Chapter IX

In her bedroom Jocelyn was thinking. The inner door stood open, and from the next room came a stream of murmured comments, broken now and then by a mumble, denoting pins in the mouth, or by the trickle of water into a basin. Mrs. Travis was going to bed; she loved to relieve the monotony of the process by discussion upon the events of the day, which never assumed such vast proportions as when she was taking her leave of them.

Jocelyn leant, in her night-dress, against her open window, smoking a tiny cigarette through a long amber mouthpiece. She drew at the cigarette, and, holding it far from her, puffed vigorously through her parted lips; the smoke, caught by the faint outdraught, blew harmlessly away in little wreaths and clouds.

Her aunt’s voice came to her in jerky, complacent periods.

“How hot the nights are getting! We can’t stay here much longer, my dear, nobody stays till June, it’s very late already. If it wasn’t for my new ‘system,’ I wouldn’t stay another day--I’m sure there’s something in it.” She appeared for a moment at the door with her arms raised rectangularly to her back hair.

“How thin Giles is growing!” she said in an injured voice, with a shrewd look at her niece. “It makes me quite uncomfortable to see him.”

It was a canon with her that people should be plump. She was alive to the state of Giles’s feelings, but she resented its affecting the outlines of his person. From much experience she felt secure of her niece’s invulnerability, she had seen so many darts fall blunted from her armour, one adorer more or less, even a married one, did not matter. She always reflected, too, that Giles was a connection of her own by marriage. Mrs. Travis possessed that order of mind which looks upon things belonging to themselves as beyond suspicion and reproach. He was a married man, but a connection of her own, immaculate! Nevertheless she resented the dwindling of his bulk; perhaps she considered it indecent; perhaps, in some mysterious way, she regarded it as the removal of her own property. In any case a moody leanness was unpardonable; to her, Nielsen, attentive yet well-covered, was more satisfactory.

“I shall recommend him to take cod-liver oil; I don’t think it’s right for any man to be so thin,” she said.

Jocelyn made an impatient movement, and the frilled sleeves of her nightdress rustled faintly against the muslin curtain. Mrs. Travis, disappearing again into her room, continued to talk.

“To-day was quite wasted; we mustn’t gad about so much; I ought to have been at the tables. Yes, I shall stay the month out, but the first of June we must go; remind me to take the roses off my new bonnet.” Her voice, overpowered by pins, ran into a mumble.

Jocelyn braced her slender, curving limbs against the wall. “Go!” The word brought her an unpleasant shock of reminder. She threw up her head impatiently. Her small, oval face looked very childish and young in the loose framework of dark hair, brushed in long, rippling tresses back over her shoulders. In the darkened room her slight figure, in its thin white covering, was dimly outlined, and the bare feet, thrust forward as she leaned back, gleamed in a little patch of light that came from the other room.

Mrs. Travis came to the door. She was more comfortable than ever in her night attire, with a comfort that threw off all attempt at decorative disguise, solely excepting curl papers.

“You naughty girl, you’re smoking!” she said.

Jocelyn shrugged her shoulders.

“It’s for the mosquitoes, and the nerves.”

“Well, I don’t like it--my dear mother would have had convulsions if she’d seen you. I don’t think it’s right! Shut your windows, and keep the mosquitoes out, as I do.” She sniffed.

Jocelyn gave a prolonged puff, and flipped the cigarette out of its holder.

“There!” she said. “Run, or the beasts will eat you, you are so good to them.”

Mrs. Travis, with a hasty kiss, retreated rapidly, closing the door. Jocelyn laughed, then she moved restlessly up and down the room. Presently she came back to the window, and leaned far out into the darkness. It was late; the town slept, vaguely stretched below in a rambling confusion of dark shapes and corners, foliage, and dimly burning lights. It was very still....

In the girl’s heart joy and pain were strangely blended.

The first of June! This was the seventh of May, nearly a month, that was all! What did it mean? Whither was she being carried? If it could only be always as it had been that evening! She had been so happy. In less than a month she would go away! It seemed very strange, very unreal; there was a desperate discomfort in the thought, the discomfort of unfulfilment.

The vague, dreaming sweetness was being rudely rent away from her thoughts--the glamour that hung like a veil over the past day. For a moment she saw plainly all the naked, unsparing reality. She heard again the words of the sick woman, “Have a good time, you are young, you are beautiful--it is fitting.” The devilish, unconscious irony of them! She felt a great sense of injustice, of hard usage at the hands of fate.

That day a wonderful sweetness had come to her. It was as if, for the first time, life had whispered some secret of hidden meaning, had spoken words at which the longing and the lonely restlessness of her soul had yielded. This was love! Love!

