Part 24

At first, as usual, his lies gave him the illusion of greater freedom, and he heightened the illusion by treating Jessie with less and less consideration. He gulped down the forced admiration she gave him and was always trying to squeeze more of it out of her. When he was in a mood of self-abasement she admired the loftiness which could stoop to acknowledge its defects, and quickly he was riding off again with his head full of himself as the kindest of husbands, the best of sons, the most irresistibly successful of men. Such glaring divergence presented itself to his mind as consistency.

Such a state of things imposed a heavy strain upon Jessie. She was not always quick enough to follow him in his snipe-like flights. Sometimes when he was accusing himself of neglect and thoughtlessness and lack of consideration for her, it seemed to her that it would be easiest and might afford both of them relief if she agreed with him. Then his vanity writhed and furiously he would cry:

"You are always finding fault with me. . . My mother thinks me perfect."

It is impossible to be wise where love is not, and Jessie could not learn discretion. He was so extraordinarily convincing in his self-reproach that she always forgot the lessons of caution she had set herself in his absence.

Still he would force endearing phrases upon her and caresses and demand to be told that she loved him. Her parrot-cries appeased him, and, feeling confident that she loved him, in stealthy small ways he began to betray her, indeed, where before he had only dared to be false to her in thought. He absented himself from his house to seek the company of flattering fools. He returned at longer and longer intervals to stoke up the furnace of his wife's love. . . . He was like a child who, having built a house of cards, removes first one card and then another from the base and leaves only enough to keep the edifice ominously swaying.

* * *

Do what he would, Frederic was slowly forced into retreat. It is impossible for life to stand still. If it cannot move forward it will plunge backward. Life is for ever seeking its channel, love. . . . Frederic was borne backward, and it was not long before he came to the thought of Annie Lipsett. Easily he persuaded himself that he had been treated with injustice, and thwarted by interference from doing what was right. Pitying himself, he began to pity her, and, in a tremendous orgy of self-righteousness, told himself that he ought to make amends, and at least, even if he could do nothing, let her know that he had not forgotten her. It did not occur to him that she might have forgotten him: impossible to conceive that she could wish to.

Though he was on a considerably more amiable footing with his father, he could not broach the subject with him. As far as Francis was concerned it was buried, and was not to be exhumed. Frederic turned to Serge, and by hints and semi-questions drew his own conclusion that Serge was still in touch with Annie. He left it at that and waited, and took to frequenting Serge's company enough to form a fairly accurate idea of his habitual movements. These still included frequent excursions into the country, for Serge found a good market for water-colour drawings of the semi-urbanised fells and dales of Lancashire, and the little towns so tucked away into a narrow valley that from one side of them you could see across the smoke to the hills and the green country beyond.

One day, when he knew that Serge was out on an expedition, Frederic visited his studio and ransacked it. He found two letters from Annie Lipsett and from them became possessed of her history. Serge's friend, the farmer, had married six months before and Annie had had to come to town again to earn her living as best she could. Serge had procured her a situation in a dressmaker's, and she was in lodgings in a suburb not very far away from Annette's little house.

Frederic wrote a very cautious little letter on his office paper, and, in a spasm of jealousy of Serge, enclosed a five-pound note. The money was returned two days later without any reply. He sent it back again, imploring her to take it if she had a single friendly thought of him or any wish for his happiness. (He heaved an enormous sigh as he wrote the word--happiness). The five-pound note was returned again. He guessed, rightly, that Serge was responsible, and he swore that he would not be ousted from his rightful position as benefactor to the woman he had wronged. Was not his own happiness wrecked? Could he not, by this means, restore it? . . . He was persuaded that he could.

He left his office early, and with a hectic sort of elation in the adventure--it was so much more exciting than the idea of returning home--set out to discover the house in which Annie Lipsett lived. He waited at the corner of the street until he saw her coming. She was with Serge. Furiously he turned and strode away.

The next evening he waited for her. She was alone. With Byronic gloom he stood in front of her and said:

"Annie!"

