The Dark House

by I. A. R. Wylie

III

1

It meant a tightening—a screwing up of his whole life. Time had to be found. The hours had to be packed closer to make room for her. He grasped after fresh opportunities to make money with a white-hot assiduity. He worked harder. For he was hag-ridden by his unfaithfulness. He drew up a remorseless programme of his days, and after that Francey might only walk home with him from the hospital. And there was an hour on Sunday evening when he was too tired for anything else.

It meant a ceaseless, active negation: a "No" to the simple wish to buy her a bunch of flowers, "No" to the longing to walk a little farther with her in the quiet dusk, "No" to the very thought of her.

2

As usual, on the way home, they discussed their best "cases." There was No. 10 in A Ward, a raddled woman of the streets who had been brought in the night before as the result of a crime passionnel, and whose injuries had been the subject of long deliberations. Even before they had reached the hospital archway Robert and Francey agreed that Rogers' air of mystery was simply a professional disguise for complete bafflement.

"It's the sort of case I'd like to have," Robert said. "Something you can get your teeth into and worry. I believe if I were on my own—given a free hand—I'd work it out—pull her through. Rogers may too. But just now he's marking time. And there's nothing to hope from time in a job like that. No constitution. Rotten all through. Still, it would be a feather in one's cap."

He brooded fiercely, intently, like a hound on a hot scent. People turned to look at the big, shabby young man with the sunken, burning eyes that stared through them as though they had been so many shadows. He did not, in fact, see them at all. He made his way by sheer instinct across the crowded street.

"She's terribly afraid of death," Francey said. "It's awful to be so afraid. It must make life itself terrible."

"They'll operate soon as they dare—an exploratory operation. If only I could have a say—a real say! It's maddening to know so much—to be sure of oneself. I don't believe Rogers would take me out on his private work if he knew I knew all I do. I'm glad we're on a surgical post together, Francey. I don't know what I'd do if I hadn't got you to talk things over with."

"You daren't talk of anything else," she answered unexpectedly. "You're frightened of our being happy together. You're always trying to justify yourself."

"I'm not—what rubbish!"

He tried to laugh at her. It was so like Francey to dash off down a side issue. And yet it was true. He did try to think as much as he could of that side of their common life. It did add an appearance of stability and reason to the splendid unreason of his loving her. It made up to him for those dismaying breaks when her face and body stood like a scorching pillar of fire between himself and his work, to find that when they were together they could be sternly practical, discuss their eases and criticize their superiors as though, beneath it all, there were not this golden, insurgent sea whose high tides swirled over his landmarks. Not destroying them.

In those latter times he loved her humbly, with wonder and passionate self-abasement. But in their work they stood further away from one another. He could criticize her, and that gave him a heady sense of power and freedom. He never forgot the year that she had deliberately thrown away. And even now, when she stood at the beginning of the road which he had already passed over, she seemed to him full of strange curiosities and wayward, purposeless interests. There were days when an ugly Chinese print, picked up in some back-street pawnshop, or the misfortunes of one of her raffish hangers-on, or some wild student rag, appeared to wipe out the vital business of life. She was known to be brilliant, but he distrusted her power of leaping to conclusions over the head of his own mathematical and exact reasoning. He distrusted still more her tendency to be right in the teeth of every sort of evidence to the contrary. It seemed that she took into her calculations factors that no one else found, significant, unprofessional straws in the wind, things she could not even explain.

And yet she understood when he talked about his work, and that alone was like a gift to him. No one else understood—for that matter, no one else had had to listen. He knew that Christine was too tired, and poor overburdened Cosgrave would only have gazed helplessly at him, wondering why this strong, self-sufficient friend should pour out such unintelligible stuff over his own aching head. So he had learnt to be silent. Even now it was difficult to begin. He stammered and was shy and distrustful and eager, sometimes crudely self-confident, like a child who has played alone too long.

And Francey listened, for the most part critical and dispassionate, but with sudden gestures of unmotivated tenderness: as when in the midst of his dissertation on a theory of insanity and crime she had kissed him.

