5
Three weeks later she stepped out of the train at a little country station in Hampshire; and was there met by a beaming Martin, and conveyed swiftly in his car to his home.
The long drive wound through shrubbery and great beech trees, and opened in a wide sweep before the long low many-windowed house-front. It was an old manor, built of exquisitely time-tempered brick. The great porch was covered with clematis and jasmine; and here and there climbing bushes of yellow or white roses wove their way up the walls and coiled around the window-frames. Beyond it and on each side of it she caught or imagined glimpses of a rich old garden, lawns and a herbaceous border, cedar trees, yew hedges, and an espalier of peach-trees along a high wall.
A butler appeared, took her suitcase and slid away again.
Martin led the way through the oak-panelled hall into a large bright flowery chintz drawing-room. All the colours were blue and pink and white; and there were photographs everywhere, and vases full of delphiniums, roses and lilies. The French windows opened on to the sunny lawn, and, set in front of them, the tea-table shone with blue and white china, and silver, and glass jars of honey and jam. Behind the tea-table sat Martin’s mother, smiling.
She was as clean and fresh, as white and pink and blue as her drawing-room. Her erect and trim little figure was crowned with white hair; her blue rather prominent eyes held the wistful appeal of the short-sighted as she looked into Judith’s face to greet her. Her thin mouth smiled and went on smiling, happily, vaguely, with a kind of sweet and weak persistence. All the lines in her face ran upwards as if she had spent her life smiling. She had a white skin with a clear rose flush over each cheekbone. She was really very pretty in her white lace dress and fleecy pale blue wrap: a mother to take out to dine in her best black frock and all her diamonds and feel proud of.
‘So this is Judith that I’ve heard so much about,’ she said charmingly; and put a hand on her arm to lead her to the tea-table.
Three black spaniels begged and adored at her feet; or rolled over, waving limp self-conscious devotional paws.
Over the mantelpiece hung the portrait of Martin’s dead father. He had been Governor of somewhere: an important man. He looked reliable and kindly, with Martin’s brown eyes and untidy features.
On the opposite wall hung a sentimental pastel portrait, life-size, of Martin at the age of three: golden-brown curls, pink cheeks, a white silk blouse with a frilly collar. There were some books in glass-fronted book-cases, some goodish furniture and china; one or two good water-colours and some indifferent ones; abundant plump cushions in broad soft chairs and couches. It was a house that shewed in every detail the honourable, conventional, deeply-rooted English traditions of Martin’s people.
And yet not they, with their sober steadfastness, but that wild sister, the disgrace, Mariella’s mother, had prepared, it seemed, the strange mould for the next generations: for all, that is, save Martin himself.
He was in high spirits. He smiled with all his white teeth, and threw sandwiches to the dogs, and teased his mother, and stared in a sort of delighted astonishment to see her actually sitting at tea with him in his home. He looked almost handsome in his bright blue shirt, open to shew a white strong well-modeled throat rising cleanly from the broad shoulders.
He did not know that Judith was dead: that a dummy was sitting beside him. He had declared several times how well she was looking.
He said suddenly:
‘Heard from Roddy, Judith?’
She was not prepared for that name; and she felt a faintness sweep over her.
‘No, Martin, I haven’t.’
‘I had a letter from him this morning. It’s pure agony for Roddy to answer an invitation, even, so I was flattered. He and I and one or two other chaps are going to do some sailing next month, off the Isle of Wight, and he actually wrote to make arrangements.’
‘What fun that will be, Martin.’
She bowed her head over the plate in her lap, crumbling a scone to fragments.
‘Why don’t you come too, Judith? Do! It’d be perfectly proper wouldn’t it, Mummie? We’re her bachelor uncles.’
It was precisely at those words, at the unexpected recalling of all that light-heartedness, that happiest day of all, that the thing leapt to life within her, and fiercely, horribly pressed towards birth. Oh, now there was no hope. Roddy had arisen all in a moment from his false burial.
With a vast effort she prevented her eyes from closing quite; but to speak was impossible.
‘Roddy says——’ began Martin, glanced across at her, and stopped uncertainly, startled. He was silent, and then said:
‘A bit—after my journey—it’s so hot to travel. Isn’t it?’ She turned to his mother.
‘Yes, my dear, it is,’ she said cooingly. ‘Come, I’ll take you to your room and you shall rest till dinner.’
Martin had got up and was hovering over her, anxious and despondent. But she could smile at him now, and she said:
‘I’d rather go out if I may, and get cool. The garden looks so lovely.’
‘That’s right then,’ said Martin’s mother encouragingly. ‘Take her out, Martin darling, and shew her the rock-garden. Martin and I have been making a rock-garden, Judith—I may call you Judith, mayn’t I?’ She laid a hand again on Judith’s arm. ‘It’s such fun. Martin and I are both ridiculous potterers and experimenters. Are you like that?’
