That was the beginning. He had never been able to hide his disgust, his love had been killed. Conscience, which held the word Duty before him, spelling it with a capital, told him to make the best of things; his sensitiveness shrank from the woman as from something loathsome.
After the child’s funeral she had pulled herself partially together, and he had never found her in the same condition again. But she had lost all her old charm. She grew listless in manner, slovenly and untidy in dress. Now and then she would look at him with the eyes of a dumb thing asking for help. He never saw her eyes. He had avoided looking at them. The sight of her—her untidy hair, her neglected dress—had offended his sensitive taste. Little by little they had drifted mentally further apart. Finally they had separated. Even the separation had been gradual. First he had taken his small house in Chiswick and the studio in Chelsea, living at home, and going daily to his work. She had known what the outcome would be, but had said nothing. Later he had begun to sleep at the studio, returning only for the week-end. He had spoken of the distance, making it an excuse.
And now there was only occasional visits, prompted entirely by conscience. He had left the studio to pay one of these visits that afternoon. An extraordinary priggishness of manner towards his fellow-men was an invariable preface to them.
As the tram bore him into the suburbs he gave a little shiver of disgust. The commonplace ugliness of the houses was an eyesore to him. He pictured the inhabitants as dull, well-meaning, ultra-respectable—leading a carpet-slipper, roast-beef, little-music-in-the-evenings—kind of life. He thought of the men as all old and fat, or young and conceited; of the women as thin and careworn, or flashy and bejewelled. His mental pictures were either extremely commonplace or extremely tawdry.
Suddenly his conscience began to fidget. It was becoming uncomfortable. What right had he to feel like that, it said. They were every bit as good as he was. Who was he to sit in judgment on his fellow-men?
He put the mental pictures aside. He said a little prayer for charity. Then he looked at his conscience again, and satisfied himself that he had swept away the dust specks which had caused it a momentary uneasiness.
But he never thought of the poetry that might be hidden away in the lives passed within those ugly walls, nor listened for the old, old tunes of love and sorrow, hope and fear, birth and death, that were played for them as they were played for those who dwelt in infinitely more picturesque surroundings. And if he had heard the music he would probably have said that the metre was out of time, the notes old and cracked, or thin and tuneless.
At last he left the tram and turned up a side street. The houses in it were small, red brick, and each of a pattern exactly like the other. They stood a little way back from the pavement, separated from it by a low brick wall on top of which was an ugly iron railing. Each of the tiny plots of ground in front of the houses was divided from the neighbouring plot by more iron railings. Some of the plots were merely gravel, others grass, while a few had blossomed out into flower-beds gay with flowers.
He turned into one of the gravel plots and went up four steps to the front door. He rang the bell. His face was perfectly expressionless. It was like the face of a man who is self-hypnotized.
“Your mistress in?” he said to the untidy woman who answered the door.