“I am going out, Yvonne,” he said, in a constrained voice. “All this is rather upsetting—and you had better go to bed early. You look tired.”
“Yes. I have a splitting headache,” said Yvonne.
She tried to smile brightly, as he wished her good-night. But when the door closed upon him, the smile faded, and her face grew drawn, almost haggard. A spirit had descended, touched her with magical wings, and changed at last the child into the woman. Her eyes were set in steadfast envisaging of the future; and they beheld the responsibilities and sadnesses of life, no longer as vague terrors and discomforts from which her light bird-like nature shrank to the nearest refuge, but as dull realities, commonplace in form and grey in hue.
It was her duty to go back to Everard, Stephen not wanting her; for she had promised. It was her duty to ask Stephen for his consent. And it was Stephen’s duty to give it, if he did not want her for more than daily companionship. She had proved that Stephen did not love her. Never had she felt so keenly the failure of her womanhood. It had not cleared his life of haunting cares. If it had, his heart would have been stirred with needs for closer union. The weapon of her sex was powerless. Newer knowledge had come to her. He needed her less than Everard. She argued with desperate logic. And yet there was a lingering, feverish hope—one that made her now and then draw a sharp convulsive breath, as she sat staring, with clear vision, at her life.
CHAPTER XXII—SEEKING SALVATION
He could walk no longer through the drizzling rain, in futile struggle with his soul’s needs. As possible to cut out his heart and fling it at Everard’s feet as to surrender Yvonne. He called himself a fool.
The glare in front of a cheap music-hall attracted him. He entered, mounted to the nine-penny balcony, where he stood leaning over the wooden partition, wedged among a crowd of loungers. The air was filled with the smoke of cheap tobacco and the fumes of the bar behind. A girl on the stage was singing a song in the chorus of which the thronged house roared lustily. Then came a tenor vocalist with drawing-room ballads. Joyce attended absently, hearing and seeing in a confused dream. A neighbour asking him for a light aroused him from his reverie. He wondered why he had come. To-night of all nights, when he might be at home in the joy of his heart’s desire. Yet he stayed.
A flashing family appeared riding on nondescript cycles. He watched them with half-shut eyes, caressing a quaint conceit that they were his thoughts whirling around in concrete form. The bursts of deafening applause seemed to soothe him. Presently a street-scene cloth was let down and a battered man appeared and sang a song about drink and twins and brokers. He threw such humourous gusto into the performance that Joyce laughed in spite of his preoccupation, and remained in amused anticipation of his second turn. The bell tinkled. The “comedian” came on and was greeted with vociferous applause. With music-hall realism he was dressed in prison-clothes, glengarry, woollen stockings, and black-arrowed suit all complete. He had made up his face into a startling brute. Joyce felt sick. He did not catch the first verse; only the concluding lines of the chorus,