‘Not practically, I’m afraid.’
‘Ah, well, it’s a delightful hobby. It keeps me busy and healthy, doesn’t it, Martin?’ She looked up into his face, and he put a large hand upon her little shoulder. ‘There,’ she added, ‘Run along now. Don’t let Martin take you in the fields or up to his precious farm: you’ll spoil your pretty shoes. Aren’t they darling shoes, Martin? And such a pretty frock.’
With little pats and handwavings and vague benevolence she saw them out of the French windows down the steps into the garden.
Martin said:
‘Wait. I’ll take a gun. We’re simply tripping over rabbits this year. It’s awful.’
She did not hear properly; nor, when Martin came back to her, did she grasp the significance of the gun over his shoulder.
He led her out of the garden by a wooden bridge over a stream half-hidden in forget-me-nots, kingcups and iris plants; through the meadow where grazed the pedigree cows which, so he said, were his mother’s pride; over a stile and up on to the chalky rabbit-pitted hillside.
She was standing among the willow trees, and out of the moonlight a voice was saying in a low hurry: ‘I love you’—and saying another thing damnably characteristic: ‘Lovely Judy! Lovely dark eyes!’ His teeth gleamed as he smiled in the moonlight.... He closed his eyes.... It was all in such bad taste, in such bad taste....
Martin was pointing out the marches of the estate. There were beech copses and farms and two gentle folds of sun-drenched sheep-strewn hill between them and its final hedgerows.
‘You know I do love it,’ said Martin shyly. ‘I worship the soil.’ He hesitated and then said with a laugh: ‘Funny: Sometimes I absolutely wish I were dead so that I could be buried in it and have it all over me and inside me for ever and ever.... Look at the way those slopes overlap....’ His eyes fastened on them, with a hungry expression.
Then this was Martin’s secret bread. It was his land that nourished him at the source, and made of him this man with an individual dignity and simplicity at the core of his ordinariness. She made an effort to come nearer to him in mind.
‘Yes ... I know Martin.’
He turned joyfully.
‘I always tell you everything, Judith. I suppose it’s because I know you’ll understand.’
‘Which bit do you want to be buried in, Martin?’
‘I don’t care—as long as I’m well inside it.’
‘Would you ever commit suicide?’
‘Would I what?’
‘Commit suicide. To—to get there quicker.’
He laughed and said comfortably:
‘Well, I’ve never been tempted to so far....’
‘It’s an old family place is it, Martin?’
‘Oh, yes. My father was born here, and all the others. Roddy’s father and Julian’s, and the only sister—Mariella’s mother. She was very beautiful you know—and absolutely wild—almost mad I should think. She ran away from her husband and goodness knows what sort of life she led. I believe it simply broke my grandfather’s heart. He died, and then Grannie—you remember Grannie?—couldn’t bear to go on living here alone. All the children were scattered or married or dead. So she moved to the little place on the river—next door to you.... Poor old lady, she didn’t have much of a time. She outlived all her children except Roddy’s father: and he was never much use to her. He quarrelled with his father when he was quite a boy and left home. I don’t know what about. Grandpapa was a terrible martinet.... Yes, they were an unlucky family.’
‘And they all died young, Martin?’
‘More or less. But we none of us ever live to be old,’ he said cheerfully.
They had reached the top of the hill; and, suddenly, up went Martin’s gun. Then, with an exclamation of disgust, he lowered it again.
‘Wasn’t ready for him. Once they get into that bracken——’
‘What’s that, Martin?’
‘Rabbit. Didn’t you see? Beastly vermin.... Never saw anything like them. Much as we can do to keep pace with them.’
He was muttering to himself in an annoyed way.
‘But, Martin—do you mean to shoot them?’
‘Shoot them? I should say I do, if I get the chance.’
‘I never have been able to understand how people can bear to shoot rabbits.’
‘Hum,’ said Martin, grim and indifferent. ‘You mustn’t expect me to be sentimental about ’em.’
His eyes roved round alertly; his gun was ready to go up in a trice. He was not giving a thought now to Judith walking beside him.
Just over the crest of the hill came a sudden small kicking and flurry. A tiny pair of fur legs started away into the bracken, the white scut glancing and bobbing. But the bracken thinned away to nothing here: the small form was bound to emerge again in a moment.
There was a sharp crack.
‘Aha!’ said Martin; and he went forward to where something flipped in the air and fell back again, horribly twitching in a mechanical and aimless motion.
‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ She stood rooted where he had left her, aghast.
He was stooping to examine it....
She knew how it was looking—laid on its flat side and shewing the tender and vulnerable whiteness beneath its frail stiff paws. He was stooping just as a figure had stooped above that other rabbit.... What years ago!... Roddy’s rabbit whose death and burial had started this awful loving. Who was it devilish enough to prepare these deliberate traps for memory, these malicious repetitions and agonizing contrasts?
