidly, first one and then the other. Then she began sobbing. “I’m ... as loyal as you ... anyhow,” she said.
For a moment Lewisham was aghast. Then he perceived he must ignore that argument.
“I would have stood it—I would have stood anything if you had been loyal—if I could have been sure of you. I am a fool, I know, but I would have stood the interruption of my work, the loss of any hope of a Career, if I had been sure you were loyal. I ... I cared for you a great deal.”
He stopped. He had suddenly perceived the pathetic. He took refuge in anger.
“And you have deceived me! How long, how much, I don’t care. You have deceived me. And I tell you”—he began to gesticulate—“I’m not so much your slave and fool as to stand that! No woman shall make me that sort of fool, whatever else—So far as I am concerned, this ends things. This ends things. We are married—but I don’t care if we were married five hundred times. I won’t stop with a woman who takes flowers from another man—”
“I didn’t,” said Ethel.
Lewisham gave way to a transport of anger. He caught up a handful of roses and extended them, trembling. “What’s this?” he asked. His finger bled from a thorn, as once it had bled from a blackthorn spray.
“I didn’t take them,” said Ethel. “I couldn’t help it if they were sent.”
“Ugh!” said Lewisham. “But what is the good of argument and denial? You took them in, you had them. You may have been cunning, but you have given yourself away. And our life and all this”—he waved an inclusive hand at Madam Gadow’s furniture—“is at an end.”
He looked at her and repeated with bitter satisfaction, “At an end.”
She glanced at his face, and his expression was remorseless. “I will not go on living with you,” he said, lest there should be any mistake. “Our life is at an end.”
Her eyes went from his face to the scattered roses. She remained staring at these. She was no longer weeping, and her face, save about the eyes, was white.
He presented it in another form. “I shall go away.”
“We never ought to have married,” he reflected. “But ... I never expected this!”
“I didn’t know,” she cried out, lifting up her voice. “I didn’t know. How could I help! Oh!”
She stopped and stared at him with hands clenched, her eyes haggard with despair.
Lewisham remained impenetrably malignant.
“I don’t want to know,” he said, answering her dumb appeal. “That settles everything. That!” He indicated the scattered flowers. “What does it matter to me what has happened or hasn’t happened? Anyhow—oh! I don’t mind. I’m glad. See? It settles things.
“The sooner we part the better. I shan’t stop with you another night. I shall take my box and my portmanteau into that room and pack. I shall stop in there to-night, sleep in a chair or think. And to-morrow I shall settle up with Madam Gadow and go. You can go back ... to your cheating.”
He stopped for some seconds. She was deadly still. “You wanted to, and now you may. You wanted to, before I got work. You remember? You know your place is still open at Lagune’s. I don’t care. I tell you I don’t care that. Not that! You may go your own way—and I shall go mine. See? And all this rot—this sham of living together when neither cares for the other—I don’t care for you now, you know, so you needn’t think it—will be over and done with. As for marriage—I don’t care that for marriage—it can’t make a sham and a blunder anything but a sham.
“It’s a sham, and shams have to end, and that’s the end of the matter.”
He stood up resolutely. He kicked the scattered roses out of his way and dived beneath the bed for his portmanteau. Ethel neither spoke nor moved, but remained watching his movements. For a time the portmanteau refused to emerge, and he marred his stern resolution by a half audible “Come here—damn you!” He swung it into the living room and returned for his box. He proposed to pack in that room.
When he had taken all his personal possessions out of the bedroom, he closed the folding-doors with an air of finality. He knew from the sounds that followed that she flung herself upon the bed, and that filled him with grim satisfaction.
He stood listening for a space, then set about packing methodically. The first rage of discovery had abated; he knew quite clearly that he was inflicting grievous punishment, and that gratified him. There was also indeed a curious pleasure in the determination of a long and painful period of vague misunderstanding by this unexpected crisis. He was acutely conscious of the silence on the other side of the folding-doors, he kept up a succession of deliberate little noises, beat books together and brushed clothes, to intimate the resolute prosecution of his preparations.
That was about nine o’clock. At eleven he was still busy....
Darkness came suddenly upon him. It was Madam Gadow’s economical habit to turn off all her gas at that hour unless she chanced to be entertaining friends.
