Chapter 20

SEPARATION

In November Marie had the letter which announced Osborn's imminent return.

"... In another week," he wrote, "I shall be with you all again. It will be good to see you. Of course, this has been rather a rag, and I think I shall hold down the job for ever and evermore; but a year is a long time, isn't it? I look forward to coming home. I shall have a lot to tell you, but I expect I shall want to hear your news first, and how George has got on at school, and so on."

The letter had an unwonted postscript: "I wonder if you've missed me, old girl."

It was waiting for Marie on a grey afternoon when she returned from a lecture, for which, a year ago, she would have needed a dictionary, but which now entered her brain glibly and was at home there. All that afternoon she had been listening to an exotic discourse on "Woman and her Current Philosophy"; and now--here was Osborn's letter, suggesting calmly, proprietorially almost, his re-entry into her life. Was it possible that he had been away for a whole year? Or possible that he had been away for only a year? Rapid as the stride of Time had been, he was already a stranger, someone dimly perceived, arriving from another life, and hardly making his presence felt.

She stood reading the letter attentively, noting its points and phrases with even detachment; its arrival arrested her thoughts, although she had known it must come soon. Its sender was already on his way to her, expecting the eager welcome of home; and home had nothing but stereotyped compliments to offer. Who was he, anyway?

Just the man who had made the domestic laws in No. 30, had made them disagreeably and could make them no longer, whose power was broken. The keeper of the purse; the winder of the clocks of life; the hostile element in a peaceful day; the shade of a dead lover long since trampled under the domestic battle-ground.

It was almost curious that he had ever existed.

She came for the second time to the postscript and smiled vaguely and faintly. He wondered if she had missed him.

Yes. She had certainly missed him.

As Marie Kerr stood by the fire in her sitting-room with Osborn's letter in her hand, she awoke fully, as from a dream, to the understanding of what was about to befall her.

She was once more, after this year of miraculous growth and power and recovery, to take unto herself her husband.

The door opened and the maid came in quietly, a teacloth over her arm, the tray in her hand. She arranged all to please the taste of the mistress who stood watching as if she watched something unusual.

For a whole year, in that flat, she had been the person whose will was government, who had to be pleased and obeyed. She had made the laws, kept the purse, and set the clock.

It had been a wonderful year.

She laid aside her furs, sat down and poured out her tea. Presently she heard George come in--he now went to school for the whole, instead of the half day--and the happy clatter of the children in the dining-room. There was no one to cry testily: "For God's sake keep those children quiet!" as if the children were aliens--crimes of the mother.

When she had finished her tea, and had heard the maid come out of the dining-room, she went in, to romp with her children. It was an hour she loved and for which she now had zest; she could enjoy it to the full. They played Blind Man's Buff, in which even the baby joined staggeringly, and Hunt the Slipper--the baby's little one, which she wanted to keep whenever it was smuggled under the edge of her little flannel petticoat; and for the last ten minutes Marie went back to the sitting-room to tinkle on the piano, while the maid was requisitioned once more to make a fourth to play Musical Chairs. Then the children came into the sitting-room, hand in hand, and stood by the piano and sang the lullaby their mother had taught them. She joined her voice to theirs with all its old strength and sweetness. And she heard their prayers and tucked them up in their beds.

Then she went into the room which for a year had been hers and, while she changed into her soft black frock, the realisation came that she was again to share it. Her lips curled.

"I won't!" she said to herself.

Why couldn't they go on for ever in this flat as they were now, sufficient unto themselves, she and the children?

She returned to her book by the fire. And while she read on deeper into the love-story, absorbed and credulous in spite of herself, the front door bell rang.

Julia and Desmond Rokeby came in with a great air of mystery and jubilation. They walked with the rich expectancy of people treading golden streets, and though they came up to Marie, captured and embraced her, laughed, and began relevant explanations both together, their eyes looked through her, away and beyond her, and she had a sense of being right outside their scheme for ever and evermore.

Loneliness assailed her rather bleakly as she stood with a smiling mouth, gazing from one to the other and trying to gather the gist of their news.

"We know you'll be awfully surprised," Julia cried, treating her to squeezes of nervous rapture, "but--"

"Now, darling," said Rokeby, "let me. You see, Marie, we've gone and done for ourselves. May we sit down with you just a moment while I tell you? I knew that Julia--"

"He was so stupid about it," said Julia, glowing.

