Part 26

"I had none. A sister, that's all--who carried a sunshade." "I had no sisters; but there was a girl next door--and her brother."

"I note in jealous anguish of spirit," remarked Dickie. "that you do not simply say 'a girl and boy next door.'"

Ruth's mischievous laugh affirmed his accusation. "The wall was not very high--I kicked a foothold into it half-way up, and Tommy gave me a pull from the top."

"Tommy was ungallant enough to leave the wall to you?"

"There were cherries in his garden--sweet black cherries. And only crab-apples in ours."

"He might have filled his pockets with cherries, and then climbed. No--I reject Tommy, he was unworthy of you. I may have been a horrid little Casino brat, I may even have worn a white satin sailor-suit with trousers down to my ankles--"

"Oh!" Ruth winced.

"I may have danced too well, and I understood too early the art of complimenting ladies whose hats were too big and whose eyes were too bright.... But once, after Annunciata Maddalena's nose had bled over this same sailor-suit, I said it was my own nose, because I knew how bitterly she was ashamed of her one bourgeois lapse...."

"Tommy would have disowned her, instead of owning the nose. Oh, I grant you the nobler nature ... but it breaks my heart that you didn't have the wild English garden and the cherries and the grubby old dark-blue jersey."

"If we have a kiddie--" Dickie began softly, his mouth puckered to its special elvish little smile. Then he met her eyes lapping him round with such velvet tenderness--that Dickie suddenly knew he was loved, knew that impulsively she was going to tell him so, and breathlessly happier than he had ever been before, waited for it--

"I _did_ kill my husband. They acquitted me, but I was guilty. It was an accident. I was so afraid. They would never have believed it could be an accident. But I had to, in self-defence."

And now she had told him she loved him.

Only Dickie was too numb to recognise the form her confession of love had taken; love, as always, was clamouring to be clearly seen--naked, if need be, blood-guilty, if need be--but _seen_ ... and then swept up, sin and all, by another love big enough to accept this truth, also, as essentially part of her.

Ruth waited several seconds for Dickie to speak. Then she got up, and strolled over to the picture, and said, examining intently, as though for the first time, the woman in the doorway: "I'm not sorry, Dickie. That is to say, I'm sorry, of course, if I've shattered an illusion of yours, but--I can't be melodramatic, you know, not even to the extent of using the word 'murderess' on myself. If I hadn't killed Lucas--"

"He would have killed you?" So he was able to utter quite natural and coherent sounds! Dickie was surprised.

"Yes--" But Ruth found that, after all, she could not tell Dickie much about Lucas. Lucas had not been a pleasant gentleman to live with--and there were things that Dickie was too fine himself, and too innocent, to realise. The only comprehension in this thoroughly well-groomed atmosphere of soft carpets and dim silken panels and miniatures and rare frail china might have come from the woman in the doorway of that incongruous picture ... a woman sullenly patient, brutalised, but--yes, her man might quite easily have been another Lucas.

For that which Dickie had always thought of as mysterious, elusive, was, to Ruth's eyes, only sorrowful wisdom.

"Come here, Ruth."

She dragged her eyes away from the picture; crossed the room; broke down completely, her head on his knees, her shuddering body crouched closely to the floor: "When you've--been frightened--and have to live with it--and it doesn't even stop at night--for weeks and months and years--one's nerves aren't quite reliable.... They've no right to call that murder, have they? have they, Dickie? When you've been afraid for a long time--and there's no one you can tell about it except the person who _makes_ the _fear_...."

But Dickie was all that she had perilously dared to hope he would be at this crisis. He soothed her and healed her by his loyalty; promised, without her extorting it, that he would never tell a soul what she had just told him; pixie-shy, yet he spoke of his personal need of her--and more than anything else she had desired to hear this. He mentioned some trivial intimate plans for their unbroken, unchanged future together, so as to reassure her of its continuance. He even made her laugh.

In fact, for a last appearance in the _role_ of a gallant little gentleman, Dickie did not do so badly.

He woke in the night from a bad dream--with terror clinging thickly about his senses. But it did not slowly dissolve and release him, as nightmare is wont to do. It remained--so that he lay still as a man in his winding-sheet, afraid to move--remembering--

"I _did_ kill my husband."

Yes--that was it. In the room with him was a strange woman who had killed her husband.

Not Ruth--but a strange woman. How had she got into the room with him?

She had killed her husband. And now, _he_ was her husband.

He lay motionless, but his imagination began to crawl.... What might happen to a man shut up alone in a house with a woman who--murdered?

His imagination began to race--and he lost control of it. Murder ... with dry, sandy throat and a kicking heart, Dickie had to pay for his audacity in imagining he was big enough to claim life in the raw.

