2
The struggling youth in her cried out, and, years later, the cry was answered. Beauty became incarnated in the person of Stephen Redshawe, whose son she later encountered in the house at Maadi. The past rose in sad loveliness, enveloping her with the fragrance of pressed flowers; but of all the memories that surged in her, this one alone broke in pitiless splendour over her consciousness. In that moment Stephen Redshawe lived again, less as a man and a lover than as a gleam, an ecstasy, a chord of divine music, a symbol of all that she had longed for and lost. Other things she could recall minutely, but Stephen remained a vague splendour. She recalled how, in her little cottage near Mundesley, she had waited for his promised coming; how she had looked again and again, in wonder, to find in her mirror the face he had called lovely. It was a face ravaged less by her thirty-three years than by discontent. His sisters and his mother she remembered only as so many bundles of feminine hostility. They disapproved of her, and no wonder: was she not a married woman, holiday-making alone, who yet suffered gladly the admiration of an infatuated boy? They called her adventuress, no doubt, and she, even in the midst of the adventure, made allowances for them. She had neither the strength nor the will to renounce the fairest gift that life offered.
‘May I come in?’ Stephen’s tall figure filled the doorway.
‘You must,’ Sheila answered, with a smile. ‘I’m not going to give you any tea while you stand there keeping the sunshine out.’
‘This is our last meeting,’ blundered Stephen. ‘I want to tell you....’
Suddenly dreading to hear the words for which she longed, Sheila fended them away. ‘Eat your pretty cake,’ she admonished him.
After tea they went out into the sandy paddock and talked for an hour of indifferent things, of trains, of luggage, of books and bad music ... until a stillness fell, heralding dusk. Evening became personal and urgent to enfold them: they could hear in the wash of the water, rhythmically plashing the sand, the rise and fall of her bosom; they could feel her breath sweeter than apples in the autumn air. And all the skies that during the past weeks of stolen companionship they had seen together, all the tides they had watched moving upon the shore, became fused with that sky, with that tide; all the hours of their comradeship were gathered up into that hour. They surrendered themselves to the embracing arms of silence.
To Sheila it was as if infinity had been spilled into time: the moments throbbed by, brimming with beauty, until the silence that these two guarded became a music, a poem, a flower of loveliness. It was a flower that budded and blossomed till their vision dimmed with the glory of it, a flower that burst and fell scattering pollen and perfume.
He bent towards her, with cheeks flaming. ‘You know, don’t you?’ he said, and for a moment could not go on. To Sheila life was become exquisitely unreal, a work of art. ‘You must know,’ he said brokenly, ‘that I adore you.’
Compassionately she laid her cool hand on his.
‘Yes,’ she said, in a low tone tenderly soothing.
‘Ah!’ His breath fluttered. She gave him her trembling lips.
They kissed, first, like boy and girl, timidly; then like comrades united after a long parting; again, and a red splendour flamed through the throbbing world. He lifted her into his arms, and divine madness seized her. He carried her with strong unfaltering stride into the house.
And this day, which they had called the end, was really the beginning. She returned on the morrow to Edward’s house and confided to her husband that she wished him to divorce her. Edward listened patiently, like the disinterested friend he was; but his disinterestedness made her pride wince, and the old hated surroundings were bleak about her. Yet on that night of her return, in the sanctuary of her bedroom, she undressed with a new joy. She stood nude before the wardrobe mirror and gazed with awe upon the pure rounded loveliness of her own form. She stroked gently her white velvet skin. Her body, so long disdained, had become sacred to her again. As she laid her head, that kingdom of heaven, upon her pillow, and murmured Stephen’s name, Stephen himself, in a suburb fourteen miles away, posted his weekly letter to the girl—no adventuress, she—who was to become his wife and the mother of his only son. For Stephen, too, was back in the old routine, enfolded and pressed close to the bosom of his family, conscious of his mother’s eyes watching him with an angry solicitude. Not without a struggle did he succumb. To Grace, whose pretty simplicity no longer held him, he hinted dire things; but at the first gesture of suffering from her he winced, and surrendered. And he wrote to Sheila in his best literary style. She carried the letter, as she had carried its predecessors, into the summer-house, that she might commune with her lover undisturbed.
‘Darling,’ she read, ‘the thought of how I must hurt you is hell to me.’
She caught her breath, looked once upon the sky, and then bent her eyes again to receive the blow....
With mind benumbed she looked up from the fastidious caligraphy to find Stephen himself standing, like a whipped dog, before her. For a moment they strangely stared.
‘Why have you come?’
He broke out into self-pity. ‘Oh, I can’t bear it. Don’t for God’s sake look like that.... I couldn’t leave you without a word from your lips.’
She tried to harden her heart. ‘Is that all?’
His hands made a helpless gesture. ‘I’m such a despicable coward. I’ve lived always among dreams. Real life is too hard for me—I’d be better dead.’
‘Why have you come?’ she asked. ‘Have you anything to add to this?’ She held out his letter. ‘Why not leave it at that?’
‘I had to see you,’ he said. ‘I had to ask your forgiveness. I hoped to get here before that thing. Oh, how detestable I am!’
He dropped on to the seat beside her and sat, hunched and shaking, a figure of desolation.
‘Never mind,’ said Sheila firmly. ‘Don’t cry over spilt milk. You’re quite free now to go back to her. And you’ve done me no harm.’
He stammered in amazement. ‘You can say that! Don’t you see how contemptible I am! I would like to kill myself!’
He brooded on that thought. Death was the only escape from his own insufferable egoism. Then he began to perceive that he was extracting enjoyment even from the savour of his own self-loathing. He was rolling the bitterness round on his tongue till it had a certain sweetness for him. He was indulging in an orgy of painful emotions that was delicious to the very egoism it wounded. He was discovering hitherto unplumbed depths in his nature and being fascinated by the stupendous spectacle of his own soul’s suffering. And he knew that the experience was far too morbidly interesting to drive him to suicide.
The perception of his self-pity afflicted Sheila with a new and more sickening pain. Something of this change must have been visible in her face, for with a manifest effort he became calm, and began speaking in more normal tones.
‘Perhaps we shall be glad afterwards,’ he said slowly. ‘The scandal would have killed my mother....’
Sheila winced. ‘Oh, Stephen, are you trying to make me hate you? Why did you say that?...’
‘Why——’
‘Why do you talk in that unreal way? Why do you pretend ... try at the last moment to blind me with false pious reasoning!’
‘But what I said about my mother——’
‘—Was false as water. You didn’t mean a word of it. You are too dreadfully sorry for yourself to care about your mother. You’re breaking faith, and because it hurts you you’re trying to feel good about it. God knows I haven’t disputed your decision—nor even blamed you for it. But now, please go!’
He rose. ‘I am not to come back?’
‘No, no. Go away.’
‘But, Sheila——’
‘Why will you torture me so?’ she cried. ‘It’s your own choice. If only you’d never come to-night—it would have been so much kinder.’
‘Oh, I can’t bear this!’ He trembled towards her.
She rose, to confront him with lustreless eyes.
‘Are you made of straw? Can you neither take me nor leave me?... Good-bye.’
‘God, how you hate me now!’ he murmured, as she swept past him.
She paused to say: ‘That should be nothing to you. But it’s not true. You have done me no harm. I had never known happiness before you came ... but,’ she added, with his child in her womb, ‘I shall soon forget, and you will have made no difference. None at all.’
She stumbled out into the hateful sunlight and went, half-running, towards the house.