She caught her breath and stepped back a pace.

"Please," she said. "No! I thought you would understand."

"I understand nothing," said Frederic; "nothing except that my life is miserable, wrecked, a thing of captivity and torture."

"You mustn't come to see me. It isn't right. . . . Your . . ."

"It is right," said Frederic. "It has all been wrong, but this is right."

(He knew his language was stilted, but he could not give himself time to revise it.)

Annie said simply:

"Please, Mr. Frederic, it isn't any good. It was all over long ago. Your way and my way aren't the same."

Frederic walked with her down the street, and found it hard to keep up with her, she went so swiftly. He made one last effort and said:

"I want to see the child . . . Our own was . . ."

Annie had heard about that from Serge. She turned to him and held out her hands:

"I'm so sorry. . . . You shall see him just this once, if you'll promise me never to come again . . . and he is not to know who you are. He has never heard of you."

The unconscious cruelty of her words did not penetrate Frederic's mind. The situation appealed to him as a situation. He was becoming a connoisseur, and the ironically bitter savour of this tickled his palate. With offensive humility and gratitude he said:

"Thank you . . . Thank you."

* * *

The boy was in bed sleeping, with the clothes tumbled by his restlessness and his arms flung across his face.

"He is such a good boy," said Annie; "he has always been good and happy."

"He is like you," said Frederic. "I am glad I have seen him. I am glad to have found you again."

"Will you go now?"

Frederic was startled. Her simplicity and gentleness had sobered him. He had grown so used to swaggering from situation to situation that it was alarming to find this, which should have been the most touching and moving and the most honourable to himself, dissolved by the light touch of sincerity. It was all the more disconcerting, inasmuch as he had made no allowance for change in Annie. In their previous acquaintance she had been as adroit and as eager as he in the game of False Positions, which is the principal occupation of human beings all the world over. He had taken her rejection of his proffered assistance as another move in the game, and lo!--here she was simply ignoring the past and out of a purely general sort of friendliness allowing him to see her son, and when he had seen, requesting him to go! He was humiliated, but still so astonished that, though all his desire was to play upon her pity and so to drag her back to the old footing, he could not find words keen enough for his purpose. He heaved great sighs and fixed her with sorrowful and yearning eyes, but she gazed only at the child, busied herself with his bed, put up her hand to the gas jet and waited until Frederic was out of the room before she turned it low.

He waited for her in the passage.

"Tell me," he said, "how you are off for money. You shall not want. . . ."

"I make my living. I like my work."

"I couldn't bear to think of you suffering through me."

Annie looked at him with that disarming directness that was unfamiliar to him:

"I have suffered," she said.

Frederic went away.

* * *

It was not long before he had persuaded himself that she had deliberately plotted to humiliate him, by meeting his generosity--had he not been generous?--with what he called "beastly pride." Generosity, in his dual scheme of the world, should find its complement in a grovelling gratitude. Generosity was the prerogative of the male, gratitude the privilege of the female. That a woman should show self-reliance and fling back a man's generosity, suspect him most of all when he brought gifts, offended him as an indecency . . . After all if the woman does not take her cue from the man where is he? How can he continue to play his part? What becomes of the human drama?

Frederic's reflections of course were more particular than this, but, generalised, they would amount to the same thing. The world (_i.e._ Frederic) was so dishonest that honesty (_i.e._ an honest person, Annie) seemed to be offending against all the rules of the game, and, since the world is under the illusion that its whole existence depends on the game, it devotes its energy to the suppression of honesty. . . . Frederic told himself that he had a right to assist the woman, who was defiantly happy in the face of her sin, while he, her partner in that sin, was properly wretched and conscience-stricken and honestly desirous of making amends. He would obey his conscience--that must be right!--regain his self-respect and compel gratitude from Annie.

"We shall see!" he said, having partially restored his belief in his own rectitude and irresistibility.

He took to sending toys and little garments for the boy. They were returned to his office.

