Part 4

“Nor I can’t say I feel like cooking it!” Vance observed bitterly. “I’m that upset! I’ve been across and asked.”

“Asked what?” inquired Mrs. Mardell wearily.

“About the funeral that I saw with my own eyes leaving that house on Christmas Day.… It’s not natural, I said, to go getting buried on Christmas Day----”

Mrs. Mardell interposed impatiently. “You don’t mean to say you went and asked at the house if they’d had any one die there? Really, Vance----”

“It’s no good saying that now, Ma’am; I had to know. And it’s only a Nursing Home, not a private house, so I’ve done no harm. And”--the woman’s voice grew low and hoarse--“nobody ain’t died there--not yet--that’s all!”

She put her apron to her face.

“Good gracious, Vance!” Mrs. Mardell cried. “Tell me more about it!”

“Ma’am, they’ve only got one patient there--a lady. She was going on all right, but she had a relapse this morning, just about half-past eleven, their cook said it was. She had an operation three weeks ago, and no good, and it’s got to be done all over again this afternoon at two o’clock, and they can’t tell as it will be successful, this time.”

“Well, my good woman, don’t you worry. Let’s hope that the lady will get over it. People do, you know, or there would be an end of nursing homes. I really feel so poorly myself that I can’t get up much sympathy with other people’s aches and pains. Be quick and get the kettle on, or is it boiling already?”

“Yes, Ma’am, you shall have it in a minute. Ma’am, you may not believe me, but I seen a proper funeral, and the hearse waiting, and the corpse carried out and down those steps… and the bearers with crape on their hats and so attentive, and one of them was no bigger than Master.… I thought of Master the moment I saw him.… And she was a big woman, for she took a big coffin.…”

“You are settling that it’s the woman who’s lying ill there now who has got to die, I see. What’s her name?”

“I asked, but the girl didn’t know it, only that she was an actress.”

Mrs. Mardell gathered in her legs decisively.

“Come now, Vance, don’t stand there gossiping and unhinging yourself with fancies; get me my cup of tea. I shall be all right, I expect, when once I have had something warm. Bring it to my room. I shall lie down a bit, I think.”

She rose to her feet, closed the swing door, dismissing Vance and her dreary soothsaying vision, and passed upstairs. Her day was spoilt. The pain did not seem to be going to recur, luckily, but the deadly feeling of uneasiness which had succeeded it certainly increased. Her legs were weak and could hardly carry her. People who have seen an apparition are said to feel just so. But as she reflected it was Vance, not she, who had seen the ghost!

She paused half-way up the stairs to look out of the window on the first landing, whence Vance declared she had watched the lugubrious tableau. Mrs. Mardell had never gone in for knowing her neighbours, it was wiser not, or else she would have been aware of the industry that was carried on at number thirteen, a red-brick sham artistic villa, just like her own house--like every other house in the street. She could only make it out by pressing her face against the window, and then she only saw it aslant, and red, through the vicious stained glass that occupied that particular pane. Eight steps led up to the front door of it, as eight steps led up to hers. Surely it was awkward for the incoming patients--many of them, presumably, too ill to walk? She wondered what sort of cases they took there. It would depend.…

Julia, she had heard, had grown very fat--at thirty.… That indicated something abnormal, in a youngish woman!… Something that had to be removed, generally.… She laughed.… She wondered why she laughed.…

“Your tea, Ma’am!” said Vance suddenly at her elbow. “I thought I would bring it up to you myself.”

Mrs. Mardell was a little ashamed that Vance should discover her staring out of the window at the scene of her absurd cock-and-bull story. She turned and coldly bade the cook precede her to her bedroom with the tea. Vance accepted the rebuff meekly. She looked cowed and thoroughly upset, and as if no merely domestic trifle could affect her now, broken to tragic issues as she had been.

