‘She was on the streets for five days. Yes, a prostitute for five days.’ I saw Bellingham’s face contract with pain, and I knew that something deeper than pity had been stirred in him. And so the recital went on. Bit by bit I got his story and pieced it together. He did not spare himself; but even his passion for repentance, his ingrained conviction of sin, could not persuade me that he had been guilty of a very heinous crime. He had rescued the girl, at first in sheer compassion, and cherished her as he would have cherished any other fragment of human salvage. And her presence, her pathetic prettiness and her childish need of affection, had been too much for him. In a passion of gratitude, I surmise, she had offered him, with a full heart, what she had so reluctantly sold to casual men during her five days purgatory. The appeal to his manhood was too sudden, too overwhelming, to be resisted. Beauty, seen for the first time in dazzling glory, had invaded his heart and beaten down his defences. For the first time in my experience of him there was inconsistency in Bellingham. He spoke, one minute, of his ‘fall,’ like any sour moralist; and in his very next sentence he would become almost lyrical about this ‘new life,’ this shattering apocalypse of beauty. It was as if the man had been cloven in twain and spoke with two voices. And that, I believe, is the real key to the baffling terror that was to follow.
Later in the afternoon, in time to prepare tea for us, came Joan herself, a big-eyed child in her early ’twenties, with very fair hair, like a little lost angel with a Cockney accent. The sudden fear that leaped into her eyes as she timidly greeted me would have stabbed any man’s heart. She was absurdly fragile, and I saw at once that those five evil days had been no more than a gruesome physical accident which had left her courage shaken but her innocence unimpaired. She guessed, no doubt, that we had been discussing her; and both Bellingham and I felt caddish, I dare say, when we remembered having done so. But I succeeded in winning her confidence by displaying a keen interest in her market-basket, which she carried on her arm, and in a very few moments she became garrulous about her shopping experiences, displaying a pretty pride in her purchases. They included, I remember, three dried herrings and a pound of pig’s-fry. The herrings we had for our tea, and I have never enjoyed a meal more.
In the evening, during a long walk through mean streets, Bellingham came to the point. He had said, you will remember, that he needed my help. What he wanted was no less than that I should play the part of conscience to him. I was to be instated, apparently, as his spiritual pastor. For the sake of that poor child happily darning his socks at home, I could not refuse the embarrassing honour thrust upon me. And when I learned that repentance was actually beginning to gain the upper hand of him I was glad indeed to exert any influence I possessed on the side of humanity. He had had a vile dream, he told me, and it was evident that he regarded it as a warning sent by that vigilant deity of his. In the dream his landlady, who believed him to be a legally married man, came and smiled at him over the bedrail, and wagged her head till it detached itself from the body and multiplied. The air was full of these grinning heads, poised like dragonflies, all their evil eyes on Bellingham. Terror, he told me, took concrete form inside his own head: he could hear it simmering, sizzling, gurgling, boiling, splitting; it drove him out of bed, away from Joan, and across the arid plains of hell under a sky monotonously grey except where the sun, a bloody red, like a huge socket from which the eye had been torn, stared sightlessly at him. Even as he gazed at it it filled and became menacing with the eye of God.
‘It was a vision of hell,’ Bellingham said, wiping the moisture from his brow. ‘And the eye of God was even there. O Lord, how can I escape from Thy presence!’
It did not seem to me a moment propitious for argument, so I held my peace. He talked on about his doubts and his difficulties, his sin and his repentance; and at last I gathered that I was being invited to tell him whether he should stay with Joan or leave her.
‘Oh, fling her into the streets,’ I advised him, with furious irony, ‘as her husband did.’
‘Yes,’ he said, mildly enough. ‘You’re right. Against all my religious convictions I feel you to be right. I have made her my wife, and I must be faithful to my choice, right or wrong.’
‘It’s as plain as day,’ I assured him. ‘Love and duty are pointing in the same direction for once. Why should you doubt it?’
‘You see, Saunders,’ said Bellingham, with sudden fire, ‘it’s all or nothing. She must remain my wife, or we must separate. There’s no third way. I can’t spend the rest of my life in the waters of Tantalus. I’m only a man, God help me!’
For a while we left it at that.