Sometimes for them both the prose and poetry of their relationship met and clasped hands. That was when they took their walk down Harley Street to have another look at the house which was one day to be adorned with the celebrated brass plates. At present it was solidly occupied by several eminent-sounding medical gentlemen who would have to be ruthlessly dislodged when their time came.

For it was the best house in the street, and, of course, the Doctors
Robert and Francey Stonehouse would have to have the best.

And once they quarrelled about nothing at all, or about everything—they hardly knew. It was an absurd quarrel, which blazed up and went out again like fire in stubble. Perhaps they had waited too long for their allotted hour together—dreamed too much about it, so that when it came they could hardly bear it, and almost longed for it to be over. And in the midst of it Mr. Ricardo drifted in on one of his strange, distressful visits to Christine, and drove them out of doors to roam the drowsy Sunday streets, hand in hand, like any other pair of vulgar, homeless lovers. For Francey could not stay when Mr. Ricardo came. His hatred of her was a burning, poisonous sore that gave no peace to any of them.

"It's a sort of jealousy," Robert reflected. "We three have always held together. He's had no one else to care about. And now you've come, and he thinks you want to take me away from him."

"I do," Francey said unexpectedly.

"Not in the way he means."

"You don't know——"

"He's been good to me. I'd never have got through without him. I can't have him hurt. And you will fight him, Francey. I know he's crabbed and bitter, but so would you be if you'd been twisted out of shape all your life. And you only do it for the fun of the thing. Fundamentally, you think alike."

"We don't, that's just it. I'm sorry for him, and if it had been anything less vital I'd compromise—he'd compromise, too, perhaps. We'd both lie low and look pleasant about our differences. But as it is we can't help ourselves. We've got to stand up and fight——"

"I say, that sounds jolly dramatic."

"It is rather."

"Next thing you'll be saying you believe in God."

"Well, I do——"

He stopped short and let go her hand. He was physically ashamed and uncomfortable. He tried to laugh, but for the moment they were face to face, and he could not mistake her seriousness. They were like strangers, peering at each other through the grey dusk.

"Look here, Francey, dearest, you don't expect me to believe that? You're just joking, aren't you? You're—you're a modern woman, with a scientific training, too. You can't believe in an old, worn-out myth."

"I didn't say that."

"'An untested hypothesis,'" he quoted teasingly, but with a stirring anger.

"I don't know about that, either. We're both bound by our profession to admit an empirical test. And if we human beings can't survive without God——"

"But we can—we do."

"I can't."

He threw up his head.

"Why do women always become personal when they argue?"

"And why do rationalists always become irrational?"

They walked on slowly, apart, vaguely afraid. He wanted to change the subject, to take her by the arm and hold her fast. For she was drifting away from him. Her voice sounded remote and troubling, like a little old tune that he could not quite remember. Its emotion fretted his overstrained nerves. He wanted to close his ears against it. It was a trivial tune which might become a torment.

"It's not only me. It's everyone. Most of us are frightfully unhappy. Don't you realize that? And the more we understand life the more desperate we get. Savages and children may do without a god, but we can't. We know too much. Even the stupidest—the most careless of us. Think of Howard and Gertie and all that lot. Every second word is 'What's the good? What's it all about?' They make a great deal of noise to cover up their unhappiness. They're terrified of loneliness and silence. And one day it'll have to be faced."

"Oh, if you're going to take Howard as an example—" he interrupted.

"—and Rufus Cosgrave," she added.

He laughed with a boyish malice.

"Cosgrave doesn't need a god. He's got me. I'll look after him."

"You think you can? And then we ourselves. We're different, aren't we? We've got our work. We're going to do big things. For whom?—for what? For our fellow-creatures? But if we don't care for our fellow-creatures? And we don't, do we? Not naturally. The Brotherhood of Man is just dangerous nonsense. Naturally men loathe one another in the mass. How can we pretend to love some of those people we see every day in the wards with their terrible faces—their terrible minds? But the idea of God does somehow translate them—it gets underneath the ugliness—they do become in some mystic way my brothers and my sisters."

