Part 6

‘We’ll discuss that another time. You’re not angry, darling?’ he said. ‘You see how inevitable it all is?’

With her hand on the door knob she turned to say: ‘Yes, Jim. I’m not blaming you.’ And she went out, closing the door softly behind her.

So that was all right. He smoked his cigarette out in something like peace of mind. Not perfect peace, however; the thought of losing something--even something for which he didn’t care--was distasteful. Old associations would cling. It was an insufferable social order that pressed this cruel alternative on a sensitive man, ordaining that he must release one woman before he could take another. ‘It’s all so niggardly, niggardly!’ said Wyvern, as he stepped out into the sweetness of that June evening. He felt the need, as he had never felt it before, of Nature’s soothing touch, her sunset’s balm for his eyes, the caress of her delicate breezes on his brow.

For the sake of the walk he set out in the direction of his studio, a walk that would take him away from suburban houses into little lanes surrounded by open fields. There one could get close to Nature and to Beauty. He had often been grateful to his own foresight for having provided him with a studio not only separate from his residence but distant from it by many miles. Only in solitude, he murmured to himself, can the human spirit grow to its full stature; and he knew that the rather recondite art whereby he supplemented, or failed to supplement, his substantial private income could never have flourished in the vicinity of Elsie, who was, when all was said, ‘a dear little woman, but no artist.’ In his studio he could work undistracted; and once or twice, when the tide of his inspiration had been at the full, he had stayed there for several days, sleeping at nights upon a little canvas folding-bed. There was something Spartan about the practice that appealed to him. Elsie exhibited a suitable distress at these absences, but she encouraged his painting and applauded the results, though without revealing any real critical understanding of them. James Wyvern professed allegiance to no school, and to that fact attributed his failure to obtain recognition. He dealt too exclusively in subtleties to be able to please the multitude, even the multitude of art-critics. It was his declared purpose to demonstrate by his work a familiar French aphorism: _La vérité consiste dans les nuances._ ‘The Boot Cupboard’ and an unnamed picture representing amethyst-blue houses were perhaps his most successful productions. ‘Representation, no. Symbolism, if you like. Representation is an artistic vice.’ Yet he had his lapses and was deliciously conscious of them. ‘My dear, I am daring. I am taking the gravest risk. What do you think--a ploughed field! Positively a ploughed field! The danger is simply colossal.’ To his artist-friends he was in the habit of saying: ‘Fundamentally, I suppose, I’m a novelist.’ Just as, three years before, during his literary period, he had fended off praise by murmuring: ‘I’m happiest, after all, with my palette and brush.... Oh, that little box of paints!’

Striding along between fragrant hedges, he luxuriated in the joy of the open air and in his new sense of freedom. Everything had been explained to Elsie, and she had taken it, on the whole, beautifully. He was really grateful to Elsie. And now he was a free man. ‘Freedom, the deep breath!’ he quoted in rapture. He was free now to rescue Marion, his imprisoned princess, from her dungeon of despair. He would take her away, far away. Away from censorious England to the magic air and blue skies of Italy, where life should become an exquisite indolent dream. ‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘Como! Como shall be the _mise-en-scène_.’

* * * * *

Dreaming of Como, he entered the studio.

‘What the devil----!’ There she was, Marion herself, in his wicker-chair. ‘My darling, _you_!’ He was amazed to find her there, and amazed by the unearthly beauty of her. She rose to meet him, excited fear shining in her large eyes.

‘Hullo, Jimmy! You won’t be glad to see me.’ How the deuce did she know that? ‘John has found out about us. He made a scene. He’s dangerous. I’ve fled the house.’

‘Marion, what a wonderful girl you are! What a study in contrast--your fragrant English girlhood, and your exotic chintz dress!’ He enfolded her in arms of solicitude. ‘My dear, tell me it all.’

‘That’s all. People have been talking to him. He threatened me. So I came here.’

