PATIENCE
I
He had only to seclude his mind in order to imagine himself in the train again, to hear its steady beat, and to sway monotonously with its rocking. As soon as he had isolated himself in this day-dream, he was impervious to the sights and sounds that washed round on the outskirts of his consciousness. He was safely withdrawn. He sat staring, not at the green baize of the card-table, where his wife, with white, plump, be-ringed hands, under the strong light thrown down by the shaded lamp, set out the neat rows of shiny cards for her Patience; he sat staring, sheltered within the friendly shadows, not at this evening security of his home, but out through the rectangular windows of the train, that framed the hard blaze of the southern country, the red rocks and the blue sea; the train curving in and out of tunnels, round the sharp promontories, disclosing the secrets of little bays, the pine-trees among the boulders, and the blackened scrub that betokened a previous hillside fire.
Opposite him, she slept, curled up in the corner of the seat, very young and very fragile under the big collar of soft fur of her coat thrown over her to keep off the dust. He had wished that she would look out of the window with him; he knew how she would sit up, and the quick impatient gesture by which she would dash the hair out of her eyes, but she slept so peacefully, so like a child, that he would not wake her. He bent forward, knocking the ash of his cigarette off against the window-ledge, to get a better view out of the window; and every little creek, as the curving train took it out of view, he pursued with regretful eyes, knowing that he would not pass that way again. This forlorn and beautiful coast, whose every accident was so faithfully followed by the train, this coast, every bit of it, was a party to his happiness, and he had been reluctant to let it go.
How his heart ached! Perhaps it was not wholesome to have trained his mind to enter so readily, so completely, into that world of recollections? He dragged himself out:
“Patience going well?”
“Not very well to-night.”
He drifted away again, before he well knew that he had drifted. Not to the train this time—his memories were illimitably various. (The time had been when he could not trust himself to dip into them, those memories that were now perpetually his refuge, his solace, and his pain.) An hotel bedroom. What hotel?—it didn’t matter. All hotel bedrooms were alike; all Paradise, so long as they had contained her. In what spot?—that didn’t matter, either; somewhere warm and gaudy; all their escapades had been in southern places. Somewhere with bougainvillæa ramping over creamy houses, somewhere with gay irresponsible negroes selling oranges out of immense baskets at the street corners. She had never tired of the gash of their white teeth in their black faces as they grinned. She would stop to buy their oranges just to get the grin. And some of them could juggle with oranges, which made her laugh and turn to him in delight and clap her hands. He clenched his fingers together, out of sight, as he lounged in the depths of his arm-chair. That hotel bedroom! Her clothes.... He used to kneel on the floor beside her open dressing-case, lifting out her clothes for her, because she was too lazy to unpack for herself. She watched him through her eye-lashes, amused at his complaints which so ill concealed his joy in her possessions; then she would catch his head and strain it hungrily against her. They were always violent, irresistible, surprising, those rare demonstrations of hers, and left him dizzy and abashed. That hotel bedroom! Always the same furniture; the iron bedstead under the draped mosquito curtains that were so oddly bridal; the combined wash-stand and chest of drawers (the drawers incorrigibly half-open and spilling the disorder of her garments, her ribbons, and her laces), the hanging wardrobe with the long looking-glass door, the dressing-table littered with her brushes, her powder, and her scent bottles. The evenings—he would come noiselessly into her room while she lingered at her mirror, in her long silk nightgown, her gleaming arms lifted to take the pins out of her hair; and after standing in the doorway to watch her, he would switch off the electric light, so that the open window and the dark blue sky suddenly leapt up, deep, luminous, and spangled with gold stars behind her. Then the coo of her voice, never startled, never hasty: a coo of laughter and remonstrance, rather than of displeasure; and he would go to her and draw her out on to the balcony, from where, his arm flung round her shoulders and her suppleness yielding contentedly to his pressure, they watched the yellow moon mount up above the sheaves of the palm-trees, and glint upon a shield of distant water.
And there were other nights: so many, he might take his choice amongst them. Carnival nights, when she fled away from him and became a spirit, an incarnation of carnival, and the sweep of her dancing eyes over his face was vague and rapid, as though he were a stranger she had never seen before. He used to feel a small despair, thinking that any domino who whirled her away possessed her in closer affinity than he. And when he had at last thankfully brought her back into her room at the hotel, with confetti scattered over the floor, fallen from her carnival clothes, whose tawdry satin and tinsel lay thrown across a chair, then, although he could not have wished her sweeter, she still kept that will-o’-the-wisp remoteness, that air of one who has strayed and been with difficulty recaptured, which made him wonder whether he or anyone else would ever truly touch the secret of her shy and fugitive heart.
“How funny you are, Paul. You haven’t turned over a page of your book for at least twenty minutes.” Not a rebuke—merely a placid comment. Another set of Patience nicely dealt out.