The tea, as Mrs. Mardell had expected, revived her, and enabled her to lay a nice little plan for a quiet afternoon indoors. She proposed to telephone for Miss Walton to come and sit with her for a bit. She needed something or somebody to pick her up. Of course there was Charlie Bligh, a nice boy whom both she and Joe liked; she might telephone him to come and take her out to dine, as he often did.… But no, she wasn’t looking Carlton form; it wouldn’t be fair to Charlie to ask him to take out anything that wasn’t gay and smart. Besides, it would be rather mean to leave Joe to eat his dinner all alone when she had not even said good-morning to him. She had often left him for dinner, of course, and he had never thought of objecting, verbally at least--but just now that he was so busy and overworked she felt sure that he would like her, sitting beside him at his dinner, even though she could eat nothing. She saw herself delicately invalidish, in her soft draperies, picking at some grapes.… She felt mysteriously drawn to Joe, dear Joe, who was working for her now, who never attempted to control her social movements, who took what she gave him and was always as ready to flirt with her as if he were not married to her! She had managed Joe well! No, she wouldn’t leave Joe to-night, but get Miss Walton, who would surely stay with her till Joe returned about half-past five, as usual.

Miss Walton, over the telephone, signified her willingness to come and have a good chat. Mrs. Mardell made up her mind to take things easy. She was really unwell, she had eaten nothing since breakfast, she felt empty, shaken, swelled and sore. She could not have got her exquisitely adjusted corsets on if she had tried, or endured the pressure of them round her body. A tea-gown was clearly indicated. She assumed one, and a little lace cap that went well with it. Sighing deeply, she lay down on the rose-coloured chintz sofa in the drawing-room, shaded by a soft standard lamp, breathing timorously, existing furtively, unnoticed. She hoped it would pass her by, this brooding eagle of pain waiting to tear her.

She had brought her jewel-case downstairs with her and idly toyed with her trinkets. There were three trays, lined with velvet. They twinkled with precious stones. She took every piece in order and examined them slowly, seriously. All the while, her fingers seemed to know that down at the bottom of the box lay their real objective, a thin, crumpled, tousled letter folded small and turning up at the corners. Florence Mardell had received it a few days after her marriage, and although it was only a letter from a woman, had forborne to show it to her husband.

The letter was not actually malicious or even disagreeable, but it had dismayed her, and shocked her. She had kept it in case Julia should ever choose to lay aside her extraordinary tolerance and become human again. She read it over now to remind her of what it contained. Indeed she had intended to do so when she fetched the box. The by-play with the jewellery was only a blind--self-deceiving, a sop to her superficial consciousness.

“_Now it is all over, my strivings have not been in vain, and Joe passes from me to you. You must not mind my writing to you, Florence. I think that, on the whole, you will prefer to know what I feel, and that the woman you have supplanted is not your enemy. Joe loves you, and as the woman Joe loves, you cannot be abhorrent to me. Convention forbids me to be your personal friend, your feeling possibly, and perhaps my own, for I am but a woman after all, and the open wound that was left in my life when Joe was torn from my side would be chafed and kept raw by the sight of him merged now in your life. Yes, it is better so. I cannot, will not, see him either--though Joe is not conventional.…_

“_Joe is nothing that is not splendid. I did, I do love him so passionately, that I cannot hate you, Florence, as you see. You are the fair new temple in which he worships the spirit of Beauty and Love and Life. The law has clanged the door to, none may dare to interrupt the Litany he prays there, on his knees. God bless you._

“_But oh, my dear, keep him there. Never undress the altar. No more shifting for Joe, if we women can help it. He is a great man--he must be treated like a great man. These upheavals are bad for him, from every point of view. So be practical as well as passionate, and condescend to learn from me, who failed, how not to lose him. Only approximately can you learn, for the wind of art blows its children where it listeth. You know what an artist he is, and all artists are nothing but divine children. But, Florence, on your life, don’t treat him as one. Don’t let yourself ‘mother’ him as I did and be mad enough to sink the mistress in the sister, the friend even. That was my fatal mistake, I abstracted my sexual self till I became at last the caterer for his mere physical welfare, the confidante of his passing flirtations. Oh, the bitterness of those smothered confessions, those despairing returns of him, broken, marred and dispirited, to the one who surely loved him! Do this, my dear, as I did, and then one day he’ll come to you, as he came to me, and put his head on your knee and ask you to divorce him. So you’re both ruined in your several ways. He cannot go through it a second time._