He found it strangely difficult to answer calmly. It would have been easier to have bludgeoned her into silence by a shouted "It's all snivelling, wretched rot!" like an angry schoolboy. He did not know why he was so angry. Perhaps Ricardo was right. It was something vital. He could feel the old man's shadow at his side, his hand plucking his sleeve, urging him on, claiming his loyalty. They were allies fighting together against a poisonous miasma that sapped men's brains—their intellectual integrity.

"Piling one fallacy on another isn't argument, Francey. We don't need to like our fellow-creatures. It's a mistake to care. Emotion upsets one's judgment. Scientists—the best men in the profession—try to eliminate personal feeling altogether. They're out for knowledge for its own sake. That's good enough for them."

"And the end of that—organized, scientific beastliness, like modern war. Knowledge perverted to every sort of deviltry. Huge swollen heads and miserable withered hearts. One of these days we'll blow ourselves to pieces——"

They were both breathless and more than a little incoherent. They had entered into a playful tussle, and now they were fighting one another with set teeth.

"I don't believe you believe a word you're saying," he stammered. "You know as well as I do that it's only since we began to throw off superstition that we've begun to move. Or perhaps you don't want to move—don't believe in progress."

"Progress towards what?" she flung back impetuously. "Perfection? Some point where we'd have no poverty, no war, no ignorance, no death even; where we'd all have every mortal thing we want? The millennium? That's only another word for Hell. It's only by pretending that there are things we want, and that we should be happy if we had them, that we can believe in happiness at all. All this unrest, this sick despair every morning of our lives when we drag ourselves out of bed and wonder why we bother—it's just because we've begun to suspect that the millennium is of no use to us. We've got to have more than that—some sort of spiritual background—or cut our throats."

"Wild rhapsodizing, Francey. You don't know a thing."

"I don't. Nor do you. When I said I believed, I meant I hoped—I trusted. And if there isn't a God at the end of it all, you people who want to keep us alive for the sake of the knowledge you get out of us will have to make one up."

Whereat, suddenly, in a cool, refreshing gust, their sense of humour returned and blew them close to one another. They laughed and took hands again—a little shyly, like lovers who had been parted for a long time.

"What rot—our quarrelling over nothing at all," Robert said, "when
we've only got this hour together. I wanted to say 'I love you,
Francey—I love you, dear' over and over again. Say 'I love you too,
Robert.'"

"I love you too," she answered soberly.

But the crack was there—a mere fissure in the ground between them—a place to be avoided even in their thoughts.

3

At night when his work was over and the unrest grew too strong to be fought, he crept down the black, creaking stairs, through the sleeping backwater of Drayton Mews, and out into the streets. He walked fast, with his head down, guiltily, like a man flying from a crime. But in the grave square where Francey Wilmot lived he slackened speed, and, under the thick mantle of the trees, stood so still that he was only a deeper shadow. Then release came. It was like gentle summer rain falling on his fever. There was no one to see his weakness. He could think and feel simply and naturally as a lover, without remorse. Sometimes a light burnt in her window, and then he knew that she was working, making up for those queer, wild play-hours. He could imagine her under the shaded lamplight, the books heaped round her, and her hands clenched hard in the thick brown hair. He could feel the peace, the rich, deep stillness round her. And a loving tenderness, exquisite and delicate as a dream, welled up in him. He said things out of his heart to her that he had never said: broken, stumbling things, melted in the white-heat of their truth into a kind of poetry of which the burden never changed. "I can't live without you—I can't live without you." He could have knelt before her, burying his burning face in her lap in strange humility—childlike surrender.

And when the window was dark he knew that she had gone out to dance, to the theatre, with friends whom he did not know, belonging to that other life in which he had no part. And then his loneliness was like a black sea. He leant against the railings, weak with weariness and hunger, fighting his boy's tears, until she came. He did not speak to her. She never knew that he was there. He hid, his heart stifling him, until the door closed on her. Then, since she had come back to him, belonged to him again, he could go in peace.

