2
Three days later I myself met Mrs. O'Rane in Hyde Park. Remembering Yolande's experience, I determined that she should not cut me and, as we had no opportunity of pretending not to have seen each other, I blocked her path, bowed and held out my hand to her.
"I've not seen you for weeks," she said with a composed smile. "You've not been to America again, have you?"
"I've been kept very busy at the House and in my department," I answered. "Have you been away?"
"For week-ends and things." She glanced collectedly round to assure herself that she was not being overheard. "Why did you button-hole me like this, Mr. Stornaway?"
I suppose my real reason was that, if there had to be any cutting, it should not be by her; and I had not made up my mind how to act when we found ourselves suddenly confronting each other at the park gate.
"When a man meets a woman he knows——" I began.
Mrs. O'Rane laughed with soft, repellent scorn.
"As if you didn't know everything."
"That is, I believe, an attribute of the Almighty," I replied.
For a few moments she was absorbed in the task of digging with the end of her parasol round the edge of a prominent black pebble. As the dry earth crumbled, the pebble worked loose, and she was free to hit it away and look up at me again.
"You know enough."
"For what?" I asked.
She sighed and waved her hand across the dusty, unshaded walk.
"For passing by on the other side."
"Habit is sometimes very strong," I said.
We stood looking at one another reflectively for a few minutes, each perhaps wondering why the other did not make an excuse to break away. I found her so self-possessed that it was difficult to believe what I knew to be the truth. I have met unfaithful wives before, I have seen men and women living in many kinds of social outlawry, but with none of them did it seem to make so little difference as with Mrs. O'Rane. She was not defiant, she was hardly even callous; and her manner was so natural that I felt the last six months might well have been blotted out of her life. Once she lowered her eyes to look at the little platinum watch; then raised them again with a friendly smile. She was dressed with unostentatious distinction in a blue coat and skirt, with a high collar to the coat and a tight-fitting amber-coloured waistcoat with round, pageboy's buttons; there was a high-crowned hat to match the coat, white gloves, grey stockings and black shoes with a pearl-coloured border. Though her eyes were tired and her cheeks a little pale, she looked wonderfully young and carefree.
"You thought I wouldn't do it," she said at length, more to convict me of bad judgement, I think, than to defend her own conduct. "Men are so curious.... You all had the clearest warning, only you wouldn't take it. You wouldn't see that it was the only thing left for me to do."
"And you are still of that mind? You feel it was the right thing?"
"It depends what you mean by right," she answered slowly. "Most people would say it was wrong, but then most people are fools. And none of them could possibly know what I had to go through," she added through her teeth.
"They'll never know that," I said, "because you'll never be able to tell them. As long as you're happy——"
"I'm very happy," she interrupted.
"And you think you'll continue to be?"
"No one can answer that.... I'm happier than I was. You, of course, think that I've behaved criminally. I only feel that we made a mistake. I thought David loved me, and he—didn't. I believe he thought he loved me.... I made every possible allowance for him, I did everything a woman could do to make a success of our life, but you must have seen enough to know that he never gave our marriage a chance. I was ready to put up with everything until he humiliated me in my own house. Then it was time to admit we'd made a mistake and to get out of it as soon as possible." Her parasol was again at work on the hard-baked gravel. "If he'd hated me, if he'd enjoyed hurting me, he couldn't have done better. I never knew what men were capable of before."
In my turn I looked at my watch and held out my hand.
"I have not criticised you, Mrs. O'Rane," I said, "so I prefer not to assist in any criticism of your husband."
Her lips curled into a sneer.
"You haven't criticised me in words," she qualified.
"I am trying to suspend judgement till I know the facts. You will admit that it requires prima facie justification when a young wife leaves a husband who worships her—I will cut out the offending phrase, if you like—leaves her blind husband——"
I have only once seen Mrs. O'Rane's beauty of face wholly desert her. At the word "blind" her cheeks flushed, her eyes grew hot and the line of her mouth became broken and unsightly. Months before, Bertrand had told me that her husband's blindness was the one thing restraining her, and, though she had lashed herself into disregarding it, she evidently could not forget it. I could see that a passionate retort was maturing, but she pressed it back and took my hand.
