§
She arrived at one in the morning. Mr. Thorpe by that time had taken three bedrooms, and a sitting-room.
‘I can’t pay,’ said the unhappy Jocelyn on seeing these arrangements.
‘But I can,’ said Mr. Thorpe.
‘I don’t know why——’ began Jocelyn, shrinking under the accumulating weight of obligations.
‘But I do,’ said Mr. Thorpe, cutting him short.
Mrs. Luke never forgot that pink sitting-room at the Carlton, for it was there that Jocelyn, walking up and down it practically demented, cast himself adrift from her for ever. And yet what had she done but try to help him? What had she ever done all his life but love him, and try to help him?
‘There’s been too much of that—there’s been too much of that,’ Jocelyn raved, when she attempted, faintly, for she was exhausted, to defend herself.
She soon gave up. She soon said nothing more at all, but sat crying softly, the tears dropping unnoticed on her folded hands.
Before this, however, while the car was fetching her from South Winch, Mr. Thorpe, bracing himself to his plain and unshirkable duty, invited Jocelyn into the sitting-room he had engaged, and ordered whiskies and sodas. These he drank by himself, while Jocelyn, his head sunk on his chest, sat stretched full length in a low chair staring at nothing; and having drunk the whiskies, Mr. Thorpe felt able to perform his duty.
Which he did; and in a series of brief sentences described the girl’s state of mind when he accidentally found her down by his fence, and how it was the idea of being left alone with Jocelyn’s mother till the summer that she couldn’t stand, because she simply couldn’t stand his mother. Frightened of her. Scared stiff. Just simply couldn’t stand her.
At this Jocelyn, roused from his stupor, looked round at Mr. Thorpe with heavy-eyed amazement.
‘Couldn’t stand my mother?’ he said in tones of wonder, his mouth remaining open, so much was he surprised.
‘That’s the ticket,’ said Mr. Thorpe; and drank more whiskey.
He then, after explaining that he wasn’t an orator, told Jocelyn in a further series of brief sentences that it was unnatural for wives to live with their mothers-in-law instead of with their husbands, that his wife knew and felt this, and that she was, besides, having been brought up on the Bible and being otherwise ignorant of life, genuinely and deeply shocked at what she regarded as his disobedience to God’s laws.
‘But my mother,’ said Jocelyn, ‘has been nothing but——’
‘Sees red about your mother, that girl does,’ interrupted Mr. Thorpe.
‘But why?’ said Jocelyn, sitting up straight now, his brows knitted in the most painful bewilderment.
‘Don’t ask me,’ said Mr. Thorpe; and drank more whiskey.
He then told Jocelyn, in a third and last series of brief sentences, for after that not only had he said his say but the young man didn’t seem able to stand any more, that if—no, when—his wife was restored to him, he had better see to it that his mother was as far off and as permanently off as possible; and then, Jocelyn by this time looking the very image of wretchedness, he gave him, poor young devil, the bit of comfort of telling him that his wife had only meant to leave him till she knew he was in Cambridge, and that then she had been going to join him there, and live in some rooms somewhere near him. It wasn’t him she was running from, it was his mother.
‘All that girl asked,’ said Mr. Thorpe, bringing his fist, weighty now with whiskey, down shatteringly on the table, ‘was a couple of rooms, and you sometimes in them. A girl in a thousand. If she’d been as ugly as sin she’d still have been a treasure to any man. But look at her—look at her, I say.’
‘Oh, damn you!’ shouted Jocelyn, springing to his feet, unable to bear any more, ‘Damn you—damn you! How dare you, how dare you, when it’s you—you——’
And he came towards Mr. Thorpe, his arms lifted as if to strike him; but he suddenly dropped them to his sides, and turning away gripped hold of the chimneypiece, and, laying his head on his hands, sobbed.