He could see her nostrils dilate and her breasts flutter in the intoxication of the danger. ‘Like netted fish they leap,’ he quoted to himself. Aloud he murmured: ‘Darling, you came here. Yes, of course. But how....’

‘Oh, I found out where it was and just came. There was a woman here----’

He was startled. ‘A woman?... Oh, Mrs. Phillips, perhaps, the woman who cleans up.’

‘Yes. I told her I was a friend of your wife’s, and she let me stay. Cheek, wasn’t it! Invented a wife for you. Just bluff, but it came off.... Do give me a cigarette.’

But this would never do. Here they were alone together, in a most compromising situation, while her husband--positively a dangerous fellow--raged round the countryside looking for her, perhaps with a pistol. At any moment----‘But, my darling girl, is it wise?’

With no sign of having heard the question, she rested her head on his shoulder. ‘Darling Jimmy, what shall I do?’

It was surely the most beautiful moment of his life. He was touched almost to tears by her perfect trust in him. All her dewy freshness, all her passionate beauty, all her vital young womanhood, was his for the taking. He had but to say: ‘Come with me now.... Como!’ and she would come. But was it wise to act so hastily? He plunged into a delirium of pleasurable emotion only to emerge with that question in his mind. With his lips clinging to hers he asked it. Was it wise? They would go away sooner or later: that was inevitable; but to go now, would it not be precipitate? To take a woman from her husband was a serious matter, involving unexampled responsibility. He would be bound to her more surely than by any legal marriage. And the scandal, the hateful publicity, the dragging of one’s name through the divorce courts--it was all so intolerable to a sensitive man. He would incur the enmity of many people, and he would lose Elsie. Elsie would divorce him, would perhaps forget him and re-marry....

He released Marion from that mad embrace.

‘What am I to do, darling?’ she repeated.

‘Let me think, dear,’ he said, stroking his troubled brow. ‘Let me think. Above all we must listen to the voice of reason. So much depends on this. Don’t you think it would be best for you to go back? Only for a while, of course.’

She stared as though he had spoken in an unknown tongue. ‘Go back? Go back to John?’

‘Only for a few weeks, darling, until I can see daylight, and make all arrangements.’

She stepped back from him a few paces, as if to survey him the better. Her eyes had the surprised and stricken look of a child unaccountably hurt.

‘I don’t think I understand. Are you telling me to go back to my husband? _You_, are you telling me _that_?’

‘My darling girl, don’t you see....’

‘Do you understand what that means? Go back to my husband who, when I last saw him, was raging like a beast. Go back to him and, if he doesn’t kill me, be his woman.’

‘Dear heart, for a few weeks only.’

She trembled violently for a moment, and then became rigid with scorn. ‘I agree with you perfectly. I had better go.’

The door slammed behind her before Wyvern recovered his wits. He ran forward a few steps as if to pursue her ... and stopped. ‘My God, I shall never see her again!’ He buried his face in his hands. ‘Perfect harmony, complete understanding, all lost. That was the moment, the moment of my life, and I let it pass. Como ... I shall never bear to look on Como again.’ Painful as his sensations were, they were undeniably interesting. If ever he wrote a novel he would make that incident the pivot of the plot, the crisis, the turning-point. ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men.... By Jove there is!’ Why had he not taken it at the flood? It was all too sudden--no arrangements made, and a picture half-finished. Marion--he must forget Marion. Perhaps he had been mistaken in her. Her scorn for him had been so undeserved; he writhed at the recollection of it. He yearned now for some haven of refuge. Bruised and broken by life, his heart cried out for comfort. Ah, Elsie--she did not scorn him. A stab of fear lest the impossible had happened, lest he had alienated his wife’s love, sent him flying out of the studio and on the road for home. Forsaken by both women, he would be homeless indeed, and with no balm for his wounds. What if it were his fate to be misunderstood again? He began rehearsing the speeches he would make to Elsie. He conjured up the scene: Elsie in her night-dress, sitting up in the rumpled bed, just disturbed out of sleep. Perhaps she would be a little cruel at first: women were like that. ‘If my little wife is not kind to me now I shall go mad with the pain of it all.’ At that she would relent, and weep upon his breast. And she would love him more dearly than ever for having been so near to losing him.

