4
The queer days succeeded each other like phantoms. Looking back on the week which elapsed between Elizabeth's going and her last letter, Joan found that she could remember very little of that time, or of the days that followed. She moved about, ate her food, got up and went to bed in a kind of stupor, broken by moments of dreadful lucidity.
On the sixth day came the letter in the familiar handwriting. The paper bore no address, only the date, "August, 1901;" a London postmark was on the envelope.
Elizabeth wrote:
JOAN,
I knew that you would never come to me, I think I have known it in my heart for a long time. But I must have been a proud and stubborn woman, for I would not admit my failure until the very last. I had a hundred things to keep hope alive in me; your splendid brain, your longing to free yourself from Seabourne and what it stands for, the strength of all the youth in you, and then the love I thought you had for me. Yes, I counted a great deal on that, perhaps because I judged it by my love for you. I was wrong, you see, your love did not hold, it was not strong enough to give you your liberty; or was it that you were too strong to take it? I don't know.
Joan, I shall never come back, I cannot come back. I must go away from you, tear you out of me, forget you. You have had too much of me already. Oh! far too much! But now I have taken it back, all, all; for I will not go into my new life incomplete.
I wonder if you have ever realized what my life at Seabourne has been? So unendurable at times that but for you I think I should have ended it. The long, long days with their dreadful monotony, three hundred and sixty-five of them in every year; and then the long, long years!
I used to go home from Leaside in the evening, and sit in the study with Ralph and Uncle John's portrait, and feel as if tight fingers were squeezing my throat; as if I were being suffocated under the awful plush folds of the curtains. I used to have the horrible idea that Seabourne had somehow become a living, embodied entity, of which Ralph and Old Uncle John and the plush curtains and the smell of mildew that always hung about Ralph's books, all formed a terrifying part. Then I used to look at myself in the glass when I got up every morning, and count the lines on my face one by one, and realize that my youth was slipping past me; with every one of those three hundred and sixty-five days a little less of it remained, a little more went into the toothless jaws of Seabourne.
Joan, I too have had my ambition, I too once meant to make good. When I first came to take care of Ralph's house, I never intended to stay for more than a year at most. I meant to go to London and be a journalist if they'd have me; in any case I meant to work, out in the real world, the world that has passed Seabourne by, long ago.
Then I saw you, an overgrown colt of a child, all legs and arms. I began to teach you, and gradually, very gradually, you became Seabourne's ally. You never knew it, but at moments I did; you were helping the place to hold me. My interest in you, in your personality, your unusual ability; the joy it was to teach you, and later the deep love I felt for you, all chained me to Leaside. My very desire to uproot you and drag you away was only another snare that held me to the life I detested. Do you remember how I tried to break free, that time, and failed? It was you who pulled me back, through my love for you. Yes, even my love for you was used by Seabourne to secure its victim.
I grew older year by year, and saw my chances slipping from me; and I often felt older than I was, life at Seabourne made me feel old. I realized that I was only half a being, that there were experiences I had never had, fulfilments I had never known, joys and sorrows which many a poor devil of a charwoman could have taught me about. I felt stunted and coerced, checked at the very roots of me, hungry for my birthright.
But as time went on I managed to dam up the torrent, till it flowed away from its natural course; it flowed out to you, Joan. Then it was that my desire to help forward a brilliant pupil, grew, little by little, into an absorbing passion. I became a monoïdeist, with you as the idea. I lived for you, for your work, your success; I lived in you, in your present, in your future, which I told myself would be my future too. Oh! my dear, how I built on you; and I thought I had dug the foundations so deep that no waves or tempests could destroy them.
Then, five days ago, the house fell down; it crashed about my ears, it stunned me. All I knew then was that I must escape from the ruin or let myself be crushed to death; all I know now is that I must never see that ruin again.
Joan, I will not even go near enough to our disaster to ask you what you are going to do. Why should I ask? I already know the answer. You must forget me, as I must forget you. I don't understand the way of things, they seem to me to be cruelly badly managed at the source; but perhaps Someone or Something is wise, after all, as they would have us believe. No, I don't mean that, I can't feel like that—resigned; not yet.
By the time this letter reaches you I shall be married to Lawrence Benson. Do I love him? No, not at all; I like him and I suppose I respect him, but he is the last person on earth that I could love. I have told him all this and he still wants to marry me. We shall leave very soon for South Africa, where his bank is opening new branches. Oh! Joan, and you will be in Seabourne; the injustice of it! You see I am hovering still in the vicinity of my ruin, but I shall get clear, never doubt it.
Do not try to see me before I go, I have purposely given no address, and Ralph has been asked not to give it either 3 and do not write to me. I want to forget.
ELIZABETH.
[BOOK V]
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
1
THE new town band played every Thursday afternoon in the new skating-rink in the High Street. The band was not really new and neither was the skating-rink, both having come into existence about twelve months after Milly Ogden's death, which made them almost nineteen years old. But by those who remembered the days when these and similar innovations had not existed, they were always spoken of as "New."
The old residents of Seabourne, those that were left of them, mourned openly the time when the town had been really select. They looked askance at the dancing couples who gyrated round the rink with strange clingings and undulatings. But in spite of being shocked, as they genuinely were, they occasionally showed their disapproving faces at the rink on Thursday afternoons; it was a warm place to sit in and have tea during the winter and early spring months, and in addition to this they derived a sense of superiority from criticizing the unseemly behaviour of the new generation.