“You know,” Pauline continued, “she’s very forcible, your Katya. You should have seen how she spoke to Sir William Wells, until at last he positively roared with fury, and yet she hadn’t said a single word except, in the most respectful manner in the world, ‘Wouldn’t it have been best the very first to discover who the man on the telephone was?”
“How did she know about the man on the telephone?” Grimshaw said. “You didn’t. Sir William told me not to tell you.”
“Oh, Sir William!” she said, with the first contempt that he had ever heard in her voice. “He didn’t want anybody to know anything. And when Katya told him that over there they always attempt to cure a shock of that sort by a shock almost exactly similar, he simply roared out: ‘Theories! theories! theories!’ That was his motor that went just now.”
They were both silent for a long time, and then suddenly Robert Grimshaw said:
“It was I that rang up 4,259 Mayfair.”
Pauline only answered: “Ah!”
And looking straight at the carpet in front of him, Robert Grimshaw remembered the March night that had ever since weighed so heavily on them all. He had dined alone at his club. He had sat talking to three elderly men, and, following his custom, at a quarter past eleven he had set out to walk up Piccadilly and round the acute angle of Regent Street. Usually he walked down Oxford Street, down Park Lane; and so, having taken his breath of air and circumnavigated, as it were, the little island of wealth that those four streets encompass, he would lay himself tranquilly in his white bed, and with Peter on a chair beside his feet, he would fall asleep. But on that night, whilst he walked slowly, his stick behind his back, he had been almost thrown down by Etta Stackpole, who appeared to fall right under his feet, and she was followed by the tall form of Dudley Leicester, whose face Grimshaw recognized as he looked up to pay the cabman. Having, as one does on the occasion of such encounters, with a military precision and an extreme swiftness turned on his heels—having turned indeed so swiftly that his stick, which was behind his back, swung out centrifugally and lightly struck Etta Stackpole’s skirt, he proceeded to walk home in a direction the reverse of his ordinary one. And at first he thought absolutely nothing at all. The night was cold and brilliant, and he peeped, as was his wont, curiously and swiftly into the faces of the passers-by. Just about abreast of Burlington House he ejaculated: “That sly cat!” as if he were lost in surprised admiration for Dudley Leicester’s enterprise. But opposite the Ritz he began to shiver. “I must have taken a chill,” he said, but actually there had come into his mind the thought—the thought that Etta Stackpole afterwards so furiously upbraided him for—that Dudley Leicester must have been carrying on a long intrigue with Etta Stackpole. “And I’ve married Pauline to that scoundrel!” he muttered, for it seemed to him that Dudley Leicester must have been a scoundrel, if he could so play fast and loose, if he could do it so skilfully as to take in himself, whilst appearing so open about it.
And then Grimshaw shrugged his shoulders: “Well, it’s no business of mine,” he said.
He quickened his pace, and walked home to bed; but he was utterly unable to sleep.
Lying in his white bed, the sheets up to his chin, his face dark in the blaze of light, from above his head—the only dark object, indeed, in a room that was all monastically white—his tongue was so dry that he was unable to moisten his lips with it. He lay perfectly still, gazing at Peter’s silver collar that, taken off for the night, hung from the hook on the back of the white door. His lips muttered fragments of words with which his mind had nothing to do. They bubbled up from within him as if from the depths of his soul, and at that moment Robert Grimshaw knew himself. He was revealed to himself for the first time by words over which he had no control. In this agony and this prickly sweat the traditions—traditions that are so infectious—of his English public-school training, of his all-smooth and suppressed contacts in English social life, all the easy amenities and all the facile sense of honour that is adapted only to the life of no strain, of no passions; all these habits Were gone at this touch of torture. And it was of this intolerably long anguish that he had been thinking when he had said to Etta Stackpole that in actual truth he was only a Dago. For Robert Grimshaw, if he was a man of many knowledges, was a man of no experiences at all, since his connection with Katya Lascarides, her refusal of him, her shudderings at him, had been so out of the ordinary nature of things that he couldn’t make any generalizations from them at all. When he had practically forced Dudley Leicester upon Pauline, he really had believed that you can marry a woman you love to your best friend without enduring all the tortures of jealousy. This sort of marriage of convenience that it was, was, he knew, the sort of thing that in their sort of life was frequent and successful enough, and having been trained in the English code of manners never to express any emotion at all, he had forgotten that he possessed emotions. Now he was up against it.