Chapter X: Part II: I (3)

Yes; she would do that. No, she wouldn’t. There was another train at eleven something, getting down at three. It was most important she should look well and happy, and show those doubters and disapprovers what a success her marriage was. She who was so well and happy--surely there couldn’t be anybody in the world <i>more</i> well and happy, except for sometimes being rather tired, which was nothing at all--must look it; and if she had lines and hollows in her face the three would at once jump to every sort of conclusion. The eleven o’clock train would give her time to go to Maria Rome, the Sackville Street lady, for face treatment first. There would still be four solid hours at Chickover. It made the whole thing very expensive, of course, but it was well worth it; for when they saw her so fresh and smooth they couldn’t but feel that it was merely silly to think her marriage had been a mistake, or to insist on measuring age and behaviour by years instead of by appearance. How intensely she wanted to prove her happiness, to triumph in Christopher!

She wrote to Virginia and told her she was coming down alone for the afternoon the following Monday, just to be with her a little by herself; Virginia wouldn’t want to see anybody she didn’t yet know very well in her present state, and she and Christopher--she wrote of him as Christopher, for all other ways of describing him were, she felt, absurd--would come down together later on, after the baby was born and Virginia was up and about again.

Then, at dinner, she told Christopher what she was going to do.

He didn’t like it. He hated the idea of her not being back till so late. She was far too precious and tiny to go racketing off alone. What mightn’t happen to her? He wouldn’t be able to do a stroke of work all Monday for thinking of her. In fact, he took the news exactly in the way Catherine would have wished him to, and she loved him, if possible, more than ever. Naturally at the same time he made some extremely disrespectful comments on Stephen’s personal appearance and general character, though, as the old boy had been the means of making Catherine marry him, he couldn’t help, he pointed out, liking him in spite of his various and glaring defects; and as for Virginia, his opinion of that girl was what it had always been, but he admitted that a mother might probably see something in her, and that if Catherine felt herself irresistibly impelled to go down and visit her, he supposed she had better go and get it over.

‘She’s going to have a----’ began Catherine, but stopped. Really, she couldn’t bring herself to tell him. She would have to sometime, but why before it was absolutely necessary? Virginia’s baby would make her a grandmother. Christopher would be married to a grandmother. If he hadn’t up to now felt the difference in their ages this must inevitably wake him up to it. To think of it made her feel raw, as if her skin had been pulled off, and she left exposed, shrinking in an agonised apprehension and sensitiveness.... Love, love--if only she didn’t love him so much....

‘What is she going to have?’ he asked, as she stopped short, looking up from the strawberries he was eating.

‘A happy afternoon, I hope,’ said Catherine quickly, turning red and smiling nervously.

‘I should think so indeed--with you there,’ said Christopher. And added under his breath, so that Catherine couldn’t hear and have her darling little maternal affections hurt, ‘Young blighter.’

IX

On the Monday, then, a pretty little lady of about thirty to thirty-five, whose prettiness was of the kind that is mostly disapproved of in country places, got out of the train at Chickover, and was met by an embarrassed clergyman.

The corners of her mouth were turned up in pleased smiles--it was so exciting and delightful to know one was looking really nice again--as she trotted along the platform to where he stood hesitating. She was, besides being very glad she looked nice, very glad to be going to see Virginia and very glad to be going back to Christopher that evening. Also, upheld by the knowledge of her attractiveness, the journey hadn’t tired her; on the contrary, it had been amusing, with an eagerly friendly strange man in the carriage, concerned in every way for her comfort. Added to which, the day being hot, she was flushed through the fainter flush bestowed on her by Sackville Street, and this was always becoming to her. And, finally, her eyes were bright with the gaiety that takes hold of a woman after even a small success. So that, altogether, it was natural she should smile.

Stephen had been prepared for anything rather than this. He had nerved himself to a quite different encounter,--certainly not to smiles. Bygones were to be bygones; his recent sacred experiences with Virginia had made him ardently determined to strive after the goodness she believed was his already, and his mother-in-law was to be received back with as much of the old respect for her as could possibly be scraped together. He would keep her before his mind as she used to be, and not dwell on that which she had since become. Besides, though she might have been happy when she wrote the postcard that had so unexpectedly intensified his own happiness, she couldn’t, he opined, be happy now. It was eight weeks ago that she wrote the card. Much, in marriage, may happen in eight weeks. Eight days was sometimes enough, so he understood, to open the eyes of the married. And here she was smiling.

‘How do you do,’ he said, grabbing at his soft hat with one hand and nervelessly shaking her hand with the other.

‘How very nice of you to come and meet me,’ she said gaily. Funny old Stephen. One couldn’t really be angry with him. And he was really very good. He looked extremely old, though, after having had Christopher before one’s eyes.

‘Not at all,’ said Stephen.

‘How is Virginia?’

‘Well.’

‘I’m so glad. I’m longing to see her. Oh, how do you do, Smithers. How are the children? I’m so glad----’

People were staring at her. It had not yet been his lot to be in the company of a lady people stared at. He hurried her into the car. He tried hard to respect her.

There wasn’t much time between the station and the house for respect, but he did try. He had thought to clear the ground for it by reassuring her during the brief drive as to Virginia’s ignorance of the reasons that had led to her marriage. ‘Led to’ was how he had intended to put it, rejecting the harsher and more exact word necessitated, for he was anxious to be as forgiving and delicate as possible, now that everybody concerned had turned the lamentable page. Besides, who was he to judge? Christ hadn’t judged the other woman taken in adultery.