"Good-bye," she said. "Remember, I didn't ask you to speak to me. This is a matter between David and myself. You needn't think it was an easy thing to do, but I faced it, I've gone through the worst——"
"Not more than six people in the world know that you're not living with your husband," I put in.
She hesitated, and I could see her lips compressing.
"I'm ready for that, too," she assured me, valiantly enough.
"Where are you living?" I asked.
"You must excuse me if I don't answer that. Good-bye."
As I walked on towards my office I wondered what use I ought to make of my chance meeting. Yet how would O'Rane or George be benefited by knowing that she was living—was probably living in London? And this was all that I could tell them save that, however great her provocation, however unheeding the passion which had possessed her and allowed her to receive a lover in her husband's house to punish her husband, she was not yet insensible to every twinge of conscience: I had succeeded in once flicking her on the raw.
Then I blamed myself for wasted opportunities; if I had been less conventionally suave, less afraid of a noisy scene, I might have put many more questions even if I received as few answers. Her life with O'Rane was over, but what was she going to put in its place? He could divorce her, of course, and she could marry Beresford—when he came out of prison. I never felt, however, in the days before the catastrophe that she loved Beresford;—to be adored and admired by him was one thing, but I never regarded him as more than a diversion, when no one else was by to flatter her. Even had the passion been there, I could not imagine her marrying such a man. The blue coat and skirt, the high-crowned hat and patent-leather shoes did not accord with a rusty sombrero, Harris tweeds and a loose, orange-coloured tie; I recalled the bizarre, bachelor rooms of Sloane Square and, in exaggerated contrast, Mrs. O'Rane's ermine coat, as I had seen it when I surprised them there. In any day I dare swear that she could not tell whether she had spent five pounds or five hundred; but, if she did not know how much she squandered in a year, at least she could be sure that it was far more than she would ever get from Beresford. And, if she did not propose to marry him, where and how would she live? Would she try to drag out a few more months or years as his mistress with the four or five hundred pounds a year which her father allowed her? Where and how was she living now?
To a long list of idle questions I added one more and asked myself how I was to behave, if I met her again. It was not easy to avoid her at the second encounter when I had forced myself upon her at the first; it was certainly no easier to continue as O'Rane's friend and to meet his wife as though nothing had happened.
An unsolved problem spoils my temper, and I was with difficulty even civil when a messenger came into my room to say that Lady Maitland wished to see me. She was shewn in and proceeded straight to the point. Was it true that under this ridiculous Military Service Act all men under forty were to be dragooned into the army? I must remember how kind I had been in finding a position for her son in my office. Well, he had come home the previous evening and told her of a report that all young men were going to be taken. It made no difference that he had only been allowed to attest on condition that he could not be called up without leave of his chief. That was all a scrap of paper, apparently. Every case had to be submitted to the War Office, every man given a certificate of exemption or packed off with the roughest clerks and factory hands into the ranks. What was she to do? It was intolerable.
It argues, if not self-control, at least great gratitude for past hospitality that I did not remind Lady Maitland of the first dinner I ate on English soil after my release from Austria, when she deafened me with her denunciations of the young shirkers who stayed at home and allowed others to die for them. I was finding no fault with her boy, who might be all that she said; I had seen him twice and pushed him hastily into a fool-proof room where he read the "Times" and acted as précis-writer for one of my colleagues; if he were unfit for the army, there was a chance that he might be rejected, though embittering experience taught me that it was only a chance. If he were passed as fit, the first girl in the street could take his place after a day's instruction, and the office would be rid of a young man who was doing no good to himself or anyone else with the number of whiskies and soda which he found time to consume on his way to the office or with the cigarettes which he smoked all day when he had made his reluctant way thither.
"Has he been medically examined?" I asked Lady Maitland.
"It would be a waste of time," she answered. "I tell you, that boy is a mass of nerves."