He went to Annie's rooms to find that she had flown. The devil of obstinacy was roused in him, and he bribed her landlady to procure her new address. He called but was refused admittance. . . . Then one morning he waited and followed her to her place of business and thereafter waylaid her several times. She was quite amiable but absolutely unyielding. One day as he was walking along by her side breathlessly pouring into her ear a tale of self-pity, self-accusation, self-abasement, entreaty for forgiveness, a word of kindness, extravagant out-pourings of love for the boy and his brave, splendid, true-hearted mother, all mixed together most adroitly with a complacent masculine belief in the softness and gullibility of the female heart, they met Serge. Annie called to him. Serge came at once.

"Take me home," she said.

Frederic caught hold of her arm and solemnly abjured her not to break his heart, to believe in him, to believe that he only was her friend. . . .

"Let her go, you swine," said Serge, and thrust Frederic away.

They were in a crowded thoroughfare. It had been raining and the streets were very muddy. It was evening and clerks and shop assistants were hurrying home. No one paid any attention to the little group. The stream of people parted, passed round them, closed again, and moved on. . . . The cold anger in Serge's tone infuriated Frederic. He saw it all now. It was Serge who was thwarting him. Serge who at every turn was thrusting humiliation upon him. He lost count of everything in hatred of Serge. He had a stick in his hand. He raised it and struck blindly. The stick was wrenched away, he received a terrific blow on the point of his chin, his feet slipped from under him, and he went down. . . . By the time he was up again Serge and Annie had disappeared. No one paid him any heed, only, a few yards away, grinning from ear to ear, he saw the boy from his office.

He hailed a cab and drove home. Jessie was alarmed at his condition, but her alarm gave way to pride as he told her how he had seen a man break a shop-window and run away with a handful of jewels--a huge, burly man, and how he had given chase, caught up with him, and after a tremendous struggle--the man knew a good deal about wrestling--held him until the arrival of the police. . . . What with the soothing influence of having his wounds tended, and the interest of his story, Frederic found it not at all difficult to recover from the degradation of the scene in the street and its outcome. He was so gentle and caressing, so apparently without thought beyond the moment, that Jessie began flutteringly to whisper to her heart that perhaps she had been wrong, perhaps, after all, Frederic had really loved her from the beginning. Both indulged in the luxury of forgiveness and fond indulgence, and they were like a shyly self-conscious couple on honeymoon.

* * *

Honeymoon folly is weakening, and next day Frederic had small power of resistance against his own miserable thoughts. His office-boy smirked when he saw him, and in the afternoon he grinned with a damnable familiarity as he announced Mr. Serge Folyat. Serge came in on his heels, caught the boy by the ear and thrust him out through the door. Frederic sank back into his chair, did his best to draw on his professional manner and sat with his fingertips pressed together and his lips pursed up.

Serge said:

"I've come to beg your pardon. I lost my temper."

Frederic could find nothing to say. Serge went on:

"Let us, if we can, discuss the matter on a friendly footing. You made a beast of yourself by pestering a woman. I made a beast of myself by hitting you. Now we know where we are. . . . We're likely to meet at home and other places where any obvious hostility would be embarrassing. . . ."

"I don't wish to meet you at home or anywhere else."

"It will be difficult to avoid. I think we had better settle the case out of court. Isn't that what you call it?"

Frederic tugged at his waistcoat and looked almost dignified as he said:

"I have no wish to interfere in your affairs. I will thank you not to meddle with mine."

"It happens, however," replied Serge, "that our affairs have overlapped. I must ask you to withdraw."

"And if I refuse?"

"Then it will become necessary for me to knock you down whenever I find you in my way. . . ."

"May I ask. . . ?"

"What I am getting out of it for myself? I was foolish enough to believe that you would not look for an interested motive. . . . The position is this. . . . You shirked a responsibility which I have had the pleasure and the privilege of assuming. Your beastly jealousy resents that, and you seem bent on taking up that old responsibility. There are two reasons why you should not do that--first, because it is too late; second, because your attempt to do so is an insult to your wife . . ."

