Part 9

Towards four o’clock it grew dark and they lit the gas, but after an hour or so it suddenly went out. They could not find any matches, hunting round in the dark. “Is there no light?” said their voices. Somebody found the door, opened it, and fled out: it was Fred. They heard him running down the passage, and his steps upon the stair. He would get down into the shop; he must look after himself. They sat down in the dark, pressed together to listen and to wait.

XV

It was the silence in the house, all that afternoon and evening, which frightened them. They were left to themselves, there was no sign of Lydia; there was no sound in the house but the sounds they made themselves. Now and then one of them would get up and go restlessly over to the window: but though they debated whether they should hail a passer-by in the street they feared too greatly the consequences of the scandal. Whatever happened, this thing must remain a secret for ever; on that point they were agreed and decided. This consideration kept them from the violence they might otherwise have attempted. No one must know ... poor Lydia ... her shame was their shame ... madness in the family.... So they kept silent; meekness was the only prudence. Weary, they realized that they were old, and looked at one another with a kind of pity. They spoke very little. Their lives stretched out behind them, enviable in their secure monotony. Never had they envisaged the grotesque as a possible element. The only grotesque that had had a place in their minds, was death; and that, by virtue of much precedent, was sanctioned into conformity.

“She’s got the better of us,” said Emily once.

“No, no, no,” said Bertie with sudden energy; he could not admit it. “No, no,” he said again, getting up and walking about. “_No_,” he said, striking with his fist into the palm of the other hand.

They waited till the evil hours should have passed and the normal be reasserted.

XVI

There remained the evening and the night. Lydia had said Christmas-day, and for some reason they took for granted that after Christmas-day was passed all would be over—one way or the other. The shutters would be unbarred, the shop reopened, and life would return to the cloistered house. Still the evening and the night. What a Christmas-tide! And they were old; too old for such pranks. Bertie was sixty-five. Old, too old. They were tired of the strain of the silent day. Hungry, too, although they had not noticed it. They went downstairs meekly when Lydia summoned them to supper. Nose, ears, moustache, blue wig; no attempt at rebellion. They sat round the table, waiting to be given their food and drink. They had half hoped that Lydia would present some unexpected appearance; if she was mad, she ought to look mad; that would be less terrifying. It was horrible to be so mad and to continue to look so sane. She might have been an old family governess; a strict one. Whereas they were condemned to sit there, so ludicrous; knowing, moreover, that she lost none of the full savour of the paradox.

“You shall drink my health,” she said, at the opening of the meal.

They drank it, in neat spirit. She plied them with more.

“I never touch anything,” said Emily feebly.

“No, but this is an exception.” She poured freely into Emily’s glass, drinking nothing herself.

The Javanese warrior holding the lantern on his spear grinned down at them with his yellow mask. The candles flickered in the great sham candelabras. The spirit was tawny in the shining glasses.

“Drink! it’s our last evening together.”

Emily looked at Lydia, they were sisters; had the same features; were not unlike one another.

“We shared a bedroom, Alice, didn’t we? I got into your bed once, when I was frightened at night. There was a box made of shells on the dressing-table, do you remember? Mother gave it to us at the seaside.”

She laughed; her laugh was almost tender.

“I used to pull your hair, Alice,” said Bertie.

They were suddenly confident that Alice would do them no harm.

“Forty years,” said Lydia, looking down the table at them.

“A waste of time,” said Bertie, “when we were brother and sisters together. But you’ve paid us out, Alice, you’ve paid us out.”

“Not yet,” said Lydia, “not fully.”

“I daresay I should have done the same myself,” said Bertie’s wife, surprisingly. “After all, it was a joke, Alice; why not take Alice’s joke in good part?” She looked round, as though she had made a discovery.

“If you prefer,” said Lydia, unmoved.

“Ha, ha!” said Fred, and was suddenly silent.