He felt in his pocket for matches and he had none. He whispered curses. Against such emergencies he had bought a brass lamp and in the bedroom there were candles. Ethel had a candle alight, he could see the bright yellow line that appeared between the folding doors. He felt his way presently towards the mantel, receiving a blow in the ribs from a chair on the way, and went carefully amidst Madam Gadow’s once amusing ornaments.
There were no matches on the mantel. Going to the chest of drawers he almost fell over his open portmanteau. He had a silent ecstasy of rage. Then he kicked against the basket in which the roses had come. He could find no matches on the chest of drawers.
Ethel must have the matches in the bedroom, but that was absolutely impossible. He might even have to ask her for them, for at times she pocketed matches.... There was nothing for it but to stop packing. Not a sound came from the other room.
He decided he would sit down in the armchair and go to sleep. He crept very carefully to the chair and sat down. Another interval of listening and he closed his eyes and composed himself for slumber.
He began to think over his plans for the morrow. He imagined the scene with Madam Gadow, and then his departure to find bachelor lodgings once more. He debated in what direction he should go to get, suitable lodgings. Possible difficulties with his luggage, possible annoyances of the search loomed gigantic. He felt greatly irritated at these minor difficulties. He wondered if Ethel also was packing. What particularly would she do? He listened, but he could hear nothing. She was very still. She was really very still! What could she be doing? He forgot the bothers of the morrow in this new interest. Presently he rose very softly and listened. Then he sat down again impatiently. He tried to dismiss his curiosity about the silence by recapitulating the story of his wrongs.
He had some difficulty in fixing his mind upon this theme, but presently his memories were flowing freely. Only it was not wrongs now that he could recall. He was pestered by an absurd idea that he had again behaved unjustly to Ethel, that he had been headlong and malignant. He made strenuous efforts to recover his first heat of jealousy—in vain. Her remark that she had been as loyal as he, became an obstinate headline in his mind. Something arose within him that insisted upon Ethel’s possible fate if he should leave her. What particularly would she do? He knew how much her character leant upon his, Good Heavens! What might she not do?
By an effort he succeeded in fixing his mind on Baynes. That helped him back to the harsher footing. However hard things might be for her she deserved them. She deserved them!
Yet presently he slipped again, slipped back to the remorse and regrets of the morning time. He clutched at Baynes as a drowning man clutches at a rope, and recovered himself. For a time he meditated on Baynes. He had never seen the poet, so his imagination had scope. It appeared to him as an exasperating obstacle to a tragic avenging of his honour that Baynes was a mere boy—possibly even younger than himself.
The question, “What will become of Ethel?” rose to the surface again. He struggled against its possibilities. No! That was not it! That was her affair.
He felt inexorably kept to the path he had chosen, for all the waning of his rage. He had put his hand to the plough. “If you condone this,” he told himself, “you might condone anything. There are things one must not stand.” He tried to keep to that point of view—assuming for the most part out of his imagination what it was he was not standing. A dim sense came to him of how much he was assuming. At any rate she must have flirted!... He resisted this reviving perception of justice as though it was some unspeakably disgraceful craving. He tried to imagine her with Baynes.
He determined he would go to sleep.
But his was a waking weariness. He tried counting. He tried to distract his thoughts from her by going over the atomic weights of the elements....
He shivered, and realised that he was cold and sitting cramped on an uncomfortable horsehair chair. He had dozed. He glanced for the yellow line between the folding doors. It was still there, but it seemed to quiver. He judged the candle must be flaring. He wondered why everything was so still.
Now why should he suddenly feel afraid?
He sat for a long time trying to hear some movement, his head craning forward in the darkness.
A grotesque idea came into his head that all that had happened a very long time ago. He dismissed that. He contested an unreasonable persuasion that some irrevocable thing had passed. But why was everything so still?
He was invaded by a prevision of unendurable calamity.
Presently he rose and crept very slowly, and with infinite precautions against noise, towards the folding doors. He stood listening with his ear near the yellow chink.
He could hear nothing, not even the measured breathing of a sleeper.
