Chapter XXIX

Grief slows all the processes of time. To Anthony it might have been weeks that he had been alone with silence in Kitty’s empty room, and yet it was only two hours before Henry, calling to inquire for Kitty, became aware of what had taken place.

Henry was aghast to discover that nothing had been done. He had not been telephoned for. Anthony, though a doctor, had ignored the urgencies of death.

Peckham, who had made tea twice, but never even knocked at Kitty’s door, had received no instructions. Anthony remained for two hours, “apparently,” as Henry said to himself, “brooding.”

Henry always considered time spent upon thought as “brooding,” unless it was accompanied by paper, a writing-table, and ink; then it became thinking.

When Anthony came down-stairs, Henry was surprised to observe no outward change in him. He bore none of the marks of grief, and he was uninclined to speak in a hushed voice.

Henry came forward with an outstretched hand.

“My dear fellow,” he said in a low tone, “I am shocked and distressed beyond words.”

Of course Henry was not distressed beyond words. Words did very nicely for him. He was, as a matter of fact, intensely relieved.

Providence had acted, as it could only occasionally be relied upon to act, with considerable tact and promptitude.

Perhaps the promptitude was a little overdone; six weeks later, considering the date of the marriage, would have been less startling and no less convenient. But Henry was prepared to overlook this slight lapse of taste on the part of the higher powers in view of the fact that they had carried out his main intention. They had got rid of Kitty.

Henry was not, however, in the least prepared for Anthony’s saying in an offhand tone:

“Yes, I suppose it was the best possible thing, really,” quite as if he were answering Henry’s thoughts and not his words. Henry was sorry for Kitty, he had been charmed by her, and he was readily sorry for those who were capable of charming him; but the fact remained that Kitty was not respectable and that all Ardens married respectable women. Now that Kitty was dead, he thought it would have been better taste on Anthony’s part not to refer to her disabilities. To admit death as a solution was, Henry felt, a direct slur upon Kitty.

“Let’s have something to eat,” Anthony unexpectedly suggested. “Peckham, have you got some tea hot for us?”

“Yes, sir,” said Peckham, fluttering, but justified. “It’s in the dining-room now, sir, and an egg, if you could face it.”

“I’ll eat anything you’ve got,” said Anthony with conviction. He did not even have to be tempted.

Henry felt a little bitterly how much more devastating grief would have been to him. He had had his lunch two hours earlier, and he did not want tea now; though Kitty had only been his sister-in-law.

“I thought, perhaps,” he said gravely, “I might be of use to you, my dear fellow. There are certain things—”

“Yes, I know,” interrupted Anthony, who was standing to eat his food in a thoroughly uncomfortable, restless way by the door. “There are heaps of things—telegrams, undertakers, the registrar. I’d be awfully obliged if you’d do them for me. Hilton Laurence said he’d look in and help later. I want to go out for a walk.”

“People will expect to hear from you direct,” suggested Henry, who did not think that widowers should go for walks before the funeral.

“Sign my name, do anything you like,” said Anthony, hastily. “She hadn’t any wishes. Will you see Costrelle for me? Don’t interrupt his bridge; he plays between five and seven-thirty.”

“On an occasion like this—” said Henry, severely. He was going to give up his own bridge.

“Yes, yes, I know,” said Anthony, hurriedly; “but Costrelle doesn’t think in occasions; he won’t like being interrupted. It’s awfully good of you, my dear old chap, to do these things for me. I think—I think I must get out.”

“There will be certain questions which you alone can decide,” said Henry. “When shall I expect you back?”

Anthony looked for the first time as if he was a little changed. He fumbled perceptibly for an answer.

“I don’t know what time it is now,” he said jerkily, and without waiting for Henry to tell him he walked out into the hall, shutting the door after him.

The day had grown unexpectedly mild and sunny. Anthony walked listlessly and without any definite direction. He wanted to get to some open space where people would cease to pour past him like part of a great procession. He found himself at last by the river. The light lay faint and thin over its gray waters, gleaming with a pale, transparent silver upon the distant towers of Westminster. The huddled, low waterside houses looked full of the stubborn comfort and unconsciousness of England. Westminster brooded high and bright above a flock of little, ugly dwelling-places. There was no background to the ancient river but the smoke from factory chimneys and the low, dim sky.

Anthony was not aware of his grief, but he was aware of a great desire, a compulsion of his inner being, to get away from all pity and arrangements. He wanted to place between himself and Kitty’s death a host of less immediate objects.

The towers of Westminster rested him, the rocking motion of the motor buses, passing like broad-sided ships down the stream of the open thoroughfares, lulled him. The slow pressure of the river upon its unhurrying journey to the sea placed a merciful image between his thoughts and Kitty.

Time stood still. The hours hung on Anthony heavily with the weight of years.

