“I’ll go on about Emily,” said Tam in a rather luxurious voice. “It’s an unhappy yarn for me to tell, of course, but you have a right to hear it. Lucy turned her out of our house. We had been here three days. Lucy is ... rather dumb in this story, if you know what I mean. Lucy has always escaped storms. She thinks emotions are indecent—any kind, I mean, and any degree. But especially misery or ecstasy. If you said to Lucy, ‘I believe in God,’ outside of a church, she would think you were irreverent. If you said, ‘I love you better than my life,’ outside of a decorous marriage or recognised flirtation, she would think you improper. All along you could see that she was hiding the situation from herself. But, I suppose unconsciously, she developed a habit of being obviously proud of me in Emily’s presence. She had a way of looking round when I said anything clever, as if saying, ‘Look what he can do—and he’s mine.’ Several times Emily, who never hides anything from anyone, least of all herself, commented with a sort of swagger on this trick of Lucy’s. Once she said, ‘Lucy, you look as if you’d helped the Lord to create him.’ ‘Mother Lucy’s chicken,’ she called me once or twice. But one night at that bungalow it was fearfully hot——”
At that bungalow! Emily’s sure clear presence had really parted the pine-shadowed air of that garden. The sound of Emily’s steps clicking up those steps had really travelled on this warm damp wind to an unquickened hearing.
“Lucy put her hand on my arm and said in her tolerant and reproachful way, ‘My darling’—like that, ‘My darling’—as a check to some flippant profanity I had just indulged in. And Emily stood up and—you know her way, even in small things—jumped with her heels on the floor. She clutched her clenched hands to her breasts and drew the corners of her mouth down and shouted, ‘Not your darling—not your darling—not your darling—’ many times. It seemed as if she would never stop. My God, we were all perspiring—we were so sick with heat and with disgust, somehow, even I, who am not afraid of emotions. Emily came and beat with her hands upon my chest. ‘Oh, Tam’—she cried, ‘Oh, Tam—save me....’ Then you could see that Lucy had been expecting something of the sort all along—she was so quick. Lucy had her. Lucy had her fast by the shoulders. Lucy pushed her in a sort of fussy, curious, shocked way out of the room. Lucy was dark red and she was making a sort of stammering blubbering little voiceless sound between her lips like someone shooing away a hen. ‘Now you can go right away at once....’ I could hear Lucy saying in a loud trembling voice in the next room. I could hear the shuffle of Emily’s things being thrown into the suitcase.”
Emily’s things! There was something unbearably poignant to Edward in that. That delicate fawn-colored silk dress that had held her body, the beads from her neck, the shoes from her dancing feet ... all Emily’s things outraged, not wanted, the things she had chosen to be part of her presence—despised.
“Lucy worked absurdly hard. She insisted on carrying the suitcases out on to the verandah; she made her insistence somehow insulting. She pulled Emily’s arm as they went to the verandah, as though to make it clear that this was a forcible ejection. Well, there was nothing for it. I fetched the chair-coolies. There was nothing to be done. Emily seemed to be beyond help—she was beyond her own control; she was crying so violently, crying with a sort of grin, a downward grin, in the violent way a child cries....”
And now Edward was crying. He had his head upon his arms on the railing. He was crying without pretence. There was a whirlpool of helpless fury in his heart. To cry was all that he could do—because Emily had been made to cry so terribly.
“Well, well, it’s a hysterical yarn altogether,” said Tam. He laid his hand on the back of Edward’s neck. The touch was meant to be sympathetically manly, but his fingers seemed to pinch Edward’s neck almost spitefully.
“You poor thing ... Edward ... You’re a poor thing. You poor things can never be happy. Sorrow gravitates to people like you. You—poor—thing....”