The others—Howard and Gertie and even Connie now—went in and out, risking ruthless ejection if she were hard pressed, to sit in the best chairs, with their feet in the fender and drink coffee and smoke endlessly whilst they poured their good-natured cynicism over life. If they were hungry they rifled Francey's larder, and if they were hard up they borrowed her money. But after the one time Robert never went. He did not want to meet them. And besides the big square room with its mark of other stately days—its panelled walls, rich ceilings and noble doors—was his enemy. It was steeped in a mellow, unconscious luxury that threatened him. There were relics from Francey's old home, trophies from her Italian wanderings, books that his hands itched just to touch, and things of strange troubling beauty. A bronze statue of a naked faun stood in the corner where the light fell upon it, and seemed to gather into itself everything that he feared—a joyous dancing to some far-off music.

The room would not let him forget that Francey held money, which he had had to squeeze his life dry to get, lightly and indifferently. She gave it with both hands. She had always had enough, and it seemed to her a little thing. Between people who cared for one another it counted less than a word, and his sullen refusal of every trivial pleasure and relief that lay in her power to give them hurt and puzzled her. She saw in it only a bitter pride.

"You might at least let me make Christine's life easier in little things," she said.

He could not tell her that Christine would have been afraid for him, as he was afraid of the deep chairs that had seemed to clasp his tired body in drowsy arms, of the rugs that drank up every harsh sound, of the warm, fragrant atmosphere that was like a blow in the face of their chill and barren poverty.

So after that one time he kept away. But he could always see the room and Francey working there, and the slender, joyful body of the faun poised on the verge of its mystic dance.

Once, Francey was too strong for him, and they bought tickets for the theatre, and he sat hunched beside her in the front row of the cheap seats and stared down at the great square of light like an outcast gazing at the golden gates of Paradise. It was The Tempest, and he hardly understood. It broke over him in overpowering sound and colour. He was dazed and blinded. He forgot Francey. He sat with his gaunt white face between his bands and watched them pass: Prospero, Miranda, Ferdinand, Ariel—figures of a noble, glittering company—and wretched, uncouth Caliban crouched on the outskirts of their lives, pining for his lost kingdom. But in the interval he was silent, awkward and heavy with an emotion that could not find an outlet. He felt her hand close over his—an, almost anxious hand.

"Robert, you like it, don't you? You're not bored?" He turned to look dazedly at her, stammering in his confusion.

"I've never been to a theatre before."

"Never? Oh, my dear——"

"Only to a circus, long ago." He drew back hastily into himself. He did not want her to be sorry like that. He would not let her see how shaken he was. "I never wanted to go," he said.

After that they walked home together, and in the empty street that led into her square a moonlight spirit of phantasy seemed to possess her, and she sang under her breath and danced in front of him, rather solemnly as she had done as a little girl:

"Come unto these yellow sands
And then take hands. . ."

He caught hold of her. Everything was unreal—they themselves and the unfamiliar street, painted with silver and black shadows.

"Don't—you're dancing away from me; there's nothing for you to dance to."

She smiled back wistfully.

"'The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices. . .'"

"I don't hear them," he muttered clumsily.

"Caliban heard them——"

"And you're Ariel," he said, with sudden, sorrowful understanding.
"Ariel!"

From the steps of the dark house she looked down at him, her eager face smiling palely in the white, still light.

"Ariel wasn't a woman, dear duffer. You'll have to read it. I'll lend it to you. And then we'll go again."

He shook his head.

"No."

"Yes—often—often, Robert. We've been nearer to one another than ever before—just these last minutes—quite, quite close. We've got to find each other in pleasure too."

He rallied all his strength. He said stiffly, pompously:

"It's been awfully nice, of course. And thank you for taking me. But
I don't really care for that sort of thing."

And for a moment they remained facing one another whilst the joy died out of her eyes, leaving a queer distress. Then they shook hands and he left her, coldly, prosaically, as though nothing had happened. But he was like a drunken man who had fallen into a sea of glory.

"The clouds, methought, would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me. . ."

There was all that work that he had meant to do before morning. It seemed far off—more unreal and fantastic than a fairy tale. His heart and brain, ached with willingness and loathing.

". . . that, when I wak'd, I cried to dream again. . ."

He set his teeth. He clenched his hands till they hurt him.

"I'll have to keep away from all that," he thought aloud, "altogether—till I don't care any more."