Delicacy, however, was as difficult as respect. She herself seemed totally without it. Also it was difficult to feel she was his mother-in-law at all. She was curiously altered. He couldn’t make out in what the alteration consisted. Manifestly she was aping youth, but she was aping it, he admitted, so cleverly that if he hadn’t known her he might certainly, at a casual glance, have taken her for a daughter rather than a mother, though not the sort of daughter one would wish to have.

The moment they were seated in the car she herself threw delicacy to the winds. ‘You know, Stephen,’ she said taking his hand--he didn’t know whether to withdraw it or behave as if he hadn’t noticed--‘good does come in the strangest way out of evil.’

‘I am not prepared to admit that,’ Stephen felt bound to reply.

‘Oh do let’s be real friends, won’t we?’ she said, still smiling at him and looking like somebody’s slightly undesirable daughter. ‘Then we can <i>really</i> talk. I wanted to thank you for my great happiness----’

He tried to withdraw his hand. ‘I think perhaps----’ he began.

‘No, no--listen,’ she went on, holding it tighter. ‘If it hadn’t been for you I never would have married Christopher and never would have had an idea of what happiness is really like. So you see, your thinking those wicked things of us was what brought it all about. Just like roses, coming up and flowering divinely out of mud.’

He had made the most serious resolutions to let bygones be bygones, and he shut his mouth in a thin tight line lest he should be unable not to say something Virginia would be sorry for. That his mother-in-law, who was once so dovelike, so becoming of speech and discreet of behaviour, should suddenly slough the decencies and allude in highly distasteful images to occurrences he was doing his utmost to forget and forgive, that she should use, herself having been wicked, the word wicked in connection with any thoughts of his was surely outrageous.

Yet even while he locked his mouth he remembered that it was his mother-in-law’s postcard that had renewed and made more radiant his Virginia’s belief in him. The service this regrettable mother-in-law had done him was great and undeniable. She had in the past, and consciously, done him very great service, and he had been grateful. She had eight weeks ago done him another. Should he, because the last service had been accidental and unconscious, not repay her? Twice over now she had helped him to his wife. The side of him that judged, disapproved, suspected, that was his early training and all the long years before Virginia, made him not able to unlock his mouth; the side of him that didn’t and wasn’t, that longed to justify Virginia’s belief in him, made him try extraordinarily hard to unlock it. He did earnestly now desire to let mercy prevail over justice; but, when he looked at Catherine, how hard it was. This blooming gaiety--he used the adjective correctly, not as Christopher would have used it--upset his plans. He had not been prepared for it. She was not like the same person.

He sat silent, struggling within himself, and they arrived at the house holding each other’s hands for the simple reason that he couldn’t get his away.

There on the steps stood Virginia, as if she had never stood anywhere else since Catherine left her on them the day she departed in Christopher’s side-car on the momentous journey that had changed her life; only this time Mrs. Colquhoun wasn’t standing there with her, and Virginia had grown considerably rounder.

‘Sweet of you to come, mother,’ she said, shy and flushed, when Catherine had run up to her and was folding as much of her as she could in her arms.

It had not escaped Virginia that her mother and Stephen had arrived hand in hand. She gave him a look of deep and tender gratitude when he, too, came up the steps. He wiped his forehead. He seemed to be in a constant condition of rousing Virginia’s gratitude for things he hadn’t done. Really, he thought, following the two into the house, he was a worm; a worm decked, by his darling wife’s belief, in the bright adornments of a saint.

Virginia was much struck by her mother’s appearance. She didn’t remember her as so pretty. She felt oddly elderly, with her awkward heavy body, and certainly she felt completely plain beside her. Her mother looked a little fashionable perhaps, for quiet Chickover, yet why she should Virginia didn’t know, for she had on the same country clothes she was wearing on her last visit and the visit before that. Her complexion was beautiful. Virginia was quite glad Mrs. Colquhoun had had to go away for the day on business and wouldn’t be there to see it. She felt--she didn’t know, for Mrs. Colquhoun had never mentioned such things, but she felt--that her mother-in-law thought women oughtn’t to have complexions once they were--well, older.

Lunch passed off well; the talk afterwards, which included Stephen who, anxious to be good and kind, remained with them and conversed to the very best of his ability, passed off well; tea passed off well; and after tea he purposely withdrew from the terrace, where they were sitting, so as to allow mother and daughter freedom to touch on matters of intimate feminine interest.

Then Virginia, after making her mother lie down on a long cane seat near hers, so as to rest before the journey home, screwed herself up to mentioning the marriage--it hadn’t yet been in any way alluded to--and said shyly, turning red as she spoke, ‘You know, mother, I’m really very glad about Mr.--Mr.----’

‘No, not Mr. anything, darling. Call him Christopher.’

‘Sweet of you, mother,’ said Virginia, looking so much relieved that Catherine said, ‘What is, dearest?’

Virginia turned yet redder. ‘I was afraid,’ she said, ‘you might want me to call him father.’

‘Oh <i>no</i>, darling,’ said Catherine, laughing nervously. ‘You couldn’t possibly.’

And taking Virginia’s hand and stroking it, looking down at it as she stroked, she said, ‘You don’t--you don’t think him too--too young, do you dearest?’

‘No,’ said Virginia stoutly.

‘Darling!’ exclaimed Catherine, raising the hand she was stroking and swiftly kissing it.