He perceived that the doors were not shut, but slightly ajar. He pushed against the inner one very gently and opened it silently. Still there was no sound of Ethel. He opened the door still wider and peered into the room. The candle had burnt down and was flaring in its socket. Ethel was lying half undressed upon the bed, and in her hand and close to her face was a rose.
He stood watching her, fearing to move. He listened hard and his face was very white. Even now he could not hear her breathing.
After all, it was probably all right. She was just asleep. He would slip back before she woke. If she found him—
He looked at her again. There was something in her face—
He came nearer, no longer heeding the sounds he made. He bent over her. Even now she did not seem to breathe.
He saw that her eyelashes were still wet, the pillow by her cheek was wet. Her white, tear-stained face hurt him....
She was intolerably pitiful to him. He forgot everything but that and how he had wounded her that day. And then she stirred and murmured indistinctly a foolish name she had given him.
He forgot that they were going to part for ever. He felt nothing but a great joy that she could stir and speak. His jealousy flashed out of being. He dropped upon his knees.
“Dear,” he whispered, “Is it all right? I ... I could not hear you breathing. I could not hear you breathing.”
She started and was awake.
“I was in the other room,” said Lewisham in a voice full of emotion. “Everything was so quiet, I was afraid—I did not know what had happened. Dear—Ethel dear. Is it all right?”
She sat up quickly and scrutinised his face. “Oh! let me tell you,” she wailed. “Do let me tell you. It’s nothing. It’s nothing. You wouldn’t hear me. You wouldn’t hear me. It wasn’t fair—before you had heard me....”
His arms tightened about her. “Dear,” he said, “I knew it was nothing. I knew. I knew.”
She spoke in sobbing sentences. “It was so simple. Mr. Baynes ... something in his manner ... I knew he might be silly ... Only I did so want to help you.” She paused. Just for one instant she saw one untenable indiscretion as it were in a lightning flash. A chance meeting it was, a “silly” thing or so said, a panic, retreat. She would have told it—had she known how. But she could not do it. She hesitated. She abolished it—untold. She went on: “And then, I thought he had sent the roses and I was frightened ... I was frightened.”
“Dear one,” said Lewisham. “Dear one! I have been cruel to you. I have been unjust. I understand. I do understand. Forgive me. Dearest—forgive me.”
“I did so want to do something for you. It was all I could do—that little money. And then you were angry. I thought you didn’t love me any more because I did not understand your work.... And that Miss Heydinger—Oh! it was hard.”
“Dear one,” said Lewisham, “I do not care your little finger for Miss Heydinger.”
“I know how I hamper you. But if you will help me. Oh! I would work, I would study. I would do all I could to understand.”
“Dear,” whispered Lewisham. “Dear”
“And to have her—”
“Dear,” he vowed, “I have been a brute. I will end all that. I will end all that.”
He took her suddenly into his arms and kissed her.
“Oh, I know I’m stupid,” she said.
“You’re not. It’s I have been stupid. I have been unkind, unreasonable. All to-day—... I’ve been thinking about it. Dear! I don’t care for anything—It’s you. If I have you nothing else matters ... Only I get hurried and cross. It’s the work and being poor. Dear one, we must hold to each other. All to-day—It’s been dreadful....”
He stopped. They sat clinging to one another.
“I do love you,” she said presently with her arms about him. “Oh! I do—do—love you.”
He drew her closer to him.
He kissed her neck. She pressed him to her.
Their lips met.
The expiring candle streamed up into a tall flame, flickered, and was suddenly extinguished. The air was heavy with the scent of roses.
On Tuesday Lewisham returned from Vigours’ at five—at half-past six he would go on to his science class at Walham Green—and discovered Mrs. Chaffery and Ethel in tears. He was fagged and rather anxious for some tea, but the news they had for him drove tea out of his head altogether.
“He’s gone,” said Ethel.
“Who’s gone? What! Not Chaffery?”
Mrs. Chaffery, with a keen eye to Lewisham’s behaviour, nodded tearfully over an experienced handkerchief.
Lewisham grasped the essentials of the situation forthwith, and trembled on the brink of an expletive. Ethel handed him a letter.
