Meanwhile, the external world was still revolving. . . .
“I want to see you about these articles of yours . . .”, wrote Bertrand.
“There’ll be a general election within six months,” Sir Philip Saltash predicted.
“I hoped to find you had knocked some sense into David’s head,” Sonia lamented.
“ ‘I see you have the same old cat’,” I whispered to myself in astonishment.
2
It is a tribute, I think, to our loyalty in public that my marriage to Barbara was commonly quoted at this time as one of the very few successful unions in an age of confessed failures and desperate escapes. Had I imagined at the beginning that our unreal separation could drag on for two years, the myth of our blissful harmony would soon have been exploded. As it was, we drifted. I thought by day, I dreamed by night, of a romantic reconciliation that never came. There were moments when I fancied that Barbara, with her passion for dramatizing life, forgot her boredom in the excitement of martyrdom. On some plea, which I do not remember, she gave up entertaining; and, while the young “London of the restoration”—in Bertrand’s phrase—went leaderless, she had the barren pleasure of feeling herself wasted.
By degrees which I cannot recall I was driven to spend more and more time at my office and to dine more and more often at a club. Her indifference spread beyond me to all the men and women who in other days had interested her; it culminated in her dispassionate efforts to interest her husband in some other woman. I returned home one evening to be told that Ivy Gaymer had fled to us for sanctuary and that Barbara was waiting for me to say whether we should send her back to her husband or communicate with Mr. Justice Maitland or wait helplessly for something to turn up. As Ivy was already in bed, we could hardly prick her into the street at midnight; and next morning she ruled out our first two courses by declaring that she would never again enter the house of a man who intrigued with other women under her nose and that her father’s advice and sympathy were limited to the triumphant question: what else could any one expect?
We decided to wait for something to turn up. I did not want to be inhospitable, but I wanted still less to hear Barbara talking about my “little protégée”. After a week or two I suggested that there were hotels in plenty and that Ivy was not without money. Barbara confined herself to saying that, as I had insisted on the creature’s staying on in the first instance, it was now my delicate task to evict her. Following the cowardly expedient of writing what I was afraid to utter by word of mouth, I sent a note to Ivy’s room one night, asking what her plans were; we should, I said, be going down to Crawleigh for Easter. By ill luck, she was still up; and her reply was delivered from the foot of my bed, where she sat, smoking cigarettes, in scantier clothes than women usually wear in public. If we kept the house open, she would not in the least mind staying on by herself; her solicitors were advising a divorce; it was saintly of us to take her in; and she would not have troubled us if she had not been in fear of her life. The interview was ended damagingly by Barbara, who came in to insist maternally that, if Ivy and I wanted to talk, she must put on a warm dressing-gown.
Though my door was locked against similar conferences in the future, my next attempt was no more fortunate. Ivy agreed that she must go and then broke into piteous weeping. I comforted her as well as Barbara’s expression of scornful amusement permitted; and, when the weeping broke out afresh as Ivy began to pack, I recollected an overdue appointment at my office. On my return, our guest was still in possession.