‘How can I, when Stephen and I----’

Dear, dear little Virginia. Catherine was so much pleased and touched that she kissed Virginia’s hand over and over again. ‘My darling little daughter,’ she said, ‘my own darling little daughter----’ and added, and really at the moment believed it, forgetting how completely she had been absorbed only in Christopher, ‘I have missed you so.’

Virginia at once retreated into her shell. Instinctively she felt the lapse from truth. ‘Sweet of you, mother,’ she said in her usual awkward little way.

She drew her hand back. It was strange, and not quite right somehow, for her mother to be kissing it like that. It made her feel uncomfortable.

‘Wouldn’t you,’ she suggested, so as to turn the talk to practical matters, ‘like to wash your face, mother?’

‘Wash my face?’ echoed Catherine, startled and staring at her. ‘Why?’

‘I always find cold water such a help,’ said Virginia, ‘if one is rather tired.’

Catherine dropped back again on to her cushions. ‘Darling child,’ she murmured, closing her eyes a minute. Cold water--on the top of the delicate structure of Sackville Street----

No, she wouldn’t wash her face; she was quite comfortable, and not a bit tired, and was so very, very happy to be with her little Virginia.

Virginia got further into her shell. There was a something about her mother that she wasn’t accustomed to. She had always been a loving mother, but not quite--not exuberant like this. Something had gone. Was it--Virginia searched laboriously round in her scrupulous mind--dignity?

‘I mustn’t miss my train,’ said Catherine, when the church clock struck half-past six.

‘There’s half an hour still,’ said Virginia. ‘If you leave at seven it will be quite soon enough.’

‘It’s the last train,’ said Catherine. ‘Hadn’t the car better come round a little before seven?’

‘If you missed it, mother, it wouldn’t matter. I could lend you everything, and Stephen and I would be very glad.’

‘Darling,’ murmured Catherine again, concealing a shudder. She pictured herself after the unavoidable washing, coming down next morning to breakfast....

At a quarter to seven Stephen thought it proper to appear once more and converse during the few remaining moments of his mother-in-law’s visit. He had decided he would pick and offer her a bunch of roses to take home with her; if he wasn’t able to respond to hand-holding, if he wasn’t able, after all, to respect her, he could at least offer her roses. Virginia would be pleased, and his own conscience slightly soothed.

Catherine began putting on her gloves.

‘Plenty of time,’ said Stephen, seeing this. ‘It has occurred to me,’ he continued, ‘that you might like a few roses.’

‘How very nice of you, Stephen,’ said Catherine, who had planted every one of the roses with her own hands,--‘but isn’t it too late?’

‘Plenty of time. Smithers is most trustworthy about trains. I will gather them myself.’

And he went indoors to get a knife and a basket.

‘I’m sure I ought to go,’ said Catherine nervously to Virginia.

‘The car isn’t round yet, mother. Smithers is never late.’

‘I believe,’ said Stephen, coming out again, knife and basket in hand, pausing on the terrace and considering the sky, ‘you will have a comparatively cool journey back. I rather fancy there has been a thunderstorm over towards Salisbury, and it will have cleared the air when you arrive there.’

He went down the steps on to the lawn, and began choosing roses with care and deliberation.

‘Virginia darling, oughtn’t I to go?’ Catherine asked, fidgeting.

‘It isn’t seven yet, mother,’ said Virginia patiently, a little hurt by this extreme anxiety not to be obliged to spend the night with them. Stephen on the lawn was carefully removing the thorns from the roses he had cut.

The church clock began to strike seven. Catherine started. ‘There,’ she exclaimed, getting up quickly, ‘I <i>must</i> go. Good-bye, darling. Never mind the roses, Stephen,’ she called.

‘You have at least another five minutes before you need leave,’ he called back in his sonorous, carrying voice, still going on selecting the biggest blooms.

Kate appeared and said the car was waiting.

Catherine hurriedly bent down and kissed Virginia. ‘Good-bye, darling--I’ll go at once. I’m sure I ought to. Don’t get up--you look so comfy. It has been such a joy seeing you again. Stephen, I’m going--I shall miss the train----’

‘Of course I’ll get up, mother, and see you off,’ said Virginia, disengaging herself with difficulty from the rugs and cushions everybody was always now burying her in. ‘Stephen,’ she called, ‘mother won’t wait.’

Stephen hastily cut one more rose, a particularly fine one, and hurried, infected by Catherine’s hurry, towards the terrace, stripping off the thorns as he came. His eyes being fixed on the thorns he was stripping off he didn’t see he had reached the steps of the terrace, and he stumbled and fell up them, scattering the roses at Virginia’s feet.

He wasn’t in the least hurt, and indeed was on his legs immediately again; but Virginia, who had stared at his prostrate form a moment in silence, her hand pressed to her heart, made a queer little sound and fainted.

Both Catherine and Stephen rushed to her. By the time help had been called, and they had lifted her and carried her indoors and laid her on a sofa, Catherine had missed her train.

X

In this way it happened that she stayed the night after all, and came down next morning looking quite different. She had breakfasted in her room, had lingered in it till the last moment, but finally was obliged to face her relations; and they were startled.

There was neither bloom nor gaiety now. The one had vanished with the other. Virginia thought her mother must have had far more of a shock the evening before than had been supposed. The fainting had been nothing,--when one was going to have a baby one did things like that, and they were of no consequence. She had soon recovered, and they had all three spent, Virginia thought, a very nice quiet evening afterwards, Stephen himself going to give the orders for her mother’s room to be got ready, and expressing the most hospitable satisfaction at her further stay. Her mother had been a little silent, that was all; and it hadn’t occurred to Virginia, who so soon was herself again, that she really had had a shock.