For a moment Lewisham held this in his hand asking questions. Mrs. Chaffery had come upon it in the case of her eight-day clock when the time to wind it came round. Chaffery, it seemed, had not been home since Saturday night. The letter was an open one addressed to Lewisham, a long rambling would-be clever letter, oddly inferior in style to Chaffery’s conversation. It had been written some hours before Chaffery’s last visit; his talk then had been perhaps a sort of codicil.
“The inordinate stupidity of that man Lagune is driving me out of the country,” Lewisham saw. “It has been at last a definite stumbling block—even a legal stumbling block. I fear. I am off. I skedaddle. I break ties. I shall miss our long refreshing chats—you had found me out and I could open my mind. I am sorry to part from Ethel also, but thank Heaven she has you to look to! And indeed they both have you to look to, though the ‘both’ may be a new light to you.”
Lewisham growled, went from page 1 to page 3—conscious of their both looking to him now—even intensely—and discovered Chaffery in a practical vein.
“There is but little light and portable property in that house in Clapham that has escaped my lamentable improvidence, but there are one or two things; the iron-bound chest, the bureau with a broken hinge, and the large air pump, distinctly pawnable if only you can contrive to get them to a pawnshop. You have more Will power than I—I never could get the confounded things downstairs. That iron-bound box was originally mine, before I married your mother-in-law, so that I am not altogether regardless of your welfare and the necessity of giving some equivalent. Don’t judge me too harshly.”
Lewisham turned over sharply without finishing that page.
“My life at Clapham,” continued the letter, “has irked me for some time, and to tell you the truth, the spectacle of your vigorous young happiness—you are having a very good time, you know, fighting the world—reminded me of the passing years. To be frank in self-criticism, there is more than a touch of the New Woman about me, and I feel I have still to live my own life. What a beautiful phrase that is—to live one’s own life!—redolent of honest scorn for moral plagiarism. No Imitatio Christi in that ... I long to see more of men and cities.... I begin late, I know, to live my own life, bald as I am and grey-whiskered; but better late than never. Why should the educated girl have the monopoly of the game? And after all, the whiskers will dye....
“There are things—I touch upon them lightly—that will presently astonish Lagune.” Lewisham became more attentive. “I marvel at that man, grubbing hungry for marvels amidst the almost incredibly marvellous. What can be the nature of a man who gapes after Poltergeists with the miracle of his own silly existence (inconsequent, reasonless, unfathomably weird) nearer to him than breathing and closer than hands and feet. What is he for, that he should wonder at Poltergeists? I am astonished these by no means flimsy psychic phenomena do not turn upon their investigators, and that a Research Society of eminent illusions and hallucinations does not pursue Lagune with sceptical inquiries. Take his house—expose the alleged man of Chelsea! A priori they might argue that a thing so vain, so unmeaning, so strongly beset by cackle, could only be the diseased imagining of some hysterical phantom. Do you believe that such a thing as Lagune exists? I must own to the gravest doubts. But happily his banker is of a more credulous type than I.... Of all that Lagune will tell you soon enough.”
Lewisham read no more. “I suppose he thought himself clever when he wrote that rot,” said Lewisham bitterly, throwing the sheets forcibly athwart the table. “The simple fact is, he’s stolen, or forged, or something—and bolted.”
There was a pause. “What will become of Mother?” said Ethel.
Lewisham looked at Mother and thought for a moment. Then he glanced at Ethel.
“We’re all in the same boat,” said Lewisham.
“I don’t want to give any trouble to a single human being,” said Mrs. Chaffery.
“I think you might get a man his tea, Ethel,” said Lewisham, sitting down suddenly; “anyhow.” He drummed on the table with his fingers. “I have to get to Walham Green by a quarter to seven.”
“We’re all in the same boat,” he repeated after an interval, and continued drumming. He was chiefly occupied by the curious fact that they were all in the same boat. What an extraordinary faculty he had for acquiring responsibility! He looked up suddenly and caught Mrs. Chaffery’s tearful eye directed to Ethel and full of distressful interrogation, and his perplexity was suddenly changed to pity. “It’s all right, Mother,” he said. “I’m not going to be unreasonable. I’ll stand by you.”