“_Now listen. You must. I know. I would have you always a little inaccessible, puzzling, capricious even. I would ask you to dare to appear selfish, if you can manage it. Preserve your delicate tangibility, punish any slight infringments of your rules, close your door to him at nights when he has been naughty or careless. What it will cost you! But it is the right way._

“_You have an enormous pull by not acting with him, believe me! One gets so common, so cheap to a man, when he is used to knocking one about all over the stage, as Katherine, say, or insulting one as Nancy. Stay away from the theatre and accept as many dinners without him as you can. Although there isn’t the very slightest chance of his losing you, don’t let him feel as convinced of that as you are yourself. You see what I mean, don’t you, Florence? I heard you were very clever, as well as a little frivolous._

“_I have thought all this out, in many sleepless nights, for your benefit and his. Yes, it is Joe that I am thinking of, and shall think of till I die. And so of you, too._

“_Oh, don’t for goodness’ sake be offended by this letter, or take a dislike to me, for whether you like it or no, you will never be quite free of me, any more. Thought, strong thought, does permeate matter and finds itself able to overthrow its mere material resistance. I have proved it, no matter how. I won’t weary you with attempted explanation. I should not fancy you were psychic. But be sure that there will be a little of me in all your relations with Joe, I shall have a word in your ménage and you must not let the thought of it make you uncomfortable. Do you suppose I could have let him go so easily, if I had not this power to console me? Take it, as the slight penalty of kidnapping a man out of the ward of a devoted woman. You see how it is, he comes away, she offers no material or spirited opposition, but he brings inevitably some of her atmosphere along with him. Joe never actually ceased to love me; he only began to love you. I never misconducted myself--funny phrase!--so I am still his true and faithful wife, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, and where he is, henceforth, in some sort, I am. It cannot be helped._

“_It is a good thing that I am not vindictive and that I don’t hate you, since our relation must necessarily be so close. I assure you that it will not inconvenience you, annoy you, or trouble you at all, at least not until the bands of the spirit are loosed in one of these great, bare, soul-stripped, unaccounted-for moments of life, that come to all of us sometimes. Then, you know, one can’t tell, or foresee.… The spiritual bonds and relationships assert themselves and enforce attention.… I can’t quite promise to shield you, then, to free you from the circle of the charm.… But are you so frivolous, Florence? Won’t it interest you--awe you--soothe you?_

“_Ah, don’t fear me, don’t hate me--bid your flesh comply with me.… I am only the ghost of a wife--a power of love that can’t circumscribe itself, even though it would. There is a physical lien between us, undoubtedly. I won’t drag it if I can help!… I’ll try to control--I don’t know what I am writing--something writes for me. But trust me. Julia._”

“What a cat!” said Mrs. Mardell.

She folded up the letter again and laid it at the bottom of the box. It was almost actionable, she thought, a threatening letter. Or else the letter of a mad spiritualist--utter sentimental, impossible rot. What would Charlie Bligh, or any other daylight person think of it?

Strangely enough, she had more or less taken Julia’s advice! It was sensible, and thus she supposed germane to her own character. She had not “mothered” Joe, what woman in her senses would? She needed no deserted, defeated schemer to hang about her, in the spirit, to tell her that! She knew men as Julia with all her preachments had evidently never known them, and the result of her wise treatment of Joe was that he was devoted to her, extraordinarily so, for a busy man. Of course he worked hard, too hard, harder than he had done in Julia’s time. It had happened so, success had brought its own tension and high pressure. He was not, as Julia and her friends might like to suggest, trying to drown the memory of her in a round of forced activities. He was only taking fortune at the flood and making dramatic hay while the sun of critics favour shone. Not for a moment did he regret the step he had taken, his was an essentially light nature, he never brooded, and he detested heroics. The writer of that letter, with its tedious mixture of sentimentality and preoccupation with material cares, must have bored Joe to death, in the days when she had him all to herself and could claim consecutive opportunity for worrying him. And now, of course, a masterpiece of supreme tactlessness, like all failures, she turned critic and took on herself to give good advice.

Florence Mardell laughed. The reading of the letter had acted as even a better fillip than the trying on of the dress, and had nearly made her angry.

