XLIV
He remembered this old château of Picardy. It lay to the right of the cottage where he had been billeted for a few weeks in 1917. He had hardly thought of it since, because that memory had been effaced by more exciting and deadly adventure. But now, as he passed up the dirty village where cocks and hens clustered across the roadway and peasant women stared at him from doorways where once British soldiers had lounged during Divisional rests between long spells in the line, he remembered the way past the pump, and then a sharp turn to the right by the estaminet of “La Véritable Coucou”—that comical name came back to him now with intimate remembrance—and so to the long avenue of poplars leading straight through the park to the old white house with its pointed roofs.
The Vicomte de Plumoison had given the run of the place to any British officers in the neighbourhood, and Yvonne, his daughter, had invited them to “five o’clock,” as she called her tea-parties. She was not very beautiful, though an elegant little lady, but it was paradise enough to sit with any lady in any drawing-room, after long terms of servitude in the lousy trenches, in exile from all beauty. . . .
He turned through the iron gates and walked slowly up the avenue. Somewhere in that white house was Joyce. His heart beat at the thought, with sickening kind of thuds. He was passionate to see her, to take her hand, to draw her close to him, and be assured of her love after all this foolishness of separation and estrangement. A word from her, a straight look out of her eyes, would be enough to kill that toad of evil still alive in the slime of suspicion, in those base and primitive instincts of the male beast which lurk as a heritage of cave-man ancestry in all human brains.
Janet Welford had spoken a true thing when she said, “Joyce is the Beatrice of your Divina Commedia.” In the time of his greatest bitterness against her, when he felt most injured by her ill-temper with him, she had been his vision, and in his heart, inescapable. His loyalty had been strained, but was stronger than all his weakness, and now, as he went towards her, the thought of this girl who had given him her beauty so generously in time of war, so recklessly, perhaps, fevered him.
He quickened his pace, and instead of going straight up the avenue, took a winding path which led to the back of the château by the trout stream. Perhaps it was some mental “wave-length” which impelled him to do that instinctively, and without conscious purpose, because, as he made his way through a little glade, he saw Joyce a few yards away from him.
There was a stone seat there, which he remembered. It was underneath a grass bank with a little hollowed place in which stood a statue of “Notre Dame de Lourdes,”—painted blue and white, amidst tall growing ferns. He had once stood there talking to Yvonne de Plumoison with a group of officers. Joyce was alone. Her hat lay on the seat by her side. She had a book on her lap, but she wasn’t reading. She was weeping. At least there were tears in her eyes when, at the sound of his footsteps on the path, she looked quickly towards him, and then sprang up with a cry of surprise.
He called her name, and went forward hurriedly, with tremendous gladness in his eyes. She looked as he had thought of her so often. As she stood there, waiting for him, the sunlight, shining through young leaves, touched her hair, giving it a glory. She wore a green frock, cut low at the neck, and looked like the Rosalind in Arden Woods.
She let him take her hands and kiss her, but did not answer his passion with any warmth of greeting, so that almost in a moment he was chilled, and saw that she had become pale in his arms.
“Here’s a seat,” she said. “Let’s sit and talk.”
He sat beside her, holding her hand, and was struck by its coldness.
“I’ve been longing for you,” he told her. “Dreaming of you o’ nights.”
She said something about his letters. They didn’t suggest any passionate longing, she thought. He hadn’t bothered to join her in Paris when she asked him.
He asked her to “wash all that out.” He’d been a blithering idiot. It had all been a question of jangled nerves—the wrong perspective—egotism. He’d been thinking things out during his loneliness. He’d killed his miserable ego. All he wanted now was to make her happy and to serve her. They’d made a mistake in taking things too seriously, arguing about trivialities as though they mattered. They’d allowed “politics” to strain their relations! It was inconceivable, looking back on it. What kids they’d been! He had grown up at last. No more of that sort of nonsense. Tolerance was his watch-word. He’d come to understand that a plain getting on with life mattered more than theories and minor differences in points of view. Love was the only thing worth while.
“Do you mean that?” asked Joyce. “Do you think, honestly, that love over-rides everything?”
“Every damn thing,” said Bertram.
She gave him a queer glancing smile.
“It’s a dangerous philosophy. Sometimes it leads to peculiar complications!”
“How do you mean?” asked Bertram. “To me it simplifies the whole riddle. The love of a man for his mate, through thick and thin, fine weather and foul, ‘in sickness and in health.’—D’you remember the old words in St. Mary Abbot’s?”
