Chapter VIII: Part II: I (4)

"It proves what I have suspected for a long time, Robert. You know it's not a light thing to make an enemy like that. He's taken his time, but you see in the end he has taken everything I had. First he made me a liar and a hypocrite. Then he took you. He sent that girl specially to come between us. And now Miss Christine. I suppose he thinks that's done for me. But it's a great mistake to make people desperate, Robert. You should always leave them some little thing that they care for and which makes them cowards. Now, you see, I simply don't care any more. I don't care for myself or even my poor sister. I'm going to fight him in the open, gloves off. I'll wrestle with him and prevail. I'll give blow for blow. I'm going now to Hyde Park to tell people the truth about him. They take him altogether too lightly, Robert. They're inclined to laugh at him as of no account. That's a great mistake, too. I shall warn them." He nodded mysteriously. "God is a devil--a cruel, dangerous devil."

Then he bent and kissed Christine's hand, very solemnly and tenderly, as some battered, comical Don Quixote might have done before setting out on a last fantastic quest. And presently Robert heard him patter down the narrow stairs and over the cobbles to the open street.

They were alone now. He bent over her and said: "Christine--Christine," reassuringly, so that she should not be afraid, and gathered her in his arms. How little she was--no heavier than a child--and cold. Her grey head rested against his shoulder. If she had only stirred and laughed, and said: "Your father was strong too!" he would have answered gently. He would have been glad that the memory of his father could make her happy. But it was all too late.

He carried her into her room. It was like her to have left it so neat and ordered--each thing in its place--her out-door shoes standing decorously together under the window, and her best skirt peeping out from behind the cretonne curtain. Her hair-brush, with the comb planted in its bristles, lay exactly in the middle of the pine-wood dressing-table. When she had put it there, she had not known that it was for the last time.

Or had she known? She had called out to him so insistently. She had wanted to say good-bye. And he had gone on, not answering.

They said that people, at the end, saw their whole life pass before them. Perhaps she had seen hers. Perhaps she had trodden the old road that he was travelling over now. Only her vision of it would be different. It was James Stonehouse and Robert's mother that she would see--radiant figures of wonderful, unlucky people--and little Robert, who belonged to both of them, tagging in the rear.

But he saw her--Christine lying white and still under the great mahogany side-board, Christine coming back day after day in gallant patience to scrub the floors and his ears, and pay the bills and chase away the duns, and do whatever was necessary to keep the staggering Stonehouse menage on its feet.

She had held him close to her and comforted him.

Her splendid faithfulness.

He laid her on the narrow bed against the wall, and smoothed her dress and folded her hands over her breast. Her bag, which he had gathered up with her rolled on to the floor. A book fell out. He picked it up mechanically. It was a little Bible, and on the fly-leaf was written:

"From JIM and CONSTANCE
to their friend, CHRISTINE."

The writing was his father's. It had faded, but one could still see how regular and beautiful it was. Then the date. His own birthday--the first of all the unfortunate birthdays.

He looked at it for a long time, stupidly, not realizing. Then suddenly he saw it--in a new light. Ricardo. How frightfully--excruciatingly funny. Ricardo. He felt that he was going to laugh--shout with laughter. It was horrible. Laughter rising and falling---like a sort of awful sickness--choking him.

Instead his heart broke. He flung himself down beside her and pressed his face against her cold, thin cheek. And, instead of laughter, sobs that tore him to pieces--and at last, in mercy, tears.

"Oh, Christine, Christine--my own darling! I did love you--I never told you--you never, never knew how much!"

The earth-old cry of unavailing, inevitable remorse.

7

So there was no one but Francey now.

He did not know what he hoped, or indeed if he hoped for anything. He turned to her instinctively. And when the door of the ward opened he did, in fact, feel a faint lifting of the flat indifference which had followed on that one difficult rending surrender. He went to meet her. If she had looked at him with her usual straightness, she might have remembered the boy of whom she had been fond--a small, queer boy, who did not like having his face washed, and who came to her truculent and swaggering, with smears under his red eyes.

Even then it is doubtful whether she could have changed the course on which both of them were set.