"Not big enough! Not big enough!"--the goblins of the underworld croaked at him in triumphant chorus.... They capered ... they snapped their fingers at him ... they spun him down to where fear was ... he had delivered himself to them, by not being big enough.

"Mrs. Bigger had a baby--which was bigger, Mrs. Bigger or the baby?"

The silly conundrum sprang at him from goodness knows what void--and over and over again he repeated it to himself, trying to remember the answer, trying to forget fear....

"Mrs. Bigger had a baby--"

He dared not fall asleep ... with the woman who had killed her husband, alone in the room with him ... alone in the house with him.

A stir from the other bed, and one arm flung out in sleep. Dickie's knees jerked violently--his skin went cold and sticky with sweat. "You fool--it's only Ruth!"

But she _did_ it--she did it once. There are people who can't kill, and a few, just a very few, who can. And because they can, they are different, and have to be shut away from the herd.

But--but this woman. They've made a ghastly mistake--they've let her go free--and I can't tell anyone ... nobody knows, except me and Ruth---- Ah, yes--a quivering sigh of relief here--Ruth knows, too--Ruth, my wife--ruth means pity....

There is no Ruth ... there never was ... quite alone except for a strange, strange woman--the kind that gets shut away and kept by herself....

* * * * *

To this bondage had Dickie's nerves delivered him. The custom of punctilious courtesy, so deeply ingrained as to mean in his case the impossibility of wounding another, decreed that some pretence must be kept up before Ruth. But with one shock she divined the next morning the significant change in him, and bowed her head to it. What could she do? She loved him, but she had overrated the capacity of his spirit. There had never been any courage, only kindness and sweetness and chivalry--all no good to him, now that courage was wanted. She had made a mistake in telling him the truth.

Suffering--she thought she had suffered fiercely with Lucas, she thought she had suffered while she was being ignominiously tried for her life--but what were either of these phases compared with the helpless bitterness of seeing Dickie, whom she loved, afraid of her?

Even her periodic fits of wild arrogant passion, which usually, when they surged past restraint, wrecked and altered whatever situation was hemming her in, and left gaps for a passage through to something else--even these had now to be curbed. Useful in hate, they were impotent in love. So Ruth recognised in her new humility. But when one day, seized by panic at having spoken irritably to her, Dickie hastily tried to propitiate her, to ingratiate himself so that she might spare him, might let him live a little longer, then Ruth felt she must cry aloud under the strain of this subtle torture. Why, he was her lover, her man, her child.... In thought, her arm shaped itself into a crook for his head to lie there; her fingers smoothed out the drawn perplexity of his brows; her kisses were cool as snow on his hot, twitching little mouth; her voice, hushed to a lullaby croon, promised him that nobody should hurt him, nobody, while she was there to heal and protect--

"Sleep, baby, sleep, The hills are white with sheep----"

Over and over again she lulled herself with the old rhyme, for comfort's sake. But Dickie she could not comfort, since, irony of ironies, she was the cause of his pitiful breakdown. Why, if she spoke, he started; if she moved towards him, he shrank. Yet still Ruth dreamt that if he would only let her touch him, she could bring him reassurance. But meanwhile his appetite was meagre, the rare half-hours he slept were broken with evil dreams, from which he awoke whimpering. He did not care any more about the little beautiful things he had collected and grouped about him, but sat for hours listless and blank; his appearance a grotesque parody of the trim and dapper Dickie Maybury of the past--what could it matter how he looked with death slicing so close to him?

"The master seems poorly of late, don't he, ma'am? His digestion ain't strong. P'r'aps something 'as disagreed with 'im." Thus Mrs. Derrick, taking her part in the drama, as the simple character who makes speeches of more significant portent than she is aware of.

Something had, indeed, disagreed with Dickie. In the slang phrase: "He had bitten off more than he could chew."

And the goblins were hunting him; whispering how she would creep up to him stealthily from behind, this woman who killed ... and put her arms round him, and put her fingers to his throat--that was one way.

Other ways there were, of course. He must learn about them all, so as to be watchful and prepared. Self-defence ... accident. Of course, they always said it was accident. He knew that now, for the evening crime-sheets began to appear in the flat again, and Dickie studied them, in place of the _villanelles_, the graceful essays, the _belles-lettres_ of his former choice. Ruth saw him, with his delicate shaking hands clutching the newspapers, his mild eyes bright with sordid fascination. He was ill, certainly; and brain-sick and oppressed; and she yearned for his illness to show itself a tangible, serious matter; a matter of bed and doctor and complete prostration and unwearied effort on the part of his nurse. "My darling--my darling.... He did everything for me, when I most needed it. And now, I can do nothing.... It isn't fair!"