‘Why, mother----’ she exclaimed, when Catherine came down into the hall, ready to start.

‘I didn’t sleep,’ said Catherine, turning away her face and pretending to search for an umbrella she hadn’t brought.

They stared at her. What a difference. Virginia was concerned. Her poor little mother must really have been thoroughly frightened by her fainting.

‘But mother----’ she began, taking a step towards her, wanting to say something to reassure and comfort.

‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ said Catherine, bending over the umbrella-stand.

She was a bundle of nerves and acute sensitiveness. She felt she couldn’t bear to be touched. And why didn’t they see that to stand there staring....

She pulled the umbrellas in the stand about with shaking fingers, putting off the moment of turning round to say good-bye.

It wasn’t only that she had had to wash off Maria Rome and hadn’t slept--and indeed she hadn’t slept a wink--it was also that in the watches of the night, of this her first night alone since her marriage, once more in that house of long calm memories, she had seen, as she stared into the darkness and thought of the inevitable next morning and its humiliations, that she was on the high road to becoming a fool. Yes, a fool; a silly fool; the sort of fool she had herself smiled at when she was younger, the worst sort of fool, the elderly fool.

But how could she stop? Sitting up in bed she asked herself this question. She must keep up somehow with Christopher’s youth. She couldn’t let herself crumble into age before his eyes. If only he hadn’t begun by admiring her physically so much! If only his love hadn’t been based on what, adoring her, he called her exquisiteness. How difficult it is, thought Catherine, wide awake hour after hour, to go on being exquisite when one doesn’t sleep enough, and is tormented by fear of one’s lover, on whom one’s entire happiness depends, suddenly seeing one isn’t exquisite at all, but old, old. It was like being forced to run a race that was quite beyond one’s strength, and from the beginning being out of breath. And next morning--she knew that separated from Sackville Street and out of reach of Maria Rome’s box she not only looked her age but much, much more now than her age, and Stephen and Virginia would be convinced the marriage was a bitter failure and punishment, and that Christopher was unkind to her. Christopher unkind to her! Christopher....

She spent an extremely unpleasant night. The house, its memories, the prospect of next morning, forced her to think. Oh, it was unfair, unfair and most cruel, that at last she should have been given love only when she was too old. She ought of course never to have listened to him, to have turned the sternest, deafest ear. But--one is vain; vanity had been the beginning of it, the irresistibleness of the delicious flattery of being mistaken for young, and before she knew what she was doing she had fallen in love,--fallen flop in love, like any idiot schoolgirl. And Christopher who didn’t realise, who hadn’t noticed yet, who loved her as if she were a girl, and by the very excess of his love burnt up what still had been left to her of youth.... Yes, she was a fool; but how stop, how stop? It was horrible to be ashamed, and yet to have to go on repeating the conduct that made one ashamed. Love--if only, only she didn’t love!

She spent an extremely unpleasant night. No wonder she came down looking different. It wasn’t just having had to wash away Maria Rome.

And then, while she was fumbling among the umbrellas, and Virginia was watching her in puzzled concern, and Stephen was endeavouring to identify the mother-in-law who had gone upstairs with the mother-in-law who had come down again, Mrs. Colquhoun came in through the drawing-room windows, arrived thus early across the park and garden to inquire how Virginia was after her mother’s visit of the day before, and to gather from Stephen what she could of his state of mind after so searching an experience.

The situation was as awkward as it was unexpected. Stephen and Virginia hadn’t thought she would come so early, or they would have sent round and warned. They could only look on and hope for the best. His mother, Stephen was aware, had decided that she, anyhow, was not obliged to continue to know the late Mrs. Cumfrit. If and when Mrs. Cumfrit came down to Chickover, his mother had informed him, she herself would always have urgent business somewhere else. Morals were, without any doubt whatever, morals, she had said, and if Stephen could reconcile his principles with leniency in regard to them, she herself neither could nor would.

It was therefore most unpleasant for every one that she should walk straight into Catherine’s presence. Virginia and Stephen held their breath. Mrs. Colquhoun gave a visible start when she saw the figure bending over the umbrella-stand, and made as if she would go back at once into the drawing-room from whence she had emerged. But when on Catherine’s turning round she saw her face, she was instantly placated. What a change. Judgment had indeed been swift. Here was nothing but a wreck. ‘He beats her,’ was Mrs. Colquhoun’s immediate mental comment. After all, she thought, one could leave these matters quite safely in the hands of God.

It had not been her intention ever to speak to Catherine again, but a wreck is different; one could not but feel benevolent towards a wreck. If only people would be and stay wrecks Mrs. Colquhoun would always have been benevolent. She put out her hand. She said quite politely, ‘How do you do.’ Stephen thought, ‘My mother is a good woman’; Virginia gave a sigh of relief; and all Catherine had to do was to reply with equal politeness, ‘How do you do.’

But she was in a highly abnormal condition. She was a mass of nerves and quivering intuitions. Caught, unprotected in the morning light, there she was standing exposed before these staring relations, unable to hide, obliged to show herself; and, with a feeling that nothing now mattered, she was overtaken by the reckless simplicity of the cornered. Through Mrs. Colquhoun’s greeting she felt the truth: Mrs. Colquhoun was being amiable because she thought Catherine was down and out, and Mrs. Colquhoun was what she was, hard, severe, critical, grudging of happiness, kind to failure so long as it remained failure, simply because there wasn’t a soul in the whole world who really loved her. A devoted husband would have done much to bring out her original goodness; a very devoted husband would have done everything.