“Ah!” said Mrs. Chaffery. “As if I didn’t know!” and Ethel came and kissed him.
He seemed in imminent danger of universal embraces.
“I wish you’d let me have my tea,” he said. And while he had his tea he asked Mrs. Chaffery questions and tried to get the new situation into focus.
But even at ten o’clock, when he was returning hot and jaded from Walham Green, he was still trying to get the situation into focus. There were vague ends and blank walls of interrogation in the matter, that perplexed him.
He knew that his supper would be only the prelude to an interminable “talking over,” and indeed he did not get to bed until nearly two. By that time a course of action was already agreed upon. Mrs. Chaffery was tied to the house in Clapham by a long lease, and thither they must go. The ground floor and first floor were let unfurnished, and the rent of these practically paid the rent of the house. The Chafferys occupied basement and second floor. There was a bedroom on the second floor, formerly let to the first floor tenants, that he and Ethel could occupy, and in this an old toilet table could be put for such studies as were to be prosecuted at home. Ethel could have her typewriter in the subterranean breakfast-room. Mrs. Chaffery and Ethel must do the catering and the bulk of the housework, and as soon as possible, since letting lodgings would not square with Lewisham’s professional pride, they must get rid of the lease that bound them and take some smaller and more suburban residence. If they did that without leaving any address it might save their feelings from any return of the prodigal Chaffery.
Mrs. Chaffery’s frequent and pathetic acknowledgments of Lewisham’s goodness only partly relieved his disposition to a philosophical bitterness. And the practical issues were complicated by excursions upon the subject of Chaffery, what he might have done, and where he might have gone, and whether by any chance he might not return.
When at last Mrs. Chaffery, after a violent and tearful kissing and blessing of them both—they were “good dear children,” she said—had departed, Mr. and Mrs. Lewisham returned into their sitting-room. Mrs. Lewisham’s little face was enthusiastic. “You’re a Trump,” she said, extending the willing arms that were his reward. “I know,” she said, “I know, and all to-night I have been loving you. Dear! Dear! Dear....”
The next day Lewisham was too full of engagements to communicate with Lagune, but the following morning he called and found the psychic investigator busy with the proofs of Hesperus. He welcomed the young man cordially nevertheless, conceiving him charged with the questions that had been promised long ago—it was evident he knew nothing of Lewisham’s marriage. Lewisham stated his case with some bluntness.
“He was last here on Saturday,” said Lagune. “You have always been inclined to suspicion about him. Have you any grounds?”
“You’d better read this,” said Lewisham, repressing a grim smile, and he handed Lagune Chaffery’s letter.
He glanced at the little man ever and again to see if he had come to the personal portion, and for the rest of the time occupied himself with an envious inventory of the writing appointments about him. No doubt the boy with the big ears had had the same sort of thing ...
When Lagune came to the question of his real identity he blew out his cheeks in the most astonishing way, but made no other sign.
“Dear, dear!” he said at last. “My bankers!”
He looked at Lewisham with the exaggerated mildness of his spectacled eye. “What do you think it means?” he asked. “Has he gone mad? We have been conducting some experiments involving—considerable mental strain. He and I and a lady. Hypnotic—”
“I should look at my cheque-book if I were you.”
Lagune produced some keys and got out his cheque book. He turned over the counterfoils. “There’s nothing wrong here,” he said, and handed the book to Lewisham.
“Um,” said Lewisham. “I suppose this—I say, is this right?”
He handed back the book to Lagune, open at the blank counterfoil of a cheque that had been removed. Lagune stared and passed his hand over his forehead in a confused way. “I can’t see this,” he said.
Lewisham had never heard of post hypnotic suggestion and he stood incredulous. “You can’t see that?” he said. “What nonsense!”
“I can’t see it,” repeated Lagune.
For some seconds Lewisham could not get away from stupid repetitions of his inquiry. Then he hit upon a collateral proof. “But look here! Can you see this counterfoil?”
“Plainly,” said Lagune.
“Can you read the number?”
“Five thousand two hundred and seventy-nine.”
“Well, and this?”
“Five thousand two hundred and eighty-one.”
“Well—where’s five thousand two hundred and eighty?”