"Well, send him before a medical board with a letter from your own doctor," I suggested.
To judge from her expression, my proposal was unexpected and inadequate.
"Isn't the best thing for you to send a letter to the War Office?" she asked. "Bertie tells me that his work is very technical."
I was grown tired of that word through many a "conscription scare" and I resented its presence on the lips of Lady Maitland, who had been too free with her taunts ten months before, too disparaging of the volunteer army and too easily insistent on the conscription from which she was now trying to extricate her boy.
"He had to learn it," I reminded her. "And, if he died to-morrow, somebody'd have to learn it in his place. If you want to move the War Office, surely your husband's the man to do it."
"I don't like to bother him," she answered.
As she walked to the door, I felt that I had lost a friend. It says much for her magnanimity that I was invited to the house within a week to be told that the War Office—without encouragement from Sir Maurice—had behaved most sensibly, reviewing the junior members of my department en bloc and granting them all certificates of exemption on the grounds of indispensability.
"We seem drifting back to the old life very much," said George, pensively watching the bubbles break on the champagne, when I told him, with some distaste, of my interview. "Here we are eating and drinking as usual, I'm always being invited to dances.... We're getting used to this infernal war, you know, Stornaway, and we shall lose it, if we can't put up as relatively good a show as the fellows who are being killed. I suppose we're too far away from the front even with an occasional air-raid to remind us."
"I was glancing through my diary the other night," I told him. "There's hardly a reference to the war. The political situation, my own work——"
He laughed a little sadly.
"If I kept a diary, I'm afraid I should find a good deal of it devoted to Raney and his wife."
"I did," I told him.
He looked up quickly and then lowered his head until his chin rested on his fists.
"God! that has been a tragedy!" he groaned. "It's the biggest tragedy of my life, bigger than when Jim Loring was knocked out. Presumably it was all over with him in a few minutes or hours or days at most.... But that poor devil Raney—he's some years younger than I am."
"What is he doing?"
"He gives no hint. It's about as much as he can stand—the agony of it—without trying to analyse it or think what he's going to do next. Did I tell you I went down there again? Well, I did—in spite of what he said. I've a convenient young cousin whose people are over in Ireland—Violet's brother, you met her at dinner with me at the Berkeley—and I can always legitimately go and see him. It was rather less of a success than my last visit. The first person I ran into was Lady Dainton, who asked me to shew her the way to Raney's quarters. She couldn't make it out, she said, that she'd written to Sonia about a concert at the hospital, written twice and had had no reply. Obviously she was away from home, but apparently it was nobody's business to forward letters." George smiled ruefully. "It was a hit for me, though she didn't know it. I send all letters to Raney, and Sonia's go in a special envelope marked 'For filing only'; it was a formula he and I agreed on, so that Miss Merryon could just chuck them into a box unopened.... I don't believe even she suspects, though it's bound to come out.... And she's in love with him, and that's supposed to sharpen a woman's intuition.... Well, I've no doubt Lady Dainton's letters were in the box with the rest, but that didn't bring her much nearer getting them answered. I felt I must really leave Raney to deal with her, so I said I'd promised to call on the Head and would come back later.... By the way, Burgess sees there's something up; he'd see there was something up if you built a brick-wall round it. When I went into his study, he looked at me for about five minutes, stroking his beard between his thumb and first finger. 'He is thine own familiar friend, whom thou lovest,' he began without any beating about the bush. 'I know the whole story, sir,' I said. 'If I thought for a week, I couldn't think of anything worse. If I may make a suggestion, sir, the kindest thing you can do is not to notice anything.' Burgess stroked his beard a bit more; then he said—'The adder is not more deaf.' But I'm prepared to bet he's made a very shrewd guess."
"Did you gather how O'Rane disposed of Lady Dainton?" I asked.
George shrugged his shoulders.