“Yes. I remember. I was a baby then. We were both babes, as ignorant of life as those tits.”
She pointed to two little birds fluttering about the branch of a tree where they sat.
“But with the same share in the eternal scheme of things,” said Bertram. “You and I went to St. Mary Abbot’s under the same divine impulse as those two tits set up housekeeping in the tree-top.”
“Yes,” said Joyce, “I suppose it’s over-civilisation that has spoilt the game.”
“Is the game spoilt?” asked Bertram.
“It’s hard to play according to the rules, sometimes. And if we keep to the rules the fun goes out of the game. It’s just duty. Mostly disagreeable, and sometimes intolerable.”
Bertram laughed so that the two tits were frightened and flew away from their branch. He took Joyce’s hand and put it to his lips.
“We seem to be talking in parables and conundrums. Joyce, let’s be human. Are you glad I’ve come back to you? Are we going to wipe the slate clean and start fresh and fair down the good old highway of married life? Say a word of love to me! Put your arms around my neck, and whisper what I want to hear.”
Joyce’s face flamed with colour for a moment, and then paled again.
“I can’t!” she said. “Something’s happened to put things all wrong—worse than before—between you and me.”
He stared at her, and knew that Fate, or Luck, or God, was going to hit him another blow between the eyes. What did she mean? That “Something’s happened—“?
“For Christ’s sake,” he said, “what do you mean?”
“It’s about Kenneth,” she answered in a low voice.
That name, after what Susan had said, after a night of dark agony, after a fight with frightful suspicion in which old base jealousies had surged up from the darkness of his mind, was like the jab of a bayonet in his brain.
“What the hell has he got to do with it?” he asked, very quietly.
Joyce touched his hand, as though asking for patience and understanding.
“You’ll get angry, I know. But I can’t help it. These things just happen. It’s as though we hadn’t any control over them, or over ourselves. I’ve always thought of Kenneth as nothing more than a good friend—a nice boy. We’ve known each other since we were kids. He understands me better than any one in the world. We speak in shorthand, as it were—the same code of thought and all that. He didn’t seem to mind when I married you. He thought it was good fun. It made no difference to our friendship. He’s perfectly straight and clean. He’d no idea at all, until a few days ago, that he loved me—in another kind of way. We found out quite suddenly, by accident. We were laughing—playing the fool, as usual. We were in a boat together on the lake in the Bois—you know—by the Île des Châlets. Suddenly he looked up at me with a kind of surprise in his eyes. And something seemed to fire a spark between us. I leant over him and kissed him, and he said, ‘What’s up with us?’—in a frightened way. We found out then that our old friendship had changed. For the first time I knew the meaning of love.—Never like yours and mine, Bertram. Kenneth and I were made for each other from the time we were babies together. It’s just that. Unfortunately we’ve only just found out. . . . I’m frightfully sorry, Bertram. But there it is, and nothing can alter it now.”
She had spoken all this quietly, in a matter-of-fact way, but now she began to cry again, with her hands up to her face.
Bertram had sat very still, with his head bent during her monologue. A greyness crept into his face, giving him a dead look. He was dead for a little while. Joyce had killed the spirit in him by those words of hers. He had nothing to say to himself. Not even anger stirred in him, nor self-pity. All that came into his mind was a kind of numbness, and one name reiterated. Kenneth! Kenneth! Kenneth Murless!
Joyce took her hands down from her face, and wiped her tears away with a handkerchief. Then she spoke again in the same quiet tone.
“Kenneth and I want to play the game. He’s fearfully sorry about you. He likes you immensely and thinks I’ve given you a rough deal. That’s true. I’ve been beastly to you, but I didn’t know all the time that it was Kenneth I wanted. You’ve been jolly good to me, Bertram. I see that now. But it’s impossible to live together after what I’ve told you. What are we going to do about it? For the moment I’ve cut and run. It was Kenneth who asked me to do that. ‘You’d better cut and run,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to play the game.’ So here I am waiting until you think things out. I haven’t told Mother yet.”
Bertram was still silent, still rather dead in his heart and brain. But one phrase used by Joyce startled him a little. “I’ve cut and run,” she said. Where had he heard that before? It was something that had happened to himself. Some time or other, from some one or other, he too had “cut and run.” It was old Christy, who had advised it. “If you’re tempted by disloyalty,” he said, “you’d better cut and run.” Queer, that Joyce should have been given the same advice. Rather funny! Damnably funny!
He laughed at the comedy of it. He stood up from the stone seat and laughed loudly and harshly, frightening the birds again, a jay in the boughs near by, which flew out with a kind of echo of his laugh and a quick beat of wings.