MISS LETTICE

MISS LETTICE

Needing some stakes for my new fruit trees, I called on Saunders, who knows everything, to ask him where they could be obtained. Saunders is something more than a rector: he is a shepherd of souls. He has an extraordinary capacity for listening, and listening, he tells me (without any irony), is the most important of his duties--far more important than preaching church doctrine Sunday by Sunday. This is fortunate, for in my belief Saunders’s orthodoxy would not survive a very minute scrutiny. The villagers go to him with their most secret troubles, their most lurid sins, and come away with hearts eased, comforted by a platitude or two or by wordless sympathy. His mind must be quite a filing-cabinet of what are called human documents. With so much silent listening to do, perhaps he finds me as useful as I find him interesting; for I am always willing, when he is with me, to keep my ears open and my mouth shut. He is a good talker but not a garrulous one: it is the things he leaves unsaid, or half-unsaid, that interest me most in his discourse.

As I had expected, he put me at once in the way of getting my stakes. ‘Bowers, of Yew Tree Farm, is the best man. He’s a good fellow, Bowers. For your own soul’s sake you’ll have to keep an eye on his charges: they’re generally much too low. Yew Tree Farm--you know the place? It’s not really a farm at all: it’s a ramshackle wooden house standing by the side of a timber-yard. Near poor Miss Lettice’s cottage.’

‘Why do you call her poor?’ I asked. For Saunders was not in the habit of using that epithet without cause.

‘Ah, haven’t you heard? She has been taken away, you know. You spend too much time among those books of yours, my friend. Why, it happened over a week ago. Pitiful affair. She lapsed suddenly into a kind of grotesque babyhood.’

I can never hear of such an event without shuddering. ‘But she wasn’t an aged woman!’ Already one spoke of her in the past tense as of the dead.

‘She was fifty-eight,’ said Saunders; and though genuinely shocked by the disaster I couldn’t help being amused for a moment by the exactness of his information--it was so characteristic of him that he knew the woman’s age to a year. ‘No,’ he added, ‘it wasn’t the sort of thing that should happen in the ordinary course of nature.’

‘She had some shock,’ I suggested.

Saunders nodded. ‘The most cruel shock.’

‘And you no doubt were in her confidence,’ I insinuated.

Observing the curiosity that I tried politely to dissemble, he looked at me for one silent moment and smiled. ‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t know. You’re a discreet fellow, and if you weren’t such a misguided heretic I could find it in my heart to like you. Well, the cause of Miss Lettice’s collapse was a psychological phenomenon that has a very old-fashioned name.’

I waited for him to go on.

‘A broken heart,’ said Saunders. ‘Miss Lettice is the victim of a hopeless passion.’

‘A hopeless passion,’ I protested, ‘at fifty-eight!’

Saunders drew his left hand from his jacket pocket and with it a pouchful of tobacco, which he tossed into my lap. ‘You’re not in a hurry for ten minutes?’

I am never in a hurry when Saunders settles down into his chair with that air of pensive reminiscence; so, when we had both got our pipes going, he told me the story.

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You are surprised (said Saunders) at being asked to associate Miss Lettice with the idea of passion, requited or unrequited. And, if you recall her small plump figure, and the nun-like pallor of the face that peered placidly from under her black bonnet, you will readily believe that hers was no ordinary passion. But it was passion: let there be no mistake about that; I’m not going to fob off some remote mystical ecstasy upon you under that name. It’s hard enough to credit that the heart of that staid, quaint, curtseying old spinster was aflame with a hunger that ultimately destroyed her, but the evidence is overwhelming. It is twofold, that evidence: there is the evidence of her words and the evidence of my own eyes.