And so, to her own astonishment, and to the frozen amazement of the others, instead of in her turn nicely murmuring, ‘How do you do,’ and smiling and going out to the car, she was impelled by what she saw in Mrs. Colquhoun’s eyes as she took her extended hand, to say, ‘You need love.’

What made her? It was the last thing she would really ever have said out loud to Mrs. Colquhoun if she had been in her senses, so that she couldn’t have been in her senses. Nobody in the least knew what she meant. It sounded improper; it was most startling.

Mrs. Colquhoun withdrew the hand she ought never to have given, and Stephen said in a strained voice, ‘We all need that,’ and added with emphasis that it was high time to start unless the train was to be missed again.

Virginia could only kiss her mother a worried and bewildered good-bye. Fancy saying that to her mother-in-law. What could her mother have meant? Of course it was true of everybody that they needed love, but one didn’t say so.

Mrs. Colquhoun took it, she considered, very well. Turning away out of the hall she waited in the drawing-room till the car had gone, and then when Virginia came in begged her not to give it another thought.

‘Give what another thought?’ Virginia asked, at once bristling, as she had lately so often bristled when with Mrs. Colquhoun, at the merest insinuation that her mother needed either explaining or excusing.

Well, well. Poor little Virginia. One had to be very patient with her just now.

XI

Christopher dined with Lewes the evening Catherine was at Chickover, and stayed with him till it was time to go to Waterloo to meet her train. He thoroughly enjoyed being with old Lucy again, and listening to his yarns about the imminent economic collapse of Europe. He had forgotten how interesting economics and Europe were. There were other important things in the world besides love, and it was a refreshment to get among them again for a bit.

They dined at the restaurant they used most often to go to when they lived together, and afterwards went back to Lewes’s rooms and sat in great contentment with the two windows wide open to the summer night, each in his own comfortable old chair, each with his feet on the sill of a window, smoking and talking, while the pleasant London summer evening street sounds floated up into the room, and the dusk deepened in the corners.

Next door was the room Christopher used to rage up and down. He laughed to think how calm and happy he now was. No more ragings up and down for him. Marriage set one free from all that sort of torment. Old Lucy ought to marry. Not that he seemed tormented in any way, but Christopher would have liked him to know for himself what a delight life could be. The poor chap hadn’t the beginning of the foggiest suspicion of it.

Lewes was very glad to see his friend looking so well and happy. Evidently the marriage was still a success. He found it impossible to believe that it would be lastingly successful. True, the lady on her wedding-day had seemed much younger than her years; but there were the years,--he had himself seen them in black and white on the certificate, and they were bound sooner or later to gallop on faster and faster ahead of Christopher’s. However, few marriages, he understood, were lasting successes, so that perhaps after all it didn’t much matter.

The two therefore were in great harmony, each much pleased to be once more with the other.

‘She’s gone down for the day to her daughter,’ Christopher said, when Lewes, observing the laws of politeness, inquired after Catherine.

‘She has a daughter?’ asked Lewes surprised, for he had never heard of her.

‘Certainly,’ said Christopher, as who should say, ‘Hasn’t everybody?’

Lewes made no comment. He silently considered this further drawback to the marriage. And Christopher, happy and expansive, continued: ‘She has married a man years older than herself.’

‘Who has?’ inquired Lewes, not quite following.

‘Well, Catherine hasn’t, has she.’

‘No. I’m obtuse. Forgive me. I think I was surprised your wife should have a daughter grown up enough to marry.’

‘It is absurd, isn’t it,’ said Christopher, liking Lewes for this. ‘She’s much too young, isn’t she. He’s a parson, and old enough to be her father.’

‘Whose father?’ asked Lewes, again not quite following.

‘His wife’s, of course. The girl’s only a girl, and he’s a horny-beaked old rooster.’

‘Is he?’ said Lewes, and thought things. Not that he, or, he admitted, anybody, could possibly have applied such epithets to Chris’s wife, but still.... And had his friend considered that he was now the stepfather-in-law of a person he described as a horny-beaked old rooster?

‘Why, he’s old enough to be Catherine’s father too,’ said Christopher.

‘Is he?’ said Lewes, reflecting how that could be. Wouldn’t that make him old enough, then, to be his wife’s grandfather? Well, best let it alone. It was a perplexing mix-up.

‘I call it disgusting,’ said Christopher.

Lewes was silent. Long ago he had observed how people are most critical in others of that which they do and are themselves. When he spoke again it was to return to the exposition and illustration of the doctrines of Mr. Keynes, from which he had so injudiciously wandered.

‘Come with me to the station,’ said Christopher, getting up at half-past eleven and preparing to go and meet Catherine at Waterloo.

‘I think not,’ said Lewes.

‘Come on. It’ll do you good. You’ll see Catherine again. It’s time you did. And we’ll arrange with her when you’re to come to dinner.’

Lewes didn’t want in the least to see Catherine again, or be done good to, or go to dinner, but Christopher was determined, and he gave in and went; which was just as well, for when everybody had got out of the train and the platform was empty and it was clear she hadn’t come, at least he was able to reason with Christopher and restrain him from fetching out his motor-bicycle and tearing off through the night to Chickover.

‘It’s that blasted son-in-law of hers,’ Christopher kept on repeating,--showing, Lewes considered, a lamentable want of balance. ‘<i>He’s</i> at the bottom of this----’

Lewes, applying his mind to probabilities, soon hit on the truth, and pointed out that the telegram that had certainly been sent was too late in arriving to be delivered in London that night, and he would get it the first thing in the morning.