"Don't cut in and spoil the story, dearest," he urged. "I knew she'd never make up her mind really to get married, you know, Marie, so this afternoon I met her coming out of the office, drove her to a church where all arrangements had been made, took one of those handy permits out of my pocket--a special licence, you know--and--"

"You're married," said Marie Kerr in rather a dull way which disappointed them both.

"We are."

"After all, Marie," said Julia breathlessly, "don't you think it's the nicest way; without any fuss and premeditation, and bridesmaids, and cake and things? Just our two selves."

"It was splendid," said Rokeby. "I'm the first man I know who ever really enjoyed his wedding."

Marie sat between them and held a hand of each; after a while she answered:

"I do congratulate you both; it's all so exciting and romantic. Oh! I do hope you'll always be very happy."

"Thank you, dear," Julia beamed.

"We know we shall always be very happy," said Rokeby.

"And now?" Marie asked with an effort.

"We're going honeymooning," said the bridegroom.

Again she sat silent, keeping the smile upon her lips.

"Where are you going?" she asked by and by. "We went to Bournemouth. We had such a delightful time..."

"Our plans are uncertain," said Rokeby.

"That means you are going to hide."

"For a while we are; no letters; no telegrams; no intrusions of any kind. Just us. See how marriage takes a hardened bachelor!"

"And a hardened spinster!" Julia chimed.

"I do hope," Marie repeated, "that you'll be very happy. When will you come back?"

"Early next month," said Julia.

"Perhaps," Rokeby qualified.

"And the first thing we do," said Julia affectionately, "will be to come and see how our Marie is, left all alone without us."

"Don't!" Marie begged. "You're making me gulpy. For two pins I'd cry. You two--you've just been everything to me this year, after the children. You don't know how lonely you're making me feel."

"But soon Osborn--"

"Osborn's coming home next week."

"Oh, great!" Rokeby cried; and Mrs. Rokeby added: "I _am_ glad. Now you won't be lonely any more."

"I don't know," Marie said quietly.

She took Julia's bare left hand from her muff and looked at the rings and stroked it.

"I love a new wedding ring," she said.

"Our train, darling," Rokeby reminded his wife.

"We must fly," said Julia, rising. "Our taxi's outside, with all the clothes I've had time to pack, upon it. Desmond had packed in anticipation, the wretch! And we've only got an hour--but we just had to come in and tell you before we went."

"I hope you and Osborn will have another honeymoon like ours is going to be," Rokeby cried as they hurried through the hall.

She shook her head, vaguely smiling, but her lips would frame nothing. She was glad to shut the door upon their happiness. It seemed as if everything young and fierce in her were pulling at her heart. How she wanted it again, that amazing rapture and discovery! As she sat down again by her fire in the quiet flat, she would have bartered half the remaining years of her life for just that first year over again.

She went across to the window, pulled aside a curtain, and beheld rows and darts of lights like stars; street lights and house lights beckoned to her; she opened the window slightly and the distant sound of traffic, the drums of London rolling, excited and affrayed her.

She felt too young for the sedateness into which her life was settling.

Restless as she was, she had trained herself too well in the ruthless habits of method and industry not to begin automatically to set all in order against the coming of the master of the home. Feeling the need of doing rather than of thinking, she went to the bureau, and picked her account-books from their pigeonholes. Accurate and businesslike, they should be presented. They were ruled with neat margins, the columns headed precisely; each quarter of the year showing a favourable balance in hand. There was no doubt but that she was a creditable housekeeper. She opened them one by one memorising with a certain pleasure their tributes to her capacity. One big item had been wiped off altogether last spring, after her mother's death: the rest of the furniture instalments, which, on the extended system for which Osborn had been obliged to arrange after George's birth, would have dragged on for two years more. Grannie Amber's sale had more than paid for all.

"He can't say I haven't been careful," she thought. Besides, she was now a woman with an income of her own; with two hundred and twenty pounds a year in her pocket, the right to which no man could question. If he demurred at the maid, and at George's school bills, she could point to her ability to pay.

She knew how greatly she had changed during their separation; to the change that might have been wrought in Osborn she gave little, thought, not caring much. She supposed that he would come home much as he left it, refreshed doubtless, better-tempered, and full of his holiday, to the stories of which she would give a dutifully interested hearing. But that he could ever rouse again in her the passion and pain which had prostrated her on the night when she knew he was to leave her was ironically impossible. As she sat over her account-books, her memory cast back to that evening, how she had stood, in silent agony, beside the table, sorting over his stock of clothes; how feverishly and blindly she had sewed, trying to hide from him all that to-morrow meant to her; how, when he had gone to bed, she had kneeled by his chair and sobbed, and prayed that no other woman should ever wean him from her....