Lagune began to look uncomfortable. “Surely,” he said, “he has not—Will you read it out—the cheque, the counterfoil I mean, that I am unable to see?”
“It’s blank,” said Lewisham with an irresistible grin.
“Surely,” said Lagune, and the discomfort of his expression deepened. “Do you mind if I call in a servant to confirm—?”
Lewisham did not mind, and the same girl who had admitted him to the siance appeared. When she had given her evidence she went again. As she left the room by the door behind Lagune her eyes met Lewisham’s, and she lifted her eyebrows, depressed her mouth, and glanced at Lagune with a meaning expression.
“I’m afraid,” said Lagune, “that I have been shabbily treated. Mr. Chaffery is a man of indisputable powers—indisputable powers; but I am afraid—I am very much afraid he has abused the conditions of the experiment. All this—and his insults—touch me rather nearly.”
He paused. Lewisham rose. “Do you mind if you come again?” asked Lagune with gentle politeness.
Lewisham was surprised to find himself sorry.
“He was a man of extraordinary gifts,” said Lagune. “I had come to rely upon him.... My cash balance has been rather heavy lately. How he came to know of that I am unable to say. Without supposing, that is, that he had very remarkable gifts.”
When Lewisham saw Lagune again he learnt the particulars of Chaffery’s misdeed and the additional fact that the “lady” had also disappeared. “That’s a good job,” he remarked selfishly. “There’s no chance of his coming back.” He spent a moment trying to imagine the “lady”; he realised more vividly than he had ever done before the narrow range of his experience, the bounds of his imagination. These people also—with grey hair and truncated honour—had their emotions! Even it may be glowing! He came back to facts. Chaffery had induced Lagune when hypnotised to sign a blank cheque as an “autograph.” “The strange thing is,” explained Lagune, “it’s doubtful if he’s legally accountable. The law is so peculiar about hypnotism and I certainly signed the cheque, you know.”
The little man, in spite of his losses, was now almost cheerful again on account of a curious side issue. “You may say it is coincidence,” he said, “you may call it a fluke, but I prefer to look for some other interpretation! Consider this. The amount of my balance is a secret between me and my bankers. He never had it from me, for I did not know it—I hadn’t looked at my passbook for months. But he drew it all in one cheque, within seventeen and sixpence of the total. And the total was over five hundred pounds!”
He seemed quite bright again as he culminated.
“Within seventeen and sixpence,” he said. “Now how do you account for that, eh? Give me a materialistic explanation that will explain away all that. You can’t. Neither can I.”
“I think I can,” said Lewisham.
“Well—what is it?”
Lewisham nodded towards a little drawer of the bureau. “Don’t you think—perhaps”—a little ripple of laughter passed across his mind—“he had a skeleton key?”
Lagune’s face lingered amusingly in Lewisham’s mind as he returned to Clapham. But after a time that amusement passed away. He declined upon the extraordinary fact that Chaffery was his father-in-law, Mrs. Chaffery his mother-in-law, that these two and Ethel constituted his family, his clan, and that grimy graceless house up the Clapham hillside was to be his home. Home! His connexion with these things as a point of worldly departure was as inexorable now as though he had been born to it. And a year ago, except for a fading reminiscence of Ethel, none of these people had existed for him. The ways of Destiny! The happenings of the last few months, foreshortened in perspective, seemed to have almost a pantomimic rapidity. The thing took him suddenly as being laughable; and he laughed.
His laugh marked an epoch. Never before had Lewisham laughed at any fix in which he had found himself! The enormous seriousness of adolescence was coming to an end; the days of his growing were numbered. It was a laugh of infinite admissions.
Now although Lewisham had promised to bring things to a conclusion with Miss Heydinger, he did nothing in the matter for five weeks, he merely left that crucial letter of hers unanswered. In that time their removal from Madam Gadow’s into the gaunt house at Clapham was accomplished—not without polyglot controversy—and the young couple settled themselves into the little room on the second floor even as they had arranged. And there it was that suddenly the world was changed—was astonishingly transfigured—by a whisper.