She stood by one of the open windows of the pretty Watteau sitting-room. The lamps had just sprung to fiery stars in the blue glamorous twilight of the square; the fragrance of wet lilac blew up to her, and a blackbird among the bushes began to sing like mad ... the fist which was cruelly squeezing Ruth's spirit seemed slowly to unclench ... and suddenly it struck her that things might be made worth while again for her and Dickie.

After all, how insane it was for him to be huddling miserably, as she knew he would be, in the arm-chair of his study, gazing with forlorn eyes at the squalid columns, which it had grown too dark for him to decipher. She had a vision of what this very evening might yet hold of recovered magic, if only she had the courage to carry out her simple cure of his head drawn down on to her left breast, just where her heart was beating. "Dickie, it's _all right_, you know--it's only Ruth I You've been sitting with your bogies all the time the white lilac has been coming out----"

A faint smile lay at last on Ruth's mouth, and in the curve of her tired eyelids. She went softly into the study. The door was open....

Dickie sprang to his feet with a yell of terror as her hands came round his neck from behind. He clutched at the revolver in his pocket and fired, at random, backwards.... In the wall behind them was the round dark mark of a merciful bullet. And----

"Dickie--oh, Dickie--when you've been frightened--and have to live with it--and it doesn't even stop at nights--do you understand, now, how it happens? They've no right to call _that_ murder, have they, Dickie?"

And now, indeed, understanding that the awful act of killing could be, in a rare once or twice, a human accident for the frightened little human to commit--understanding, Dickie was shocked back to sanity.

"Dear, dear Ruth----" Why, this stranger woman was no stranger, after all, but Ruth, his own sweet wife. Dickie was tired, and he knew he need not explain things to her. He laid his head down on her left breast, just where the heart was beating.

THE WOMAN WHO SAT STILL

By PARRY TRUSCOTT

(From _Colour_)

1922

When he went, when he had to go, he took with him the memory of her that had become crystallised, set for him in his own frequent words to her, standing at her side, looking down at her with his keen, restless eyes--such words as: "It puzzles me how on earth you manage to sit so still...."

Then, enlarging: "It is wonderful to me how you can keep so happy doing nothing--make of enforced idleness a positive pleasure! I suppose it is a gift, and I haven't got it--not a bit. It doesn't matter how tired I am, I have to keep going--people call it industry, but its real name is nervous energy, run riot. I can't even take a holiday peacefully. I must be actively playing if I cannot work. I'm just the direct descendant of the girl in the red shoes--they were red, weren't they?--who had to dance on and on until she dropped. I shall go on and on until I drop, and then I shall attempt a few more useless yards on all fours...."

"Come now," in answer to the way she shook her head at him, smiled at him from her sofa, "you know very well how I envy you your gift, your power of sitting still--happily still--your power of contemplation...."

And one day, more intimately still, with a sigh and a look (Oh, a look she understood!), "To me you are the most restful person in the world...."

* * * * *

Why he went, except that he had to go; why he stayed away so long, so very long, are not really relevant to this story; the facts, stripped of conjecture, were simply these: she was married, and he was not, and there came the time, as it always comes in such relationships as theirs, when he had to choose between staying without honour and going quickly. He went. But even the bare facts concerning his protracted absence are less easily stated because his absence dragged on long after the period when he might, with impeccable honour, have returned.

The likeliest solution was that setting her aside when he had to, served so to cut in two his life, so wrenched at his heartstrings, so burnt and bruised his spirit, that when, in his active fashion he had lived some of the hurt down, he could not bring himself easily to reopen the old subject--fresh wounds for him might still lurk in it--how could he tell? Although it had been at the call, the insistence of honour, still hadn't he left her--deserted her? Does any woman, even his own appointed woman, forgive a man who goes speechless away? Useless, useless speculation! For some reason, some man's reason, when another's death made her a free woman, yet he lingered and did not come.

He knew, afterwards, that it was from the first his intention to claim her. He wanted her--deep down he wanted her as he had always wanted her; meant to come--some time. Knew all the time that he could not always keep away. And then, responding to a sudden whim, some turn of his quickly moving mind--a mind that could forcibly bury a subject and as forcibly resurrect it--hot-foot and eager he came.

