4
As I kept deafly and pusillanimously to my room, I am far from sure what happened during the remainder of the night. O'Rane, I believe, carried his wife up to bed, left her in charge of Lady Loring and accepted from the tired butler at Loring House an armchair in the library for his own accommodation. Bertrand was already in bed, I heard George going to bed as the car started outside; by two o'clock all was quiet.
I remember that, when I was young enough to play baccarat for high stakes and impressionable enough to be embarrassed by a scene, I stayed in a house where certain unpleasantness took place at the card-table. The dispute and recriminations were bad enough, the night of reflection—after a dozen final councils adjourned from bedroom to bedroom—was worse, but worst of all was our uncertain meeting next day, when we stood whispering by the fire in the dining-room, peevishly waiting for breakfast and watching the door to see whether the cause of the unpleasantness would shew himself. Bertrand, George and I stood whispering next morning with much the same embarrassment; breakfast lay on the table, and none of us paid any attention to it. The time was early for me and late for George; I have no idea at what hour Bertrand usually rose, but I remember he was soothing himself with the first cigarette I had ever seen him smoke, at intervals forgetting that it was not a cigar and trying to hold it between his teeth.
Our attitude of vague expectancy was broken up by the arrival of Lady Loring in a creased, black evening dress with a travelling rug over her shoulders. Her eye-lids were pink with fatigue and her arms mottled with cold.
"We look a nice band of conspirators!" she exclaimed. "Now, will somebody tell me what it's all about?"
"How's Sonia?" George asked.
"She went to sleep the moment her head touched the pillow and she was sleeping like a child whenever I looked at her. I think you're all needlessly alarmed about her, but then you're only men. I've been through it all, so I know exactly what it feels like to imagine you're being neglected. But what does anybody want me to do?"
She beckoned us to the table and sat down rather wearily, looking from one to another.
"The trouble is, dear lady," Bertrand grunted, "that we don't know. I suppose you've heard that these two young idiots have had a disagreement? Does that young woman upstairs know where she is?"
"She'll know the moment she wakes up. Is David here?"
"He said he'd beg a shakedown at your house, Violet," George interrupted.
Lady Loring hummed dubiously.
"To judge from her condition yesterday," she ventured, "she's hardly accountable for her actions. It's not to be wondered at, you know, when you think what she's been through—and the way she's lived on her nerves for years. If you'll tell me what you want done, of course...."
It was easier to concentrate our attention on breakfast. George soon hurried away to his office, Bertrand lighted a cigar and went off to a committee meeting, after stumping the library for half an hour, with the ends of his walrus moustache pulled into a circle, and murmuring at five-minute intervals, "What are two fat old men like us doing in this galley?" A telephone message from O'Rane enquired how his wife was, and Lady Loring took the opportunity of arranging with her maid for a supply of clothes to be sent round. The conversation reminded me of her vigil, and I told her that, if she would lie down until luncheon, I would take a book, a chafing-dish and a bowl of bread and milk and sit outside Mrs. O'Rane's door in case she wanted anything. Half-way through the morning O'Rane tiptoed upstairs for a change of linen; Bertrand relieved guard while I went down and took a light meal with Lady Loring. It was not until three or four o'clock that I heard sounds of movement within the sick-room.
I went in to find Mrs. O'Rane considerably altered since our last meeting, but more collected than I had anticipated. She asked for food and, when I had brought her the bowl of bread and milk, begged me to stay and talk to her. Her first question was who had brought her to "The Sanctuary," and, when I had told her, she lay back on the pillows with closed eyes to avoid giving away any points.
"I feel better than I did yesterday," she said at length. "I shall go back to my own rooms to-day."
"You'll be wiser to stay here."
She smiled rather sneeringly.
"You think it's the simplest thing in the world for me to stay here."
"The wisest," I corrected her. "Your husband's not here, by the way, and you can be sure of being well looked after."
"Oh, don't say that again! You think it's easy for me to lie here and be looked after by people who despise me and hate me...."
I got up and lifted the tray from her bed.
"I'm going to leave you now," I said. "Sleeping's much better for you than talking, and I'm afraid I've got rather a faculty for getting on your nerves."
Her lower lip at once fell and trembled with nervous contrition.
"I didn't mean to be rude, but I do feel so ill! And you do all hate me! To bring me here!"
She gave a single breathless sob, and tears began to well into her eyes and trickle down her cheeks. I pulled a chair to the bedside and took her hand.
