THE NEST

CHAPTER I

He seemed to have had no time for thinking before he sank into a corner of the railway carriage and noted, with a satisfaction under the circumstances perhaps trivial, that he would have it to himself for the swift hour down to the country. Satisfactions of any sort seemed inappropriate, an appanage that he should have left behind him for ever on stepping from the great specialist's door in Wimpole Street two hours ago. When a man has but a month—at most two months—to live, small hopes and fears should drop from him: he should be stripped, as it were, for the last solitary wrestle in the arena of death.

But the drive, from the doctor's to the city and from there to Paddington, had seemed unusually full of life's solicitations. The soft, strained eyes of an over-laden horse, appealing in patience from the shade of dusty blinkers; the dismal degradation of a music-hall poster—a funny man with reddened nose and drunken hat, as appealing in his slavery as the horse; the vaporous blue-green silhouettes of the Park on a silvery sky;—he had found himself responding to these with pity, repugnance and pleasure as normally as if they meant for him now what they always would have meant. That such impressions were so soon to cease must change all their meaning,—at least, so one would have supposed; he began to think of that and to wonder a little over the apparent stoicism of those intervening hours; but, while the mood had lasted, the fact that he had come to the end of things, that there was a pit dug across his path, had done hardly more than skim on the outskirts of his alert yet calm receptivity. He seemed never to have noticed more, never to have been more conscious of the outer world and so little conscious of himself.

Now, in the train, the outer world, wraith-like in a sudden summer shower, became the background as it sped on either side, and thoughts were in the foreground, thoughts of himself as doomed, and of the life that he had loved and worked in, as measured into one shallow cupful at his lips. Even yet it was almost absurd, the difficulty he found in realising it. The doomed figure detached itself, became that of a piteous, a curious alien, whom one watched respectfully and from a distance. From a safe shore he observed the tossing of the rapidly sinking skiff with its helpless occupant. It required a great pull, push, and effort of his whole being, like that of awakening from a half-dream, in order to see, in order to say to himself, really believing it, that he was the man. Wonder, rather than dread or sorrow, was still the paramount feeling, though, oppressively, as if he picked his steps about the verge of an echoing cavern, turning away his eyes, there lurked behind all that he felt the sense of sudden emptiness and dark.

It was wonderful, immensely absorbing and interesting, this idea of being himself doomed. Self-conscious, observant, sensitive as he was, he still thought more than felt. It was at last credible and indubitable that he was the man, and he was asking himself how he would take it; he was asking himself how he would bear it. He was amused to observe that the pathetic old human vanity, by no means stunned, was pushing its head above the tossing surface in order to assure him again and again that he would bear it very well. It should be a graceful and gallant exit. If there were to be dark moments, moments when the cavern sucked him in and had him, if he was to know horror and despair, no one else, at all events, should know that he knew them; no one else should share his suffering. Up to the edge of extinction he would keep silence and a stoic cheerfulness. The doctor had promised him that there would be little pain; there would be knowledge only to conceal.

This vanity, and there was satisfaction in it for all his ironic insight, was not so selfish as it seemed; the next turn of thought led him to this. For no one had a right to share his suffering; or perhaps it would be more magnanimous to say that the some one of whom he was thinking had a right to be spared the sharing of it. He shared so few of the things that mattered with Kitty that she might well claim immunity. His wife's figure, since the very beginning, had been hovering near his thoughts, not once looked at directly. It might be horribly painful to look at it, but he suspected that it would not be so painful as to look at the other near thing that he must leave behind: his work; the work that with all its grind and routine—so hard to harness to at first—had now become so much a part of himself. The fact that he might come nearer to despair, nearer to the crumbling edge of the cavern, when he thought of leaving his work than when he thought of leaving his wife, was in itself a pain; but it was an old pain in a new guise. Kitty had for so long been one of the things that counted for less than his work. Vanity even raised its voice high enough to say ruefully that they might get on badly without him at the Home Office; the country itself might suffer. He smiled; but the dart told; it was perhaps feathered with truth. Yes, everything most essential in him, everything that most counted, was answered, called forth in his work. It was in that that he would most truly die. For, of course, in the many other, the young, the ardent, the foolish hopes, he was dead already. And it was round the figure of his wife, that light and radiant figure, sweet, soft, appealing, that those dead hopes seemed to gather, like mist about a flower.

Poor, lovely little Kitty: the sight of the rain-dimmed meadow-sweet, by the brookside in a passing field, brought her before him in this aspect of innocent disillusioner. For nothing essential, nothing that counted in him, was answered or called forth by Kitty except a slightly ironic tenderness. He didn't judge life from his own failure to find splendid mutual enterprise and sacred mutual comprehension where his lover's blindness had thought to find it. Nor did he judge Kitty. His own blindness was the fault, if fault there were, and even that blindness he could now see tolerantly. The dart and pang had gone from his memory of young love; his smile for it was indulgent; he was even glad that the memory was there, glad that he had known the illusion, even if it were at the price of failure in that happy realm of life. Little of the sadness could have been Kitty's; she had not known the bitterness of his slow awakening; she was easily contented with the tame terms of unillumined life. A charming home; a fond husband; a pretty, diligent part to play in the political and social life of the countryside; the nicest taste to show in dress and friends;—Kitty, he imagined, thought of her life as completely successful. And why not? He himself saw love as an episode and contentedly accepted the fact that for the flower-like woman and the man who works there can be, eventually, no deeper bond.