‘But suppose she’s ill? Suppose----’

‘Oh my dear Chris, try and not be a fool. She has simply missed the last train. You’ll know all about it in the morning.’ And he took him by the arm and walked him home to Hertford Street.

When they got there Christopher insisted on his going up and having a drink. Lewes did his best not to, for he had no wish to behold his friend’s married <i>milieu</i>; but Christopher was determined, and he gave in and went.

He felt a faint distaste at seeing his friend opening a door, his only by marriage, with a latch-key belonging really to a woman, but suppressed this as foolish. Fortunately the flat was not the thing of fal-lals he had imagined, and he was quite relieved on being taken into the drawing-room to find it so solid and so sombre.

‘George,’ explained Christopher, seeing his friend looking round.

‘George?’ repeated Lewes, who had never heard of him.

‘All this black stuff.’

Lewes said nothing.

‘Catherine’s first husband,’ said Christopher. ‘He was old enough to be her father too.’

‘Was he?’ said Lewes, groping about among these different persons old enough to be people’s fathers.

He sank into a chair. He drank whisky. At intervals he tried to go, but Christopher wouldn’t let him. For two hours he had to listen to talk that made him feel dimmer and dimmer of mind, more and more as if his roots were wilting; for Christopher was jerked back by Catherine’s unexpected failure to come home, and his unhappiness at the prospect of the first night alone in their room, and his efforts not to be anxious and worried, into thinking and talking only of her.

‘My dear chap--yes ...,’ ‘Old man, I’m sure of it ...,’ Lewes, as sympathetically as he could, from time to time interjected. But his head drooped; his spirit failed him. Women. What didn’t they do to a sensible, intelligent man? Made him go all slushy and rotten; turned him into nothing better than a jabbering ass. Much of it was whisky, Lewes allowed, as Christopher drowned his disappointment and secret fear in more and more of the stuff, but most of it was woman.

‘Look here, I must be off,’ he said, getting up firmly on Christopher’s showing a tendency, after quite a lot of whisky, to become too intimate in his talk for comfort. ‘This room’s pure George,’ he had been saying, ‘but Catherine’s bedroom--you should see Catherine’s bedroom----‘--was he going to offer to show it to him?

Lewes hurriedly got up and said he must be off.

‘You’re not crawling back into your shell already?’ cried Christopher, much flushed, and his hair, from his frequent passing his hand through it while he talked, much ruffled. ‘I’ll tell you what you are, Lucy--you’re nothing but a miserable whelk.’ And he laughed immoderately.

‘I’ve some work I must get finished to-night,’ said Lewes, taking no notice of this.

‘At two in the morning?’ exclaimed Christopher, laughing louder than ever. ‘That’s just the sort of thing you would do at two in the morning. Get married, old whelk--get married----’ He clapped him on the shoulder. ‘You jolly well wouldn’t----’

‘Good night,’ interrupted Lewes abruptly.

But after he had gone Christopher soon recovered from the exuberance of whisky, and went very sadly to bed. He missed Catherine terribly. The flat was the loneliest place without her. And what if something had happened to her after all, in spite of Lewes’s cold-blooded assurances that nearly always nothing happens to anybody? He didn’t sleep much. He hated being alone in that dear room of happiness; and when at breakfast he got the telegram, as Lewes had foretold, saying she was coming by the first train, he determined to chuck the office and go and meet her.

Catherine, however, anxiously turning over every possibility, had thought that he might do this, and at Chickover station, eluding Stephen who was talking to a parishioner, sent a second telegram saying she wouldn’t be back till dinner. Her one desire was to keep out of Christopher’s sight till she had been to Maria Rome. Impossible to let him see her in the state she was in. Well did she know that this was being a slave, a silly slave, and that it was cruel to leave him all day wondering what was happening, but she <i>was</i> a slave, and this cruelty was nothing to the cruelty to them both of letting him meet her and see what she now looked like really. So she sent the second telegram.

Naturally, Christopher was excessively perturbed when he got in. What in damnation had happened in that beastly Chickover? Never again should she go there without him. Never again should she go a step without him. And she hadn’t taken any luggage with her, and she would be worn out. Blast Stephen. Blast that girl. And probably the bird-faced mother-in-law had had a hand in all this too. If so, let her be specially and thoroughly blasted.

He looked up the trains, and found that one arrived at 5.30, and there was no other till after ten. The 5.30 must be the one, then. He told Mrs. Mitcham, who had shown every symptom of astonishment and uneasiness on getting to the flat that morning and finding her mistress hadn’t returned, to have dinner ready earlier than usual, because Mrs. Monckton would be badly needing food, and then he went to his office after all, intending to go to Waterloo to meet the 5.30.

What a day it was. He couldn’t do a stroke of work. He felt like nothing on earth after the whisky. His chief was sarcastic. Everything went wrong. At five he was starting for Waterloo when Mrs. Mitcham rang him up to say her mistress was safely back and resting.

Safely back? How had she managed that, with no train that he knew of?

He flew home. Catherine, her face beautifully rearranged, was lying in the shaded drawing-room.

‘Why, darling--how? When----?’ he cried, rushing across to her.

He didn’t wait for an answer. There was no time for one before he had picked her up and locked her in his arms.

Oh, how blessed this was--oh, <i>oh</i> how blessed this was, sighed Catherine, her cheek against his, her eyes shut, safe in heaven again.

