6
As I finished dressing, Barbara tapped at my door and came in with Eric’s letter in her hand.
“If you want this, I must give it you back,” she began. Her voice had almost left her; and the radiant vitality of an hour before had flown. “I hope you won’t have to quote it, because these things are so terribly vulgarized in court. Do I . . . have to be unfaithful? I wasn’t . . . with Eric,” she added carelessly.
“I know you weren’t.”
“I meant to be, . . . if I must use that . . . unclean word. For one moment I had a vision of perfect happiness, I forgot everything else. . . . It would be generous of you to say you won’t use this. Eric’s dead. And people would think he was to blame.”
“I certainly shan’t use it. Barbara, why are you talking like this?”
Before she could answer, the letter had to be thrust into safety. Then, with one hand clutching it to her breast, as though Eric’s heart were beating against hers, she looked up and forced her mind on to my question:
“Because father’s coming down to-morrow, and we must decide what we’re going to do. We had to fight him pretty hard to get married, but we shall have to fight much harder to get divorced.”
“But no one has mentioned divorce.”
“I have. You said you could never forget that letter. . . . It was a great risk for us to marry; but you were so sweet and I was so miserable. . . . I see now that the thing never had a fair chance while Eric was alive. I heard his voice in the streets, wherever we’d been together, when I knew he was the other side of the world; and, as soon as I had a chance, I rushed to him. When he wouldn’t have anything to do with me, I did try once more to make a success of our life. You wished for a son; and I did my best, though Eric was the only man I wanted as father of my children. Perhaps that’s why I . . . couldn’t keep him alive, poor mite. . . . It’s funny that little things should cause such big troubles. If I hadn’t asked you to open my letters, we should have made a success.” . . .
There was a moment’s break in her terrible composure; and she turned away with a single dry sob.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Babs?”
“You wouldn’t have understood; you don’t understand now.”
“If I hadn’t understood . . . a little, should I have come?”
Unwittingly, I moved a step forward; and she held up her hand against me as though I were assaulting her:
“If you’d understood, you wouldn’t have waited twelve days.”
I was goaded beyond discretion by the scorn in her voice. I had understood and forgiven too little, it seemed, when I fancied that I had forgiven and understood too much.
“It was . . . a startling letter,” I answered in her own measure. “Whenever you told me you’d try to forget Eric . . .”
“You wondered for twelve days whether you could ever trust me again.” She did not trouble to look at me, but I felt myself flushing. “As though any other man could tear my heart out of me as Eric did! Why did you come?”
“Because I needed you.”
Barbara’s lip curled in derision:
“Your servant’s too useful to discharge, so you pretend you haven’t caught her stealing! When we met to-night, I noticed a difference. I thought you must have seen in the papers about Eric’s death. When you kissed me so tenderly, my heart leapt; and I thought you really understood. Now I know . . .”
The incisive scorn cut deeper as her failing voice died away.
“Well?”
“You need me because I’m a woman. That’s why you insult me with your forgiveness. And that’s why you must divorce me, George. We’re divorced in spirit; and we should both be dishonoured if we put your need in the place of love.”
In the distance I heard the gong booming for dinner. Neave’s door opened and slammed. A cautious footfall, accompanied by a warning whistle, told me that O’Rane was making his way downstairs.
“I shall not divorce you,” I told Barbara, “even if I could. And I can’t. You’ll be as independent of me in Seymour Street as if you were on a South Sea Island. But we mustn’t do anything irrevocable till we’re more cool-headed.”
“But . . . this is impossible!,” Barbara cried.
“If we find it impossible, I shan’t try to keep you.” As I followed her down to dinner, I wondered whether we either of us realized what we were saying. “Coming here to-day,” I told her, “I was thinking that life only becomes intolerable when there’s no love in it. If I can get back to the state we were in a fortnight ago . . .”
“You’ll never do that. You’ll be very kind and attentive, as you always are; but I married you because I thought you understood. Now you’ve become like any other man who puts a cushion at my back or tucks a rug round my knees. I’m utterly, utterly indifferent to you!”