She laughed. The mockery and hopelessness of it were so plain that she felt its strength the more. Her eyes moved restlessly from side to side as if seeking a way of escape--she twisted her hands silently, and pressed them to her cheek. She loved him, and he was beyond her reach--why? why? She chafed under the thought.

The passionate, penetrating cry of a peacock broke suddenly through the vibrating air; it echoed painfully within her. Why should she not know love? What had she done? She had not sought--could she help it? Why put it away? It was sweet and good to be with him, she wanted nothing more. Then there flashed before her the look in Giles’s eyes, as he gazed at her after his struggle with the dog; for one most disquieting moment she saw into them, behind them; he knew there _was_ something further, beyond, something fundamental, burning, unknown to her, which passed by, scorching her like a fiery breath. And for that moment she shrank back frightened ashamed, and thrust the shutters to, to drive out the long, fiercely wailing regret in the shrill, bird’s cry.

The figure of the Polish woman, lying in its white drapery, came before her. A woman with haunting, unhappy eyes, ill--her friend, his wife--her friend! She made a little impatient movement in the dark room, and groping, turned to her bed with a shrinking desire to hide herself. She felt as if in the presence of something contaminating and poisonous; she shuddered, her pride revolted. She drew aside the curtains, and flung herself upon the bed. What had she done? Why should she be treated like this? Tears of impotent rage and self-pity filled her eyes. It was all so new, so strange, so unreal. She drew the clothes over her, as a child does to drive away the fear of bogies. She would not think of these things; there seemed a safety and a refuge in the soft pillows and the familiar cool rustle of the sheets as she turned from side to side. She lay a long time rigid, trying not to think, vaguely uneasy, vaguely unhappy, vaguely frightened; she was very tired too. But in spite of herself all the mingled feelings of the past weeks came back to her. The rude shock, so long ago now, of awakening to the knowledge that he loved her--the horror of it; that horror, which was but sharpened by the something in her own heart which she would not confess. All the weary struggle and repression for days and days with no certain knowledge of what she desired. And this was the end! He could never be hers--and she loved him! She buried her face in the pillows, and sobbed as if her heart would break.

After a long time, she fell into a half-conscious, restless state. Motionless and unreasoning, she passed in succession through all the events of the day gigantically exaggerated, blending grotesquely one into the other; then through each one of them, startlingly distinct, having no relation to any other thing that had ever happened to her--visions of things, which seemed like vast, shadow-throwing rocks one might encounter in a desert of sand. Then again, in sudden change, a great, blurred mist of vaporous phantoms came before her. One by one she strove to attain them--they were without form and void, and one by one they passed her by, remote and mournful as the flight of a lapwing. Images, carved in the air, of people she had known, of faces she had never seen; words she had heard, words that had never been spoken, flitted by, hovering like moths with restless wings. All that she had ever done, seen, or heard, was before her in a dancing maze of coloured shapes, threading singly to the centre of a blazing wheel, darting outwards radiant to the misty circle edge, like a flight of gnats round a fire. The lids fast-closed over her eyes seemed to enclose the world for her, to drive down into her brain a mass of wheeling unreality. With an effort she wrenched herself free from her pillows, tossing her bare arms over her head. She fell back again, with one hand clasped behind her thick, soft hair, looking up with wide eyes at the dim shape of the curtained bed roof. It was thus that sleep presently found her....

When she awoke in the morning, a faint feeling of frightened discomfort, a feeling that something new and dangerous was before her, vanished with the slanting, brilliant beams of sun striking through the shutters. She lay, quietly twisting a wisp of her tumbled hair, surprised only that she had forgotten to plait it the night before. Then, as everything came back to her with a rush, she wondered what she had found to so trouble and alarm her. Giles loved her!--well, it was very sweet and good to be loved by him, and she could not help it. She only wanted to be with him--to know that he loved her! What harm was there! She sprang from the bed.

The pulse of life beat very strongly this morning in the green-clothed, quivering valley behind the town; the almond trees seemed to flush a deeper pink; the tinkle of bells, as goats shifted dustily along the road to a new pasture, came with fuller melody to her ears. She leaned from the window and drew in a deep breath of the freshened air.

After all, there was nearly a month, and life was good just now--nearly a month of a sweet companionship, and after--well--all things come to a end!--it was not very good to dwell upon that thought, it was better to take things as they came. She fell to wondering what time Giles would be with them.

