THE CAPTAIN OF HIS SOUL
Three weeks and they were still in London. If they could only have risen up in the morning of the New Life, and turned their backs on that hateful flat forever! But, seeing that Mrs. Nevill Tyson was tired out with her journey from one room to the other, it looked as if the greater removal was hardly to be thought of yet. The doctor was consulted.
"I must examine the heart," said the man of science.
He examined the heart.
"Better wait another week," he said, shortly. Brevity is the soul of medical wit; he was a very eminent man, and time also was short.
So they waited a week, three weeks in fact. The delay gave Tyson time to study the New Life in all its bearings. At first it seemed to him that he too had attained. He was ready to fall in with all his wife's innocent schemes. For his own part he looked forward to the coming change with excitement that was pleasure in itself. He was perfectly prepared for an open rupture with the past, or, indeed, for any sudden and violent course of action, the more violent the better. He dreamed of cataclysms and upheavals, of trunks packed hastily in the night, of flight by express trains from London, the place of all disaster. His soul would have been appeased by a telegram.
Instead of telegrams he received doctors' bulletins, contradictory, ambiguous, elusive. They began to get on his nerves.
Still, there could be no possible doubt that he had attained. At any rate he had advanced a considerable distance on the way of peace. It looked like it; he was happy without anything to make him happy, a state which seemed to be a feature of the New Life.
The New Life was not exhausting. He had an idea that he could keep it up indefinitely. But at the end of the first fortnight he realized that he was drifting, not towards peace, but towards a horrible, teeming, stagnant calm. Before long he would be given over to dullness and immitigable ennui.
A perfectly sane man would have faced the facts frankly. He would have pulled himself together, taken himself out of the house, and got something to do. And under any other circumstances, this is what Tyson would have done. Unfortunately, he considered it his duty as a repentant husband to stay at home; and at home he stayed, cultivating his emotions. Ah, those emotions! If Tyson had been simply and passionately vicious there might have been some chance for him. But sentimentalism, subtlest source of moral corruption, worked in him like that hectic disease that flames in the colors of life, flouting its wretched victim with an extravagant hope. The deadly taint was spreading, stirred into frightful activity by the shock of his wife's illness. He stayed indoors, lounging in easy-chairs, and lying about on sofas; he smoked, drank, yawned; he hovered in passages, loomed in doorways; he hung about his wife's bedroom, chattering aimlessly, or sat in silence and deep depression by her side. In vain she implored him to go out, for goodness' sake, and get some fresh air. Once or twice, to satisfy her, he went, and yawned through a miserable evening at some theatre, when, as often as not, he left before the end of the first act. Hereditary conscience rose up and thrust him violently from the house; outside, the spirit of the Baptist minister, of the guileless cultivator of orchids, haled him by the collar and dragged him home. Or he would spend whole afternoons looking into shop windows in a dreamy quest of flowers, toys, trinkets, something that would "suit my wife." Judging from the unconsidered trifles that he brought home, he must have credited the poor little soul with criminally extravagant tastes. The tables and shelves about her couch were heaped with idiotic lumber, on which Mrs. Nevill Tyson looked with thoughtful eyes.
She was perpetually thinking now; she lay there weaving long chains of reasoning from the flowers of her innocent fancy, chains so brittle and insubstantial, they would have offered no support to any creature less light than she. If Tyson was more than usually sulky, that was the serious side of him coming out; if he was silent, well, everybody knows that the deepest feelings are seldom expressed in words; if he was atrociously irritable, it was no wonder, considering the strain he had undergone, poor fellow. She reminded herself how he had cried over her like a child; she rehearsed that other scene of confession and forgiveness—the tender, sacred words, the promises and vows. Already the New Life was passing into the life of memory, while she told herself that it could not pass. It takes so much to make a strong man cry, you know. When doubts came, she always fell back on the argument from tears.
He was reading to her one evening after she had gone tired to bed (reading was so much easier than talking), when Mrs. Nevill Tyson, whose attention wandered dreadfully, interrupted him.
"Nevill—you remember that night when the accident happened? I mean—just before the fire?"
He moaned out an incoherent assent.
"And you remember what you thought?"
His only answer was a nervous movement of his feet.