As he leaned over the bridge and watched the long, slow ripples pass his thoughts unnumbered, he felt eternity. The sun sank into the misty west; there was a faint deepening of color and light along the Embankment. Five white swans rose on massive wings high above Battersea Bridge; they slipped dazzlingly across a path of light into the darkening sky, taking the day with them.

Twilight slipped gray and blue in long lanes between the shadowy houses; the lights at the street corners had misty haloes round them, like a cloud-encircled, opal moon.

Anthony became aware of an overwhelming physical fatigue; it was so intense that, despite the chill of the falling night, he sank with relief on to one of the benches. It was empty, for it was too early for the prowlers of the night to seek their rest there, and too late for the belated children playing their last games.

Anthony could no longer see the river, but he was aware of it moving quietly beside him in the dark. It seemed to help his mind to turn slowly and without pain back to the thought of Kitty. He reflected what a wonderful and easy chance his life would afford a cynic for laughter. Only a few years ago his career had been so shapely and definite a fact. He knew what he meant to do, and he had the means and the ability with which to do it. He was as sure of his surgical powers and his unshakable nerve as of the continuity of bread upon his table. He had no bad habits, no overmastering temptations. His life was a clear and steadfast plan, and in due time, with substantial success behind him and ripened ambition for the future, he meant to seek and find a fitting mate.

He laughed out suddenly into the dark. He was not that sane man now, with his iron-like securities. He had lost the rapier-like decision of the unbroken. His mind saw many issues, his will flickered at a choice of opportunities, a long day’s work unstrung him like a delicate girl. His memory was uncertain, his clean slate was written across with undecipherable, lost activities. He was not sure of anything at all.

And his love, that reserved and whole-hearted quality on which Anthony meant to found a home, had been called out and wasted on a light woman, happily dead. Destiny had applauded him for his equipment and then destroyed it.

And yet he was aware, sitting there in the dark and cold, with his weaknesses and his great grief, that he would not for anything in the world be the old Anthony, secure and hidebound, moving with blind assurance among infinite things. The old Anthony had been a master of material facts; he had not been a servant of reality. Broken and twisted and sore, unsure of his aims, diffident of his remaining powers, Anthony knew that there was nothing in him that reserved itself for its own purposes.

He could meet all that came with his naked new possession. The old Anthony had given his faculties only to his work; he himself remained aloof, fastidious, and unused. He had been imprisoned in a fortress of privilege.

An unseen hand had plucked him out of it, and plunged him into a fettered, dreadful intimacy with miserable human beings, so that he should learn the reality of pain. Pain had taught Anthony his own insignificance and broken a little of his isolation away from him. Anthony had given more of himself than he knew to his fellow-prisoners, but he had not given all. His sympathies were touched and widened, but his heart remained intact. He could still blame men for their weaknesses.

He thought of his return to England, and how its beauty and serenity had rebuilt him. But he was not the same again; there was more that was accessible in him, or he would never have known Kitty.

She would have been to him either what she intended to be, a few weeks’ amusement, or perhaps merely a fresh peg upon which to hang his measured morality. It would have been so easy for the old Anthony to have dispensed with Kitty. But his new responsiveness to pain had saved him from this ignoble security. Her need had called to him, and his whole being had rushed out to answer it.

Kitty had taken from him one by one his old immunities. She had shaken him with a passion so vivid that he saw his code as a little thing, and she had roused in him a tenderness that was stronger than any self-control. She had not done these things of a set purpose; she had no purposes. She was one of the instruments of life.

She could not give him the completeness of love because love’s completeness had been defaced in her, but out of the shattered gifts and images of their hours together she had left him one changeless memory: Kitty had never blamed or judged a human soul.

From her father to the vicar’s wife she absolved them all. All women were her natural enemies before their faces, but behind their backs she was their indignant advocate. She could even stand up for the self-righteous with a whimsical admiration. Anthony remembered with a pang of shame how easily and quickly she had let him off his own rigidities.

He had felt his rigidity was his strength. Even now he was aware of the loss of it, with a certain sense of formidable exposure; but he was no longer afraid of the exposure.

He did not want to get out of anything until he had taken with him the comradeship of what was in it.

Kitty’s little, narrow life was like the foam of a wave. It had been lived for pleasure; and, miscarried by the wind, had broken itself against the iron rocks of life.

Anthony’s wider being was like the force and purpose of the waters beneath; but for a moment the powerless foam had lit it onward and enlightened its purposes.

Kitty had not changed the direction of Anthony’s life, but she had changed the angle of his vision. She had told him that she was only an atom of dust dancing in a sunbeam, and that when the light went, there would be nothing left of her but dust. It seemed to Anthony that it was the dust that had gone, and left him with the memory of light.

A cold, wet wind rose from the river, cutting against his weariness. He shivered, rose, and set his face toward home.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

[The end of _A Servant of Reality_ by Phyllis Bottome]