3
As I waited in the hall, I drafted a telegram to explain that I was being called away from London on business. O’Rane arrived in the middle; and I led him at once to his room. I could not unburden myself yet; and, as we drove out of London next day, I found it necessary to pretend that I was enquiring into unemployment.
“Bertrand’s afraid the men will get out of hand,” I explained.
I might have said that in some parts of England the men were already out of hand. It was at this time that the “Homes for Heroes” campaign was launched: as the government failed to provide sufficient houses, a homeless band of Welsh quarrymen seized a public hall and announced that they would stay there until cottages had been built for them. They were led by a man, then unknown, named John Griffiths, who followed up his first success by organizing similar raids on any convenient unoccupied land. No one was paying much attention at present; as Bertrand said, we were resigned to unemployment in London, but danger would march hand-in-hand with winter, when the government declared its housing-policy and when the official leaders of labour indicated whether they supported “Griffiths’ landgrabbers.”
“Where are you making for first?,” O’Rane asked.
Until that moment I had not thought of any destination.
“We’re half way between Reading and Hungerford. I don’t know. . . . I’ve had a bit of a shock; and you’ll find me rather disjointed. . . . God! I don’t know what I should have done without you!,” I broke out.
O’Rane’s fingers rested for a moment on my arm:
“Old man, you knew I was always at hand if you needed me!” His unseeing eyes softened; and his voice fell to a whisper:
“‘I cannot come to you—I am afraid.
I will not come to you. There, it is said.
Though all night long I lie awake and know
That you are lying waking even so:
And all the day you tread a lonely road
And come at sunset to a dark abode.
Yet, if so be you are indeed my friend,
Then, at the end,
There is one road, a road I’ve never gone,
And down that road you shall not pass alone;
And there’s one night you’ll find me by your side—’”
He paused; and I waited for the rime that should complete the couplet:
“How does it go on?”
“‘And there’s one night you’ll find me by your side—
. . . The night that they shall tell me you have died.’
It’s . . . Chinese, I was told. Two or three hundred years before Homer.”
I drove on, staring drowsily ahead of me at the broad, unfolding ribbon of black road and the monotonous water-meadows on either hand. The tender warmth of the little poem made me forget for a moment the bleakness of the Kennet valley in late autumn; and, after a sleepless night, the rushing wind drugged my brain.
“Though all night long I lie awake and know
That you are lying waking even so.” . . .
I murmured the lines to keep myself from falling asleep. What had Barbara’s thoughts been when I lay waking the night before? Suddenly my sight was dimmed with a curtain of blood; and I stopped the car in twice its length because I could not see the road before me. If indeed I had fallen asleep, I had looked for a moment, through this red curtain, on a sun-washed verandah, where a dying man was gasping for breath.
“And there’s one night you’ll find me by your side—
. . . The night that they shall tell me you have died.”
The vision faded before I could make out whether Eric was speaking to Barbara or listening for her voice.
The unexpected jolt had flung O’Rane out of his seat; and, as he pulled himself back into place, he could hear me stopping the engine.
“Is anything the matter?,” he asked.
“Eric Lane’s just died.”
“Good God! When?”
“This moment. I . . . pulled up to avoid him,” I answered without knowing what I was saying. “He’s gone now. Poor devil! Oh, poor devil!”
If I was shaken, O’Rane was in no better case:
“Those lines . . . I had them from him.”
“I know.”
“You’d heard him . . .?”
“I heard him then . . . At least I think . . .” The road was once more stretching firmly ahead of me to a belt of leafless trees. In the meadows on either side I saw deliberate cattle splashing up to their knees in muddy water. “It’s ten to two, Raney. Shall we see if we can find a place for lunch?”
“That’ll wait. You’re not fit to drive any more at present. . . . You’d . . . better tell me everything, old man.”
“But I’ve told you! I knew Eric was dead or dying because I had . . . I saw a letter from him quite recently. My nerves are rather jumpy.” . . .
“It’ll break poor Lady Lane’s heart,” he murmured. “And it’ll be a shock for Ivy.”
