Well, he had to be cheerful, and he got up, calling to her.
“I shall go out then, dear, but I think I’ll come back for tea. It’s rather a steep climb for the tea-basket carrier.”
She did not answer, and he went out of the room. But in the hall he stopped. He was too sick at heart to walk; he was too sick at heart to do anything. Nothing seemed worth while; the thought of the hillside, of the clean pine odour, were hateful to him, the earth and the sky were all hateful. Yet—what else was there to do? He must go, after all; Edith must think he was tramping cheerfully through the woods. He had left his hat in his bedroom, and went there for it. But he could do no more. The breaking point came, and he broke. He threw himself down on his bed face downward and sobbed.
Edith heard him leave the room, and as the door shut she felt as if her own heart had been shut out from her, leaving just this tortured, miserable bundle of nerves and tissues which was her body. For her, too, this afternoon, it seemed that the unbearable had been reached, and the blackness of it consisted in the fact that it was her own fault. Why had she not taken that dear head in her arms a minute ago when she had the chance? Why had she not sent her pride, her stupid pride that revolted from pity—Hugh’s pity—to the devil, from whom it undoubtedly came? Why, too, was it allowed that Hugh, of all the people in the world, should have the power to make her like this?
She descended into lower depths; she told herself that she knew he was being hopelessly bored here, bored when he was with her, who was suffering so. Of course he refused to go to England, he could not well do otherwise, but surely he wanted to go. Or perhaps he did not much care; he was the sort of person who was happy and whistling everywhere. He had been extraordinarily cheerful all these months—his cheerfulness had seemed so effortless, too, that now, in this blackest hour she had ever known, she told herself it was effortless. He did not really care, she saw that now.
For one moment Edith turned off the flow of these meditations and asked herself if she was going mad or had gone mad. She decided, however, that she was only being clear-sighted and making discoveries. Yet somewhere, deep down in her, in spite of the darkness of this wave of misery that was going over her head and the deep waters that were drowning her, there burned a little flame by which she saw—at least an infinitesimal fraction of her saw—that she was thinking wild, wicked nonsense. But all the rest of her, her tired, tortured brain told her that she was thinking sense. And then that little flame went out too, and for the moment she believed it all.
And that was the true authentic hell, more real than any that theologian had invented. For she was quite alone; there was nobody here except herself.
The balcony where she had been lying ran round two sides of the house, and both drawing-room and dining room on this side, and Hugh’s bedroom on the other, opened on to it. She got up, alone in hell, and walked quietly up and down it once or twice. Then, to make her quarter-deck a little longer, she turned the corner and went by Hugh’s room. The window was wide open, and she saw him lying there face downward on his bed.
For the moment it was as if the devil and all his spirits tried to get in between her and him, and she stood on the threshold, unable, it seemed to herself, to take a step forward. He had not heard her; he had heard nothing for the last few minutes, poor soul, and she looked on his shaking shoulders with that wall of evil in between. And then, thank God, she marched straight through it, and she was not alone any more, there was no hell any more.
Then the scalding tears rose to her eyes, tears from which all self was banished; they were utterly for him, whom she loved so, whom in thought she had wronged so. Soon, no doubt, there would be shame and humiliation in them, but not yet.