My interest in Miss Lettice was first roused by a disquieting rumour that reached me, by a devious route, from a neighbour’s wife who was employed by Miss Lettice to come in and do the rough housework for her. According to this rumour Miss Lettice was, for no stated reason, afraid of me. This puzzled me, as well it might, because at that time I didn’t even know who she was: if we had met in the street I could not have recognized her. But it was more than puzzling: it was distressing. I knew that if I were to be of any use to the parish at all, fear was the very last emotion I must inspire. I examined the few sermons I had preached, for there, I thought, since they were the only communications I had had with the lady, the solution of my problem must lie. I looked for unsound doctrine, or for traces of hell-fire, or for anything else that could have alarmed a timid soul; and I found nothing. You must remember that I was new to the job, and totally without experience, and altogether too disposed to take trifles seriously. To-day I should soon find a summary method of dealing with such a situation, but at that time it baffled me. I accepted it for a while as a permanent minor discomfort.

I had promised myself to make friends, if I could, with every member of my congregation, and with as many others as I could contrive to visit--no small undertaking in this wilderness of scattered dwellings. Miss Lettice had to wait her turn, of course, but it was a point of honour with me that she should not have to wait beyond it. Nervous, but also curious, I knocked at her front door.

She received me, rather sternly, I thought, but without discomposure. I was shewn into a tiny mottled room, which she called, I believe, the parlour. It was rather crowded by furniture, but the furniture itself was good and old and the mantelpiece was laden with less than the usual cottage assortment of bric-à-brac, though, of course, there was the inevitable lustreware glittering on each side of a marble clock, and, equally inevitable, a pair of china dogs. The pink beflowered walls were hung with very bad pictures, in the Marcus Stone tradition, most of them from Christmas annuals; but there was not a photograph to be seen anywhere. I remembered having heard Miss Lettice described as ‘a real lady in reduced circumstances,’ and I knew that she supplemented a tiny inherited income by giving music lessons.

For half an hour we talked of indifferent things, and I began to fear that I should never succeed in breaking through her armour of frigid politeness. But in those days I was an obstinate young mule and determined to get at the truth behind that rumour. At last she gave me my chance.

‘You have been in the parish three months, have you not, Mr. Saunders?’

I chose to regard the remark as a challenge. ‘Three very busy months,’ I answered, loading my words with all the weight they would carry.

‘Too busy, I’m sure, to visit middle-aged nobodies,’ she retorted. And then, taking sudden pity on my youthful confusion--I was nearly twenty years her junior--she smiled in a way that seemed to betoken forgiveness.

It was a smile almost maternal, and it emboldened me. ‘Miss Lettice,’ I said, smiling in return, ‘why do you dislike me?’ Placidly she shook her head. ‘Then why _did_ you dislike me? Oh, never mind how I know. Things soon get about in a little community like ours.’

She seemed startled. ‘What do you know?’ Her eyes narrowed to gimlet points. The abrupt change in her manner disconcerted me. ‘What do you know?’ she repeated defiantly, and, finding me silent, she flung another question at me, this time a veritable challenge: ‘Do you know about my son?’

Her son! So that was the cause of all the misunderstanding. ‘Nothing at all,’ I assured her. ‘Upon my word this is the first I’ve heard of him. Did you think....’

‘Yes, I did. I thought you disapproved of me, as your predecessor did, or maybe his wife. I thought you were never going to call.’

‘But why,’ I protested, ‘why should I or anyone presume to disapprove of you?’ And I wondered what travesty of religion had been current in this parish before my coming.

She looked unaccountably severe. ‘I think you don’t understand.’

‘I think I do,’ said I, with cheerful arrogance.

‘Mr. Saunders, I am an unmarried woman, and I have a son.’