The great feature of Maria Rome’s treatment was that it was husband-proof. Nothing came off.

XII

Catherine made much of Virginia’s fainting.

‘What she want to faint for?’ asked Christopher sceptically. ‘A great girl like that.’

‘Well, she <i>did</i>. So of course I couldn’t leave her sooner.’

But when she was saying this sort of thing she felt uncomfortable. Such tiresome almost lying, such petty almost truth. She seemed now to walk continually in small deceits. It was as though her feet couldn’t move a step without getting into a tangle of repulsive little cobwebs. Nothing much really; nothing more than she supposed most women, whom she began to think of as creatures necessarily on the defensive, had to wade through; but so different from the clean-swept path along which she had all her life till then proceeded. All her life? All her death. That hadn’t been life. Up to her marriage with Christopher she had merely been dead. Now she was alive; and mustn’t she take the stings and the pains and even the pettiness of life gladly, in return for its beatitudes?

But they worried her, the stings and the pains and the pettiness. Also, beatitudes were expensive. They forced her to go oftener to Maria Rome, and the oftener she went the more she needed her. It was like drug-taking. And suppose there should come a point--in her heart she knew it must come--when Maria’s ministrations would merely accentuate what they were intended to hide? Once or twice lately she had fancied they had been less successful; or was it that there was more to do to her the deeper she sank in this business of being young and happy? She led a racked life, an uneasy mixture of fears and blisses. And the grey in her hair seemed to multiply, and it too had to be treated by Maria Rome, and she began to look more and more like somebody adventurous,--she who was really the most unadventurous of perch-clinging doves.

The thought of Virginia’s life,--Virginia, so young, so needing to do nothing to herself, so completely at ease with her elderly husband--made her sigh as the overheated and overtired sigh at the thought of cool shadows and clear waters. There <i>was</i> a difference, and it was simply all the difference in the world, between their two cases. She had been horribly right when at the beginning she snubbed Christopher for declaring there wasn’t. Stephen didn’t need to watch Virginia as she watched Christopher, anxiously on the alert for the least sign of change in her, in what she did, what she said, in the very tone in which she said it. Stephen was safe, was at rest; Virginia would never, never do anything but love him. He was the father of her child, the authority she looked up to, the intelligence she adored. But Catherine--she wasn’t going to be the mother of any child of Christopher’s, she hadn’t got any intelligence for him to adore, and wouldn’t have wished to have authority, even if she could have, for him to look up to. For her there was nothing but strain and effort, with the tormenting knowledge that her very strain and effort were bound to bring about what she dreaded.

It was a terrible business, this business of bliss. She clung to him, clung to him, tighter and tighter, as if his youth must somehow get through and make her young to match.

Now nobody can be clung to tightly for any length of time without presently feeling that they would like a little air; and soon after the return from Chickover, when he had got over his anxiety at her absence and his joy at her return, Christopher began to have this feeling. It was gorgeous to love and be loved as he and Catherine loved, but it was a patent and acknowledged fact, and he gradually now began to want to talk about something else. Catherine apparently never wanted to. She loved, he couldn’t but notice, anxiously. She seemed to have very little of the repose of real faith, and she needed an incredible amount of reassuring. And when he had reassured her, and got her quiet and placid as he supposed, there she was needing it all over again.

Marriage being mainly repetition, and Christopher now being a husband, he presently began to make fewer rapturous speeches. It was quite unconscious, but as the weeks passed it became natural to love with fewer preliminary cooings--to bill, as it were, without remembering first to coo.

He wouldn’t have noticed it if Catherine hadn’t noticed it and said something about it. Whereupon he began to meditate on this, as he recognised, undoubted fact, and came to the following conclusions:

A husband cannot go on cooing after he has ceased to thrill, but he can go on very happily billing. Only mystery thrills, and only the unknown is mysterious. It wasn’t reasonable for the dear explored one to want still to be mysterious, for the so felicitously known to want still to be unknown. Catherine was the darlingest love of a wife, and every night when he went to sleep with his arms round her he thanked God he had got her, but she was no longer mysterious; his heart would never give great choking bumps again when he came near her. Yet that, it seemed, was what she wanted and expected. And she had a really remarkable love-memory, and never forgot a single love-look or love-word or love-vow or love-action of his, and had taken to comparing him with himself,--which was rather awkward, for unconsciously at the beginning, it appeared, he had been creating precedents and setting a standard; and the standard, it appeared, was a very high one, and the precedents were difficult to follow in calmer blood.

What he now wanted, thought Christopher, reflecting on these things, was to lead a happy, healthy, lovemaking life, in which all the speeches were taken for granted. Was that out of the way at all? Didn’t married people inevitably get into this condition after a bit? He supposed that the difference between himself and Catherine--he hated to admit there could be such a thing--was their several attitude towards billing and cooing. He wanted--and he imagined most husbands at last wanted--to bill without cooing, and she wasn’t happy in any billing that hadn’t been preceded by coos. Loud coos, too; loud and long ones.

Well, no man can coo for ever. Christopher was convinced of that. Not with spontaneity, anyhow. He tried to once or twice just to please her, but she instantly found him out and was tremendously upset. He then tried to laugh about it and tease her; but she wouldn’t laugh and be teased. She took everything that had to do with love very seriously. Her view was that love was like God, and couldn’t be joked about without profanity.