"Keep my wife out of it."

"If you will tell your wife and ask her permission to make a settlement upon the boy . . ."

"You know I can't do that. I can't afford it."

"Then leave it alone."

"No."

"You'll take the consequences?"

"I'll take the consequences and be damned to you. . . . It's a fine thing to do, isn't it?--to take a woman when she's gone under?"

"My dear brother," said Serge, "you are the most childish little blackguard . . ."

"I'm man enough, any way, to stand up for my own rights . . ."

"When you learn that you have no rights you'll be a man . . . In a way you are right. My brother is not my keeper. I should prefer not to let the thing go any further, for your wife's sake. . . ."

"Keep my wife out of it!"

"Good-bye, then . . . You insist on being a fool?"

"I shall do as I think best."

The office-boy announced another client and Serge went away.

* * *

Frederic continued to waylay Annie Lipsett, but could never meet her without Serge, who called for her at her house in the morning and at her place of business in the evening. He wrote to her and implored her to give him an opportunity of explaining himself. (He had begun to believe, without reference to Jessie, whom he kept in a separate compartment of his mind, that he loved Annie, had never ceased to love her, and that a declaration of love would break down her resistance.) She did not reply and he wrote at great length explaining his desire to set her beyond anxiety, and hinting at the fires that were raging in his bosom, fires which he stoked with unceasing care.

At last he had a letter from her. She wrote:

"DEAR MR. FREDERIC,--Please, please believe that I want nothing from you, that I am happier as I am. I don't want my boy ever to know who his father was. He is mine by all the love I have given him. I could not share him with you, and to let you do anything for him would be sharing, wouldn't it? I have thought no ill of you for a long time now. I was to blame just as much as you. That is all over. You cannot take me into your life, therefore I cannot take you into mine . . ."

Frederic was interrupted in the reading of it and slipped it into the pocket of his coat.

His long absences had begun to stir jealousy in his wife. She was spying on him. She found the letter, her jealousy burst into flame, and thereafter was no peace in Frederic's house, nor any moment of sweetness and ease.

Once more, with horrible hypocrisy, Jessie resumed her habit of walking with her husband to the little iron gate in the morning, and meeting him there in the evening, and the old ladies and gentlemen, who had been a little anxious, peered through their windows and smiled their blessings.

Mrs. Folyat always said that Frederic's house reminded her of Eden before the Fall.

XXXI

NEWS FROM MINNA

_"Sir" cries Adams, "I assure you she is as innocent as myself."_ JOSEPH ANDREWS.

MRS. FOLYAT found the position of a grandmother entirely to her liking--the maximum of opportunity for beatific clucking with no responsibility. Annette had three children, Gertrude two, and Minna two, and Mrs. Folyat had already a large collection of their sayings for quotation in company, the most popular being an ode addressed by Annette's second boy to Mr. Gladstone, who had visited our town several times when its allegiance to the Liberal cause began to waver.

Minna brought her two children to stay in Burdley Park. They came for a fortnight and stayed four months. They would have stayed longer but that Francis began to be anxious and, after a good deal of cogitation, shyly questioned Minna as to her husband's doings.

"Basil is having a bad year," said Minna. "We're horribly poor sometimes. Rents in London are so dear."

"Even so," said Francis, "it seems hardly wise to leave him for so long."

"We have rows." Minna seemed to be quite cheerful about it. "Poor people always do have rows. They get so afraid, that they can't enjoy anything else."

"I was beginning to think that something serious might have happened."

"Oh, no. I'm still Basil's 'darling wife' when he writes to me, and he is my 'devoted husband.'"

"Marriage," said Francis, "is very difficult."

"Of course it is, to anybody who isn't an angel like you. . . . I'll go back and try again."

Francis sucked at his pipe thoughtfully.

"I oughtn't to tell you this," he said, "but Annette ran away once."

"Did she?"

"Yes, after breakfast. She was back again in time to give Bennett his tea."