It was a whisper between sobs and tears, with Ethel’s arms about him and Ethel’s hair streaming down so that it hid her face from him. And he too had whispered, dismayed perhaps a little, and yet feeling a strange pride, a strange novel emotion, feeling altogether different from the things he had fancied he might feel when this thing that he had dreaded should come. Suddenly he perceived finality, the advent of the solution, the reconciliation of the conflict that had been waged so long. Hesitations were at an end;—he took his line.
Next day he wrote a note, and two mornings later he started for his mathematical duffers an hour before it was absolutely necessary, and instead of going directly to Vigours’, went over the bridge to Battersea Park. There waiting for him by a seat where once they had met before, he found Miss Heydinger pacing. They walked up and down side by side, speaking for a little while about indifferent topics, and then they came upon a pause ...
“You have something to tell me?” said Miss Heydinger abruptly.
Lewisham changed colour a little. “Oh yes,” he said; “the fact is—” He affected ease. “Did I ever tell you I was married?”
“Married?”
“Yes.”
“Married!”
“Yes,” a little testily.
For a moment neither spoke. Lewisham stood without dignity staring at the dahlias of the London County Council, and Miss Heydinger stood regarding him.
“And that is what you have to tell me?”
Mr. Lewisham tamed and met her eyes. “Yes!” he said. “That is what I have to tell you.”
Pause. “Do you mind if I sit down?” asked Miss Heydinger in an indifferent tone.
“There is a seat yonder,” said Lewisham, “under the tree.”
They walked to the seat in silence.
“Now,” said Miss Heydinger, quietly. “Tell me whom you have married.”
Lewisham answered sketchily. She asked him another question and another. He felt stupid and answered with a halting truthfulness.
“I might have known,” she said, “I might have known. Only I would not know. Tell me some more. Tell me about her.”
Lewisham did. The whole thing was abominably disagreeable to him, but it had to be done, he had promised Ethel it should be done. Presently Miss Heydinger knew the main outline of his story, knew all his story except the emotion that made it credible. “And you were married—before the second examination?” she repeated.
“Yes,” said Lewisham.
“But why did you not tell me of this before?” asked Miss Heydinger.
“I don’t, know,” said Lewisham. “I wanted to—that day, in Kensington Gardens. But I didn’t. I suppose I ought to have done so.”
“I think you ought to have done so.”
“Yes, I suppose I ought ... But I didn’t. Somehow—it has been hard. I didn’t know what you would say. The thing seemed so rash, you know, and all that.”
He paused blankly.
“I suppose you had to do it,” said Miss Heydinger presently, with her eyes on his profile.
Lewisham began the second and more difficult part of his explanation. “There’s been a difficulty,” he said, “all the way along—I mean—about you, that is. It’s a little difficult—The fact is, my life, you know—She looks at things differently from what we do.”
“We?”
“Yes—it’s odd, of course. But she has seen your letters—”
“You didn’t show her—?”
“No. But, I mean, she knows you write to me, and she knows you write about Socialism and Literature and—things we have in common—things she hasn’t.”
“You mean to say she doesn’t understand these things?”
“She’s not thought about them. I suppose there’s a sort of difference in education—”
“And she objects—?”
“No,” said Lewisham, lying promptly. “She doesn’t object ...”
“Well?” said Miss Heydinger, and her face was white.
“She feels that—She feels—she does not say, of course, but I know she feels that it is something she ought to share. I know—how she cares for me. And it shames her—it reminds her—Don’t you see how it hurts her?”
“Yes. I see. So that even that little—” Miss Heydinger’s breath seemed to catch and she was abruptly silent.
She spoke at last with an effort. “That it hurts me,” she said, and grimaced and stopped again.
“No,” said Lewisham, “that is not it.” He hesitated.
“I knew this would hurt you.”
“You love her. You can sacrifice—”
“No. It is not that. But there is a difference. Hurting her—she would not understand. But you—somehow it seems a natural thing for me to come to you. I seem to look to you—For her I am always making allowances—”
“You love her.”
“I wonder if it is that makes the difference. Things are so complex. Love means anything—or nothing. I know you better than I do her, you know me better than she will ever do. I could tell you things I could not tell her. I could put all myself before you—almost—and know you would understand—Only—”
“You love her.”
