1
My return home from Crawleigh Abbey brought to my mind the reappearance of the small boy in Punch, who, finding his running-away unremarked at the end of one whole day, drew attention to it by observing that his parents had the same old cat. For a single moment, as O’Rane and I reached Salisbury Plain, I had remembered that the world was revolving in sublime unconcern at my private tragedy; then a starless night of misery enveloped me once more. In London, a fortnight later, I was amazed to find letters and messages, proofs and manuscripts from people who seemed still interested in unemployment or reparations, in the fate of Ireland or the coalition.
Now and for many weeks I thought only of new means to win back a woman who had become a stranger to me. After her first declaration of “indifference, utter indifference”, Barbara never weakened the effect of her action by talking about it; when I had influenza, she nursed me as she would have nursed any man who had the misfortune to fall sick in her house; when she caught my influenza and aggravated it with pleurisy, she allowed me to take her abroad to recuperate. No two acquaintances, sharing the same house, could have lived in greater harmony; and no woman could have devised a keener torment than by treating lover, husband or friend as an acquaintance.
Meanwhile, the external world was still revolving. . . .
“I want to see you about these articles of yours . . .”, wrote Bertrand.
“There’ll be a general election within six months,” Sir Philip Saltash predicted.
“I hoped to find you had knocked some sense into David’s head,” Sonia lamented.
“ ‘I see you have the same old cat’,” I whispered to myself in astonishment.