"The older I get," I said, "the greater disparity I find between the theory and practice of hating. Theoretically I hate no end of a lot of people, but, if I had the power of venting my hatred on them, I don't see myself using it much. As a matter of fact, I had a talk with George the other night about you; I said that the madcap life here was fantastically impossible, that your husband had himself to blame more than any other man for driving you out of the house——"
"That wasn't why I left him," she interrupted quickly.
"You didn't leave him because you thought he was unfaithful to you."
"I know he was. I had proofs."
"Supplied by Grayle?" I hazarded. She looked at me steadily without answering. "Well, when you've time, I should re-examine those proofs in the light of your general knowledge of your husband. If you're interested in my opinion of you"—her eyes lit up eagerly—"you'd sooner be insulted than ignored, wouldn't you?"—expectancy gave way to affected anger—"Well, I don't hate you, but you were a little fool to marry such a man; your instinct, your knowledge of life, your knowledge of him ought to have made it impossible. Having married him and considering his affliction, I blame you for not effacing yourself, obliterating your own individuality to stay with him. After that——" I dropped her hand and strolled to the window. "You were young, entitled to make your own life; it's not easy to justify, but it seems to follow almost naturally from the premisses. It happens to have turned out a failure, but no one can hate you for an error of judgement, particularly when you've shewn that your instinct about men is unreliable; you shewed it with O'Rane, I believe you shewed it before ... and fortunately pulled up before it was too late. I feel this so strongly that I told O'Rane it would be a tragedy, if you ever tried to come back to him; there'd be a second catastrophe worse than the first.... I'm afraid he's too much in love with you to use his imagination."
She pressed the palms of both hands against her eyes.
"I can't stay here," she exclaimed irrelevantly. "I've no right to turn David out."
"You needn't worry about that. He's given you the right, and you're turning him out for less than a week. For the matter of that——"
Her face grew suddenly set and her eyes scornful. "I suppose in spite of all the fine words this is all a trick to try and force me back here?"
"I've not the least doubt that O'Rane hopes you'll return to him," I told her frankly; "he probably will, even when he knows what's the matter with you,—no, he doesn't know even that at present;—but he's living in a fool's paradise."
With another of her quick facial regroupings—which is the only phrase I can find to indicate the shortening of a line here, its lengthening there, the droop or lift of the corners of her mouth, the dilatation of a pupil, the sudden gleam which turned her brown eyes almost golden, the tilt of the nose or the sudden birth of a dimple—she was smiling with her old demure self-confidence.
"I'm vain enough to think I can make almost any man want to live with me," she said, darting a glance from beneath lowered eyelashes.
"Come, that's more like yourself!" I laughed.
Thereupon the smiles and coquetry vanished as though I had struck her in the face. Yes, I had always hated her, always disapproved of her, regarded her as a flirt, taken everyone's side against her. There was no good in her, was there? Nothing ever to be said in her defense?... She lashed herself from one fury to another for ten minutes, only stopping from exhaustion and discouragement at my failure to answer.
"I could make him love me!" she panted in conclusion. "I shouldn't even need to make him, he's in love with me now. But I could make him happy. You think I can't. You think I can't! You know you think I can't!"
I laid my hand on hers; she slapped at it petulantly, but without any great desire to hurt, I fancied.
"Mrs. O'Rane——"
"Why don't you call me Sonia?" she interrupted with complete detachment from all that we had been discussing. "Everyone does. I suppose you prefer to keep—at a distance!"
And then I did a thing which still surprises me. I got up and sat on the edge of her bed. (There was a spring-mattress which I largely capsized, so that she was thrown half on her side.) I put one arm round her shoulders, drew her to me and kissed her on the forehead and both cheeks. I remember thinking at the time what an amazing thing it was to do, and the thought was confused with a knowledge that her face was dry and burning. She put her arms on my shoulders and returned the kiss; quite dispassionately I noticed that her lips were crumpled and dry as brown paper.
"Don't you think you're really rather a silly baby, Sonia?" I said. "If you could remember the times we've met, I should tell you frankly that for half of them I wanted to go away and keep at the farthest possible distance. For the other half——"
Her eyes brightened in anticipation of a compliment.
"Well?"
"It doesn't matter now. Why won't you believe that everyone here wants to help you?"
"Because I don't see why they should. I didn't expect it, I don't ask for it; I made up my mind at the time...."
