My husband was sitting at his desk, confronted by a litter of papers and letters, which I knew to be the mail he had just brought home and flung there. But he wasn’t looking at anything on his desk. He was merely sitting there staring vacantly out of the window at the paling light. His elbows were on the arms of his Bank of England swivel-chair for which I’d made the green baize seat-pad, and as I stared in at him, half in shadow, I had an odd impression of history repeating itself. This puzzled me, for a moment, until I remembered having caught sight of him in much the same attitude, only a few days before. But this time he looked so tired and drawn and spineless that a fish-hook of sudden pity tugged at my throat. For my Dinky-Dunk sat there without moving, with the hope and the joy of life drawn utterly out of his bony big body. The heavy emptiness of his face, as rugged as a relief-map in the side-light, even made me forget the smell of the scones Iroquois Annie was vindictively scorching down in the kitchen. He didn’t know, of course, that I was watching him, for he jumped as I signaled my presence by slamming the door after stepping in through it. That jump, I knew, wasn’t altogether due to edgy nerves. It was also an effort at dissimulation, for his sudden struggle to get his scattered lines of manhood together still carried a touch of the heroic. But I’d caught a glimpse of his soul when it wasn’t on parade. And I knew what I knew. He tried to work his poor old harried face into a smile as I crossed over to his side. But, like Topsy’s kindred, it died a-borning.
“What’s happened?” I asked
“What’s happened?” I asked, dropping on my knees close beside him.
Instead of answering me, he swung about in the swivel-chair so that he more directly faced the window. The movement also served to pull away the hand which I had almost succeeded in capturing. Nothing, I’ve found, can wound a real man more than pity.
“What’s happened?” I repeated. For I knew, now, that something was really and truly and tragically wrong, as plainly as though Dinky-Dunk had up and told me so by word of mouth. You can’t live with a man for nearly four years without growing into a sort of clairvoyant knowledge of those subterranean little currents that feed the wells of mood and temper and character. He pushed the papers on the desk away from him without looking at me.
“Oh, it’s nothing much,” he said. But he said it so listlessly I knew he was merely trying to lie like a gentleman.
“If it’s bad news, I want to know it, right slam-bang out,” I told him. And for the first time he turned and looked at me, in a meditative and impersonal sort of way that brought the fish-hook tugging at my thorax again. He looked at me as though some inner part of him were still debating as to whether or not he was about to be confronted by a woman in tears. Then a touch of cool desperation crept up into his eyes.
“Our whole apple-cart’s gone over,” he slowly and quietly announced, with those coldly narrowed eyes still intent on my face, as though very little and yet a very great deal depended on just how I was going to accept that slightly enigmatic remark. And he must have noticed the quick frown of perplexity which probably came to my face, for that right hand of his resting on the table opened and then closed again, as though it were squeezing a sponge very dry. “They’ve got me,” he said. “They’ve got me—to the last dollar!”