“I suppose”--she tossed her little gold crowned head--“that it is very good of her to give me the straight tip, and volunteer to overlook my ménage, generally, like a sort of superior lady housekeeper! I am not so bad at it myself, thank you?” She worked herself up to a sneer. “Much obliged to Julia, I’m sure, for haunting me, especially as she appears willing to confine herself merely to bothering the sensible mistress of the house, and doesn’t go frightening the servants and making them give up their places. Vance wouldn’t stop a minute----”

Her brow furrowed a little as she remembered the white, frightened face of Vance that morning.

“It’s a fairly cool thing, though,” her thought resumed, “for one woman to tell another, flat, that she considers herself part of her because she happens to have adored her husband and does still, I suppose. Man and wife--no, wife and wife--are one flesh.… Ha! Ha!…”

It was two o’clock, her face changed. Arrowy tinglings, growlings as of a chained monster inside her slender frame, punctuated her words. The pain had come again.…

When Miss Walton came in she would ask her to ring up a doctor. She could not have dragged herself to the instrument now.

* * * * * * *

The front door bell rang. She heard Miss Walton’s cheery voice making inquiries about Mrs. Mardell’s health as she shook the balled snow out of her boots on to the hall mat, and plumped her umbrella into the rack. Mrs. Mardell sat still, physically incapable of rising, though she had had but a short bout of pain this time.

She had made up her mind to question Miss Walton about Julia. Julia’s affairs seemed for the moment essentially her concern. She felt no malevolence towards her in spite of the re-reading of the letter. Miss Walton, the confidante, had never been allowed to see that letter. She should see it now, if she was good and satisfactorily confidential?

“Well, dear, how are you?” Miss Walton had come in, her work-a-day nose reddened with exposure, and her hands thickened with chilblains. “I suppose you are feeling the continuous cold, like the rest of us. And you know, you little minx, that you look best in a tea gown.”

“Do I look well?”

“Well, a bit bleached, perhaps, and your eyes rather funny and starey, as if you’d been seeing ghosts?”

“Vance has, she says.”

“A ghost in West Kensington! Nonsense!”

“It was a mock funeral, Vance says,” Mrs. Mardell remarked in an even voice. “Coming out of a house in this street on Christmas Day, when there was nobody died in it, as they told her.” She looked closely at Miss Walton’s face. “Do you know any one at number thirteen? An actress, Vance says----”

“Bless her. Christmas pudding, I should say. No, I don’t know a soul in this street besides yourself----”

Mrs. Mardell, with a sigh of relief, leant back again.

“But, I say, Florence, you do look dicky,” Miss Walton continued. “What have you been doing with yourself?”

“Perhaps you’ll say it is Christmas pudding with me too,” replied Mrs. Mardell, laughing feebly. “But I don’t know--somehow, I’ve had a horrid day. I seem to have got a sudden attack of lumbago, or sciatica or something.”

“It doesn’t sound likely, at your age.”

“No, does it? But it’s pains right through me at intervals all through the day. I had a fearful bout, just before you came. I daresay it’s nothing----”

“Rheumatism, probably,” said the other. “Nothing so absurdly painful when it gets hold of one. Here’s tea--nice hot tea. It will do you good.”

“I’ve had two goes already.”

“Oh, have a third! Nothing like tea for us women! Here, let me pour it out. Your poor little hands are trembling.”

“No, I’ll manage. Sugar? I forget if you take it? And lots of milk?… Alice, how long is it since you saw Julia?”

Mrs. Mardell was surprised at the coolness of Miss Walton’s reception of the seldom pronounced name. She might have reflected that the other woman had no particular reason to be shy of it, for she had been Florence’s and Julia’s confidante during the stormy times of the divorce and had managed to be loyal and friendly to both. She now replied offhandedly to Mrs. Mardell’s question--

“Not for six months. Lost sight of the poor dear, rather.”

“And when you last saw her, how did she look?”

“Handsome, but rather too fat. I can’t say I much liked the look of that, for she’s still quite young. I always fancy it means morbid growths, and that kind of thing. Poor old Juley! One never even sees her name in the bills now, does one?”

“Retired on the allowance Joe makes her, I suppose,” said Florence Mardell bitterly. “I can’t think how she could bring herself to take his money?”