She choked and drew herself closer to me, sobbing quietly but inconsolably until I felt her arms relaxing and laid her back on the pillows, a pathetically disfigured and moist piece of something that was above all wonderfully youthful.
"If you'll promise not to cry, I'll stay and talk to you," I said. "Otherwise——" I must have made some unconscious movement, for she clutched at my sleeve. "Do you promise? Well, I'm only a man...."
She pulled herself suddenly upright.
"Where's David?" she demanded.
"At Loring House, I believe,—only a man, as I was saying, but I can tell you that you'll wear yourself out, if you go on like this. You've got a great grievance against all of us, you say we hate you and despise you; wouldn't it be fairer not to say that till we've given you some better cause than you've had at present?"
Her teeth snapped like the cracking of a nut. Then the corners of her mouth drooped, and she began to cry again.
"If you would hit me!" Her head fell back until I could see only a quivering throat and the under side of her chin. "My God! what I've been through! No one knows! No one can ever know!"
I gave her some water to drink and asked leave to light a cigarette.
"When I was a small boy," I said, "there was a big oak press in my bedroom which used to reflect the firelight until I thought that all manner of goblins were coming out to attack me. I never got rid of the idea until I was shewn inside it by daylight—I remember it was full of the drawing-room summer chintzes;—then I never feared it again. Does it help you to talk about things, Sonia?"
Her face set itself again, but this time in resolution. For two hours I listened to the most terribly frank self-revelation that I am ever likely to hear. Like a sinner worked up to make confession, she told me of her life from the age of sixteen, when she had fallen romantically in love with O'Rane and when her mother had, quite properly, told her not be ridiculous. For years she had been incited—I had almost written "excited"—to make a great match; she had rushed into an engagement with an honoured title, half feeling all the time that she was pledged to the trappings of a man rather than to the man himself; and, when the engagement ended, she had set herself, like a prisoner at the triangles, to shew that it did not hurt, that she was not going to allow her capacity for enjoyment to be killed; and, when her own people looked askance at her, she had traded her charms among others who fawned on her and whom she despised. The outbreak of war found her unplaced—without mission or niche; she had thrown herself into war-work—and broken down, she had lain useless, neglected and tacitly contemned until she met O'Rane, blind and icily self-sufficient.
Then she had married him in the delirium of self-immolation, only to find that his passionate idealism for the future was transmuted into a white-hot zest to perfect the present. He was prepared to practise the Sermon on the Mount in a tweed suit and soft hat. For a month she shared his life as she would have partaken of an impromptu mid-night picnic in the Green Park. Then a homing instinct had rebelled against the promiscuous publicity of their life, she had felt that his love for her was diluted beyond taste by a vague devotion to mankind. She had treasured slights where no slights were intended and vented irritabilities where none was justified. His smiling patience had evoked a sense of hopelessness, followed by a desire for self-assertion. They had quarrelled, and, rather than admit herself in the wrong, she had blindly groped for evidence against him which the heat of inconvertible resentment would torture her into believing. Grayle had supplied it....
She told me unreservedly of the conflicting influences upon her of three men at the same time. All were in love with her after their kind. O'Rane himself, most sympathetic with men and least understanding of women, gave her the keys and cheque-book of his life, imagining that undemonstrative, uncaressing fidelity would meet with like return; Beresford offered a romantic devotion which posed her frigidly among mountain snows and would have sent him through fire to avenge an insult to his idealised conception. And Grayle had strode in, compelling and indifferent, slighting and frightening her alternately, at a time when she was instinctively yearning to be called to order, taken in hand, shaken and even beaten.
"I was like the 'Punch' picture of the woman in a thunderstorm," she laughed. "I wanted a man there just to tell me not to make a fool of myself. Poor David never, never ..."
Grayle desired her until she felt safe in playing with him, then he neglected her until in pique she set out to try the temper of her charms; ultimately he terrorised her into a surrender which neither blind trust nor deaf devotion could compass.
She told me of her mood when she felt that Grayle was overpowering her, of her drunken willingness to believe what she knew was untrue. She described her parting with O'Rane as she might have described herself beating a child because she was out of temper and had to pretend that someone else was in fault. I was given an unsparing account of her life in Milford Square, which she entered with an unsubstantial hope that she would find love and a quivering sense that she had come like a dog to be beaten. Not a day and night had passed before she found that she had outstayed her welcome, that she was pressing on him for all his life what he desired for an unoccupied afternoon. Their life together was like the record of wife-beating by a besotted husband refined in method by the play of sarcastic wit on impressionable senses. At last there had come a day when he put into words the taunt that hitherto lacked only verbal clarity; she riposted with the charge that he was discarding her to clear the way to his political ambitions; every hoarded grudge and bitterness was dragged into the light, unseemly reproaches were uttered with the knowledge that all were exaggerated and most without foundation; and in a breathing-space both discovered that the articulation of such hidden and reserved acerbity made it impossible for them ever to live together again.