"Well, I've often wanted to tell you about that. I know you didn't really think there was anything between me and Louis, but—"
"Of course I didn't."
"I know—really. Still it might have made a difference. I would have told you all about it that night, if it hadn't been for that beastly fire. You know mother said I was awfully silly—I laid myself open to all sorts of dreadful things. She said I ought to have left London—that time. I couldn't. I knew when you came back you would come right here—I might have missed you. Besides, it would have been horrible to go back to Thorneytoft, where everybody was talking and thinking things. They would talk, Nevill."
"The fiends! You shouldn't have minded them, darling. They didn't understand you. How could they? The brutes."
"Me? Oh, I wouldn't have minded that."
Tyson was frankly astonished. Apparently she had not a notion that she had been the subject of any scurrilous reports at Drayton Parva or elsewhere. From the first she had resented their social ostracism (when she became aware of it) as an insult to him; and now, evidently she had found the clue to the mysterious scandal in her knowledge of his conduct. Before she could do that, in her own mind she must have accused him gravely. And yet, but for this characteristic little inadvertence, he would never have known it. How much did she know?
She went on a little incoherently; so many ideas cropped up to be gathered instantly, and wreathed into the sequence of her thought. "Mother said people would talk if I didn't take care. She thought Sir Peter—poor old Sir Peter—do you remember his funny red face, and his throat—all turkey's wattles?—because he said I was the prettiest woman in Leicestershire. I don't see much harm in that, you know. Anyhow, he can't very well do it again—now. Perhaps—she thought I oughtn't to have gone about quite so much with Louis."
"Why did you, Molly? It was a mistake."
"I wonder—Well, it was all my fault."
"No; it was Stanistreet's. He knew what he was about."
"It was mine. I liked him."
"What did you see to like in him?" (He really had some curiosity on that point.)
"I liked him because he was your friend—the best friend you ever had. I hated the other men that used to come. And when you were away I felt somehow as if—as if—he was all that was left of you. But that was afterwards. I think I liked him first of all because he liked you."
"How do you know it was me he liked?"
"Oh, it was; I know. Whatever other people thought, he always understood. Do you see? We used to talk about you, every day I think, till just the last—and then, he knew what I was thinking. Then he was sorry when baby died. I can never forget that."
(Inconceivable! Had she never for an instant understood? Ah, well, if he had been so transfigured in her sight, she might well idealize Stanistreet.)
She went on impetuously, with inextricable confusion of persons and events. "Nevill—I wasn't kind to him. They said I didn't care—and I did—I did! It nearly broke my heart. Only I was afraid you'd think I loved him better than you, and so—I didn't take any notice of him. I thought he wouldn't mind—he was so little, you see; and then I thought some day I could tell him. Oh, Nevill—do you think he minded?"
He bowed his head. He had not a word to say. He was trying to realize this thing. To keep his worthless love, she had given up everything, even to the supreme sacrifice of her motherhood.
Her fingers clutched the counterpane, working feverishly. She had had something else to say. But she was afraid to say it, to speak of that unspeakable new thing, her hidden hope of motherhood. He covered her hands with his to keep them still.
"You see it was all right, as it happened."
"Yes—as it happened. But I think it was a little hard on poor old Stanistreet."
"Sometimes I wonder if it was fair. He used to say things; but I didn't take them in at the time. I didn't understand; and somehow now, I feel as if it had never happened. Perhaps it wasn't quite fair—but then I didn't think. I wonder why he's never been to see me."
"Can't say, Molly."
"He must have seen the fire in the papers—I hope he didn't think what you did. I mean—think—"
"What?"
"Think that I cared."
"Don't, Molly, for God's sake! I never thought it. I was in an infernal bad temper, that was all."
"So that hasn't made any difference?"
"Of course it hasn't."
"Nothing can make any difference now then, can it?"
It was too much. He got up and walked up and down the room. Poor Mrs. Nevill Tyson, she had put his idea into words. She had suggested that there was a difference, and suggestion is a fatal thing to an unsteady mind. In that moment of fearful introspection he said to himself that it was all very well for her to say there was no difference. There was a difference. She was not exactly lying on a bed of roses; but in the nature of things her lot was easier than his. There was no comparison between the man's case and the woman's. He had not sunk into that serene apathy which is nine-tenths of a woman's virtue. He was not an invalid—neither was he a saint. It is not necessary to be a saint in order to be a martyr; poor devils have their martyrdom. Why could not women realize these simple facts? Why would they persist in believing the impossible?