* * *

Two days later Minna returned to London. The day after she had gone, Basil appeared with a drawn, miserable face. He asked Francis if he might speak to him, and Francis, quaking, led him into the study. Basil said he had been abroad. Minna had run away from him with the children.

"She came here," said Francis. "For all we know, she was writing to you every day and hearing from you. She said she was hearing from you. . . . Only just before she went she spoke about your letters. She went back to London yesterday. You ought to be with her. . . . In my opinion you ought to have fetched her back months ago."

Basil seemed to have a great deal to say, but he gulped it down and reached out for the railway guide.

"Yes," he said. "I suppose we must try again."

"If you want money," said Francis, "I would rather you came to me than were obliged to any one else."

"It isn't money. Thanks all the same."

Francis felt his heart sink, but he let it pass. It seemed all the more imperative to him that Basil should hurry back to London. He bustled him out of the house and saw him to the station.

* * *

Three weeks passed during which no word came from Minna or Basil. Francis did not write to them, hoping that they were settling their differences--whatever they might be.

One morning when he was up early he took in the letters and found one from Minna addressed to Mary. He watched Mary read it at breakfast. Without looking up she thrust it back into its envelope, her hand trembling so that the paper rustled, and slipped it into her pocket.

"Who's your letter from," asked Mrs. Folyat. Francis held his breath.

"It's from Fawcett's, the music-publishers. They haven't got the piece I wanted. Perhaps I didn't give the name right."

Francis breathed again.

Mary disappeared soon after breakfast. She went to Serge's studio. He was out. She waited for him all day and had nothing to eat. She did not even light the gas but sat thinking, thinking on no thought. Serge found her in the dark.

"Why, Mary!" he said.

She held out Minna's letter, and he sat and read it.

"Have you told anybody at home?"

"No. It's too awful."

"It isn't awful at all. It's very silly of them to be angry with each other."

"But divorce. . . . It's wicked."

"Nonsense. It may be necessary. It often is. . . . She'll want a good deal of sympathy."

"She doesn't deserve any."

"How absurd you screwed-up people are! You don't give sympathy because people deserve it, but because they need it."

Mary pondered that for a moment or two. Then she asked:

"What did you say I was?"

"Screwed-up."

Mary said nothing.

"We'd better burn this," said Serge. "We shall have to be discreet. Letters nearly always convey wrong impressions."

"Shall I write to Minna?"

"If you want to. Don't give her your opinion. She won't want it."

"Who is to tell them at home?"

"I will, if you like."

"That's what I wanted you to do. . . . I felt that something was happening all the time Minna was here."

"I'll go home with you now."

"I think the sooner the better. . . . Something awful might happen."

* * *

Serge found his father in the greenhouse and went straight to the point. Francis was in his shirt-sleeves. He laid down his trowel and very slowly put on his coat.

"I knew something was happening, but I never thought it could be as bad as that."

He sat down heavily and blinked through his spectacles.

"I seem," he said, "I seem to have brought my children into the world to very little happiness. I suppose Minna ought never to have married a poor man. . . . It's very queer, Serge, very queer. One reads of these things and the rights and wrongs of them appear to be very simple. They happen in one's own family and the rights and wrongs don't appear so simple. . . . If Minna were to come in now, I should be glad to see her. I should at least know that she was safe. . . ."

"The truth is," said Serge, "that the rights and wrongs don't matter. You either love people or you don't. If you love them, you help them. If you don't, some one else does."

"I think," said Francis, "I had better go to London. I always liked Basil. He always liked me. I might be able to make him see reason. . . . Minna says she is innocent. He ought to take her back."

"My dear father, that isn't reason. That is nonsense. . . . You're thinking of what people will say. Public opinion doesn't matter any more than my opinion or your opinion. If they have fallen so far apart as to wish to break the tie between them it will be quite impossible for them to live together without degradation----"

"You go so fast. I can't follow you. I don't see . . ."

"It is always degrading for a man and a woman to live together when they have no love for each other."