That morning Mrs. Travis, in pursuance of her resolve, went early into Monte Carlo. She knew that Giles would come over, but she always shut her eyes to the possibility of mischief, knowing that to recognise it would mean the sacrifice of her daily visit to the gambling-tables. Taking the greatest care never to dive below the surface, she was enabled to persuade herself quite comfortably that her niece ran no risk, and she consoled herself for leaving her with her habitual reflection that Giles was a connection of her own--the elasticity of her principles enabling her that morning to fix the relationship at some two degrees nearer than it really was. He was also a married man, a fact which she could twist either way as it suited her convenience, with an equally full and just feeling of comfort. She departed, getting over the ground at a great pace with a dignified, flat-footed gait, her head full of enthusiasm and artificial flowers. She studied, as she went, a little book on her “system”--without in the least understanding it, which was immaterial, as she always abandoned it after playing it for a quarter of an hour. She assured Jocelyn comfortably, on parting from her, that she would be back quite early, and Jocelyn looked after her, smiling, perfectly assured that she would be free till dinner.

Giles came soon after; his face, impassively haggard, lighted up when Jocelyn came towards him. She had never seemed to him so beautiful and full of life. She gave him both her hands, with the intuitive feeling that in frank friendliness alone lay a narrow path of safety and happiness for the days left to them. She looked at him softly, and so took from him the bitterness which might have driven him to passionate words. In the reaction of a long, sleepless night he had schooled himself painfully to accept this position, but he was relieved beyond measure not to have to take the initiative. It hurt him to see those two hands so frankly stretched to him, but he was grateful to her, with a dull, despairing sort of gratitude.

He had not seen his wife since the scene of the night before--the impression left upon him by it was too strong and painful. For the space of a short hour, he had proposed to himself not to see Jocelyn again, to keep away at all costs, but his resolve had shrivelled, like all his resolves, before the flame of his passion, and he had come, with the reservation to let yesterday’s words be as if unspoken.

He spent the whole day with her, and went home in the evening humble, and almost happy. He was worn out by the conflicting emotions of the previous day and his sleepless night....

A fortnight of days went by, and as the sands of their hour-glass of time ran out, the strain upon them became almost unbearable. Jocelyn’s continual thought was, “I shall go away, and there will be the end!” But she found that there were moments when she was dumb with the dull craving to feel his arms round her. At other times she longed to get away at once, anywhere away; to be free for ever, and at all costs, from this grinding necessity for repression, from the appealing, haunting look which Giles could not keep out of his face. With the constant varying of her moods their meetings became daily more difficult, the hours spent together more feverish or more dismal. Once Giles broke through the intolerable restraint, but the piteous, frightened look that came into her face at the first word held him mute.

Never for one moment did Jocelyn doubt herself. She would go away, and there would be the end! But the very impossibility of union with him, which she kept ever before her as the one barrier of safety, roused at times in her feelings before which she recoiled ashamed, which she had never thought that her mind could harbour--curiosity to probe her lover’s nature to its depths, ardent longing to know, and to prove the full meaning of the passion she saw in his eyes, felt in every touch of his fingers. At other times she had an intense, passionless pity for the suffering he could not hide from her. And sometimes the old horror came over her, and she would turn from him with aversion, only to be smitten with remorse when he had left her.

She had no one to help her in her trouble; the thought of confiding in her aunt never even occurred to her, so completely was that lady associated with the conventional crust of life.

In these days Giles lived only in the minutes that he was with her; the knowledge that she loved him served but to fan the flame of his passion. Often after he had left her, he would come back when it was dark, and, standing in the shadow of the thick bushes along the terrace wall, watch her bedroom window till the light within it failed.

One night he had watched long; the light behind the closed shutters still sent a faint glow into the soft darkness. Leaning against the wall he waited for it to die. A bat flitted past; great moths fluttered out of the night towards the lamps at the gates; dull murmurs came from the street, and always the frogs croaked. The scented laurel behind which he stood gave forth a sweet, hot odour. Suddenly the shutters of the window swung back, and in the arch of light he saw Jocelyn. She stood motionless, with her hands clasped behind her head; the sleeves of the loose, white garment wrapped around her fell back from her bare arms.

His heart stopped beating; the breath of the laurel was heavy in the air, and ever afterwards its scent brought back with it the sweetness and emotion of that memory.

As she stood, with her face lifted to the purple heaven where the pale stars gleamed fitfully, he could see the masses of her dark hair hanging loose upon her shoulders. He felt, as though with the yearning of his gaze through the impassive darkness, his whole being clung to her in a mute caress, as though her heart were beating against him, her lips quivering upon his own; and, as if in answer, her hands fell to her sides, and she leant forward on the balcony, looking downwards. Breathless he watched. With a swift movement she clasped her hands together into the darkness, and then pressed them to her forehead. Through the sudden hush of the night he could hear her weeping; his passion swelled in one long, dumb cry, and ebbed in a sob of pity. With her face still buried in her hands, she turned inwards with a swaying movement. The shutters swung slowly to, and the light died....

A cockchafer droned by him, its hum fading into the night. With a groan he beat his fists against the wall.