What an extraordinary exhibition! What weakness of temper and nerve!

She knew it was more. It had been the terribleness of love.

"And now?" she mused.

It made her smile a little, lazily and serenely.

But now and again she sighed with a sharp envy, thinking of Julia and Desmond.

She waked often in the solitude of the night, imaging the bride and bridegroom on the track of rapture, following the unwaning star.

In the morning there was a cablegram for her, reading: "Home on Thursday.--OSBORN."

To-day was Monday. She stood with tight lips for a moment wondering just how to set this scene of reunion; the flat was not large, comprising as it did the tiny slip of a room in which the maid slept, the children's room, her own, and the two sitting-rooms and kitchen. All the day she arranged and rearranged the accommodation in her head.

She was not only reluctant for Osborn, but almost shy of him; he had left her thoughts so that it seemed impossible that he had ever had the right to intrude, at all hours, on her privacy; impossible that it should ever be so again. After all, there were many husbands and wives who went their own way, led their own lives, and the outside world never knew. To such a confraternity would she and Osborn now belong, living under one roof, but separated, separated not only by walls, but will.

For she did not want him any more; she could not contemplate his assumption of the husbandly role. It sounded strange as she uttered it aloud to herself, but there it was.

"I do not want him any more."

She thought: "Had he never gone away, had we gone on living as we lived then, year in, year out, this would never have happened. People don't get out of a deep rut like that unless they're helped out. But now I've had a year to get my looks back; to sit down and think, and I know things that I should never have guessed before."

After she had taken the baby for her morning airing on the Heath, she left the two younger children with the maid, and went into town to lunch. She chose again the Royal Red, but not the table behind the pillar from which she had peered, glad of its shelter for her shabbiness, a year ago. She took a table at the side of the room where she could see and be seen, and she looked at the other women without envy or hatred, with no more than a level sense of rivalry which was almost pleasant. If she had not known how well she looked, the glances of men would have told her. She lingered long over her coffee, enjoying her opportunity and her freedom, and telling herself--resolved as she was that it should not be so--"Well, it's probably my last time like this."

She was in Regent Street after lunch, looking into a blouse shop, when she saw close at hand the Beauty Parlour sign which brought to her memory at once the sleek pale girl with the emerald earrings. Something made her curious to see the girl again, and she went in, to find her still there, the emeralds still in her beautiful close ears, but sharper set, a year wearier.

She uttered charming things of madame's white hands. And, surely, she had never had the pleasure of seeing madame there before?

Madame replied: "No; you have never seen me here before."

She reflected: "It's very true, that. No one had ever seen me, this me, a year ago."

Just as she had felt no hate for the women in the Royal Red, so her sense of hostility to the girl bending over her hand had vanished. She was a friendly rival, not to be feared. And she was not so peerless, after all; there were flaws under the powder with which she coated her pale skin.

"I have never seen prettier nails, madame," said the manicurist, as she smeared on cream.

After she left the Beauty Parlour Marie had nowhere to go. There was no Rokeby to give her tea in his comfortable office while he offered her business advice; he had been very good with his advice over the question of Marie's inheritance. Neither was there a Julia to ring up and invite to tea at one of the numberless cosy teashops of the West End. Marie turned in, at three o'clock, to a matinée and bought an upper circle seat, a few minutes late for the rise of the curtain on the first act of an ultra-modern play.

The play was all about marriage. It dissected marriage into a thousand pieces, and held every piece which was not turned into tragedy up to ridicule. It fostered all the nonsense which fretted in idle women's hearts, and touched many sore spots in others; and made men smile cynically as if saying, "That's got it to the life." This play kept Marie Kerr enchained; it set her wondering why the Marriage Service had ever been written and consecrated; it blew to and fro the winds of the storm in her soul until a tempest rocked her mind; she drew a black comparison between the tragedy of the hero and heroine, and the situation between Osborn and herself. But at last, when the playwright had ridiculed and denounced what he called the oldest and tiredest convention in the world for long enough, the play seemed to turn on a pivot, and the pivot was the cradle. The playwright gave the playgoers the happy ending for which the world craves and sent them home relieved.

He sent Marie Kerr home relieved, too; but the day had not changed her mind. She was fixed and, she felt, irrevocably. Over her solitary dinner she thought of the play; and she thought of the fight to be fought in her own home, and she slept upon it, to awake unmoved in the morning.

She did not want Osborn.