Chapter III

Three days had passed away, and Jack Burnham had found that he was, in his own phrase, "up to the coffee-room" after all. In consequence, Mrs Lorton and he dined there every evening at separate tables. A sense of rivalry--and there is no rivalry more keen than that between contesting invalids--prevented both of them from eating as much as they would have liked. When the widow refused a course, Burnham shook his head at it wearily, and they rose from their meals in a state of passionate hunger, which they solaced with captain's biscuits in the seclusion of their bedrooms. Since they had Westgate almost to themselves, and the weather was becoming bright and warm, they were much out of doors; but their profound depression still continued, and they were as morbid human beings as Max Nordau could have desired to meet with when he was seeking for specimens of degeneration.

Their continual greedy anxiety to narrate the details of their physical and mental sensations drove them to seek one another's company, and soon it became an understood thing that they should sit together on the lawn or in the winter garden during the morning, and stroll feebly in the direction of Margate during the breezy afternoon.

These times were times of battle, of a struggle for supremacy in symptoms that led to much heart searching and to infinite exaggeration. Mrs Lorton, being a woman, generally got the best of it, and Burnham entered the hotel at tea-time with set teeth, and an appalling sense of injustice and of failure in his breast. One night at dinner, determined to conquer or to die, he refused everything but soup; and noted, with a grim satisfaction, that Mrs Lorton could hardly contain her chagrin at having inadvertently devoured a cutlet and a spoonful of jelly. Indeed, her temper was so much upset by this occurrence that she went straight to bed on leaving the coffee-room, and sent down a message the next morning to say that she was far too ill to venture out.

Burnham, therefore, sat in the shelter alone, cursing the craft of woman. In the intervals between the cursings he was conscious of a certain loneliness that seemed to be in the atmosphere. It hovered with the seagulls above the sprightly waves, swept over the lawn hand in hand with the wind, basked in the sunshine, and companioned him closely upon the esplanade as he walked home to lunch. He was puzzled by it.

At lunch-time Mrs Lorton was still confined to bed, so her maid announced. Burnham promptly began to wonder whether she was going to die. He strolled towards Margate wondering, and found himself presently in the sunset, gazing with tears in his eyes at the silhouette of Margate Pier, and, mentally, placing a reverent tribute of flowers from Covent Garden upon her early grave in Brompton Cemetery.

He also found himself, later, dropping a tear at the thought of his own death, for of course with his weak health he could not hope to outlive anybody for very long. Mrs Lorton's absence at dinner struck him as more pathetic than all the misery of the travailing universe, until he remembered that at last he could gratify his appetite, and even accept two _entrees_ at the hands of the waiter.

Life, if it is full of sorrows, is also full of consolations.

He ate steadily for a couple of hours, pitying himself all the time.

Next day Mrs Lorton re-appeared in a very bad temper. Her seclusion, although it had enabled her to score several points off her rival, had been in other respects wearisome and vexatious. She barely nodded to Burnham, and went out towards the shelter alone. He followed furtively, longing, as usual, for condolence, and presently saw her seat herself facing the sea. The strained relations between them seemed to forbid his placing himself at her side. The back-to-back posture would be more illustrative of the exact position of affairs, and Burnham's nicety and accuracy of mind induced him accordingly to face Westgate. Their positions of the first day were thus reversed. She looked at the sea; he stared at the villas. Strange turmoil of life, in which we never know which way we shall be facing next! It struck Burnham suddenly, and so forcibly, _a propos_ of his and Mrs Lorton's reversal, that the ready tears sprang to his eyes. How would it all end? Man spins about like a tee-to-tum, bowing to all points of the compass. The time comes when the tee-to-tum runs down--and what then? Burnham was certainly run down. That must be his excuse for what he did. He glanced behind him through the glass screen, and saw by the motion of Mrs Lorton's back that she was sobbing. In truth, the sight of the dancing waves had set her thinking of all the poor people who have been drowned in water since the beginning of things. Poor dead folk! She was trembling with emotion, and still wept mechanically when she found Mr Burnham on her side of the shelter proposing to her with all his might and main. He was asking her to comfort him, to be a true woman and shield him with her strength, to support his tottering footsteps along the rugged ways of life, to dry his tears and stay the agonies of his shaken soul.

"Your health will help my weakness," he said. "Your vigour will teach me to be strong."

It was a strange proposal, and she began to defend herself from his imputations, stating her maladies, marshalling her symptoms of decay in an imposing procession.

But it was no good. He had taken her unawares and got the start of her. She felt it, and his determined weakness obtained a power over her which she could never afterwards explain.

His influenza triumphed, for she forgot her resolution.

A wave of morbid pity for him swept over the woman in her. If he was disorganised now, what would be his condition if she refused him?

"Have I the right," she asked herself, "to devote a fellow-creature to everlasting misery?"

Her influenza told her plainly that she had not.

* * * * *

People say that the marriage will really come off.

Jack Burnham announced it everywhere before Mrs Lorton got thoroughly well, and Mrs Lorton told everybody while Jack Burnham was still what his friends called "awfully dicky."

One can but hope that their married life will be passed on the same side of the shelter. If he persists in facing the sea, and she in staring at the villas--well, they will live most of Ibsen's plays!

But at least they will be modern.

And so the tee-to-tum, thought of pathetically by Burnham on a memorable occasion, spins round, and the sea and the villas are the two aspects of life.

* * * * *

Transcriber's note:

Inconsistent hyphenation has been retained.

Duplicate title headings at the beginning of the book and before each story have been removed.

The following corrections were made to the text:

p. 267: missing period added (danced merrily.)

p. 325: single close quote to double close quote ("I hope you will not be bored,")

p. 328: healthly to healthy (fresh and healthy interest)

p. 331: be to he ("A little more restrained," he said.)

p. 349: paragraph break removed after comma (and continued, "I doubt if any one)