On this, the first night of what she called for two years our “life in a gilded cage”, I was chiefly concerned that her indifference should be concealed from the sharp eyes of Neave and the abnormally sharp hearing of O’Rane. With the same intention or in her usual reaction to an audience, Barbara sparkled her way through dinner in a manner that set me wondering whether I had not waked from another nightmare; but, when we looked for her afterwards, she had disappeared; and, when I went—as a matter of form—to bid her good-night, she answered me through a locked door.
Neave had asked me at dinner how long I was staying; and, when I reached my room, I found a note from Barbara:
“If I am to come at all, I had better come to-morrow. Mother has a big party this week-end.”
I sat down in front of the fire and tried to picture our life on the day after to-morrow. Could Bertrand direct my paper if I found it necessary to live in Ireland? Was Ireland tolerable or even safe? Could I afford to keep two houses in commission if my wife refused to live with me. And how long would Barbara endure this spiritual starvation?
“Utterly, utterly indifferent.” I had never been the romance, the passion, the great love which she still demanded as of right; even with Eric Lane out of the way, I could not deck out my humdrum self as a fairy prince. If I failed in the “understanding” for which alone she had married me, how was her indifference ever to be overcome? The whole of our life must be such an evening as this, when she donned a brilliant mask of gaiety for dinner and discarded it when she locked her door against me.
A sudden thought urged me from my chair and sent me pacing up and down my room. How many other masks did Barbara employ? She dramatized her life so richly that, though her grief for Eric was unfeigned, I doubted if she could resist the temptation to make a romance out of his death. Had she been still unmarried, she would have cast herself for a part of inconsolable bereavement; as I obtruded awkwardly into her scene, she chose a blend of remorse for the injury she had done him and of heroic endeavour to forget him in her devotion to me. Unconsciously, in that queer childish brain that could never separate sincerity from pretence, the phrases had formed themselves; the emotion that fed the phrases had been fed by them. Instinctively she had changed her attitude and improvised a new part when she heard of Eric’s letter; and this trick of dramatizing her life was now so much ingrained in her nature that within half an hour she was perfect in her lines, her expression and her whole reading of the part. Henceforward she would continue to regard herself as “a damned soul”, with the added damnation of being tied to a crass, unsympathetic husband and of conspiring with him to deceive her neighbours as she had deceived O’Rane and Neave at dinner.
I readily believed that Barbara had forgotten half the agony of Eric’s death in the joy of playing her new part.
“But how long is it to go on?,” I asked myself in despair.
The new part had in some sort been forced upon her; she could not relinquish it without abandoning her attitude of moral superiority to one who already believed her to be morally in the wrong and would believe her to be yet more deeply in the wrong if she admitted that even her grand romance had been a piece of play-acting. And play-acting it had been for half the time! She could have married Eric if she had dared to admit that Jack Waring was tired of her, instead of pretending that she was pledged to him. . . .
Next day the Crawleighs arrived in time for luncheon; and we returned to London in the afternoon. Our departure was on the border-line between farce and tragedy. Muffled in furs and bathed in the warm fragrance of her beloved carnations, Barbara took her place by my side; her eyes were shining as when I came back to her the day before; and her undemonstrative mother was stirred to exclaim: “My dear, you really do look very lovely.” Crawleigh, who had recently met my uncle at dinner and was overcharged with repartees that had not occurred to him in time, stood with one foot on the running-board and emphasized his endless rejoinders with excited cutting movements of a tremulous forefinger. In the background stretched the low grey walls of the Abbey, unchanged since the days when the first marquis criticized the treaty of Vienna, unchanged since Lord Chancellor Neave cavilled at the peace of Utrecht, unchanged since some nameless political abbot pointed the significance of Crécy and attacked the staff-work at Poictiers. I can no more reproduce my father-in-law’s arguments than I can reconstruct those of his predecessors; but I remember being told that now, two years after the armistice, we were in a more parlous state than when the war was still raging.
“That’s what my uncle always tells me,” I answered, though it was not worth while to remind Crawleigh that this was what I had been preaching in despised Peace for fifteen months. “If you sow the wind, you must expect to reap the whirlwind.”
The reply probably bore no relation to the argument, but I wanted to get away; and I had not listened to the argument.
As the car turned out of sight, Barbara flung aside one mask and pulled another into place. Her eyes lost their colour; her whole body seemed to grow limp. Appearances no longer needed to be maintained.
So we returned home, to reap a whirlwind. My trite phrase haunted me. I wondered who had sown the wind.