“Good God in Heaven!” he said. “So you haven’t told your Mother yet? I wonder what the Countess of Ottery will think of it. Her sense of propriety will be a little shocked. She too will want to play the game according to the rules. I don’t know this kind of game. Perhaps it’s up to me. I guess the rules will oblige me to give you an excuse for divorce. I rather fancy that’s the way it’s done in your set. I commit a technical sin. I indulge in a perfectly painless act of cruelty. You institute proceedings for restitution of conjugal rights. Isn’t that one of the rules? I refuse on a post-card. Then you divorce me. The newspapers print your photograph—the beautiful Lady Joyce Pollard obtains her decree. I seem to remember that sort of thing. . . . Joyce! Oh, my dear wife! Joyce, my beloved!”
It was quite suddenly, at the end of his monstrous irony, that he broke down and wept, and pleaded with her weakly, in a stricken way.
Several times Joyce said, “I’m sorry, Bertram! I’m frightfully sorry!”
She too was weeping now, and her slim body shook with sobs. Under the trees there in the little glade of a French château, this man and wife, so English, so young, so good to see, if love had been between them, made a pitiful picture.
“You’ve been very good to me, my dear,” said Joyce again. “I’m sorry—for everything.”
He went towards her, and took her roughly and drew her close to him.
“Joyce, this is frightful. It can’t happen. It’s just illusion. You’re my wife and I’m your lover. Let’s go away together, and forget all else. That baseness with Kenneth. It was just a moment of madness. Weakness. I understand! I’ve been tempted like that!”
She drew herself out of his arms.
“It’s not like that. It’s Kenneth I belong to; and he to me. One can’t go against revelation.”
He told her that she was murdering him. He’d suffered hell already because of their separation. He’d been tempted by sheer weakness and loneliness. Did she intend to send him straight to the devil?
She said something about his going to “a nice woman.” She couldn’t complain of that. He would find some one more patient with him, more in tune with his ideas.
It was that which angered him and broke down any kind of restraint to which he had clung.
“You’re hellishly immoral,” he told her. “God knows how far you’ve gone a header with that swine Murless. If there’s truth in what people say of you in Paris, I’ll wring your neck and blow his brains out.”
She stiffened at that threat.
“I’ve told you we intend to play the game as far as possible. Kenneth has played up like a gentleman. I hope you won’t behave like a savage.”
“I am a savage,” he said, “when it comes to this sort of thing. It is the primitive right of man to make sure of his mate. D’you think I’m going to connive at your sin? To play the “mari complaisant?” Not in your life!”
“Don’t mediævalise,” said Joyce. “We’re in the Twentieth Century.”
“Human nature doesn’t change,” he answered. “You’re my wife, and I’ll hold you, if I have to fight for you.”
“You can’t hold me,” she said. “I’ve escaped. You can hold my dead body, but not my living heart. Kenneth has that. From the beginning of things, as I see now, he and I were meant for each other. You were an accident that intervened. It was my mistake, and yours. And I’ve paid for it already, pretty badly.”
An accident that intervened! That was how she spoke of his love. That was his position between Joyce Pollard and Kenneth Murless! The phrase slashed his soul, and stung him into a mad rage. The man who had come into this glade with love in his heart for this girl with gold hair and slim white body, strode towards her now with clenched fists and a fury in his eyes. He meant to do her bodily harm, and she saw that in his eyes. But she stood very straight and still, and did not flinch as he came close to her, but smiled with a strange disdain.
“As you like,” she said.
It was a kind of invitation to hit her, even to kill her, if he thought well of that, as for a moment he did. But, as once before when he had raised his hand against her, he was disarmed by her prettiness, and the fury passed from him.
Down the avenue came the sound of voices, speaking French, and through the trees Bertram saw Yvonne de Plumoison and her father, as he had seen them walking arm-in-arm in time of war. On the other side of the old man was Lady Ottery with her hand on the arm of Yvonne’s brother.
Bertram took hold of Joyce, and kissed her twice on the lips, with passionate brutality, and then released her, flinging her away from him so that she fell on the grass. He hadn’t meant, then, to be as rough as that. He made his way through the glade, and turned a moment to look back. Joyce was standing again with her face towards him. He raised his hand with a tragic gesture of farewell, to which she made no answer. Then he walked back to the great iron gates through which he passed, and so towards the village, and so towards life without the hope of Joyce, in loneliness and desolation of soul, worse than he had known.