Oh, this world!... No hope, no meaning in it; nothing but perversities, cruelties indulged in for sport, lickings of lips over helpless victims. Men treated each other just as Martin treated small animals. The most you could hope for was a little false security: they gave you that to sharpen their pleasure in the blow they were preparing: even the ones that looked kind: Martin for instance. As for Roddy—Roddy liked experimenting. He chose girls sometimes: that was more voluptuous. She saw his face, pallid and grinning, crowds of leering faces, all his. The hillside darkened. She sank on her knees, shaking and perspiring.
He was striding back.
‘I buried it,’ he called. ‘It was a little smashed about the head.’
She had to lift her face towards him; but she made it blind. He came and stood beside her—he dared to, red-handed as he was.
‘I’m afraid it wasn’t one of the cleanest shots,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I got him at too long a range. Still,—that’s one less.... Come on.’
Her mind would frame only one sentence; and she tried over and over again to say it.
‘I will not be a witness of your butcheries. I will not be a witness of your butcheries.’
But he would not understand. Perhaps it did not make sense anyway.
‘Oh dear!’ She sat there, tearing up turf with shaking cold wet hands, face averted, eyes staring, mouth open and out of shape, impossible to control. ‘Oh dear! Oh dear! Oh dear!’ The repetition was a sort of whine or mew.
‘What’s the matter?’ he said sharply. He sank down beside her, and his astounded face came round her shoulder.
‘Oh, the poor little thing, the poor little thing!...’
‘Do you mean the rabbit?’
She nodded.
‘But, Judith—good heavens! A rabbit.... Judith. I’d never have shot it if I’d dreamed you’d mind.’
She went on staring and pulling up the grass.
‘Oh, this world!’
‘Judith....’ He was silent, completely at a loss.
‘Still—it can’t be helped.... I suppose one gets accustomed....’
Her mind grew black again with formless and colossal conceptions of torture, murder, lust: and Roddy’s face went on grinning among them. All was lost, lost.
‘I’m very sorry,’ said Martin helplessly.
‘Oh, I don’t blame....’
‘It didn’t suffer you know. Did you think it had? That kicking didn’t mean anything: it was simply reflex action.’ He thought he had found the clue; and added cheerfully: ‘You’d do the same if I shot you dead at the back of the head.’
‘I wish you had.’
She wept.
‘Good God! Really, Judith.... I’ve said I’m sorry. I can’t go on saying it, can I? I didn’t know you were so—you oughtn’t to be so—easily upset. Rabbits have to be kept down, you know. They destroy everything. Ask my mother.’
She went on weeping; and after a little while he got up and strode a few steps away, and stood with his back to her, shoulders hunched.
Worse and worse: he was deserting her.... She bit hard on her thumb till the pain of it steadied her, waited and then called tremblingly:
‘Martin!’
He turned, saw her hand held out and came quickly and knelt beside her.
‘What is it, Judy, what is it?’
‘Oh, Martin! Oh, it’s nothing. Don’t ask, don’t.... Only—just—only——’
His arms went round her and she abandoned herself against him, pressing her head into his shoulder, groping for comfort, sobbing vast sobs, while he knelt beside her quietly and let himself be wept on; and now and then gave her shoulder a little pat.
After a long time she was so empty of tears that their source seemed dry for ever. She would never in her life weep any more. In the thin crystalline buoyancy of exhaustion she lay back on his shoulder and observed the gold light lying tender and still in the folds of the hills; and two rabbits skipping unperturbed not so very far away; and blue butterflies swinging on the long grasses; and all the evening shadows slanting beautifully downwards. Peace and comfort dropped upon her. The heavy ache for Roddy was gone. Oh, now to make this no-pain permanent, to fix this languor and mindless calm, to smother the voice which cried and cried: ‘I am cheap and shameful. I have been used for sport!’ Now was the time to turn to Martin and see if he could save her.
She sat up and dried her eyes.
‘There!’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. Thank you, Martin. You are a dear. You’ve always been very kind to me, haven’t you?’
‘Kind to you! Oh, Judith, you know——’
‘I think you must rather like me, Martin.’
He said with a deep intake of breath:
‘Like you! You know I’ve loved you for years.’
She was silent, tasting a faint relief and satisfaction; and then said:
‘Well, what would you like me to do about it, Martin?’
She saw that his hands were trembling, and he answered shakily:
‘Do about it ... I.... What do you want to do about it?... I’ve said I——’
‘Would you like me to marry you?’ she asked softly.
‘God! If there was a chance!...’
‘Well—I might, Martin.’
She started to laugh and cry weakly at sight of the transfigured face he turned towards her; and a voice went on protesting inside her: ‘No! No! No! It isn’t true. I never will.’