His face was very red when he turned round and answered. "I can't talk about it, Molly. God knows what I feel."
This was the way he helped to support that little fiction of the man of deep and strong emotions, frost-bound in an implacable reserve.
He took up the book again, and she fell asleep at the sound of the reading. He sat and watched her.
Straight and still in her white draperies, she lay like a dead woman. Some trick of the shaded lamplight, falling on her face, exaggerated its pallor and discoloration. He was fascinated by the very horror of it; as he stared at her face it seemed to expand, to grow vague and insubstantial, till his strained gaze relaxed and shifted, making it start into relief again. He watched it swimming in and out of a liquid dusk of vision, till the sight of it became almost a malady of the nerves. And as she saw it now he would see it all the days of his life. He felt like the living captive bound to the dead in some infernal triumph of Fate. Dead and not dead—that was the horrible thing. Beneath that mask that was not Molly, Molly was alive. She would live, she would be young when he was long past middle age.
He found it in him to think bitterly of the little thing for the courage that had saved his life—for that. Of all her rash and inconsiderate actions this was the worst. Courage had never formed part of his feminine ideal; it was the glory of the brute and the man, and she should have left it to men and to brutes like him. And yet if that detestable "accident," as she called it, had happened to him, she would have loved him all the better for it.
Odd. But some women are made so. Marion Hathaway was that sort—she stuck like a leech.
And now—the frivolous, feather-headed little wife, whom he had held so cheap and wronged so lightly, urging her folly as almost a justification of the wrong, she too—She appalled him with the terrific eternity of her love. Was it possible that this feeling, which he had despised as the blind craving and clinging of the feminine animal, could take a place among the supreme realities, the things more living than flesh and blood, which in his way he still contrived to believe in? The idea made him extremely uncomfortable, and he put it from him. He had drifted into that stagnant backwater of the soul where the scum of thought rises to the surface. Molly was better than most women; but, poor little thing, there was nothing transcendent about her virtues. She loved him after the manner of her kind.
No—no—no. She loved him as no other woman had ever loved him before. She loved him because she believed in him against the evidence of her senses. If she only knew! A diabolical impulse seized him to awaken her then and there and force her to listen to a full confession of his iniquities, without reticence and without apology. Surely no woman's love could stand before that appalling revelation? But no; what other women would do he would not undertake to say; she would only look at him with her innocent eyes, reiterating "It makes no difference."
Would he have cared more if she had cared less? On the whole—no. And what if she had been a woman of a higher, austerer type? That woman would have repelled him, thrown him back upon himself. She had drawn him by her very foolishness. He had been brought back to her, again and again, by the certainty of her unreasoning affection. By its purity also. That had saved him from falling lower than a certain dimly defined level. If there was a spark of good in him he owed it to her. He had never sunk so low as in that intolerable moment when he had doubted her. For the behavior of the brute is low enough in all conscience; but below that is the behavior of the cad. Tyson had his own curious code of morals.
Yes; and in the raw enthusiasm of remorse he had made all manner of vows and promises, and he felt bound in honor to keep them. He had talked of a rupture with the past. A rupture with the past! You might as well talk of breaking with your own shadow. The shadow of your past. Imbecile expression! The past was in his blood and nerves; it was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. It was he. Or rather it was this body of his that seemed to live with a hideous independent life of its own. And yet, even yet, there were moments when he caught a glimpse of his better self struggling as if under the slough of dissolution; the soul that had never seen the sun was writhing to leap into the light. He would have given the whole world to be able to love Molly. There was no death and no corruption like the death of love; and the spirit of his passion had been too feeble to survive its divorce from the flesh.
He could not look away. He rose and lifted the lamp-shade, throwing the pitiless light on the thing that fascinated him. She stirred in her sleep, turning a little from the light. He bent over her pillow and peered into her face. She woke suddenly, as if his gaze had drawn her from sleep; and from the look in her eyes he judged a little of the horror his own must have betrayed.