‘Yes?’ I said, simulating polite interest when in truth I was burning with curiosity. But if I hoped to win her sympathy by this unconventional attitude I was to be woefully disappointed. ‘You don’t seem to realize the gravity of what I tell you,’ Miss Lettice rebuked me. ‘It is mistaken kindness to treat a sin so lightly.’

‘I want to be a friend to the parish, not a judge.’ Priggish remarks rise readily to the lips of a young man such as I was then. ‘Besides,’ I added, ‘if your son was a child of true love there was no worse a sin than indiscretion.’

But the confessed sinner would not hear of such wickedness. ‘You, the vicar, to say a thing like that! That’s not the kind of teaching we want in this parish. Why, I’ve done penance all my life for that indiscretion, as you dare to call it. I forfeited marriage and sent my lover away. Not even for the child’s sake would I condone our sin by marrying. And do you tell me that all my bitter repentance was unnecessary?’

What could I say? It would have been cruel to convince her that she had thrown away her happiness in sheer waste, sacrificed her life on the altar of a false god. I hadn’t the heart to attempt it, so I fell back, I’m afraid, on Scriptural quotations, and left it at that. The familiar words seemed to comfort her and to reinstate me in her eyes as a moralist. None the less she was sufficiently assured of my sympathy to speak of her love, and as she spoke I began to wonder whether after all my pity had not been misplaced. Sin or no sin, the memory of her golden youth was dear to her. She was repentant enough, no doubt, when she remembered to be; but she did not live by morality alone. The woman in her still exulted, the woman’s eyes still shone, in the knowledge that she had, however long ago, been found beautiful. ‘We were very young,’ she said, with disarming simplicity, ‘and we loved each other very much. He was all the world to me.’ Her cheeks flushed; her meagre bosom rose and fell tremulously--and in that moment I saw her as she had been, young, fresh, adorable, alight with limitless ecstasy, the incarnation of a man’s desire. The transfigurement endured only for a flash, and flickered away, leaving me desolated with the stabbing poignancy of life. From that to this, I thought, we must all pass. To hide my emotion I led the talk back to her son. ‘And where is he now?’ I asked. ‘Does he often come to see you?’

She smiled wanly. ‘He’s all I’ve got. You see there’s a place set for him. You’ll take a cup of tea with us?’

The lid of the kettle that stood on the fire was already palpitating. Miss Lettice made the tea and enclosed the pot in a knitted cosy of green wool. For the next few minutes we exchanged only tea-table talk. But afterwards, when I made gestures of going, she confronted me wistfully, her eyes lit up once again. But this was a new light, and one more consonant with her years.

‘Would you like to see his room?’ she said, almost in a whisper.

I expressed eagerness, and she led me to the threshold of a room so tiny that it made one think of a monastic cell. It was just large enough to contain a small single bed, ready for use, a wash-stand, and a miniature dressing-table. The furniture was all of childish dimensions. In the further corner, under the window, stood a cricket-bat. I glanced round with the vague smile of politeness. ‘So this is Bernard’s room. A snug little place. And I see it’s all ready for his return.’

After a silence Miss Lettice sighed. ‘He would have been eighteen this coming April,’ she murmured.

I stared at her a moment in stupid wonder. ‘He would have been ... do you mean...?’

‘He was stillborn,’ she confessed, and her glance dropped before my stare. ‘It was silly not to tell you at once. But Bernard’s all I’ve got. He’d be a fine big fellow by now.’

To avoid those glistening eyes I turned away, only to encounter a sight but one degree less pitiful: Bernard’s cricket-bat--symbol of lusty young manhood, white flannels, sunlit turf--which no cricketer’s hand had ever grasped. What could I say or do? I was angered as well as touched by the wanton sentimentality of that room, and having murmured words of conventional comfort I hurried back to the vicarage. Not until many hours had passed did I succeed in hustling away my mood of melancholy; and as I entered my own bachelor bedroom I shuddered to hear, in imagination, the Good-night uttered by that fond impossible woman to the ghost with whom she shared her home.

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