He did not want her to see. And yet, unknown to himself, he did count on her instant understanding, on some releasing, quickening word or look that would give back life to the dead thing in him. But her eyes, preoccupied and unhappy, avoided him. He could not have appealed to her. He could not have said, as he had meant to do, "Christine is dead." He was silenced by the certain knowledge that all real communication between them had been broken off.

"No. 10 is going to pull through," she said.

They walked slowly down the corridor. He found it difficult to keep his feet. He wondered vaguely why she should talk of No. 10 when Christine was dead. He was puzzled---confused.

"It seemed likely," he muttered. "Rogers had got his teeth into her."

"I suppose you think he was a fool to try?"

(What was she talking about? He would have to arrange for the funeral. And the money. He did not know whether there would be money enough. It was hideous--to think of a thing like that--to have to go into a shop and say to some bored shopkeeper: "I want a nice cheap coffin, please." For Christine--for whom he had never been able to buy so much as a bunch of flowers.)

"I--I don't know."

"You see, I heard what you said."

(What had he said? He tried to remember. No. 10. Better dead. Yes, of course that was it. He couldn't go back on that. His mind seemed to strain and stagger under the challenge like a half-dead horse under the whip.)

"She didn't hear me, anyway."

"I want to know--was it just--just a sort of pose--or did you mean it?"

"It was true."

"That doesn't seem to me to matter. It was a beastly thing to have thought--beastlier to have said----"

He stopped short, as though she had struck him across the face. For an instant he was blind with pain, but afterwards he steadied, grew deadly cool and clear-headed. There was a constant movement in the corridor and he turned abruptly, almost with authority, into an empty operating theatre. Instinctively he had chosen his ground. Here was symbolized everything that he trusted and believed in--a cool, dispassionate seeking, the ruthless cutting out of waste. Yet in the half-light the place surrounded them both with a ghostly, almost sinister unreality. Its stark immaculateness lay like a chill, ironic hand on their distress. It made mock of their unhappiness. It divested them of their humanity. The nauseating sweetness that still lingered in the sterilized air was like incense offered up on the grotesque sacrificial altar that stood bare and brutal beneath the glass-domed roof.

And now Robert saw Francey's face. It was white and pinched and unfamiliar, as though all her humour and whimsical laughter and loving-kindness had been twisted awry in a bitter fight with pain. But he knew her eyes of old. Long ago he had seen them with the same burning deadly anger. And he knew that it was all over. Their patient antagonism had come to grips at last over the bodies of their suffering love for one another.

Even then she held back.

"You don't know how hard life can be. It was hard for her----" But at that he burst out laughing, and she added quickly, reading his thought: "Nothing that you've gone through is of any use if it hasn't taught you pity."

"Your pity would take a half-dead rat from a terrier."

"You have no right to judge," she persisted.

He smiled with white lips.

"Oh, yes, I have! We all have. We condemn men to prison--to death."

"You do believe in God," she said bitterly. "You believe in yourself."

"It comes to this, Francey, doesn't it? You're through with me? You don't care any more?"

Her eyes narrowed with a kind of desperate humour. It was as though for a moment she had regained her old vision of him--a sad queer little boy.

"You say that because you want to shirk the truth. You're almost glad--presently you will be very glad. You never did want to care--not from the first. Caring got in your way. You will be free now." She waited, and then added very quietly, without anger: "I love you. I dare say I always shall--but I couldn't live with you--it would break my heart if we should come to hate one another. Don't think any more about it. I'll have gone to-morrow, and I'll try to arrange not to come back till you're through. It will be all right."

"Francey, it's such a foolish thing to quarrel about."

"It's everything," she said simply.

She turned to go. Even then he could have stopped her. He could have said: "Francey, Christine died this morning!" and their sad enmity might have melted in grief and pity. But what she had said was true. It was everything. And his reason, his will, rising up out of the general ruin, monstrous and powerful, stood like an admonishing shadow at his elbow.

"It's much better. There's nothing to make a coward of you now. You're free."

He half held out his hand, but it was only a convulsive, dying movement. He let her go.