They began to eat what Lydia had given them. Beyond the open door of the dining-room the shop was dark and jumbled. Lydia ate primly, and the little black revolver lay beside her plate. The light glinted along its barrels. They viewed it without apprehension. This was their last evening; they were confusedly sorry; Alice, hospitable if eccentric; and what, indeed, was eccentricity? She was giving them champagne now; it was wrong to begin with spirits, and to go on to champagne; but what matter? Alice was well-meaning; generous. That little revolver: like a little black, shining bull-terrier, squat, bulbous. They heard themselves laughing and making jokes. Alice seemed pleased, she was smiling; up to the present she had not smiled at all; but now the smile was constant on her face as she watched them. They exerted themselves to entertain her. Their efforts were successful; she watched them with evident approval, swaying a little, backwards and forwards, as she sat. They ventured more; still she smiled, and her hand poured generously, though she did not empty her own glass. They had forgotten that they were old. Looking at one another, they laughed very heartily over the trappings Alice had provided for them. “Christmas!” said Bertie, tapping his nose. Emily leant back in her chair; she was sleepy and happy. She roused herself to accept the sweets which Lydia offered her. “Sleepy,” she murmured, smiling at Bertie’s wife; “your hair ...” she toppled off to sleep in the midst of her sentence. Fred wanted to prop her up. “Let her be,” said Lydia benignly. “All happy,” said Bertie. They pulled crackers, and put the paper caps on their heads; the table under the candelabra was littered with the coloured paper off the crackers, and there was a discord produced by the whistles and small trumpets that came out of them. Bertie was on his feet, trying all these toy instruments in turn; he swayed round the table, collecting them, and reading out the mottoes. He paused to look at his wife, who had fallen forward with her arms on the table and her head on her arms. “Asleep,” he said, with a puzzled expression. Lydia still sat bolt upright at the head of the table, letting them all have their way as it seemed best to them, whether in sleep or hilarity; with her hands she clasped her elbows, and the bands of hair lay undisturbed upon her brows. She examined her guests in turn; Emily, who slept, slipped sideway in her chair, the moustache still stuck on her upper lip; Bertie’s wife, who slept likewise, her face hidden, the blue wig uppermost; Fred, who between the ears stared vaguely before him; and Bertie, who, portly and irresponsible, wandered round the table searching among the litter of the crackers. Lydia at last, having scrutinized them all, gave out a sudden creaking laugh. Her party was to her satisfaction. “Forty years!” she said, nodding at Bertie, “forty years!” When she laughed he looked at her, dimly startled through his confusion. “Christmas,” he replied, blinking; he intended it to be an expression of good-will, an obliteration of those forty years. At last, he thought, they had found out the right way to treat Alice: not solemnly, not as though they were afraid of her, but in a light-hearted and jocund spirit. “Christmas,” he repeated, leaning up against her chair.

She began to laugh. Her laughter grew; it creaked at first, then grew shrill; she pointed derisively at them all in turn. Bertie was not alarmed; he joined in. He relished at last the humour of the situation, which Alice had been relishing now since yesterday. She had got twenty-four hours’ start ahead of him: an unfair advantage. He made up for lost time by trying to laugh more heartily than she did. She observed this with a dangerous appreciation; her fingers began to play with the butt of the revolver. Forty years. Forty Christmases spent in solitude. Her sudden rage blackened out the room before her eyes. She lifted the revolver uncertainly, then laid it down again. “Subtle, subtle. Not blatant,” she muttered to herself, an often-rehearsed lesson, and tapped her fingers against her teeth. She felt slightly helpless, as though she were unable to make the most of her opportunity. She knew she had had many schemes, but they all seemed to be slipping away from her. It was difficult to hold on to one’s thoughts, difficult to concentrate them; they scattered as one came up to them, like a lot of sparrows. A pity—she must make an effort—because the opportunity would not come again.

Just then she heard the front-door bell ring sharply through the house.

A little dazed, she got up to answer it. A messenger from outside? Perhaps an unexpected help in her emergency? She left the dining-room, where Bertie fumbled and tried to detain her; she passed through the shop, and, moving like a sleep-walker, unlocked and undid the many fastenings of the door. Outside in the street stood a group of men, carrying lanterns; the snow sparkled on the ground; the narrow street was like an illustration of old-fashioned Christmas. She stood holding the door open. She recognized many of her fellow-tradesmen; she heard their words, “Your well-known charity, Miss Protheroe ... never turn away an appeal unanswered.... Christmas-time ... trust we don’t intrude ...” and heard the rattle of coin, and saw the collecting-boxes in their hands.

“You don’t intrude,” she said. “Come in.”

Inwardly she knew they wanted an excuse to find out how Miss Protheroe spent her Christmas. They should see. They came in, removing their hats, from which the melting snow began to drip, and scraping the snow from their boots on the wire mat; their faces were red and jovial. She led them through the jumbled shop, through into the dining-room, where Bertie leant up against the littered table, and the two women slept, and Fred gaped stupidly.

They were at a loss to say anything; checked in their joke of routing out old Miss Protheroe, they gazed uncomprehending at the scene before them. Their eyes turned again towards Miss Protheroe; she stood erect and prim, her hands clasping her elbows.

“You don’t know my relations,” she said, and, indicating them, “my sister, my brother-in-law, my sister-in-law, my brother.” She effected the introduction with irreproachable gravity.

“She’s mad,” cried Bertie suddenly, reason flooding him, and he pointed at her with a denouncing hand.

They stared, first at those four crazy figures, and then at the stiff correctness of Miss Protheroe as they always knew her.

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.

After that he turned the pages assiduously, it wouldn’t do to be caught dreaming. Then came the relapse....

