We exchanged a few letters, he and I; but it was not until eighteen months later that, at his own invitation, I went to see him. ‘Saunders, I need your help,’ he said in his letter, and added something about my being his only real friend and so on. He had dismal little lodgings in a dismal little side-street the name of which I have forgotten. Bellingham himself opened the door to me. I had told him when to expect me and he must have been waiting at the window. He greeted me in a shamefaced eager fashion that touched my heart. I was astonished at the change in him: the more astonished because it was at once subtle and impossible to miss. There was a gentleness in his eyes that I had never seen there before. He was more human. He led me to his own rooms—they were at the top of a four-storied house, and looked out on a prospect of smoking chimneys—and forced me into the only comfortable chair he possessed.
I began smoking, but he denied himself that nerve-soothing indulgence. His eyes, alight with an unwonted shyness that was only half shame, avoided meeting mine. We fenced for a while, talking over our Jesus days; and all the while my mind, involuntarily, was seeking a name for something in that room that I had not expected to find. Presently Bellingham rose from his chair. It was an abrupt and surprising movement. ‘Like to see the rest of my quarters?’ he said, in a tone desperately casual. I followed him into the next room, and there, in one glance, the mystery was made clear. The bedroom was the answer to the problem of the sitting-room. What I had detected while we sat talking was domesticity, a subtle but decided fragrance of home: a certain precision in the arrangement of books and furniture. In the bedroom, with its two spotlessly white-sheeted beds and its vase of flowers standing in the centre of a miniature dressing-table, the same story was told more eloquently; there was, accentuated, aggressive, the same neatness and daintiness of effect which a contented woman instinctively imposes on her surroundings. No bachelor, however fastidious, could have achieved it. ‘Quite a jolly little place,’ I remarked, to hide my own surprise and his embarrassment. ‘Very,’ said Bellingham, and we went back to our seats by the fire.
Bellingham tried to take up the thread of our conversation where we had dropped it five minutes before. But for his own sake I cut off that line of retreat.
‘Look here, my dear fellow! You didn’t ask me over here in order to discuss our esteemed Dr. Morgan. Tell me all about it.’
Bellingham faced me squarely at last. ‘You mean my marriage?’ I nodded. ‘Well, to start with, I’m not married.’
I think he expected me to flinch at that; and perhaps my failure to do so disconcerted as well as encouraged him. I said nothing. I felt that I could do more good by listening than by talking.
‘She has been in these rooms for two months,’ said Bellingham. ‘And what you saw in there—that has existed for ten days, just ten days.’ I divined that this was his way of indicating to me the duration of his married life. ‘You see I didn’t fall at once, or easily. The Devil is always insidious, isn’t he? Saunders, that girl is a magician. Joan, her name is. She transformed this place. It’s not bad now, is it? You should have seen it before she came. And me, too—you should have seen me before she came. It’s a new life to me. I’m translated. And yet....’
‘How and where did you meet her?’
‘In the street, at the beginning of November. Her husband kicked her out. A swine he is; thank God I’ve never set eyes on him. Told her to go and sell herself, and come back with her earnings.’
There was a pause. ‘And she?’ I asked.