He shrank back guiltily, replaced the shade, and sat down in the chair at the foot of the bed. She looked at him. His whole frame trembled; his eyes were blurred with tears; the parted lips drooped with weakness, bitterness, and unappeased desire. Did she know that in that moment the hunger and thirst after righteousness raged more fiercely than any earthly appetite? It seemed to him that in her look he read pity and perfect comprehension. He hid his face in his hands.
After that night he began to have a nervous dread of going into her room. He was always afraid that she would "say something." By this time his senses, too, were morbidly acute. The sight and smell of drugs, dressings, and disinfectants afflicted him with an agony of sensation. There was no escaping these things in the little flat, and he could not help associating his wife with them: it seemed as if a crowd of trivial and sordid images was blotting out the delicate moral impressions he had once had. Tyson was paying the penalty of having lived the life of the senses; his brain had become their servant, and he was horrified to find that he could not command its finest faculties at pleasure.
There was no disguising the detestable truth. He could attain no further. From those heights of beautiful emotion where he had disported himself lately there could be no gradual lapse into indifference. It was a furious break-neck descent to the abominable end—repulsion and infinite dislike, tempered at first by a little remnant of pity. Every day her presence was becoming more intolerable to him. But, for the few moments that he perforce spent with her, he was more elaborately attentive than ever. As his tenderness declined his manner became more scrupulously respectful, (She would have given anything to have heard him say "You little fool," as in the careless days of the old life.) He had no illusions left. Not even to himself could he continue that pleasant fiction of the strong man with feelings too deep for utterance. Still, there were certain delicacies: if his love was dead he must do his best to bury it decently—anyhow, anywhere, out of his sight and hers.
He noticed now that, as he carried her from one room to the other, she turned her face from his, as she had turned it from the light.
And she was growing stronger.
One afternoon she heard the doctor talking to Nevill in the passage. He uttered the word "change."
"Shall I send her to Bournemouth?" said Nevill.
"Yes, yes. Good-morning. Or, better still, take her yourself to the Riviera," sang out the doctor.
The door closed behind the eminent man, and Tyson went out immediately afterwards.
He came home late that night, and she did not see him till the afternoon of the following day, when he turned into the dining-room on his way out of the house. He was nervously polite, and apologized for having an appointment. She noticed that he looked tired and ill; but there was another look in his face that robbed it of the pathos of illness, and she saw that too.
"Nevill," said she, "I wish you'd go away for a bit."
"Where do you want me to go to?"
"Oh, anywhere." She considered a moment. "You'll be ill if you stop here. You ought to go ever so far away. A sea-voyage would be the very thing."
"It wouldn't do me much good to go sea-voyaging by myself."
For a second her face brightened. "No—but—I shall be quite strong in another fortnight—and then—I could go out to you wherever you were, and we could come back together, couldn't we?"
There was no answer.
"You might go—to please me."
He laughed shortly. "I might go to please myself. But what's the good of talking about it when you know I can't."
"Well, if you'd rather wait, there's the Riviera"—he colored violently—"would that do for you?"
"Yes; I think it would 'do' for me—just about."
"Well—anywhere then. If I'm well enough to go to the Riviera, I'm—"
"You're not well enough to go to the Riviera."
"What makes you think that?" she asked gravely.
He looked away and muttered something about "Thompson," and "the journey." Again that look of agonized comprehension!
She said nothing. She knew that he had lied. Ah, to what pitiful shifts she had driven him!
He hurried off to his appointment, and she lay on her couch by the window with clenched hands and closed eyelids. She had no sensations to speak of; but thought came to her—confused, overwhelming thought—an agony of ideas. She loved him. Ah, the shame of it! And that hidden hope of hers became a terror. Mrs. Nevill Tyson's soul was struggling with its immortality. The hot flare of summer was in the streets and in the room; the old life was surging everywhere around her; above the brutal roar and gust of it, blown from airy squares, flung back from throbbing thoroughfares, she caught responsive voices, rhythmic, inarticulate murmurs, ripples of the resonant joy of the world. Down there, in their dim greenery, the very plane-trees were whispering together under the shadow of the great flats.
What were these things to Mrs. Nevill Tyson? She had entered the New Life, as you enter heaven, alone.