“Only that she’s poor, of course.”

“How poor?”

“One can’t tell,” replied Alice Walton, “with people like Julia. She’s Irish. She’s the kind of woman who pays a man from Douglas’s to come and wave her hair, and dry it on towels that you can’t see for the holes! You understand. She’s the sweetest, cleverest, untidiest soul alive! She took a flat in Paris with a friend, and the state of that flat, I’m told, after a week of Julia, beat even the _femme de ménage_ they got in to do for them! They never dressed or ate, but lay about all day in peignoirs and smoked cigarettes. They got in a hypnotist to talk to them about Joe, I believe. Julia makes no secret of her devotion to Joe, as I suppose you are aware?… Now, Florence, keep your feet up--there’s a good girl! You look ghastly.”

“Yes, I know. So she’s still mad on Joe? Tell me more about her. She isn’t a woman of much taste, I fancy--can’t dress a bit?”

“No, but a generous creature, full of impulses and never a mean one among them. I do admire her character, I confess.”

“So do I,” said Florence Mardell. “And so did Joe, I believe.”

“Does. He can’t help seeing her qualities, and being flattered by her immense devotion to him. Though, of course, he’s used to it--he can’t help being faskynating! He’s such a sprite and yet so strong. Julia was as big again as he was, pretty nearly. He admired her awfully, as little men do always admire big women.”

“I’m not very big, yet Joe admires me.”

“Oh--I know he does and long may he continue. He may, for Julia, that’s one thing, she’s strictly ‘hands off,’ I know. She’s never made the slightest attempt to get him ever to go and see her.”

“He wouldn’t go if she did.”

“I shouldn’t be too sure of that,” said Miss Walton, carried, by love of her subject, beyond the limits of tactfulness. “And what would it matter? Joe was truly fond of her till you came along, you little witch! And she’s never done anything to set him against her or hurt his self-love. That’s what a man minds. I don’t see how he could have refused her a thing like that, nor could you. No, give her credit for her generosity, I believe he proposed it and that she refused to see him, steadily. Nobody in theatrical circles thought for one moment you’d keep him against her. The betting was all that, if she had tried, she’d have got him back in a month.”

“No, not if she’d tried, she wouldn’t,” said Florence Mardell earnestly. “She loved him too much!”

Her lips sketched a grimace as she spoke; her hand moved to her side and her eyes filled with tears.

“What is it, dear? The pain again?”

“I was afraid of it--my body was, I mean. But it luckily doesn’t seem to mean business, this time. And I don’t believe I could feel any more,--I don’t seem to have any organs left. It’s the peace of emptiness--exhaustion! Do, dear, let me go on talking and thrashing out things. What I meant when I said that Julia loved him too much, was this, that it is a mistake to love so openly and make such a noise about it. Men don’t value affection that’s cried from the house tops. It just disgusts them. Love at breakfast, love at luncheon, love all day; it’s sure to pall. Love shouldn’t be mixed up with daily bread-getting. It should be a speciality, not a sort of smoking mixture, advertised on every passing omnibus.”

“Go on, child, you interest me. Why, you yourself simply adore Joe!”

A faun-like, tormenting expression Miss Walton had never seen there, came over Florence Mardell’s face, as, in the weak exhausted voice of a privileged invalid, she proceeded--

“I adore Joe as smart women permit themselves to adore the thing they value and mean to keep. I believe I prize Joe, not for what he is, though I’m aware he’s a genius, but for what he means to me--light and kisses and frocks and champagne. There isn’t so much of that as there would be if Julia and her allowance didn’t stop the way! I love Joe because he’s the fount of life to me, because I feel good when he is in the room, and dull when he is out of it. I happen to know that I shouldn’t feel that about him if he came to me ill and hipped and unsuccessful. Sounds mean, but it’s true. I perfectly enjoy the placards telling me that he can make a cat laugh, and critics saying he is like what Garrick used to be. An ‘abridgement’--what is it? I am quite cross with him when the notices are poor, and I don’t in the least long, then, to take his head on my shoulder and comfort him. It’s he who has to comfort me.”

“Julia had a rather different theory!”