Two in the House
A letter from Falk to Joan.
Dear Joan--Mother has been here. I could get nothing out of her. I had only one thing to say--that she must go back to father. That was the one thing that she asserted, over and over again, that she never would. Joan, she was tragic. I felt that I had never seen her before, never known her. She was thinking of nothing but Morris. She seemed to see him all the time that she was in the room with me. She is going abroad with Morris at the end of this week--to South America, I believe. Mother doesn't seem now to care what happens, except that she will not go back to father.
She said an odd thing to me at the end--that she had had her time, her wonderful time, and that she could never be as unhappy or as lonely as she was, and that she would love him always (Morris, I suppose), and that he would love her.
The skunk that Morris is! And yet I don't know. Haven't I been a skunk too? And yet I don't feel a skunk. If only father would be happy! Then things would be better than they've ever been. You don't know how good Annie is, Joan. How fine and simple and true! Why are we all such mixtures? Why can't you ever do what's right for yourself without hurting other people? But I'm not going to wait much longer. If things aren't better soon I'm coming down whether he'll see me or no. We must make him happy. We're all that he has now. Once this Pybus thing is settled I'll come down. Write to me. Tell me everything. You're a brick, Joan, to take all this as you do. Why did we go all these years without knowing one another?--Your loving brother,
FALK.
A letter from Joan to Falk.
DEAREST FALK--I'm answering you by return because I'm so frightened. If I send you a telegram, come down at once. Mr. Morris's sister-in-law is telling everybody that he only went up to London on business. But she's not going to stay here, I think. But I can't think much even of mother. I can think of no one but father. Oh, Falk, it's been terrible these last three days, and I don't know what's going to happen.
I'll try and tell you how it's been. It's two months now since mother went away. That night it was dreadful. He walked up and down his room all night. Indeed he's been doing that ever since she went. And yet I don't think it's of her that he's thinking most. I'm not sure even that he's thinking of her at all.
He's concentrating everything now on the Pybus appointment. He talks to himself. (You can see by that how changed he is.) He is hurrying round to see people and asking them to the house, and he's so odd with them, looking at them suddenly, suspiciously, as though he expected that they were laughing at him. There's always something in the back of his mind-- not mother, I'm sure. Something happened to him that last day of the Jubilee. He's always talking about some one who struck him, and he puts his hand up to feel his forehead, where there was a bruise. He told me that day that he had fallen down, but I'm sure now that he had a fight with somebody.