She had flitted away from him; yes, the day had come when she had flitted. He had known, always, somewhere within himself, that it would come. To whom had she gone?—he didn’t know; he hadn’t tried to find out, perhaps to no one; and, anyway, the fate of her body, passionately as he had loved it, didn’t seem so vital a matter; what mattered was the flame within her; he couldn’t bear to think that she should have given anyone _that_. Not that he was fatuous enough to suppose that he had ever had it. Oh, no!—he was far too humble, too diffident in his mind. He had worshipped her all the more because he knew there was something in her withdrawn, the eternal pilgrim, the incorrigible truant. He knew that he could never have loved any woman who hadn’t that element in her, and since he had only found it once, quite logically he had never loved but once. (He had been young then. It had been easy enough for his relations to pick holes in her: “Flighty,” they had said, and, snorting, “She takes the best years of his life and then throws him aside,” and to all their comments he had never answered once, but had looked at them with deeply wounded eyes, so that they wondered uneasily what thoughts were locked in his heart. Nor had they ever got any information out of him; all their version of the story had been pieced together from bits of gossip and rumour; correct in the main as to facts, but utterly at sea as to essentials. But as he disdained to set them right, they were never any the wiser.) Never loved but once; and here he was, fifty, prosperous, even envied by other men, going daily about his affairs, dining well, talking rationally, a certain portliness in his manner which his figure had escaped.... He and his wife, a commendable couple; a couple that made one disbelieve in anarchy, wild oats, or wild animals. People smiled with the satisfaction of approval when they came into a room; here were security, decorum; here were civilization and politeness; here was a member of the civic corporation, a burgher to admire and to respect. He had a grave, courtly manner, slightly indulgent towards women, which they found not unattractive, although they knew that he varied it towards none of them, whether plain or pretty, staid or skittish. There was always the same grave smile on his lips, always the same sustained, controlled interest in his eyes; attention, perhaps, rather than interest; the line was a difficult one to draw. The type of man who made other men say, “Wish we had more fellows like him,” and of whom the women said amongst themselves, “A puzzling man, somehow, isn’t he? So quiet. One never knows what he is really thinking, or whether he isn’t laughing at us all. Do you suppose, though, that he has ever really _felt_?”

The madcap things she did! He recalled that evening at the railway station, when under the glare of the arc-lights she had danced up to a ticket-collector—she in her little travelling hat and her furs and the soft luxury that always seemed to surround her: “When does the next train start?” “Where for, miss?” “Oh, it doesn’t matter where for—just the next train?” And they had gone to Stroud.

“This Patience never seems to come out,” said the voice proceeding from under the lamp.

“No, dear?”

“No. I think I shall have to give it up for an easier one. It’s so irritating when things won’t go right.”

“I should try an easier one to-morrow.”

“To-morrow? Oh, I see, you want to go to bed. I must say, I should rather have liked to try it this evening, but if you want to go to bed....”

“No, dear, of course not; try your Patience by all means.”

“No, dear; I wouldn’t dream of it, as you want to go to bed. Besides, to-morrow will do just as well. You will go round, won’t you, and see that everything is properly locked up?”

“But I am dragging you to bed when you don’t want to go.”

“Not a bit, Paul, I assure you; it is quite all right. I am really quite sleepy myself. I should have liked to try the Patience, perhaps, but to-morrow will do just as well.”

He held the door open gravely for her, but there were several things she must attend to before leaving the room: the fire must be poked down so that no spark could be spat out on to the hearth-rug; the drawer of her writing-table must be locked so that the housemaid should not read her letters or examine her bills when dusting the room before breakfast on the following morning; and the book which she had been reading must be replaced in the bookcase. He endured all this ritual without betraying any irritation, watching even the final pats which she gave to the cushions of his chair.

“It’s quite all right, Paul, dear; of course one can’t help crumpling cushions when one sits on them, and what are they there for but to be sat on?”

She bustled out of the room, calling back to him as she mounted the stairs: “You won’t forget to lock up, will you?”

He had remembered to lock up now for twenty years. He went methodically about the business, looking behind curtains to see whether the shutters were closed, testing the chain on the front door. All that paraphernalia of security! He felt sometimes that the cold, the poor, and the hungry were welcome to the embers of his drawing-room fire, to the silver off his sideboard, and to the remains of the wine in his decanters. And as he stood for a moment at the garden door, looking up the gravel path of his trim little garden, and felt the biting cold beneath the slip of new moon, he wondered with a sort of anguish where _she_ was, whether she was sheltered and cared for, or whether in her gay improvident way she had gone down and under, until on such a winter’s night as this there remained no comfort for her but such as she might find among the mirrors and garish lights of a bar, in such fortuitous company as she might charm with a vivacious manner and an affectation of laughter. She had from time to time been haunted by a premonition of such things, he remembered; a mocking wistfulness had come into her voice when she said, “You’ll always be all right, Paul, you were born prosperous; but as for me, I’ll end my days among the dregs of the world—I know it, so think of me sometimes when you sit over your Madeira and your cigar, won’t you? and wonder whether my nose isn’t pushed against your window in the hopes that the smell of your cooking might drift out to me,” and when she had said these things he had put his hand over her mouth to stop the words he couldn’t bear to hear, and she had laughed and had repeated, “Well, well, we’ll see.”