She had walked into the street with his last scurrility stinging her ears and cheeks until she found herself tearlessly crying. It was no use crying, when she needed all her wits to decide her next move, all her composure to face it. A lodging for the night had to be found in some place where she would not be interrogated, and for long her mind wavered slowly from one to another of the neighbourhoods in which she had lived and which all the while she knew were the first for her to reject—Rutland Gate, Manchester Square, Curzon Street, Westminster. It was hard to think of anywhere else; one needed a map, one of those easy maps that were pasted on the walls of Underground stations....
The long recital had exhausted her pent antagonism, and she described her experiences as General Lampwood's driver with humour and an occasional preening of her feathers.
"One day I knew I was going to have a child," she threw out abruptly. "It—it made me quite ill. Then—well, you know the rest. I'm not complaining. I never thought it was going to be easy or pleasant, but, if I had my time over again——"
"I think not, Sonia," I said.
"I never expected a bed of roses," she answered haughtily. Then she suddenly covered her face with her hands. "You mean I'm not through with it yet? Mr. Stornaway, is it—is it as bad as people say? I'm not a coward, really; I don't believe I should mind if I wanted it, if I were praying for a child, if it was going to be a child I should love.... That was what made me ill. When I first knew and I remembered the awful day when he turned me out of the house.... I wanted to kill myself. There was a big motor lorry racing along Knightsbridge, and I made up my mind to step in front ... as if I hadn't heard it. I stood on the kerb and put one foot forward.... Oh, but I wanted to live so badly! I couldn't, I simply couldn't! It was like tearing myself in two with my own hands. I just had time to think of next spring and all the early flowers coming up.... And then I knew that I should have to go through with it!"
Her eyes closed, and she lay without speaking until I made sure that she was asleep. I was treading lightly to the door when she called out and asked to be supplied with paper and a pencil.
"You're just in the mood to go to sleep," I protested.
She shook her head obstinately.
"I couldn't sleep, if I tried. You say David's at Loring House?"
"He spent last night there and looked in here this morning for clean clothes. I've no idea where he is now."
She looked at me with the set, unrevealing expression which I had seen once or twice already.
"Let me know if he comes in to-morrow," she said.
We had not to wait so long, for O'Rane, behind the pretext of packing books and clothes for his return to Melton, came in after dinner and examined me keenly on the condition of his wife. I mentioned that she had hinted at a desire to see him or at least to know his whereabouts, and, for all his control of himself, O'Rane's face was transfigured.
"I'm—here now," he said significantly.
"That means I'm to go up and find out if she wants to see you and if Lady Loring will let her?"
There was a sound of voices, as I knocked at the door—the nurse mildly begging her patient to go to sleep, Sonia resolutely and not too petulantly protesting that she had just finished. I delivered myself of my message, while she sat turning over a pile of manuscript and trying to read it and listen to me at the same time.
"Will you look at this?" she said at length.
She had written a condensed but pitiless version of the story which she had told me, starting with the day when she had chosen to believe that O'Rane was unfaithful to her and ending with the morning when she knew that she was going to bear Grayle a child.
"It's not very legible," she commented casually. "My writing's not up to much at the best of times, but when I'm in bed it's hopeless."
"I can read it," I said.
"I want you to read it to David," she went on in the same tone.
I raised my eyebrows, but said nothing.
"Will you do that for me?" she asked.
"If you wish it."
"Thank you very much. Now I think I shall go to sleep."
I went downstairs and led O'Rane to the far end of the library. He stood with his hands in his pockets and his back to the fire, rocking in his old way from heel to toe.
"Have you read it?" he asked me, when I had explained his wife's request.
"Yes."
He held out his hand for the papers.
"And you remember everything she said?"
"Pretty well."
He rocked in silence for a moment and then smiled whimsically.
"I suppose you could—forget it, if you tried?" he suggested. "Perhaps it would help you to forget it, if we got rid of this. I usually burn myself when I start playing with fire; perhaps you wouldn't mind putting this in. Don't set the chimney alight, will you?"