* * * * *

He had left her recovering slowly and surely from a long illness; an illness that must have proved fatal but for her gift of tranquillity, her great gift of keeping absolutely, restfully still in body, while retaining a happily occupied mind. Her books, and her big quiet room, and the glimpse of the flower-decked garden from her window, with just these things to help her, she had dug herself into the deep heart of life where the wells of contentment spring. Bird's song in the early morn and the long, still day before her in which to find herself--to take a new, firmer hold on the hidden strength of the world. And, just to keep her in touch with the surface of things, visits from her friends. Then later, more tightly gripping actuality, with a new, keen, sharp, growing pleasure--the visits of a friend.

While those lasted there was nothing she would have changed for her quiet room, her sofa: the room that he lit with his coming; where she rested and rested, shut in with the memory of all he said, looked, thought in her presence--until again he came.

While they lasted! She had been content, never strong, never able to do very much, with seclusion before. During the time of his visits she revelled, rejoiced in it, asking nothing further. While they lasted, sitting still (Oh, so still), hugging her joy, she didn't think, wouldn't think, how it might end.

Sometimes, just sometimes, by a merciful providence, things do not end. She lived for months on the bare chance of its not ending.

Yet, as we know, the end came.

At first while the world called her widowed she sat with her unwidowed heart waiting for him in the old room, in the old way. Surely now he would come? She had given good measure of fondness and duty and friendship--that was only that under another name--to the one who until now had stood between her and her heart's desire, and parting with him, and all the associations that went with him, had surprisingly hurt her. Always frail, she was ill--torn with sorrow and pity--and then, very slowly again, she recovered. And while she recovered, lying still in the old way, she gave her heart wings--wild, surging wings--at last, at last. Sped it forth, forth to bring her joy--to compel it.

While she waited in this fashion a sweet, recaptured sense of familiarity made his coming seem imminent. She had only to wait and he would be here. She couldn't have mistaken the looks that had never been translated into words--that hadn't needed words. Though she had longed and ached for a word--then--she was quite content now. He had wanted her just as she was, unashamed and untainted. And to preserve her as she was he had gone away. And now for the very first time she was truly glad he had gone in that abrupt, speechless fashion--in spite of the heartache and the long years between them, really and truly glad. Nothing had been spoilt; they had snatched at no stolen joys. And the rapture, (what rapture!) of meeting would blot out all that they had suffered in silence--the separation--all of it!

As she waited, getting well for him, she had no regrets, growing more and more sure of his coming.

It was not until she was well again, not until the months had piled themselves on each other, that, growing more frightened than she knew, she began her new work of preparation.

* * * * *

Suddenly, impulsively, when she had reached the stage of giving him up for days at a time, when hope had nearly abandoned her, then he came.

He had left a woman so hopeful in outlook, so young and peaceful in spirit, that with her the advancing years would not matter. On his journey back to her, visualising her afresh, touching up his memory of her, he pictured her going a little grey. That would suit her--grey was her colour--blending to lavender in the clothes she always wore for him. A little grey, but her clear, pale skin unfaded, her large eyes full of pure, guarded secrets--secrets soon to unfold for him alone.

A haven--a haven! So he thought of her, and now, ready for her, coming to her, he craved the rest she would give him--rest more than anything in all the world. She, with her sweet white hands, when he held them, kissed them, would unlock the doors of peace for him, drawing him into her life, letting him potter and linger--linger at her side. Even when long ago he had insisted to her that for him there was no way of rest, he had known that she, just she, meant rest for him, when he could claim her for his own. Other women, other pursuits, offered him excitement, stimulation--and then a weariness too profound for words. But rest, bodily, spiritually, was her unique gift for him. She--he smiled as he thought it--would teach him to sit still.

And tired, so tired, he hurried to her across the world as fast as he could go.

Waiting at her door, the door opened, crossing the threshold--Oh, he had never thought his luck would be so great as to be taken direct to the well remembered room upstairs! Yet with only a few short inquiries he was taken there--she for whom he asked, the mistress of the house, would be in her sitting-room, he was told, and if he was an old friend...? He explained that he was a very old friend, following the maid upstairs. But the maid was mistaken; her mistress was not in her private sitting-room; not in the house at all--she had gone out, and it proved on investigation that she had left no word. The maid, returning, suggested however, that she would not be long. Her mistress had a meeting this evening; she was expecting some one before dinner; no, she would certainly not be long, so--so if he would like to wait?

He elected to wait--a little impatiently. He knew it was absurd that coming, without warning--after how many years was it?--he should yet have made so sure of finding her at home. Absurd, unreasonable--and yet he was disappointed. He ought to have written, but he had not waited to write. He had pictured the meeting--how many times? Times without number--and always pictured her waiting at home. And then the room?

Left alone in it he paced the room. But the room enshrined in his heart of hearts was not this room. Was there, surely there was some mistake?