‘Oh, I’m so tired, Martin, I’m so tired!’
‘Come home, my dear, come home.’
It was compassion and exultation and doubt and certainty, all mixed in an inarticulate eloquence.
He lifted her and brushed her skirt.
There was nothing to do but accompany him down the hill.
He left her at her bedroom door. His mother, he said, would come and give her aspirin and put her to bed, and see that dinner was brought up to her. His mother was splendid about headaches. To-morrow there would be plenty of time to talk.
He had behaved perfectly.
She fell asleep that night in her white room with its cretonne wreaths of pink roses tied up with blue ribbon, and dreamed of Roddy. He sat on the hill, close to where the rabbit had been shot, and conversed in friendly fashion. He had come back from abroad, from some remote island. He took a puff at his pipe and said with apparent irrelevance: ‘Not wives, my dear girl—mistresses. It’s more convenient. When I return I intend to take Martin as my partner.’
‘Martin wouldn’t come. Not if it’s mistresses....’
‘Oh, dear me, yes. He’ll soon forget you over there. It’s a very voluptuous clime.’
She said very humbly:
‘Would you care for me to come, Roddy?’
‘I fear you’re supered,’ he said with elaborate courtesy.
‘I suppose so.’
He studied a notebook.
‘Where do I come in your list, Roddy?’
‘You’re in the twenties, somewhere,’ he said indifferently.
‘Oh, miles down——’
He seemed suddenly bored or suspicious, and shifted his position. As he did so, she saw his face for an instant, heavy-lidded and dissipated. She understood that he was thinking of voluptuous climes.
It seemed then there was no use in hoping to win him back. He was, obviously, bored to death with her.
‘What’s in here?’ he said suddenly, and plunged his hand into the earth.
The rabbit!... the rabbit!... Everything shrieked,—and she started awake, sweating, in horror and desolation.
She leaned out of the window and saw the moon high in the sky. Beneath it, the trees had suffered their moon-change and were sculptured masses of dark marble, washed over with a silver-green phosphorescence. A tragic night, sleepless and staring beneath the urgent pressure of the moon: there was no comfort in it.
This house was full of ghosts.... Perhaps Roddy’s father had slept in this room as a small boy. He had grown up here and then shaken the dust of his home from his feet and gone away and begotten Roddy.... Charlie must have looked like the beautiful wild sister, and that was why the grandmother had given him all that anxious and painful love.
The sister had given birth to Mariella, and then run away and led God knows what sort of life. Poor Mariella! She had never had the sun on her: she had lived from birth—perhaps before birth—in the shadow cast by her bright mother; and when she grew up she had not emerged from it. That was the truth about Mariella.
The family portraits were in the dining-room. To-morrow she would see them, study and compare....
It was madness to have come to this haunted house.
Oh, Roddy! She could not live without him. He must, he must come back and take her for a year—a month even. Perhaps he had found out by now that he did love her after all, and was too proud to write and confess it. Martin had said it was agony to him to answer even an invitation. She must write to him again, give him an opening.
Where was he now? If she could be transported to him now, this minute, she could make him succumb utterly to loving her. She would think of such ways of delighting him with caresses that he would never be able to do without her again.... It was sheer stupidity to go on enduring this agony when it only needed a trifling effort to end it all. For instance, if you leaned a little further out of the window.... But one did not commit suicide in other people’s houses: that was the ultimate error of taste.
And then, poor Martin’s feelings at the inquest!
‘Mr. Martin Fyfe, who was overcome with emotion several times, stated that a few hours previously deceased had declared her willingness to become his wife. This avowal, made on her own initiative, had met with ample response on his side, and there seemed every cause for joy and congratulation. The coroner in returning a verdict of suicide while of unsound mind observed that this reversal of the customary procedure in betrothals was but another example of the lack of self-control so deplorably frequent in the young woman of to-day, and seemed to him sufficient in itself to suggest a distinct lack of mental balance in deceased. He tendered his sincerest sympathy to Mr. Fyfe and absolved him from all blame.’
And Roddy might depart from his habits and inclinations once again, and write Martin a letter of condolence.
No, no. She was going to show him she did not care, was not weeping for him: she was going to announce her engagement to Martin before long.
There would be a paragraph in ‘The Times,’ congratulations, letters to write—(I am a very lucky girl)—a pretty ring—and almost certainly photographs in the illustrated weeklies.
Roddy would smile his cynical smile because she had behaved just as women always did behave: so long as they hooked some poor devil—no matter whom—they were quite satisfied. And a damned fuss they made if a chap refused to be hooked.
Martin would probably insist on being married in Church, and ask Roddy to be his best man.
No. Poor Martin was not going to be able to save her. Perhaps, instead, she was going to destroy him.
She went back to bed and tossed between her sheets till dawn.