"He had to say that Sonia wasn't at 'The Sanctuary' and he had to admit that he didn't know her address at the moment. Fortunately, Lady Dainton is so ready to think ill of him and so very unready to think ill of her darling daughter that she never dreamed or suspected what had happened. I don't know whether she went further than thinking that Sonia was staying with friends and that Raney wasn't sufficiently interested in her to discover her whereabouts; perhaps she did, for she took the opportunity of saying that it was monstrous for him to desert his wife like this for three months at a time, but that, on her honour, he didn't deserve to have a wife, if she was to be condemned to the life he had led at Melton or in London. Raney was smiling to himself and saying nothing, when I came in, so she turned her batteries on to me. As a rule she frightens me into agreeing with anything she says, but this time I did pluck up courage to tell her that, in my opinion, when two people married, they must be left to work out their own salvation. There's a certain irony there, Stornaway,—I was conscious of it at the time—when you think of the way you and Bertrand and I laboured to keep their boat from capsizing. She didn't appreciate the irony, though; she only thought I was being rather rude. That didn't matter so long as I got rid of her."
He pushed away his plate, sighed and rose from the table.
"Did you have any talk with O'Rane?" I asked, as we went upstairs together.
"That depends on your definition of talk," he answered with a joyless smile. "We emitted words at each other. It—I don't mind telling you, Stornaway,—it hurt like sin to find that I couldn't get near him. I suppose it was a compliment to our friendship that he didn't try to cut jokes as he did when I dined with him in Common Room the last time, but it was an unfilling sort of compliment.... No, to offer him any kind of sympathy would have been to get myself pitched out of the room. I felt that. He was in a suit of mail.... I should have thought—but then I've not been through it and, please God! I never shall. It did hurt, though, because there hasn't been much that we've kept from each other all these years."
He laughed a little at his own sensibility. I thought for a moment and then told him of my meeting that day in Hyde Park. From behind their rimless glasses, his eyes were fixed unwaveringly on mine, and at the end he made no comment.
"What line do you propose to take if you meet her?" I asked.
His brows set in a forbidding frown, and, when he spoke, it was between closed teeth, and his voice trembled.
"I think I told you, my instinct is to get her neck between my two hands and shake her as a terrier shakes a rat. I suppose that would be out of place in the more public parts of London, so I shall walk quietly past her. What induced you, knowing all you did——"
"I have no idea why I did it," I said, quite humbly.
"Are you going to do it again?"
"My dear George, once more, I have no idea. I'm like O'Rane in that I haven't been in the mood to analyse or make decisions. I've shirked them. I've deliberately tried to keep my mind occupied with other things so that I shouldn't have to think about this miserable business. Most of us are doing that, I fancy."
He was silent for many moments, and I fancied that he was visualising my meeting in the light of an early summer morning in Hyde Park with Sonia O'Rane, brown-eyed, red-lipped, redolent—to the senses—of purity and young freshness.
"As long as that swine's under lock and key," he said at length, "she can't make a move. And, when he's out, they're bound to hold their hand till they see what Raney's going to do, whether he's going to face a divorce—when I say 'face,' it's on her account, of course. He'd stand anything for himself, but I don't know that he'd let any damned two-and-one junior put questions to Sonia—I don't know, and he doesn't know...." He covered his face with his hands. "God in Heaven! Stornaway! I remember when I was the oldest fourth-year man and he was a freshman and she was nothing at all—a lovely little slip of a girl who'd been sent up for Commem. in place of a woman who'd failed us. Raney'd loved her ever since he'd first set those god-sent eyes of his on her, and they solemnly got engaged that night—when he was nineteen and she a baby three years younger...." The rising voice which was beginning to make our neighbours turn curiously round stopped of a sudden. "Sorry! I'm apt to break out every time I think of that boy coming back from the front ... and not letting it make that much difference to him ... and starting again at the bottom for God-knows-the-how-manyth-time—and then—this.... Well, Raney's not in a state to say whether he'll divorce her or not, what he will do, what he wants to do. You're quite right, we're none of us in a position to analyse. By the way, what do you propose to do, if you run into Beresford?"
"I don't see myself engaging him in conversation," I said.