She told him this used to be his view too. Was it? He couldn’t remember, but didn’t tell her he couldn’t, for a certain amount of caution, highly unnatural to him, began to creep into what he said. The expression ‘used to be’ seemed to recur rather a lot, he thought. He had heard tell of one’s evil past dogging one’s footsteps, but fancy being dogged by one’s alleged satisfactory past, and having it shake its fists at one!

He told her this one morning, waking up in the jolly, careless mood when he would have tickled a tiger; but she only looked thoroughly alarmed, and said he never used to talk like that.

What a frightened, nervy little thing she was. What was she frightened of? He couldn’t imagine; but he only had to look at her eyes to see she <i>was</i> frightened. She was happiest and most content when they didn’t go anywhere, and didn’t do anything but just sit in the flat together, she curled up close to him on the sofa, and he reading aloud. They spent evening after evening this way. About every third evening or so she would suddenly get into a panic lest he found it boring, and would start making eager plans about things they would do next week: they would go to the play, and have supper afterwards, or motor down into the country and drift round on the river and come home by moonlight.

When the time came she would cling to him and beg him to let her off. Let her off! What a funny way of putting it, he would tell her, laughing and kissing her. Was she going to have a baby, he began to wonder? And he asked her so one evening, when she was wriggling out of a plan they had made that involved exertion.

She seemed thunderstruck. ‘Chris!’ she cried, staring at him.

Well, why not? he asked. People did. Especially women, he said, trying to make her laugh, because her face had gone so very tragic. They had babies much more often than they had husbands, anyhow. She must have noticed that.

‘But not if--not if----’ she stammered, her eyes full of tears.

Oh Lord--he had forgotten that age-complex of hers. He never thought of her age. She was as old to him as she looked, and she looked the same age as himself. He never could remember that she was convinced she was a little Methuselah.

‘After all,’ he said cheerfully, still trying to make her laugh, ‘there was Sarah. I don’t see why you----’

‘Sarah!’

She stood looking at him a moment, and then ran out of the room.

Horrified, he ran after her; but she had locked herself into the bedroom, their bedroom--locked herself in, and him out.

This was their first scene. And it was peculiarly distressing, because nobody was angry, only sorry.

XIII

Soon after this the Fanshawes gave a dinner, and invited the Moncktons. It was, in fact, a dinner for Catherine, who hadn’t enjoyed their dance very much, they felt. Dinners were perhaps pleasanter for her now, they decided. It couldn’t be much fun, Ned had remarked, to sit looking on at that great red-headed lout of hers dancing with a pack of girls, just as if she were chaperoning her débutant s----

‘Oh <i>hush</i>, Ned!’ cried Kitty Fanshawe, stamping her foot.

For some reason, impossible Catherine considered to account for, except as one of the many off-shoots of their warmly benevolent dispositions, the Fanshawe family as one man loved her. They had known her slightly in the days of George, and with growing intimacy ever since. In those days they had deplored that she should be tied to one so old; they were now engaged in deploring that she should be tied to one so young. Fanshawe-like they wouldn’t even to themselves judge any one they loved, but tacitly making the best of a bad job, set about seeing what they could do to amuse and entertain her.

They came to the conclusion that a little dinner at a restaurant would be more amusing than a dinner at home, and chose the Berkeley; and they reserved one of those tables in the window-recesses which have sofas fitted round three sides of them.

The party was eight: themselves, the Moncktons, Sir Musgrove and Lady Merriman--great friends of theirs, and both delightful, which made them conspicuous among married couples, who sometimes were, the Fanshawes were forced regretfully to admit, unequal in attractiveness, so that while one of them would make a party go the other would prevent its budging--and Duncan Amory, a rising barrister. But at the last moment Kitty Fanshawe caught a cold and couldn’t come, and Mrs. Fanshawe invited Emily Wickford, an agreeable spinster, to take her place.

Five sat on the sofa, and three on chairs on the outer side of the table. Mrs. Fanshawe put Catherine in the middle of the sofa facing the room, between Ned and Sir Musgrove--Ned had invented a birthday for her, so that she should be the guest of honour and he could give her flowers, for Ned was good but tactless, and it hadn’t occurred to him that birthdays were the last things Catherine wished attention drawn to--and on Ned’s left sat Lady Merriman, and on her left sat Christopher, and on his left sat Miss Wickford, and on her left sat Duncan Amory, with Mrs. Fanshawe next to him on his other side, between him and Sir Musgrove.

All would have been well if it hadn’t been for Miss Wickford. That exquisite spinster, who had refused so many offers that she could hardly be called a spinster at all, was still only twenty-eight, and had the most beautiful eyes in London. She had been invited merely to fill Kitty’s place, and the Fanshawes had thought of her only because she was a great friend of Duncan Amory’s, and he at any rate would enjoy himself if she came.

Unfortunately, Sir Musgrove and Christopher enjoyed themselves too because she came--at least, Sir Musgrove did at the beginning. Taking advantage of the table being round, he leaned over whenever he could to talk to Miss Wickford, and while he was doing that he naturally wasn’t talking to Catherine, for whose entertainment he had been specially invited; and Christopher, whose duty it was to begin by talking to Lady Merriman, at once upset the balance of the party by talking to Miss Wickford instead.

This left Ned to amuse two neglected ladies, and as he wasn’t amusing he didn’t amuse them. It also cut off Duncan Amory from his dear Emily, for Emily liked beginnings rather than endings, and therefore preferred Christopher, whom she hadn’t seen before, to Duncan whom she had seen almost too much; and, regarding him as years younger than herself, probably still at Oxford, or the other place, proceeded to give the boy a good time and see that he thoroughly enjoyed his evening.