Slipping his arm through mine, O’Rane led me into a field by the roadside. Though he must have guessed that Eric’s letter had something to do with my frantic appeal the evening before, I could not speak at present for fear of breaking down. ‘Boyish to cry—can’t help it—bad fever—weak—ill.’ For many moments my head sang with Mr. Jingle’s clipped phrases. A shock for Ivy? Some one had told me her marriage was all the failure that Mr. Justice Maitland had predicted. It would have been better if she had married Eric: she might have kept him alive. It would have been better if Barbara had married him, better if he had never left America, best of all if he and she and I had never been born. . . .
“Babs can’t be ill,” O’Rane murmured as though he were thinking aloud; “or you wouldn’t be here. Sit down and smoke a cigarette.”
When he returned with the basket, I was able to tell him. I wondered at the time, I wonder still, whether I did right; but I know that I could not help it. He let me talk myself out, only asking dispassionately at the end:
“What are you going to do about it?”
And I talked myself out a second time, until the fever left me and I lay back on the rug, almost too much exhausted to move or think. Physical infidelity, committed in a moment of passion, stood in relation to this long infidelity of spirit as a blow struck in hot blood stands to a calculated and artfully concealed murder. Had Barbara left me and come back, as Sonia left and came back to Raney, I believe I could have forgiven her. After deceiving me once, she could deceive me again; to get what she wanted, in her own way, she would sacrifice me as she had sacrificed Jack Waring and Eric Lane.
It was all over. And I wanted her desperately. And it was all over.
Hitherto, I had always pretended that there was something I did not understand in her tragic entanglements: Jack and Eric were straight as the day; if they both fled from the woman they both loved, I wished to think that they were parted by a lover’s quarrel which both were too proud or obstinate to heal; I refused to believe that they had run from her in disgust.
“I’m here because Barbara will soon be coming back to London,” I told O’Rane. “I . . . couldn’t divorce her if I wanted to; but I can let her divorce me.” . . .
“She won’t be very . . . happy alone,” he answered reflectively. “When Jack Waring disappeared, she turned to Eric out of sheer loneliness and misery; when Eric went, she turned to you. If you go, George, she’ll turn to some one else. A married woman without children, without a husband, more lonely and miserable than ever before . . . Well, you won’t have long to wait for your divorce.”
Four-and-twenty hours earlier, I should have called my best friend to account if he had warned me that Barbara needed watching. Now she had convicted herself and robbed me of all temptation to defend her.
“I don’t see much difference,” I said, “between the woman who runs away with a man and the woman who only stays at home because the man won’t run away with her.”
“There’s still a difference between the woman who keeps her reputation and the woman who loses it. When women become reckless . . . It’s a big responsibility to give them the first push down the slope.”
The short sunlight of late autumn was fading; and I busied myself with packing our luncheon-basket. As I had not asked for sympathy, I could not complain if none was offered.
“If I give her the chance of divorcing me,” I said, “I’m not accountable for anything she does after that.”
There was a long silence. Then O’Rane asked:
“What will you do?”
I had not thought; but, in that moment, I had a vision of the blue water, the close-packed green woods and the vivid fuchsia hedges of Lake House.
“Go back to Ireland, I expect.”
I was making enough clatter with plates and knives to convince the least attentive that my patience was exhausted; but O’Rane lay with his hands clasped behind his head, frowning a little at his own thoughts and wholly unmoved by my demonstration.
“Will divorce make for Barbara’s happiness?,” he asked in a maddening drawl. “You can’t quite wash your hands of a woman you’ve married. You weren’t content, you see, with somebody of your own mould. Your wife had to be brilliant, beautiful, romantic, tragic. . . . You married Babs when you knew she’d been shaken to the depths of her soul by Jack Waring, when she’d been broken to the bottom of her heart by Eric Lane.”
“I thought she’d had so much romance and tragedy that she’d be glad to settle down quietly.”
“When she wasn’t in love with you? Has any one settled down quietly after gambling with death for nearly five years?”
“I’d have forgiven anything if she’d told me!,” I cried, as we went back.
We must have driven for an hour before he spoke again:
“Well, George, if you want my advice, I should recommend you to burn Eric’s letter and pretend you’ve never seen it. Then begin again at the beginning.”
“You imagine I can forget it?,” I asked.
“If you think more of her and less of yourself. The bigger the crime, the more she must have been tempted: try to understand that instead of counting up the things a man has a ‘right’ to expect of his wife. Rights here, rights there! Every one’s thinking too much of his individual rights, George! Every group of nations, every nation, almost every man and woman.” . . .