“Yes,” said Lewisham lamely and pulling at his moustache. “I suppose ... that must be it.”
For a space neither spoke. Then Miss Heydinger said “Oh!” with extraordinary emphasis.
“To think of this end to it all! That all your promise ... What is it she gives that I could not have given?
“Even now! Why should I give up that much of you that is mine? If she could take it—But she cannot take it. If I let you go—you will do nothing. All this ambition, all these interests will dwindle and die, and she will not mind. She will not understand. She will think that she still has you. Why should she covet what she cannot possess? Why should she be given the thing that is mine—to throw aside?”
She did not look at Lewisham, but before her, her face a white misery.
“In a way—I had come to think of you as something, belonging to me ... I shall—still.”
“There is one thing,” said Lewisham after a pause, “it is a thing that has come to me once or twice lately. Don’t you think that perhaps you over-estimate the things I might have done? I know we’ve talked of great things to do. But I’ve been struggling for half a year and more to get the sort of living almost anyone seems able to get. It has taken me all my time. One can’t help thinking after that, perhaps the world is a stiffer sort of affair ...”
“No,” she said decisively. “You could have done great things.
“Even now,” she said, “you may do great things—If only I might see you sometimes, write to you sometimes—You are so capable and—weak. You must have somebody—That is your weakness. You fail in your belief. You must have support and belief—unstinted support and belief. Why could I not be that to you? It is all I want to be. At least—all I want to be now. Why need she know? It robs her of nothing. I want nothing—she has. But I know of my own strength too I can do nothing. I know that with you ... It is only knowing hurts her. Why should she know?”
Mr. Lewisham looked at her doubtfully. That phantom greatness of his, it was that lit her eyes. In that instant at least he had no doubts of the possibility of his Career. But he knew that in some way the secret of his greatness and this admiration went together. Conceivably they were one and indivisible. Why indeed need Ethel know? His imagination ran over the things that might be done, the things that might happen, and touched swiftly upon complication, confusion, discovery.
“The thing is, I must simplify my life. I shall do nothing unless I simplify my life. Only people who are well off can be—complex. It is one thing or the other—”
He hesitated and suddenly had a vision of Ethel weeping as once he had seen her weep with the light on the tears in her eyes.
“No,” he said almost brutally. “No. It’s like this—I can’t do anything underhand. I mean—I’m not so amazingly honest—now. But I’ve not that sort of mind. She would find me out. It would do no good and she would find me out. My life’s too complex. I can’t manage it and go straight. I—you’ve overrated me. And besides—Things have happened. Something—” He hesitated and then snatched at his resolve, “I’ve got to simplify—and that’s the plain fact of the case. I’m sorry, but it is so.”
Miss Heydinger made no answer. Her silence astonished him. For nearly twenty seconds perhaps they sat without speaking. With a quick motion she stood up, and at once he stood up before her. Her face was flushed, her eyes downcast.
“Good-bye,” she said suddenly in a low tone and held out her hand.
“But,” said Lewisham and stopped. Miss Heydinger’s colour left her.
“Good-bye,” she said, looking him suddenly in the eyes and smiling awry. “There is no more to say, is there? Good-bye.”
He took her hand. “I hope I didn’t—”
“Good-bye,” she said impatiently, and suddenly disengaged her hand and turned away from him. He made a step after her.
“Miss Heydinger,” he said, but she did not stop. “Miss Heydinger.” He realised that she did not want to answer him again....
He remained motionless, watching her retreating figure. An extraordinary sense of loss came into his mind, a vague impulse to pursue her and pour out vague passionate protestations....
Not once did she look back. She was already remote when he began hurrying after her. Once he was in motion he quickened his pace and gained upon her. He was within thirty yards of her as she drew near the gates.
His pace slackened. Suddenly he was afraid she might look back. She passed out of the gates, out of his sight. He stopped, looking where she had disappeared. He sighed and took the pathway to his left that led back to the bridge and Vigours’.
Halfway across this bridge came another crisis of indecision. He stopped, hesitating. An impertinent thought obtruded. He looked at his watch and saw that he must hurry if he would catch the train for Earl’s Court and Vigours’. He said Vigours’ might go to the devil.
But in the end he caught his train.